Homeless (at Homewood Suites)

Hello again, my precious and small audience.
Thanks for reading my lowly blog.
Today’s post and picture is one that my daughter took of us.

It was a “Olivia, wanna take a quick selfie of each other?” sort of photo.

Cue the 15/16 year old teenage typical sigh.

“Fine. But only one Mom....”

“Ok! Great! Now, let me take off my glasses so they don’t reflect and show your arms or anything....”

And then came another sigh as if waiting for me to remove the object that allows me to see her lovely beauty takes a whole lot of her precious time away...

hmmmm....
maybe someday a teen will come along that isn’t filled with (what seems like obligatory) attitude...

Anyway, this picture was taken out in the patio of a hotel suite we were residing in during the ‘rebuilding’ phase of our post-fire life.
(Fire and story to come a little later in my posts)

I remember looking at this picture after Olivia had taken it and thought how beautiful my daughter is...
I mean, she goes through these phases of wanting to dye her hair crazy colors and at times she taps into her inner goth and likes to wear ‘all black, all the time’. But, she is just so pretty.
And quite simply, I am so proud.

My daughter is an amazingly sweet young lady. Even as I think of her now, at 17, she still possesses an endearing naivety that most teens no longer come equipped with - thanks to the all knowing smartphone age we all live in ...

When this picture was taken, the weather was still so bitter and cold. And we may have been bitter and cold too in our hearts had we not been waiting on a brand new home to live in whilst residing in (probably) the fanciest hotel we’re ever going to be guests at...

Look at all my prepositions at the ends of all those sentences!! I know better, I really do.

Sorry about all of those...

Anyway, the picture posted here is worthy of remembering to learn to smile through the gloomiest of times.
You see, when this picture was taken, we were homeless after a totally destructive house fire had stripped us of most of our worldly possessions in October of 2016.

Sure, we were homeless when this picture was taken.

But we were not doing homeless outside in the cold and nasty weather under a bridge or inside a box. We were doing homeless in a two bedroom suite next to a steakhouse and adjacent to a really nice shopping center. And during our amazing stay at this hotel, we - as a family of just 3 and a cat - we learned just who we were and what we could handle - if we just learned to keep smiling despite the gloomy times...