A Place to Write

I scheduled my original screening on Friday and had a big mental crash Saturday night. Feels like I can't breathe. I was counting down the hours until I could just get to my appointment. I also couldn't keep the tears from my eyes and finally Brendon noticed. He held me and let me cry and just shrugged and said "We'll figure it out." I know we've always had that relationship. That no matter what comes in our marriage, we will figure it out, but it feels deeper now. Because no matter what happens to me he is for sure stuck with me! Haha Our lives are too deep, too interconnected to ever take a step back. How lovely it is to know he's mine forever and ever. He gave me a blessing and I woke up feeling better. And now my appointment has been pushed back an entire month, to a time when Brendon cannot come with me, and that anxious feeling is creeping in again. But I can breathe through it. Because we can do this. We'll figure it out. 

In May of 2024 I decided to finally do something I’ve been putting off forever. I got some genetic testing done to see if I carry the BRCA1 gene mutation that my half sister, Bethany, does. Bethany had a double mastectomy after finding an unusual lump but we’ve also had an aunt pass away from breast cancer and her daughter had a double mastectomy as a preventative measure.  I learned that I do have the mutation. And then I crashed out and decided I wasn’t ready to deal with that. So I put it off again. A few months later I reached out and asked to be scheduled. No one called me back. This week it came to mind again and I decided I should stop putting it off. So I reached out to the woman who did my testing and asked her again to put in a referral for screening. Then I missed their call.  I called back. "Who do you wan tto schedule with?" "I have no idea. I did some testing, I got results, I don't know what the next steps are." "I'm looking at your recor...

8/24/25 These past few days have been so peaceful that I feel like I need to write them down. Thursday we went to Sunsplash for their Night Splash. I’ve been to Sunsplash dozens of times over the years and it is amazing how little it has changed. Yes, they add a new slide or two every few years but they never re-finish what was there before and so the result is somewhere between nostalgia and disgust. At night splash most of the slides are closed, but that didn’t matter too much to us.  We went as a family, just the five of us, and were excited for practically no lines or crowds. It felt so fun to just be just us. I’ve spent years watching Kaybree and Eisley fight nonstop and now we’ve turned a corner. I told you both you could invite a friend but you didn’t. You didn’t mind just hanging out with your sister.  Dad took aspen to do what she wanted while we went on a big slide and then I took aspen to do a slide while the two of you ran off to the lazy River. We all met back up ...

 This summer Brendon and I got to go on the Midwest Church History Tour for Seminary and Institute Teachers. I kind of wish I had written something on this blog nightly because now I feel like it was too much to recap. We were on a bus with 54 seminary and institute teachers from all over the US. Each day we were on the bus from about 7:30 a.m. to 8 or 9 p.m., making very quick visits to all the church history sites from Missouri to Iowa. In between each stop, we were being taught or getting to know one another.  Our first day we visited Independence, Missouri. We visited the temple site, where there is no LDS temple but there is a Community of Christ temple and their church headquarters. The Community of Christ is an off-shoot of the LDS church and as the years have gone by they've abandoned most LDS teachings, including the Book of Mormon. But they returned to Missouri long before the LDS church did and reclaimed many of the early church history sites. Their temple is large,...

 It's been more than a year since I've written on this blog and that is a very sad thing. I think I'll have to do multiple posts to avoid skipping over anything. We just hit a year in our new home. Our home is so beautiful. Our neighborhood is quiet. And somehow, we've had multiple miracles that have helped us afford this home. When we were moving I was terrified. I kept running the numbers and I was absoutely positive we would be in big, big trouble. I started going to the temple as often as I could. I needed that peace in my life. I needed the blessing the temple gives: Clarity, peace, strength. Out of the blue we had people approaching us, asking us about new potential business opportunities. We met several people who would be in the new ward and they told us over and over again how great of a ward it is. We had all these small moments, convincing us that we were going to be OK.  So we moved and we were OK. None of those business opportunities panned out, but Brendon...

Written May 4, 2024 I haven’t been able to go to bed on time at all this week and it’s making me tired. And I had to spend a whole day in a training that was SO boring. And I was asked to write blogs for dry cleaners and I hate writing blogs for dry cleaners. And there’s a mysterious stain on the carpet that I can’t get out and every time I try it just gets bigger and messier.  And Brendon is fighting with his sister again and she won’t let him apologize and move forward and nothing he says matters and now none of her kids will talk to me and my kids want to see them but they can’t and it feels like everything we do is wrong in her eyes somehow and if they can’t get along we may have to cancel our summer vacation. And I was really looking forward to that vacation.  And selling a house is difficult and I feel like we won’t be able to afford the new one but I’ve been holding out hope that it will work out and trust the process and then our appraisal came back $50,000 less than w...