Hello! I stumbled upon Hellobee way back when my daughter was itty-bitty, and rediscovered it while I was on bedrest with my twin sons. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to share snapshots into my day-to-day life, and tap into the collective wisdom of the Hellobee community.

My parenting journey has been an adventure so far! My husband is active-duty army, and over four years of marriage we’ve lived in four homes in three states, adopted the world’s cutest rescue dog, and welcomed three beautiful children. Home, for now, is in the high desert of California, and is almost three thousand miles away from my family, and a thousand miles away from my in-laws. My husband’s job takes him away from home about two weeks out of every month, so I’ve had to get pretty adept at handling the kids on my own. My three year old daughter, A, amazes me daily with her resiliency and optimism, and my four month old twin sons keep us all on our toes!

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The original three during a post deployment trip to Disney World.

Living in such an isolated location, while also being so far from family, can be a struggle. On the bright side, having to drive over an hour to get to Target really keeps those impulse purchases to a minimum! The challenges associated with living here were thrown into sharp relief during my pregnancy with the boys. I’ll go into more detail later, but we found out we were expecting twins at twenty weeks, baby A’s membranes ruptured at twenty five weeks, and I remained inpatient on bedrest until the boys made their appearances at 31+3. After all that, the boys stayed in the NICU for seven and eight weeks, until finally coming home shortly before their original due date.

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It took some time, but we’re starting to get our feet under us again. We love traveling, and we’ve managed several day trips around Southern California. We spent a weekend in the mountains a few weeks ago, and we’re planning a trip to Disneyland in the upcoming months. When we’re not traveling you’ll find me playing with new recipes, at the playground with the kids, binge-watching Netflix, or playing board games with my husband. I’ve also recently discovered that Amazon Prime includes roughly a million free kindle books, and I’m doing my best to work my way through them while breastfeeding the boys. My most elusive parenting goal involves trying to get a picture of all three of my kids looking in the same direction and smiling at the same time. I hope to accomplish that at some point before A heads off to college.

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Progress is….slow.

At the moment my parenting style can best be summed up by “survival mode.” I’ve found myself letting go of some long-held convictions in the interest of making it through the day. There’s more screen time than I’d prefer, and A is getting embarrassingly familiar with the menu at Starbucks. Everyone is figuring out what it means to be a member of a family of five, and there are certainly growing pains associated with the discovery process. However, there are smiles too. And laughs. And oh so much love. When I sit down after getting everyone to bed, those are the parts of the day I focus on, and those are the moments that get me out of bed the next morning. (Or at 2:00 am. Whichever comes first.)