What I Learned This Summer: 2018 Edition

Every season, Emily P. Freeman invites friends to link up with her and post what they learned.  I’m a bit late on this one, but I knew I wanted to write it anyway.

Here’s what I learned this summer.

**Unresolved decisions are exhausting. I wrote a blog post that was birthed out of this experience. Drawing a line in the sand and forcing a decision and deciding to trust myself has allowed me to move forward.

**Parenting presents lots of opportunities for self-doubt. There’s something about having children involved that makes the stakes feel a million times higher. I have a lot of insecurities about parenting. I wish I had more confidence, but the truth is I struggle. I take comments from others personally. I wonder too often if I’m disappointing others.

**The days of slow, unscheduled summers are over and I don’t think they’re coming back. 3 kids X camps, family trips, and extracurriculars = schedule chaos. As much as I try to protect our calendar, so much is out of my hands.

leaving for camp

**My daughter isn’t me. This should be obvious, I know, but it wasn’t. I had braced myself for months in preparation for something I anticipated to be really difficult for Audrey. It ended up looking nothing like I expected.

My first response was to wonder if something was wrong with Audrey, but a conversation with a friend reminded me that we have different personalities and ways of dealing with feelings.

My daughter wasn’t broken. She was processing life through the unique lens God gave her.

**When I’m feeling lots of overwhelming feelings and I want to write, but I’m not ready to “publish” journaling is the best thing. I’ve been silent on this site lately but I have thousands of words that I’ve journaled in my notebook. The words are sitting on the pages simmering for a while

**Back pain is no joke. My husband, Nathan, had a herniated disk late this summer. I got a call, on my way to an appointment, and Nathan told me I needed to come home. He was in so much pain, he couldn’t move. He was stuck where he was– standing in the kitchen. I’ve never seen him in so much pain. We ended up calling an ambulance and taking a trip to the ER. We’re paying the last of the bills now. Thankfully, he’s feeling fully recovered.

We wrapped up our summer with a bang!

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