The Joys of School Events

As the parents of school-aged children, you are constantly pulled in multiple directions – recitals, programs, sports games, fundraising events, carnivals, etc. There is almost aways some “event” that your children want to attend. As a blended family, one of the extra challenges we face is that two of our children (“mine”) live with us …

Year One

This is the third in a series, so if you missed them you can read the first one here and the second one here. We ended the last post with saying our “I do’s” and wedding cake (of course). I think I forgot to mention the importance of my wedding dress. I was honored to be able to …

You Are Not Alone

If you’ve been following this blog, you know I’m in the middle of a series that’s telling an overview of DJs’ and my relationship. I’m going to take a break from that today because what I’m going to write about is heavy on my heart. Dealing with damaged emotions. We had our blending families small …

In the Beginning

This is the beginning of a blog series that walks through how all of this started. So let’s start with In the Beginning… DJ and I met on eharmony. Yep – we met online. Both of us were about to end our subscriptions, but from the beginning, something just felt different about our match. I think DJ …

Are We Living In Sin?

I’ve read some comments to a posting on another blended family FB page recently that really disturbed me. I know, I really shouldn’t read the comments, but I did. The original post was promoting the Blending Families material (and of course I can’t find it now to link it here) that we are using in …

How Our Garden Grows

We had some beautiful weather here this past weekend, so we spent a good amount of time outside. DJ worked hard to finish up the chicken coop extension, and T helped me work in the garden, pulling weeds and tilling up the raised beds. We will spend the next few weeks planning out our garden, …

Setting Priorities While Managing Blended Family Dynamics

Family dynamics in a blended family can get confusing to outsiders. For my kids, they have extra blending to do.  They have an older half-sister, who lives with her mom, Wendy, in a blended family a couple of hours from us. Of course, they have the four step-siblings at our house. And then they have two …

The Perfect Blend…is Not So Perfect

Wait….what?? Then what is this all about? The Perfect Blend was the theme from our wedding. It is what we are striving for, but we are not there…yet. We believe God has given us a vision for our family, and while we make plenty of mistakes that cause us to ask for forgiveness, we are …