Long overdue Update and Tradition commences.

It has been some time since I posted. Fear not I have not lost my desire to fill you in on the ridiculous and mundane details of my families life. Instead it was something more sinister and less dramatic. A sign of the times has manifested in us having to cut back bills to be able to pay others. Aka net,cable and phone. We were offline for a month and we just couldn't sacrifice the net so we pared down the phone and cable to make it a more manageable bill. We also rectified a problem with our electric bill so that we should see significant savings shortly.

It is safe to say that we are about as bare bones as we can take at the moment. The kids need the net for school otherwise I would say we could do without that but to be honest we do everything on the net. Bill pay, maps, homeschool materials, we get all notifications online ( insurance etc.) Not to mention just about all family correspondance. So yea internet has become a necessity. Odd that.

What is new with us? Well largely it has been more of the same. Homeschool, activities, friends and family. Tomorrow when I have more time I will update on everyone individually and I am wont to do but for now we are all doing ok. Kids are busy. Hubby and I are busy and tired. a lot. a lot a lot. We have a wedding coming up, my hubby's youngest sister. It has made me reflect a bit on my own wedding and marriage and I might post on that at a later date.

We restarted some of our old family traditions that we had to stop after the housefire. It seems a small thing but honestly to me personally its huge. We began baking bread again. Before the fire I made everything from scratch that I could. Bread, rolls, muffins, tortillas etc. We had theme nights of the week. The kids LOVED it. One night chinese, one night italian etc. After the fire I kind of stopped cooking, I mean I cooked meals ( we didn't starve ) but it wasn't "my " cooking. It was thrown together stuff that just got everyone fed. I used to really thoughtfully and lovingly prepare meals. I love to cook so it was easy. I had a very well stocked kitchen and it just felt good to make homemade pizza or calzones. Or eggrolls and wontons, potstickers etc. Over the past 18 months I have noticed the kids say things like " remember when you used to make this? or remember when we would always do this ? Or the one that hurts the most. " I wish we could make "( eggrolls, lasagna,tortillas etc.) " again" It's hard to miss the longing in a child when they say things like that and you know they long for it because YOU don't or won't do it anymore.

Personally it was hard to get back into my old swing. It felt foreign and awkward and it didn't feel like it fit anymore. It was scarey too. If I restarted some old traditions it meant I would have to remember a life we no longer had. A home we no longer had. People we no longer have. I would have to go back to that dark place and find a way past it to be able to access those memories without them smelling like smoke. Without them feeling like fear. So I just decided one night that I was taking back one tradition at a time. One memory, one action that we did . Bread baking commenced and my daughter took to it like a champ. It is amazing how the smell of baking bread doesn't smell like smoke. It's memory might bring that smell to the forefront but suddenly you are reminded that the bread baking in the oven is a new memory, an old memory reinvented. It might seem odd to someone who hasn't exprienced a housefire to hear me relating it's smells to memories. If you have never experienced it you just can't know what I mean.

Your brain attatches that smell to everything you once knew. It's like a tag. Almost a classification of that time of your life and no matter what you can't change it's tag. Now I have always said the fire was a blessing and I truly believe that. There is no measuring how much of a blessing it was because far too many good things came from it. However that is not to say it was not hard, painfull and even now continues to be a recovery process. This is a life altering event and it doesn't just go away in a couple of years. This continues. Recovering from something like this takes such a long time and often people forget or grow tired of hearing about it. So like any mourning process it takes a lot of time and it has many steps. Reintroducing small traditions into our lives again is a small step toward reinventing memories with painfull tags. So we started with bread. It was good.
Mrs. F.