The last few months have been one giant inhale of life. School got out, my kids and I traveled to visit family, I worked a lot of new edits to my debut book, and finally after 6 long months we…

Today was beautiful. We’re in that weird part of Spring in the PNW when the rain stops and the sun comes out and everyone thinks that summer is here. We all know that the rain WILL come back, probably next week, but for now we are all enjoying the sunshine and warm temperatures. The kids went back to school today after a week of Spring Break, in which we drove down to California to see family. I finally had time to be still and write, and I got so much done, but still I felt annoyed, and irritated. It wasn’t until this evening that I realized what was wrong…

Every year I choose a word for the upcoming 365 days of my life. This word will live at the forefront of my mind and help guide me to what the year is going to become. One year my word was “Brave”, and because of that word I tried things that scared me, and you know what? Things…

The other day the kids and I were sitting at dinner chatting about our cozy weekend we had been having, it had been pouring all day long, when the conversation eventually turned to Daddy and his deployment.

“When Daddy comes home can we all go bowling together? And we can all have a…

When you suddenly realize that you should be getting lost in your manuscript world instead of trying to make sense of everything you cannot control in this world.

When you realize that waiting for people to like you is like waiting for paint to dry: it’s…

This afternoon while I was midway through my long Sunday Funday run in the pouring spring rain in Washington, I started thinking about delayed gratification. You see I’m slightly addicted to this tv show. It’s trashy and maybe a little embarrassing that I’ve…

Today is International Women’s Day. On this day five years ago, I was nursing our twin girls who had just turned three months old. We were living in our hip, downtown loft apartment. I had been on maternity leave for over 3 months and was just about to start going back into the studio a few days a week…

Recently my son has been asking me questions at random.

“What is your dream job?” he asked one morning as we walked from the parking lot into school, his hand wrapped tightly around mine.

“If you could eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?” he questioned me as we sat eating pasta and broccoli at the dinner table one night…

“If our life was a Vien diagram our marriage would be the only overlap.”

My husband said that to me once when we were backstage at an event for my previous career. I laughed looking around at the artists preparing for the next showcase, while the audience sat waiting in the front, sipping champagne and eating appetizers.

I thought of that again this morning as I was making pancakes…

Hello, March. You sexy beast.

When you’re on the home front side of a deployment each new month is cause to celebrate. I guess he’s celebrating the new month too, but heck this side is all I know. Sometimes I daydream about being on the other side of the deployment, you know the side that actually deploys and goes to foreign countries with a team and a mission. Part of me envies him, you know? The idea of going out into the world…

Someone once told that me that energy stays in your body, and you can either let it sit there and take up space or you can use it to do something. My husband is deployed right now. We’ve done this multiple times over the 15 years we’ve been married, but this time something has been different. I’ve been moving the energy from the moment he left…

I recently met with a life coach for the first time in… well… my life. It was actually my friend’s mom who was visiting from of state who asked her daughter, my friend, if anyone she knew would be interested in a pro bono initial session. I think the response in my text was something like “OMG. ME! PICK ME.”

I arrived having dropped all the kids off at school, with my laptop, a notebook for taking notes and a cool outfit on. Despite this outside appearance…

I’m reading through “Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott, and in chapter five she talks about school lunches, or rather how she prompts her students to write about their experiences with school lunches. She discusses how no matter what state they grew up in or type of school they attended, school lunches and the anxieties and social rules attached to them were similar across the board. As a homeschooler, my only experience with “real” school lunches were from popular culture. So, Anne I’m not sure what you would make of this, but here are my memories of school lunches from the perspective of a homeschool kid in the 1990s and early 2000s…

We went grocery shopping the other day. We filled carts with cucumbers, and crackers, bananas and canned tuna. We stocked up on toilet paper, and cleaning supplies, frozen meat and pickles. It probably looked like we were preparing for the end the world, and in a sense we were.

“Wow!” our 8-year-old marveled at the stocked shelves when he got home from school that afternoon “you guys got a lot this time!’

It was the last big shopping trip before you will leave…

For Christmas my older sister gave me the book “Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott. I flipped through the pages and commented,

“Huh, I haven’t read this one.”

“What?” she exclaimed in surprised, and I suddenly felt like a nerdy kid admitting I didn’t actually know what any of the cool kids were talking about.

“Oh,” said my sister, leaning in a little closer “It’s really a good one.”

And she was right. I started reading “Bird by Bird” shortly after…

I’ve been piecing this together in my brain for months now. It’s been slow going. Even the title has been evading me. An Open Letter on the Stages of Deployment from the Homefront, or An Open Letter to My Friends on How I May React When My Husband Deploys, or even An Open Letter on Why Despite My Outside Appearance, I Am Not Actually Crushing It. Somehow none of these seem to say what I am trying to say, which is this…

Yesterday, I was out in our garage working out. I am a runner by nature, and since I like a challenge, I have been focusing on weight training the last few months. It’s been hard but rewarding. So, I’m out in the garage lifting and decide that in between sets it would be a good idea to straighten up a little bit. We just finished a big kitchen renovation and recently cleaned out of the kid’s playroom.

Like all military families across this big wide world, at some point the inevitable happens…your loved one gets orders that they must deploy soon. It’s for the greater good. It’s for the mission. This I know, in my head at least because it is what I have been learned to know. Afterall this is not your first rodeo, and it’s not my first either.

My whole life I’ve struggled with how writing would fit within my plans for the future. When I was a kid, and learning how to type on the computer (thanks Mavis Beacon) I would constantly type out the sentence “I love writing, but what about my real life?” Even now as I typed out that sentence my fingers knew the pattern perfectly. My fingers trained to type out the words for decades. Looking back, I don’t know why I had this conundrum.

When I was a little kid, we moved around a lot. We lived in the Midwest, multiple places on the West Coast, we even lived in the desert for six months. Finally, when I was about to start middle school, my parents settled us into their forever home back in the Midwest.