Wow, it looks like someone hand-made those cabinets, and from your own description of the kitchen, I suspect you don't find them "nice and rustic". Love the woodstove w/ the little windows up around the top! (There's an idea to help cool that smokestack pipe!) And the kitchen floors - are those pine? They look nice, but keep us posted on your transformation of the place. It will be neat to see. We just painted our whole interior in 1 week this summer. FYI, if you're going to do this, take more than a week off.
You just had to ask deep insightful questions, huh. No, my life is nothing like I thought it would be or ever planned. What is different is that marriage takes effort (I especially hadn't planned for this 10 yrs. ago), parenting takes way more than I ever imagined but in it you reap what you sow for the most part, my kids have brought me so much joy and I never knew a human was capable of loving this much, because of that deep love any heartache regarding them is especially painful, love for my DH is still growing deeper even 11 yrs into it (it doesn't stay the same like I imagined in the beginning), I have learned/am learning who I am and what I like, vs. being a major people-pleaser who didn't really have many "plans". Oh ya and I never thought I'd weigh this much! Life is full of suprises

If I had the opportunity to go back and do it all over again... would I be able to do it over with the knowledge I have now? Even still, I don't think I would, b/c that's how I became who I am now, and while there are some things that will always need adjusting as I go along in life, I have discovered that I like me. There are some isolated things that if I could go back and change, I definately would, because they affected others. But, those things were caused by other things which were caused by more other things/people... it's a big chain, and unless you change the whole thing, there would be no way that I could have known or made any sense out of doing anything differently back then. We do the best we can with what we have (experiential knowledge) at any given time. Even when we fail, even when we don't try our best, it's for a reason. If I could go back and do it all over again the same, NO! it was hard enough the first time. You had to suspect the answer would be long, right? Esp. from me

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OK so here's my question... Do you believe in the afterlife, eternity, and if so, where do you believe our spirits/souls go? What do you think happens to us when our bodies die? If you believe in heaven, what do you believe it takes to get there?