beyond cinderella

My husband, Bill and I are going to retire on January 7th, 2016. Bill will retire from his out of the home job, and I will retire from my in home and everything else job… 🙂 We are going to sell our home, and everything in it, buy a motorhome and become full-time RVers traveling throughout the United States and Canada…

So, in order to prepare for this big life changing event, my first order of business/big project, is to research everything I can find about motorhomes, and full-time RV life… and go through and sort all of our family photos and personal items that we will not have room for in our motorhome. I have spent the past two weeks doing just that.

I not only have all of the family photos that Bill and I acquired over the years before the age of digital cameras, but I also acquired all my mother’s years and years of family photos. OMG, I’m talking about trunk loads of photos…. there ought to be a law against hording photos…. I don’t mean to be a Debbie Downer about family treasures…. but I can’t imagine why anyone would want as many photos as I am looking through, sorting into piles to ship off or give to other family members that might want to have these treasures for their very own… Good thing there are names on the back of most of the old photos because without that, I wouldn’t have a clue who some of those people even were… I have been working on these photos for the past week and this isn’t even a slight dent in what is left…

It seems like the more I sort through, the more there is to sort through… I will be at this for a long, long, time… 🙂

In addition to sorting through piles of family photos, I’m also going through precious personal items like my daughter’s ( Katie and Shantel) childhood drawings, cards, etc. I came across this note that Shantel dictated to my father while I was at work one day. It is dated November 5th, 1999. It says: “Dear Mama, Please don’t ever give anything away again unless you ask me first or you will be sorry and we will take you to an attorney but not to jail. Love you, Shantel

That is priceless! Apparently I cleaned out her room/toy box and gave some things away that I thought she never played with anymore and of course she went looking for it the very next day.. go figure! 🙂

I also came across these tiny precious little bracelets my mother saved all these years. They were placed on new-born babies born in Washington Pennsylvania. They spell out the last name of the new-born baby. My brothers, Tommy and Danny, and I all received one. My brother, Stephen was born in Phoenix so he didn’t get this type of bracelet… But what am I going to do with these now? My brother Danny doesn’t want them and since we are going from a home to a motorhome, I just can’t keep everything… But aren’t they sweet?

Little things like these, collected over time, help shape our lives… Again, I don’t mean to be a Debbie Downer here, because apparently they were precious trinkets to my mother since she saved them all these years. But now she doesn’t even know they exist. So, in the end they are just trinkets that have no meaning to anyone but our family and I just can’t keep everything…

Stay Tuned!