New Beginnings

  

     3 1/2 months has now passed since Sharla's passing. I started thinking about another family that we knew who lost their 10 year old boy about two years ago to a drowning at the lake. I remember when Sharla and I had first heard about it we looked into this friends blog back to when it happened. Sharla and I wept and wept. We felt so sad for this family to have to lose one of their family members at such a young age. We often told each other that we were grateful that we had been blessed to have such a healthy family. Yet here I find myself on the opposite side of the spectrum. Now I will be that family that others will read about and they will hold on their loved ones more and more. It still brings tears to my eyes to actually think that my wife is gone, taken from this planet. We had noticed that over the last three years we have lost alot of friends, including my best friend Jared. Then a couple who passed away withen two months of each other both at a really yound age. I even lost my uncle about two months before my friend Jared's passing. These are what we like to call in my faith the end of times. I know it to be true and God has been taking so many wonderful people in preparation to the second coming. My wife happen to be one of them. So I say all of this because over the last couple months it has been anything but easy. But, it hasnt been complete misery. I have been feeling an incredible strength, even from the very beginning. I somehow had somewhat an understanding to why she was taken from me. I knew that I had to be strong for my little ones and no matter what i had to survive. I could not be absent from my kids life because not only would they have lost a mother, but also a Father too. So I did what I had to do and I am still doing it. Yesterday a dear friend came over to my house. Her name is Leah. She is Sharla's best friend. These two were and still are friends like you could not even imagine. When the two were together, you would think you were looking at the same person. They just understood each other. Even more than I could have ever understood Sharla. She brought me this book. I was a book that she had printed from this blog. It dated all the way back to when she started this. Leah handed it to me and said, "Here is Sharla's journal." I had never thought of it that way. For years I would tell Sharla how we need to keep journals so that our legacies may know who we were. But she didnt really like to write, so she never really got one started. Or so I thought. I teared up right away when she handed me this book. It had 5 years of our life in it and all the important things we did and endured together. It truly was not only her journal, but our journal.
   So giving this much thought, I knew what I needed to do. It was time to get on the bandwagon and continue OUR journal. Not just get on here and write a blog when I am feeling inspirational. I needed to include our happenings. Our life now after her passing. I know that sharla is here with us and she would want this to continue. I cannot deny that. It would not be fair to her or the kids. Especially since she always worked so hard to put so much time into making this a possibility. So not only will I write my feelings in here but I will write our life and the still many adventures that we will face. I can see many renditions of this book. Sharla had ALWAYS talked about how she wanted to eventually print out the blog. Leah made that happen and I will forever be grateful. I pray that i will be able to put as much time and energy into as she did.
    So here we go. Yesterday it had been raining all day. I had been laying in bed and just looked out onto the balcony where all of the kids toys layed. I saw their brown and white playhouse dripping from the water droplets that had made their way to the earth from the saturated clouds above. I kept telling myself that I needed to get out of bed, but just couldnt find the strength. I had just got done working 5 days and tried toconvince myself that today was a lazy day and that was okay. But knowing my personality I just couldn't lay there. I had to be productive. So I found the strength to bring myself to my feet and make my way to the couch where the kids were playing in the livingroom. The boys were in their playpen playing with toys they were trying to make sense of what they were and the girls were at the table coloring in their coloring book with crayons that had been broken many times from being stepped on. I plopped myself on the couch and layed there watching them play. All the sudden it dawned on me that i was still in the same situation as I was in the bed, just a different location. I felt lazy. I didn't like it. But what was i going to do? It was raining. That lasted a few hours of just kinda strewing about the house picking up toys that the kids had moved on from. I felt like a human vaccumn of toys.
   Then there was a knock at the door and I remembered that there was a woman coming from Paso Robles to drop off some clothes for the kids. I was amazed to see that there were almost 7 bags of clothes. All I kept thinking was, "Yeah I am going to have to go through all of these today." But that was okay because i was so grateful. She visited for awhile helping me to take care of the little ones and we just conversed as I told her a little bit about my story. It was a good visit and she eventually decided it was time to leave and there I was again laying on the couch.
   Shortly Leah came by. She brought not only the book but special matching church dresses for the wee ones. Natalie was the only one awake at the time and she delicatly opened the present presented to her that had the dress in it. Once she discovered the dress she was over joyed. After Leah took off, I looked at my phone and suddenly remembered that I was supposed to meet with some friends for dinner. I called them and we decided that we were going to take the kids downtown to see Santa. At first I thought this wouldnt be a possibility because it was pouring outside. Chances are Santa would be long gone and chilling in the North Pole. But I looked outside and it was a sunny day with hardly any clouds in the sky. i thought, "That's weird, how long have I not been paying attention to the weather?" This actually gave me a little bit of excitement because i finally had an excuse to leave the house. I could stop being a sloth.
    When we arrived to the "North Pole" as Delaney put it when she got out of the car, "Daddy are we at the North Pole?" We geared the stroller up, the girls each took hold to the side of the stroller and we made our way to the mission where Santa's house resided. We had beaten our friends there and we waited patiently while they were in the process of trying to find a parking place in the overcrowded city. Well I waited patiently, the girls kept jumping up and down about how excited they were and how badly they wanted to see Santa. The girls decided that they wanted to go over and look at the fountain by Santas house. I had images about how Natalie and Delaney just had to reach over and put their hands in the water. But now Kherrington had joined the pack and her little body was so small that I had images of her taking a plummet into the water head first. So I had to watch them carefully. Then I started to smell alcohol near me and I turned around to see a very drunk homeless man standing pretty close to me. It was not a comfortable feeling. If you know anything about people who are pretty intoxicated, they have opinions and must share them no matter what and there is no cutting them off lol. The guy must of thought I was his best friend because of how many times I told him that it was nice to meet him and to have a good day. He just wasn't getting the hint. Luckily my friends showed up just in time and I put all of my attention on them and in a blink of an eye this man was nowhere to be found anymore.
   The moment that the girls had been waiting for had finally arrived. It was time to visit that one man they thought could make all their christmas wishes come true. The look of wonder and amazement was so special to see. To hear them wish for Bikes, and princess toys, and video games. It all brought a little bit of joy to me because they still have that believe in magic. Just like I still have my belief in miracles. Both are things that cannot be explained when we are in those ages but we just know in our hearts that they are true. That magic may not be true and at some point they will discover the real santa, but i know miracles are true and I have already had more miracles in the last couple months then I have had collectivly in my life.
  The day turned out to be so much more tan I thought it would be. Afterwards we got to go over to Josh and Rhondas house where the kids all got to play with each other and i was able to take out a moment to converse with them about how things are going. My life is slowly starting to move forward in a normal fashion. Time is no longer an enemy of mine in the sense that I felt trapped in a unmovable time. That waiting to see Sharla again seemed like an eternity. Now I am finding a way to slowly move forward. To always keep in the back on my mind how much I cannot wait to be with her again while leading a normal productive life. I will meet new people, I will have more experiances. I will raise 3 beautiful daughters and two valiant Boys. They will each know there mother in a way that they will never forget her. I will make sure of that. These are her legacies. They deserve to know where they came from and the person that would have given her life to make sure they did. What an amazing spirit she had and I know she resides in each one of them. They do not cry as much for Sharla these days, and I know that is because they feel her each and every day withen themselves. She brings them the comfort that not only they need, but a comfort that i personally need to see in them to feel like things are going to be okay.
  So as I said before, here I go. This will mark the day that I will continue the blog and put as much into it as I can, so that if one day something to were ever happen where I couldnt be here, then i will have left a legacy unto them to understand us both. my family is my world, I am the patriarch of the family and I have now taken on many new jobs. I accept them because they are worth it. If the good Lord believes that I am qualified to do so, then why not? I do not feel abandoned, nor do I feel forgotten. If anythign I feel so important in his eyes. This means that he took notice of my spritually worthy wife. He noticed that he really needed her at home with him. I love my family. Forever and ever! Let the Blog continue!