There is a tendency, for many of us, to go into survival mode when things get rough. We concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other and find ourselves with hardly any energy left for anything else.

This year, we have four kids playing flag football. Because the family that plays football together...stays together. Or something like that.

On Halloween this year, I saw an unforgettable photograph of a young girl trick-or-treating on streets clogged with Michael's wreckage. She walked towards the sunset, her bag over her shoulder, with broken shingles and chunks of brick on either side of the street and a row of blue tarped houses in front of her.

I had coffee with a friend this week who told me about moving into her new rental after her old rental had a tree dropped through the middle of it, effectively destroying 80% of their household goods.

It's that time of year where most of us are making some kind of resolution to exercise more, eat more healthily, pursue our personal goals instead of just talking about them, etc.

I wake up every morning and I think about all the stuff I can get done during the day if I just work smarter, time manage more effectively, and don't waste any time. Then by the end of the day, I can see just how little I've accomplished and just how exhausted I am, and I realize why I don't finish more of the items on my list.

In May, the Man accidentally scraped a chair over my toenail, leaving a blackish purple bruise that slowly crept closer and closer to the tip of my toe for weeks. Just a week earlier, Oswald had bitten a hole straight through the thumb nail of my right hand while trying to avoid getting his vaccinations updated.

I was recently thinking back on my husband's decade in the military (our family's decade as a military family). Ten years, two deployments, five kids, five moves, more short term separations than I can count... Looking back, I see things so differently now than I did then