In Review

It's been a while, folks. I haven't had a lot of time to blog. When I did have time I didn't have the heart. I just wanted to sit on the couch and do something mind-numbing to rest my brain and body.

However, my baby just started sleeping through the night (like, completely through the night till 6 or 7 am, not just the medical definition of a 7 hour stretch that means I still have to wake up and feed him at 3 am) and so I feel like a new woman! Suddenly I have energy stores and motivation I haven't seen since 2016.

Since last blogging, my little family

• had a baby, 
• mourned the death of my brother, grandmother, and cousin and attended two of the funerals, 
• all four of us had hospital visits or stays, 
• finally convinced our insurance to pay for thousands of dollars in covered expenses that they inexplicably would not pay for months on end,
• bought a new-to-us car and then spent a lot of time and $$ getting it fixed periodically all summer, 
• endured lots of non-hospitalized illness (usually while out of town, of course), 
• attended four weddings (three out of state), 
• healed from injuries (including a broken nose, sliced finger, herniated disc, and impinged shoulder between us), 
• suffered through an assortment of other good and bad news,
• and probably went through a lot of other crap I can't even remember now.

I can't honestly say it was a bad year because there were so many blessing among the trials and trips. Nothing was as bad as it could have been. Everything could have been SO MUCH WORSE. There were lots of happy things that happened too. It was more a weird year. A crazy year. Not in that "oh life is crazy" way adults use it as an excuse for why they haven't kept in touch, but in a crazy everything-was-actually-extreme kind of way. 

The strain of it all on top of night after night of interrupted sleep was very taxing. I saved my brainpower for parenting and homemaking. I managed stress through sewing and crocheting while binge watching old seasons of Downton Abbey and America's Next Top Model. I didn't want to write down or share my thoughts.

I have a little distance and longer stretches of sleep since the worst of 2017 now and I'm ready to write again. Maybe I'll do catch-up posts. Maybe not. I'd like to share some of the things I've been making and activities we're looking forward to this year. Are personal blogs even still a thing in this era of Facebook and Instagram? Whatever. They are for me. See you around.

At wedding #4, October 2017