Moving forward while looking back.

Apr 26, 2025

It’s Saturday friends,

This week has been heavy. My Aunt Katy’s (Mom’s younger sister) health has taken a turn for the worse. Palliative care for now while she’s in the hospital. Eventually hospice.

I have a friend back in Colorado who had multiple kids with Reactive Attachment Disorder and she used to write at the end of her scary posts on social: Prayers are coveted. I had never heard it put that way but I always liked it.

And that’s how I feel right now: your prayers are coveted. Or sending good energy our way if prayers aren’t your thing. In my mind, prayers and good energy are the same anyway :-)

I find myself alternating between racing around, mind whirling and then moving slowly, as if in molasses. In those slow moments I find myself noticing the small things even more sharply. It doesn’t feel right to be moving forward like normal, moving toward goals, living life but that is what we always have to do isn’t it? Live life, while grieving. Move forward, while looking back.

This and that. There is always an “and.” So, I grieve and I live. Brad has been picking up more farm chores while I spend some time every day at the hospital with my aunt. We talk about funny stuff, we cry, we laugh, we talk about throwing a party after the funeral, she tells me who she wants and where she wants it.

This is such a gift. Mom was on a lot of morphine for her degenerative disc disease for a long time before that last week of her death. She wasn’t willing or really able to talk about what came “after.” My brother and I have talked about that since, saying that we should probably write all that stuff down, things we want when our time comes.

If it doesn’t happen, you figure it out. We did and it was fine. But it’s really nice to know what is wanted!

Amidst all of that, life on the farm continues.

THE RANCH

The many faces of Lucy and her frisbee:

LOL, whoops…it was a little stuck! She got it off before I could get there:

Look at her little vampire upper teeth:

And then she heard a scary crow and that was that:

•••

The bonus room aka my new bedroom’s ceiling is done and ready for paint:

Well, I finally made a decision. Can you guess which one?

I’ll start by reminding you that the floor will be much lighter than the typical orange that red oak becomes over time, it will look like this:

So…that’s a lot of cool colored floor! I liked that blue a lot, kind of wedgewoody. I had originally wanted a deep, warm yellow but the boys were horrified. I don’t know why, we’ve had it before and it was gorgeous! I kept trying the lighter yellows the boys were more agreeable towards but for some reason they appeared almost neon in our house. So weird.

I kept at it. I went to the hardware store a half a dozen times (starting way back on March 20th!), looking for new paint chips that would be just right. I had a pile of discarded paint chips:

When I finally got a few that I thought would work, I took them back to the hardware store to get little half pint samples. The first was soooo minty! No:

The second try brought that wedgewood blue that I liked on the right but the yellow was soooo lemony! No!

And on and on and on until the minute the words “paint samples” came out of my mouth everyone’s eyes would glaze over.

At the time I was bummed because I needed help. It’s never been this hard before!

This last week as I was buying more samples (got all the way up to 9 samples!) and painting them in little patches (along the windows where it has to be brushed anyway) everywhere around the house, I found that in reality, even with all the fussing from ManChild and B-Rad, I was really the only one that cared.

Well THAT realization freed me up. I wanted a deep, intense yellow. By the time it was all said and done, they had given up and just wanted me to pick already LOL.

They start sheetrocking ManChild’s room this coming Monday. Paint starts on sometime next week as well. Let’s hope my choice of yellow is as beautiful as I think it will be! As I keep telling B-Rad, “Don’t worry about it, there is so much white trim, and so many big windows and eventually so much art on the walls that you will hardly even be able to see the yellow!”

•••

Found this funny little tableau:

Sweet Cash doesn’t let much phase her anymore, she’s happy to be living in a herd of littles I think! Tori was completely up underneath her neck, finding the bits of grain that Cash had dropped: