Life Lately

It has been a while since I’ve done a Life Lately post. That’s because life lately has been a bit crazy. 2024 started off with a bang, to say the least. My oldest, Tanner, had an unfortunate incident in January in which he got into some trouble with other kids. We are still working through all of that right now, but the outlook is getting better at least. I will share more details once it’s behind us (which is hopefully sooner than later). Later that same month, we lost Jake’s sister, who was my age, due to complications from pneumonia. She had a hard life as it was, and for it to end like that was horrible to watch, and it all happened so fast. No one was prepared for that. To make matters worse for an already tough time in our lives, the night of her funeral, I had an unfortunate incident of my own in which I accidentally caused damage to my neighbor’s home. All is well and good in that situation now, but to say I felt distraught and a bit “WTF is happening in my life right now?!” is an understatement. Then in May, we lost our almost 9-year old Olde English Bulldogge, Badger, who had quickly been deteriorating from dementia. This year had managed to break my heart  into a million pieces. And it wasn’t even half over.

Through it all, I’ve worked hard to focus on the good, and control the things I can. I often find myself in up and down states, battling depression while simultaneously being conscious of it and  trying to rise above it. It has been very lonely. And I’ve learned that some people are just really cruel. However, there have been good moments. For some reason I had a lot of extra travel opportunities this year (which in looking back, really seemed like a blessing in disguise, as I really needed the time to enjoy life). In March, I got to go to Hawaii with my mom (Recap: Part I / Part II / Part III) because she had a paid-for room for a work conference so all I had to buy was my plane ticket and some incidentals. In April, it was Farrah’s turn to go to NYC with me for her birthday (Recap: Day 1 / Day 2 / Day 3/4). In June we went to the Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge, TN area for our yearly mountain trip and stayed at a house right on Douglas Lake. And most recently, I got to go on a Mexican Riviera cruise to celebrate my older brother’s wedding.

Other positives for this year were that despite all the trouble from his incident, we did see Tanner graduate high school. And even though we thought we might have to delay it a semester or a year, he got started with college, which has made him so happy. We also had Breckin finish middle school and Farrah finish elementary school. We had a big week that week with all of their graduations and I was given a lot of “proud mom” moments. I am still working on my MBA and despite all the things going on have still been able to ace my courses. I start back with fall semester next week and I only have three more classes to go. I got a promotion at work in March as well. And even though the loss of Badger left a huge void in our lives and hearts, we found room to welcome two sweet pups – Piggy, an English Bulldog, and Roxy, a Rottweiler. It’s important to remind myself how blessed I am even when it feels like everything is going wrong all at once. I have to keep that in perspective to keep me going most days.

If you know me, I’m all about goal-setting. I start every year with ideas and to-do’s to constantly improve life. This year, my husband and I had signed up for the Myrtle Beach half marathon in March. A couple days into the new year our world started to crash down and it became too tiring mentally and physically to commit to the training, so we postponed. I think we will plan to do the same race next year, however.

Additionally, my fitness suffered. I found less and less time to get to the gym, and a lot of times when I did have the time, I wasn’t mentally in the right space. Now that school has started back for the kids, I have a regular schedule going again. With the pups having to be let out very early AM, I am forced to get up before my normal wake time for work, so I do cardio after letting them out and before getting ready for the day. I also joined a yoga studio that recently opened by my kids’ school, making it super-easy to commit to making it to classes after work before I pick Farrah up. And other than that, I am lifting in my garage gym. It feels good to be back at it, and it’s a much better outlet for stress.

So that’s my life lately in a nutshell…hopefully my next update will have a lot more positives as I feel things are finally moving in a good direction. 2024 has been a long road, but I won’t let it keep me down.