Day 12: How have you changed in the last 5 years?

Five years ago would put us in March of 2009.  I was living in Sioux City, was still in school full-time (had about a year left), was working full-time at Girls Inc. of Sioux City, and was single with no children.

The next five years brought a crazy amount of new life-changing events.  I quit my position at Girls Inc. that spring/summer and moved home for the summer.  That was quite an adjustment since I had been on my own for the past almost 3 years.  After that summer at home, I moved back to the Sioux City area and worked at a daycare for a short time and then got a position at Greenberg's Jewelers at the Southern Hills Mall in Sioux City while I finished up my last year of school.  After graduating in May of 2010, I worked for Greenberg's until shortly after I found out I was pregnant.  I applied and accepted a job back home, which I am still currently at.

I already described in a previous blog post about my relationship with my children's biological father, so there is no need to describe all that again, but needless to say, the rest of 2010 and the beginning of 2011 was a fairly trying time in my life.

In February of 2011, I became a mommy for the first time when Bentlee Jacob entered the world at 7lbs 3oz.  While having him in my world couldn't have made me any happier, my relationship situation was far from picture perfect. 

In May of 2011, I first found out I was pregnant AGAIN only 3 short months after Bentlee was born. Two weeks later, Bentlee passed away due to SIDS at the babysitter's.  That was obviously one of the most life-changing things I have ever endured.  Talk about emotions...being pregnant after just having a baby 3 months prior, and then losing a baby 2 weeks later???!!  I am not quite sure how I survived that one...

I left that relationship situation shortly after Bentlee passed away, and started the journey of being a single pregnant lady.  I kept my pregnancy pretty quiet for the most part, and even the birth, mainly because of my situation at the time with "bio-dad".  Evalee Marie graced me with her presence in January of 2012,  and I lived in my grandparents house on my parents' farm with her.  I eventually bought my first house in December of 2012.  After fixing it up, Evalee and I moved in the week before her first birthday.

I remained single until Evalee was about a year and a half old.  I tried out the whole Match.com thing in 2012 and got a couple of guys' contact information from it after about a month, and then closed down my account.  Among those guys was Nick.  He added me to Facebook way back in July of 2012, but because of a lot of B.S. I was dealing with from Evie's bio-dad at the time, I kind of avoided "dates" to prevent someone else getting caught in all of the drama.  Nick and I kept in contact off an on for the next several months and eventually went out on a date...and well...the rest is history.  We hit it off.  It seemed like everything in my life was finally falling into place after a hectic past few years.

Unfortunately, my relationship with Nick ended tragically with his passing this past January, and I am still trying to figure out where to go from here.  Evalee and I are back to our life with just her and I, and I am back in single-mama mode. 

The past 5 years have been a whirlwind of emotion and experiences....some overwhelmingly happy, and some tragically sad.  Would I do anything differently?  Absolutely not.  We can't rewind our lives to make them perfect.  To go back and change things in our lives would be to change our whole future, and even though my past hurts terribly in a lot of ways, a lot of good came with that hurt.

In a nutshell, how I've changed in the last 5 years...I finished school and found a great job, I became a mom, I lost a child, I found love and I lost it tragically.  Through it all I gained family, friends, and a true sense of who I am and want to be.