Life Spins On

 I was going to blog a birthday post for my sweet Lucy, to honor her seventh birthday. I took some gorgeous photos, and had begun editing them. But then my computer died entirely and had to be reset, and I lost the edit progress and.... and I lost a lot of time for editing other clients.... And so then it was all catchup on other's images. So Lucy's beautiful photos remain unfinished. Unshared.

We got some really neat photos taken by my dear friend Laura at the end of April. But because I hadn't managed to blog for Lucy, I didn't want to skip it and blog other stuff.

And then the end of the school year barrelled through and life was crazy and then it was summer break and life stayed crazy. I photographed a (gorgeous) wedding and we went to the Ballwin Days carnival where I took my big camera and grabbed some more fun photos not yet shared....

And then we had to get packing for our trip to Colorado and I had, like, an overwhelming pile of June sessions suddenly, and had to find babysitters, and was still trying to find my footing from the computer crash....So I plugged away at all the editing, and I packed for 5 out of six of us, and we drove to Colorado for a busy, amazing, exhausting, incredible, giraffe and elephant and horse and hot springs and mountain creek-filled week with Joe's family...

And then we got home and it was SO hot and muggy and the whole trip needed to be UN-packed. The kids had a week of summer day camp and then I got the news that my entire professional photography website had been lost forever in a freak RAID system fail at the hosting company...While Joe had to immediately leave for a week-long conference in Washington D.C.

And I just BARELY finished editing the "catch up" sessions from before the trip, and am now working on current sessions, and maybe, MAYBE will feel caught up enough to edit some Lucy birthday images and even maybe some Colorado trip images, and then it will be time to begin working on my super-overdue bookkeeping, and ya know?

Life spins on.

It doesn't stop.

And I don't blog like I used to. Like I want to. Like I dream of doing.

And I've been SO crabby SO MUCH this month already, and it's only a third of the way in. And I gotta figure out how to stop the annoyance loop.... letting every piece of summer clutter and every squawk of Southerland kid noise and whine and chaos get under my skin like little scratchy grains of sand, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing.

I gotta breathe in and breathe out more.

I gotta learn to laugh at it all more.

I need to try not to fossilize into this person I am being right now.... I CANNOT become this permanently. Not already, at only age 41. (Oh yeah- P.S. I had a birthday. And somehow, even though I'm still not entirely sure of the age 40, I have bumped up an additional year. Weird.)

Life spins on.

I don't wanna be annoyed at all of it. I don't want to play catch-up ALL the time.

I'm going to try to, I dunno.... breathe in and breathe out more.

Go to bed a bit sooner.

Wake a bit earlier and just be still for a tiny tiny bit every morning, maybe.

Force myself out into the disgusting summer wetness to get moving a little, maybe.

Pray a bit more throughout the day.

Pray for grace, but also to laugh a bit more at the absurdity of all of it.

*

Life spins on.

And one day, there WILL be time for the stuff there is NO time for now. And for all the chaos and noise and blah right now, I have to try not to let it turn me into a permanently grumpy old lady. I have to remember to turn back toward the gratitude, and to remember that all of this LIFE MESS affirms that I am ALIVE. We are not dead yet. And the chaos is really a gift. All all of this is a gift. 

So. 

Onward. Spinning onward. 

Til next time, friends. 

♥