My poor blog has been sadly neglected. I have a job. Well, a paying job, in addition to all the other non-paying jobs I have. I'm a tutor and assistant director-in-training for a private tutoring center here in Anderson. It's the perfect job, I think. I love working one on one with the students and the timing still allows me to homeschool Jacob. I haven't had much time for anything else, though. I suspect that will change as the training subsides and I'm just tutoring. I have 2 students now and will have 3 more by next week.

I realized the other day, as I was chauffeuring another Arnold child to his destination (one of these people needs to find the time to get something besides their driving permits), I realized that January 19th had slipped by without notice from me. Perhaps because it fell in the middle of my first work week, when my brain was filled with Orton training, Geometry tutoring, and the proper pronunciation of the letter 'b'.

January 19th seems like just another day to most people, but it was the day my father died in 1999. I was exactly 25 weeks pregnant with Jacob at the time. I'd almost lost the baby a few months earlier and I remember so clearly not knowing if I should cry outloud, like I really needed to, or try to hold all my grief inside. I was terrified of losing Jacob, too.

I never, in a million years, imagined that my father would be gone when Chris retired and we moved back home. I always felt lucky, being not only the oldest child, but the oldest grandchild. I was lucky with my grandparents, all four were with me until I was a young adult, when I lost my first grandparent on my 23rd birthday. I still miss them but feel that I have a good sense of who they all were, I got to hear their stories from *them*, not passed down as family lore. Jacob and Lauryn did not have that with their grandfather. All they know of him is what we have told them. Brianna and Chase remember him some, and although Reid knew him, he hardly remembers him at all. That makes me incredibly sad, especially since their other grandfather died unexpectedly just 6 weeks after my dad. The children lost both grandfathers in such a short time.

So January 19th slipped by me this year. I felt a little relieved once I realized it, since that day usually triggers a vague sadness in me all through January, until I look at the calendar and see the 19th looming and can pinpoint the sadness. It's a sad day.

Mostly, I am just amazed that I've lived 12 years without my Daddy. How can that be?