"Becca's Coming Home! - Sept. 17, 2007"

Well, the last 24 hours have been interesting. Becca called me yesterday, very upset that all was not well with her boyfriend Chaz. We talked and to make a long story short, she asked if she could come back home. I must admit that I have been praying for this for many months, so ~ thank you, Jesus ~.

We still have a ways to go, but this is a major start and I'm thankful for it!

Some of the dispatchers and officers that I work with usually get together for breakfast on the last morning of our rotation when we get off. This morning Becca joined us and we had a nice breakfast together (along with 5 others). It was a little early for her (we get off at 6:00 AM) so I'm glad she made the effort to come eat with us. It was lots of fun.

She left breakfast this morning to go back to Chaz's house to get her stuff and that's where she is now. I'm headed to get some sleep - It's been 26 hours since I slept last and I'm beat.

Remember that I love you . . . . Jo

"The Iowa Race is Coming Up - Sept. 14, 2007"

I'm getting so excited - by this time next week Becca and I will be in Newton, Iowa at the new speedway that was built by Rusty Wallace. The Hooters team that I cook for and score for will be racing there on Saturday. Becca helps Dusty during the autograph sessions and then scores for whatever driver needs a scorer.

We will leave on Thursday as soon as Becca gets off of work and drive straight through. It will take us about 16-18 hours (including stopping for gas and to eat) of driving but it's always worth it. Up to now, the Mansfield, Ohio track was the furthest that we have gone to get to a race. We'll be driving about a thousand miles to get to the Iowa track.

I have always loved driving - it gives me some good quality quiet time and that gives me the time I need to talk to God and "do some splaining" about the things I need to get forgiven for. Mostly they're little things, but I still need to ask for the forgiveness.

It has also helped to bring Becca and I back together. She moved out last November and our relationship was really really strained for a long time. I wasn't happy with her (and I'm still not crazy about what she is doing) but going to the races together has given us a chance to get back on the right track to getting close again. After all, when you spend 16 hours in a pickup truck alone together, you have to get along with each other.

Well, I have to go walk on my treadmill and then get ready for work. It's supposed to storm tonight and that means that it will be an insane night at work. Just another fun Friday night in D'ville....

Love you all (even if you're reading this and I don't even know you!)

"Those You Touch - September 12, 2007"

Everything you do touches someone in some way - some in good ways, some bad and some in ways that you will never know. Your smile, a frown, the comments you make, the things you don't say when you should, a touch, a hug, a kiss on the cheek, little things you do that no one ever knows about, things you do that you shouldn't that everyone finds out about . . . . They all affect those people around you.

Remember the old saying "What goes around comes around"? The older I get the more I find that this is sooooo true!

What brought all this on was a message I got yesterday from a sweet, beautiful young lady that I have known since she was a small child. She went to church with us and moved away many years ago, but would come back to visit often. She never failed to talk to me and give me a big hug when she'd come back which always made me feel wonderful. I always wondered what I did to deserve such kindness, but you know what - it doesn't really matter. What matters is that I did it. And everytime she remembers me with the hugs, smiles or messages, it is like a little reward from God telling me that I did a good job.

Remember those around you who have touched your life and tell them you appreciate it while you still can.

Thank you sweetheart - you know who you are! I Love You.



Making Amends.....

I seem to have had a horrible time keeping up with this blog.  I was so gung ho at first but then life got in the way and I seemed to have less and less spare time to work on a blog.  I recently had the bright idea to post some of my old blogs from my “MySpace” page.   So for a while, some of my posts will be reposts of the older ones.   I hope you enjoy them!

"How Lucky I Am - Sept. 10, 2007"

It's really amazing when you think about it.... all the little things in life seem so trivial but then you look at all of them over time and life is sooooo good. I have been so lucky in my life, God has been so good to me. I have done things that some people only dream of doing and never get the opportunity to do.

I try to be a good person and to do the things that Jesus would have me to do and I know that sometimes I fall short but that's when he seems to pick me up and dust me off and then he says "well done, my good and faithful servant" and then it's all worth it.

I must have done something right because the good things have come back to me 100 fold in ways that I never dreamed possible. If I died today, I could not complain because of all the awesome things I've gotten to do, the opportunities I've had and the wonderful friends and family that I love so much......

I'm feeling a little nostalgic - just got through looking at some old racing pictures to send to a friend and it made me realize just how lucky I really am. I hope that if you are reading this, you will realize just how lucky you are - no matter what comes your way - because there is always someone who loves you no matter what happens and will always accept you whatever comes. Enjoy life and be grateful for what comes your way, even the trivial little things, because they add up to the big things in the end. Love you all with all my heart.

Our 25th Anniversary

We have the sweetest daughter - Becca and one of our best friends planned a party for our 25th wedding anniversary at "Agatha's Murder Mystery Dinner Theater".  I knew she was up to something, just wasn't sure what.

When we headed toward town and the directions put us into a parking deck that showed "Agatha's", then I knew that was where we were going.  What I didn't know was that 14 of our friends and family were also there waiting for us.  When I rounded the corner into the theater area, they were all standing up cheering for us.  It was awesome!  Becca was so excited because she had pulled off the surprise!

Bobby and I both had speaking parts in the performance and everyone else got to participate also.  It was so much fun and I have to admit that I almost got to the point of being tired of laughing!

Poor Steve was on the end of the table and kept being used as a resting place for "boobs"!  He'll hate me for posting this picture, but it was so funny I couldn't help myself!  The other picture is of my daughter-in-law, Jennifer and my sister-in-law, Anita singing with their group.

Can't wait to see what they'll do for our 50th (that is if we live that long!)!

I Laugh Every Time I Go To The Bathroom

And NO, it is not what you are thinking....  A while back, I decided to redo my bathroom and wanted to have a mountain cabin / outdoor theme.  It has always been a yellow or light blue and I just wanted something different. 

I found the perfect shower curtain at WalMart - it was a dark sky blue, green, brown and tan plaid.  While I was there I purchased some green towels to match it and a few other items.

I then took the shower curtain to Home Depot to have them match some paint to the green color in the curtain.  Everything was set to start the redecoration of the bathroom. 

Becca came over and helped me paint the walls, we put all the accessories out and then stepped back to see how it all looked.  I must admit that I was a little taken aback.  Standing there staring at the shower curtain with all the green accents around it, we both realized that there was absolutely no green in it whatsoever.  We were amazed.... to say the least.

After laughing hysterically for a few minutes, we could only assume that the halogen lighting in WalMart and Home Depot made some of the tan appear to be green.  Hence the reason that I laugh every time I go to the bathroom....

And don't ever tell me God doesn't have a sense of humor!

Selling Moonshine

My father’s father was a moonshiner from the hills of North Georgia. Mind you, I do not consider this a bad thing for the times that they lived in. Times were hard for the family, which was a large one consisting of Granddaddy, grandmother and 10 children.   One of the ways that they earned extra money was to make moonshine from the sugar cane and corn that they grew.

Daddy with 3 of his sisters and 2 of his cousins

Unfortunately, many of my aunts and uncles were alcoholics as adults, having grown up drinking shine all of their lives. I must admit though that I do not remember any of them ever missing a day of work or not taking care of their families because of their drinking.

As a child, I remember Daddy having mason jars with “water” in them that I was not allowed to touch, and it never occurred to me that it was anything but water. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized it was moonshine. I’m not even sure that I would have known what liquor was when I was a child.  My father was also an alcoholic but until I was in high school, he kept it hidden from me. 

Long after my grandfather was dead, I remember that sometimes on the weekends, daddy would drive to Cabbage Town in Atlanta and would get out of the car, open the trunk and then lots of people would come to the car to talk to him. He always made me stay in the car so I could never see exactly what they were doing. As an adult, when the memory came back, I realized that he was selling moonshine out of the trunk.

It’s funny to me now to think that I helped my Daddy run moonshine (I guess it gave more credibility to him – after all, what kind of man would take his little girl with him to sell moonshine?).

Lucky for me I had a mother who was a “teetotaler” and taught me to never become addicted to alcohol. Not that I was an angel growing up…. I had my “younger, more stupid” days just like most of us have had. I just figured out at an early age that I enjoyed watching drunks rather than being one.

That Helpless Feeling

I think that the worst time of my life was when I was told that Becca would need open heart surgery to repair a heart murmur. We knew she had a heart murmur when she was born, but it had been gradually closing up over the years. During the first part of 1994 I realized that I could hear her murmur without a stethoscope. When I asked her pediatrician about it, he said that sometimes when they are closing up they get really loud and this was normal. Several months went by and the next time we went in he decided to send her to a cardiologist for an echo cardiogram. The heart had been building up pockets of muscle around the hole trying to make another valve out of it. At the time it was not giving her any problems, but the doctor assured me that at some point in the future it would start to obstruct the flow of blood through the heart. She was five and had just started kindergarten when we got the news.

I grew up in a time when open heart surgery meant that you went to see the patient before the operation to say your goodbyes. Patients did not usually survive the trauma of open heart surgery and if they did, it was a long slow recovery process. My mind immediately thought of the worse case scenario when the doctor told me and for the first time in a long time, I cried like a baby. Luckily the nurse had taken Steve and Becca to the waiting room to play with the toys so they didn’t see how upset I got. And thank goodness, modern medicine had come a long way and the chances of her not surviving were less than 5%.

Surgery was scheduled for the Tuesday after Thanksgiving at Egleston Children’s Hospital, with us going in on that Monday for all the pre-op work. To keep Becca from being scared and to keep my mind off of what was about to happen, I decided to keep a diary of all the events surrounding her surgery. I took pictures of everything that happened to her and kept notes about the times and what was going on. I knew that when she was older she wouldn’t remember anything about the surgery and would want to know what had happened.

I had decided that when they took her to surgery, I would finally be able to have a nice cry, but when the time came – Bobby and everybody else was crying, so, trying to be a good mom, I got a stiff upper lip and held it together.

The surgery went well and I continued to occupy myself by working on the diary. I stayed at the hospital the whole week because I couldn’t bear to leave my baby there. They had a nice shower area for the family and sofas in the waiting room that slept better than our bed at home.

When Becca came out of surgery, Bobby and I were the first to go into ICU to see her. We knew what to expect about all the tubes and bandages, so that wasn’t much of a surprise. She was still out of it so all we got to do was watch her. Bobby was so pitiful, all he could do was cry. I had been so strong through the whole ordeal because everyone around me was falling apart and I still had to be strong when all I wanted to do was cry for my poor baby.

The second time we got to go in, my mother-in-law went with me. Becca was awake but her hands were strapped down to keep her from pulling out any lines and she still had a breathing tube down her throat. My heart broke – she kept trying to say mama and to reach out to me, but she couldn’t do either one and I couldn’t even hold her. Well, that was my moment – I had to turn away so that she wouldn’t see me cry and I only cried for a few seconds, but it was enough to scare everybody in the room. When I left the ICU, the staff had a nurse and a counselor waiting to make sure that I was OK. I think I must have scared them half to death when I cried.

The next day when it was decided that Becca should be put in a regular room and they started removing all the drainage tubes, cath lines, etc, she would scream every time they pulled on the heart catheter. The cardiologist decided that rather than taking a chance on doing some damage, they would take her back to surgery to find out what was wrong. My poor baby had to go through a second surgery. Luckily it turned out that the catheter was hung on a loop of suture and there was no damage done so the surgery took just a few hours.

She went back to the step down unit of the ICU and on Friday night was put into a regular room. At this point she had not had any food since early Monday evening. The cafeteria was closed but the nurses were so great – one went down and managed to bring Becca back some mashed potatoes and popsicles so Becca was in hog heaven! On Saturday they actually let her go home and I figured that I would have some time to get all of the Christmas gifts wrapped and do some decorating while she was recovering. Well, Becca had other ideas. Once she figured out that she didn’t hurt she was up and running and hasn’t stopped yet!

Watching your child go through something like this is one of the hardest things you ever have to do, you want so bad to take away their pain and make them better but you can’t. You have to trust that God has given you the best doctors and nurses to make them well again and that he will hold your child in his arms until he can place them back in yours.

Tuesday morning came around and the whole family was there to wish her well. After they had given her the “happy juice” (a type of anesthesia) Steve knelt beside the bed to kiss her bye and she was so sweet, stroking his face and loving on him and then before we knew it, she drew back and hit him, knocking him to the floor then just laughed and laughed. I thought for a minute that Steve would probably take care of the surgery problem by just killing her on the spot, but being the sweet little boy that he was, he just got up and went back over and gave her a kiss. It was the greatest of Kodak moments and I was so in shock that I forgot to take a picture of it….. go figure!

Mom, April and Steve naming Becca

My mother and father lived for the day when I would have them some grandchildren. When Steve came along, they doted on him and spoiled him every chance that they got. My mother would say that his “poop” didn’t stink (I’m here to tell you it did, but that’s another story).

When we found out that we were going to have another baby and it was a girl, Mom and Steve decided that they were going to name her. I only had one stipulation and that was that I wanted her middle name to be Joenne after me. They both agreed and immediately said Stephanie (after Steve) Joenne, but my sister-in-law and I were both pregnant and she had already decided to name her’s Stephanie if it was a little girl.

They were disappointed but set out on a quest to find just the right name. Steve got out books so he could find girl names and he and Mom sat on the sofa and put names together for what seemed like hours. Bobby wanted her named something that would have a nickname that he could call her by. It was funny listening to all the combinations that Mom and Steve came up with. Bobby would check each name for what the initials would spell, what nicknames she could be called by and other name related problems. The whole family got in on the act. Mom and Steve finally came up with Rebecca Joenne and it was agreed that we would call her Becca.

Never in the history of our family has it taken so much time and effort to name a new baby. But it was worth it, Becca seems to fit her just perfectly. And the whole family was happy with her name.

I have a P.S. to this story - April called me and reminded me that she was the one who originally said something to my mom about calling the baby "Becca" and I have no doubt that she did.  No matter what, it's fun that we all had a hand in naming her!

My Aunt Eula

Before I married Bobby, I was married to another man named Steve. The marriage only lasted for a little over 3 years and was a learning experience for me. I don’t regret it, I just wish that I had waited a while longer before getting married.

After Bobby and I married, when I found out that I was pregnant, Bobby told me that he wanted a little boy. We already had a daughter (April – by Bobby’s first wife). If it was a boy, Bobby wanted to know whether or not I would mind if we named him Robert Steven (Bobby, his Dad and Brother-in-law are all named Robert). I really didn’t mind so when the time came and it was a boy, we named him Robert Steven. Bobby was so proud, he said he’d always dreamed of having a little boy named Steve and he was tickled to death.

When we finally got Steve out of the house and started showing him off to other family members, we took him to see my Dad’s sister, Eula. I loved Aunt Eula dearly, she was as country as they come and somewhere along the road of life she had lost a card or two out of her deck. When we told her what Steve’s name was, she got so mad at us. She was appalled that we would name our son after my first husband. How dare we?!? We tried to explain to her that this was not the case, that Bobby had always wanted a son named Steve, but she didn’t believe us. Through the years, she would fuss at us over and over for what we did to Steve and I truly believe that she went to her grave thinking that we had named him after my first husband! God love her, this story still makes me laugh when I think of it!

We all have family members like Aunt Eula, but just think of how boring life would be without them! Remember them fondly and with love, because you know they’ve made you smile more than once. And just think, you come from the same gene pool!