My life is a beautiful collision of worlds - and somehow, against all odds, I manage to keep most of the plates spinning.

By day, I’m dedicated to serving our military and veterans, a career that has given me an incredible sense of purpose and a deep respect for the men and women who serve our country. It’s more than a job to me. It’s something I genuinely care about, and knowing that the work I do can make someone’s life a little easier is one of the things I’m most proud of.

And then I come home… where things get considerably less professional.

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Welcome to Morgan Mile Manor, my little slice of Vermont heaven, where I like to pretend I live inside the pages of a beautifully curated country-living magazine. Jet would probably like everyone to know that we absolutely do not. In my head, however? We do. Please don't ruin this for me.

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Country life has become one of the greatest loves of my life. There’s something about muddy boots, quiet mornings, baking something from scratch, pretending I know what I’m doing in the garden, and drinking coffee while looking around at this beautiful life that makes me ridiculously happy.

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Then there’s  Jeremy (Jet).

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I somehow stumbled into the kind of love I thought only existed in fairytales, the real kind. The comfortable, ridiculous, laugh-until-you-can’t-breathe kind. The kind where you can be completely yourself, find your person, and wonder how the hell it took you so long to get there. He’s my best friend, my partner in this crazy life, the voice of reason I frequently ignore, and the man who has learned that when I say, “I have an idea…” there is a very good chance it’s going to cost money and a lot of hard work on his part.

 

Speaking of the loves of my life, I am one ridiculously proud mama.

 

I have two incredible kids, Benny and Gianna, who will forever be my babies regardless of what their birth certificates say. Benny graduated from Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina and is building his career in finance. Gianna serves in the United States Air Force Reserve, which makes this military-loving mama especially proud. Watching the two of them become adults and build lives of their own is equal parts amazing and completely unacceptable because I'm pretty sure they were little about twelve minutes ago.

 

Family is everything to me.

 

My mom is my person. I talk to her every single day, and I genuinely can't imagine doing life without her. She has been my constant, my sounding board, my safe place, and one of the biggest pieces of my heart.
 

And because every woman needs at least one friend who will tell her not to do the questionable thing, I naturally chose Amy - who does the exact opposite. She is equally unhinged, fully supportive of bad ideas, and exactly the kind of best friend everyone deserves. There is very little adult supervision happening when we're together, and frankly, that's part of the charm.

 

And then there are my dogs.

 

At one point, I had three Great Danes filling my home, my furniture, and basically every available square inch of personal space. Today, my sweet Cadence (aka Sugar Bear) is my last remaining Dane. She’s a huge piece of my heart and a reminder of all the love, memories, slobber, enormous paws, and beautiful chaos those dogs brought into my life.

 

As for me? I appear to have my shit together.

 

This is false advertising.

 

I'm basically fueled by coffee, sarcasm, online shopping, and good intentions.

 

I love baking. I love cooking. I love thrifting. I love decorating my house. I love shopping in general, which we're going to lovingly refer to as an enthusiasm rather than an "issue". I enjoy gardening mostly because every spring I become wildly overconfident about my agricultural abilities. And I can doom-scroll with the endurance of an Olympic athlete until my eyes are watering and I've somehow gone from watching a recipe video to learning about a woman who disappeared in 1987.

 

I love beautiful things, but I don't believe life has to be beautiful all the time.

 

And that's really why Coffee, Chaos & Kelly exists.

 

I didn't create this space to show you a perfectly curated life. There are enough places on the internet doing that already. I wanted somewhere to share the real stuff. The recipes we actually eat, the products I genuinely love, the ridiculous things that happen, the things I probably shouldn't say out loud but do anyway, the good days, the hard days, the shopping finds you absolutely did not need until I showed them to you, and all the little moments in between.

 

Vermont has taught me the beauty of slowing down, even when the rest of my life seems determined to move at full speed. Whether it's sitting with a deliciously brewed cup of coffee from one of my latest ways of brewing the "perfect cup", laughing until my stomach hurts, baking something for the people I love - the hard way, wandering through a thrift store looking for something I definitely don't need, spending time with my family, or looking across Morgan Mile Manor at the fairytale life I never saw coming. I've learned that the best parts of life are rarely the perfectly planned ones.

 

They're messy.

 

They're loud.

 

They're unexpected.

 

Sometimes they're completely inappropriate.

 

And they're ours.

 

I'm still figuring things out as I go. I'm unapologetically myself - sarcasm, caffeine, shopping problem, questionable decisions and all. I love hard, laugh loudly, swear occasionally (okay, regularly), and believe that if we can make each other laugh and feel a little less alone in this crazy world, we're doing something right.

 

So welcome to Coffee, Chaos & Kelly.

 

Come for the recipes. Stay for the stories. Let me convince you to buy something you absolutely don't need. And please don't be fooled by the house, the career, or the occasional well-organized pantry, you haven't seen my "Tupperware Cabinet".

I have no idea what I'm doing either.

But damn, I'm having a pretty good time figuring it out.