first of all...

...i want to apologize for the radio silence over here.  i swear i'm really alive.

but, in the words of my home dog, martin lawrence:



"shit just got real."

you see, life sometimes has a way of walking up to you, slapping the shit out of you and waking you the eff up.

i mean, i'm just being honest here.

and while i'm being honest and open here, you should know that this has been an incredibly hard year for me.  i know i'm not really into sharing my feelings here on the ol' bloggy blog, because, well, i'm not really into sharing my feelings in real life.  i'm kind of like a dude in that way.  i like to internalize things and just pretend they will go away eventually.  which, obviously, when you are an adult, that's so far from the truth, it's laughable.

so, i'm going to get down and dirty and share a little with you all because...well...i don't know, because

in june, kyle lost his great-grandfather, who was about 6 months older than my grandfather.  this was a sad time for kyle and his family and i didn't really know how to react, as i had never lost a grandparent before.  all of my great-grandparents were gone before i was born (except one that passed when i was still a baby) and my dad's father passed away before he even met my mom.  while sitting in the middle of the service, i came to the realization that my grandparents weren't going to be around forever.  and that hit me.  hard.  why it took me until the age of 26 to realize that, i'm not sure.  perhaps because i've been blessed to have never lost a grandparent i knew before.

and then, at the beginning of september, just 25 days before our wedding, i lost my maternal grandmother.  she had been sick for quite sometime with some form of dementia or alzheimer's.  i can't even tell you the last time that she recognized me, but it was always a comfort to me that someone was there to keep my grandfather company.  they lived in a home for sometime and have outlived the majority of their friends.

and, because i love pictures...here are a few of my favorite family photos with grandma in them.

 my grandparents on their wedding day.

 beautiful.

 grandma and myself circa 1984.

silly me, my grandfather, the incorrigible flirt, has plenty of friends in the assisted living facility where he lives.  he is more than able to take care of himself and i expect will be around for quite sometime.  i'm sure he misses grandma, but he has a lot to live for.  my grandfather is the best, he is truly my hero, he has always been my hero.  he's 96, still very independent and spunky, loves getting on the computer to email people and has even asked one of my cousins to set him up a facebook account (eek!  he's not on there...yet...)

some more gratuitous family photos...

 so handsome!

hahaha, i just realized how unhappy i look in this photo!  me and gramps circa 1984.

and then, the real kick in the pants was a couple of weeks ago, was when my dad called me and told me his mom was sick and they had taken her to the hospital and placed her on a respirator.  it was a saturday.  he and my mom were going up to see her the following day, which happened to be when we were forecasted to get a huge snowstorm here in kansas.  i told him i wanted to come and see her, but would wait until i heard from them and would come up if they thought she wasn't going to make it.

to make a very long story short, the doctors thought she was doing much better that night, i spoke with my parents that day and they agreed it wasn't a smart move for me to drive to kc with the weather forecast and i stayed put.  they and my brother and one of my cousin's went to see her and she seemed to be doing much better.  i dropped kyle off at the airport for an international flight (only a week long trip) and felt much better about not being able to make the trip.

she passed away the following tuesday.  i have to be honest, that really tore me up inside.  i didn't help that i was left alone here at home (remember, kyle was overseas) and left to my own crazy thoughts.  i beat myself up for days and days about not going up to see her.  would she have recognized me if i had gone?  probably not.  but, i would have felt a million times better than i do now.  the funeral was last wednesday, ironically, the morning after yet another famous kansas snowstorm that dumped 12 inches of snow in wichita.  but, kyle and i trudged through the snow and made it to the funeral.  because there was no way i wasn't going to be there.  not this time.

and a picture of my gorgeous grandmother carpenter on my parents wedding day (omg, my dad is so going to kill me when he sees i put this picture of him on the internet.)  :)

sorry to be such a downer on such a lovely day, but i felt everyone deserved to hear why i have been silent for so long.

i do hope everyone had a great valentine's day!  we kept it low key and enjoyed this:

okay, we didn't watch just frank...but we did watch the jayhawks get their butts handed to them by the one and only wildcats!