All About Me....The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly!

Ok, if you look to the sidebar you will find a lovely picture of me.  I am a pretty average 5'3" (and a half!), weigh a very ugly 210 lbs., self-employed stay-at-home mom of 4 amazing kids plus one (who has sworn fervently to me for the last 12 years that while he "may grow older, [he] will never grow up").  I own a small online business I call "The Handmade Heritage" and run a monthly boutique event that I termed "Mom's Monthly Market and Charity Fundraiser".  You will hear about these all quite often as they are the bulk of my life.  The one other major item which fills my life is church.  I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  I also volunteer quite too often for various activities and functions including spending an inordinate amount of time at our local Cache Valley Community Garden maintaining our own plots, plus extras.  All of this is on top of the normal, day-to-day activities which so quickly consume everyone's lives: personal health, figuring out finances, cleaning house, hoping Griffon (our family's favorite little household gremlin who loves socks) is not getting up to too many antics, dreaming of the day when I can begin writing again, etc.

This blog is essentially the quest of a self-employed, stay-at-home mom's crusade to get off welfare, out of debt, free from my own self-image problems, and generally on a healthier pathway of life...all while remaining sane, keeping my kids and husband fed, clothed, and healthy and my mind hopefully intact as well!  Sound like a lot to you?  It does to me!  But it is the game we all play every day.  So I decided to do what most people do these days: blog about it.  But this blog is very specifically meant to be one that strictly tests the methods I use to accomplish my goals.  I am working to keep most of my personal posts limited to other sites so that this will just be a practical test site for all the various methods, products, tips, tricks, and information I use.  I hope you all find it helpful as well, and thanks for stopping by!  Please, if you have found other methods that work better for you don't hesitate to post about them in the comments!!! 

With all of this, it makes for a very overwhelming schedule to maintain.  I have my reasons (I'm sure you'll hear many of them eventually) for feeling that I must keep them all up, so I simply try to power through my days as best I can and hope that not too much falls to the wayside.  Unfortunately, in the last few years that has happened more often than not.  And since the more people I meet in similar circumstances are all complaining of the same things, I thought I would just do a very common thing now-a-days: share with you all my ups and downs in sorting it all out in my own hair-brained way.  I'm hoping that in doing so, you will see some of my successes and failures before you attempt anything too crazy (since I'm usually one of the "jump and pray you don't fall" types) so you will at least know what has happened with one person who attempted it already.

So consider this blog my own personal quest.