reflection.

I can't believe 2009 is almost over. I can't believe we are entering into a new decade. It seems like just yesterday we were "partying like it's 1999." This year has gone by fast, but it's been hard.

Every Christmas, I think "Next year will be different. Our situation will change. Things will be better." And they never are. I don't mean to be pessimistic, but it's the truth. This year, we were broke. Last year, we were broke. The year before, we were broke. See a pattern? It sucks. I keep hoping that we will somehow be able to better ourselves each year, but something always gets in the way.

Here's the low-down on our "bah-humbug" of a Christmas:

Christmas Eve was wonderful. On Christmas Eve, we went to Rob and Hilary's for a delicious feast of beef tenderloin, cheesy potatoes, and cranberry-apple crisp, and of course presents. There was even a surprise visit from Santa! It was a lot of fun, but we were up way too late. The girls were completely awful on Christmas Day. They whined, cried, argued, and the whole spirit was just missing. Next year we are planning to buy them even less. What's worse, is that our dear Aunt Sharon was terribly sick, so the Sexton tradition of breakfast on the ranch was cancelled. I swear, it has been going on for 50 years, and this is the first year ever that I remember it being cancelled.

So we planned to just do our own breakfast with my parents, but my mother did her famous flake-out, so I ended up cooking at my house, and then going to their house to find that she had done nothing, so I had to cook everything else there, too. Grrr! We were so angry. We basically ate and ran back to our own house, where the kids continued to be complete brats.

I've been thinking about how difficult life has been for us this past decade, and I want to be able to change it in some way. There are so many things that cannot be fixed, but I am hoping that the new year will bring us more strength to endure.

I am always reading blogs, and I saw this quote on one of them today:

"Everywhere in nature we are taught the lessons of patience and waiting. We want things a long time before we get them, and the fact that we want them a long time makes them all the more precious when they come."
~Joseph F. Smith

Patience and waiting. There is so much that I want out of life. I'm afraid those things will never come. But I know that I need to be patient. And hopefully, one day, those things will come, and they will be sweeter than anything I could have ever imagined.