Live Well Lived: Getting Happy

I was recently asked, “How do you plan to create happiness for yourself in 2012?” There are, of course, the cliche answers such as take time for myself, live in the moment, get my priorities straight, exercise more, tell corny jokes…you get the idea.  But since I hate cliche answers, I kept thinking.  Then there […]

Takeaways from a week with 3 extra kiddos

Sometimes even a 15 passenger van (ours actually just has 11 seatbelts right now) isn’t big enough.  We actually had to take two vehicles to go Christmas tree hunting. Everyone needs a chance to hunt for and cut down a live Christmas tree. Needing to fell the tree must be an inherent male trait. Having 6 kids […]

Catch up

My cousin recently told me this hilarious story about how her childhood dog had hind legs that were faster than her front legs.  She described how she would take off running only to have her hind end slowly catch up to her front end creating a tangled mess that would inevitably send her tumbling only […]

The In Between

When Patrick started his own business a year-and-a-half ago, I didn’t expect to cherish the times he didn’t have work.  I’m pretty very type A and I expected that the periods of time he was in between c0ntracts to be stressful on all sorts of levels.  And they have been.  I stress when he wants […]

Dear Anonymous Letter-Writer,

Dear Anonymous Letter-Writer, Thanks for taking the time to care so much about the appearance of our house that you would come to us and approach us in a neighborly matter to find out what was really going on–oh wait, you didn’t.  Thanks for making assumptions about how much we care about our property value […]

State of our Family

January seems to be the month to give the state of anything (Union, State, school, etc) so here’s the State of our Family in list form because that’s how I roll write. PJ’s into anything written as a comic book, Star Wars, and LEGOs.  He constantly amazes us with how much he knows and his […]

Clean!

If you know me in real life, you know that I despise cleaning.  I enjoy a straight, organized, clutter-free zone as much as the next person but it’s so tortuous for me to get there, that I’m often just leave my roost rather than let the clutter stress me out.  Recently, Patrick and I have […]

I usually don't…

…make New Year’s Resolutions.  But if I did I might resolve to work on those thousand or so pictures I’ve yet to edit or post from the last 6 months.  Or I might resolve to get rid of a lot of stuff and simplify, to get more organized, to seek God before I say “yes” […]