HomeLife
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. - Annie Dillard
-
the charcoal face mask and my children
Life with children (or with any other humans actually) is unpredictable. No wonder they call it a roller coaster. One minute someone is laughing, one minute someone is crying. In one afternoon the living room is pristine tidy and smells like oranges and cloves and the next afternoon the living room is littered with magazines and blankets and smells like coughing. At this point in the parenting game, I’m pretty certain all I’ll ever learn how to do is ride the waves, with no genuine hope of controlling the tides. Yesterday I stopped by a friend’s house to pick something up. She has four kids and a long term…
-
five finds friday (on a SATURDAY, featuring cute letters and free stuff)
Unscheduled. Awry. Shifted. Not as planned. Those are all the correct words to describe this week. Mostly stemming from car issues, nearly nothing that I thought was going to happen or scheduled to happen actually occurred as planned or anticipated. All. Week. Long. Some days my car would start. Some days it would not. Some days I spent trying to get it repaired. Some days it looked repaired. Some days it did not. Also, several of the kids began to feel off this week – a cough there or a fever here, light headed for one, extra exhausted for another. Again – changed up all the plans. I’ve got…
-
weekend gone awry, right on schedule
The kids are watching Cars Three and I don’t even know how we justify THREE movies about cars that can talk and have feelings and relationships. But then again, I think they’re sort of cute movies. So. You know. Whatever. (I’m so grateful that (for now) my two teenagers and one nearly teen will happily watch a cartoon with their younger siblings even though they also have of late embraced the world of Thor, which is unbelievable to me as well. Not so much the very fit immortal who comes to earth so much as the fact that my kids are old enough to watch those movies is what…
-
Five Finds Friday (bad lip reading, maggie weaves, piper feeds a calf)
I had no mental space this week for reading Charles Martin novels because I exhausted all of my emotional energy on watching the last two episodes of This Is Us. Those writers. They are so talented. I also watched my first ever Super Bowl and turns out, it was kind of fun. Sausage cheese dip and good company help that out too, of course. funny In honor of that Super Bowl viewing, here’s something funny. A Bad Lip Reading. (Here’s hoping there’s no creepy ad that comes up first for you guys. When I went to this link the ad was for the newest Fifty Shades…
-
to be a parent
I don’t have to tell you guys – parenting is hard hard hard work. A single day can hold so much, can’t it? There’s the subtle disrespect and the blatant type too. The kid who helps his sister do the chores and the same kid who cries later because his sister won’t share her flashlight. The continual reminding to get their tasks completed and the endless questions about what’s for dinner and why does this have to happen on that day and why can’t that other thing happen instead and where should this go and what do you think we should do with this. The mess that…
-
Five Finds Friday (odd products, good products, a faithful God and a friend who’s doing great things)
Hi February. Nice to see you. Let’s be friends. funny The internet brings us both wonder and horror. Sometimes at the same moment. What. Is. This? fashionable I’m not a big make up wearing kind of human. (Mascara feels like really “going all out” to me.) I have a daughter, however, who is infatuated with make up. It has almost always been true. And now she’s a grown up and she’s making a job out of the art of make up. Anyway, Riley has become a Mary Kay guru and I love my daughter so I’ve been trying out some of…
-
aimless. arbitrary. disconnected. Today’s Thoughts.
Sometimes when my friend Brittani cuts my hair, she straightens it afterwards. In regular life, I can all but guarantee that I will never do such a thing on my own. I do own a hair dryer because Hannah bought me one a few winters ago when my pipes froze and we needed to try to thaw them out. I’ve never used it on my hair. Also, it takes too long. But after she has taken all that time to dry it straight, it’s sort of a game to see how long I can go before I have to wash it. (Don’t worry – I take a shower, I…
-
before the promises fulfilled: life in the regular
Sometimes I come across words like these: Repay the years the locusts have eaten. Beauty from ashes. Like a phoenix rising. All the right ideas. The symbolism. The hope. But (thus far) none of the follow through. I have yet to see the descendants, numbers greater than the stars. I’m no longer sitting in the ashes, although the smell from the fire still lingers on the tips of my hair, despite all the extra washings. I’m not in a hard place like I’ve been before. My problems are less desperate, more run of the mill. We’ve just started a study on the book of Ecclesiastes at church. Meaningless. Hevel.…
-
Five Finds Friday (a funny video and my take on The Greatest Showman)
Hey-o. Friday it is. Short days – long week, am I right? I maybe made it worse on myself by catching up on This Is Us on two different nights so I was past my bedtime twice this week. (Past my bedtime. Who am I kidding? I don’t even have an assigned bedtime and that’s a real problem.) funny I woke up one morning this week to a text. “We are still meeting, right?” To which I was forced to respond with honesty – “Right. Yes. We are. That’s exactly why I am still in bed in my pajamas. Because we are meeting.” Who’s the grown…
-
Five Finds Friday (snow cream & old lady knees & a history making moment)
I heart snow. Give me all the snow. If it’s going to be cold, might as well be snowed in and have all the ugly brown landscape of winter vanish and all the pure white forgiving beauty of snow cover everything. So glad we’ve had the opportunity to enjoy a little gift of the white stuff this week. funny Funny stuff happens Every Single Day. It’s just that I’ve been noticing that lately I forget to write it down. I laugh a lot though. So I know funny things are being said and done all around me. What’s a little less funny is that I…
-
Puzzles. Why we love them.
Every holiday and on any vacation- especially a mountain cabin or a beach house sort of vacation – a puzzle is in mid-progress for our family. We’ve got out favorite brands but we’re not all that particular. Usually we pick a puzzle with more than 500 pieces and we like best the 1000 piece puzzles but we’ve tried all sorts – including a round globe puzzle that intimidated me but the kids whipped it together in no time and have now assembled it multiple times. One of the favorite puzzles the kids enjoyed was an educational life sized reversible floor puzzle of the human body – one side being…
-
a story of a tradition gone south
Maybe this just isn’t the year for keeping things the same. I didn’t chose a word. I didn’t make our annual list of things to accomplish this year. I already told you guys all that. But we always take a hike on the first day of the new year – or a day really close to that. It’s not just a regular hike, it’s a hike designed to be about creating a little time for reflecting as a family and for looking forward as a family. We also always pack along a bottle of sparkling juice of some sort and our own small glasses. The best part of the…
-
Five Finds Friday (quelf the game, oatmeal in the Instant Pot, kind words)
We’re back to school this week. It’s been good to be back to routine but it’s been painfully difficult to get out of bed on these cold mornings. It was also a four day school week and that has me thinking that ALL weeks should be four day school weeks. Can I start a utopian society where people only work for four days a week for about five hours each day? I think we’d all be more productive and just embrace working harder for a short time, knowing you had lots of free time coming. Who wants in on my future society? Happy Friday y’all. funny …
