LeahAndMark.com

Okay, everyone can read Mark’s entry below, so I’m not posting the rules again… but here are 6 things about me you may or may not find interesting:

1. When I have to use a public toilet, I always tear off the end of the toilet paper and dispose of it before tearing off some to wipe with…  I just always think that maybe the person before me had dirty hands and touched the paper.

2. I have 1 grandfather, 3 grandmothers, 5 uncles, 6 aunts, and 23 cousins still living, in addition to a father, mother, and brother. 

3. I will soon have a brother-in-law, sister-in-law, mother-in-law, father-in-law, and grandparents-in-law to add to my big, crazy family.  I’m very excited about that.  Mark’s family is beyond awesome!

4. Almost all of these people will (hopefully) be at the wedding.

5. That really limits the number of other people we can invite.  So please don’t feel bad if you don’t get an invitation!  It doesn’t mean we don’t love you.  It’s just… our families would be pissed if they weren’t at the wedding.

6.  Yes, I worry about stuff like this because I was brought up to be an extremely polite and sweet Southern girl and I’ve been working hard ever since to lose some of that self-sacrificing, over-the-top niceness.  But not all.  Because it never hurts to be polite and hospitable!

Okay, and now for blogs I like to read:

http://jamesadamthwaite.com <– my BFF and crazy conspiracy theorist

http://girlsgonechild.blogspot.com  <– cool blog by a hip, young mom

http://schuylersmonsterblog.com  <– cool blog about a special dad-and-daughter duo

http://postsecret.blogspot.com  <– PostSecret.  Duh.

It’s not that I don’t have my own family, because I do, and they’re great, but when you have a large extended family that lives close to each other… family entails many more things.

I am fortunate to be close and even included/accepted as one of theirs - and it’s an interesting experience. Aside from their family in particular, the whole ‘large extended family’ is a foreign experience for me - and one that I’m glad to be a part of. It’s partly my own fault, but my relationship with my own family is slightly distant, even though the underlying love and everything else is always there. I missed my sister’s graduation and not being able to go hit me harder than I thought it would - even though I really was struggling to get finances in order at the time… but still, that realization that ‘money’ is always keeping me from things… is frustrating. And while I wish I was fighting to push back how much not having money ’stops’ me… I know I’m only getting more money so that the lack of it can stop me only slightly less…  Paying off all my debt this year should help out considerably.

Happily, I have already purchased my ticket to fly out to Phoenix in May for a few days and attend my brother’s graduation. And even though I missed my sister’s, it does seem like this one has more weight, or rather, a different significance since only a few years ago, it was a real issue whether or not Ryan would actually get up and do something with his life…or at least… get to a point where he could go live it. Because being stuck in a depression, deep in a hole without a clue as to how to even begin to climb out… that was Ryan at times, and then one day, I’m sure with my sister’s help, he started moving forward, and then all of a sudden it wasn’t an upward climb but merely a gradual walk up an incline out of a cave instead of a deep, deep hole in the earth.

I am going to take insanely too many pictures of my family when I see them again.

-Mark