Have you ever seen Chevy Chase as Clark Griswold in Christmas Vacation? Remember the scene where he's stuck in the attic and so he hunkers down, wrapped in old clothes watching home movies...remember the tears? The smiles?
On Christmas Eve I received the best, most personal gift anyone has EVER given me. My fiance presented me with the first of several dvds containing home movies. Some were of my parents a decade before I came along but most were of me as an 8, 9 and 10 year old.
Many I had never seen, some I had seen maybe 20 years ago. Seeing my parents that young and moving, laughing, smiling...it brought me to tears. My father and mother have been dead over 18 years.
Seeing me as a hammy, silly kid, mugging for the camera was surreal. I vacillated between laughing at myself and feeling sad wondering, "What happened to that little girl." I know, she's still inside me, deep down.
What made this miraculous (speaking of miracles) is because over the past 23 years several things have happened: 1.)my stepmother took many of my dad's things up with her when she moved back up north, after dad died, 2.)I had a car fire in '84 and it was en route to a storage unit to unload a lot of personal affects from childhood and teen years, 3.)I moved three different times and 4.) things just have a way of finding their way into the Bermuda Triangle!
BUT one thing that I was able to retain, my home movies. Somehow, someway, God protected those valuable things. But I never kept them safe-hell for 14 years they were up in a hotcrawl space in my FL home. They were never stored properly.
When fiance went to collect them up from the study this June, where I had placed them when I moved up here, he smelled them, luckily they didn't smell of vinegar. (A VERY BAD SIGN FILM WISE!) Then he shipped them off to the same people who take care of all those "Turner Classics" They cleaned them up, brightened them and did other magical things to restore them and then put them on dvd and sent them back to fiance. (Thankfully, fiance knows people-has connections)
Having a side job in post production, he was able to then over the past 6 weeks edit and add music, bells and whistles to the first hours worth. He has many more to go and slowly, over the next year he will continue to work on this project.
For the past 17 years I have wanted to see them but never had a projector and then when computers came along, I wondered if there was a way we could save them but never had the time or means or wisdom.
God found the right man for the job-and it didn't hurt that I love him! He spent well over 100 hours doing this first dvd, all while still having to do two other jobs and take care of the finances of the home. He is remarkable.
Our other project next year is to further aid me in recapturing the past and solving some personal mysteries as we look for my biological mother.
As I get older all of this becomes more important.
I had a wonderful time with all my kids! All around it was an AWESOME Christmas.
Made more special by a man that has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he loves me. And who doesn't want to know we are loved.
-pr-
I'll be back, full force!
because "NOBODY ELSE'S MOM IS IN THE STUDIO TAKING PHOTOS ALL THE TIME...MOM!!!!" now of course, I am soo glad she did. God rest her soul...and her camera! 
Namaste and God Bless! 
)
argh and OY!
BirthdayShoutOuts To: Don Johnson (57!!??) Tim Conway (73) and Nero, EMPEROR of ROME! 
