1 9 .

today is the day because i sat here all day in my underwear listening to "Blondie" on the record player. i figure i should tribute this day.

i turn nineteen tomorrow. it's a scary feeling. sort of like the one when you turn eighteen, but worse.
i learned a lot about myself this year:

like how to love wherever i am.
i learned to make life less about me and more about others.
to be okay with change when you made all the plans in the first place.
i learned that if i'm not content in Christ, i'm not content.
i learned to be better friends with my sisters&brother.
i learned that i prefer
fall over summer
big spoons over small ones
& saving money over spending it.
i learned how to plan a wedding and be creative with deadlines.
i learned that sometimes i can cry a dozen times in one week and that's okay.
i learned that dancing like a spaz is fine, no one knows how to dance unless you are an ethnicity other than white.

i learned that at eighteen, i really love this thing called life.

& so,
cheers to nineteen. 

F

that 'f' in my post title doesn't stand for anything bad if that's what you were thinking. it stands for 'francesca'.

she turns fifteen today. my petite sœur, fifteen years old. (she'll totally kick butt this year.)


joyeux anniversaire to her.


i love.
i love.
i love.
you.

i miss her everyday. but today, i miss her most.

when i was little, i never thought all three of my sisters would be my best friends like they are today. we had our tiffs, and by golly, still do. we made one another mad more times than i can count. but in all fairness, my sisters are my best friends, ever.
that's a picture of my great-grandma and my two older sisters with me. it's my oldest sister's birthday today. the little girl with the floral skirt and a crown on. she turned twenty-two.

la.
she takes better care of me than i take care of her. she calls me from faraway and leaves messages on my phone when i'm in ceramics class. i've smiled and laughed with her. la has this love for life and blessing other people that i don't have. she loves jesus. and this quote, sums her up in a nutshell.

"I don't want to drive up to the pearly gates in a shiny sports car, wearing beautifully, tailored clothes, my hair expertly coiffed, and with long, perfectly manicured fingernails. I want to drive up in a station wagon that has mud on the wheels from taking kids to scout camp. I want to be there with a smudge of peanut butter on my shirt from making sandwiches for a sick neighbors children. I want to be there with a little dirt under my fingernails from helping to weed someone's garden. I want to be there with children's sticky kisses on my cheeks and the tears of a friend on my shoulder.

I want the Lord to know I was really here and that I really lived."

- Marjorie Pay Hinckley 

that's her. she's doing it.

Joyeux Anniversaire dear.

bottom line, i feel bad for everyone who doesn't get to have her for a sister.

my dad

Dad, you are as much of a hunk today as you were fifty-three years ago. just don't go wearing overalls again, i'm not sure you could pull it off. 

happy birthday.

Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest.-Larry Lorenzoni

a new side of me.

i am 18 today.

scary.

almost thirty.

yesterday i was thinking about my birthday.

i've been trying not to worry. but i couldn't help but think that in 33 days, i'll be thirteen years away from thirty.

that's not very many at all.

o my.