~990, their mother's words~

~990~

And so I guess that I never really figured I'd make it this far as I wrote the stories of my life on this blogging site.  Really, no kidding, I was going to write a dozen or so posts about my journey on the Bike Across Kansas in the summer of 2011.  That was it.  From start to finish, it would be no more than a month.  I never had the desire in the beginning to take it any further than just that.

Things changed.
They changed a great deal.

I thought that when I got to the 100th post that would probably be enough.  I mean for goodness sake, what more would there really be to write about?  Turns out there was plenty and then some.  I just hadn't realized where life would begin to take me at the time.  The years kept rolling by and May of 2011 turned into September of 2016.  

So here I am now.

If I write 10 more times, then I will make it to the 1,000th post of this blog site.  It seems kind of strange to even think that I have written as much as I have.  It's not really something that many people desire to do.  As for me, I can't imagine the last 5 years without it.  The ability to sit before the computer screen and type these words out loud has been my saving grace in many a stressful situation in the life of a Kansas farm girl.  Writing has been the best of medicines for me and given me a whole new understanding of myself.  That's a gift, my friends.

I've had this feeling for some time now that God was saving up the very best of my stories for the last 10 before that 1,000 mark.  Perhaps it is true.  No matter what lies ahead of me, be it bad or good, I will probably just keep writing about it.  Nothing that I have written is prize winning and that's a good thing because I never intended for it to be.  There was another reason that I chose to do this.  When it is all said and done, my blog posts will serve as a digital diary for my 3 children and their own children yet to come.  I won't be able to leave them thousands of dollars in the bank, that's for sure.  They grew up the children of a teacher.  They know better.  But through this blog site,  I can leave them something that might just be more valuable to them anyways.

~their mother's words~

Five of the earliest pictures that I posted on this site were these.  It was great run at the Bike Across Kansas in June of 2011.  I had never heard of Montrose, Colorado yet.  I didn't even know there was a place called Petrolia, Texas back then.  I surely didn't know that there was a great school called Big Pasture in Randlett, Oklahoma.  Life changed many, many times. Through it all, the good Lord watched over me.  He never left my side.