Beautiful Spontaneity

Some of my most beautiful choices have been headlong leaps into the unknown.

Perhaps you haven't noticed before, but I tend to live by the seat of my pants. Yes, I am a planner. Yes, I love lists. Yes, I can organize and carry out fairly big projects. But I also work best under pressure. And when you don't have anyone giving you pressure anymore, you sort of have to make it yourself. And when you make it yourself, once in a while you realize just how impulsive you really are.

Looking back I can see some major times in my life when my impulsivity changed my very life course.

- When I chose to relocate permanently to Cincinnati barely days after returning home from school
- When I accepted my husbands proposal of marriage a mere 5 months after meeting him
- When he talked me into going to college to get my bachelors degree, and finished in 3 years
- When we decided to start having kids and I said I was all in! Let's stack 'em deep and sell 'em cheap.
- When I started this blog!

The consequences of the kid example are the most beautiful, funny, difficult, endearing, frustrating, lovable blessings in my life. And I'm only one shy of my goal of 4. Yet, now that I'm the mother of a blossoming 5 year old, a sensitive but hilarious 3 year old, and the most demanding, laid back paradox-of-a-1-year-old I've ever met, I've stepped back a little from my headlong ways to breath a bit. Or at least I thought I had.

You see, little 1 year old has shown signs of having food allergies for a while now. And so, after talking about it for a few weeks, I decided (pretty much overnight) to do it. Yep. I'm doing it. I'm all psyched up for it, the energy is there... let's make it happen.

I'm on day three of being a family free of the 8 big allergens - dairy, eggs, wheat, soy, peanuts, tree nuts, fish and shellfish. And I thought, why not! In for an ounce, in for a pound (that's what I always say!). Let's throw in gluten! So here we are, learning as we go. Stumbling through our diets and feeling hungry as I figure out what portions are appropriate when there's not a thick piece of bread or big bowl of pasta to go with our meals.

Oh homemade mac and cheese... how I could eat an enormous bowl of you right now. Preferably with a big slab of homemade garlic bread, a tall glass of milk, and a big portion of ice cream to top it off. :)

Here's to hoping this latest case of jumping off my own manmade cliff turns into yet another amazing, life-changing event that brings me more joy and energy to make other life-changing cliff jumps possible.