With the Christmas holidays and out of town trips, I have missed a few weeks of blogging. We spent Christmas with all but one of my siblings (and their families) at the home of my widowed mother. She is 91 now, in good spirits however her body is failing after 5 years of fighting a rare form of blood cancer. As we all realized this may have been her last Christmas with us, we tried to particularly embrace the time spent with her…lots of pictures, lots of talking, laughing and reminiscing of days gone by. My dad passed away almost 10 years ago but was still very much a part of the fabric of our family memories during the time there.

The house that my mother is still in was one that we moved to when I was 10 years old. All of my adult life…when my husband and I (with expanding family) moved around the country 11 times due to job locations…my parents’ house was always “home” to me, an anchor in the midst of my otherwise wandering life. Now we are settled in one place and I mentally can now call my own house a “home” since we own our small business. Since the business is located less than 2 miles from our house we will be here at least for the duration of the business ownership. I enjoyed the adventure of new places when I was younger but now love the fact that the friends we have made here we do not have to move away from.

Well, it’s the New Year now. I tend to shy away from making concrete resolutions that will last only for a few weeks. I prefer instead to think along the lines of thinking of revising a general perspective that I know will be healthy for me, such as… “I think I will revert back to eating the way we did before the holidays came”.

Along with a revised perspective on whether Holiday chocolate should remain one of the major food groups, I have a clearer perspective of how my youngest son is wired…he is the one we removed from our home and sent to a wilderness program about 2 months ago. Tomorrow we will be heading to the program where he will “graduate” and we will bring him home Monday. We have learned a great deal about him and our relationship has vastly improved in the past 8 weeks. Between observation from the on-site therapists and a clinical psychologist who came out to the site and ran an extensive battery of tests, we have a hugely better picture of how he thinks and why he has behaved in certain ways. Some of it, we suspected and some of what came of it was new to us.

I will write about what we learned in another blog, however want to end with the thought that as my younger son comes back home and then goes off into life as an adult (He will turn 18 in a few days), my desire is that we will remain as supportive of who he is and how he is “wired” to approach life as we are now. I am such a “fixer” that I tend to forget that my kids are individuals and different from me. Hurray to kids becoming young adults in their own unique way.

Happy New Year to all.