I like thirty

I've been thirty for six months now.
I'm really liking it and that surprises me.
I was kind of afraid that this age would instantly turn my hair gray, kill my remaining eggs and give me wrinkles. I am happy to report that my worries were a bit dramatic. I still look the same.

But I'm different. I'm different and I am so much happier. For the first time in my life, I am comfortable in my own skin. I'm okay with me. That might sound so cheesy, but I've battled anxiety and body dismorphia off and on my whole life, and this is big.

I'm finally okay with who I am in Christ, who I am as a woman. At thirty, I realize, finally, that I don't have to be liked by every single person. I don't have to be the thinnest, or the funniest, or any of that.

It was so exhausting trying to be the girl that was all those things.

The truth is, sometimes I eat things that would make my Whole30 friends cringe. And I am not a bad person for it. 
The truth is, sometimes I don't smile all day long. Sometimes the thought of having to smile one more time is crazy overwhelming.
The truth is, I have never been perfect and as I age, my body is subtly changing. I have varicose veins from birthing big babies. I have two stretch marks on my belly. I used to be afraid to wear shorts. In Florida.
Not anymore.
I'm finally happy. Comfortable. I'm realizing that THIS body, flawed as it may be, is mine for life. So I can be good to it.
Thirty to me means I can finally feel confident. My twenties were a giant roller coaster of fear and playing it safe. Thirty means I am finally realizing that God has BIG, good plans for me and I can get excited about them.

I finally feel free. 

Did we fail?

We remodeled our first home. Put in hours upon hours of work, used up our tax return and our weekends and a chunk of our life. We got things looking great, and we put our house up for sale. It was scary. I don't like the idea of strangers in my home, seeing where my family sleeps and eats and all of that. But I told myself countless times that it was worth it because Ben and I have been so homesick for Orlando, and this was our ticket to move back.

We'd sell our house, put some money in our savings, even get to take a cruise for our upcoming tenth anniversary with our earnings.

Contract number one fell through.

Contract number two fell through.

And this past Friday, contract number three fell through.

We're realizing that there's a reason we're here, in this sleepy little town with not much to do. There's a reason we live an hour away from so many of our favorite things and favorite people. I don't understand any of it.

On Thursday, as inspections were underway, I prayed this: Lord, you know our hearts and where they are. You know we don't want to be so far away from our hometown. We're lonely out here. Even so, we want what you want. If this isn't what you have for us, let it slip out of our hands.

It slipped out of our hands, guys.

Last night after a busy Sunday of church and errands, I sat in the garage with Ben. I was just...sad. Did we fail? Did he think that we had failed? Could we have done more?

No. We're out here for a reason. I don't know what it is. Neither does he. But we don't have to know. This year my word has been content. I vowed to be content with what the Lord had planned for us, even if it wasn't what I necessarily wanted. It looks as though he's giving me my chance, yet again, to be joyful right where I am at.

So no. We didn't fail. Not at all.

For real

It's the end of an era. I'm not using Facebook anymore. Technically, I still have it, because I didn't delete it (there are SO many videos and pictures of the boys on there, and I'm not quite sure how to save them all). But I deleted the app on my phone and made it difficult to get on from my home computer.

I've had an account since 2007. I was a college senior and life was so incredibly different. Facebook was an amazing new world to reconnect with people from different parts of my life. I didn't realize that for someone like me, a girl that is constantly battling perfectionism and feelings of unworthiness, this particular website would cause me to go down a slippery slope.

The truth is, social media has made me unhappy. Ben and I have had the hardest year yet in our ten year marriage. Really, really hard. Things we never thought we'd struggle with personally, we've ended up facing (full disclosure, he is okay with me writing this. Promise). When we'd be in the middle of a struggle, I'd find myself on social media, viewing everyone's date nights and fancy getaways and wondering what we were doing wrong. Why we didn't feel the way the people on the computer felt. It wasn't fair for me to compare real, in the thick of it us with a filtered, highly edited them. Every new pregnancy announcement just made me angrier with him. He didn't understand, because he's always been very uninterested in this whole phenomena of over-sharing every little detail with the world wide web. All these years, he's been on to something.

So this Friday, I held my finger down on that little app and deleted it. It was a little scary. What if my friends don't talk to me in any other way? But I don't really need 350 friends. I need to save my marriage.

I'm not knocking all forms of social sharing. I mean, I am typing this on a blog. I'm not knocking Facebook, even. I'm just tired, bone tired of comparing. It's time for real. I'm really excited for real.

I am not you

I'm going to confess something that a nice Christian girl should perhaps keep to herself: I am struggling with sin. My sin of choice? Jealousy. Big, green, ugly jealousy.  I'm not jealous of your fancy SUV's or your four bedroom houses. I'm not jealous of your Starbucks runs or your clothing budget or any of that.
I'm jealous of your big families.
I want one so much it hurts.
But God's been using my pain to teach me something amazing. I am not you. I am not meant to be you, I never was. It's really hard for me to have babies and we may never have more and it doesn't make me any less valuable, any less of a mother just because I can't have six kids. A mother is a mother, no matter how many kids she has given birth to.
What makes me a mother is the love I have for my sons. The fact that I would give my life for theirs in a second, without hesitation. What makes me a mother is a million little things, a million choices I must make each day to put these boys before myself.
But the jealousy thing. Here's my problem. As a follower of Christ, I believe with all my heart that God chooses family size, and God is in control, ultimately. Pretty much everyone I hang out with has a big family, or is working on having one. I can't compete. I want a quiver full just like you do. But sometimes God's answer to my prayers is different from his answer to yours.
I'm not going to tie this post up with some Christian cliche, because I'm not sure they help. I'll just say this. I'm grateful that even when I don't know, even when I have zero control over the future here, God is still good. I am not you. And I guess it's okay.

I jumped on the bandwagon, but it's a really cool one

I have to confess something: For years, when my friends would talk about how much they loved their essential oils and their organic food and their various natural remedies, I would roll my eyes. Not really, that's rude, but I would kind of tune them out. I seriously thought the whole thing was silly and a waste of money.

But then I started to have an awful lot of health problems, some pretty serious. And I went to so many doctors, paid thousands and thousands of dollars out of pocket and still didn't get better. My body was breaking down, and it started to get my attention.

Through a series of events, I started seeing a wonderful Chiropractor who helped deliver my second baby. She moonlights as a doula and she is perhaps the best. I remember her showing up to the hospital with a basket of Young Living essential oils, all for me to use to help me through a complicated labor. Even nearly two years later, when I smell Frankincense, I think of the birth of my Levi.

My health troubles didn't disappear after I had him though. My teeth got really bad. I got gout. I dropped down to 92 pounds. I couldn't keep food in.I had horrible migraines. Something was going on.

I turned to essential oils because my doctors were out of answers. They wanted to put me on an antidepressant and be done with it. That wasn't something I was ready for.

Young Living has helped me in so many ways. I'm healthier, my teeth are healing (who knew they could do that?!?) I have more energy, and I've gained a few pounds ( a good thing in my case). I'm passionate about these oils because they've helped give me a new perspective.

I never, EVER want to pressure anyone, but if you'd like to start learning and growing I'd love to have you on our team. I'm looking into starting a Youtube channel on this with my husband, but we're not the most tech savvy people so we'll wait and see. 

Happy oiling!

Update: A link to my first youtube video! I have no idea how any of this technical stuff works :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvntw_jxjCs

On Disappointment

We had buyers. We met them, they were lovely, they had cool tattoos. The inspection went well, everything passed. We got the call on the tenth day. They were backing out.

Our second offer to back out.

I didn't sweep behind the fridge before the inspection. I knew it as soon as I saw the muck that was back there. The inspector had pulled out the fridge to check the outlet behind it, and there it all was. As clean as I thought I was, as many baseboards and windows and floors as I had scrubbed....I felt like a failure. They saw the gunk behind the fridge and mentioned it specifically.

I tried to make it perfect, and I failed.

I spent the day wallowing a little. Cleaning more (it calms me?), stuffing my face with ice cream, feeling sick yet again. Have I mentioned that selling a house that you actually live in sucks big time? It sucks big time.

I think the scary thing is not feeling secure. Logan is signed up for classes in August. An hour away from here, because we had faith that we'd be moved into our new home by then. And now I'm just not sure where we'll be. Probably here still.

Disappointment is hard. Whether it's a buyer backing out, another negative pregnancy test, or a painful comment from a family member. It's all hard to digest. Sometimes literally, as is evident by my inability to keep food down these days.

But I guess I still have hope, as silly as it may seem. Today I thanked God for our buyers that backed out, because this was obviously not a deal that was supposed to happen. I don't know why, I don't need to know why. But I can be grateful that something new, something better will come our way when the time is right. In the mean time, we get to live in our nicely remodeled home, with very little clutter because most of what we own is in storage. It's all okay. As cliche as it may sound, I'm grateful for setbacks like the ones we've been experiencing. They make the victories that much sweeter.

Tangents

I think in tangents these days, so it's probably only fitting that I write in tangents. 
Life is an absolute whirlwind right now, and I'm pretty sure the only reason I blog is to have an excuse to sit down for five minutes with a cup of tea and look like I'm doing something very official and important to my kids. 

We got an offer on the house the first week it was up. A great offer. It fell through. We got a second offer on the house, not as great, but so far it hasn't fallen through. We had the inspection yesterday, so as long as that goes well we're moving next month. 

I never, EVER want to sell a house again. Unless it's a flip. Having strangers in my home, where my babies live, while we're NOT THERE,  is incredibly terrifying. There is nothing normal about it. My stomach has been a wreck and I haven't been able to keep food down because I don't like strangers apparently. 

House showings have also turned me into an annoying, OCD neat freak, because that's what the people want. They don't want to see dirty dishes or cloudy windows or clutter. As a result I clean any time I am not sitting down. And it's never enough, because there are kids here and kids are messy and that's just real life.

I'm a minimalist, I talk about how great it is to not have a lot of stuff, but the stress of putting our home up for sale has sent me straight to Kohl's. Apparently I self medicate with pretty things. It's an expensive problem. 

There's more. There's always more. I am dreaming of the day, someday soon, when we will be in our new house, no for sale sign in the yard, and we'll be just a little bit bored. I hope that day comes soon.