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My name is Charity and I live in a beautiful suburb of Denver, Colorado with my husband Andy and my three little ones Adalyn, Carter and Aubrey.
As a former TV writer and producer, I have a deep passion for telling stories, and I believe nothing is more powerful than words formulated in a way that allows them to linger on your heart or mind long after you’ve read them.
Crafts are my joyful escape from the hard stuff life dishes out. Nothing makes my heart go pitter-patter like a too-cute-to-stand-it cake pop, impossibly detailed homemade paper card, perfectly coordinated themed party or amazing food art that defies the laws of the kitchen. Aside from writing, crafting brings me an immense amount of happiness and joy. And those are both things I want to share with you! Let’s put the hard stuff on hold, even for just a few moments, and create something beautiful together. Don’t worry, I’ll show you how!
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I have the most amazing husband who encourages and enables me to bring my crafty ideas to life. The smile I get from him when I start a sentence with, “So I have this idea…” is a staple in our house. I come up with the crazy ideas and he’s the engineering brains behind helping me figure out a tangible way to execute them. Like that one time when my knife wasn’t sharp enough to carve and build a 5 foot tree out of pineapples, he willingly went and got his drill and different tools to help me finish my project. All the late-night runs to the store to buy whatever I need at the moment, as well as the time spent brainstorming and troubleshooting with me makes him a keeper in my book. If that’s not true love, I don’t know what is!
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I had never considered sharing anything personal until I started to experience some really big things life threw at me a few years ago including depression, anxiety, blood clots, inflammatory diseases, a school shooting, a miscarriage, a separated tailbone and chronic pain. I’ve almost lost my life a few times in the process, and this is all on top of having three children and trying to be a good mom and wife. So now I want to share my story and come alongside others who might be facing similar situations, because we are better together than we are alone.
While giving birth to my firstborn, Adalyn, I almost died from massive hemorrhaging that caused me to lose half of my total blood volume. After I recovered from that trauma, I felt like I was given a second chance to make the most of the limited amount of time I had been given on this earth. It gave me an entirely new appreciation and zest for life. Being a new mom with the opportunity to live and raise my daughter was a gift I had casually overlooked. I made a promise to myself that I would never take anything for granted and be grateful for everything, no matter how small. Two years later we had Carter, our rainbow baby, who suffered from severe GI problems, as well as an eye condition which led to three surgeries before he was 2 years old. All in all, things were going seemingly well and I was pretty proud of myself for navigating through all the tough situations and counting my blessings. That is until my 3rd child was born.
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From there, everything crashed and burned.
And by crashed, I mean like a semi slamming into a brick wall at 200 miles an hour.
And by burned, I mean burning like the fire of a thousand suns.
Life as I knew it was forever changed.
I had a complication from delivery that left me with unexplained nerve damage in my leg. I could not drive; I struggled to walk and even get up and down from the floor. I couldn’t kick off my shoes or cross my legs. How do you navigate those waters when you have a newborn, two other young children to care for and postpartum hormones coming out of your ears? This all led to extremely severe anxiety and postpartum depression turned clinical depression that put me in the emergency room on more than one occasion. To be honest, I don’t remember the first 6 months of Aubrey’s life. I literally have no memory of it, except for a few mental snapshots and some pictures on my phone that I can’t recall taking. All I remember is going to doctor after doctor after doctor and begging someone to help me. Once I started to wake up from that nightmare nearly 2 years later, I suffered many more health problems, including a pulmonary embolism, that killed part of my right lung almost ended my life again, and a bad fall down the stairs. I’m now learning how to live my everyday life with chronic pain.
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These experiences have taught me that we can’t do life alone. I have learned it’s ok to not be ok. I grieve the loss of the blissfully ignorant, joyful, always-smiling person I was before all the trauma, but there is beauty in the ashes. I am now able to connect with other people going through similar struggles that I wouldn’t have been able to genuinely empathize with before. And that is one of the main reasons for this blog.
Being a wife is hard.
Being a mom is hard.
Being depressed is hard.
Being anxious is hard.
Being sick is hard.
Being in pain is hard.
Being hopeless is hard.
Being depleted is hard.
Being dismissed is hard.
Being stripped of joy is hard.
Being alive in today’s world is hard.
It’s all just HARD!
But you don’t have to go through it alone.
We were not created to be alone. We are meant to have fellowship with one another. We are meant to share our thoughts, struggles, successes, failures, dreams, fears, grief and insecurities with each other. We are made to offer kindness, support and encouragement. We are meant to do life together and willingly meet people where they are. You are welcome here, and wherever you are in your journey, I’ll meet you there.
It’s not an accident that you stumbled onto my blog and I’m so glad you are here! Whether you’re looking for connection with other moms, understanding, encouragement, support, a fun craft or just a place to escape the outside world for a little while, you’re in the right place.
My promise to you is I won’t sugar coat my experiences (unless we’re talking about a cake pop that’s supposed to have a glorious amount of sugar coating!) and that I’ll be genuine, raw, real and vulnerable as we talk about our Little Ones, Big Things and Everything in Between.
Family photos and headshots taken by Vintage Spark Photography