Stressful Monday at the office:
-Renting our dream house for our Seaside, FL Trip for 3 weeks
-Spent 100% of the day with my most treasured people
-Watched my baby ride her bike without training wheels for the first time with her daddy running behind her (on a Monday… because we get to be a stay at home family — TOGETHER!)
-Signed up 2 new oilers while laying by the pool (nobody’s here… we love being able to travel during off season and on weekdays!)
-Grilled out and watched the sun go down on the front porch as a fam
I share little bits about our life and the way the last 3 years have changed everything, and there’s a huge passion behind why (aside from documenting it for our family).
It wasn’t always this way. Ty and I started our family as a pair of 19 year olds with a baby on the way. We were “ramen noodles broke” and lived on $14,000 that first year. A few years later Ty had a great job and I was running a successful photography business and blog, and we were delighted but yet it still didn’t feel like absolute freedom. Ty was working 60 hours a week and wasn’t able to be there for things he wished he could with the kids. He was gone before the kids woke up and he came home in time to put them to bed, and we know that’s how it is for a lot of families. Dads sacrificing their lives for their families, and not even getting to be with their families.
God laid it on our hearts for Tyler to quit his job and be with us (to go back to darn near “ramen noodles broke,” but to BE TOGETHER) and we made that leap. He walked away from his job and we cut our income in half and existed solely on my photography/blogging. It was counter-culture and abnormal and probably hard for people to understand, but it was the right move for us.
We adopted N & H in 2014 back to back. (Fun fact: When we later asked Noley’s birth mom why she picked us to be his family, she said it came down to the fact that Tyler stays home 🙂 How cool is God?!)
Somewhere in all that crazy mix, in May of 2014, Young Living entered our lives. It transformed our family’s health, and then it began to transform our life financially as well. We were able to pay off both adoptions and H’s NICU stay (totaling over $60,000) that same year. Debt free. We’ve been able to start funding adoptions for other families. We’ve been able to homeschool our kiddos, travel the world, and find incredible fulfillment that we THOUGHT we had before, but have truly found now. We started bringing in more per month than Ty used to make in a year… and it kept growing (still does).
Like I said… there’s a reason we share this stuff. And that reason is that we know a lot of people who are still in bondage living lives that don’t fulfill them. We get to live on earth ONCE and we don’t know for how long. We were made for freedom! The freedom to serve people at the drop of a hat, the freedom to say “yes!” when God calls us to move, the freedom to live life abundantly and help others do the same… for loving people recklessly and fully, and leading them to freedom too.
ANYWAYS, all that to say: We want this for each person who desires it. If you’re ever curious about what we do, shoot me an email here and I’d love to tell you all about it and how it might bring your family closer to freedom too.
XOXO
Madison
PS. Stay tuned for more Seaside, FL Trip pictures… maybe even non-iPhone ones if I’m feeling crazy! 😉