My Personal Blog

Visit my personal blog to read stories of small town life with 4 homeschooled girls!

Edit: I am trying to make a link to my personal blog with a pic in the sidebar...I thought I could do it by linking to this post, then moving it to the sidebar, but it won't work with the pic, so I'm leaving this post here until I have more time to see if it's possible...if you know how to do it, help me out! Now, we have to get to some school work, as much as I hate it, there's more to life than blogging ;)

Child's Play

I'm noticing that having a daddy in LE makes play a little different than having a daddy who, say builds airplanes like my daddy did. I don't recall my Barbies' husbands going to work at Lockheed, lol. I overheard my two "middles" playing Barbies the other day and I had to referee a fight because Hope wouldn't let BB's Barbie out of jail. BB, who's 4, came to me and said, "I want my Babrie unarrested, but Hope won't let her out of jail, so I can't play with her!"



Very funny stuff. Jump in and share your stories!

How to love your husband

Since V-Day is this month, I thought I'd post a few ideas of how to show your LEO hubby how much you love him. Without further adu, but with tongue firmly implanted in cheek, here we go!

Show sympathy for the poor, drunk 66 yr old lady he booked into jail. Yeah, the one he had had to clean vomit off of all night. While you're at it, sigh with sympathy every time he tells you disciplinary action had to be taken on a poor inmate. He'll love you for your oozing compassion.

Send him Mickey Mouse pancackes in his lunch. This takes great skill, as the ears are delicate and will fall off in transit, making them normal pancakes. His fellow officers then never have a chance to see how much you love him!

Ask him to run errands for you when he gets off work. Nothin' shows lovin' like sending him to a half dozen places that don't even open for an hour after he gets off the night shift.

Care enough to ask "now, which one is that, is he the one with no neck?" every time he mentions one of coworkers.

Give out his work email so everyone can send him those sweet forwards.

It's important not to lose his badge, name tag, handcuff key, or, and this is very important--his chapstick when you take it all off/out of his uniform to wash. Whatever you do, make sure you keep up with the chapstick, even if you have to wash it in the pocket. Trust me, he'll love you for it and he won't even notice the big dark spot of oily residue left on his shirt after 14 attempts to remove it.

While we're on the topic of uniforms, remember to keep the uniform pants that are a little snug right with the comfy ones. He'll appreciate the little reminder that he's gained a few pounds, especially on the nights he's running late and has to just wear them anyway. What a good wife he'll think you are, so concerned for his health!

Since we've only been in LE for a couple of years, I'm SURE I'm missing a few key ways to show your love. Feel free to add your secrets in the comments!

PS-Blogger is showing the love today by the spell check not working, so forgive my typos, I have no idea how to spell "adu"

Rita Revitalized Me!

Okay, I decided to keep the blog up at Rita's persistance :) Her encouraging post and email came in just as I was flipping pancakes and thinking I'd delete the blog this weekend. She was such and encouragement! You can read her post on the Calling all Lurkers Comments.

So, if I'm keeping the blog up, I have to change the colors. I LOVE blue it's alwasy been my favorite. It was my family of origin's favorite and is now our family color. I know it's LE's chief color. I just sometimes think all the blue is a bit cheesy. I mean LE-Blue (I'm sure that's a Crayola color) gets tiring, doesn't it? Well, even if you have your house done in LE blue and you eat off Sheriff badge shaped dinner plates, everyone needs a break sometimes!

Consider this the break. Indefinitely, lol.

I'd also like to ask LEO wives to contribute to the blog. Rita, for instance, has great stories to share. Her husband, like Shane, has security experience, but he also has Peace Officer experience. I'd like to invite her and others to share their stories of how God ministered to them or how He worked in their lives in relation to LE.

And maybe I'll open up the blogging for more topics than just LE related. I read recently that the LEOs that do the best emotionally have a broader lifestyle than just LE all the time. They have other hobbies and interests. The ones that live, eat, breathe, and sleep LE are the ones that burn out (um, if you have Sheriff star dinner plates, this could be you...just sayin'...).

I don't know how I'll work that out since all my non LEO stuff gets on my other blog, but that's okay, I'll figure it out...or not...but at least I'm thinking about it :)

Finally, I've been posting a little at Officer.com, a great site with news, jobs, links, and forums. If I put the blog addy in my siggy, then I might get a couple more people over here to comment and mix it up a little.

If you have more ideas, leave a comment. I know you come here, I see it on my sitemeter, so you might as well leave a comment, lol.

Calling all lurkers

I've been considering deleting this blog-I think it's only my friends reading it and maybe a few people who randomly stumble upon it. If that's the case, I might as well just combine the blogs and just post this stuff at my other blog. So, if this is seriously ministering to anyone-speak out now. You can email me at allgirlhomeschool@yahoo.com if you're not the commenting type.

Contamination

What do you do when your husband's heart gets contaminiated at work? I know our husbands take precautions to avoid disease when they do searches, pat downs, and so on, but what can you do for him when he's looked into the eyes of someone who probably raped and murdered their own daughter? A daughter close to your own daughter's age. You know the officers have to be civil to them, even though I'm guessing on some level they'd like to take him down with their own bare hands. Shane doesn't seem to have trouble relying on his training, treating him with respect, but he comes home with a troubled heart.

We live in a rural area, with a low crime rate. Most of Shane's dealings are with drunks, druggies, and thieves. Rarely does he see an alleged murderer. I can only think of two in the recent months, three if I count the guy driving high as a kite who killed 2 days before Christmas on the most dangerous stretch of highway in our area (he lived and Shane helped book him in a week or so ago). This is the first child rapist I can recall in the 2 years Shane's been at the SO.

My heart goes out to the officers who work higher crime areas, where murder and rape are common. My friend and I went to a Women of Faith conference a year ago and her car was burglarized. The cop who took our report said he'd worked that bad side of town for 20 years or so. I'm sure car break-ins are nothing to him; I'd bet he's seen more than his fair share of serious crimes.

I don't know how to reach out to those officers, or even our local guys and gals who deal with that kind of mental/emotional trama, but when our family hears sirens, we pray. We lift up the officers/emts/firefighters and the ones they're helping. We pray that God would have so much influence on the situation that all involved would see His hand and be drawn to him. I'm going to start praying for the repsonders' hearts, too. This is a great way to remind your kids to pray, too-they often come to me and say, "Mom-sirens, pray!".

Be blessed-and pray :)

Well, Christmas was okay, I don't think I cried about him being gone Christmas Day, but it wasn't easy. I'm glad that for him, Christmas Eve is the height of the holiday; that's when his family celebrates. He was home Christmas Eve (well, except for that SO party).

This morning was a bit of a challenge, though. Sometimes I feel trapped in this position we're in. The night shift challenges of no social life and no husband home at night is hard. It's also not fun on his days off, since he's really still on the night shift (he can't just switch to our schedule at the drop of a hat). He tries to sleep when we sleep but his body thinks it's time to be awake, and at 7pm when we're ready for some family time, his body says its time for him to be in deep sleep.

We went outside this morning and realized the girls hammocks were stolen from the side yard. They weren't expensive or anything, it's just the fact that someone was outside messing around with our stuff probably on a night Shane was gone. A couple of nights ago I heard male voices and our dogs were barking like mad. We live in town, so I'm not too alarmed. I chalked it up to our noisy neighbors and just got Shane's gun and put next to my side of the bed, then went back to sleep.

So it's not all about fear, although those nights come. It's just about being backwards from everyone else, even on days off. It's staying up late to hang out with him when I have to get up early the next day. About feeling like I'm the family's protector at night.

What does the Lord want me to learn from this? I'm not there yet, but I want to seek those answers. I desire to be less negative about it, but at the same time not gloss it over and pretend its fine. Is God moving us to change jobs or shifts or our lifesyle in anyway? Is God just wanting to teach me contentment in this situation?

Oh how I want to be content! I promise I would be if God would just change Shane to days with Sundays off, give him enough of a raise so he only has to work one job (uhh, that'd be a miracle!). Really, that's all it'd take to make me content. Well, for at least a few weeks, then I'm sure I'd come up with something else...I guess God might want to go about the contentment stuff from another angle!