Kicking off the dust on the old blog tonight.  Has it really been 2 months?!  Ugh.  It has.  What killed my blogging for 2 months?  Lots.  First, we had a rough week right after my last post in January.  In the matter of a day our van broke down and my laptop was destroyed in an unfortunate run-in with a bottle of shampoo my husband left next to it.  For real, coconut shampoo, I couldn’t make this randomness up.  So the van went in the shop, my laptop got tucked away, along with my productivity and I cried.  A lot.  We are NOT a one car family.  And we are not a one computer family either.  We had Jason’s tiny old Jetta on it’s last leg but we couldn’t fit our family of 6 in it.  If we wanted to go anywhere as a family, we had to make 2 trips out to get everyone to one location.  It was not working.  At all.  After a few weeks of the van still being in the shop, we decided it was past time to go trade in Jason’s car to something more functional for our family.  So, van in the shop ($$$$), broken laptop needing a $600 repair and the need to purchase a new (to us) vehicle, it was a month that hurt financially.  Big time.  It turned out our van was in the shop for almost 6 weeks, it needed a new transmission, a new computer and a new key panel.  And it sucked.  Not only the expense, but being stuck at home with the kids all the time and not being able to get out of the house drove me to the brink of crazy.  Somewhere in the middle of all that we started a new year of homeschool and tackled our busiest time of the year for birthphotographers.com by building a new website and doing the Image of the Year Competition.  The competition is something Jason and I put in hundreds of hours of work on, it’s super heavy on the back end and so much work.  We had over 1.8 MILLION hits this year…that’s just crazy to me.  We lived through another year and some amazing birth photos were shared with the world!  And the same week we started a new homeschool year.  1st grade for Jude and 3rd for Taryn.  Why did we do that?!  I don’t know…not the smartest or most efficient thing.  Having a toddler under foot during our school day is….uhm…challenging….to put it nicely.  One top of all those things, we had Ty in driver’s ed 4 nights a week for over a month and had back and forth to Cedar Park during the normal dinner / bath time evening rush with 4 kids.  Driver’s ed.  My baby.  In driver’s ed.  What?!  For real.  And then do you know what happened?  The State of Texas decided he was responsible enough and old enough and grown enough to drive.  What?!?!  Yes, he has his learner’s permit.  And then somewhere in the middle of all that we celebrated Jude’s 6th birthday, Valentine’s Day, Jonah’s very first cold, and a million little moments of joy, chaos, love, laughs, tears and life.  But I’m back.  Van is running, Jase has a new car, my laptop is fixed and running again (bonus:  it smells like awesome coconut!), drivers ed every night is over and the image competition is done.  We are returning to our normal level of chaos thankfully!