We Don't Need A Fan Club

When you tell someone your dreams and goals and they point out all the negativity and impossibility THEY think your dreams and goals have...those are the people that should not be in your life.

I'm learning fast here...
I can let no one discourage my ambition, my dreams, my attitude, my life. Remembering we don't need a fan club to achieve our goals. I have to learn how to be my own motivation.

I know where my lack of motivation and depression is coming from. Now it's just to stand strong with people and support myself. Cheer for myself. And just try a little every day. Try what I can every day and be proud of however little or however much that is. Even if it's just a baby step. Even if it's two steps forward and one step back.

Sometimes life is about risking everything for a dream no one can see but you.

Miranda {set two}

I could never get tired of photographing this beauty! 

Miranda {set one}

I will eventually look back on it and smile.
Because it was the life that I conquered and decided to choose to live.
You were never created to live depressed, defeated, guilty, condemned, ashamed or unworthy .
You were created to be victorious.
You were created to be you.
To live happy.
Do it for you own reasons.
Make your own happy.

Last Day of Pre-K!

Last day of pre-k! My heart is full and bursting. I have watched my boys learn, grow, mature and experience life in ways I never did as a child. I watched them get up excited to go to school and come home with crazy tales of all that happened that day be it good or be it hard lessons. I have watched them make lots of "best friends", go to their first dance, learn things mommy didn't even know, dress up...a lot, wait anxiously for that one day a month they got to be class leader, perform on stage, and take their first ride in "the big yellow school bus" and then getting to tell them they have done something mommy had never even got to do and watch them giggle wide eyed and feel big and grown up about that fact. I will never forget the first parent teacher meeting in August. I was terrified and nervous. What I had always been told about "school" was in my head, I didn't know what to expect. I was completely illiterate about it all. I sat in the boys at the time soon-to-be classrooms soaking in the bright cheery surroundings and the enthusiastic teacher. I stared in awe. I gulped down knots in my throat and tried to appear like the other parents. Like I knew what I was doing and this was normal. I left, got in my car and bawled all the way home. They were tears of excitement for the boys and tears of pain for little girl inside me. And those tears...have showed up a lot over the last 9 months. I could not be more proud of the little men these two have become and are becoming. I could not be more overjoyed of the life they are getting to live and trying to the best of my ability every day to nurture and love and be there for their little souls to give them what they need to grow up strong and healthy and alive. And slowly with each experience and each tear and every jumping excited day and grinning bright eyed joys and hard lesson they learn...that little girl inside me is healing.

I can't wait to spend all summer with them even though there are days I know we're all 3 going to go crazy! :P 85 days or so of party time, adventures, water gun fights, long swims, lots of sunshine, popsicles, watermelons, and sun tanned skin! And then...on to kindergarten we will go!

The first jump of summer!

Diana {part 2}

Another Mother's Day

This was my third mothers day of acknowledging the truth surrounding this holiday and though I can look back and see how far I have come I still have to say that I still have mixed feelings about this day. A day I still find myself trying to avoid Facebook and social feeds and the plasters of mother/daughter pictures and long praise filled notes. It's a day most celebrate someone special that nurtured, supported, and stood by them as they grew. Someone who listened to their heart cries and applauded their passions. Someone who spoke truth into them, who set an example to them of what a strong, loving, passionate, brave, beautiful, independent, imperfectly perfect woman should be. Someone who taught them how to start to learn and think, feel and thrive. Someone who loved them unconditionally and unmanipulatively. Someone who protected them and fought for them. 

This mothers day I went into it with a new outlook on the day. It was always a just another holiday of fake for me. Of trying to please and trying to make myself feel something inside that wasn't there. Then it became a day of looking at myself as a mother to not only my boys but to myself. Celebrating nurturing that little girl inside me. Last year someone told me to sit down and write a mothers day note to myself and it started a whole new path of painful discovery, healing and freedom.

This year I'm still in that place of acknowledging the loving mom that I have become to that lost girl that is deep inside and celebrating the mother I have become to me in my own life. Because that mother I have become from healing myself and digging through the pain inside is the mother that my boys need the most.

The last thing I want for them is what I knew. The last thing I want for them is for this day to be surrounded by expectations of them celebrating a woman in their life that isn't even a real mother to them. Instead of this day being about me I want to make it about them in my head. Instead of them growing up thinking this day must be a day to sing me praises I want them to know how incredibly irreplacbly special they are to me...to this world. As they grow up I want them to know that without them this "holiday" the world has come up with wouldn't even exist for me.

I want to face this day not thinking about the incredible toughness being a parent sometimes is, and about how exhausted and stressed I can get and about all the crazy I face everyday and how I should be celebrated for all the things I do. NO. I want to face this day thinking about the amazing humans that are here in my life that I get the honor of loving on, standing by, nurturing, messing up with and fixing it and messing up again. I want to face the day taking a deep look into these two beautiful souls, so alive, longing, yearning, passionate and innocent and shed tears over their amazingness and marvel that they get to be in MY life! That I get to be THEIR mom!