Four years.

Four.

That was the length of my blog break.   I'm guessing that whomever once followed me will not be here anymore, and that is fine.  I'm still going to start again.  The words and feelings batting around inside my brain need a place to go...and this is the place.  Safe.

So much has happened over the span of my 4 year hiatus.  The biggest and hardest being the loss of my younger sister, Diane, just one month after my final blog post of 2013.  It still feels somewhat unreal.  It's not.  And that one loss set a spiral of change into motion...one that has forever changed who I am.

We left our sweet, first home about 1 year later.  I do miss it.  Never really thought I'd say that, but its true.  It was small, too small for our family...but that smallness kept us close.  Our new home is bigger...it fits us and it's becoming more and more ours as we live here.  It's finally starting to really feel like home...

Colin is 14.  Ty is 11. Eden is 7. Terra-dog is 5.  It is true what they say...the days are long and the years are short.  And what we all come to realize is that life is so easy when they're little.  If we could just stay there a bit longer....
Parenting is hard at this stage.  Life is hard at this stage.  The "finish line" is within sight and yet I don't particularly want to get there.  How is it possible that I have a kid in high school!?

I feel like somewhat of a failure for not documenting the past 4 years of our life.  Oh, there are bits of documentation here and there...social media posts, mainly.  But the heart of what I feel and think does not make an appearance there.

I read through the years on the blog and I yearn to go back.  I want a do-over.  Is that normal, do you think?  Because what if I had handled just one thing differently...smarter?  Just one thing.  The opportunity to be a better Mom...to do better where I feel like I failed them.  The only choice is to move forward.  To start where you are.  To forgive yourself where you feel like you've failed and be better next time.  It's true in all life, not just Mom-life.

Inspite of my "mom fails" these children of mine amaze me every day.  They are incredible humans...not perfect, but good.  So good.  And, for some reason, God made me their Mom...probably more for them to teach me.  They are, and continue to be, the best thing I've ever done...

So, I'll start here.  This place that feels very much like middle life, because it is.  The angst of living life with some major regrets behind us and looking towards the unknown.  Pretty much just life, only now we're older and "wiser" and we realise things that we paid no attention to before.