HomeLife
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. - Annie Dillard
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Five Finds Friday (should I buy the boots & a little poetry)
When the temperatures drop even slightly, my crew and I become hermits. We want to sleep late, stay under the covers, hibernate. It’s just so cozy at home. Give us all the hot chocolate and thick novels and warm blankets. It’s hard to get up and go anywhere. But we do force ourselves out of the house from time to time. This week we had appointments we couldn’t shift (believe me, we wanted to) and school to do and a theatre performance of Much Ado About Nothing to attend. funny Here’s what is NOT funny. Paul Blart. Okay, sure. This movie was out a while ago…
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she prays for us.
She sought us out Sunday morning before the service started. Hugged us with genuine affection and greeted each one of my children by name. She was excited – legitimately excited – to see our faces. She told us Tuesday. Tuesday was the day she prayed for us each – by name. Who knew that would matter so much? And that it would, of course, remind me of my mother. My mother, who also had a written down list of people for whom she prayed. My mother, who drove to her job as a nurse at an assisted living facility and prayed down that list as she drove. Name by…
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Five Finds Friday (Harry Potter kitties & biscuits & tween fashion)
I like that the weather has finally turned cooler. I don’t like that it’s dark by 6 pm. I like that my teenagers are fun and interesting humans. I don’t like that we are closer to graduation age than we are to starting kindergarten age. I like that the weekend is upon us. I don’t like that my to do list from last week carried right on over to this week. funny It’s a Harry Potter world at our house. Dumbledore and Gryffindor and Mrs. Weasley are all names I am attempting to become more familiar with, just so I can have a shared language…
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life. in the right now.
This is life right now. The house I currently live in puts on a pretty show – right? I mean – just look at her. From a distance. There’s so much good about it – the allusion of rural only minutes from our town. Wonderful neighbors. High ceilings. Wide door frames so I can swap furniture with relative ease from room to room. And there’s also the other. Mold that seems as unbeatable as sin. The smell of musty old-ness that just seeps into every drawer and closet (of which there are only two) and floorboard in the house in South Carolina’s rainy season. (Which is basically…
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A Great Big List of Games
It’s underneath the tree every Christmas. A new game. Sometimes we open it on Christmas Eve to play, sometimes it gets played Christmas afternoon and sometimes it waits a couple of days to make the rounds. But it’s long been a tradition – the new game for Christmas. If your family likes to search out a new game for the holidays, I thought I’d take some of the guess work out of the search for you. Some of the games listed I have written reviews for over the years and you can click on those to read more. Some of the games I’m just telling you are fun and…
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alone. married. single. not single.
It’s such a pervasive lie that it almost always sounds and feels like the truth. It is promoted by society and culture, movies, songs, novels and well-meaning friends. This lie that the culture keeps feeding us, keeps shoveling down our throats through our screens and our movies and our words, is that to be fulfilled, to be a success, to be happy, you must have a significant other. A boyfriend. A girlfriend. A husband. A wife. The idea is — you cannot be complete without romantic love. Get a person! Don’t be alone. Happiness is not happiness until it is shared. Soulmates. Better half. Til death do us part. It’s…
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five finds friday (dutch babies and bad Halloween candy, beanies and avert brothers)
It’s November already, for the love. funny Last week at Target I saw this. It’s a joke – right? fashionable Alright. I’ve got two. One. I love my Bogs boots. They’re about three years old. They’ve been looking rough and I was wondering what I could do to bring back their glory. I wear them year round and they are my first choice for comfort and style. I found this Wren’s Leather Cream on Amazon and took a chance. Success! They look so fantastic! I will definitely be heading toward their products for all of my other leather care – furniture and…
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the questions. the answers.
Things change and get strange With this movement of time. It’s happening right now to you. (Avett Brothers, Down With the Shine) Each month, each week, each day, each hour – it’s the same and it’s different. Time goes and it slips and it sloshes and it wraps me up in tangles and it finds me sitting at the kitchen table for hours making lesson plans and it pushes me into meetings for work and propels me down hiking trails with my children and it keeps me up late and has me rising early. It’s time. It’s balance. It’s never enough and always too much. And it’s the same…
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five finds friday – mostly a photo collection
It’s been a good week. And a regular week. A slow week and a fast week. Things have been fine and things have been pleasant and things have been weird. Right on track, I’d say. I’m mostly going to use photos today. Because I’ve both written and spoken a lot of words already this week. fashionable flavorful When we visited the apple orchard in North Carolina we were talked into buying mountain grown sweet potatoes. The staff told us they were the best sweet potatoes. That they were stringless. That growing them in the mountains soil made them better. I wanted to believe.…
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you pick the story from our day: a beautiful & terrible world.
Which story should I tell you about my day? The one where the kids and I sat on a gigantic rock outcropping behind poet Carl Sandburg’s house in Flat Rock, NC and read his poems to one another while the mountains and the trees listened in? Or the one where my kids acted so ridiculous at the dinner table that one of them spewed lemonade all over his sweet potato? Should I tell you about how we visited a new to us apple orchard and loved the dwarf trees and the views and the staff there? Or should I tell you how my…
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Five Finds Friday (cozy pants & days you would live over again)
It started with such good intentions – this week. Looking at the calendar I planned for a week of stay stay stay. Life heard about that plan and laughed and instead I wound up with a week of go go go. It’s alright but I feel as if I’m crawling across the finish line, except – the finish line really isn’t Friday, it’s more like Sunday and I’m not even close. And there you have it, friends. My week. funny I like when my kids leave me written notes that begin with the request, “Please read this with a British accent.” fashionable I finally…
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An Ode to Autumn
A simple part of our Nature Study for the past several years has been to simply pick a spot outside (each of us in a different location) each week and for just a short time to sit still and observe. While you are observing you may lie still with your eyes closed or you may draw what you see or record what you hear or let nature inspire you to draw or create in some other manner. Recently, this is what I heard and what I saw and what I wrote after one of our observation times. _____________________ When a bird makes a noise that distinct I…
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Five Finds Friday (a t-shirt and a muffin and a quote)
I’ll give it a go this week. Although I have enjoyed watching soccer and I know London has enjoyed playing it too, I am looking forward to not attending a practice two nights a week during dinner time. I’m in literal shock that it is October and I am in some sort of consistent anger that the weather is so warm that my air conditioning is still on. Hello Friday. How are you? funny In the store the other day, the kids and I saw these bath loofahs. At first I thought it looked like marshmallows were inside the loofah. Which seemed weird. Turns…
