Not on BlogHer....

BlogHer. All I know of it is that there are several blogs I adore that are a part of BlogHer. I can also tell you that I have not spent enough time on the site to understand it. How is that for honesty? I can also tell you that I am not a part of BlogHer because there is a waiting list to even be considered to be a part of it. I have not put my name on the waiting list, nor have a joined any of the contests on BlogHer. One contest consists of a question you can answer and then be entered into a drawing to win.

It's not that I don't enjoy joining things, it's just that well, the directions were longer then my attention span this summer. Again, how is that for honesty?

I like the contest question they had for this week or rather it liked me enough to stick in my brain and haunt me all night. Maybe that is why they are so successful!

"What will you be doing in ten years?"

While I don't think it was meant to make my brain hurt, well, it made my brain hurt. In ten years I will be 52 and that sounds very grown up to me still!

At 15 I could have answered with almost pin-point accuracy that I would be married and making babies. But the truth is that I had no idea what the ten years in between would hold. I had no vision for nursing school, a career, much less a mom on a vent for six of those years or even being a single woman living alone in New Rochelle. Not one bit of the ten years in between was on my horizon.

I wonder what my answer would have been if I had been asked that question, only with a seven year span? Probably that I would want to be married and making babies too...yeah, one track mind here, always was!

I can tell you what my answer would have been at 32: RETIREMENT! Out of NY and on to a new and simpler life with lower taxes and more land! I had my 3.5 children and we had a plan. A good plan...except that I had never seen the joys like having Maggie, and the pain like losing dad or moving with in the boundaries of NY, along the way.

So what to do I want to see my life like at 52? I hope and pray I am somebodies favorite mother-in-law by then and maybe a grandma...but that's more about the kids then us. Where are we going to be?

I've spent so much of the last year either mourning not retiring or regrouping into retirement that there has only been the shortsightedness of retirement and bills.

School is looming and I am trying to figure out how to get every child from Point A to Point B without losing track. When does Jack have his next game and can I sell some of these JETS tickets because I know we can't use them all? What's for dinner? Can I make it to September when the pension kicks in? How much coffee can I really drink in one day?

As Dave Ramsey puts it, "The difference between a dream and a goal is a plan."

I've had a few unexpected blessings in the past few days. Never saw them coming. And I wonder if that is the point to this exercise here.

Truth is, every dream I have ever had, has come true.

Let me say that one again: Every dream that I have ever had, has come true, less the ballerina thing when I was four. But I never took that one to heart anyway.

I firmly believe that God has never put something on my heart to pray for or work for that He didn't plan to use in my life. Some of those dreams came with heart ache but the rain was always worth the rainbow.

Maybe it's time to start spending some time, "writing the vision down" again, "that he may run who reads it." (Habakkuk 2:2 reads in part)

So dream a little today, just like I am going to do...and start to write it down. What do you want to be when you grow up?