Good-bye 2025, Hello 2026

It is very hard to believe we have already come to the end of another year. This one was a wild one that brought an abundance of both beauty and pain. Mike had four business trips to Florida this year, and I got to tag along on two of them. The two of us also took two vacations to Mexico--one to Puerto Vallarta and one to Cabo San Lucas. I took several solo trips to New Braunfels to visit Liv and a solo trip to Cairo, Egypt to attend Clay's 8th grade graduation. And we took the entire family to Breckenridge, CO for our first blended family vacation. Mike also had solo business trips to New Orleans and Las Vegas, and another to Scottsdale in October that I got to go along on. Unfortunately, at the end of that trip, he found out his company was undergoing a restructuring and that his job was being terminated, so he has bravely been going through the process of trying to find a new job, which has provided lots of opportunities for growth and self-reflection. We are anticipating him finding just the right thing in the new year. 

Other big happenings included me leaving Starbucks after five and a half years and taking a temporary nanny job. I also took as many yoga classes as I could fit in my schedule, took a six-week long pottery class, and enrolled in yoga teacher training, which I will graduate from at the end of January. Mike renovated our master bedroom after a major water leak, completely overhauled our guest bedroom because it needed some updates, and made some repairs to our garage space after a different water leak. We also did a lot of work on my Flower Mound house after all the kids moved out of it in January and were able to get it sold in August. 

We are so proud of and thankful for our kids! Liv got engaged and finished her first year of OT school. Weston graduated from WGU after just one year and is currently working on getting his teaching certificate. Max went for the second year in a row on a mission trip to Belize and has started his senior year of high school. And Clay has started high school and is excited about his wrestling season. Kai has been working at a radio station and Door Dash. Reid got his private pilot's license and his instrument rating and took Mike and I for a night flight that was absolutely incredible. Aiden is heavily involved in a leadership organization at his school and is looking forward to the upcoming lacrosse season. And Quinn and his band had an amazing marching season and got 9th place at the state competition. 

My words for 2025 were Present and Contentment/Acceptance, and I have really tried to embrace being present with myself and with others and finding contentment and acceptance in the good seasons, the bad seasons, the waiting seasons, and all the other seasons. I have worked hard to see and be the good in the world. I have tried to be grateful for all the gifts this year has given, even when they have been wrapped in circumstances that I wouldn't have chosen. I have chosen to believe the best and to trust the story that is unfolding, even if it isn't how I would have written it. 

I'm excited for all the new year holds! Inspired by my yoga journey, my words for 2026 are Strength, Balance, and Flexibility. These apply to my physical world, but probably more importantly, to my mental state of being. I feel like beautiful things are coming in 2026--for me and for you! Wishing you love and light and peace and joy in the new year! 

The Clay Will Become What It Wants To Be

I spent the last six weeks taking a pottery class where we did hand building as well as wheel throwing. I was in a season of betweenness, and I really needed a creative outlet. I specifically chose pottery because I have always had a bit of a fascination with it, and because I knew I probably wouldn't be very good at it, and that seemed like a great way to learn some valuable lessons along with some new skills. I was certainly right about that and can definitely say I learned a lot. 

At the beginning of every class we would start with a few lumps of damp, grayish-white clay that had no personality whatsoever. Then our teacher would show us an example of something we could make but would soon set us free to "create whatever we wanted." Being very new to the craft and prone to rule following, I pretty much stuck to the projects of the day, but I never really produced the true likeness of the teacher's example. And even he, with more than a decade of experience as a professional potter, said he wouldn't be able to replicate his work exactly. Perfect was not my goal, and I always felt delighted that I had managed to make anything at all and found each piece beautiful in its own way. Each classmate brought their own ideas about what they wanted to get out of the class. One of my classmates rarely stuck to the prescribed project and made some truly interesting pieces that she conjured up purely from her imagination. Another classmate broke down in tears and scrapped many of her projects when they didn't turn out "just right," even though I couldn't really see anything wrong with them. But, as our teacher reminded us over and over, there was no one correct approach.

In hand building it was difficult to get the clay to a uniform thickness or to master the detail work. On the wheel, it was easy to get the clay too off-center, leave it too dry, get it too wet, or stretch it too thin. If you had something specific in your head when you started, you could almost count on something going awry and then having to take some measure or other just to salvage the project--the image in your head be damned. And never once did all six of the students end up with things that even remotely resembled what the other students had made or what the teacher had shown us. By the third class we had embraced a motto: The clay will become what it wants to be. And from that moment, the whole class became an exercise in letting go of the idea you had in your head and just accepting whatever happened. The concept freed many of us up to just enjoy the process and be delighted with whatever we created. 

Once the clay had become something--a beautiful, wonky, lovely, unique thing--it had to dry out for a week or so before it could be fired. The heat of the kiln was sure to shrink the pieces and sometimes reveal serious and not-so-serious cracks. And once it was fired, each piece had to be glazed. We could read on the containers the colors of the glazes and, for most, see tiny example tiles of the finished colors, but many of the glazes looked almost the exact color of the clay when first applied or not at all like the finished product, as the heat of the kiln during the second firing was what was needed to bring out the trueness of the hue. There was a skill to applying just the right amount of glaze too (especially tricky since we couldn't always tell where it had been applied). Too much, too close to the bottom of the piece, and it would melt onto the kiln and pretty much guarantee chips in the finished product; too little, and the color would barely show up at all. It was super hard to predict what the finished pieces would actually look like, and it was a little like a wonder-filled Christmas morning when we arrived to pick up our finished pieces. 

I was enthralled with all my pieces and genuinely appreciated what each of them had become--with and without my help. I did a show-and-tell with my family and was practically doing a happy dance seeing everything displayed on the table. I have a couple of "bowls" that decided to become "planters" because of unplanned holes that appeared in their bases during the process. I have a vase that fell in on itself on the wheel and turned out to be one of my favorites because it is so unusual and interesting and 100% non-replicable. I have coffee mugs with awkward handles, but the coffee this morning tasted better out of a mug I made myself. None of the things I made is perfect, but every one of them is beautiful to my eyes and to my heart. I did the best I could with the raw materials I had and the skills I learned along the way, but without a doubt, the clay became what it wanted to be, which is what makes each piece so valuable to me.

Examining my work got me thinking about raising kids. It's a process. And people do it differently. And there are a lot of things that can factor in to how the final product comes out. But even if things don't go according to our original plan--which they rarely do--there aren't really a lot of ways to do it wrong. Even the mistakes we parents make along the way can become something lovely. My finished product will not look like yours. It will likely not even look like the picture I had in my head. We start with similar raw material that is moldable, but ultimately "the clay will become what it wants to be," and the only real truth is that the final product will be absolutely beautiful and unique. 

The last few months have held frequent reminders for me to accept things as they are and to see the beauty in what is. My kids are not all turning out according to the images I had in my head or according the societal "instructions," but they are all turning out to be exactly who they are meant to be, and it is absolutely the most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed.