52 Weeks: Week 51

Looks like someone is long overdue for some haircolor! Man, it is hard to keep up with it these days! I try to color every month or so, but get behind a week or two and look what happens! As I approach my 41st birthday, I am wondering if I will be completely gray/white by the time I am 45 like my mother was (and all of my other female relatives as well). I may even beat them out by a few years! Still, I do NOT like it and I plan to keep coloring--guess I have to do it even MORE often as I age! Maybe the fact that I now have two teenagers is turning my hair gray even faster than before! :) All I know is this: I still FEEL young, so I want to LOOK as young as I feel! I just cannot accept being totally white-headed in my 40s!! Heck, I don't know if I will accept it in my 60s!! But in my early 40s--it just seems ridiculous!! I know, nature is doing what it is doing and I am trying to fight nature--thank goodness for haircolor or I would feel "old before my time." This aging thing is tough! If it is this hard at 40, how hard will it be at 60? Am I fighting a losing battle? I know I WILL age, but can't I do it at a slower pace? Maybe I am making too big a deal about hair color. Even if I did let it get completely white, I still would feel the same inside. I would still approach life with gusto and enjoy my "second adulthood" with vim and vigor. Why am I placing so much emphasis on my hair color? I don't know--I think white hair represents a life stage to me. My grandmothers and other female relatives began "acting old" in their 40s--and they wore their white hair proudly as a sign of their aging. They wore their snow white hair in "old lady" styles, they wore "old lady" clothes and shoes, and they pretty much sat in their rockers and waited for their lives to end. To them, they WERE old and life was nearly over! They had married, raised families, taken care of their homes--they felt that they had accomplished everything in life by the time they were my age. The rest of their lives were spent thinking they were too old to do anything else. NOT ME!! I am thinking: yes, I accomplished all of my former goals, but now I have LOTS of new goals. I am ready to set out and conquer the world! I plan on doing as much or more in my NEXT 40 years as I did in my first 40! I am a "very young middle aged woman" in my mind. I have so much more to accomplish! So I am NOT ready to look like an old lady, dress like an old lady, or act like an old lady!! Coloring my hair is just one aspect, but it is a very sensitive issue with me. To me, if I let my hair go white, I will look like an old lady like my grandmothers were. I guess I am rebelling from that whole image, and I want to do the exact opposite of what they did. No white hair, no granny clothes, no rocking chairs! Bring on the hair color, the stylish wardrobe, and the red convertible! I will definitely be coloring my hair this weekend! :)

52 Weeks: Week 50

Introducing my new blog: Mother of Two Teenagers. My daughter just turned 13, and my son will turn 15 in December...oh my! I am really deep in it now! And in just a few weeks, I will turn 41. I will be officially "forty-something"...not simply FORTY. SO now everything is official: a forty-something mother of two teenagers. Wow! It seems like yesterday that I was a thirty-something mom of young kids. How did that happen so fast?! Well, I am trying to look at the positive aspects of all of this: it won't be easy but I think there are some really great times ahead. Life will be VERY different in this new stage, but different isn't bad...it's just...DIFFERENT. So now my life as a forty-something mother of two teenagers is off and running. Here we go!!! :)

52 Weeks: Week 49

Watching and waiting...waiting and watching. This is the window I often use to watch people ride by our house, stop at our for sale sign, take a flyer, and spend a few minutes looking at our house from "curbside." I think we have good "curb appeal," but not everyone calls and wants to tour the inside of the house. Some do, though, and we have shown several families around our home hoping they would soon want to call it "their home." Selling this house has become an all-encompassing task: everything else is lined up and ready to go, but we really need to sell the house and be free of the mortgage before we move. We aren't planning on buying anything for a while, and we have some possible rentals lined up...still, paying the mortgage on this house would be a very difficult task if we were also paying for living expenses in Florida. So, not only am I waiting (not so patiently!) for someone to buy our house, I am waiting for a whole new life to begin once this happens. I am so excited about the future! I can't wait to begin! It is SO hard to hang in there through delays...it makes me wonder if it will EVER happen! I know it will, I just have to hang in there through the duration. The end result will be wonderful, but the process is long and grueling...kind of like going into labor. I feel a lot like I did at the end of my pregnancies: an anxious "lady in waiting." I knew that wonderful times were ahead, but the tough stage at the end, as well as the intense labor required, was not easy to endure. But I did endure, and the end result was my wonderful life as the mother of two children. So now, we are in the "last trimester" of our moving plan. Our "due date" has come and gone and now we are "overdue." We must be patient as we wait...the time will DEFINITELY arrive soon now. We will have to endure some intense labor as we achieve our final goal of moving, but the end result will be worth all of the hard work. I know this, logically...still, as I watch and wait...wait and watch...it isn't easy to convince myself that the time is near. Sometimes it feels like it will NEVER happen! But it WILL...and I will hang in there and wait as long as needed. (SIGH!)

52 Weeks: Week 48

Me with my two favorite magazines: More and O. Both have great advice and inspirational stories for women over 40. Both motivate me to "be all I can be" and to make my second adulthood as much fun as my first one. Both inspire me to dream big, to want more out of life, and to "go for it." I love being part of this new generation of women! :)


As my 41st birthday approaches, I want to look back over my first year of my forties and see if it was everything I had hoped it would be. In some ways it was, and in some ways it fell a bit short of my expectations. A quick synopsis: lost weight/gained some back/lost again/gained again/trying to lose again and truly maintain!; graduated with my Masters Degree/ready to begin career/not yet successful with job-hunting; visited Florida and made plans to move/prepared house to sell and put it on the market/made arrangements for our life in Florida/haven't sold the house and haven't moved to Florida yet; achieved all of my old goals and made new ones/began working toward achieving my new goals/made some progress and had some success/didn't complete some goals within the planned time period. All in all, I feel good about what I have accomplished this year. I am proud of myself! On the other hand, I am not exactly where I thought I'd be at this point in my life. I'm close, but not there yet. I won't truly feel successful until I have completed the transition and am living my new life the way I had planned. So I feel good about what I DID do, disappointed about what I didn't do (yet), and excited about what I plan to do in the near future. Soon I will be 41, and I will have 9 more years to make my 40s everything I want them to be. I KNOW I can do it! I am so ready! :)

52 Weeks: Week 47

High School Football Games: what memories! As my son enters high school and his first football game approaches, I have mixed feelings. Since he isn't a football player and he isn't in the marching band (we had planned to be in Florida and he had planned to be in the band there), I am just not excited about it like I would be otherwise. In 8th grade, his band played a few games with the high school band to get the feel of how it is. We went to the games and really enjoyed the atmosphere. It brought back memories for us, as his parents, and it seemed to motivate him to view high school in a positive light. However, he did NOT want to be at the local high school: his sights were set on a school in Florida with an award-winning marching band. The cost of participating in a high school marching band is quite high, so he opted to wait until he was settled into his high school in Florida. Now it is football season, and we aren't there yet. What a disappointment!

So, as the season begins and teenagers everywhere are donning school colors and preparing to root for their home teams, my son is not so excited about it. As his parents, we were really looking forward to watching him play in the band and enjoy his first taste of high school football season, but it isn't working out that way. We are all trying to muster up some school spirit here, but all any of us can think about is everything we were planning to do in Florida! I sure hope the move works out soon! It is hard to get excited about life here when our minds are there. I think anyone who is planning a move but is experiencing a delay knows what I mean. Once you get your mind on how things will be in your new home and life, it is hard to enjoy things if you end up being stuck in your old life or in a place you hadn't intended on being.

My son decided not to go to the game, so we aren't going either. It just feels like a let-down because we were all really looking forward to football season and the marching band. Oh well, maybe next year. I look at it like this: he's kind of a "red-shirt freshman". He has to "sit out" for his first year, but things will really kick into gear beginning in his sophomore year. I am trying to get excited about being the parent of a high schooler, but the situation is making it more difficult. I can't wait until NEXT year's football season: that will be a lot of fun for all of us!