Sweet Potato Pie and I shut my mouth

Thanksgiving Week, ya'll! This week, I really want to focus on staying nice and positive and...well...giving thanks. It has been a really big year for me. I have had both the highest of highs and the lowest of lows this year. My family endured tragedy with the death of my uncle and we are still dealing with that daily. Trying to find a way out of that darkness has been a test for me. It has made me question both the faith that I have and the lack of faith that I have had. I don't know if that makes sense.

It has been a year of ups and downs with Addison. We have been thru new doctors, new medicines, new schools, etc. Coming out of the woods? Maybe. I am always hopeful with him at year's end. My mantra...next year things will all come together for my boy.

Perhaps the most surprising happening of the year has been my decision to move back home to Vicksburg. When I left here in 2002 I was absolutely certain that I would never really even want to come back to Vicksburg for a visit. I don't claim to understand the way the mind or the heart works, but for this last year I have felt like I was just away from home. Ocean Springs is beautiful, charming, progressive, artsy, and you can't get much better than the air down there. It is a great place to live and to raise kids. What it isn't is home. It's amazing the little things that you remember you loved when you move away from a place. A certain bend in a road, buildings that hold some significance or another, the familiarity of it all...I hope I never take any of it for granted again.

The need to come home led to the hugeness of me leaving my job at Global after nearly four years and take a job doing something totally opposite of what I have always done. I am settling into my new non-technical job as an administrative and marketing assistant. I go thru days of wondering what the hell I am doing here answering these phones and making coffee and copies. But at the end of the day when I go home and I leave my work at work and I get to enjoy my family...answering the phones and making copies doesn't seem so bad. It's all what you make of it, right?

Not only glad to have had the good this year, I give thanks for all of my trials and tribulations as well. They have taught me lessons about myself and that's never a bad thing! They have also taught me that the importance of family and friends cannot be measured and that just when you think you can't take any more, you not only take more but you conquer it. This year has been hectic, exciting, heartbreaking, overwhelming, great, and so much more I can only look to next year and wonder what it will bring. I believe with all certainty that no matter what it is, I am ready.