Homeward Bound

Sometimes I surprise myself. My first job out of college was in advertising. I loved it. But after a few years I decided to go work a desk job at a state agency. The hours would be better for a mother with a young baby. My husband also worked there so we could tackle the demands of working parents together.

The work was intriguing, but I longed to return to my former life in the world of advertising. After our second child was two, I moved back to the land of marketing at the coolest agency in Topeka. It's great, intriguing work. Full of cool benefits, creative people and exciting events. I loved the energy being  around these fantastic people who were so knowledgeable about so many things. I was so excited, but here is where the surprise comes in. As much as it is what I thought I wanted, my heart wasn't in it. I missed my job at the state.

An Adventure in Landscaping

Knollwood, the neighborhood where we live, is one of the hilliest neighborhoods in Topeka. Stacked stone retaining walls line three sides of our property. The wall on the southern side of the yard  is less than two feet. With the Neighbors wooden fence set in a couple of feet, it serves a dual purpose as a decorative planting bed. When we took ownership of our home six years ago, the back yard was completely overgrown. This wall was barely visible due to being completely covered with English ivy. Clearing off the Ivy, we discovered roots from the surrounding trees and bushes had completely destroyed the wall.

Starting at the Westernmost end of the wall, we worked together intending to simply "clean it up" a bit. Dennis worked ahead of me, removing the ivy and volunteer trees so I could re-stack the stones that had fallen. We quickly realized that a rebuild was in order. So I began pulling the rocks down and digging out the dirt behind them. Working a few feet at a time, I piled the limestone rocks on top of the bed and project went pretty quickly.

Reflections on the Annunciation

Not being a cradle catholic this concept of putting it in Gods's hands is a hard one for me. But God is full of surprises, he's given us this amazing gift of free will and sent angels to protect and guide us along our journeys. So why am I supposed to put it in God's hands if I have free will to do as I please? His angels are protecting us from messing up right?

Being Me

I've spent a good many years trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up. It was not until recently that I found an answer to this ponderance. It's not "what" but "who". There are many things that I am unsure of in life but of this one thing I am 100% positive. I want to be Carrie Jo when I grow up.

Now this may seem like a silly thing to say, but how many times in your life have you been encouraged to do something because others thought it would be good for you? Or you make a decision because you think that you should be something more than you are? It's a simple situation,"The grass is always greener on the other side." Right?

Building Our Community

Growing up I rode my bike everywhere.  The two rules were, "don’t go into anyone’s house" and "be back before dark". I had multiple friends, a school playground, and a park within a mile of my house. If I did anything wrong, my father knew about it before I got home. There were kids everywhere, we would run from yard to yard, jumping over hedges and playing in each other’s yards.

But something happened. Cable, Atari, Nintendo, one by one the kids started disappearing and the grass grew back on the paths between houses. Is it that parents live in fear of giving their children independence to run from house to house due to predators? Or perhaps children are busy, constantly being shuttled from one activity to the next. I look around and see backyards hidden with privacy fences, preventing us from communicating with each other. Neighborhoods built without parks and houses built without porches.

The Water Feature

What a challenge this project was. Not only did we have no idea how to take care of the deep concrete hole outside our front door, but nobody we consulted seemed to know what to do with it either. Dennis and I spent many hours researching garden shows, specialty pond stores, and swimming pool companies. While a great number of visitors were sure we should just fill it in, we were determined to find a plan to make it amazing.


After three years of caring for the concrete hole, I finally decided on an idea I was excited about. It including a paint a mural, which made the project more like two, but I was hopeful it would only take a couple weeks.

The House, A Love Story

While house hunting, my husband and I had a lot of things we agreed on but esthetic was not one of them. I preferred an older home, two-stories, with history and charm. My dream was to live in an established neighborhood, centralized in the city. Dennis preferred nothing over fifty years old, attached garage and a poured concrete basement. (No stacked stone!) Thank goodness for the ease of browsing via the internet. Otherwise, we would have taken months to find a house. We had looked at too many houses and I was discouraged. We almost settled on a house neither of us was completely in love with. Then I was reminded of a neighborhood we'd walk while we were dating. The houses were unique and grand. I didn’t think we would ever afford anything in that area.  But it never hurts to look! After more searching, I was able to a couple of options and things began to look up!

Online, the house was described as “Classic Knollwood” which meant nothing to us. We were not familiar enough with the area to know that is what the subdivision was called.