This morning I’ve already changed 2 horrendous … must be gut issues … diapers. The house still smells. I can’t wash my hands enough.

We’ve gone to get coffee, the mail and made a ton of phone calls.

My daughter has decided it’s time to deliver tickets to the neighbors. “Tickets” are pieces of paper she makes and then hands out to people who she thinks should be invited to something grand she has planned. I’m never “in the know” on her details, but apparently it’s a lot of work and she’s ready for the task.

She has decided she would like to deliver them alone. She promises not to go across the road.

I’m not OK with this so I’ve convinced her we’ll have an adventure!! And I’ll chaperone her friendly deliveries.

I’ve enforced a no TV rule for the day and it’s working nicely so far. Although my son is getting into WAY more naughtiness than usual. He’s so curious. A little monkey, that one.

Words I’ve decided I say way too often are “Be Careful”, “Calm Down” and “NO!!” or “Stop it!! RIGHT NOW!!”.

I freaked out about being a horrible mother last night because my reservoir of patience has been running on empty and I don’t want to be that parent. The one I see in the mirror every morning. The one who, last week, had the happiest moments of her day when the children finally went down for naps.

Nope. Not interested in that kind of life. Not interested in that kind of parenting or relationship to depression.

I try really hard to keep people out because I’m safer that way. History has prepared me for these kinds of walls, these kinds of battles I fight daily to keep the barriers down, to let the people closest to me in.

This is my life, today, as I know it.

I am loved. Cared about. I’m am precious to a few and that’s what matters.

I am His.

I know you want to see where we’re living now. You want photos and details and you want me to open my doors and windows and let you back in.

Except, I’m not going to. Not yet. I’ve been over exposed and burnt on being an open book. I’ve been guarding myself lately because I need to. Because I want to.

Not because you’ve been cruel, I’m very lucky to have such a great online community who holds me up and supports me and I think that’s happened because I continue to be vulnerable with you, I continue to let you in.

Big changes are hard for me. I tend to keep people out when big changes happen. I know this about myself and I’m exercising it right now. I just need the space. I need the quiet.

I need the mystery and secret to be veiled a little longer.

The last year or so I’ve been doing an awful lot “living” just for this website. Events, outings and every day opportunities turned into something to write about, something to share. There were months when I wasn’t writing for myself any more, I was writing for an audience, most of whom I know personally …

It’s just … that’s not what this is for me. I’m back to writing things that I want to remember. For now, for this season.

The other writing and sharing won’t stop and I won’t morph into something else, this website won’t change into compartmentalized places for thoughts, tips, cooking etc etc. I’m a one page girl with a 100 thoughts per post.

WORDS! WORD VOMIT! WORDS! I guess what I’m saying is, I understand your need to know and thank you for being so patient.

I’m writing again. Not blogging … writing. Writing to me is putting pen to paper and opening my wounds for the linen beneath me to change. For the tree pulp and water, for the little blue lines to make sense of.

How appropriate that our last address was on a literal dead end road. I was so scared to leave it, so scared to change it but I was clawing my eyes out trying to convince myself that it would get better.

Life in a fish bowl, in a box that is taped shut, isn’t living.

Here we are in a 2nd floor apartment with a view of trees and buildings and it’s breath taking for me. Healing in all kinds of ways to change the present so we can change the presence. It’s small and the kitchen has absolutely no counter space but we have blankets and chairs and food.

But really, it’s larger than anything I’ve ever had. It’s full of possibility and chance. It’s waiting for me, for us, to make the first move. It doesn’t ask anything of us. Not to mow it’s yard, not to take care of it’s cracks and it’s leaks. We just have to be here.

We just have to breath.

Today Rebekah from Thankfully Thinking is writing here about how to find contentment. I know Rebeckah in a few ways – through our husbands, through friends, through blogging. She’s a passionate person with friendship as a true value. Enjoy this from her …

The older I get, the more I realize how many times I am tempted to base my own value on comparing myself to others. That I am more or less serving that them, that they have cute little size 7 shoes that look great in peep toe heels or that they can eat ice cream every night of the week without an evidence of it. But, the more women I share life with, the more I also am recognizing that this vortex pulls at all of us, like a heavy under toe, sucking us out to sea where we lose our compass for reality.

I know for me, it starts with my daily life– the blogs I read, the facebook pictures I view, the way people choose to present themselves online. I paint pictures of others lives based on the little snapshots I see on the screen. And I think as obvious as it is, we all need to remember that people are dynamic and multifaceted which overflows into the reality of each of our lives having struggle and grief and joy and confidence and insecurity all at once. I think we love to show the world our best self life through a filter that siphons out the evidences of the hard things.

But what if we banded together, and helped each other and helped ourselves by sharing the load of these struggles. And all the more sharing our joys as well. And what if the things we presented on our blogs were not just our glossy 5 x7 moments but the ones in between that we don’t have pictures of? I think so much of life happens between the glossy moments.

I have a deep longing for this type of community in my life , to grow with other women and get real about the things that I am convinced we are ALL dealing with. I have learned over the past year that in the moments that I have been able to be transparent I have experienced some incredible friendships and conversations, places that I never have been before with friends because we were both willing to let their guards down. To confess things to one another and ask for prayer, to share hopes and dreams in a place that can hold them until they are realized.

And something extraordinary happens in those moments; where you begin to have the freedom to see yourself as talented and beautiful and worth it rather that lesser and in contrast to. All of the fears that we have about sounding crazy or weak or needy are heard, filtered and echoed back with the insight and experience of other women and we start to feel like we are ok. So here’s to honest living and blessing one another by being real.

that some times you just need to get the negative out there. write it down, say it out loud …

to be able to move past it.

Welcome to the other side.

As we’re busy uprooting our lives over here and deciding on the next best thing, we’ve also been busy actually living life and not freaking out about every detail. (most days)

Tangent: Weekends have proven to be the most difficult because that’s when I have help. I have someone there to tackle this task of moving with me, another set of hands. Another parent to parent and to read books to young children so I can clean a room, box up a memory and price away possessions. However, the details are still so fuzzy. We haven’t inked a contract other than the one that says we’re homeless in less than 2 weeks and things are starting to feel stressful. Aaron asked me tonight after seeing a commercial for depression how I was holding up in the area of my life? Which is funny, how they know when to ask those types of questions, because I was just thinking about that earlier today as I was washing dishes by hand, even though our dishwasher works … and we’re out of detergent. Because I don’t know if our new-to-us rental house will have a dishwasher and I’m dutch.

So I start thinking; if I let myself I could be really really unhappy right now. This whole ordeal has the power to break part of me again. To tear me down and keep me in the alley of my own thoughts, my own deafening thoughts about how bad it is. How it’ll never get better. How many mistakes we’re making, have made, will make. I could get really really sad and then really really angry right now.

And I could feel it. I could feel the anger and needed a distraction. I needed something ELSE to happen in my mind because walking these halls and seeing the empty walls, watching the boxes collect dust bunnies because we’re still here when we should be there was making me feel INSANE.

I felt powerless to the situation in which I thrust myself into.

Life, y’all.

I am [re]learning lots of wonderful lessons through all of this. I will frame this house when the time is right.

Until then, I’ve also been busy else where …

Taking photos of Aaron’s offices at Elevator Up for The Garage to highlight for Steelcase.

You can see all of the photos here. I’m just sharing some of my favs.

I’ve been busy with the garden, harvesting my sugar snap peas and trying really hard not to eat all of them right off the vine. I do try to save them to put into meals, but they. are. so. good.

I can’t wait to tell you about making cyanotypes in depth – I did this a few weeks ago with a reader turned friend (Hi Katie!) and she writes about the process here.

Summer is flying by and I am really am loving all of it. Even the stressful days, because in-between wanting to scream and being frustrated and figuring out how to deal with huge life changes … I’m beyond blessed to see this face.

and this face.

And the Summer Jar has kept us occupied and happy as well. More to come …

** I am still super excited about everything and don’t want to whine and complain about the decisions we made, but I also sort through those decisions and emotions here. I have been for 10 years. This is what keeps me from going to that dark place. This is my therapy.

Yesterday I was running some errands which had to do with moving. Getting boxes, going to the bank … running around town. As I was pulling out of the bank I thought to myself “Man it’s fun to be an adult.”**

**Actual thought that went through my mind.

Then I decided I would treat myself to one of McDonalds’ chocolate dipped ice cream cones. Which I never did, by the way. I just decided I could and then I drove away.

That was yesterday. Today I stood next to my washing machine and cried while my two year old boy was watching Sesame Street. I was crossing things off my To-Do list of the day which happened to be “Price garage sale items, basement” … so I was being an adult and staying on task when it hit me.

When I could feel the panic rising I called Aaron and started to sob on the phone while he was in the car with 2 other professional folks. I could hear them through my sobbing – on the other end, sitting near Aaron, having a normal conversation and I am losing my fucking marbles.

It was not fun to be an adult this morning. I got overwhelmed. We are so excited and so very terrified at the same time about moving. Yes, we’re done with this house and have done what we can to it without doing too much and we’re not, in fact, in the school district we thought we were – we’re ready.

But it’s easy. It’s complacent to stay here. To just go on living here, shoving things in the cupboards we don’t use and putting the garage sale off another year. And it’s comfortable. We know the neighborhood, the kids have only ever known this house, we started our life as a family here.

And there’s so. much. to. do. to move.

It didn’t help that Aaron was out of town for a night and I had to carry on conversations about mortgages and banking with people he was originally having the conversation with. I had to jump in and assume that I knew the details of what was already discussed, the ideas that were swapped. It didn’t help that I was solo parenting 2 children and trying to pack up a house, get ready for a garage sale and set up times to see rental homes for the interim.

None of it helped. It was all too much. I caved. I cried. I sobbed.

This house is somewhat of a band-aid for me. The last house my (step)dad saw before he died … he walked through it weeks before he passed. Gave us his blessing, in a way. He got to see where the baby (who is now a 5 1/2 year old female) would be sleeping, she was only 5 months into being formed in my belly.

We went from 900 square feet to this house, 2,400 square feet and all kinds of ideas and dreams. Our income has only changed once since we’ve lived in this house – and that happened within the first year of being here.

We were building our “5 year plan” on the fact that we only ‘planned’ to be here for 3 of those 5 years. We’re going on six. We had another baby here, who is now a 2 year old male and sleeping in what was the office when we bought this house. He is named after Him.

This house, to us, was a stepping stone in the journey of being mortgage free. Buy, fix up and sell until we accrued enough equity to own a home scott-free.

This House.

Just goes to show that a plan is really just an idea – something to be considered. A fluid situation.

I am ready to tear off the band-aid and get going with all of this, but we’re not really changing much other than an address when we leave here and it’s really really difficult to see the silver lining when I’m knee deep in old flatware and pillow forms that I no longer need.

We’re still on a journey, just happens that this leg of it is the Roller Coaster.

All these photos. I love sharing photos, they tell a story all their own, but sometimes I get lost in the photos and need to bring it back to all the words.

Like today.

We’re in all kinds of flux right now. With our house, with our summer, with where lots of things are heading. I’ve been enjoying articles and blogs on subjects that seem to flow from this flux in our lives and I absolutely love that there is, somewhere it seems, always someone else going through the same thing we are.

Insert huge internet hug.

I’ve grown to love the friends I’ve made from this blog and others, from facebook, from conferences and from meet-ups with this awesome little sisterhood feeling. We get each other. And even that statement … they understand.

I feel like I belong to this really fun, really knowledgeable Star Wars league … only we breast-feed, some times. And well, we don’t play with light sabers.

I never did the college dorm thing and after being married and having kids – I never will. But I get to do this blogger thing. I get to spend weekends and evenings and special events with them. I GET TO.

Not have to. Not need to.

Want to.

I said I would post today and I have 43 minutes to make good on my word.

Hi.

Tomorrow will be controlled by nothing but a list of things to do, of expectations, of excitement. It’ll be fueled by coffee and sheer adrenaline. I’ll be working harder because I know my kids are waiting for me, because I know people are depending on me, because I respect and enjoy the company of my partner in this crime of blogging conferences.

Then Saturday will be here, before I even know it and then will come crashing down on me. Months of work and millions of emails later – we’ll be done.

And I’ll pick myself back up, excited for tomorrow. A little quieter for a while after all that talking, blogging, tweeting … all that planning. A little less for a little more.

I’m so excited.

I’m so nervous.

I’m so ready.

So I used to be on antidepressants. At age 14 I was diagnosed with clinical depression, which is a tall order being 14. Do I believe it? Yea.

I haven’t been on anything since that one time I went back on them after my daughter’s first birthday – 4 1/2 years ago.

And it’s been fine, actually. Every once in a while I think … huh? This is getting in the way of my life, I should work on this. So I do. I write, or exercise or create something.

Then it hit me today as I was reading comments on the facebook page – this website is my Zoloft. The community of this website, the friends I’ve made – the joy I get from hearing about what you’re doing … it lightens my heart. Every day.

And I have a pretty heavy heart.

I am kind of intense and it bothers me. Really bothers me. Some times I have to sit my husband down and apologize because I know that I couldn’t live with another me. Anxiety, crippling insecurities. You guys, I’m human.

But THANK YOU, from the very deepest bottom of that very heavy heart, for loving me and not even knowing it.

I like you!