Here is our back story so you can get to know us a little. My husband and I just celebrated our 4yr wedding anniversary last week. We each brought a child into our marriage and were blessed with a daughter together 2yrs ago. Our oldest is Aaron's daughter, Abbie, she just turned 11yrs old. Next is my son, Henry, who is 5 and started Kindergarten this year. And our baby is little 2yr old Emily. We also have a 6yr old black lab named Apollo. We live in a small town in central Illinois in a house that we rent. My husband works overnights as an electrician in a factory and I stay home with the kids. I am involved as a room parent for my son's class as well as a member of the school's parent involvement team. I try to keep the kid's in at least one activity per season so this month I am also a Football Mom for the first time and so far it has been a blast! My daughter attends a really neat program where we get to go to "school" twice a month and she can learn and play with other kids her age. As part of this program a teacher also comes to our home twice a month and plays an educational game with her. Also, we own a small business that is currently in serious financial distress. We need to make a really difficult decision to either pour everything we have into it or to cut our loses with it. It is a major source of stress in our lives, but it also provides great joy at times.
Aaron and I met online and had a long distance relationship for a while. We lived about 2hrs apart. We dated about 8mos before we decided that we needed to either go ahead and commit to each other and move in together or we needed to stop. So, I moved in with Aaron in July with my son. There was no school in session for summer so his daughter was also with us all the time and his Father lived in the house as well. It was quite an adjustment. I had gone from just me and my baby to a full house overnight and let me tell you it was HARD. I mean really, really hard on all of us. That is a lot of change to cope with. In the first year we lived together we both switched jobs, I put my son in day care for the first time, our exes worked on accepting our new partners in their children's lives, my Father-in-law moved out then back in again, we got engaged, got married, and then moved back to where I was living before we met. It was a crazy year and we spent too much time reacting to problems and not enough time concentrating on what we really wanted as a family and working toward it.
Unfortunately, the chaos of that first year really formed the way we acted as a couple and as a family. Four years later and we still seem to have lost our goal orientated mindsets. I feel like we are still always reacting to "emergencies" instead of creating an organized plan of attack on life. As a result of this we have financial problems, health problems, communication problems, you name it we aren't handling it correctly!!! And we have come to the conclusion during a rare moment where we actually communicated with each other that it all has to change and it has to change today! Not one more day of my children's childhoods will be spent with parents who don't have their shit together.
In this blog I will share with you things I have tried to improve our financial security, our credit rating, our marriage, our family vibe, our home, and our health. I will openly discuss our triumphs and failures. I will give lots and lots of tips for things that have really helped us. And I look forward to communicating with you as you find the things that work best for you and your families. I hope we all grow together into the best versions of ourselves possible.
