Where have you been?

I feel like my inability to keep up on my blog is a reflection of how things have been going in my life lately. So, I thought I would do a different kind of a post and document at least my feelings I've had lately because I use this as a journal.

The 2017-2018 school year just about whooped my butt. Brent's PhD program turned out to be a lot more work than we were expecting, my work got busier, and we had Ava in two preschool sessions which meant a lot of driving back and forth. One Sunday, probably in February, I said to Brent, "if you compare each week in our life to riding around on a horse, do you feel like everyone else is trotting around on their horses and we're being dragged by our horse?" Brent laughed and responded, "that's a weird analogy, but I'd say it's accurate."

Life was just too crazy for me and I don't thrive on living a stressful life with hardly any downtime. My stomachaches started to come more often, and it seemed everything I ate hurt my stomach and made me feel unwell.

My anxiety that I have been battling since I was about 18 struck with full force.

Then I got called to be the Primary President at the end of April. While I felt peaceful about accepting the calling, it seemed that any spare moments of free time were now taken up by my calling. I know I'm going to grow a lot in the calling and be stretched in new ways but it was challenging.

In June I finally got into the GI doctor and she put me on a strict diet to find out what's bothering me. As soon as I stopped gluten all together, my GI issues stopped. My blood work came back with a possible diagnosis of celiac disease?!? I'm sure we'll learn more over the summer as I experiment putting things back in my diet. It's been really good to start feeling better, but really hard not to eat so much of the food that I love. I have been so thankful for both of our moms who have been so accommodating in preparing special meals for me, which is really hard to do since I'm not eating dairy, gluten, beans, garlic, onion, etc.

All this isn't to say I was miserable the whole year. In fact, every day was filled with happy moments and I feel like Brent and I grew closer and clung on to each other through the stressful times. It's interesting how you can simultaneously go through a hard experience and have personal growth and happiness at the same time.  When we're going through the toughest times is when we can have the most tender experiences.

So...that's where I've been :)