My dearest Ryan, Yesterday we celebrated another year of loving each other through this crazy, awesome thing called marriage. Eight years ago yesterday we stood in front of our friends and family in that church we first met in and said our wedding vows. I still remember how it felt to hold your hands and …
Book Review: I Cry in the Shower: Loving Silas Living with Cancer by Gloria Martin
If you stopped by the journal on Friday, you probably saw my latest fine art self portrait piece and you may have watched the video that accompanied it in which I dedicated the art piece to my dear friend and author, Gloria. I just finished reading her book. It is amazing, honest, and brought me …
Start Planner
With all the goals I’ve set for myself for this year, I knew I needed to get organized in 2016. When I was in high school, I was an avid planner user. We got one at the beginning of the school year each year and I used that sucker like crazy. Well somewhere between college …
Book Review: If You Feel Too Much by Jamie Tworkowski
What?! Book 2 is done already! How is this happening? For the past few years I’ve struggled to find the time to read… but with this new goal to read a book a month – it’s really helping me get some much desired reading in. (Real Talk – It also has helped that I’ve started …
Baby Journey: Why Adoption Is Not Always the Answer
When you open up about something that people have no experience in or don’t understand… you undoubtedly are going to get questions. A lot of questions. There is one question that seems to be incredibly common when you are struggling with infertility. Before we changed directions in our path towards parenthood… I was asked this …
The Birthday Boy
Eleven birthdays… today is the eleventh birthday I’ve gotten to celebrate my wonderful, amazing husband. And he certainly deserves to be celebrated! There is never a day that I don’t consider myself lucky to have this man in my life and better still that I get to be his wife. If you’ve been reading for …
Rocky Pezzelle Puppy Portraits
As many of you know – exactly a month ago my family lost a furry, four-legged member of their family. Ginger had been a part of our family for a very long time! We adopted her when I was a junior in high school, after my black lab, Shadow, died. She was a rescue dog …
Four Years After the Fire…
Last Saturday, October 10 was officially the four year anniversary of the Great Kirksville Fire of 2011. In spite of the passage of time, I still remember it all very clearly. It was 4:00 am. Ryan and I were asleep in bed. I woke up a little to what I thought was someone in our …
Story Conference in Nashville | Part 2
Friday you got to hear the beginnings of my trip down to Nashville for Story, a creative conference. So today I’m breaking down what Day 2 looked like for us! We stayed in a hotel a little drive from Cross Point church, so we got up bright and early, packed up our bags and headed …
Story Conference in Nashville | Part 1
So if you follow me on Facebook, you may have noticed I was out of town on September 30th through October 2nd for a conference. The conference I attended was called Story and it was in Nashville, Tennessee at Crosspoint Church. I had never heard of Story before, but when my church asked me to …