This summer will mark 10 years since I very suddenly began my journey with dysautonomia. Although I try not to think about all of the symptoms all at once, it has and continues to change my life in drastic ways. Some of those ways are good, like my illness being the impetus for starting Picture Birmingham, which has now donated nearly $60,000 to The WellHouse. Also, dysautonomia is what forced me to become a runner, because running helps with my symptoms a good deal, and on most days, running feels like a positive change. But of course, living with a chronic illness has changed my life in a lo ..read more

I was at church, and my phone and Fitbit had SOS alarms going off. Loud, repetitive, chirping, SOS alarms. Clearly they were automatically set up to notify local emergency response crews, as I could hear sirens in the background, growing closer to church. I frantically hurried through the hallways, looking for somewhere to sit down and fix the problem. I tried turning them off. Resetting them. Switching off the SOS alarm. Nothing would stop the repetition. Nothing would stop the DANG CHIRPING that was about to drive me insane and crack my head open. Nothing would stop the oncoming slaught of ..read more

Whether you need last-minute Christmas gifts or some fantastic books to curl up with on rainy (or snowy, depending on where you are – you lucky, lucky person) winter days, here are my latest favorite books. To check out my past recommendations, click here. Current Favorite Author: Kate Milford. She has written 8 (or 9, if you count the one you can only get in .pdf format) books for middle grade, but in my opinion, her books should be adult books – mostly because of their complexity. Her novels aren’t all meant to read in a specific order, and happen in different places, times, and with differi ..read more

I never envisioned my life to include caring deeply about a giant slab of living snot. But here we are. Not only do I have one pet giant slab of living snot, but I actually have five adorable pets. And I do care for them very deeply. A SCOBY is the stuff of my children’s nightmares. Literally. When I first mentioned that I was going to attempt to make kombucha at home, one of them gasped and the other squealed. “That doesn’t mean you’re going to have a SCOBY – IN OUR HOUSE – does it?!?” It does indeed. SCOBY stands for Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast. And it’s just as nasty lookin ..read more

Guest Post by Chris the Husband. There we were, the five of us, unlikely comrades in an unlikely place – a dry-heaving, lost, and injured party – with one unlikely hero to save us all. ****** 12 Hours Earlier: I stood at the start line in the early dark. It wasn’t very cold – 60 degrees – but the wet blanket of humidity made steam out my breath anyway. I had trained for 9 months on hard terrain with a comprehensive strategy of speed, weight loss, elevation, heat, distance, equipment, nutrition, hydration, and preparation. I’d woken up almost yesterday, ridden a school bus 90 minutes from the f ..read more

For every summer since first grade (except for 2020 … which as an aside, the phrase “except for 2020” should be a given addendum to nearly any sentence about anything), Noah has attended two weeks of day camp at our church, Camp Adventure. It is the most exciting, fun, delightful 70 hours of Noah’s entire year. Camp Adventure regularly wins “Best Summer Camp” ratings in Birmingham because of the incredible amount of work and creativity put into it to make it the dreamy camp that it is. Every week has a different theme such as Spy Camp, Creative Camp, Build Camp and more, each having its own un ..read more

Chris’ Grandmother, Millie, was a tiny precious woman that I met when she was already quite advanced in age. She was always kind to me, and I liked her very much. I think she liked me, too, as I provided her, at 90 years old, with her first great-grandchild. She met Ali just a couple of times before she passed away 15 years ago. One of my favorite pictures is from her 90th birthday, the first time she got to meet Ali. I heard a couple of stories here and there about Millie’s early years, and particularly the incredibly romantic and farfetched way she’d met her husband Roy, Chris’ granddad, but ..read more

The thing is, I’ve always been mostly against matching. I have written about it here. Multiple times. Sure, Ali and her best friend had matching pjs when they were toddlers – but match my husband and my son? Never would I ever. My family knows this. My family has watched me agonize over wardrobes for family photos – my circular thoughts spinning out on “how can we NOT clash, coordinate-but-not-cheesily, but DEFINITELY NOT MATCH?” I have lived my life by these principles. So they should have suspected something when I got Chris and Noah matching shirts for Easter. They should have known. But ap ..read more

My plan was always to save the Grand Canyon for an epic trip – when I had time to plan it, time to fully process and prepare to hike down in it, or take a helicopter ride above it, or all of the above. But once we realized that it was more or less in the direction in which we would have to travel to make our way through our unexpected road trip, the die was cast. How could we not go? In fairness, I clearly hadn’t fully done my research before the trip – if I had realized how perfectly situated Flagstaff was between The Grand Canyon and The Petrified Forest, I would have always planne ..read more

Saguaro National Park. It’s a tiny little spit of land – or actually two spits – one hugging each side of Tucson like strangers in the airport that insist on sitting right next to you, despite the luggage barrier you tried to create. We’d not planned on going to it, as aforementioned, but when one finds themselves unexpectedly in a city squeezed betwixt two halves of a National Park, and one is on a mission to go to as many national parks as possible, one absolutely goes to Saguaro National Park. We chose the western Saguaro, in the Rincon Mountains, which was fun for me because I run in Hoka ..read more