Welcome 2025!

I know I’m about two weeks late, but life happened, as usual. The holiday season for us is chaotic; we attend and/or host four different Christmas get-togethers with family. Thankfully, we were able to host two of them, which made it easier to avoid packing everything for a baby and a toddler. My friends with children under three will understand—you can’t just pack one stuffed animal. It’s the whole zoo, or you risk a meltdown when she can’t find the one you thought you could sneakily leave behind during her nightly roll call. Whether I mean to or not, we’re bound to forget something. Packing is my ADHD Achilles’ heel. I can be very organized—my husband would probably say too organized—but no matter how many lists I make or how early I start, I will forget something. So, shoutout to those who were willing to travel to us in 2024; you saved me a lot of emotional turmoil in the packing department!

We rounded out 2024 with a trip to South Texas to visit some close friends who have truly become family. We welcomed the New Year with a girls’ night watching movies while the guys enjoyed a dominoes tournament. It was exactly what I needed after our busy Christmas season. We headed back home ready to return to some normalcy, but life had other plans. Our family slowly took turns getting sick over a week. Not sure what exactly we caught as our symptoms were all over the place, but it had me out of commission for 24 hours and running on fumes for another two days. I was one exhausted mama, but we survived.

As soon as we all started to recover, my husband noticed our dog’s eye looked swollen and cloudy. If you have pets, you’re probably picturing the same thing I did: dollar signs floating away in the wind. After some examination, we determined he likely injured it while tracking a deer in South Texas and now has an ocular ulcer. Oh, Waylon—there’s never a dull moment when you own a hound. Now that my family was feeling better, I got the privilege of administering three different eye medications, each given five minutes apart, every two hours during the day and every four to six hours at night. It’s like having an infant again! We followed up this week, and while his eye is looking better, the vet wants to try another week of medications and may consider sedating him to debride the top layer of his cornea for better healing. They also pointed out that he has entropion, which is when the bottom eyelid rolls under and into the eye. This causes the eyelashes on the bottom to irritate the eye. They believe this could also be why his ulcer isn’t healing as well as they’d hoped, and it might require surgery to correct. Cue the vision of dollar signs floating away again!

Just when normalcy seemed to settle back into our house, I realized our son’s birthday is the first week of February, and I was hurled into party-planning mode. I’m going to do my best to keep it low-key because I need it, but it’s his first birthday, so we’ll compromise with low-key-ish. He deserves to be celebrated; he came into the world during the craziest year of our lives and has been so chill through it all. We’re going with a “Rookie of the Year” theme and are taking his pictures this weekend. I’m so excited for all the cuteness! I heard Party City was going out of business, so my sister-in-law and I going to take a morning to go shopping to load up on fabric, party supplies, and more kids’ clothes because our son grows out of a size every two weeks.

We love a good Kid to Kid haul! The sleepers were only $2 a piece.

Welcome to about as normal as our lives get. As stressful and exhausting as it can be, I’m thankful for every moment. I loved soaking up all the sick cuddles from a baby and toddler who won’t sit still otherwise, spending more quality time with my dog, who often doesn’t get the attention he deserves while I’m chasing around the kids, shopping with my sister-in-law like we did in college, and taking time to slow down in the evenings to enjoy dinner and a show with my husband. There’s a lot going on, but I’m trying to live it in slow motion. We often get caught up in trying to accomplish as much as we can each day, but the reality is that the dishes and laundry will still be there tomorrow. It’s okay to play with your kids or enjoy an evening on the porch. We don’t need to complete everything on our often unrealistic and lengthy to-do lists. Our homes are meant to be lived in and it took me having a second kid to realize that trying to keep a perfect home was stealing my happiness. I’m no expert, but I’m doing my best to start prioritizing time to slow down and enjoy my kids and all their messes while I can.