Bring On Lemons

The picture on the left was taken the day I brought my daughter home from the hospital. This picture hangs in our living room (and has for the last 6+ years) as a reminder of how small and precious she still is. It's our job as parents to point her in the right direction, remind her that she is beautiful smart and funny, and surround her with love. Sometimes I wonder if I'm too hard on the children. Am I too hard on them? Too hard on myself? Do I expect too much from others? I have plenty of these sorts of questions and not many answers. What I do know is this: once someone is gone it's too late to handle them with care and lavish them with love. Tonight I'm reeling from a phone call I received telling me someone had hung themselves but I'm not necessarily talking about absence by death. Once my children are in college, it's a little difficult to hold them on my lap and baking them some banana bread doesn't have quite the same effect as making it togethe...