Country In Suburbia

Dusting off my box of stationery in prep for the 30-Day Snail Mail Correspondence Challenge.   Join in the fun and share the feedback you receive from reaching out with a personal touch!

If your stationery stash looks like mine and needs a refresh, check out dozens of choices in all different styles: A variety of inexpensive stationery on Amazon

Plain paper and envelopes do the trick also! Just pick someone each day and write a note. Need ideas? Check out the list below:

1. Send grandparents a writing or art sample from the kids
2. Express to a neighbor how much you admire their curb appeal for their home (they’ll love that someone noticed).
3. A note of kudos to a business who gives you great service.
4. Send some of those digital pictures to be printed (seriously, upload them and pick them up at Walgreens or CVS within 2 hours) and send a few to someone or a few someones who would love them.
5. Send a note to a friend for any reason you can think of, even if you talk to that friend every week.
6. Congratulate someone for an accomplishment or job well done to a relative, friend, or even your own family under your own roof (still has to go through the mail though).
7. Congratulations on a new home purchase.
8. Best of luck on a new venture, goal, business, promotion.
9. A get well to someone under the weather.
10. Written words of encouragement to someone having a rough time.
11. Good luck to someone waiting for good news or maybe a job promotion.
12. Invite a friend or two for coffee or lunch with a note through the mail.
13.  Thank a host or hostess for the event you attended.

With some creativity, awareness, and consistency your 30-day challenge will help reconnect with some folks, inspire other people, and delight more than you can anticipate!  SHARE your progress!

 

I love getting mail–the old fashioned USPS “snail mail”. I like leafing through the pile and once in a while spotting a hand-written envelope or postcard that is not a bill or an advertisement but an actual piece of mail that someone I know personally wrote my name and address on, stamped it, then dropped it in a mail box somewhere. I also like looking through magazines, weekly grocery circulars, and even catalogs that I’ll probably not even buy anything from.  E-mail is a communication wonder and even the plethora of social media and it’s so easy just reach out and update someone or thank them and put it in the electronic version of a pile of mail (junk mail most likely).

Starting in November I always see my Facebook friends start a daily note of thanks on social media.  I truly like seeing this and how much more powerful would that be if the notes of thanks went out in the mail to say a sincere, thoughtful ‘thank you’ so someone in your life.  Personally, I’m a huge failure when it comes to popping envelopes in the mail, much less actually writing and addressing a quick note.  I used to be a great pen pal and even made time to write letters and notes.  Slowly my letter writing dropped off as my life got busier with kids, business, and other activities and email was just so much easier.  That is all about to change.  It only takes about 15 minutes to write a note, address an envelope and put it in the mailbox.  I can do that while enjoying my first cup of coffee in the morning or during those few minutes in the evening when I’m getting ready for bed or even waiting for food to come at a restaurant.

I want to introduce you to a book that has inspired this Snail Mail Correspondence Challenge:   365 Thank Yous: The Year A Simple Act Of Gratitude Changed My Life by John Kralik.

The author was at a rocky place in his life and decided to recognize things that he was grateful for.  He wrote one ‘thank you’ note every single day for a year to a variety of people including family, friends, kids, distant relatives, former business collegues, and even people who served him coffee or showed kindness in the regular everyday interactions.  He started seeing his thank you notes make a difference and delight people who least expected his correspondence and thanked him in return for noticing them and making them feel special.  His life was changed for the good just by having the intention of sending a daily thank you note that translated eventually into having a thankful heart as a daily way of living.  It really challenged him to think of someone every day who made even a sliver of his day or week pleasant.

Snail Mail Correspondence Challenge rules:

1. 30 consecutive days of sending a note, letter, or postcard with a stamp.   You can do your own 30-day challenge any time you want, especially when you want to me more connected in an organic way!  You can send more than one a day if you wish, but every single day at least one needs to be send via the United States Post Office (Snail Mail).
2. Be prepared for success by purchasing simple writing paper and envelopes or a stationery set, or a variety pack of cards that are blank on the inside.  Purchase 2 books of stamps (20 to a book) for $9.80 each (no excuses because you can get these at the grocery store checkout line if you have no idea where your local USPS is).  This 30-day Snail Mail Correspondence Challenge can cost as little as $30 for the month or maybe a little more if you love fancier stationery.
3. Sundays count!  Your Sunday notes will go out on Monday, no matter where you send it from.  30 consecutive days.
4. Christmas or any other obligitory holiday cards or a pile of wedding invitations do not count.  This challenge is to send organic, spontaneous correspondence.
5. Be resourceful getting addresses.  If it is someone who helped you at a store or coffee shop it’s easy to find that address and address it to the employee because they probably had a name tag on.
6. Your correspondence does not have to be all thank you notes.  It can also be dropping someone an update about something in your life and asking how they are.  It can be a postcard from somewhere you recently visited, or even a couple of pictures that actually make it out of your phone camera or camera memory card (yes, this takes a bit of effort downloading it and sending it to Walgreens to be printed on actual photo paper).
7. SHARE!!  Share the challenge on social media, share your progress or comments here and any feedback you receive as a result of your effort.  I promise you will be inspired and will inspire others to reach out offline.

We spend that summer 2005 with faith that somehow our baby would be ok and survive the birth even though the doctors painted a gloomy prognosis.   We worked on fixing up the house, maintaining a garden, entertaining our 4-year old son, Roy, and keeping him worry-free, working at our jobs of course, more doctor appointments, and praying that somehow our baby growing inside of me would escape the perilous fate the doctors warned us about.

Then the day came that everything changed, about the 2nd week in September.  Our home is a split level so all of the staircases are just 7-8 steps long.  I was headed downstairs and had a pregnancy clutz moment–I slipped on the stairs and ended up bouncing down a few steps on my rear end!  That hurt a little but I got up and knew I had an ultrasound scheduled the next morning.  Doctors still don’t have an explanation for what they saw on that exam table the next day during the ultrasound.  It was a miracle.  All of the fluid that was trapped in the baby’s bladder had moved out of the bladder and there was a regular amount of amniotic fluid!  The doctor even pulled the last ultrasound to compare to be sure they were looking at the same uterus!  As of that day, all of the doctors concurred that this baby might have enough time for the lungs to “catch up” in development to sustain his life after birth.  The doctors that suggested to terminate this pregnancy now were saying that this could be a viable baby!  None of them could figure out why, but it’s not the way it usually happens.  A few hours later I was checked into the maternal-fetal unit at the hospital for 6 weeks of fetal monitoring.  That’s a whole other story, but that room at the end of the hall on the high-risk floor was my home for a while.

Finally mid-October came and it was almost time.  This whole odyssey had been unconventional so why would it be a surprise that this baby was breech and a c-section was planned.  Docs gave me a dose of surfactant to help the baby’s lung pockets open for the best possible chance at breathing.  A week later, with my husband and extended family by my side I was taken to the operating room for the C-section.  We didn’t know what the outcome would be so Father Emilio (our parish’s newly ordained priest from Italy) agreed to baptize our baby as soon as possible after his birth.   A few moments later, Joseph was born (a life changing event for Father Emilio as the first birth he witnessed), my husband did great and stayed calm while one team attended to this fragile baby and the other team worked on stitching me up.  Father Emilio baptized Joseph with oil on the warming table before he was whisked off to the NICU and I was whisked off to recovery (the aftermath of the c-section was a little harrowing and I needed a blood transfusion).  I recovered the next few days just down the hall from the NICU.

Joseph was in Children’s Hospital for 3 months before we could bring him home with the diagnoses’ of Eagle-Barrett Syndrome, End Stage Renal Disease, Bilateral Club Feet, Failure to Thrive, and urological abnormalities.  He had a series of leg castings for many months, had his first surgery at 7 days (a vesicostomy) and his second surgery at 30 days to start peritoneal dialysis which would become a nightly ritual for the next 3 years.

Remember in Part 1 of this story we really wanted a semi-rural home but our realtor, Beth Ann, found us one in the suburbian metro area.  Turns out it’s just about 45 minutes, all highway, from Children’s Hospital (less on low traffic days).  Well, at the old Children’s Hospital there was no room for parents sleeping in the NICU (the new hospital changed all of that).  Daily drives to the NICU and even after he came home on peritoneal dialysis, there were countless trips to the emergency room when dialysis wasn’t working right (with the dialysis machine in tow), every little infection he had was serious, multiple monthly appointment with nephrology, urology, gastroenterology,  over 21 surgeries, follow-ups, lengthy hospital stays several times each year, it’s not hard to see how important our home choice was to not only be with our new child but also be present for our older son, Roy.  It definitely wasn’t easy through those most fragile, scary years and things got exponentially better when we got the call Thanksgiving weekend 2008 that there was a kidney for Joseph!  The next night Joseph had a hero that said “yes” to organ donation and received a new kidney.  It’s been almost 9 years now and the family of the man who put that heart on his driver’s license is always part of our hearts.  Now his check-ups are only every couple of months and we can usually plan on at least one hospitalization per year, sometimes more, because of one complication or another, but it’s not every 3 months or so like when he was younger.

If we got the home location we wanted many of those trips to the hospital would have turned into an emergency situation, we may have had been stranded due to snow and not been able to get Joseph the help he needed many times without the intervention of ambulance transport, and just so much more cost in gas which many times was a hardship in and of itself not to mention that the “hospital mom” (me) still needed to eat while staying in the hospital with Joseph.

During my years as a “hospital mom” I have met many families that travel from South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, and throughout Colorado for the specialty treatments only the Children’s Hospital of Colorado can provide to the smallest patients.

Instead of getting what we wanted, we got what we needed–even though we didn’t know we needed it at the time.  A home in a suburb only 45 minutes from Children’s Hospital, all because of Beth Ann Mott, our heaven sent realtor.

Joseph is now a 2017 Children’s Hospital Ambassador.  Here’s his personal link to help raise funds for Children’s Hospital:  Foundation:http://support.childrenscoloradofoundation.org/site/TR/TeamChildrensColorado/General?px=1239638&pg=personal&fr_id=1163

 

 

Our little family of three was living just outside of the Simi Valley area just east of the 210 freeway in California.  Long story short is that my work with a large hotel chain is what brought us out to California for a while and after our son was born I left the 24/7 hotel management lifestyle and and pointed our wagon train east to more familiar territory.  We’d lived there in a 3-bedroom, 2 bathroom, end-unit town home that we purchased in 1998 for $112,000 and sold six years later for $275,000 during the California real estate bubble.  Our son was 3 years old and we were moving back home to Colorado.  I grew up in Colorado Springs and my husband grew up in Denver so somewhere in between was our goal for our new home so we would be close to both sides of the family who still lived in Colorado Springs and the Denver areas.

We sure had ideas of where we wanted to live and it wasn’t going to be in any neighborhood that was governed by a home owner’s association!  We had enough of being scolded anonymously for leaving the broom on the porch, or parking in front of our garage, or not having the right backing on the curtains,  or having to have a properly approved screen door.  The plan was to be semi-rural, away from the city, lots of roaming room, and neighbors that were not a just stone’s throw away but more of a slingshot distance away and slowly acquire toys like quads, motorcycle, a tractor, and also animals like horses, goats, and a barn cat.  As a kid, my family moved a lot with my dad in the Air Force.  My mother, who passed away when  my sister and I were young, was born and raised on a farm in Kentucky.  As it turns out, I was always more of the country mouse and my sister is the city mouse.  My brother, who came along after my dad re-married, is a crazy talented tekkie and has lived near Silicon Valley for many years very successfully.   My husband grew up in the city but doesn’t like crowds so he was excited to look for a house outside of the frey as well.

The next person to touch our lives doesn’t even know, to this day, what a blessing she was for our family.  We needed to track down a realtor who would help us with our new adventure relocating to Colorado.  We didn’t have the time or funding to be going back and forth to look at homes between the two states.  I don’t even remember how we found her, but Beth Ann Mott  is the realtor who partnered with us.  She found us a nice two-bedroom apartment with a balcony in a large complex with a 6 month lease we could live in while we settled in and was able to take our time looking for a home.  To my knowledge she did not get paid for doing this because she knew if she could get us to Colorado with minimal stress about a living situation then she’d be able to find a home for us to purchase and she was looking at the long term business, not the short-term income.

After a 3-4 months of our new apartment living Beth Ann took us to see houses.  Lots of houses.  She stayed within our price range, tried to show us homes that were outside of the suburbs, we didn’t want a basement,  had to have a good sized back yard, at least 3 bedrooms, and a bathroom connected to the master bedroom.  We wanted Bailey, west Golden, Morrison, and other areas of west Jefferson County or even Gilpin County.  She did find and showed us some, but gently also pulled us into non-HOA suburban older developments as well.   One day she led us to a house in a cul-du-sac in and unincorporated pocket of the county.  A neighborhood build in 1980 (my husband was years in construction and didn’t want anything newer than 1995 as he says quantity vs. quality started taking over then and he saw all the shortcuts builders took and subsequent problems).  Big yard (almost 1/4 acre property),  master suite with bathroom, no basement (although a split-level),  no HOA, 3 bedrooms and room for a home office since I was a full-time admin assistant to several district manager for a tutoring company.   It felt like home from the first time we entered even though it had been vacant for 6 months.  Neighbors all around us.  Not our ideal location, but the cul-du-sac with only 5 houses, very close to mountain access,  and the house felt like it needed to be ours.  This is the house we purchased through Beth Ann and we had no idea how important this location would be just a few months later.

Beth Ann knew we wanted to be semi-rural and she repeated a few times that the areas we were wishing for were farther from suburb/city conveniences than we realized and kept gently steering us back toward where we ended up living.  To this day I believe God had his hand on her shoulder and she listened to His message telling her that we needed to not be far from conveniences, even if she didn’t realize she was listening at the time.

Just six months after we purchased our home in suburbia, I was pregnant and we were thrilled!  My first ultrasound revealed a problem in the fetus, the amniotic fluid was trapped and building up in my baby’s bladder instead of circulating to help develop the lungs and other vital processes in the womb, and we saw a variety of neo-natal specialists.  The bladder kept distending with amniotic fluid and there wasn’t much on the outside of the baby to swim around in.  We had some quick physiology lessons from that moment on.  The fetus swallows the amniotic fluid which develops the lungs with every swallow, then essentially ‘pees’ it out and swallows it again throughout the pregnancy — it’s how they ‘breathe’ in the womb.  My baby was swallowing but something was preventing the recirculation of the fluid.

Doctors did an amniocentisis to see if I was eligible for in-uterine surgery to repair and save my child.  The qualifications were no chromosomal abnormalities, the fetus had to be male, and the kidneys be without significant damage.  We passed two of those tests and found out we were having a boy with no abnormal chromosomes.  It was a relief until the doctor showed us that both kidneys showed significant damage due to all of that fluid backing up in the bladder.  When you are pregnant you always want to see the heartbeat but you don’t think about what all of the other organs are doing and the kidneys weren’t able to perform their function even before he was born.

The doctor proceeded to tell us that even if our baby survived the pregnancy he would most likely have a compromised quality of life.  We couldn’t believe the words we were hearing.  He continued to paint a dismal picture of a future high schooler who would have a hard time making friends, left out from his prom, and the general burden it would be on us and any other kids we would have.  He then spoke the words I never thought I’d hear a doctor say.  He said, “Many couples elect to terminate the pregnancy and start over.”   I couldn’t believe it.  This is not a project in woodshop that was cut wrong so I just “start over”.   This is not a cassarole that I dumped too much salt into so I just “start over”.  This is not a diet that I started then binged on a quart of ice cream and had to “start over”.   This is a human being with a soul that was known to God even before he was known to us.  No, we wouldn’t be a “start over” sort of couple.  We would be leaving it in God’s hands to fulfill his plan for this little one and for us.

Our realtor, Beth Ann, from a few months ago was finding home for other families and living her own life, not even knowing  what a significant contribution she had by finding us our home in a place that wasn’t our ideal choice.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of 2:  In The Beginning — But if you try sometimes, you get what you need.