I love true stories. It’s almost an obsession. I have read dozens and dozens of memoirs/biographies. And my hands down FAVORITE podcast is How I Built This becuase each week you hear a story from a succesful entrepeneur. Anyway, it’s been such an honor to be able to integrate this interest into my own blog by inviting others to share their stories via How We Met and Inspiring Moms. Note to self, I need to get landing pages for those series.

By the way, the next Inspiring Mom is a friend of mine who has been a mom for 19 years and has so many different stories that she could share; each one is  just as phenomenal as the last. Her latest adventure involves moving with her husband and 3 of her school aged children from Waxahachie Texas to Roatan Honduras.

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She looks so young it’s hard to tell whose who. This is Shana-

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She is going to give us a glimpse of what it’s like making such and dramatic change and potentially whet the apetite of those who have considered living abroad.

You can look forward to that this coming Monday, but today I wanted to share a few little creative collections of sorts from previous Messy Mom contributors.

First off, my dad shared his story back in 2015 of how he met my mother (sounds like a TV show). He mentions how  he met Nancy in High School when he had his pilots licence so he was able to fly her around the mountains of Vermont.

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Now,  40 years later she is the one flying him around thanks to her flying benefits from working for Delta.

She is also flying all of her grandkids around. It’s been a tradition to take each grandchild on a trip when they turn 5 (give or take). Ezie is almost 5 and just recently had his first plane ride to Florida. My dad caught this video of his reaction and it is the SWEETEST. It truly encapsulates that child like wonder that we all can only hope to get a tiny taste of as adults.

The next year in 2016 Melissa Mulvany shared how she met her spouse. She was a black jack dealer at a charity table at the bar where she met Ian. You can read the whole story here, but (spoiler alert) they have now been married for 18 years, have 3 awesome boys, and are serving the Lord together as a family in their home and community.



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Melissa posted a photo on Facebook a couple days ago that made me laugh outloud. I asked permission to share and she said yes. These two women (Melissa on the left) were best friends in college and 17 years ago when they were new moms they took this photo together holding eachother’s babies.

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They recently reunited and decided to try to recreate that same photo. The results are hilarious.

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I love how the teens cooperated to the point that they even try to mimic their faces and hands. The young man in the photo is Melissa’s football player son towering over all of them. What a difference 17 years makes! One of my best friends from my college years is coming to Ohio in a few weeks and I am hoping to do this same thing with her. I’ll definitely reveal the photo afterwards if it all works out!

Last but not least, for this most recent How We Met series Emily Williams shared about her husband Colton’s esophegeal cancer diagnosis moved them from Kentucky to New York City for immuno therapy and clinical trial treatment. Colton has stage IV cancer and a year ago the doctors were ready to give up. They wanted to pursue palliative care for Colton, but this couple did not quit! They keep fighting, and praying, and linking arms with their loved ones and believing for more. It’s been a roller coaster but we’ve seen miracles along the way.  For their whole story you can follow Colton and Emily on cure.coltonwilliams.com and for their love story you can read Emily’s guest post for How We Met.

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So what I wanted to share from Colton today is this incredible moving poem. Now that you know a bit of his back story you can see the depths of where Colton is coming from when he speaks these truths. It is so raw and so powerful; I hope everyone watches it and that all of us would be shocked into being thankful for life.