My Beautiful Days

10 months.  That's how much time has passed since I last updated my blog.  It is completely amazing to me that I have let that much time slip by, but it seems to have passed in just a mere moment - not in ten long, dragged-out months. It's not that I haven't had things to write about (I have, a lot actually), or that I have lost my passion for writing (I haven't, not at all).  It's more that I think I've been caught up in a game of trying to find myself, so much so that I lost myself completely. Let me rewind.  My last update (that post I wrote 10 months ago) told you that I was back at work managing a salon.  Now this update will tell you I'm back at home being a stay-at-home mom!  While I truly enjoyed having a job outside of our home and having an identity outside of "wife and mom", my household just does not function as well when I'm not here during the day to put the pieces in place.  It was SO hard to not be available to be here when ...

This is something that has been on my heart for about a month.  I had the privilege of sharing it with my MOPS group yesterday, and now I want to share it with you.  Looking back over the past (almost) four years, I have found that there were so many times I felt I didn't measure up.  It started out with motherhood. Jumping in head-first to being a step-mom to four kids is one of the best blessings I've ever been given, but it also is one of the most frustrating learning journeys that I've been on.  You see, I really thought I was doing a good job - I was staying on top of our housework and laundry (which I now realize was truly a miracle!), I was making dinners, I was playing with the kids and helping with homework.  Sure, we had a hiccup every now and then, but life really seemed to be going smoothly. Then I started following mommy blogs. There are few things in the world that tear me down the way that reading a mommy blog can.  Those bl...

I know that many of you who read my blog are moms.  You've been through the sleepless nights, the cries that won't stop, the endless dirty diapers and the fact that doing anything now takes you three times as long to get done as it would have before you had a baby (i.e. making dinner now has to allow time to pause and comfort my sweet crying baby!).  You also know the endless hours of cuddling, the moments of studying your baby's every feature so intensely that it is forever burned in your mind.  You know the kisses and sweet whispers of love to your baby, you know the lullaby's and the little things that calm your baby better than anybody else knows.  You are the one whose voice your baby recognizes and is instantly calmed by your touch. I never knew that motherhood was going to be this involved.  I will admit to my sheer naivety about becoming a mother to an infant.  My assumption was that there weren't many things in my life that were going to change, ...