Just a sip of Coffey

 WARNING! This is my personal soapbox, if you do not want to continue reading, I have specifically not posted this to my regular social media so that no one has to actually read it. If you have come this far and clicked on this link, you may be more invested in my thoughts but read at your own risk . We went to see the movie, The Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot. This movie follows a small town in Texas, specifically a church group,  in the late 90's that adopts over 70 children from the foster care system over roughly two years. It begins with the Donna, Wife of  pastor W.C Martin losing her mom and in turn feeling lost. She feels this call from God to do something to make her life more like her mothers by serving. She decides to adopt children; when she breaks this to her husband he is not hearing the call from God, but eventually realizes they NEED to do this. After having a sibling set placed with them, WC realizes more and more how important this call was to t...

 As September 11th gets closer, I have been thinking about our trajectories in life. Many people who were in the towers that day or in any of the hijacked planes were in those places because of previous events and decisions that put them there in the first place. Are their people who should have been in those places and weren't because they made ever so slightly different decisions? Most likely.  This thinking may be a bit selfish on my part because it makes me think about my life now, and how no matter how indirectly, this one day when I was a mere 12 year old girl would impact the way I live my life.  If we flash back to September 11, 2001 young Sam Coffey was in his 9th grade year. Upon seeing news reports of the events of the day, this teen made the decision that he would join the military. While he grew up with grandpas and uncles in the military, nothing was so compelling as this day to sway him to his decision to join. If you would have spoken to Sam on this day, I...

On August 25, 2021 our lives changed forever. We got the long awaited call for two children who needed a place to stay. We picked up these two children from the Christmas Box House later that day, and met the two most afraid children we have ever met in our lives. I feel the need to express my feelings about the past 6 months as a way to heal as well as write to remember our experiences.  I can’t even begin to express my feelings on this topic. Our kiddos moved on to a wonderful adoptive home about a week ago, and I didn’t realize that I could feel so many different emotions all at the same time.  The children had been living with us for a few months when we got word that the goal for their case was adoption. As two people who were expecting to foster multiple children before actually adopting any children, we felt overwhelmed. We discussed this topic from October on, and went back and forth with our decision daily. Sam and I fell in love with these kiddos pretty quickly and r...

   It has been forever since I have written a blog post, and I have drafted a few in the past year but haven't posted them. A lot has been going on in our little world over here and I feel like I want to share with my people. Since Sam and I have known each other, we have always known that we wanted to foster children and adopt as many as we can sustain in our household--two at a time. Our 10-year anniversary was this year, and in January, we decided that it has been long enough and we are ready to open our home to a little more love since we have a lot to give. We knew this would be a huge commitment but felt like we are finally ready and have the space to grow our family. We started taking foster classes through Utah Foster Care in March and finished by mid-April with everything we needed to do to prepare for a home study. For those of you that don't know much about foster care, a long list is given to families of what they need to do to be ready to foster children. On the l...

I have had many thoughts over the past few days, and I'm sure most of you have as well. Whether or not people care what I have to say, I've decided to put it out there. When I was in 6th grade, my teacher would put daily quotes on the board for us to put in our journals...one of them I remember well that has been at the front of my mind lately is "Watch your thoughts; for they become your words. Watch your words; for they become your actions. Watch your actions; for they become habits. What your habits; for they become your character. Watch your character; for it will become your destiny." -Frank Outlaw. I've been thinking so much about our world today and what is happening, we have become a society that is mean. Do we ever have anything nice to say to one another? This is not to say that I haven't seen some amazing people do amazing things, and seen people that are absolutely wonderfully kind; I am just saying look at your social media feed. How much of it is...

As this first overseas deployment comes to a close(or a near close), I have been thinking about what I have learned, and I'd like to share. When we found out about deployment, I clung to the present, hoping that if I clung on hard enough, leave day would never come; well, let's get real...it doesn't work that day. As deployment came closer, I was really doubting myself and my ability to handle the house, car, dogs, and life in general by myself. Struggling with anxiety my entire life, and even worse the past few years, I was quite terrified that this was going to be the worst thing that would ever happen to me. I knew that we'd be apart for an anniversary, a milestone birthday for Sam, and 189 other days that we would not be together. I have learned a lot about what it is like to live alone and to manage without a partner for a longer period of time...the first and most important thing is; It's not that bad! I don't mean to say that I love being alone, I just me...

Since my last blog post, my husband Sam has encouraged me to continue writing, so here it goes. Last week, my sister and I got talking about this component of my anxiety called emetophobia...ever heard of it?  The definition of  Emetophobia  is an intense phobia that causes overwhelming, intense anxiety pertaining to vomiting. This specific phobia can also include subcategories of what causes the anxiety, including a fear of vomiting in public, a fear of seeing vomit, a fear of watching the action of vomiting or fear of being nauseated.  So I guess this is a pretty big deal for me...definitely not my only anxiety trigger, but it's a big one. For people who have known me my whole life pretty much know this is serious for me, but never have I ever met anyone with the same issues....so as I was talking to my sister, we started to wonder if their are others who share this deep rooted fear of Barf/Vomit/Puke/Throw up or whatever else ya'll call it...other people ob...

I have been thinking about anxiety a lot lately, especially since I started following a page called "The Mighty". This page posts so many things about having anxiety and shares the truths that people do not understand about anxiety based on their followers experiences. It helps me a lot knowing that I am not the only one. I have often felt ashamed about my anxiety, and try to hide it from other people, even when it's threatening to crawl out and explode wherever I am....the thing is, I started to realize that when I read about anxiety, and it describes all of my crazy little quirks, I realize that no one would have written a book describing me, unless it was describing millions of others as well. As much as it is so great knowing that I am not alone in this awful struggle, it pains me to see others have the same struggles that I go through roughly everyday. I wish anxiety didn't exist, but it does, and somebody has to deal with it...this is my challenge, and I am real...

Wow, what a year it has been, and I have been the worst blogger in the history of blogging. I plan on trying to be better come 2016 so we will see. 2015 started off rough, with anxiety and work and living in our tiny yet cute little village apartment. Little did we know at that point that we would buy a house and get two little adorable puppies. In January we thought our lives were pretty set, going to school, living near the university, our jobs were set, everything was fine. In May, we got word that my step dads' father would be selling his condo, and we decided to have a look. We LOVED the place and decided we would try to get going on getting a home loan so that we could own our own place and FINALLY have a garage. We closed on our house on June 24 and painted the entire inside as well as replacing all of the light fixtures and switches and such. It was small touches that we redid, but it made all the difference and the home feels like ours. We have been so happy in our home a...

Today is a very special day...one that for me, is a day I want in my future. Fifty years ago today, my grandparents Lillian and Johney Colledge were married. When I think about marriage, it is a bond between husband and wife and it is the most important thing that we can do on this earth. I feel that for some, in this day and age, marriage is more disposable than it used to be. I have often looked at pictures like the one below and thought that it is such a true statement. I am sure that my grandparents have gone through those bumps in the road, but they never once thought that they couldn't fix what they had. One of my favorite past times with my grandparents is listening to stories about their childhoods and early lives together. Among my favorite stories is the one about how they met. Once upon a time Johney B. Colledge was called on a mission to Canada. There he started teaching the Rodrigue family, my grandmas family. My grandpa baptized my grandma, and when he got home fr...

Some of you may have heard that Sam got into the University of Utah! We are so excited for him to start this journey and get his Degree in Computer Engineering. We have been talking for a while now about if we wanted to try to get an apartment rather than live with my dad, even though it has been just fine living with him. So we started to look for apartments in our price range that were closer to the U and finally had this brilliant idea to check out student housing. It turns out that student housing is Extremely affordable and is exactly what we are looking for; close to school, affordable, and looks like it came straight from the 70's! So we applied knowing that the waiting list was 3 months long. So we thought we would maybe move in October or something. We were hopeful so we put our requested move in date for August 22, the week before classes start. The day after we applied we got an email saying that they have an apartment available for us and our move in date would be Augu...

Yes it has been two years since Sam and I got married and we just got around to going camping together! We went to Moon Lake which has been my family's camping spot since before I was born! It was so much fun! We got to take our nieces in our car and got a great taste of parenting! It is always so fun to spend extra time with our families. Considering that Sam isn't the biggest fan of fishing, I think we all had fun with it! We caught close to 80 fish on our trip and this year we even decided to try eating it! We all decided that trout is not too bad..so we saved a dozen or so for eating. I learned a few things about Sam on our trip..well one thing...he will not gut fish! So let me ask this...who is tougher the fish gutter(me) or the non fish gutter(Sam) lol! I just have to give him a little bit of a hard time...he did an excellent job filming the how to video. Aside from all the fishing we did some hiking and Lots of playing with the kids and getting muddy with them. I am so g...

Considering I am home ALL THE TIME, I sure am bad at keeping up on blogging. Time has sure flown since we have been here in Mississippi, and it's hard to believe but it's only 18  days until Sam graduates and we make our way back home to Utah. YAY! We are so excited, but we have found some new I guess you could say entertainment..for Christmas we decided to get an X-box with money we got from family members..I am not a gamer at all, but I agreed to get the console for one purpose and one purpose only. Since our X-box came with a kinnect, we wanted a Nike video game. We have the nike fuel bands which have helped us become more active since we got them, but the video game helps you earn "fuel" on the fuel band and it also burns about 200 times each workout you do. The workouts are about 30 minutes. We have been doing this workout for about 2 1/2 weeks and it is intense.  Getting into a harder workout has been really hard for me..I realized almost instantly that I am ver...

I have been terrible terrible terrible at blogging. I am not really sure why since I have SO much time on my hands right now. So as many of you knowI moved to be with my sweetheart in Biloxi, Mississippi in the beginning of August..I would like to update everyone on all our adventures thus far, if you would call them adventures heehee! I got here knowing that I would have to wait a few weeks for Sam to move in..well it's been a couple months and I am still living alone. Which is fine, better than I thought...the movies make coming home to an empty apartment way scarier than it actually is. Sam does stay over the weekends and to me it is exciting..it's like getting to have A sleepover with my best friend every weekend! Woo!Woo! This town that we live in...well their is nothing here...just the base, that is basically it. There are towns that are between 15-30 Min. away that are alright. We spend a lot of time netflixing and all that jazz...it's one of our favorite things to d...

I have been SO bad about blogging that I decided it was time to blog again, since my life in Mississippi gives me so much spare time! As many of you know, hurricane Isaac hit this past week and I am excited to share my experience with everyone. Living in Utah we don't ever get as much rain as I have seen this past week. We are so used to snow and honestly, I prefer the snow.  I never thought I would say that but it is true. Can't wait for snow, this rain stuff is not super fun. The storm wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. The only things I didn't enjoy were the not leaving the house, the zero power, and the I am totally alone part. Sam had to stay on base and I had to stay off! Luckily Sam enjoyed things like power and friends. I am SO grateful that we were kept safe during the storm and couldn't ask for more. I didn't feel like the hurricane was bad at all..I was actually really surprised about how worked up everyone was..but who knows? I don't know ...