About Me

I'm Tara.  Wife to Andy and mom to Luke, Seth and Lydia.  

I get my kicks out of sharing my life, even though it isn't always easy or comfortable or safe.

I've wondered the whole time I've been blogging what my niche is to share with the small percentage of people in the world actually reading. 

Duh.  It's sharing life.  That's my niche.  I'm gonna warn you.  I'm kind of the perfect mix of a melancholy "deep thinker/analyzer/feeler" and a sanguine "lets party like it's 1999."  I think you'll enjoy hanging out here if you can handle some deep posts written from my heart sloshed in with some total shallow hal stuff.  You in?  Awesome.  

This is our family, and I wouldn't trade our crazy for anyone else's on earth.



This is Andy, my always handsome husband.  I'm so glad this was the person God picked to be my forever.  He's been studying and loving me well since we met my senior year in college.  He laughs at my jokes.   He tells me I'm beautiful when I text him a ridiculously awful picture of myself in the middle of the day with the caption, "Feel lucky?"  

He fights hard for oneness with me, and I am honored that we get to learn how to do this together for as long as we live.

Our marriage isn't perfect, but we've worked hard to make it a strong one.  Let's face it, having a good one takes effort and a daily decision to love someone else more than you love yourself.  Can we say hardest work ever?

These are our kids, Luke, Seth, & Lydia.  

They are our tangible proofs that God uses us despite all our many mistakes and weaknesses, for his good pleasure and glory.  

I don't know where the years are going, but they're going fast. 

 Our mothers were telling the truth when they told us this parenting gig would be over in no time flat. 

 I wish so bad there was a step by step, foolproof  manuel for raising them.  

Just when I thought I had a few things down pat, Luke went and decided to become a teenager.  Parenting shows me exactly who I am, and sometimes that's good and sometimes it's really, truly, deeply, ugly.  God uses my kids constantly to remind me that I'm not in control and that's a good thing.  I'm in the throws of it over here, but anything I'm learning is yours for the taking.

My great passion?  Stories...in word and in pictures.

Where we come from, no matter how functional or dysfunctional, makes us who we are.  God uses all things and wastes nothing to draw us to himself.   When you get married and build your own family, you get to decide what from your family of origin you want to take into your new family and what you want to leave behind.  

A couple of years ago, while Andy and I were doing some hard work to decide what we wanted our  family to look like, we made a family rules sign for our home.  We wanted our mission to be ever-before our family...to remind us of the story that God is writing uniquely for us.   Imagine our shock when it turned into a business!  It's one of those things that I know if we'd tried to plan it, it never would've happened.  What an honor it is for us to help you guys write your family's story through words on a custom sign for your homes!