I'm Back! And I'm Less Naive.

Hello, my friends! Did you miss me? 

I have spent the past month moving most of my posts to another blog, one that will remain private, so I can make this page public again.

I tried taking myself off the grid completely, but I forgot about people who have pinned recipes, crafts, and organization ideas from this page over the years. I was contacted by a few of them within the first week or two, asking me to send them their favorite recipe, etc.

I'm hoping I fixed everything so that creepy people will leave me and my little website alone. I spent many late nights on my laptop, Mike snoring beside me, up until midnight deleting anything questionable. I deleted almost 1000 posts about my family, removed many pictures from posts that were left, and scanned countless posts for key words that might lead the wrong people to this page.

So I just wanted to drop a note to say that I was gone. But now I'm back.!I'll still post less frequently than in years past, but you can count on me for awesome recipes and ideas that I need to share with the world. 

I hope you had a blessed Easter!  We did something a little odd this year: my in laws made plans to go to Mike's brothers' house for the first time, so we decided to go untraditional. We let the kids plan the day, the menu at each meal, the activities, basically ALL of Easter. 

This lead to a make-your-own-pizza bar for dinner. Everyone LOVED their creations and it was as far from ham and scalloped potatoes as you can get! After dinner, we had an ice cream sundae bar, along with a carrot cake that Kaylin and I made, plus a couple of desserts my mom brought over. There was so. much. food. for just the 6 of us. 

Ryan made his pizza into a face, Kaylin made a heart, and Jason's pizza looked like...Nevada.

Our carrot cake...the green half is the cream cheese frosting.  Kaylin was willing to put it on there as long as there was an alternative for her! Kaylin did the fondant, she asked me to do the words. She loves cake decorating!

So. Much. Dessert.

I'm glad to be back in blogland! I just hope I don't regret it...I was freaked out BEYOND words last month. I hope I didn't lose all of my followers last month!  Is someone still out there reading this?! 

Time to Go Private?

Last week, I got an odd comment (which I promptly deleted), followed by a horribly vulgar comment yesterday about Kaylin. I flipped out and immediately changed the settings of my blogs to private. For years, I have been under the naive notion that only people like me read my blog. Because who cares about my mundane life other than moms like me?

I am sad to make my blog private, because I have really enjoyed writing to strangers over the years about mom things: cooking, baking, healthy living, organizing, party ideas, and small glimpses into our life.

But it's time to transition away from sharing on the world wide web. There are just too many crazies out there!

The only picture I would allow Ryan to upload to his FitBit profile. Something in me was cautious last week and today, it slapped me in the face and shook me to my core.

A Blogging Evolution

Hello, readers!  I can't believe it's been more than 2 months since I last wrote a blog post. Honestly, there's been plenty to write about, but over the past year, I've started wondering if anyone still reads my ramblings? 

Then I got a sweet, concerned email from a long-time follower (thanks DeeAnna!) wondering if I'm doing ok. YES! I'm still alive and well. I've just been reflecting a little. 

My blog began in 2007 as a one-stop-shop for my family and friends to get caught up on pictures of my growing kids and to see a glimpse of our daily life. Back then, I was known as Three Blondes and a Redhead...Kaylin was an infant and Ryan was only 2 years old. Within a year, I had dozens of followers. As an overwhelmed stay-at-home-mom, I didn't realize I needed to be heard...to have a voice. I appreciated that others understood my exhaustion. I loved sharing recipe ideas and organization tips with strangers all over the globe. Friendships developed with people I would never meet in parts of the world I may never visit.

A few months before Jason was born, I evolved into Intentionally Katie, my page got a facelift, and things got big-time. Dozens of readers became hundreds of readers. I actually met people around town who recognized me from my blog...it was a trip!

Then when I began homeschooling in 2011, I lost some people. I've always written about our daily life, which was soon consumed with all things homeschooling, and many couldn't relate. I had less time to compose and publish blogs posts (oh, but I started so many...!) and people got sick of checking in, only to find nothing new.

Looking back over 2015, my single-digit, monthly post numbers are truly pathetic. If nothing else, I love journaling about our life! And I hardly have anything to look back upon.

Blogs don't seem to be nearly as widespread as they were when I began writing nearly 9 years ago. Sure, there are certainly plenty of blogs to read, but with other social media outlets to stay connected and get ideas, I have noticed my followers have dwindled, comments are scarce, and I tend to wonder if anyone has the desire to read about my relatively mundane world...?

I also wonder how safe it is to post pictures of my kids. I don't want to sound paranoid, but this world is going downhill at warp speed and there are some crazies out there! I've strongly considered making this blog private, since it's turned into less "struggling moms, you're not alone" and more about a personal memoir of my kids and our family moments. 

But those decisions are for another day. What have we been up to these past few months? 

In October, just as my body was finally recovering from a miscarriage, Mike and I headed to Los Cabos, Mexico for an all-expenses-paid FREE vacation. This trip was earned by the top 19 people at Tastefully Simple and I was one of them!!! It was fantastic. We snorkeled, went horseback riding on the beach, relaxed, relaxed and relaxed some more. We needed this getaway! Badly. We came home and I got back to work, trying to earn the top trip to Italy next year!

In November, Ryan finished up his first season of tackle football and Jason ended his 2nd soccer season. Weekly practices for both boys, tumbling for Kaylin and games all weekend long kept us very. busy. After 12 years unmedicated, I decided to go to the doctor and get back on my ADD medicine. It was a decision I'd wrestled with and finally just threw in the towel and did it. Things are so much clearer in my head! Later in the month, our house was invaded by workers as we got the house and cabinets painted and finishing Kaylin's "tween" room. November is a blur.

In December, it was all about Christmas: Baking, Christmas movies, holiday parties, the whole sha-bang. We had a more mellow holiday season this year...I wrapped our gifts just days before Christmas and we didn't even visit Santa until Christmas Eve! But it was stress-free. The month/year ended with the sad news that my favorite grandmother passed away. She was sick for a very long time, but it was still a sad time for my family.

In January, we celebrated the New Year up north and went sledding, had our family pictures taken professionally (FINALLY...it's been years!), I went to Atlanta for a leadership conference, and Kaylin got braces. Mike and I also jumped into our 2nd complete round of Whole30. And I've been working out like crazy to get my pre-pregnancy, pre-Dallas-move-stress-eating body back. Yoga, lifting weights, kickboxing, cycle, I take about 6-8 classes each week and I'm finally feeling comfortable in my own skin again.

That brings us to February. Earlier this month, I contemplated ending our homeschool journey. I was burned out, the kids were sick of it, and I was sick of THEM (just being real). I felt trapped in a life that I'd chosen. After reading about others with this same experience, I made the drastic decision to pull the plug on academics. We go to the library 1-2 times a week, pull 30-40 books about any and all topics of interest, and we read. A lot. We read together, we read alone, we talk about what we read, the kids do presentations for the rest of the family about what they've learned each day, it is very different and giving us all the break we need. The kids still do math every day, plus a creative journal I bought them each for Christmas, but learning and school is finally becoming fun again. For all of us. 

In other news...after many years of wondering, we went through the process to see if Ryan has ADHD like his mama. He asked a lot of questions after I went back on my meds and when I described my symptoms, he said, "It sounds like you're explaining what's in my head." 

He was officially diagnosed a couple of weeks ago and we're seeing huge improvements with his new medication. More than anything, his confidence is skyrocketing. He no longer wonders why he struggles with simple tasks, makes silly mistakes in his schoolwork, forgets basic instructions, and a million other things. I have tried battling this issue with homeschooling, nutritional changes, everything I could think of...I wanted medicine to be the last resort, but it was officially time to nip this issue in the bud.

I think that's it!  You're finally caught up on everything within our walls. If you've made it this far, feel free to leave a comment if you'd like me to keep my blog public. Don't be shy! An anonymous comment will do, as long as you're not a psycho stalker. You can be a normal stalker, just not a psycho stalker, because no one has time for that kind of drama. Especially me!

#65 - Touch up the paint spots all over the house (with the correct shade)

As it turns out, after nearly 10 years in a house, paint fades. For the life of me, I could NOT figure out how to touch up any spots on our walls because the right paint color, with every sheen under the sun, was not a match.

I later learned that sprayed-on paint can't necessarily be touched up with a paintbrush. Who knew?

Now that we've decided to stay put in our house for a while, I decided it needed a face lift. A friend had her cabinets and banister painted and it looked nice in pictures, but once I saw it in person, I couldn't stop thinking about it! 

Was there anything "wrong" with my house before? No, not really. I was just ready for a change, and paint is a relatively cheap way to change things up.

I didn't mind the tan that was throughout our house, but I have had an itch to cool things up with gray for a couple of years now, so I started looking for grays. There are brown grays and green grays and TONS of blue grays...finding a shade of gray turned out to be a lot harder than I imagined.

I finally pulled the trigger and picked one. We painted all of the common areas of the downstairs, up the stairwell, into the office and in the halls. I really like how it turned out! I went with a basic white for the cabinets, even though I considered tea-staining it, I decided on white in the end.

Kitchen: Before

Kitchen: DURING the painting of the cabinets. I thought ahead and pulled out some dishes and silverware and put them in the pantry, but they moved the fridge right in front of the pantry door. Curses!  So we had to eat out almost every meal for 3 days and, what's worse, is that I couldn't get into my kitchen to make Mike a birthday cake this year. :(  He got a birthday pumpkin pie from Trader Joe's.

(I didn't know what was going on behind that quarantined plastic wall, so I peeked through from the backyard window.)

Cabinets painted, walls the same

Kitchen: After

Family room: Before

Family room: After

I bought some pillows to try to tie together the old brown and the new gray, because we're clearly not replacing our furniture and window coverings anytime soon!

This was my inspiration for the staircase. We'll rip up the carpet and put in wood down the road.

Banister: After

This was my inspiration for a VERY dark charcoal bathroom with red and white accents.

Bathroom: After

It's easy to decorate with red and white at Christmas, but we'll keep the colors the same when we replace our decor in a few weeks!

In the bathroom, I spray painted a useless, mint-green tin container bright red and that's what's on the back of the toilet, holding extra towels. I also touched up a giant red basket that holds extra toilet paper on the floor. I know it seems silly to pay this much attention to a random half bathroom, but I am in there every day, multiple times each day, and it makes me happy every time I see it.

#82 - Do something crazy with my hair (well, crazy for ME)

It took me a while, but I finally decided to do something fun and different with my hair. I tried last year, but when I told my friend, she asked if I was going through a midlife crisis. It made me feel like I was trying to be younger than I am.

But during my most recent hair appointment, I finally pulled the trigger. My hair stylist (who originally tried to talk me out of it) said that I would be disappointed if I just did a strip underneath because you wouldn't be able to see if. So she took a HUGE chunk and colored it bright red for Christmas. I LOVED how it turned out!!!  I might even have her recolor it red for Valentine's Day, then phase back to my normal hair. 

So, at 39 years old and only a few weeks left until the 1001st day, #82 is crossed off of my 101 Goals in 1001 Days list. What's funny is that it's such a big deal for straight-laced me, but hardly anyone has noticed it. I've probably only had 4 people say anything unless I brought it up!  Go figure.

Hulk 6th Birthday Party

I got some of these Hulk ideas from Pinterest, the cupcakes are my original design, though!  After a chaotic all-boy party at the house last year, we decided to go ahead and celebrate Jason's 6th birthday at the park. It was a beautiful day and the kids had fun playing tag, sidewalk chalk, soccer, and baseball in between snacks, cupcakes and presents.

Happy birthday, Jason!

Sleeping In. Daily.

I don't know how the other kids do it!  Practicing sports so late, then waking up at the crack of dawn and being expected to function at school all day long.

Ryan is starting his first season of tackle football. He has practice late, two nights each week. He gets home around 9:30, eats a second dinner, spews  details about plays and hits and passes he caught that night, showers, then finally gets to bed around 10:30.

He has never been a kid who sleeps in, no matter how late he goes to bed, but when he turned 11, puberty started kicking in and he final…FINALLY…was able to fall back to sleep after waking up early in the morning.

Now, he stays up a little later, reading (I finally found him some lists of books that he has been enjoying!) and almost always sleeps past 7:00. On the mornings after football practice, he doesn't wake up until 8:30-9:00. 

Every time he wanders down the stairs that late with bed-head, I wonder how tired his teammates must be. They get up at 6am, take the bus to school and have already been bombarded with information from their first class long before Ryan's eyes open for the day. 

Just another reason that I'm grateful we are homeschooling. My kid can participate in sports AND get the amount of sleep his body needs!  Sometimes, it's the little things.

Staying Content as a Family of Five

Sad news…I'm no longer pregnant. As excited as we were about adding another sibling to our home, this one was not in God's plan. Our biggest prayer was for the health of the baby, and (although this was definitely not what we were hoping for) we truly believe that God answered our prayer.

It's been more than a week and my heart is healing. To be honest, I was sad the day that I went to the ER and found out there was no heartbeat in the ultrasound, but the next day I was feeling better, the cramping had stopped, and I thought I was doing well. 

The most annoying reminder has been my knee: the night I went to the ER, I passed out in my bathroom and fell into a crumpled heap onto the floor, landing wrong and twisting my knee. It still hurts to straighten it and I have to limp after sitting for an extended period of time. I'm hoping it will just go away.

I had publicly announced this pregnancy on Facebook (by posting the video of when I told the kids…which was hilarious) so I had to publicly UNannounce the news. It was the fastest way to avoid running into people around town and have them ask me how I'm feeling, if we know what we're having, etc.

The outpouring of more than 300 comments, dozens of private messages and texts, flowers, Edible Arrangement fruit bouquets, sympathy cards, and meals from neighbors…it was all quite unexpected. The love and empathy I felt was absolutely overwhelming. Reading through the comments, hearing about others' personal experiences with miscarriages (I even learned that one friend lost twins at 22 weeks) - it was all very emotional. I was a wreck for the better part of two days. 

Jason's sweet comments didn't help. At least once daily I heard things like: 

(while hugging my stomach) "Good bye, Baby! I can't wait to meet you in heaven someday!"

"Mom, I wish we were still having a baby."

"I really wanted to be a big brother."

"That little baby is so cute, Mom!  I said I wanted a baby brother, but I kind of also wanted a baby sister."

He even randomly walks up and kisses my stomach, then walks away. It's really sweet.

One night, I was praying with him at bedtime and instead of holding his hands, for some reason I pulled him in for a hug. I was praying about the baby and he started hugging me really tight. I lost it. He pulled back to see why I stopped praying and said, "Are you crying because your heart is broken about the baby? If you don't want to cry, you probably shouldn't talk about the baby."

A few days ago, my OB/GYN called to say that my blood work had come back and my levels were still showing that I was pregnant. I had a little glimmer of hope that maybe there was a mistake and I hadn't miscarried…? After all, my doctor's office was taking the word of the ER doctor, but hadn't actually seen any of the paperwork. They had me come in the next day for another ultrasound and, sure enough, there was nothing there. 

As I was going back out to the waiting room, the ultrasound tech sweetly said, "I'm so sorry for your loss," and my eyes filled with tears. And they wouldn't stop. I just sat in the waiting room, unable to stop crying while a dozen or more pregnant women stared at me. 

That day was the last of my hard days. Physically, my body is still healing, but I'm finally recovering, emotionally. It wasn't this difficult with my first miscarriage 12 years ago. 

One Facebook friend commented on my un-announcement saying, "We've had four miscarriages and it never gets any easier. I'll bet my kids are showing yours around in heaven!" That visual has made me smile every time I think about it.