It’s December 23rd. Okay, not really, but stick with me here. It’s December 23rd. You’re sitting at your kitchen table looking over the long list of items you have yet to complete: make the rolls, make the cheesecake, wrap those last-minute gifts, get the guest bedroom ready for Aunt Suzie…wait, […]
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Weightlifting for Weightloss
“Okay. Sit here?” I gestured to one of the weightlifting machines and took a seat. “And grab these handles….and just pull?” That seemed easy enough – and that time, it was. Was I doing something wrong because it was easy? Was any of this even going to make a difference? […]
The Two Main Tenets of Preparedness
People have dreamed of and written about the perfect society for eons. Personally, I don’t believe that, this side of Heaven, there can ever be such a thing as a utopian society. We live in a fallen world. But – what if we could? How close could we really get? […]
He Told Me No: How Weightlifting Changed Everything
I’m rather addicted to Instagram, and sometime in January this year – because of several IG posts – I became convinced that I should start weightlifting, so I messaged a friend who was very much into going to the gym and asked him to walk me through some exercises. He […]
What If You Never Had to Prep Again?
What if I told you that you could stop prepping? Yep. Just stop. No more worrying about what happens if the grocery store shelves are empty. No more wondering whether you have enough food put back. No more thinking through what your family would do if you lost an income, […]
Seven Laps Around a Basketball Court
Oh! You have to hear this story. The week after I started watching what I was eating, I went out and ran a 5K! NOT!! I have been sedentary for nearly all of my life since college. There were days when, as a stay-at-home mom, my pedometer said I was […]
From Contending with People – to Writing the Novel – Contenders
Contending with People Kids sometimes say the darndest things. Yes, but you expect them to do so when they’re somewhere between two and six—not when they’re nineteen. And certainly not when the whole family is going through a struggle together. Our hard season was not the kind of hard where […]
Numbers Didn’t Define Me. I Defied Them.
Numbers don’t define who you are. They don’t. But when I weighed 324.6 pounds (yes, you read that right!), it might not have defined me, but it limited me. The effects of that number limited how far I could walk. It limited my sleep. It limited my physical ability to […]
340 and 5: The Two Numbers Behind My Three-Month Disappearance
It’s been … about three months since you’ve heard from me. Three Long Months. And I have a pretty good excuse. Over the past few months, I’ve been working on two projects that have consumed a huge part of my life. One of them started with a doctor’s appointment and […]
12 Survival Themed Books to Read For Summer Reading
I don’t know about your house, but summer is well underway in our house. Summer means that the kids have more free time, and I usually have more free time. When my kids were younger, I spent a lot of time doing readalouds with them. Here are some of our […]

