Josh and Becca Thrap and Family

I recently tried to watch some old home videos and had some serious trouble with the quality of one of them. Now, I’m not talking about the camerawork, because that is fairly horrific in all of them. It is difficult to watch any of them for any extended length of time because that sort-of carsick headache feeling is inevitable. Especially my videos from Russia, partly because we’re running around so much in them there is almost constant movemenet, and partly I think because everyone is speaking Russian which is difficult even for me to understand now, and every now and again the Russian is interrupted by my awful voice either obnoxiously loud in English or horribly jarbled in Russian. Honestly, after listening to a little bit, I think the people who used to tell me I spoke so well, even without an accent were full of garbage and really just trying to be nice. Anyway, so one of the tapes I tried to watch seemed almost like the film had just deteriorated, so my next big project (on top of trying to lose weight and declutter the house etc) is to record all of my home videos onto dvd. I plan to start with the ones from my travels abroad and then hope to eventually get around to all of them. But for now I’m only thinking of the travel ones because I don’t want to get overwhelmed! I think I have something like 45 tapes, but only 7 or 8 are from my trips. Josh and I are really trying to plan some travels, but it is incredibly difficult now. It’s strange to me how hard it can be to connect with something that was once such a huge part of my life. It sometimes feels like everything that I did before having children wasn’t really me. Like it was a dream or happened to a different person. Which can be sad because there are some beautiful memories. I definately think I am one of the sufferers of momnesia and lost a lot of parts of “myself” over that last decade. I lost demension. But now that the kids are getting older and more self-sufficient and I almost have an empty home several hours a day, I think it is time to excavate my personality. Dig up the things that were once important to me and find new things to excite me as well. The difficulty is in fitting it into my life now which always seems crazy busy without trying to do more or be more. And to muster up the motivation to put in the effort. Because after so many years of living more or less without passion for anything but my family and closest friends, its not easy to change, partly because I think it means acknowledging that I gave up on myself in the first place. I let life dictate how I was going to live and just blamed life’s circumstances when I wasn’t happy. So it’s difficult to think that it is something I could have any control over, and if I could control it now, why not sooner? And what does all of this really mean? This post is completely deterring from what I originally meant to write about so I apologize for dragging you all down this path with me. But as I was writing this I received an email from my Russian sister so I replied and she was still at her computer and she replied almost immediately! So for the last half hour we have been “talking” via emails! It felt good to be able to connect like that. In real time. I can do more. I can be more. I just need to remember that.