Celebrate in Achieving Goals

This week I'll be celebrating while my oldest daughter collects her Masters degree in Fine Arts Administration.   Yes, I am proud of both of my daughters' accomplishments, and I'll be waving the flag to celebrate and demonstrate my pride for a week or so in the garden.  Now is a good time to pause and reflect, with gratitude, on the ability to achieve goals.  Not all goals result in degrees; take motherhood, for example, but each one deserves a celebration.  

Waving the flag in the garden.

My oldest daughter married after her sophomore year in college, and worked a few years before deciding on pursuing her MFA.  She is also a gifted ballet dancer, and continued both performing and teaching while working through her degrees.  She loves our city, loves people, and I can't wait to see where her MFA takes her.  Her husband, my son-in-law, is working toward bettering his qualifications for application in a Physician Assistant's program, a goal which will hopefully open doors for both of them.

My oldest daughter (far L), with her besties in her MFA program.

My youngest daughter graduated with her Bachelor's degree in Nursing three years ago.  I celebrate the fact that her strengths lie in medicine, a field that scares me on so many levels.  I can faint with having blood drawn or receiving a shot, no kidding, but she cares for patients in the Neurological ICU without flinching, always ready for a challenging case.  I would feel confident in her care and having her in charge.  Come Fall, she'll be marrying her recently appointed Lt. Fireman.  The two of them make a great team - he attends patients in emergency situations, and she cares for those often coming from those emergency situations.

My younger daughter, after her pinning ceremony, becoming an RN.

While I wouldn't necessarily recommend the path I took in earning my MBA, it is still something I celebrate having done.  I trudged along for seven and a half years, chipping away at required coursework, while trying to achieve goals of mom, business person and part-time ballet dancer simultaneously (I kept the primitively stitched saying, "Please help me not to be so busy making a living I forget to make a life.  Amen." hung as a gentle reminder to myself).  After many years of hard work and life changes, I feel more than blessed to celebrate living in a much less-stressed life with my husband now, and I'd like to attribute it to the hard work in years past.  And I feel twice blessed in seeing my daughters motivated and able enough to work toward their goals, let alone achieving them.

One of these days I suppose we should do a gallery wall of our diplomas with the degrees we've collected.....they're like badges or medals that scouts and athletes earn.  Maybe I'm procrastinating on the indecision of sweating small stuff like mattes and frames and coordinating color schemes, or maybe it's just that I'm working on other goals...life goals.  Life goes on, we've collected our degrees dust, and we now wave the flag for others as they reach their goals.  Maybe I'll at least make ornaments (as seen pictured on Pinterest, for which I was unable to determine origin in order to give credit for such a clever idea).  The point is, celebrate achieving goals and how they give meaning to your life, not just collecting the badges, medals or degrees.  Will you be celebrating yours or someone else's goals soon?

Graduation tassel in glass ornament.