Welcome to Loveland

A couple weekends ago I was very blessed to participate in my second Ragnar Relay. Four years ago I ran one with many of the same people in Tennessee. This year we connected in Colorado. I think it means so much more to me because in the beginning, I didn't know if I would be able to participate. Between airfare and logistically leaving my family for a weekend, I didn't know if I could swing it. Until. . . Jamie, my sister-in-law that I ran the previous Ragnar with, called me up with a plan. She wanted to know if she and Ben (my brother, her husband) bought my ticket to Denver for my birthday present, if I would be able to come. After using my own birthday money to cover the cost of the entry fee, I couldn't see a way NOT to go. And can I just tell you, after thinking that I wasn't going at all, I was ecstatic!! I cannot remember personal that I looked forward to more than this.  Of course that was not the end to the challenges. After signing up, I was super motiva...

It has been such a long time since I have have written anything. I think that it is time for me to do an update on my kids. Matthew is 15. He is such a peaceful, fun kid. He wants peace. He brings peace. He also has such a fun, happy-go-lucky personality. He is pretty chill. He does like to text his friends, watch YouTube, and play video games, but I know/hope that he is trying to find a balance. Lately he has been starting to study Portuguese with Tommy on DuoLingo. He loves to squish and hug Carly and give her kisses on her chubby cheeks. He has been putting quite a bit of time into Jiu Jitsu this summer. He teaches a few kids classes to pay for his own classes and does some other work at the gym to earn a bit of spending money. Most evenings he is there for a couple of hours. Recently he competed in his first fight. He did well considering his opponent, and was great at his defense. He avoided three different kinds of submissions. He also earned his blue belt. He finished his ...

I was talking to my sister-in-law and great friend Jamie and we both decided that next year we would like to hibernate during the month of January. That would be nice if it were possible, but a little extreme, especially being a wife and mother. I would have to put the rest of my family into hibernation to make it happen. Instead, after thinking about it, I'm going to write a few of the amazing things I have been able to do this month with my family that I would not have been able to do if I had hibernated. Earlier this week I was able to make the most delicious dinner of creamed eggs over toast, or bread in this case because it was fresh out of the oven. I had Tommy and Taivan helping me peel the eggs to put into the white sauce because they were hungry and whining at me for food and this was a good distraction that sped up dinner and kept me sane as well. I was trying to stir the sauce and help them rinse the shells off the peeled eggs at the same. I kept thinking that I must...

Where do I begin? Tommy has been in our family now for seven years. He is the sweetest, most imaginative, curious, bright, vibrant, focused, intelligent boy. Here he is loving Toby, our new adopted dog.  A boy and his dog. He loves his siblings, and he loves learning. Everything. He doesn't have just one favorite subject. He takes turns loving them all. He will spend hours making a book about creatures in his imaginary land, the Tommy Forest. Or he will lose track of time playing "games" of imagination with Taivan and Lucy. He will study the flags of the countries of the world and then draw them from memory. He taps away at the piano, composing a song via Musescore. He will complete two chapters of math in a couple of days. He knows more about most animals than I do. He can remember almost anything.  He is great at working with his hands. He loves to take apart old electronics to figure out how they work. He can paint and draw and color with inc...

Carly has been with us now for four months. I am going to do my best to remember the circumstances surrounding her birth because they are important to me. Before this delivery, I had five epidurals. Two of them went very smoothly and the other three did not. The epidural with Matthew's delivery I couldn't feel a thing and wasn't able to push well because of it. In Lucy's delivery, the anesthesiologist could not do it right the first time and poked me five times trying to start the epidural and consequently I had a horrible headache every time I was upright for a week after I had the baby. And the last one when I was delivering Taivan only numbed me halfway. I felt everything on one side and nothing on the other. So for this delivery I did not want to roll the dice to see what kind of epidural I would end up with. I decided quite a while back that I wanted to do my next delivery naturally. No drugs, no I.V. I knew what I wanted, but it was difficult for me for e...

I have been meaning to write this post for about a week. Hopefully I can remember the events that took place well enough, despite my procrastination. The solar eclipse that took place on August 21, 2017 across North America was something that we had on our calendars for months. As the time drew near, we knew it was something that we needed to make a priority. In our area of Georgia, the eclipse was supposed to reach 97.7% of totality. So we decided to pull the older two kids out of school for the day and make it a family field trip, a day we would not forget. We were lucky enough that our family from Charlotte, NC, our sister-in-law Charlotte and cousins felt the same way and traveled to stay with us and join us in our travels to reach a site of totality. We decided on a location that wouldn't be too busy based on population and ease of travel and one that would also be on the way back to Charlotte, NC from Acworth. That ended up being Toccoa, GA. There was some traffic on the...