got chocolate?

so, my mom is gone. she left on sunday morning, and i DIDN'T cry as i watched her walk into the airport, bound for the True North, Strong and Free. josh held my hand really tight, and i think that helped. it also helped that we stopped at home depot on the way home (rapidly becoming my favourite store) and i picked out a little african violet plant with dark purple flowers to put in the blue pot my mom bought for me. african violets remind me of my mom because a few years ago, she became an african violet addict. see, if you take a leaf off of the plant and put it in a bit of water, it will grow roots and you can plant that new leaf, which makes a whole new plant. she became obsessed with growing african violet plants and we had about a million all over our house. at one point in her serioius addiction stage, she even picked a leaf off of a plant in a restaurant just because she liked the color of the flower and wanted to grow one for herself. luckily, i convinced her that she was going mad and so eventually, her ferocious plant making slowed down a little, and now she probably only has about half a million african violets growing in her house. i, however, had none and kind of missed them, and so now i have one. but i kind of want two. so i'm thinking of cutting a leaf...

the ONLY nice thing that i can think of about my mom leaving is that when we got back home, we discoverd all kinds of nice things that she had left for us to find. back when we were first married and came home, she had hidden chocolate bars all over the house in places that we wouldn't look right away, like the medicine cabinet. oh my! just as i was writing that last sentence, i glanced over to where josh keeps his records and i discovered 2 christmas chocolate advent calendars!! (those things are really hard to find down here) i'll bet you we'll still be discovering little things like that for days. she brought us SO MANY crunchie chocolate bars (josh's favourite) and smarties (my favourite) both which you cannot buy in the usa. we also got gifts from my little sister who was in scotland and morocco over the holidays, so it felt kind of like christmas when she pulled out all of this stuff! my brother andy, and his wife cara sent us a home video of our niece, sarah. there's this one part where she's in a little jumpie kind of thing that bounces up and down and we could NOT stop laughing! she is so great. it's hard to believe that the next time i see her, she'll probably be walking already.

so i didn't cry at the airport, but i started to cry in church, of all places. luckily josh had his hankie handy. my friend leah (with-2-kids-and-a-dog) is out at disneyland with her daughter and mom and grandma, and its been POURING rain on them! she called me last night and told me that they had those garbage-bag ponchos on and umbrellas and had just paid their admission fee into disneyland, when it began to pour and people just started running out of the front gates! i don't think it was the happiest place on earth yesterday. they quickly decided to go shopping instead. so they're hoping to go to sea world on thursday, and i'll meet them there. hooray! i love having friends and family from my old corner of the world visit my new corner of the world.

i'm not working today, so now i'm off to do groceries and laundry and cleaning the house...you know, wifely stuff.

~heidi, Soon To Become 2nd Generation African Violet Addict