Welcome to LifeSharesTogether — This Is Us

Let me be honest with you right from the start: I did not wake up one day with some grand vision of becoming a blogger. I’m a content creator by trade, which means I spend a good chunk of my life helping other people tell their stories. And somewhere along the way, I completely forgot to tell mine.

Actually — our mine. Joise’s going to read this and correct me on that.

So here we are. Welcome to LifeSharesTogether. Pull up a chair. Let me tell you how this whole thing came about.

The moment that started it all

Yesterday, Luis turned 8. Eight. The kid who used to fall asleep on my chest during movie nights is now negotiating screen time like a tiny lawyer and beating me at video games without even looking at the controller.

And Isa — our firstborn, our baby — is about to turn 13 this year. Thirteen. She’s already rolling her eyes at my jokes, which, frankly, I refuse to accept.

Joise and I looked at each other one night after the kids went to bed, both of us somewhere between exhausted and amazed, and one of us said it. I think it was her. She’ll say it was me.

“How is this going by so fast?”

And that was it. That was the moment.

The problem with being a content creator

Here’s the irony of our lives: Joise and I do this for a living. We create content. We document things. We tell stories professionally.

And yet our own family? Almost completely undocumented.

Our schedules are hectic — that’s the polite word for it. The real word is chaotic. There are brand deals, deadlines, edits, calls, and a never-ending inbox that neither of us fully controls. We are busy people doing busy things and somehow, in all of that busyness, we forgot to slow down and notice what was actually happening at home.

Luis is 8. Isa is almost 13. Joise and I are in our early 40s — a sentence that still surprises me every single time I say it out loud.

Time is moving. And we realized we needed to start paying attention.

So what is LifeSharesTogether, exactly?

It’s our family. All of it.

The chaos of raising a 12-year-old who has opinions about everything and an 8-year-old who has energy for everything. The cozy Sunday mornings and the frantic Tuesday school runs. The way Joise and I have had to learn, again and again, how to be partners and parents at the same time. Our home. Our routines. Our arguments about whose turn it is to do the dishes (it’s mine, it’s always mine).

This blog is us deciding to slow down — not our actual lives, because let’s be real, that’s not happening — but our awareness of our lives. We want to document the stories while we’re still in the middle of them, while the kids are still young enough to be embarrassed by what we write, while Josie and I still remember what it felt like to figure this whole thing out.

Because one day, when things get really old — when Isa has her own family and Luis is too cool to call — we want to have something to look back on. Something real. Something that says: we were here, and it was beautifully messy, and we wouldn’t trade it for anything.

A little about us, quickly

I’m Louie, 43, dad, content creator, and the person in this family most likely to burn the rice. Joise is my wife — 42, brilliant, funnier than she gets credit for, and the reason this family actually functions. We have two kids:

• Isa, our firstborn, who is simultaneously our greatest achievement and our greatest source of “Dad, please don’t.”
• Luis, our youngest, who currently believes he can do anything and is, statistically speaking, probably right.

We are a family of four navigating parenthood, home life, relationships, and the general beautiful madness that comes with all of it.

Why you should stick around

If you’re a parent — new, seasoned, somewhere in the middle — you’ll probably find something here that feels familiar. We’re not going to pretend we have it all figured out. We’re going to write about what actually happens, not the highlight reel.

We’ll talk about dad stuff, mom stuff, couple stuff, kid stuff, and home stuff. We’ll be honest when things are hard and loud when things are good.

We’re just a family that decided to write it all down.

And we’re really glad you’re here for it.

— Louie

(P.S. Joise says hi. She also says I should mention that she edits everything I write, which is both true and slightly humiliating.)