mama said there'd be days like this...

(At the National Zoo, last Spring)

Me: Sadira, don't stick your head in between the slats the in fence.

Sadira: But I wanna see the monkeys.

Me: You can see the monkeys just fine without sticking your head in there.

Sadira: No I can't, I wanna see them.

Me: DON'T do it.

(Sadira disobediently sticks her head in between the slats.  Momentary victorious grin is quickly erased when she realizes....she's stuck.)

Sadira: MAMA HELP!!!!!

We were able to free her with a little wriggling...no wooden fences were sacrificed in Operation Free Sadira.

And yes, like any good mother, I stopped to snap a picture for posterity before I helped get her free. ;)

Moral of the story is there are some lessons you just have to learn through experience.  No amount of external influence or opinion can really teach you more than life experience itself.  That is what has been weighing on my mind heavily over the past three weeks.

It's been several weeks since I blogged, and I can't believe so much time has passed.  Things have been busy around here, very busy, bordering on hectic.  The truth of the matter is, there were some pretty ugly things that happened in January that I needed to face and take care.  I had to wait it out a bit because I knew things would get worse before they got better, and that's exactly what happened.  But things are starting s-l-o-w-l-y to look up.  At the end of the day, I'm okay and Sadira is phenomenal, and it's nothing that will handicap us forever...it's just an unexpected blip in the radar that must be dealt with.

Obviously sometimes life is not always rainbows and butterflies, and while Sadira and I do tend to have it pretty good 95% of the time, this is one incident that has left me scratching my head, still trying to figure out what the lesson I'm expected to learn from this is.  In the meantime, we look towards the future and try to move on.

And while I appreciate all the support I've received from my friends and family, especially since I've been pretty vague to most of you, I will talk about it if I need to, and most of the time I don't.  So emails or phone calls asking, "what happened?" will unfortunately not be returned.  This situation is just not something that I can or am willing to talk about publicly.

But love and hugs and prayers and good, positive, well-wishes are always appreciated. ;)


So, moving forward...

Despite the recent obstacles I've been dealing with, we have had some great adventures and the beginning of new pursuits.  I have about 3 blog posts in the hopper that I just need to get down on paper and write, so I most likely will be posting several times this week to get myself caught up and back on target.  It'll be a good distraction in light of "the situation" I'm currently dealing with and will help focus me back on my goals.

So in other words, "Hi there. I'm Nasrene. Sorry I've been off the radar for awhile, but I'm back now and am I'm really happy about that."