It's Soccer Season

My oldest played her first game of the season on Saturday. Heavy rains left the fields too wet to play last week.

Backyard Soccer

My neighbor (and good friend) has signed up to play on a woman's soccer league. Last night my daughter saw her practicing and decided to help her out. My daughter is an avid soccer player who has given up the sport this fall in order to play basketball for her school team. As you can see, her equipment has not found its way out of summer storage. Fortunately she walked away with only one small injury.

Finding Yourself

I've often heard of people who are trying to find themselves and always wondered what a person means by that. How do you find yourself? I think it's often used as an excuse for someone to extricate themselves from a difficult situation, most often troubled relationships. I imagine some find it as a deeper way of saying, "I'm not happy with you and I want out to find someone that does make me happy." Although I'm a firm believer that you can't depend on someone else to make you happy, but that's another rambling.

So as I'm reading from my most recent fiction selection I come across the term "find yourself" once again. I then realize that I think I get what a person trying to find oneself is looking for and at the same time I realize that it can't be found. It is something that comes with age, wisdom and experience. The experiences are not always good but they certainly help shape who you become. When I think back to my youth, especially my twenties, I can certainly put my finger on the floundering that likely creates this need for one to find oneself. I see it as a need to figure out what you believe and the need to understand why you believe it. It's a desire to feel content with who you've been and who you've become. It's a need to be at peace with the events of your life, to be sure that they happened for a reason or maybe to be able to pin-point the good that came from the especially tragic events of life.

So then I wonder what will I tell my daughters someday if they express the need to find themselves? I think I will have to tell them exactly what I've expressed here. You can't find yourself, simply live life, accept and embrace the good and bad of it and one day you'll wake up to realize that yourself has found you.

Conversations with a 7 year old

7 year old: "Mom, is there something I can wash my face off with? I ate a caramel apple and it's all sticky."

Me: "Yeah, it's called soap and water, it does amazing things."


She rolled her eyes at me! Is there something wrong with soap and water that someone has not let me in on? Does it cause premature aging? Cancer? What? Sheesh!

A tired I haven't felt in a long time

I am definitley feeling the effects of working full time and being a single parent. It is certainly a tired I haven't felt in a long time. But, let me confess, it's a good tired. I'm now ready to sleep at a normal hour, like the rest of the world and once I can actually force myself out of bed (this has always been a challenge for me), I feel rested and ready for the day. All these things get a little slack when your a stay-at-home mom.

Oops, abrupt change of subject: The weather has been gorgeous the past three days. No shivering on the soccer fields yesterday morning, not even for the 9 a.m. game. I can only hope the trend continues. In case it doesn't, the girls and I are now on our way, with our rollerblades, to meet some friends and enjoy the 80 degree sunshine while it's here. I only ask that you pray for me, it's been over a year since I last rollerbladed and I'm not the coordinated type.

Oh how I laughed

Eleven year old - "I spy with my little eye, something yellow."

Nine year old - "Your teeth!"

All work, no play

That's pretty much what my life is feeling like since I've started working. Between working, homework, the start of soccer season, Easter, etc... there has been very little time for posting. Ok, I confess, there has probably been plenty of time to sit down and post but truth be told, I'm too brain fried to come up with anything to write about. Which brings me to the fact that this post will not be all that exciting. But there is a plea for information within!

The job is going good, lots of information to absorb. I keep telling myself that I'm very fortunate to have previous experience in the printing field because without it I would be clueless. I'm attempting to do marketing for the printer I'm working for. Once again, clueless. While I've worked in sales and advertising before and have some journalism education I've never actually worked in marketing. I've been trying to do as much research and reading on marketing as possible, which brings me to my plea. If you have any good marketing advice, know of any good articles or blogs, especially, about marketing I would love to hear about them.

I'm not feeling completely lost, I have some good ideas in action already and I know the more I get to know the ins and outs of this particular company the easier it will get. But, I'm an information hound and the more I have the better prepared I feel.