Tumbleweeds...

You know that whole "divorce is not a good thing" mentioned in the bible? God definitely new what He was talking about.

In all of His infinite wisdom, He new that even though His grace and mercy would see His children through such situations, it could not make drafting a family tree any easier.

Forrest has homework due the first day of school. One of those assignments requires him (translation: us) to create a family tree covering 4 generations. At first, this sounded like an interesting and somewhat fun project.

Until we actually began thinking it through.

Then, we (translation: I) was presented with dilemmas...as in more than one dilemma.

Dilemma numero uno (see, my Spanish classes are paying off): Which "father" do we use? Forrest cleared that up rather quickly and decided that we should use both Brandon and Mark.

Hurdle cleared, we move on. Now, in order to incorporate all of Forrest's siblings, Mark's ex-wife got added to the family tree. It's getting more and more interesting by the minute.

Okay, so far we have Forrest at the bottom of the tree. We have the "mother" blank filled in and we have the "father" blank filled in...twice. We have a broken line to account for Mark's first marriage thus allowing us to account for all siblings.

Now, we move on to Forrest's grandparents. Of course there is my mom. Easy enough. My dad...not so easy. Let's see...I'm not exactly sure who my biological dad is...so, do I put a large "?" in that blank?

Then, I think "I should just use my step-dad because he did in fact raise me". Now if I do that, then do I change my maiden name to my step-dad's last name...and if I do that...wouldn't that be lying? Of course he has to be on the tree somehow, because we have to account for my sister, Forrest's only maternal aunt.

Okay, a headache is forming, let's move on to someone else. How about Brandon's side. His mom (Forrest's paternal grandmother) is easy enough. Insert more broken lines to indicate her two marriages that produced children in order to show Forrest's aunts and uncles, which means more broken lines to account for a remarriage and the children that came with it to account for cousins.

My headache is getting worse.

Did I mention that we also need dates of birth, death if applicable, marriage, divorce, and remarriage?

We are barely through generation two and Forrest's Family Tree looks more like Forrest's Family Tumbleweed.