Family life with a depressed husband and three kids

Hi! My name is Sarah, I am a wife (married for over 8 years) a mother (Three children, Aspen-7, Cedar-5, Olive-3) and the person who (tries) to hold everything together. My husband suffers from depression. I am starting this blog for a few reasons. The first is a bit selfish, but I need a place to put everything that goes on around me down. The second is that I searched for something like this and couldn't find a blog or a support group for the wives of men who have depression. I believe that there are many women like me out there who love their husbands, but struggle with their depression. I want to post my daily struggles and victories so that wives like me know that we are not alone, we can make it through the dark times and we can make sure that our children are healthy, our families are safe and our husbands struggles don't drown us with them. Before I got married and started my family I was a teacher. I decided not to go back to work, but to stay home and raise our children. When I got married I knew my husband had depression, but I didn't really know what it ment. He was on Effexor when we got engaged, and stayed on it for over two years into our marriage. By that time we had our first little girl, he was teaching Japanese and our lives had become fairly stable. He decided to go off his medication and took several months to ease off of it. Things were pretty good. He was in "remission" for several years. Then about a year and a half ago things started again. In April or May of 2007 he hit a breaking point and went back on medication. Effexor again. Right now, he is on 75mg/day. Thigs got better, but now they are bad again. I think that he needs to up his dose (although I can't talk to him about it. When he is bad like this, he shuts me out and won't talk to me. I feel like I'm the enemy, the cause of it all. Yep, OUCH!) So, that's where things are now. We have jumped out of the happy state of well being and into the whirlwinds of full fledged depression. Let the blog begin!