By Nicole

The other day the whole family packed up and headed into Port Angeles and Sequim for a day of crabbing, shrimping and oyster shucking... Jason, brave and awesome dad that he is, held the sole honor of shucking, since I had Leilee in the Napsack and Connor and Grady are much too young to wield oyster shuckers. Jason also had the cool dad idea of packing the kids' bikes in the back of the truck and letting them ride on the pier. We brought helmets because I said it was the law. Now, some of you may think, 'Wow, how adventurous!' It's true, it is adventurous. But we embark on excursions like this all the time. Jason is a brave and bold outdoorsman. He hunts and fishes and scouts and forages all day long. If I didn't know him better and he had a longer beard, I would think he was a mountain man. So, like any good mountain dad, he wants to raise his sons (and daughter) to be mountain children. I'm all for that. Definitely... besides my uncontrollable urges

"And a certain sign of grace is this.... through broken earth, flowers come up, pushing through the dirt." What a foolish notion, grace. Who deserves it? Many feel they don't need it. Only fools understand and accept it. The educated scoff at the idea that men, the most "evolved" species with the highest intelligence would have need of God's love and forgiveness. After all, we are capable of doing good. Those of us who are positive forces in the community, who believe in the inner good of man and the power of being in balance and in tune with nature and ourselves have no need of grace. We are good enough on our own. We don't hurt anyone. We pay taxes. We put a nickel or a dollar in the little red bucket yearly. Some of us volunteer, donate our old clothes and fundraise for orphans. We have no need for unconditional love. We are educated. We majored in humanities. We realize that some choose to do bad things, but it is what we believe that d

Ahhh, life. Doesn't it move quickly? Who are we to think that we have any control? Why do we try to cram so much in? Wouldn't it make more sense to travel through life one major life event/crisis/phase at a time? Wouldn't it make even more sense to slow down, enjoy what matters and quit letting the stupid stuff stress us out? Just the other night Jason and I had a teary (postpartum - back off) conversation about how quickly our kids are growing up and how at the end of the day, when they are tucked in and drifting off to sleep... it is just that, another day. Another day gone, a day older, a day that we can't make up or redo. What were we like that day? Did we feel like we had been good parents or bad parents? Had we gotten too frustrated or angry over something just plain stupid? How did we make their life better? Or did we make it worse? We have a lot going on and a lot of pressure on both of us to take care of all the junk we think is important. I keep ta

So, about two and a half years ago, a dear friend of mine, who also happens to be a financial guru in my opinion, got me onto the envelope budget and accompanying debt repayment calculation Excel spreadsheet. Jason and I had been essentially living from paycheck to paycheck with good intentions of getting everything paid off, but we still spent every two weeks looking at each other and wondering where all our "extra" money went. Yeah - he would work his butt off doing all the overtime possible... just to hear me say that we didn't have any money. Somehow we were throwing it all away... We jumped into a new life of budgeting... every pay period I would faithfully enter in our payments, check credit card balances, and fill our hand labeled envelopes with the cash we were allowed to spend on groceries and miscellaneous. Let me tell you - the envelopes didn't have to be very big. We faithfully put money into savings every paycheck. I even began to tithe like I was suppose

There are many things I would like to do when I am independently wealthy...(read into that...!)but, nevertheless, I think there is one more thing I need to do... I have come to the conclusion that there are individuals who strive to take on as many things as possible just to see if they can handle it. They may blame it on things like their desire to help, their inability to say no, or just plain stupidity, but I am positive that most of those individuals (way deep down) really just take it all on to see if they can handle it. Hectic days and busy nights are symptoms of an overachiever. Overachievers aren't happy with just a 40 hour a week job and a family. They need at least one church, sporting and extracurricular activity per family member to be going on. They need distance learning or online classes for a back up degree. Throw in some pets, a couple hobbies, housework, yardwork, and a blog, and they're in business. Overachievers have this sick, twisted desire to see ho

Where to start. Over the course of the past four months I have done two entirely unrelated things (I have also done LOTS more unrelated stuff - like deep clean my refrigerator, clean, grind, cut and wrap 70 lbs of deer meat (with Jason ), sew a merman tail and learn to make cedar roses - but those are not part of this particular story). So the two things... begin my Christmas shopping super early (in order to avoid stress, relax and enjoy the Reason for the Season) AND slowly let frustrations regarding events mostly beyond my control pile up and stress me out until I sometimes want to scream and run down the street pulling my hair and basically making a complete fool of myself. Soooo, all stress that would have been relieved by Christmas shopping early, has now multiplied much beyond what it ever would have been EVEN if I had waited until Christmas Eve and marathon shopped. Every night and every weekend I have told myself - now is the time to relax, let it go, in the grand scheme of

Lately I have been reading lots of home decorating magazines, excited with the prospect of having a house in the next year or so... I have also missed work due to a sick self and sick children and got so behind in housework that I would not voluntarily invite friends or the county health nurse over for tea. The combination of reading lots of "home" magazines and being unable to do ANY housework is not mentally or emotionally healthy, especially when paired with the guilt that comes from not necessarily missing work, but feeling like I should be there because I have so much to do, and then feeling doubly guilty that I am feeling guilty about not being at work when I should be happy and relieved that I am spending quality time with my children, even if we are sick, because usually I feel guilty when I am at work because I am not with them.... (Only the working mothers reading this will FULLY understand me, but hopefully most of you have some idea of what I am trying to convey).

The last thing I should be doing is sitting here at this computer. My mind forgot a long time ago what the first thing I should be doing is... or was. Because this is a blog about getting off track, I would begin by apologizing now, but since I am not actually sorry, just read on and prepare to occasionally back and side track. I just changed my status to quixotic, which I actually didn't know was a word until now... but am quite relieved to find out that it is, since it almost perfectly describes the way my mind has been working lately. Except I am under the impression that Don Quixote was delusional. Since I am perfectly aware that I am crazy, am I post-quixotic? Right after I had Connor, I was able, through page and paragraph reference of "What to Expect When You're Expecting" and Fit Pregnancy to attribute forgetfulness and my sudden onset of intense ADHD-like symptoms to pregnancy hormones and lack of sleep. I can't remember what my excuse was before... a

Sleep - ah, the relationship I love to hate. I am obsessed and repulsed at the same time. At times, it is all I want to do, yet the time I have I like to spend awake, doing. As a mother of two boys (who STILL wake up in the middle of the night to crawl into our bed) I have had my share of sleepless nights. I have also spent portions of my life studying or working during the night, since it was the only "free" time I had. I generally have a night owl complex. Once the boys are asleep, I am wide awake... balancing the checkbook, making earrings, folding laundry, blogging, talking to Jason while he is "working", and generally, wasting time that I could be sleeping. In the morning I am mad at myself for staying up too late and by midafternoon, I loathe my ultra bad habit! I torture myself with sleep deprivation for a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 5 days and then spend two to three days going to bed at the same time as the kids... but it is so disconcerting when

Before I allow myself to get overly rational or lose the element of newness and awe, I have to document, in black and white, one of the most colorful things that has possibly ever happened to me in my life. Just this past weekend, I went with a group of women from my church to our yearly retreat. (I say that like I am a veteran or a pro, even though this was only my second year.) Like a lot of the women who went (I think) I went to the retreat full of bottled up emotion and stress, hoping that in one fell swoop God would rain down love and relief and wash away all my worries, and that I would emerge from the Silverdale Beach Hotel a newly cleansed, refreshed woman of God, all because I paid my $60.00, endured the back seat of a 15 passenger van and made the effort to attend in the first place. The speaker had wonderful energy. Us women had wonderful fellowship. We laughed, we cried, we stayed up late sharing stories and ate Domino's pizza much too late at night. But at the end

If only there were a place to begin... okay there is. Let's begin with my living room, never mind - actually, this story could begin many years ago... pieced together by bits and pieces of various magazines, ripped and stuffed into yellow envelopes and later carefully gone through and thrown away or meticulously taped into manila folders, next to paint swatches and pieces of laminate samples. This story is about my walk with color. Even before I knew I would have a house of my own, I loved the thought of picking colors for rooms and matching walls with chintzy second hand garage sale chairs and random works of art. I adored flipping through magazines looking at colors and trying very hard to ignore the neat and tidy rooms (see previous blogs). For all of my adult life I have rented white walled interiors and filled holes in with different brands of white toothpaste. I have eagerly anticipated the thought of planning my own color schemes... so the moment arrived. Enter Home Depot. I