Being a parent is awesome...some of the time. Some of the time it's not, some of the time it's downright awful, and, if nothing else, most of the time it's messy.

A while ago I commissioned my amazing friend Jenna to capture some photos of me with my boys. I wanted to juxtapose the picture-perfection we sometimes like to portray on social media with the realities of life in the trenches of parenthood. We worked hard to capture what it's really like living with three young men under the age of six.

I've dealt with post-partum depression following the births of each of our three sons. I'm still healing from the birth of our last boy, who's now 16 months old. There are many tools I've found helpful when it comes to dealing with my depression. Along with medication and therapy, humor and sarcasm have become a sort of home-grown coping-mechanism for me.

Dealing with depression has been a real struggle. Being a stay-at-home mom with three boys under the age of six is a real sanity-killer. Combining the two can be overwhelming, and I've really been looking for a good way to illustrate the struggle between the ideal (looking good, having a clean house) and reality (wearing sweats all day, living in piles of dirty dishes and legos.)

Depression is real, and needs to be treated very seriously. Learning to laugh at the hard stuff, though, can help cut through the day to day mental struggles and physical requirements of being a parent and a person.

Life can me messy, but it should be fun, and laughable, and happy...most of the time.