2019!

It has been years since I have been here.  Facebook surely killed my blog, and Instagram has severely  wounded Facebook.  But even with all of that, I have returned to the place where my head might literally explode if I don’t get some of the words out so here I am.  Life is drastically different than what is says in my current “profile” and it will take a while to get all caught up.  We have lived many books worth of material since the last time I was here, and time will tell if I keep this up enough to get some of it out there.  Jonathan is grown and living in Pennsylvania  with a sweet girl named Kylie.  He is a front desk supervisor at the Westin Hotel and Conference Center in downtown Pittsburgh.  Madi is only months away from graduating from USF with her BSW.  She is in LOVE with a great guy from CHWC.  Our life has been an endless stream of initials... BSP, FTC, FPEA, FPMA... most of them no longer apply and new ones have taken their place.  Jake is the only child left at home (sometimes...more on that will surely spill out eventually), and he is a publicly schooled sophomore who plays the trombone.  He is not far from getting his license.  When I started this blog a decade and a half ago, I had to type from the stationary desktop through the dialup internet.  I am currently lounging on the love seat typing this frantically with the thumb of my right hand from my phone.  If I actually revive this thing thoughts on us currently inhabiting the dystopian world where we all live inside of our “devices” will surely come out.  Other topics will include the fine line between giving young parents the advice they want to hear and the information I have actually gleaned from 23 years of parenting (and 38 years of scrutinizing families); why I hate politics but am prouder than ever to not align with either major political party; an epic saga about 10 siblings and the reasons some of them sometimes live at our house; lots of stories about why parents need to actually have a relationship with their kids that encourages them to make wise decisions instead of relying on random adults to police said children (depending on when I get back to this I might have no earthly idea what this even means, but it was currently the impetus for me to dust off this old blog and spew words out into the atmosphere); and a plethora of why I could get so much more accomplished in life if I didn’t live so much of it in my head where I try unsuccessfully to apply logic and reason to situations that defy those things.