If you must know, I blame the Babysitter's Club.
In the highly impressionable years of tweendom, I devoured the tales of Kristy, Claudia, Mary Anne, Stacey, and Dawn. I was enamoured with their friendship, their camraderie, and their devotion to each other through the ups and downs of life. Growing up on the windy plains of Oklahoma where each map dot town was surrounded on all sides by nothing but acres and acres of wide open spaces, it was easy to romanticize storybook Stoneybrook where the BSC girls and their families seemed to live life so very close to each other. It's funny, but true! From tweendom to now, my love for community and togetherness is stubborn and unyielding.
And that's the story behind my somewhat kooky but totally sincere invitation to be (pretend) neighbors.
This blog began in 2006 as a place for me to share my enthusiasm for natural family living, but over the years it has evolved into a community space that I love with my whole heart. I like to think of it as a coffee klatch of the virtual variety where we can get together and talk about pop culture and kids and God and marriage and music and life and love.
In the non-virtual world, my family and I live in a 1920s-era American Foursquare in one of the oldest neighborhoods in Oklahoma City. At any given moment, these are the people pitter-pattering around this old house:
My husband Kyle and I began dating in the middle of my freshman year of college, and we got married three days before my twenty-first birthday in 1998. We've weathered blissful highs and devastating lows together in the years that followed, and he has always been and always will be my favorite. Though he now works in the financial services industry, for over a decade he coached college football. If you read far enough back in the archives here (a challenge which I do not highly recommend), you'll see him referred to as The Coach. He's intensely private, so though I may write about marriage from time to time, I try to respect his desire to keep our secrets just between us.
Dacey (9) is our oldest daughter and the reason I began blogging (and wrote a book!) all those years ago. She has the deepest brown eyes of anyone in our family, and she is smart as a whip. A beautiful blend of scientist and dreamer, she's growing into the most amazing young woman. And she has the best laugh of anyone I know.
Our second daughter is Aliza Joy (6) or AJ as she is known to most. Her first name means "joyful" and she is the sheer embodiment of that word. Other words that would describe her would be firecracker, pistol, character, and trouble. She is intensely extroverted and is happiest when she is with PEOPLE.
And last but not least, the twins. In the summer of 2012, we decided on a whim we would try for one more. No one was more surprised than us when an ultrasound revealed we would be welcoming two more. Mack and John Kyle were born February 7, 2013, and you can read here all about my pregnancy with them as well as updates on their infancy.
And then there's me, your devoted hostess.
The rundown on me is that I'm 36, and I'm finally making peace with always being the square peg in the realm of round holes. I was raised an in evangelical church culture, but now prefer liturgical services. I raise my hands in worship to hymns hundreds of years old. I live in the Bible Belt but my politics lean a hard left. I've been known to eat McDonald's in the parking lot of Whole Foods. I'm addicted to HGTV but I hate to actually do anything DIY. I start more projects than I'll ever finish, and I dream up more projects than I'll ever start.
Some of the things I love include coffee, good food, personality tests (I'm an ENFP, an Enneagram type 9w8, and a Golden Retriever), owls, flip-flops, finding a great bargain, old things that have a story, rocking chairs, front porches, real people and real conversation, and babies in cotton pajamas.
I hate housework and horror movies.
And that's about it, I suppose! Thank you for stopping by today. Stay as long as you'd like! The coffee is hot and strong and ready whenever you are.
(Pssst. It's super easy keep up with me via email! Just pop your email address into the box below and you'll be signed up to get new post updates delivered right to your inbox. Free, of course, and never ever spammy!)
