One Long Year

It's been an incredibly long fourteen months since I last wrote on this blog. My wife does a much better job of keeping things updated over on her blog, which is definitely worth your time to check out.

It would take much more time than I have to cover the entire last year in one blog post, so I'll abbreviate.

• We spent twelve and a half of those months technically homeless, living with friends & family in their homes, trying to get back on our own feet.
• We moved to Fort Worth, Texas for the hottest part of the summer of 2011 and then back to South Carolina just before Christmas, because it was close to impossible to get necessary medical care for our oldest daughter there.
• We got pregnant in September 2011, right after we moved to Texas and right about the time we decided we weren't going to try for a baby anymore.
• I did manual labor in Texas, a short term at an industrial company right after we moved back to SC, several months as a gas station attendant and finally, landed a wonderful, steady, and full-time job working with the school district. I work in the same school that our oldest just started attending, which has made for a really nice transition into middle school for her.
• I actually just got a promotion, so I will be working in both schools that our girls attend, as well as a couple of others.
• My twelve-year-old Saturn coupe stopped running, after limping along like a dog with a broken leg. We borrowed a vehicle for a short time and were able to take out a loan for a new-to-us PT Cruiser last month. It's beautiful, we have plenty of room now (which we definitely did not before) and it runs like a dream.
• We were able to move into our own apartment last week, and we could not be happier and more appreciative of having our own space than we are right now. Our friends and family were so generous to allow us to stay with them for so long, and we will forever be grateful to them, but there is so much to be said for being in our own place again. It's a 2-bedroom, so twice as much room as we had in our old basement apartment.


• Sadly, our beautiful baby girl Clara was born still on July 1, 2012. We were 42 weeks and 3 days pregnant, so eager to meet our new little one. It was unexpected... we found out only an hour before she was born. It has been the most awful thing that either Heather or I has ever been through, and in spite of our recent turn of luck financially, we walk through each day with a heavy sadness in our hearts. Heather wrote out Clara's story on her blog, and she said it better than I ever could.


• As far as drawing goes, I've drawn very little in the past year. I drew one fairy in Texas... and then started a portrait of what I thought our baby girl would look like in May. It turns out that my drawing was almost spot on... it could have been drawn from a photograph of Clara, rather than months before she was born. I'll finish it one day soon and post it here. Now that we're in our own place, I intend to start drawing again. I miss the creative release and expression. I'm a happier man when I'm drawing, putting graphite to paper and giving a face to my viewpoint.

It's been one long year... and I'm hoping that the next one brings us peace, prosperity and a lot less sadness.

If you're still following my blog, I thank you kindly. I'll have more drawings to share, very soon I hope.

Clara's Flower Butterfly drawn by Carly Marie