Hey friends! I’m so excited you’re here! Like, really, really happy. This blog, me sharing my heart and the insides of my life has been in the making for years. It’s been tugging at me, nudging its way in and out of my life. It wasn’t until I started to take captive my wellness journey that I decided it was time. Time to share with others. Time to hopefully inspire and help others any way I can! And since overall wellness, which can mean so many different things for everyone, is my biggest passion, I figured it was time to not let insecurities, fears, and just plain laziness get in the way of that. I want to serve YOU! I’m here for YOU. And maybe a little bit for me too! It’s a creative outlet and we all know what that can do to a person’s soul.

So here we are.

I’m getting real close to giving birth to our third baby girl. Our world is about to change yet again. And I couldn’t be more excited. Sure, a little scared of what’s to come and how everyone will transition, but overall I’m feeling ready to handle business! And fall in love yet again with a tiny little human that I helped to create. Pretty amazing.

I wanted to give some back story to who I am and how I got here. So let’s dive in.

My husband and I met back in 2008 at one of our still-to-this-day favorite coffee shops, Peet’s Coffee and Tea! Little did we know then how influential this place would be throughout the coming years.

We both got hired to help open a new store in Irvine, CA, but rarely worked or saw each other those first few months. Well, one of the first shifts that we actually did work together pretty much started and ended it all! We chatted in between helping customers and making lattes. Mostly about music, showing off my fully stocked IPOD, probably thinking in my head how impressive I looked with such a wide variety of genres. I so “discreetly” hung around the shop after my shift ended, secretly hoping we could chat some more once his shift ended. That worked in my favor as our day continued in to the night and suddenly it was breakfast time the next morning and we hadn’t stopped talking.

We were pretty much inseparable from that day forward. We rarely spent a day apart from each other and we loved how much we enjoyed one another’s company. He became my very best friend.

We moved around to a couple different cities in Orange County, me working full time at the coffee shop and him working part time tutoring and getting his Masters degree and teaching credential in English.

Eventually our path led us to the middle of nowhere…good ol’ Exeter, CA. Well, it’s not nowhere, but to us it was a huge change of pace! And we were really excited for it. We had saved up enough money to pay six months rent up front and moved in to an adorable little one bedroom duplex down the street from my older sister and her family. We enjoyed the slowness of a small town. We enjoyed being together somewhere new. We enjoyed witnessing my sister and brother in laws CrossFit business and family grow. It was a special time in our lives which really started to shift and transform part of who we are today. Our health journey truly began here and was also where we decided to get engaged!

We lived in Exeter for about 6 months until Brian got his first real teaching job at a High School in Salinas, CA. So off to Monterey we went, him teaching and me working again at Peet’s Coffee. It was a really fun year being in such a beautiful place, planning our wedding, being young and basically getting do whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted! Which now looking back after having kids…I realize what a luxury that window of time was!

Then a few months before our wedding, we unexpectedly found out we were expecting! It was definitely a shock, as this was something we knew we wanted sooner than later, but not quite yet! We fully embraced the change coming our way though, knowing how special a baby truly is. Being a mom was something I had always desired, so even though it was just a tad sooner than expected, that’s life and you roll with it!

Our wedding day was something magical and beautiful and a whirlwind all at once. And still one of the best days of my life. Post wedding, we were in a sort of limbo, figuring out our next move, job opportunities, and ultimately where we wanted to begin our journey raising our daughter. I had become quite close with my older sister over the years, especially getting to live so close to each other in Exeter the year before. It felt right to go back there and become a family, even though that meant leaving behind a great job my husband loved and such a beautiful, coastal city like Monterey.

In January of 2014, we welcomed our beautiful daughter Evely Jeane! We had a home birth at my parents place, which you can read all about here.

Brian worked from home the first year of her life which allowed him to be very involved. There’s something so special about that time looking back at it now. We were always together which was so helpful! But the fact that as a father, especially with your first born, being able to witness all those firsts is pretty amazing and maybe not all that common these days. We got to do so much of it together. And I know those are memories we will both cherish forever.

Once I was back in the swing of life after baby, I was able to get back in to CrossFit since my sister owned a gym in town still. Fortunately I was able to workout majority of my pregnancy, up until about a week before her due date! I’d like to believe that this contributed to my pretty quick and mellow first birth experience. My body felt strong and ready! This time in our life was also when we started dabbling more in to a “paleo” way of eating, but still weren’t very consistent. Baby steps!

After about a year and a half of being back in Exeter, we knew we were ready for a change. Location and career wise. A series of things unfolded really quickly that ultimately led us to sunny San Diego!

We somehow found this amazing and charming 2 bedroom home for a completely affordable price and thoroughly enjoyed it for two years. We lived near downtown San Diego and loved the diversity, walkability, and good coffee and food options galore!

We also found out about a month after moving that we were expecting our second child! We joke about how I only get pregnant in coastal cities because we were trying for a couple months in Exeter, but it wasn’t happening. Then sure enough, one month in to moving back to the coast and bam! Preggo!

My second pregnancy was similar to my first and generally pretty mellow. A bit of morning sickness, but never anything that made me actually sick. Horrible heartburn though. I tried to keep my body active, but not being a part of a gym made it hard to stay motivated on my own. I had weeks where I’d get in some solid home workouts and city walks with Evely, but overall I was inconsistent. I still felt strong, but I was used to lifting weights and pushing myself much harder in my first pregnancy. But that’s also life. A new phase. A second pregnancy. You’re not able to focus on just yourself anymore. It’s just different. So I accepted that fact and tried to give myself grace.

Our food journey had been continually unfolding over the years at this point, mostly setting our goals at leading more of a primal lifestyle, but again it’s an evolving journey. We didn’t get it right all the time. In fact, probably more often than not did we fall off the wagon. We still desired to feed that crazy sugar dragon and eat the way we had been used to all our lives. But slowly we’d make changes, we’d feel and witness the results of doing so, and would stick with it.

Thankfully we had another great birth experience with our second daughter Maeve Frances, which you can read about here!

Around six months postpartum, I was really feeling ready for a change in my physical health. I committed to starting BBG (bikini body guide) at home workouts and it actually changed my life! Not only did my body totally transform, as I had some extra baby weight to drop, but it started me on the path of being in the best shape of my life so far. But more than that, it created a habit and desire in me to have fitness be a part of my life and a part of who I am, not just something I needed to do but dreaded. Not something I just needed to do to look good. But it was about how it made me feel. What my body was now capable of.

***Also, as a little disclaimer, I highly recommend seeing a pelvic floor physical therapist during pregnancy and especially postpartum! This was something I did not do, in fact I didn’t even know it was a thing people did! I wasn’t aware of it fully at the time, but I believe the exercises I was doing for my body weren’t necessarily the best in healing after a baby. Sure I looked and felt good, but I feel like it also contributed negatively to some pelvic floor issues that I am now dealing with and aware of with my third pregnancy! It’s incredibly important to be active before, during, and after a baby, but the way in which we do that should shift and change just as our bodies do!***

We’d also been digging deeper in to our health and nutrition and followed a pretty clean, whole foods diet! Mostly Paleo. We spent time experimenting with certain grains and dairy and trying to find a good, sustainable balance for our family. It’s awesome being on the same page as your spouse because it’s something we can tackle and figure out together. And we can stand up for what we believe in together and for our girls and their health, too. Hopefully giving them the knowledge and pallete for the good stuff!

Fast forward over 5 years from the start of our health journey and we are in so many ways completely different people. We have a rhythm for our family, we desire to have a clean home free of ingredients that don’t build up our bodies, we try to be active and move every day. It’s still evolving, we’re still figuring out what helps us thrive best, but that’s life. Always moving along.

Over the years, I’ve become very passionate about what wellness looks like overall. Not just the food we eat, but the products and other things we put in to our bodies. How can we build up our immune systems to be the strongest they can be? Clean, simple ingredients!

I’m looking forward to sharing more with you soon and hope you leave here feeling inspired!

Thanks for reading, friends. I’m so happy to be connecting with you.