I'm Emily, welcome to Breezing Through!
I started this space in 2014 as a travel blog while I was organizing international conferences. I wanted to share the places I was going and the travel hacks I have picked up traveling internationally since the age of 5.
Since then, Breezing Through has morphed into a style/lifestyle blog, a space to share my experience of living with ADHD and our family's journey of getting an Autism diagnosis for our daughter and now where I share my DIY projects!
I have been creating things for as long as I can remember. From hemp bracelets & necklaces for myself & my brothers in 90s and 00s to organizing elaborate birthday parties for the kids I babysat, I have always been a creative. I did some furniture refinishing/rehab in the early days of our marriage when my husband was in law school, but nothing on a larger scale until we bought our first home in 2020. My father-in-law gifted us a set of power tools we could keep at our house with the intention that he would use them to do projects for us when they came to visit. After a frustrating month of waiting for a blind company to come and give me a quote (not even install) for blinds in our windows, I decided to pick up the drill in that tool kit and hang my own blinds! And it was so much easier than I expected and everyone had told me!
Since then, I have taught myself how to use a whole range of power tools, bought some more and I am creating a home that functions for us along the way. I have discovered a passion for taking an unused space and turning into something functional that also adds value.
Some of the projects I have done in our home along those lines are building shelves under our 9 foot long kitchen bar, putting in a closet under the stairs on our 1st floor and adding shelving to our laundry room. All three spaces were completely unused before I added to them and now we have extra storage space and organization so everyone can find what they are looking for!
DIY has become a sort of therapy for me. I was diagnosed with ADHD at 16 and started taking medication right away. It changed my life, in the best way possible. But having ADHD and being the parent of an Autistic child can be difficult and I don't always get it right. After our daughter was diagnosed as Autistic at the age of 3, we started therapy for the whole family. No child comes with a handbook so participating in therapy was the best thing we could do as parents to understand our daughter better and learn how to change our behavior & parenting to create a better home for her.
I have always been a fixer. Give me a problem, and I will find a solution! But I would never want to "fix" my daughter, because she isn't broken. She is Autistic and while that comes with challenges, it isn't something to be cured or forced out of her. Sometimes though, I can get frustrated because I don't know what I need to do differently to help her. Established systems make getting accommodations for her complicated or society has impossible expectations of her. This is where DIY as therapy comes in. I can take a problem, design, create and build a solution! Sometimes, often actually, I mess up and I have to fix it. And that satisfies my need to fix things.
