Welcome to my blog!  I hope I have peaked your interest with my title.  I’m well aware that “ordinary unique” is an oxymoron, but can one not be both at the same time?

The word ordinary means normal, plain, commonplace, or customary.  I am not from a bloodline of the privileged or highly educated.  I’m just an ordinary American girl born into a lower middle-class family in what used to be a simple city of Jacksonville, Florida in the mid 1950’s.  Life in general was so much simpler then.  My dad was a carpenter by trade and my mom was a homemaker.  Ordinary.

The word unique is defined as unparalleled, not typical, or the only specimen of a given kind.  For as long as I can recall I have considered myself to be “different”.  Maybe it was because I was so tall and lanky with Irish fair skin and freckles.  Or perhaps it was because I was an only child for 12 years.  My very personality and sense of humor was odd compared to my peers when I was a teenager and I was always much more serious minded.  I did at some point though begin to realize I was purposely made the way I was.  There was no need for conformity, no point in even trying!  Why, the very Creator God of the universe had formed me and shaped me to be just as I was!  The entire chapter of Psalm 139 told me all I needed to know to feel comfortable in my own skin.  Scripture assures me that he knew all about me even when I was still in my mother’s womb and although I was “curiously wrought” and I am “yet being unperfect”, still His thoughts towards me today are more than the grains of sand on the earth!  Can you imagine that? How unique we are!

This has been a goal of mine for quite a few years and I’m finally taking the time to launch it.  I do hope to have followers, maybe at least a couple of friends or family members who will occasionally read.  However, my primary purpose is just to record what I have learned through the years in hopes that my children, grandchildren, and possibly even great-grands will know a bit about their heritage.  I want them to find comfort in the fact that their parents were not perfect and they were well aware of it!  I hope that they will also see how the experiences of life are much more favorable, and infinitely more adventurous, when God is allowed to be involved.  I really hope they will laugh at me and with me as I record some interesting and incredible details of the life and times of Bob & Tracey Cavender.

I hope you will learn and laugh with us, too!  Now let this journey begin!! WELCOME!