Those readers that have been following my blog for any length of time know how passionate I am for 'making memories' with and for my daughters. My latest love of genealogy has brought to crystal clarity how important it is to get these memories recorded! If only my Scottish great-grandparents had their stories written in a journal...then I wouldn't be struggling so to find where Hartsible Livingston was born!?!
Well over at
http://thisismechallenge.blogspot.com/ she has begun a series to help focus those of us procrastinators. Each Tuesday she posts a 'challenge' designed to get you thinking about yourself and then getting those thoughts recorded in some form or another. Bet you are thinking to yourself, "But today is Father's Day?!?!" Well it all comes together because as I was in the kitchen this morning with my girls cooking and assembling a SPECIAL breakfast for the best Dad in the whole wide world, we started discussing the first challenge. [She's up to 10 or so so I'm playing catch up here!]. As Mari chopped the honeydew melon, Julia set the table, and I fried Irish sausages/bangers we decided to put a piece of paper at each place and have all four of us draw up our own lists! The challenge is to name the 10 modern things you would just HAVE to take back with you if you were sent back to live in "the olden days".
As we buttered toast and peppered scrambled eggs the discussion got very lively! Mari's portable DVD player was met with a challenge of "where would you get the electricity"? This led to a definition of just how "olden" the days would be because her answer was classic, "But Grandma lived in the olden days and she had electricity!" and then we discussed just where these "olden" days would have to be spent. The merits of Ireland, Guatemala, and Chicago were passionately debated but we settled on a Colonial Williamsburg model. We also decided that the debate about how you would provide adjunctive support to things like "my laptop" would be dropped since the goal for our family is to try and identify those items that seem so important to you that you could not live without them.
So here we go.....
Julia's Top 10 are;
1}Electricity,
2} TV,
3}Our Car,
4} My toy box,
5} Hot showers(after Patrick's story of washing up in a bucket),
6} toilets,
7} Our house,
8} My bed,
9} Modern clothes,
10} My asthma medicine
Mari's Top 10 are;
1} Portable DVD player with Never Say Never DVD,
2} Kerosene generator,
3} TV,
4} Lifetime supply of bottled water with fluoride,
5} Toothbrush and REAL toothpaste (after hearing Patrick's story of using twigs and baking soda!),
6} Our own car,
7} Our own safe, modern food,
8} My own bed with my own sheets (again, after Patrick's tale of bed sharing as a child in Ireland)
9} Modern clothes,
10} Antibiotics (after hearing me justify why it was going on my list)
Suzanne's Top 10 are;
1} Antibiotics,
2}My Merck's manual and medical book library,
3}Lifetime supply of non-expiring sunscreen,
4}Washing machine and dryer (they count as one, right?),
5} My stove (I have no intention of relearning to cook over fire!!!),
6}Lifetime supply of diet Coke,
7}Refrigerator to keep it appropriately cold!,
8}Tampons and pads! Even as I need them less and less I have two daughters to get through this stage and I would absolutely gag at the old rags method described by my Mom and Grandmother!!
9}My laptop with internet access (with the assumption that I could borrow the electricity from my daughters to keep it powered and that sufficient others chose to bring theirs so we could still read each other's blogs!),
10} My camera and photo albums not scanned onto my computer!
Patrick's Top 10 are;
1}Modern plumbing,
2}Electricity,
3} My car,
4} My glasses,
5}My modern trained doctor,
6} My family......and that's all I need because I lived in the "olden days" already and family is all you really need to have a great life!
AMEN, dear Patrick! AMEN! Thank you for teaching us what is really important in life and for being the best man a girl could ever have in her life!!!
