How it all happened

"We have five children."

Random people and their verbal diarrhea rarely bothers me and I've heard it all. A vast majority of the time I'm too busy to really care what other people say. Just in case you ever find yourself squeezing your cheeks together to avoid verbal diarrhea bring on the full clench if you find yourself wanting to ask a stranger about

• their use of birth control
• their desire for children of a specific gender
• your assumption about their religion
• how many fathers a set of children have

Suck in those cheeks and repeat, "you have a beautiful family." Good. Now walk away.

So how did we end up with this big 'ole family? When we were dating my husband and I wanted children. He like being one of three and I didn't want a child with the dreaded middle child syndrome. (Yes, I'm aware that we ended up with a middle child, que sera sera.) So we decided early on that four would be the right number. Surprise! We were expecting our first little boy who was beautifully born in 2005. At his first birthday we announced we were expecting again. Our next little boy was born in 2007. Then another boy in 2009. Surprise! Along came a girl in 2013. Then shockingly we had one more boy in 2016. If you lost count that's four boys and one girl in ten and half years.

It's been a long and winding journey over the past twelve years. Like countless others I thought my life would look a certain way and of course, it doesn't. Some days I feel so blessed that my life is what it is, other days I want to crawl into bed and wallow in self-pity. I'm not super-mom, I'm normal. Some days the laundry is put away and I've reorganized the winter mittens, and the littles bedroom, and created a craft, other days I forgot to both shower and eat. I'm not Wonder Woman, I'm normal.

Through this blog I hope to lay out my story to inspire, commiserate, and above all, laugh, at this crazy life. This blog is for normal moms with any number of children. You are welcome here no matter what you believe parenting should look like. Comments and questions are welcomed, trolls are not.