Stories about blended families, hockey rinks, healing, motherhood, second chances, and figuring out life after survival mode.
Hi, I’m Alanna.
Forty-something. Mum of five. Bonus mum to one more. Account manager by day. Professional chauffeur to hockey rinks, dance competitions, gymnastics meets, orthodontist appointments, and whatever emergency destination a child suddenly needs to be at with eleven minutes’ notice.
Life looks a lot different than I imagined it would.
These days, my world revolves around a beautifully chaotic blended family, a calendar that requires military-level coordination, and a grocery bill that regularly makes me question whether I’m secretly feeding a small village.
I’ve been a dance teacher, a bartender, a single mum raising five kids, and the woman wandering Costco wondering how the cart is already full when I only came in for milk.
I’ve lived through some hard chapters. Divorce. Addiction. Heartbreak. Courtrooms. The kind of years that teach you resilience whether you wanted the lesson or not.
But this season of life feels different.
The kids are growing up way too fast. The hockey bags keep multiplying. My fiancé is the kindest human I know. We live in a multi-generational home where there is usually someone around to help, laugh, listen, or remind me that the laundry has been sitting in the washer since yesterday.
For the first time in a long time, I’m spending less energy surviving and more energy living.
This little corner of the internet is where I write about all of it.
The funny stuff. The hard stuff. The things nobody warns you about.
Parenting teenagers. Blended family life. Healing. Perimenopause. Hockey. Dance. Gymnastics. Marriage. Codependency. Reinventing yourself at forty. Learning that peace is a skill. Discovering that happiness doesn’t usually arrive in grand moments, but quietly, in the middle of ordinary Tuesday afternoons.
There will be stories.
There will be sarcasm.
There will almost certainly be references to the Backstreet Boys.
And if you’ve ever looked around at your wonderfully imperfect life and thought, “Well… this isn’t exactly how I planned it, but maybe it’s turning out okay after all,” then you’re in the right place.
Welcome.