About

My name is Kathleen, and I live in Southwest Virginia with my husband, Adam and two kids, Charlotte and Jonah.
We are originally from Ohio. We met in college studying to be teachers, and in our last year, we decided that we didn't want to teach in Ohio. We took our last Spring Break in college to drive around the mid-Atlantic, and we ended up moving to southwest Virginia to be teachers. He teaches elementary school, and I teach high school English. That was almost ten years ago.
A couple of years after moving here, it became clear that God had brought us here to be a part of our current church body. He has been teaching us, molding and shaping us through this church, and He has also provided to us a family here when our biological family can't be here.
There was a lot of initial adversity that came from having our daughter, Charlotte. Don't get me wrong; she is an amazing blessing, but there were definitely some challenges at first. She was our first child, of course, but she was born unexpectedly with bilateral clubfoot in an emergency c-section. Gratefully, we had an excellent pediatric orthopedist in the area, but casting, braces and a tenotomy on each foot were needed over about three years. A year and a half after Charlotte was born, Adam lost his job, and for a couple of years, we had some hard times. Thankfully, we pulled through it, and our marriage and our family is much stronger for it. Praise God.

The reason I tell you this is twofold; one reason is that I always want to know the story of the person whose blog I'm reading, and I thought you might want to know that too. The second is a little more complicated. In the months and years after Charlotte was born, I went online to find encouragement, solace, tips and advice. As two teachers, there is no way we could afford for me to stay at home, but every blog that I loved by a Christian woman was written by a woman who stayed at home, usually homeschooled, had several children, and in some cases, grew and canned her own produce. As faithful and wonderful as these women's stories were, they were not the help that I needed. I needed help balancing work and family in a God-honoring way. I needed godly role models to show me that I didn't need to resent my job or my husband's job because I couldn't be home. I needed women to tell me that it was okay that I couldn't be home, and that not every woman is made to stay at home. Even me, I felt sure that I was called to stay at home, and I couldn't. What I didn't need was blogs telling me that if we just made a few sacrifices, we could make it work. We couldn't. We made sacrifices to make our lives work, and that was with my paycheck.
With God's grace, I pulled through this period of difficulty, and my husband who is wonderful and strong and courageous supported me through it all, and our marriage is infinitely stronger because of it. But there is still a void in the range of quality blogs by Christian women. Few, if any, are written by women who are not the women I mentioned above. There is nothing wrong these women, but I am not them.
This blog began as a way of keeping my out-of-town family members in the loop with what our kids are doing, since they don't see them that often. Recently, I have made a separate blog for that, so that this blog's mission can be more streamlined. My goal is to create a space that encourages Christian women, women who strive to be Christ in their homes, Titus 2 and Proverbs 31 women. And I'm going to do it from a working-outside-the-home perspective because that's where God has placed me. Join me, if you will.
I am where I am because of God's grace. I am not Superwoman, and I am not perfect; I'm pretty ordinary. I am not saying that staying at home is easier than working outside the home. But God has brought me to where I am, and I am grateful for His faithfulness and grace to me. I hope that this blog can be a blessing to you.

 As always, Soli Deo Gloria.