I’m sitting in my mud room, on a dog bed, keeping our youngest dog company while he finishes out his second week of “jail time” from an injured knee. Lost is playing on my iPad, and my coffee is cleverly balanced to keep my dog from drinking it. My mind is filled with things I want to say, and I’ve deleted this beginning paragraph, and re-written it 4 times already (I’ll let you know the final tally at the end).

Why am I so nervous to put my thoughts down and share them with you? Overthinking, sure, but it’s more than that. I recently listened to a podcast by Brene* Brown that talked about the FFT (Fu**ing First Time). Are we swearing on here?? Well either way, you know what she is saying.

This really resonated with me, because for so many of us, we are in some sort of FFT, and need to acknowledge how scary it can be, but also set expectations and just keep going. *(I haven’t figured out how to add accents here, so my apologies for the error for all you Brene Brown fans).

When Vince and I started working on this website, we discussed what expectations we had of ourselves, and what we could commit to in order to achieve what we hope to accomplish with this forum. We talked about how often we would write blogs, update videos and build content for you guys, and how we would manage to fit this into our days that honestly, typically look like an 8lb bag of crazy crammed into a 2lb sac. We are committing time to this because it is something we feel passionate about. We want to help people gain access to information, support them during their ups and downs and give them tools to stay consistent, hopefully while providing some laughs along the way. Let’s face it, Life is funny. Why not share the parts that make you shake your head and say “I can’t make this shit up”. It happens in our house almost daily.

How did this site come to be? Well, that is a story that starts with Vince, and ends with tears.

As mentioned on the “About” page of the site, this is something we have wanted to do for years, but didn’t start for a variety of reasons. Anyhoo…that’s not what this is about.

On Christmas morning, we started our day, as I’m sure many others did, with strong coffee, and a quick run to the mailbox to see if that last parcel from Amazon made it’s way the day before. With my mom on Facetime, we started opening up gifts together (and sending texts with pictures of the would-be gifts that were somewhere over the Mediterranean but should be arriving between January 9-21). When Vince handed me his laptop, I thought nothing of it, other than this was a gift that would show up in time for Ukrainian Christmas. He told me to type in www.thecollectivewpg.com, and up popped a picture of the two of us. After a few minutes of WTF…I realized what he had done, and started reading what he had created for us, the realization of a dream we’d kicked around for years. (Cue the tears)

It took me a couple of weeks to wrap my head around how this would all come together, and how we could really make this perfect. Here’s the thing though, it isn’t going to be perfect, but it is going to be real. Real workouts (messy hair, out of breath, “why didn’t I do a practice run before filming this” workouts), real food that you don’t need to source from the natural springs of a forest somewhere in Brazil, and of course the Blog.

So…here we go. Thanks for being with us! (p.s.: the final tally was 11)

-Gillian