My name is Katie.
I live with my husband Cortney and my sons Eddie and Charlie in a little city on the Lake Michigan coastline in Michigan.
My life is nothing like I imagined it would be.
It didn’t follow my plan at all.
I knew Cort almost all my life, but we didn’t fall in love until our mid-twenties when we had a quick courtship and lovely wedding.
And since then, we have struggled to find the “easy” part of life.
Oh we have had hurdles in our life. But we persevered by laughing through the tough stuff.
In the first few months of marriage we lost Cort’s dad to cancer (and on the same day his dad died, Cort lost his appendix).
We were suddenly aware of how much our vows would be tested.
In our second year, we lost an unplanned pregnancy.
It taught us that we truly wanted to be parents while simultaneously breaking our hearts wide open.
It was around that time that I decided to start blogging.
I needed to write our life. I needed to put our stories from my perspective somewhere.
I needed a physical record that I was here…that I wasn’t just a name on a family tree.
I was on the layoff list from my teaching job…four times.
Through it all we somehow kept trying to find the good in this life.
And we kept laughing.
So I kept blogging…even though there were times I wanted to quit.
I needed to keep telling our story.
Five days after our fourth wedding anniversary I gave birth to our first child. A son. Eddie.
My blogging took a bit of a change when I became a mom.
No longer was I posting silly pictures of my cat or updates about our jobs or the flower beds I was ignoring tending to.
Now I was blogging about being a mom.
Things did not get easy after the baby in the baby carriage.
There have been more hurdles.
When Eddie was four months old, Cort lost his job.
And nine months after Eddie’s birth I was diagnosed with Postpartum Depression.
Our life hurdles don’t go away. They just change.
But we fight through them…together.
Each time we conquer another mountain, we are stronger.
And now…
we have added to our family again.
Our Charlie was born in March of 2012.
Again there were challenges.
Along with PPD, I was not diagnosed with PTSD, OCD, and General Depression and Anxiety.
We have hit bumps, but we push on.
We are a little family doing what we do.
We experience hardships.
We experience joys.
We choose to keep our eyes on the joys.
This is why I blog.
To tell of the joy in all the things.
To write the story of our life for future generations.
I hope you enjoy visiting Sluiter Nation.
Twitter: @ksluiter
Sluiter Nation by Katie Sluiter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
