Intro... New to blogging.

I have always said I would probably never have a blog. To me, there was no benefit of blogging, because I actively utilized Facebook for posts I wanted to share with family and friends about my life. After losing my grandmother this past August 19, 2013 to an awful disease called pulmonary fibrosis, who was so much more than a grandmother to me, but rather more like a mother, I slowly began realizing that it actually would be nice to have a blog... If anything for the writing and the ability to speak freely about things that were weighing on my heart, things that I am passionate about, etc.

In addition to being an outlet for me, I do want to be able to reach out to and encourage other women, mothers, and wives through my writings. My grandmother was an amazing mentor and counselor to hundreds of men and women and she truly showed Christ's love to everyone she came in contact with. It has been my desire to follow in her footsteps. Given the time of my life and the current location I am in, I feel it would be easiest for me to start this lifelong journey through blogging.

Here is a photo of me and my Mam-ma just a couple days before she passed away.

A little bit about me...

I am a wife to a wonderful husband, my college sweetheart. We have been through a lot and had many ups and downs prior to marriage, but we always worked it all out and in the end love prevailed. I could not be happier and although at times, I do wonder why we had to go through so much to get to where we are now, I know it has all been part of God's plan and He has a purpose for everything.

We have a daughter who is 4 1/2, a son who will be 2 in just 2 weeks, and are expecting our third (another boy) in just a little over a month. We do also have one precious baby in Heaven who we never got to meet. Before I was pregnant with our son, we miscarried when I was roughly 5 weeks pregnant.

This was an extremely tough time in my life especially as I had never experienced this kind of loss. What made it more difficult was I had not yet shared the news of being pregnant with anyone and therefore did not even know how to begin sharing the news of this loss with anyone close to me. We ended up not telling anyone and dealing with the loss by ourselves, which in hindsight was not the wisest choice. It was very difficult to sort through the emotions I was feeling and to deal with the grief I was experiencing without anyone to talk to about it. While my husband was wonderful, being a man he could not fully understand the degree of hurt that I was feeling and I think that in and of itself was very hard for him. We have over time, shared our loss with a few close to us who have also experienced this same kind of loss in hopes we can help them with their grief a little better than we were able to help ourselves. I have since come to realize that women should not be ashamed to talk about this loss or even share the news of pregnancy early on for fear of a possible loss. These are our children no matter what stage of pregnancy we are in and in the event this horrible loss does occur, we need people to acknowledge the life that was, the life of our young, the life we carried in our womb and ached for when it was taken from us, to truly allow us to grieve in the way we need to.

For an amazing read that will pull at all your heartstrings on this topic, I am posting a link to a sweet friend of mine's blog post on this topic. It was written several weeks following her miscarriage and she puts everything I have ever felt into words so perfectly.

http://fastforwardgirl.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-disqualified-grief.html

Originally from Dallas, Texas, I went to college in Lynchburg, VA where I received my BS in Psychology. I would love to further my education one day and complete my Master's in Marriage and Family Therapy. I may try to do this when all my children are in school. We now live in a small town in North Carolina where my husband has grown up most of his life.

Although I have grown up in church all my life, something changed drastically in my heart at my grandmother's funeral. I began to have this thirst for The Lord that I had been lacking over the past few years, I began reading my Bible daily and truly seeking His face, and I began trying to be more like Him when before I had been much more on again off again.
It is my desire that my family will serve The Lord all the days of our lives and we will all continuously strive to be more like Him.

Here is a picture of my 2 kids.

I hope you will enjoy reading my blog and will find something in it that speaks to you or encourages you in some way. I look forward to connecting with many other wonderful people as well.