The Unexpected Life

  • I Wore the Wrong Shoes For This

    It has been a rainy week here. And when I say rainy I don’t just mean brief periods of soft rain lightly misting the flowers and greening up the grass. I mean absolute downpouring rain. I mean standing at the bus stop waiting for my kid with water gushing around my ankles in a river

    Read more

  • A Train of Thought

    A Train of Thought

    Recently, someone gave us a box of conversation starter cards to use with kids. The cards cover a range of topics, and have been a fun way for us to talk about some different things at our dinner table. Sometimes Finley’s answers are predictable and sometimes they catch me totally off guard. The other day

    Read more

  • What Does Normal Even Mean?

    The algorithm knows me well and frequently feeds me parenting/mothering specific content. There’s a lot of it. Something I’ve been seeing more lately is posts with the general idea that it takes mothers some extended amount of time to “return to normal” after giving birth. I’ve seen it in a few iterations, taking about “getting

    Read more

  • Are we having fun yet?

    Today, the twins are 9 months old. I remember that this age was around when I started to really have fun with my oldest. I remember shortly after Finley was born, I showed up at a friend’s house for a group hang, baby in tow. It was the first time many of them were seeing

    Read more

  • A Lesson in Friendship

    My son is almost 5 years old and we’ve officially entered the era of having friends over. Finley has been asking to have one of his little buddies over for dinner for months, and this weekend I finally got my act together enough to make it happen. I had a million excuses for not inviting

    Read more

  • Not Enough

    Not Enough

    Last weekend, I participated in an IF:Local women’s conference at my church. We enjoyed some time together and watched several of the sessions from IF:2024 that took place in February. The first session of the day was a message from Christine Caine, someone I’ve heard about for years but never heard speak until now. It

    Read more

  • False Spring

    False Spring

    I live in Ottawa and every single year, the entire city falls victim to false spring. After a long, cold, and snowy winter, temperatures finally peek above freezing and the sun shines for a couple of days in late March or early April. The snow melts, at least enough that hints of grass start poking

    Read more

  • I Wish I Knew

    I Wish I Knew

    When we found out we were having twins, we of course asked everyone we knew or met with twins for advice. We heard a huge variety of advice that sometimes contradicted itself. But one thing that almost everyone told us was that the first six months would be unbelievably hard and then it would start

    Read more

  • Thriving

    Thriving

    Since the twins were born (almost 6 months ago!), I have been thinking a lot about trying to make the most of the time I have with them little. I sometimes look back with a twinge of regret at the first few years of Finley’s life. I was in a state of survival at that

    Read more

  • I have no idea what I’m doing

    Parenting is so weird. I remember a few weeks after having my son, I told Kent that I felt like Michael Scott: There’s this strange idea that once you become a parent, particularly a mother, there’s some sort of instinct that kicks in and you’ll just know what to do. I guess that sort of

    Read more