It started with the notes app on my phone.

A month or two ago, in the middle of everything, I started grabbing my phone and tapping things down. A moment at the dinner table. Something one of my boys said. A decision that needed to be made. I wasn’t sure what I was doing exactly — only that I couldn’t let it all disappear. The notes kept accumulating. Memory gold, I started thinking of them. I didn’t want to lose a single one.

Here is what the middle of my life looks like right now: My husband and I just pulled our youngest two boys out of a charter school we thought would be perfect for them. Two weeks in, I knew. We moved them back to our local public school, while quietly building toward something bigger — a nearby Catholic school that I keep thinking about, keep praying about, keep running the numbers on. My mother was just moved into an assisted living facility and is still deciding whether she likes it. She is learning what it means to be alone for the first time, really alone, since my father died two years ago. My husband is being recruited by a fellow master electrician who wants him as a partner in a new company. It is a real opportunity and a real risk and we are sitting with it.

And underneath all of it, the conversion. Two years of learning to be Catholic — the liturgy, the sacraments, the calendar, the whole way of moving through a year — while raising three boys in the middle of it, while my in-laws fold laundry in the next room and love their grandchildren in Albanian, while I try to figure out what it means to build a domestic church when I am still learning what the Church is.

And I turned 50 in July.

I am not writing because I have anything figured out. I am writing because I do not want to forget. Because it helps me to process these moments. And because someday I want my boys to read this and be inspired and wowed that their mother was paying attention. That she caught it. That she wrote it down.

That is what this is. A record. A stamp on our life that I hope will stand.