Random Thoughts

Do you ever just sit and wonder what happened to your life. You know, the plans you dreamed of when you were in your teens. I am having that kind of day, cleaning toilets and emptying diaper pails, comforting Jonah after he bangs his head again while trying to study for my class tonight. I am sitting here and thinking back ten years ago when I thought that total happiness would come from living in a big house, earning the money and flying off to exotic places. Zoom forward 10 years and I am living on base, having never gone anywhere remotely exotic, and am just about the happiest I have been in a long time.

While I try to prevent Jonah's daily attempts at either killing himself or learning to fly (we haven't figured out which one applies yet but hope for the latter) and clean the living room for the umpteenth time today and I realize that this life is much more than I could have dreamed. For me back then, kids were the kiss of death to your social life, and while most of my topics of conversation revolve around him, I have made more friends since having him then I did before. Watching him as he achieves his goals, whether its climbing up onto the sofa unaided to being brave enough to climb up the slide on his own and go down, no longer needing to hold my hand as he does so, these are the moments that I hope I will remember when I am old and he is busy taking care of his own family.

I was reading a question posed in an article that asked people if their house was on fire what would they save and a large amount of them would say their family but then a surprising amount went on about returning to get jewelry, money/wallets, clothes, etc. I sat back and thought about it and I can honestly say that as long as Mike, Jonah and I were all safe, everything else can just burn. It's all stuff, all these things I have spent so much time and money buying, none of it is irreplaceable (apart from some pictures of people passed), but still I can be truly happy with just us, knowing that anything else would be provided for us one way or another. I mean, that's what we have spent the last 9 years paying insurance for right?

I don't know. Maybe it's being 30 and away from family. Maybe it's watching the news and seeing the state of the country and economics right now. But in a time when stuff is valued higher than your own life, you have to wonder at the mindset of some people today.