When Life is Hard.

When I read that sweet Emily from The Freckled Fox lost her husband last week, it broke my heart in a deep way. Not because I know her personally (I don't), but because it just seemed so utterly unfair. 
My heart was already heavy from recent events, and it just filled me with a lot of questions. 
Why did a 25 year old mother of 5 have to lose the love of her life so soon? What possible good can ever come of that? and How can we call a world where 50 people are slaughtered in the name of what someone believes in good? and Can life really be beautiful when it's filled to the brim with tragedies, like that sweet little babe being killed by an alligator right in front of his parents?

I wrestle with these questions. I wrestle with wondering how the world I fall in love with on a daily basis-the one that offers sunshine and pool days, the one with the sweetest friendships and family, the one with pumpkin spice lattes and giant dreams-can be the same world that offers up such terror. I wrestle with wondering how God could let these awful things happen.

I wrestle with trying to understand how tonight, I'll get to eat dinner with my best friend and my littlest love. I'll fall asleep in a house, so thankful for how full my life is. All the while knowing that my sweet little babe will grow up in a world that seems to have more than its fair share of ugly.

I know there's a time for mourning. We honor those who have been ravaged by tragedy-by cancer and terror and just sheer chance-with a time of sadness. But sometimes life feels so hard and so heavy that it seems that no period of mourning can ever be long enough to do it justice. And when you only get one life-one short, terrible, beautiful life-how do you make sense of that?

The answer to all of my questions is both incredible simple and incredibly frustrating: I just don't know. And perhaps even more frustrating and final-I will never, ever know.

I know that sometimes life is hard. And sometimes life is beautiful. And we have to grab a hold of the beautiful moments.



We live in a world where we get both summertime and heartbreak, campfires and terror, sunflowers and gut-wrenching sorrow. It is beautiful. It is terrible.

I'm thankful for the beautiful moments and perplexed by the terrible ones, and while it leaves me in confusion, it also leaves me knowing what I want to fight for.

It leaves me knowing that I have to fight hard for thankfulness. That I have to fight hard for love.
Life can be awful, the past few weeks have shown us that. The world can be ugly. So I want to fight for the beautiful moments. 
For the ones filled with laughter. The ones where you go to sleep that night completely exhausted from a day just so full of life. The days spent in the sunshine, the nights spent by a fire, the mundane things like a trip to the grocery, made special because of who you're with.

I want to fight for the magical moments, the ones you couldn't possibly make yourself, but are made by spending time with the people you love the most. 

Because in the end, all we really have is each other and our memories, you know?

What do you want to fight for? 

lemons + lemonade.

Life is going to throw you days that really suck. 

I pride myself in being a really positive person and always focusing on the good in things. 

But sometimes, there are going to be days, or weeks, or months that just totally suck. 

You heard it here, from the girl laid up in bed with her face and neck covered in Benadryl cream due to some mystery sickness.

And that's okay. 

I'm learning it doesn't make you any less of a positive person to look at a day or week or month and just think, "yeah, that was terrible." 

Because that's life. 

But I'm also learning to be really thankful for all the good days and weeks and months, because there are a heck a lot of those, and they blow the bad days totally out of the water. 

This month has been so bad at times that I've wanted to scream "ARE YOU KIDDING ME SEPTEMBER?!" on quite a few occasions, but it's also been freaking fantastic. 

I've spent a lot of time up here, and learned that it's a really cool place to hang out right before it storms:

I've spent a lot of time snuggling with this guy:

And really, any month where this happened can't be classified as a bad month:

There's been a lot of blurry car-selfies:

And a lot of late nights trying our best to act our age instead of going to sleep at 8:30 like our bodies are desperately telling us to do: 

So yeah, this month has kind of sucked. It's been full of car wrecks and sickness and crazy unexpected bills and broken down vehicles and mean people and crappy days that you just have to cry about.

But it's also been full of family and friends and pushing myself out of my comfort zone. It's been full of squeezing in date nights with the love of my life and early mornings laughing together about how deliriously tired we are. It's been full of sunsets and sunrises and cheers and dancing and remembering just how much of a privilege it is to be alive.

Sometimes life gives you lemons. And when that happens, it's really important to stop and remember all the times that life gave you lemonade. 

So bring it on. The lemons and the lemonade. Because life, no matter how full of days that make you want to scream, is really, really, really freaking beautiful. And that's worth remembering.

Has your month been full of lemons or lemonade?

and that's okay.

Sunday started with my computer crashing and ended with me at the emergency vet with my sweet pup.

And things pretty much went downhill from there.  The past few days have been a struggle. 

So this isn't a happy blog post about how you should stay positive when things go wrong.  This is a real life blog post about how sometimes life is just hard.  Sometimes so many things will go wrong that it will take everything in you to just wake up and get work done. 

And that's okay. 

Because that's real life, and real life isn't always rainbows and butterflies.  Sometimes it's two hours of sleep and six cups of coffee and sweatpants and dry shampoo. 

And that's okay. 

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