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Family means no one gets left behind or forgotten.

If you know me, you know that the past year of my life has been immensely difficult. I won't bore you with the details of all of the kindling that started the fire, but it has been rough. When bad things happen to me, I can sometimes get stuck in negative thought patterns, and that can be my undoing.

While I constantly remind myself of things like this: 
"On particularly rough days when I’m sure I can’t possibly endure, I like to remind myself that my track record for getting through bad days so far is 100% and that’s pretty good.” – Vinny Genovesi

I still can get really stuck sometimes. 

I had the opportunity to reconnect with my extended family on my mom's side this weekend. It is weird how in the presence of the people that you love and love you unconditionally, those stresses can melt away. And melt they did. 

The next point requires some background. Back in March, we adopted a new cat Mallory after Ushi suddenly passed away. Mallory did pretty well with adjusting, but since adding her to our family, she's had some incontinence issues of unknown origin. Several trips to the vet and trying many other things haven't really gotten this to stop, but it came down to the fact our carpet needed either to be cleaned, or to be replaced altogether. We began working on trying to price laminate flooring thinking this might be an economical resolution to our problems. Unfortunately, the holidays are super busy for us and it just got to be insurmountable. We obviously discussed this with our families and our mother in law kindly volunteered to come over and have our carpets cleaned. With us out of town this weekend, it was the perfect time. 

Little did we know Mother-in-Law recruited my father in law, my brother in law and sisters in law and did a home makeover that puts extreme home makeover to shame. 

Thank you seems wholly insufficient. I had the opportunity to share this weekend with my mothers family while my wife's family did everything they could to ease the difficulties that had just gotten too overwhelming for us. You reminded me that "no one gets left behind or forgotten". There are no words. I love you all.


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