There Are A Few Things I Want To Share With My Daughter About This Strangely Awesome Rollercoaster Ride She’s About To Take Called Middle School.

The post-deployment story I have yet to tell. because…

If you rip the band-aid off you will find it is still raw underneath.

Even though I know how the game is played, being on the roster for over two decades, I am left feeling in shock and awe by it all. Every. Time.

When my son got his first set of hearing aids, at 3-months-old, I hated them. For more reasons than one.

And, unlike the videos of babies hearing for the first time you now see going viral, that wasn’t our truth.

Never give up.

Even when you are down with seconds to go, it ain’t over till it’s over. If you fight until the final buzzer, sometimes it goes your way. The hungriest team often wins. And, some of the best moments occur in the last minutes of a close game.

People who are deaf or hard of hearing make different choices; there is not a one-size-fits-all way to navigate your personal hearing loss experience.

As frustrating and exhausting as it was to figure out how to keep the devices on, the trickier part was teaching the kids why they needed to keep them on.

“Are you sure you can handle being a military wife?”

A question actually posed to me when I was 25-years-old.

How the heck would I have known what kind of wife I was ready to be? Seriously. Did other brides-to-be get asked similar questions?

Humility is hard. But, important.

Be Confident. It’s not cocky to embrace your strengths.

Talking is better than texting.

Teenagers are weird. And you are almost one of them. It’s ok. It’ll pass.

It’s almost like having surgery. You are unsure of going in and wake up feeling nervous. Hazy. And when you finally make it to recovery—you can’t really recall what has transpired.

I’ll never forget the look in my dad’s eyes when the doctor told him the cancer was sprinkled throughout his abdomen like powdered sugar. At that moment I saw the man I considered fearless look afraid.

Today marks the anniversary of having my cancerous thyroid removed. This day always makes me think about the power of intuition and, how you should trust it.

It’s real.