My sister is 9 years younger than me and it’s just the two of us. No other siblings. We get a lot of questions about that. Apparently my parents started trying for a second child when I was about 5, but they were unsuccessful in conceiving. After 8 years passed, they had visas, passports, and plane tickets ready to fly over and adopt a child from Romania. Weird right? Well, apparently it was the thing in the late 80s. You got babies from Romania. Then all of a sudden, my mom discovered she was finally expecting. Boy was Caroline Adele worth the wait! An utterly adorable, totally hysterical, full of life, vivacious bundle of 100% GIRL became my sister a few weeks after my ninth birthday. For many, many, many years I wasn’t a fan, but as we became adults we also became inseparable, and now I absolutely adore her. We’re oddly close, especially given the age gap. But my heart is full and life is complete with my “Pickle” in it every day. My hubby and my sister are my best friends in the whole wide world. They are my most intimate family. They know all my secrets, faults, strengths, weaknesses, and dreams. I am one lucky gal.
One of the advantages of having a sibling who is a decade younger is they help you stay cool longer and keep you “in the know” when it comes to pop culture. My sister has a particular gift for this because she is extremely social. She would regularly visit me in Texas (from Chicago where we both grew up) during her high school years and come “home” during college breaks with a whole new vocabulary of hip terms to teach me. (The terrifying thing is that now my stepdaughters are teaching Caroline and me the new terms. Lord help us all.) It was always highly entertaining to hear “what the kids are saying these days” and naturally many of these colloquialisms became a part of our family vernacular after hours of laughter and the irresistible desire to adopt quirky terms like “janky” and the reapplication of words like “precious.” The absolute best is when my mom drops one of these in casual conversation. (I’m LOLing just thinking about her relatively frequent employment of the term “janky”…) So on one of these typical visits, Pickle came home using the term “Buckwild” to describe anything out of the ordinary— particularly behavior that would be considered crazy, or things that would be characterized as shocking. Hands down, no contest, “Buckwild” was my FAVORITE of the urban dictionary worthy terms. It’s just so… buckwild.
Once Pickle moved to San Antonio after college, we began hosting a women’s bible study together and we would often talk as a group about the goodness of God and how He has such a crazy amazing way of turning all the sour things in our lives sweet. It was then that we decided that we needed to pair the term “Buckwild” with “Blessed.” We needed a way to communicate that we were CRAZY BLESSED—and Buckwild Blessed just worked. It stuck. We put it on tshirts, among other things, and it is forever memorialized into our lives and family culture.
You may be wondering why on earth I thought anyone else needed to know about this, apart from the fact that it’s just an entertaining part of Smiley family history—- and it’s because you’re Buckwild Blessed too. I promise. There is some above and beyond, super special, melt your heart into a puddle aspect of your life that God has just… crazy blessed. And I thought you could use a special term to describe it. 🙂 You’re welcome!
In celebration of this official Peaceful Home term—- I designed a super simple fashion/home goods line in case you wanted a regular reminder that you, too, are Buckwild Blessed. 🙂 I LOVE sharing this with you!
Love you guys!!
Lizzie
Check out the Buckwild Blessed line here: http://www.zazzle.com/yourpeacefulhome
