Old Soul, Young Heart

The kitchen was deee-sgusting when we moved in. The fridge was the first thing I started cleaning when the house become ours and it took me like 2 hours to get it livable. And then I wiped down the cabinets, which didn't even really help because they are just so grease covered. We think they must be original (which means they are from 1969). Unfortunately I don't have any before pictures of the kitchen (what the heck?!). It's like the one room that I missed, I guess! I think maybe I didn't take before pics because the cabinets are still the same and they'll be the same for probably years. If we ever get new ones, the kitchen will be so much better. But here's a pic of us before we painted in there, though! It's a door knocker with our last name on it (thanks, Joy and Phil!) and a giant "new home" cookie (thanks, Aunt Peggy)! In December, we decided to paint the kitchen. We had friends coming in from Florida and so we thought it would ...

My mom was diagnosed with leukemia either in December 2003 or January 2004. I found out about it, though, in January 2004. Mom was really tired around Christmas 2003, but she still did as much for us as she had in past years. She didn't have as much energy and I remember taking some of the Christmas morning pictures that she normally would've taken. I took some pictures of her opening her gifts, which, if you look through past albums, there are of course hardly any photos of her since she was always the one behind the camera. A few days after New Year's 2004, I was at my boyfriend Philip's house with plans of spending the night there, which wasn't an uncommon occurence for me even though we were only a few months into our relationship. My mom called my cell phone, I guess to check up on my plans for the evening, and had asked me to just come home for the night instead of staying. She said that she had something to talk to me about, but I insisted on not coming ...