Home Sweet Home

We are finally home after a quick visit to my family in the Rio Grande Valley.  I am totally sleep-deprived and suffering from heartburn after binging on my mom's home-made tamales, but my heart is brimming with joy-- the unique joy that comes from spending time with your loved ones in the town where you grew up.  

I love taking my children back home to visit our extended family.  My dad had thirteen children and my dad's brother had sixteen and those two families have grown tremendously. Thanksgiving Day down there is like a big open house day.  Relatives, neighbors, and friends drop in throughout the day to taste the delicious Mexican-style turkey my mother makes, her tamales, and her tres leches cake, and to catch up with the family.  My kids especially love spending time with their many cousins.  Remember how much fun it was to go visit cousins when you were little? 

I also enjoy sharing with my children the spaces and places where I spent the first 19 years of my life. I am overcome by emotion at the thought of my children playing in the same beach in the same sand with the same rocks with which I played when I was a child.  That's when I ponder the insignificance of my 40 years of life on this earth which has been here for 5 billion years.  My great-grandchildren's grandchildren will probably play in that same beach in that same sand with those same rocks long after I am gone. 

My kids love to stand in the room where I slept as a little girl. They can't believe their mom was once a little kid just like them. My parents have combined my grandmother's old room and the room  that my sister and I shared into one large guest room, but sometimes late at night when I walk into that room and see the moonlight coming in through the window, I feel like I am an 8-year-old again looking out my bedroom window.  

I love visiting my childhood home, but I also love coming back to my very own home where my children are creating memories of their own. 

TTYL.