Chester...bad Family ...good

So today is the second to last day of the Writing Institute. I am pumped about all I have learned here but I am ready to start my traditional teacher summer of getting up around nine and going from there. Sure my traditional summer is going to be full of little missions like going to the courthouse, Social Security and DMV to change my name, unearthing the back bedroom from beneath the mountain of artifacts from the apartment and such but it is something I am ready to embrace. Being a wife....I want to have time to do things to surround my husband with reasons to notice that I love him more and more each day. I also want to get back to loving myself. I am setting the goal of walking three miles a day. 1.5 in the morning and 1.5 in the evening and eating fun salads for lunch....we will see how it goes.

You may wonder what is up with the title of the blog today. I can explain.

Lets start with the bad. Chester : he is my car. I love him dearly. He is eleven years old . I have had him for nine. We have had many good and bad times together. Still, he will be leaving the family this summer as we purchase a new car for Meredith. Somehow the car must have caught wind of this and the fact that we had intentions of testdriving cars this Saturday because when I came out of Kohl's yesterday and turned the car key in the ignition this is what happened...

NOTHING!

My husband sent my inlaws to my rescue and we made our way (after a jump) on to our original plans to go through items at Mawmaw's house. Once we concluded there ( and another jump was issued to revitalize Chester), we went on to have a really nice dinner at the house as a family. The good news: Our house now has motion sensored lights and a toilet in the bottom half of the house that doesn't run non stop. And since Chester's problems were not fixed in a very permanent way - I got to drive the truck to the Writing Institute today. Yay! :0)

Now on to the family good. With the men outside doing work, Linda (my second mom aka mother in law) and I were allowed an opportunity to talk. We dabbled in a lot of topics but eventually came to talking about Carter's middle name and what it might end up being. As we came up with possibilities, we shared different names in our family trees. I mentioned that Grandma's name is Lillie and that I had always thought about trying to work it into a girl's name if I ever had a daughter. Linda told me that Mawmaw's mother's name was Lillie Mae. She even thinks it was spelled like Grandma's with the -ie instead of the -y. I was so in awe of the fact that one name could mean so much and honor two women so incredibly significant in both Brad and my lives. Brad even smiled when I shared the discovery with him after his parents had left. So who knows? In our future we could very well have a beautiful little Lillie Dillard in our lives and if she is just a fraction of the grace, greatness, sweetness and generosity of her two greatgrandmothers, then we would be so blessed.

So definitely family good.