The Wednesday Weekly - one day late!

This video is a little bit silly, we're all trying to get Haley to wave again on video (she'd waved 4 times at 4 different people earlier that day!) but of course she had stage fright and didn't want to cooperate! But I still think it's just too cute to hear her babble away, to her Mimi she loves so much. You'll note that when it comes to me she goes totally quiet - she loved to laugh and smile for mommy, but she liked to talk to everybody else! Don't get me wrong, she'd talk to me every now and again, but usually she saved the long chats for Daddy in the evening when she needed to catch him up on her day. I guess she figured I already knew everything she'd been up to anyway. :)

Earlier this week, Tuesday I think, I was flipping through the TV channels when I came across the new Documentary channel. I thought I'd check it out for a minute, and the documentary that happened to be on was about the average life expectancy in various countries. In the 5 minutes that I watched, they interviewed a woman serving a life sentence in prison with no possibility of parole. She talked about how being in prison and having no chance of that ever changing had made her finally wake up and live every moment to the fullest. That her goal every moment was to make it as good as it could possibly be and to make every encounter she had with each person she came across as positive as possible. She said when she met someone in the hallway she would think to herself "What can I say to them to make them smile?" As the interview progressed, she compared her life sentence to that of the life of a parent who has lost a young child. (You know your life isn't too hot when people serving life sentences in prison think to themselves "What could be worse than this? Losing a child, yep, that's about it.") She claimed that as with parents who've lost children, you just have to deal with the cards your dealt and keep on living. There's nothing else you can do. And she said "I'm not miserable. I'm not happy, but I'm not miserable either." And when she said that, I realized that at that moment her comparison was true so far as I was concerned. On Tuesday, when I was watching that documentary, I may not have been happy but I was no longer miserable. And while I feel confident that I will have miserable moments again, probably even miserable days and miserable weeks, I hope that I will no longer have miserable months and months. But I also hold out hope that one day we will be happy again. That someday there will be a better description for my life than 'not miserable.' But, for now, I'll take it.