5 years ago I sat down and opened up my laptop and started a little blog. It was the fall of September 2007 and my friend had recently introduced me to what a blog was. Little did I know five years later I would still be visiting my little space on the internet sharing my life-happenings with you.
I wrote over at St.Udio for much of the time I’ve been blogging. I stopped sharing there when that site became too hard to visit. It became a very vulnerable space and I needed a fresh start. The Lovely Messy has become that for me, and sometimes change is a very good thing.
I have spent some time scrolling over my past five years knowing I was coming up on a big blog-iversary and it is so wonderful to pick a month in time and be transported back to that moment with pictures and words. I am so glad I’ve preserved my personal history this way. There is no way on earth I could have remembered what we did October 2008 without this sort of documentation. That being said, it is also very hard to look back at myself from five years ago. I feel like I was such. a. different. person.
Five years ago I was 25 years old, had a newly turned 3-year-old {Moses} and Lincoln was just 6 months old. Babies!
I went to mama-playgroups and had so much energy. I thought we could take on the world {which is why we brought home 3 of our kiddos just a few short months later!}! Jeremy and I rented a house from my parents, he was a tennis coach and science teacher. I hung out with the babies and was learning to can {a hobby I still love so much!}. It was just such a different life. I was recently on the phone with my friend, and my eyes were brimming with tears, as I was telling her how I just feel like such a different person. And sometimes I like the person I have grown into, but sometimes it is just really sobering to think about how greatly our life choices and experiences shape us. It doesn’t always translate into what we thought it would. Sometimes it changes our perspective, our beliefs, our dreams- dramatically. And changes them in ways we don’t like.
But change is also a very good thing. It opens our minds and our hearts in magnificent ways. It makes us stronger and wiser and more discerning. For example, five years ago I never knew the beauty of boxed wine or amazon prime. Growth, people. In all seriousness though, I am proud of the woman I am, five years later, and it feels good to say write that.
I am proud of myself for sticking with this blog thingy. I am proud that I have chosen to be transparent in this way, my life is much richer because of it. It always means so much to hear from a reader that something I said has resonated with them, or that something I’ve gone through is something they can relate with. It has been amazing to meet people in real life that I got to know through the internet. It is a really cool time in history to be a person 
Thanks for sticking around and supporting me and my family for the past five years.
xoxo,
anya*
