Hard to believe we met in our 20’s and are now staring down 40. Well, one of us is. I still have a couple of years left. 😉
This has been the hardest year of our married lives, and one of the hardest of our whole lives – it feels unfair at times because at our age, it seems like we should have started to figure things out.
I hope this period of growth is something we can look back on as the start of something even better than what we already knew.
So many of the photos I found were of Cylon in Dad mode:
helping kids,
holding kids, carrying them where they needed to go. 
And smiling with them.
Happy 40th Birthday to the precious soul I am privileged to do life with.
(Photo Credit: P. Furniss)
One could argue that as a mostly SAHM with a part-time job that I wear scrubs for, my personal style doesn’t matter. And really, it doesn’t.
I leave my house to go grocery shopping and take my kids to activities or to the library. I go out on dates with my husband or leave the house by myself about twice a month. And when I say go out by myself, I usually mean, solo grocery shopping. I go to church on Sunday. Otherwise, I’m almost never Out In Public.
A lot of life feels like a struggle right now. Home school burnout has been bubbling up for a couple of years now. There are a lot of littles in our house. I get overstimulated. I’m struggling internally because I have everything I need and almost everything I want, and I’m still anxious and depressed.
Life feels hard, and no matter what I wear.
A few days ago, my oldest daughter was at a church event with kids her age all day. Not long after, she mentioned to me quietly that she found out that day that she was the only kid there with only one pair of shoes.
I asked her a few questions, and more information came out about what had happened over the next day or so.
I felt really sad that it was at a church function where my kid began to feel insecure about Stuff. I had to think about it for a while before I came back to her about it.
I have what they call a Large Family. In fact, as one of my sister-in-law’s friends put it, “That squad is deep.” I don’t know if it was meant as a compliment, but I like it. We have a Deep Squad.
Sometimes we get a super warm welcome.
Our kids are generally well behaved. They are smart, and interesting. Yep, they totally have their bad days, and when they are excited and confined to a small space, even I don’t want to be with them.
The summer of 2015, I bought and read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, along with everyone else on the internet.
I have lost count of the number of garbage bags of stuff that went out the door as a result of reading it, but I would guess not less than twenty. I have never thought of myself as too sentimental about stuff. Yet I was storing craft supplies that I “might need” someday, excessive amounts of hand-me-downs for the kids, and a number of items in my own closet I was holding on to for the wrong reasons.
I hate feeling tied down. I thought about what would happen if we ever moved. I wouldn’t have time to deal with all our stuff. I’d end up throwing it in boxes and bringing it along even though it wasn’t worth keeping. Keeping the toys picked up had become onerous. My kids’ drawers were overflowing. My kids weren’t capable of keeping up with their own stuff themselves, and I couldn’t live with the disorder.
