Ode to Kristin

I recently wrote about my sister Kristin and how she and her family visited the first week in June. I was so excited to see her because it had been four years since I'd seen her last.

Kristin and I are three years apart, so we went through periods in our life when we were closer than others. However, we became closer when our older sister Annetta left for college and we were the oldest two at home. It was hard for me when Kristin went away to college a year later, but it was always great to talk to her on the phone or see her when she visited. Kristin got married a few years after leaving home, and she and her husband have been living in Utah for the past 10 years. This means that I haven't seen Kristin face-to-face very much in the past decade.

Thanks for technology, though, because I'm able to e-mail on my voice-activated laptop, and Kristin and I usually e-mail each other four or five days a week. We prattle on about all sorts of things like the TV shows and movies we watch, the books we read, what I'm up to in my life, what she's up to with her kids, what new recipe or dessert she's trying, etc. I love Kristin so much and I just wanted to brag about her for a minute. I'm so glad that we're sisters and friends!

Here are a few of my favorite pictures of the two of us throughout the years: (I accidentally added them backwards, so were starting at at the most recent.)

Back in the day...

A few days ago I wrote about my sister Sharon and her visit from Mississippi. Here's a little history about the two of us. Sharon is six years older than I am, so she and I weren't super close growing up. Six years isn't a vast age difference, but it is quite a gap when you're young. She and I had a big sister/little sister relationship when we were young, but now that we are older six years doesn't seem like much of an age gap at all. Here are a few pictures of us from back in the day: (the first one is from July 2001, the second one is from December 2002 and the third one is from March 2005):

It's fun to be sisters and friends!

Name! Name! Name!

Another of my hesitations in starting a blog was that I had no idea what to name it! I spent a couple days racking my brain for short, "catchy" names, but I couldn't think of anything. Finally, I settled on two: 1) Heather's Life: Tales from the Cripp and 2) Paralized with JOY!. I obviously went with the second.

I want to explain a little bit about the first name I was contemplating. My sister Sharon and her family visited my mom and me for Easter in 2004. I'd recently come back home to live after being in the ICU and rehab hospital for four months. Sharon was helping me make a scrapbook detailing the accident and everything that followed. At one point while we were working I referred to myself as "The Little Cripple That Could." (A reference to the children's book The Little Engine That Could. The engine had a difficult journey ahead of him and he was determined to finish his trip, so he kept telling himself, "I think I can, I think I can!"

Well, I adopted that same mantra after my accident, knowing that I could live as a disabled person if I set my mind to it. So, that was when I started "affectionately" referring to myself as a cripple. Of course the "politically correct" terms for myself and other people in my situation are "disabled" or "handicapped." However, since I am the disabled one, I feel like I can poke fun at myself and call myself a cripple if I want to!

I didn't want people to think my blog title was in poor taste, though, so that's why I decided to go with Paralyzed with JOY! because that really sums up who and what I am. Although I'm disabled, I'm still just as happy, if not happier than I always was.