I’ve had this blog for nearly a year now. When I started, I was full of motivation and ready to make some changes. I’ve had some personal setbacks throughout the year, as did most of Nashville. Let me tell you, the Noah’s Ark jokes got old reeeeeeally quickly. With each speed bump, I managed to recover and try to keep a positive attitude. However, the last few months have been quite a challenge for me. The hits just seem to keep on coming, and I’m ending the year shell-shocked and limping across the 2010 finish line.

In late August/early September, my sister had a health crisis. She’s been battling illness for many years since a Lupus diagnosis at the age of 15. I could go into all of the other diagnoses that have stemmed from that, but I’d need several blog posts to accomplish this. Anyway, she developed some internal bleeding that kept her in one hospital or another for a couple of weeks. It was obviously stressful for the whole family. The bleeding stopped somehow, and we never got answers as to why or how it all began. We thought she was on the road to recovery, but just a couple of days ago, she began experiencing numbness and memory loss, which made us suspect some sort of stroke. She is hospitalized once again; I pray she doesn’t have to spend her Christmas there.

A couple of weeks after my sister’s initial crisis, we experienced the nightmare of Pierce’s disappearance (If you haven’t read it already, details are in the post “Every Parents Worst Nightmare”). This set us on a journey we weren’t ready to take. Realizing he was oblivious to the dangers around him and faced with very low test scores, we came to the realization that Pierce would not be attending college one day; instead, we needed to place him in Life Skills classes that would prepare him to, hopefully, live on his own one day. Just when we thought he understood how dangerous his wandering had been, we had another scary incident in October. He was upset about something at church, and ran out of his Sunday School classroom. After searching for some time, a member of our church pulled up in the parking lot with Pierce in her car. She had seen him in the Chic-Fil-A parking lot down the road from the church, and she coaxed him into her car with candy and toys. Within a couple of days, I got Pierce in to see a Pediatric Neurologist. She started him on anti-anxiety medication. We’re still working on getting him on the right dosage. I can’t even begin to convey how emotional this has been for our whole family.

Tim’s job has been both a blessing and a curse. We’re so very thankful that he has found work in our still struggling economy. Construction is an industry that has yet to fully recover here in Nashville. That being said, we’ve had almost too much work lately. In the meantime, the remodeling we’ve done on this very old house has begun to fail, and we’ve been faced with some home repairs of our own. When Tim comes home exhausted from working all day with some very needy clients on the problems with their homes, what do you think is the LAST thing he wants to think about? I’m sure you can imagine what a strain this has been on our home life.

Last week, I went on a field trip with Reagan’s chorus. I was gone for all of two hours. When I came home and walked into our living room, I noticed our TV was gone. I walked back into the kitchen and could see into our bonus room. The glass in our back door had been smashed. We’d been robbed. They took computers, wii, xbox, nearly all of the games for both, cable motem and routers, an old video camera, and two pieces of jewelry: a broach belonging to my great-grandmother and Tim’s wedding ring. This wasn’t our first break-in. Almost five years ago, Reagan and I came home to find a man and his girlfriend ransacking our house. They were never caught. We’ve made an insurance claim, but there’s a $1000 deductible. I wasn’t through with our Christmas shopping, and now I have to spend money on replacing stuff these crooks stole. They didn’t just take our stuff, though. They dealt me a final, crippling blow to my emotional state so that I’m ready to climb into a hole and hibernate for the remainder of winter. To add insult to injury, we celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary this past Sunday with a fender-bender due to snowy/icy roads. UNCLE!!!

I’m really sorry that the final blog post of the year is so very negative. Quite the contrast to my last post, huh? I figure I’m among friends, though, and if you can’t be honest with those you love, then just what kind of friends are they? If I had a message, I guess it would be this: Be kind to everyone you encounter this Christmas season. You have no idea what kind of burdens they are carrying. In the immortal words of Tiny Tim, “God bless us, everyone!” I’m praying for a kinder, gentler 2011. How about you?