Labor Day

Thoughts of Labor Day approaching reminds me that many labor to the end of their lives for our freedoms to pursue anything in life that we'd choose to pursue.  What a gift and one that I desire to give thanks to many, many who gave all.  I salute my dear husband, who gave much.

This time of year for me causes me to do quite a bit of reflection of where, oh where, did the summer go!  Knitted some wonderful pieces this summer and enjoyed my summer so much, even though we had a very rainy summer.

This is my Blue Heron Egyptian Cotton Purple piece that I love dearly and I probably spent more time on this project this summer than any other.

Then I spent some days painting and here are 3 of my owls!  just got into a week of painting owls and they are so cute!

Just a little play and fun......

Also for fun....I won a bid on Ebay for this beautiful fur wrap......

Then there is my beautiful patio with my tiny lake view that I have left.....

I bought a new car.....well new to me....it is a 2012 and I love my car.....

My daughter had a wonderful birthday and pictured below is, Connie with my mom.

And then last but not least, here is my current knitting project from the book "Essentially Feminine Knits".  I am knitting the sweater Coco by Lene Holme Samsoe using Isager Strik Highland Yarn pictured below.

As you can see........I have not blogged much this summer so I had to make up for lost time with all that has been happening.

I will leave you with one final thought for reflection......Setting others free means setting yourself free, because resentment is a form of attachment.  

Cheers to a wonderful summer!

What Are you Here For?

What are you here for?  That was the question in today's sermon.  I'd say by now way more than one half my life is over and I'm hoping I can look at it and tell you some of the things I'm here for.  I'm here to walk with God.....I'm here to be a daughter, wife and mother and be the best I can be.  I'm here to be a good friend and to feed the hungry and I'm here to be a good listener and a prayer warrior for those in my sphere of atmosphere.

It has made me reflect all day and to ask the Lord to reveal His plan for the rest of my days, they pass so quickly.

I'm posting a picture of two of my closest cousins growing up.  I'm sure most people have family members they are pretty close to growing up and then we allow distance in many ways but it seems to me that as we age, we have a coming back together phase of our lives.  At least, it has been that way for me.

This is a picture of the two cousins that I was very close to growing up.  I had no sisters and we spent lots and lots of time together.  Mostly, I was trying to get the other two in trouble, I must admit!  The one in the middle is in need of much prayer so if you read this and you pray, just mention this to Him as you read and I know He will hear and answer prayer.  I love these girls.

What are you here for?  I hope you know..........it's important.

Enjoying Life

It has been so long since I blogged.....I think about it often but just do not take the time.  I'm having a wonderful summer so far.  As most of you know, I am currently helping my 86 year old mother.  She moved in 3 years ago when my dad got sick and I have had to care for her at times, much more than at other times. She fell on December 21 last year and put her left eye out.  It's a total mystery about what she hit to cause such a tragic injury.  At the time, I thought it most certainly would be fatal but alas, she has recovered all but the sight in that eye and she is actually doing better than she was before the fall.

This has allowed me and Tom, my husband, to get out and enjoy living on the lake together some.  We are so very blessed to have a boat slip on a lake near Winston-Salem NC.  We went out for just a bit on Saturday and I have the sweetest picture of Tom and his dog Zoe.  Zoe was a rescue from the pound and she was a gift from our daughter for his father's day two years ago.  Zoe has brought him much pleasure in his man cave.  He has a heated and air conditioned garage and Zoe abides with him in his hole.  I thought this was just a precious picture.......Did I mention that Tom is a Vietnam Veteran and finds few things in life where he really allows himself to relax....

Well now as to important things.......knitting.  I can say that I have just completed two very inspiring knits.  The Purple Haze probably took me 3 months to knit.  The yarn is luscious, maybe the best I have ever knitted with.  I have 2 more skeins to use and cannot decide what I will knit with those.  Here's the Purple one.......

And then there was this........a fun project and one that I KNOW I will wear once cold weather once again hits North Carolina.......this is sooooo cute although a bit pricey.

Knitting Through Troubles

Wanted to post my latest finished knitted project and I could not resist telling what I went through during the finishing part of this piece.

My mother has been living with me almost 3 years.  My dad was diagnosed on my mom's birthday, February 13, three years ago with brain cancer.  My husband and I moved them into our home to take care of him and my mom during this difficult time.  He passed away 7 weeks later and my mom never returned to her home.

If she lives until her next birthday, she will be 86 years old but her health is failing.  On December 21, 2012, at 10:30 PM, she fell going to the bathroom and fell flat on her face.  Her faced was banged up pretty bad so we called 911.  I spent the next 40 hours going through one of the most trying times I've had in a while.  To make a very long story short, she hit so hard that she lost her eye sight in her left eye and, of course, she took another leg down in her ability to take care of herself.

I was finishing this project during all that and am always fascinated  at how you can still have a hobby that can relax you during a stressful time.

God has been very faithful and after 3 weeks, she is getting along pretty well.  I have a different sort of view for those people who have spent years care taking someone they love.  It's a very exhausting job but I'm grateful for the opportunity to serve my wonderful mother in what will probably be her last years.  I don't think I will look back and ever regret a minute.

Part of care taking involves also taking care of myself.  So....Dawn and I headed off on a Saturday to Hillsborough Yarn Shop in Hillsborough NC for an afternoon excursion of yarn shopping and lunching to give me a much needed break and of course, I came back home with more Isager yarn which has quickly become one of my favorite yarns and I had a bag full!

Here we are taking a break....we love to pick out our yarns, take a break and go eat and then get right back into more yarn shopping.  Thank goodness we both kind of set a limit on how much we'll spend because, we can be very dangerous as most of you knitters understand.....!

It was a very fun and relaxing break for me and always fun for Dawn to practice a little shopping.....maybe practice wasn't the correct word!

Friends

I was thinking today how blessed I am that I have spent 6 days in the past month with different girlfriends out having a girl day and we have had a blast.  I have some wonderful friends.....some I have known for most of my adult life and a couple others, only a short time.  I have a great new BFF who is my knitting bud, whose picture is posted on a previous post and we feel like we were born sisters.  We find ourselves often starting a conversation concerning the same subject and at the same time many times and we have only really known each other for about a year and a half!

Well I had lunch at a long time friend's house yesterday and she graced me with the dress I have shown a picture of....!  I love this new dress.......so cute.

Proverbs 17:17 says "A friend loves at all times" and I hope and pray that I will be a true friend to my friends.  They mean so much to me and the older I get, the more precious that time spent with them becomes.

I need some ideas on something to knit to match this dress.....I couldn't wait to try it on and didn't really match it up with what I was wearing before taking the pictures last night but it still is so pretty!

On another note, I love my dogs as well and talk about a friend!!!  and below you will see something I ran across today and I want IT!!!!!

Isn't that the cutest thing you've ever seen!  and guess what.....I have two dogs about this same size. Too bad I built my kitchen without this built-in....lol!  okay on to Christmas....later.

Grieving Parent's Grief

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.......Psalms 147:3

This is a picture of my beautiful daughter, Nickole who died on October 25, 1993.  Today in the midst of the  grief we, as a country, are going through over the tragedy in Newtown CT, I have decided to blog about what it feels like in the days, weeks and years after your child dies.  Many of you reading this, may have experienced this yourself in varying degrees and ways but for those who have not, maybe this will in some way help you to remember these families when others may not.

I will tell you later in the blog about the "how" my daughter died.  Right now, I'd like for you to understand some of the things these parents have facing them.  Reality.....it takes many days for this to sink in.  I remember when the sun came up the first day after my daughter's death, asking God how the sun could just rise.  I remember school buses coming down the street, and thinking how can they just go on as if nothing happened.  Your entire world has ceased to exist in the way that you know it and the world just seems to go on as if nothing happened.  It's a very lonely feeling you see because even others who are grieving for your child are not experiencing your grief.  Your grief is your own.

There is such a churning on your insides and a pain down in the very pit of your being that cannot be consoled.  I think this is where God's grace comes in.....in those places that you don't even recognize or know about until you need it.  Since so much time has passed, I can reflect now and understand that without HIM, I would not have made it but at the time, I was very skeptical.

It would be a waste of my time and yours to try to get you to understand the pain.  Only if you've experienced it would you be able to understand it.   My purpose of blogging on this is to help us all to keep these families lifted up in prayer and if my post can help you remember at a time when you may have forgotten, then my purpose will have been accomplished as they have so much ahead of them and so many different things to go through.

As I was watching the news, they were saying late into that fatal night that the children were still in the school and there would be no time set for their bodies to be removed.  Grief came over me for a totally different reason and that is that the parents felt helpless to help their child, although at that point, there would be no help.  It's your nature to do everything you possibly can for the child and they could not reach them.  Authorities do everything they can to shield a parent from seeing anything that would be burned into their brain as they deal with these sort of things and they know it would be too much to bare.  As a parent, you still just want to help.

This would be just one of many things they were going through.

My story?   Nickole committed suicide by getting in my own car in my own garage and turning the motor on and then turning the motor off.  BUT, it ran long enough to fill the garage with carbon monoxide and take her life.  I'm not going into much more detail in this blog post except to say that when we found her, her body was still warm and my husband removed her from the car, had me call 911 tried to shield me from anything else that would happen.  I did see her laying on the driveway and for years after that I saw the same thing every time I stepped outside my home.

So I know that whatever these parents saw first will be remembered for a very long time.  They will not see the pictures you and I are looking at of the beautiful children.   When they lay down to sleep, they will dream of their children's deaths much more than their lives for a very long time.

Today, I just say pray.......pray every time you think of it.  Just ask God to give them what they need because we don't even know what all that entails.  Join with me in prayer for these families.

Bronna

Girlfriends, Girlfriends, Girlfriends!!!

This is my new Picot Lace Hat & my Horseshoe Lace Scarf which were inspired by "Larisa" on Ravelry.  My friend, KnittingDivaGirl (Dawn) are trouble when we get on the telephone on a Saturday and wonder around the pages of Ravelry upon which one or both of us find a knitting project that  the yarn MUST be purchased right now.  Funny because when we first started doing this, we happened upon many a yarn that had been discontinued, at which Dawn would exclaim, "that's been discontinued, you can't find that!"

We are both kind of natured in the way that you probably should not tell us we can't have something....heehee!  While on the telephone looking at these two projects, low and behold, I found the yarn and then she found more and we had the yarn ordered before we could say goodbye!

Of course, we were both working on knitting projects that had to be put aside because these two things were added must haves to our knitting projects and we needed it right now!  If you're an avid knitter and you're reading this blog, I know you get it!  so......I just want to say how much fun it is to knit with a best friend.  There is nothing in the world like it.  Without her permission because she's not home, I'm going to post her picture as well as a couple more of mine on the bottom of this blog and hope you enjoy!