Welcome! Thanks for stopping by! Living for the Moments is a website that I have dedicated to the memory making I’ve done with my daughter over the course of her 20-something years. In 2008, when she was 5, her father passed away. The biggest part of our coping and healing has been the moments we have shared as mother and daughter. Grieving never goes away. You learn to live with it always taking up residence on your shoulders. It can be a heavy burden to carry – even all these years later.

Our most favorite place is Disneyland. It became a haven for us after losing her Dad. We’d go as often as we could. Thanks to her Dad being an Airline employee, we were able to continue enjoying flight benefits for a few years and that allowed us to escape to the “Mouse House” frequently. I don’t know what we would have done had we not had that benefit. I will always be thankful to Southwest Airlines for taking care of things and us during our early years without him. Michaela considers Disneyland a “second home”. She feels relaxed and worry free whenever we can visit and it will always have a place in our hearts.

Love Languages

Not long ago I learned about “love languages” and unsurprising to me, I learned that my love language was “quality time.” I would have known that before taking any tests because spending those moments with the people I care about are what I value the most. And as I’ve gotten older and have lost several people I am very close to (my husband & parents), those memories have become all the more precious to me. When my daughter was small, I made a promise to myself and her that I would spend the rest of my days making every moment with her a beautiful memory so that some day, a long time from now, when I am no longer here, she will be able to look back on her life with her Mom and say, that we always were living for the moments.

Want to learn more? There are five love languages:

• Words of affirmation.
• Physical touch.
• Quality time.
• Gifts.
• Acts of service.

You can Google Love Language tests to take to find out your own.

Where did the name Living for the Moments come from?

In 1996, after I graduated college, I moved from California to Tennessee. And one of the popular country songs that year was Living in a Moment by Ty Herndon. I LOVED that song. I was starting a huge new chapter in my life by moving out on my own. My boyfriend at the time (my future husband & Michaela’s Dad) had joined me in Tennessee. We began our life together that year and this song just said it all. And it still does.

What to Expect

This is site will be a travel blog / memory journal as I take a look back at some of the trips and moments I have shared with my daughter. I will also blog about any future memory making moments we share so while I will start with what’s already transpired, eventually it will become more current as I share experiences in “real time”. There are SO many Disney related YouTube Channels out there that are getting the job done, that I don’t want to even attempt to “reinvent the wheel” but I do have a channel that I started many years ago that wasn’t meant to be public, per se but just a place to store some videos that I made about life in general and to share photos of Rick Springfield that I had taken. So, I will not even begin to think that I could come close to some of my favorite YouTubers who have content galore. Please check out my blog about which Disney YouTube accounts are my favorite and who I recommend following and why. I will post videos there from time to time about things that I thought would be fun to share. If there is a video that you’d like to see or a particular topic that you’d like me to talk about, let me know! Contact me! Let’s chat!