Hello.

Hi. Welcome to my little space on the internet. It isn’t much. I am good with that.

This space exists two main reasons. First, I miss the old days of blogging. I miss clicking on all my links and reading the daily posts of my favorite blogs. I can remember telling the art teacher across from my science classroom that blogs made the world smaller. I followed people from all over the country and world. I loved reading the little snippets of life they shared. And I loved sharing. Blogging changed at some point. Now, everyone wants to influence me or sell me something. They want me to click affiliate links. I say everyone, there are a few I follow that still just share. And it isn’t just other people. My internet life changed. I suppose social media changed blogging. I quit reading posts in favor of scrolling Facebook then Instagram. I tried out Twitter but…meh. Now Facebook feels toxic and Instagram feels like one big influencer site. Maybe that is why I feel drawn back to where I started.

I started blogging in…2003 I think. Back when I was graduating from grad school. It gave my friends and family a way to follow my life. That first blog was titled Mundane News. I think it was on the Blogger Platform. Hmmmm…I wonder if it is still floating around out there somewhere. At some point I moved to WordPress and started Small Moments. I blogged there for years. It followed by life as I taught middle school, married my husband, and we started a family. It chronicled our struggle with infertility and my subsequent pregnancy with our twin boys. It even followed their early years pretty good. But blogging changed and life changed and I was writing less and less. I did chronicle most of our journey in discovering both boys had special needs and our laundry list of therapies and therapists. Part of the reason I started writing less is because much of my time was consumed by raising them. And then they started getting older and concerns about privacy and what I should and should not share came up.

When we moved to our current home I started fresh with Lake View in Winter. Writing there was VERY sporadic. I struggled with what to write and how to just share my piece of our life story. That’s a very tricky line isn’t it? How to share my story without crossing over into someone else’s story, especially when our stories are intertwined.

The second reason is: I feel ready to write again. It’s linked to that first reason of missing the old blogging. I realized, if I love it and want to write, then I should. It doesn’t matter if I have followers or make money or even if people care about my words. One thing I love about my Small Moments blog is that it is a record of those years. I am missing a huge chunk of years because I wasn’t recording. That makes me sad.

Now I am starting over here. The title for this new space is something I have been dwelling on for about a month now. In March I was at our local home school conference. I was talking to the creator of the math program we use. He has a special needs son and I have two and we were chatting about all sorts of things. At one point in the conversation I said, “It isn’t what I expected…but…it is MORE than I expected.” At the time, after I said the words, it felt awkward to word it that way. I was talking about my life. As a child and then teen and then young 20 something, I had dreams and plans and ideas. Our life seldom turns out exactly as we think it will. Some things did. Most didn’t. The more I thought about what I said the more I realized how much truth was in that statement. My life is SO much more than I dreamed and expected. That doesn’t mean it has been easy or even great every step of the way. But even those bad or hard things have led to great things. Life IS more than I expected.

And that is what this place will be about. Life. The good and bad. The extraordinary and the mundane.

Thanks for stopping by. 🙂