Lost Phones

My mom is in the hospital tonight.

When she sees that I wrote something about it on my blog (and facebook) she'll probably be embarrassed.

But you see, my mom's been bugging me about blogging again.  She's told me a few times "You know, I keep clicking on that blog of yours to see if you've written anything lately, and I'm always disappointed to see you haven't."

It's been very encouraging to hear that my mom cares about such a little thing as my blog.

I can't be with her tonight.  So, I figured the least I could do is write a post for her.

So, here goes.

I haven't written in a while.  During that time my little girl who was just a few months old when I started this blog has blossomed into a very entertaining 18 month old. 

She charms everyone who meets her and puts on quite the show.  I think Trevor hits the nail on the head when he says "She has a personality only God himself could have come up with."

Ainsley also has an affinity with putting things away (praise the Lord someone in our family has finally inherited my mom's genes when it comes to cleaning up).  If she can't figure out where the item in her possession belongs (which is almost always), it ends up in the garbage can. 

I have found so many things in the garbage can that shouldn't have been there.  Makes me wonder what I didn't catch before it got thrown out for good.

I've caught her trying to dispose of our phone three times.  I don't know what her personal vendetta is against telephones, but it gets violent at times.  Once I found the phone dismantled and shoved inside a McDonald's bag in the trash can.  One of these days I'm going to find it at the bottom of a bathtub full of water with a brick tied to it.

So when the phone turned up missing a month or so ago I figured it made its weekly pilgrimage to visit the soiled diapers and banana peels. 

I looked in the can. Not there. I realized that yesterday was garbage day. And this was a new bag.

Uh oh.

We held out hope that the phone would turn up somewhere around the house.  After a couple of days of looking, we assumed the worst and threw out the charging stations and cords. 

It was a lost cause. 

We even went as far as to cancel our home phone completely.  We don't use it much anymore, so we figured we wouldn't miss it.

A couple of weeks later I was digging in our couch, looking for a pair of keys (that ironically were later found in the trash can) when I pulled out our phone.

The phone I had completely given up on.  It was right under my bum this whole time.

You know what I've been sitting on all this time?

Lots of stuff.

You know how you find something you really love, and then you go through a bad patch, get discouraged and give up? 

Then you fall behind on your expectations and think it's a lost cause.

I do that with pretty much everything. 

I did that with writing.

But the lost phone's meaning was not lost on me. 

Most of our dreams that we think are long gone are within arms reach.

We're just sitting on them.

What are you sitting on?