Goodbye to 2014!!!!

We're screaming, "GOODBYE 2014!!"

I feel like with today being New Year's Eve, I had to write something.  The problem is though that I have given this a lot of thought and really couldn't decide what to write.  2014 has been a year of the highest highs and the lowest lows and I'm not too anxious to relive any of it to be honest.  If you've ever had a child with a serious illness, you can understand the stress that brings and 2014 started out scary for us as a family.  Lainey was about to enter into the hardest phase of her treatment and we didn't know what to expect.  I was training for my first half marathon and finding strength I never knew I had.  Just as Lainey was entering the maintenance phase of her treatment and we were exhaling a little, I was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer.  It was the ultimate sucker punch that I never saw coming. I finished my half marathon (Go Team Lainey 9:16 and many thanks to Tricia, KP, Cindy, Sarah and Emily), then started chemo, followed by double mastectomy and radiation.  Somewhere in the middle of the biggest fight of my life, I decided starting a non-profit to help others was a GREAT idea! (Must have been the meds, ha!) Couldn't have done it without Dianna Bacon being my partner in crime.  Over and over again though, God showed up and gave us all everything we needed at just the right time.  Suffice it to say, it's been a LOOOOONNNNNGGG year!  I am not gonna lie, it's been a LOT and at times I was exhausted and past exhausted.  My husband and family will tell you that I heard over and over again, "Stop doing so much, you have to take care of yourself first, everything else can wait."  But I just felt like God had given me this opportunity to share my story and I needed to do it.  I have no regrets, but boy am I READY to put 2014 behind us and move into 2015 with a bang!  We still have almost another year of Lainey getting chemo and lots of surgeries for me but that's ok because by God's grace we're both HERE! I will be starting some contract work again to finally make money again, along with focusing on building the Foundation, but most important of all, focusing on my family.  Loving on these beautiful babies God chose me to be the mother of and spending time with my husband, who unfortunately through all of this really got the short end of the stick but has been incredibly supportive.  I don't just love this guy, I LIKE him, like really, really LIKE him.  He's my favorite person to hang out with in the whole wide world, seriously. I'm not a fan of New Year resolutions, but I am of new beginnings.  This is a new beginning for us ALL, not just my family, but yours too!  Take stock of your life, learn new things, break out of your comfort zone and make a new friend, go back to church, just shake things up, listen to some new music, it feeds the soul!  I love the old saying, "If you keep doing what you did, you'll keep getting what you've got."  It's really that easy, we make life so much more complicated than what it really is.  Start a bucket list because you want to, not because you NEED to.

Every night after I say prayers over each of the girls, Lainey always insists on saying her own prayers too.  It goes the same every night, she's very dramatic about it, throws her head back, closes her eyes tight and says, "Dearw Gawd....." she inserts the most random things in there, sometimes it's Cheetos, a dog she met at the park, but she always says a couple things, then stops abruptly and says loudly, "WHAT ELSE?"  Then I'll say something she might have forgotten, and again she says, "WHAT ELSE?" This will go on forever if I let her, she's a great bedtime staller :-).  So today I say to all of you, "WHAT ELSE?"  What else in your life do you want to do or learn, what relationships do you want to fix?  Find out what your "WHAT ELSE?" is and just like Lainey, don't stop asking yourself that question until somebody cuts you off with "Enough already!" and then just like her, you can say, "I'M NOT DONE YET!!"  Oh, the lessons I learn from these kids.  Thank you all for following us, praying for us and believing in us.  My prayer for all of you is that 2015 is full of excitement and most of all, LOVE.  Love for yourself, for others and most of all, for God!  AMEN!

We're all looking straight AHEAD to 2015 (Sorry, I couldn't resist, AHEAD :-)