On Father’s Day, we decided to do a little impromptu photo sesh before church.  Sadly, since one of us had to operate the camera, we couldn’t all be in the frame, but the pictures turned out wonderful nevertheless.  We captured some great shots, but even the ones that were off-center, the ones where no one is looking at the camera, the ones where the kiddos are over it, all perfectly captured our imperfect life.  I ended up loving all of them.

It seems that life often occurs in the outtakes – the living that you do when things are askew, details are blurry, and practically everything is out of focus.  

I tend to take these kind of moments for granted when my plan isn’t going just so. 

When I look back over the recent months, there are a lot of things that didn’t go how I wanted them to go, but there was a lot of learning and growing in those months that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to experience without a little struggle.  I didn’t know that the struggle would be shaping, but God did.

Home schooling was hard.  Especially when I was newly pregnant and feeling sick for about 85% of the day.  I struggled hard with sending Becks back to public school.  There were a lot of tears on my end.  Hormones, for sure.  And the fact that I felt like I was failing.  Failure isn’t a word I’m real comfortable with, and it was difficult to quit something mid-year and make yet another big transition in Becks’ life.  But we did it.  Becks thrived at his new school and I felt a huge weight lift off of my shoulders.  Everything was okay. 

 We listed our house for sale.  It sold.  We bought another house.  Then, the buyers on our house backed out post-inspection.  Extremely frustrating. We left a contingency offer in place on the house we were to buy.  It ended up selling a month later.  We continued to show our home with no bites.  Suddenly, it was spring and Becks was outside eating popsicles on the back deck with his friends. I had this moment of clarity.  We should stay.  We live in a great neighborhood with tons of kids, our home is plenty big for our expanding family, and I wasn’t getting any less pregnant.  The thought of moving didn’t seem as appealing anymore.  B agreed.  So, we took the house off the market.  And, everything was okay.  Better than okay, actually.  

We got a dog.  A big dog.  Her name was Lily and she was a Great Dane pup.  Again, I was amidst the agony of the first trimester, trying to home school, keep up with two active kiddos, and am – admittedly – not a big dog fan.  I like old, lazy, house-trained dogs, but was willing to give it a shot for my animal-loving husband.  However, with B away at work unable to share in the training and take-care tasks and responsibility that come with a puppy, we just couldn’t manage.  We tried hard to keep her.  But, ultimately, we had to make the decision to return her to the breeder.  Guess what?  Everything was okay.  

We planned a spring trip to Charleston.  We didn’t go.  Bad timing combined with a lot of stress on our marriage.  We ended up using the money set aside for the vacation to eat out every night for a week, and do family things at home.  We were all sad it didn’t work out, but everything was okay.

I truly believe we attempted to do such BIG things as a way to gain control of our lives.  Though it’s been over a year that we were officially discharged from the hospital with Faith, those months spent in-patient affected us deeply.  I’ve read a few articles about parents of children in the NICU as having symptoms of PTSD, and I believe it.  Living out the unknown daily for months on end was nothing short of crazy.  

Thankfully, there was still life in the outtakes.  We didn’t do things perfectly.  We made some interesting decisions.  We learned from them.  And everything is okay.