Remembering 2009 part 1

Hey everybody,

Wow.  I cannot believe 2009 is over.  It seems like last year just flew by, and yet, it went by so slowly.  Do y'all ever feel like that?  Like everday takes 10 years to get through... and then you look back and the year seems to have gone by in a day?  2009 was filled with hello's, goodbye's, new friends, old friends, difficulties and new opportunities, regrets; and those happy memories I will look back on for the rest of my life!  

Some of the highlights of 2009 were:

January:  We moved out of our beloved old farmhouse located in the cornfields of Illinois.  It was bittersweet, my family and I had grown to love that ancient, out-dated, large, out-of-the way, drafty, beautiful house.  The summers there were just gorgeous; the woman before us had tended the garden faithfully, and lily's, baby's breath, little purple flowers, and so many others were blossoming.  We had a little pond in the backyard, one that we could keep fish in, and there were two sheds out back, one of which used to be a smoke house.  I never went into either building, but all of us kids had so much fun playing on the trampoline,  using those buildings as props to pretend we were settlers in the old west, princesses and princess in the Medieval times, orphans during the Depression, or something like that.  I don't know if we could have moved away during the summer; it was really just so breath-taking.  But it was winter, everything was dead, our grill had fallen into the pond, which was completely iced over and had a frozen baby rabbit in it =(  we were all freezing, and just to get from the house to the car was a miserable journey.  That was when our lease ended, and God opened the way for us to move to a new house, one with a heating system that worked!  So we signed a lease and said farewell to cornfields.

February:  We had lived in our new for about a month, when Daddy got an offer to come back to the South and get the position he had been wanting in the first place.  His current job was wearing on him.  He was hardly ever home, and it was tough on the whole family.  And if you have ever lived in MO, you know how it gets.... coooooollllld  in the winter.  My family doesn't like cold at all!  So February was a month of prayer asking to make the right decision.

Later I will try to put up March and April.  I used to do a lot of journaling when I was little, and now I love to look back on what I wrote (or I cringe and think I was really silly) I regret not writing during '08 and '09 because I am missing a huge chunk of memories, from how I was angry at my brother that day, or how beautiful the sunset was, or how it felt to hear a mouse scurry across my bedroom floor, or what it was like to just go outside and marvel at God's creation one summer's eve.  So I want to catch up on some express memories, as well as an overview of last year.  

So I will be back later!