Finding Joy During Covid-19 House Arrest

Hi Friends! I'm reaching out to the universe to say "Hello! We miss you!" to all the planet. We are on day two of "stay at home" lockdown here in New Mexico, but school has already been out for two weeks and we have basically been self-quarantining since then except for a few necessary departures from home. 

First thing this morning I took dear Hubs to an emergency endodontist appointment. Having a tooth die during a pandemic, while on lockdown is not a lot of fun. Like you need more problems. Thank goodness for Tylenol with Codeine or I'm not sure what would be happening here.

As I said, Kiddo has been out of school now for two weeks already and now with our latest state lockdown that has added at least another week, not that anyone is feeling very optimistic that the kids will go back to school this year. Kiddo says she's learned her lesson about leaving things like jackets in her locker. I think I may have mentioned that in warning a few times over the past three years but no one was listening to me on that. Ha. Whatever it takes, a mom's gentle, wise warning or a global pandemic. Insert "hands thrown up in the air" emotion here and then "laughing" emoji -- haha.

We are staying busy completing a list of chores, tasks and odd jobs around the house that have needed attention. Progress is slower than I had hoped but we are crossing things off just about every day. Yesterday I fixed three loose tiles on our master bath tub. We've been weeding and trimming up the yard in 15 minutes stretches that really end up being 30 but no one has rebelled yet. Crossing my fingers there is no uprising about it not really being 15 minutes even though I keep selling it as that.

The Man has replaced some electrical plugs this week, fixed a plastic storage cupboard that was knocked over and cracked in a crazy wind, and sorted through a box of shoes in the garage. Progress.

Kiddo has finally caught on to the philosophy The Man and I have been preaching for years that if you tidy your room up in a few minutes every day you don't have to spend a whole Saturday cleaning up a giant mess. If there is to be any silver lining to this crazy March 2020, I'll take a long-term commitment to keeping her room clean. But I'm going to hold back my celebratory dance a little longer to see if things stick.

The one person who thinks having the entire pack at home 24/7 is the greatest thing ever it is our German Shepherd. Everyone taking breaks to play with him throughout the day, people to snuggle with, no one too busy for him or leaving home for long hours. This IS his best life!

Meanwhile for we humans there are a lot of stresses underlying all this and worries for the future. Just managing the daily anxiety for children and adults requires a lot of attention and effort. But there is an interesting lesson I've learned as I've watched social media over the past two weeks. Those who are positive are positive still, those you are happy are finding ways to stay happy and make the best of life. Those who are generally grumpy, negative and sour still are. Attitude really is everything! Doesn't matter what you are going through. Some people act like this is only happening to them and some people are reaching out in every way possible to bless others and share love EVEN THOUGH this IS happening to them. Such a life lesson!

A friend dropped off a brownie mix, some microwave popcorn and some chocolate in the cutest bag on our doorstep yesterday. I have lots of friends texting to see if we need anything while they are out. 

Perhaps my favorite act of service this week was after we heard Monday afternoon that the governor was going to put the state under "stay at home" rules. So we decided to run out and just see if we could grab a few more groceries. As we were getting ready to leave, The Man got the brilliant idea to grab some food for our dear "senior" neighbors so they would not have to go out and expose themselves to the potential health risks of grocery shopping. At the store we each got a cart and tried to divide and conquer on our list.

When we met up again his cart was filled with stuff for the neighbors. In the end he delivered a giant box with tons of fresh produce because the wife is a vegetarian, juice, bread, toilet paper and other goods to them. It was so sweet! He tried to doorbell ditch the box at the porch but their dog started barking and the wife saw him. But I thought that was one of the sweetest, most generous things I have ever seen him do -- and he has always been very generous.

So I say, keep on watching out for each other, friends. Keep looking to the positive people to buoy you up. This is hard and none of us has ever done it before -- so we have to give ourselves a lot of grace and be gentle with ourselves. This is a "figure it out day by day" situation. We can do this! Brave and strong! Resilient. Loving and caring for each other.

What's Up Buttercup?

Goodness it's been a while. It seems I stay in touch with so many of you more often on Instagram and Facebook these days but oh how I've missed the blog. I look back at the 2009-2010 era and how much of our world of communication was through blogs and blog comments. How things have changed.

Life has changed a lot since that time. We now have a teenager in the house, who is busy running to sporting, church and social events, doing math we don't understand and writing essays in a class called Language Arts that we used to call English class. I spend a lot of my time driving her to activities and events, spending long hours at track meets and golf tournaments - and working and studying, while waiting to pick her up from activities, in parking lots around town. I try to make that time really productive since there are a lot of small clusters of time spent that way. It's amazing what I can get done with my phone and a notebook.

We now live in a house on a large lot that requires upkeep...no more depending on the apartment manager to take care of issues and tend all the landscaping. Keeping things in good order, watered and clean takes up an amazing amount of time, but it usually is a labor of love when you see how nice the house looks afterwards.

We live in a state I never expected to live in. New Mexico. It's strange to adjust to being closer to states like Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado when I've been so used to being on the left coast most of my adult life. Living closer to "the middle" always throws me. And just like living in any other state, city or town, there are things we love and things we don't always love so much about our new state. But we try to see the best and contribute our best and enjoy every good thing. Sunsets are definitely one of those. This image is from our street. It's dreamy sunsets here just about every night.

Creatively most of my focus has been spent on the house. Reimaging and redecorating, repairing and reorganizing as we go along, trying to learn who we are in the house and how it will best work for us. It's interesting how after three years you can go back and wonder why you ever did things the way you did in the beginning and to see how much some things just haven't worked for the family. I took over our never utilized family room for my office and have absolutely loved having the open space, a big work area/counter and lots of storage for supplies and tools. Plus it has a lot of windows facing out the front of our house, so there is lots of natural light and nature to watch outside.

We have settled into a wonderful social circle here in New Mexico and that is probably the thing I am most grateful for. When you don't have family support nearby, having a strong network of friends who are family is priceless. We have been so blessed and I hope we are blessing others and helping and supporting as well as we are receiving. I'm looking forward to doing more blogging. I have a long list of things to talk about with you.

Big Likes #8: Rodan and Fields Redefine Lip Renewing Serum

It's tough trying to keep your lips soft and pretty in the desert. So my big like for this week is Rodan and Fields lip serum. It's amazing. The first time I used it I put it on The Man's and Kiddo's lips. It was the end of winter and both of them had cracked, bleeding and dry lips. The next morning their lips were soft and smooth. A little miracle.

The Man has now become religious about using it and boy do his lips look and feel nice. I love how it softens and smooths my own lips and apply it on my own lips nightly and in the mornings when I remember. I try to get it on Kiddo as often as she'll hold still to do it.

I like to use it as a base coat before lipstick and gloss. The gloss seems to stick to the serum better than lipstick but I've always been a gloss girl and never much liked lipstick so that works just fine for me when I apply them both at the same time. If you're a lipstick wearer and want to try it I would just put it on well before I'm ready to do lipstick and it should be just fine. Even without any lip color my lips look healthy and shiny and fine as they are.

Another thing I love about it is that it has no taste or flavor. Super simple. This is just one of the products I initially tried from Rodan and Fields that made me say, "I need more of this stuff!" This is why Rodan and Fields Redefine Lip Renewing Serum is a Big Like for me!

10 Things To Consider Before Buying A Mountain Home

Well we've been living in a desert mountain environment for more than two years now and have been in our home for about 18 months. I've learned a few things that I thought I would share about buying a mountain home with a "wild" yard versus living in a designed, manicured neighborhood. There are a few things I've had to learn to adjust to, some things might have turned me away from choosing a mountain home and some benefits are priceless. But they are things I never thought about until I experienced them.

I'll start with the cons just to get them out of the way and so that I can end of a positive note:

1) Pest control: Oh the nature creatures sure are cute. The wild bunnies, flocks of quail, wild birds, and deer are so charming until you realize the furry creatures especially also bring fleas and other bugs along with them. We also have packrats, tons of mice, bobcats, snakes (poisonous and not), tarantulas, lots of spiders, very noisy, rather aggressive birds, coyotes that eat small pets and creatures, ants (of all varieties, sizes and biting abilities), and a lot more flying insects than I see at friends homes even just a little lower on the hill. Those include tarantula hawks which are giant relatives of hornets, hornets, wasps and bees. Pest control could be a full time job if we let it be. Don't imagine we are constantly under barrage of animals attacking us, but living with nature is living with nature. You have to be thoughtful and careful.

Last weekend we had a rattlesnake across our driveway and The Man could not get by, so he had to wait. Two weeks ago we had bear in our yard, very close to the house several times. That was a little scary, especially when one night I came across one and the next night The Man walked out of the house in the dark to a large bear on our front living room patio.

2) Protection for pets and children: All these critters also mean you have to be a lot more careful with children and household pets that go outside. Cats aren't safe around coyotes, and even a large dog can be taken down by a pack of coyotes or other predators. They can also pick up diseases from the wild creatures. Dogs can be rattlesnake trained but you can never guarantee what might happened if your pet comes across a poisonous creature in the wild. Child safety is also a big concern from all these same kinds of animals. I almost forgot to also mention dangerous plants! Cactus everywhere. I once had to pull a cactus needle out of Kiddo's shin that was embedded about 1/2" into her skin. Super gross feeling to keep pulling and pulling until it came out. She fell at the far back side of our property and had a lot way to drag herself back to the house to get help.

We have a rule that Kiddo can't go outside without telling us, so that we know to check on her every few minutes. Both kids and animals have to be trained to be watchful and they also need to be fairly closely supervised. It's also important to have first aid preparedness and plans for all these scenarios. Some extra caution is needed.

3) Mountain weather pattern dangers: The weather gets a little wilder in the foothills. This may mean more powerful winds, heavier rains, more powerful sudden storms of all kinds: electrical, thunder, snow, rain, etc. This can make driving more challenging too even when things are fine in the city. Temperatures can also be considerably colder in winter. You may be just a couple of miles away from the heart of town but a higher elevation, canyons and mountains that storm clouds will bang into make things a little more challenging and unpredictable. I was "twinkled" by some lightening two summers ago - it didn't strike loudly it just buzzed up the air around me and I was holding my cell phone and received a burn on my palm from where the phone contacted my hand. Not fun. I try not to go outside at all if we are having an electrical storm now.

4) Outdated utilities: The farther you live from "civilization" the less maintained utilities will be and the less interested companies are in investing in your neighborhood. Our neighborhood is about 30+ years old now. The lots are big and spread apart and the population is mostly over 70 years old. So you can imagine we are not the hotbed for the tech companies interested in investing in installing their latest technologies. Things you don't think about...high speed internet is everywhere now isn't it?!

The fact that home lots are big, spread far apart and that the soil is very rocky also adds to the plausible costs for utilities to consider upgrading to new systems and laying new wires that have to be buried underground. So our neighborhood has adequate but not great internet access and our options are limited. The phone lines are old, all the wiring is old. We've already had to have the internet company come and replace the main connector for our house at the junction box down the road and were without internet service for a week. It seems like every few weeks we have to restart our modem to reconnect to the system.

5) Public and emergency services availability: Once you are out of the city limits you will likely not be getting city water, garbage, sewer, or emergency services. You may be on the county system for fire and law enforcement and it's important to know how far away these facilities are located if you have an emergency at your home. We have a neighborhood association for garbage and water which we pay for and it's probably more that regular city services would be. We also have a septic tank instead of a sewer system. I have mixed emotions about that as well. Wouldn't probably be my first choice because we are fully, financially responsible for its proper function. When things go badly with a septic system it can mean replacing the entire tank and tearing up a major section of your yard to do it. $$$$$. Ouch.

6) Yardwork, soil and gardening challenges: In our neighborhood, most yards are left completely natural, in fact I think it's somewhat required. But if a homeowner wants to have a manicured space within a walled or fenced in area that is allowed in back of the house. We have a small grass area with a large patio, deck and pool deck area. We still haven't figured out how to deal with our grassy area as far are cutting it nicely because there are "architectural" rocks in the midst of it and around it. We need to work on that. My feeling is that a push mower would be the best bet. It's hardly worth buying a real lawnmower for such a tiny piece of grass plus it sounds incredibly dangerous potentially have rocks or bits of rock being shot out of the bottom of a power mower.

Trying to grow anything in this mountainy soil really is impossible unless it's something that is already growing on this mountainside. For any kind of gardening a lot of soil conditioning or container planting is necessary. However in the hot, desert climate, thing son planters have a hard time surviving. Large container or raised bed gardening seems like the best option. I have only planted a few small containers at this point. Maybe someday when we've finished up more house projects we can think about starting larger scale gardening projects.

Fantastic Pros:

7) The amazing views! Being higher up makes for amazing sunsets, city views and storm watching as they come across the valley. In our valley we enjoy an 80+ mile view in three directions. It's quite beautiful and the sunsets are stunning night after night after night. The mountains on the other side of our home are beautiful too. It's so much to take in and something we don't take for granted.

8) The privacy! We didn't really realize until we moved in that we actually have three houses that are within a few hundred feet of our house because the trees block the other houses nicely. But because the lots are bigger here we have plenty of privacy. All the bedrooms face out to big open, tree-lined spaces so we do feel there is a lot of privacy here.

9) Respectful neighbors. I think people who tend to live in neighborhoods like this are people who appreciate their privacy too so everything is very respectful for the most part. We did have some problems with a neighbor's dogs when they first moved in and were roaming into our yard without leashes and barking a lot but after neighbors complained that seemed to get significantly better. Our neighbors all wave as they drive through the neighborhood and we know we know them well enough to feel comfortable visiting but not intruded upon.

10) Distance from the city hustle and bustle. After living in one of the busiest areas of Los Angeles and surrounded by constant noise 24-hours a day, living a bit outside the noise of the city and traffic is lovely. It is so quiet up here. You can sit in bed at night at stare out the windows at the trees and stars and enjoy the silence. Some nights it is so quiet you can hear traffic from almost a mile away on the closest main road outside our neighborhood. That is such a huge change for us.

One thing that is very interesting is how voices carry across the mountains. Sometimes you can very clearly hear voices through the trees and there are no people there but the voices are coming from several homes away or a completely different direction. It is very strange and sometimes a little unsettling. The wind and the trees do interesting things to the things we hear.

There are so many things we do love about living here and I think there are, in any home one purchases, big pros and cons. Some you recognize before you move in and some you don't find out about until you've lived there for a time. I could do without the dangerous creatures, but I love our home, the yard and the views, our local church congregation and the friends we've made in the neighborhood. Our next door neighbors are the absolute best and that is something we had no idea about when we purchased the house because they were traveling from the time we first looked at the house until long after we'd closed on the house.

I choose to love the good and not worry too much about the challenges. Make the best of it all. Living in this mountain environment is a lot of fun and brings us a lot of things we needed at this point in our lives. I hope these tips will help you know if mountain living is right for you!

Summer Kick-off Trip

School ended near the last full week of May and then we had just the right amount of days to unwind and rest of before we headed off to visit family and attend sports camps. In the aftermath of our trip I will say that I really liked getting away and starting summer off with a bang right away. It was good for the soul to see family, get out of town out and be somewhere different, and start the summer fun of splash pads and picnics right off the bat.

Sometimes I find that if I don't really start summer off with intention for summer fun, suddenly it's late July or early August and we are just getting having our first barbecue, trip, big bike ride, night at the city park or baseball stadium and we've missed the majority of the summer. So jumping right into the spirit of the season the week after school got out was great.

Kiddo attended golf and basketball camps in the mornings and then in the afternoons and on the weekends we had time to spend with immediate and extended family. We met lots of cousins at a local splash pad one day and another day we took a fun evening bike ride around Midway, Utah. It is a wonderful little town that was settled by Swiss immigrants and has the look and feel of a beautiful quaint European village. After  our ride, that we had the best burgers and fries at a local food truck.

It was so good for the soul to be with our people, to see old friends and to be about different things than we generally are on regular days at home. I met up with a fun friend from California who is now an esthetician working in American Fork and had a great facial and chat. Things have changed so much since I lived in the area where I grew up that it's a challenge for me to find my way around anymore. But it is fun to adventure to new places that I often hear about from locals that I haven't been to.

I also had a chance to do a little undisturbed clothing shopping and scored on a few great deals on summer clothes. We enjoyed some great meals at my folks home and out to eat at fun old favorite eating spots and some "new to us" spots too. I think I got a bit of heat exhaustion one day and eating a lot of salads really helped with recovery. Fresh fruits and vegetables just make summer such a happy time for me.

We were sad to leave everyone, but once we were home we were also happy to be back in our own home, beds and routine. Thanks to our fun 10-day trip we came home in full summer mode. Even though we have work, home chores, classes and camps to attend to,we are still making the most of summer by taking some free time every day to relax, swim and watch a little TV or go somewhere fun. Bedtime has also gone out the window, for better or worse. It feels like it's okay so far and I think everyone in the family seems to be benefitting from taking a break from the rigorous and tiring routine of the school year.

It's been insanely hot since we got back and we feel like we're roasting a lot of the time, so that downtime really does help us keep our sanity and stay as cool as possible. Swimming has helped cool down our core body temps in the late afternoons and we stay cool the rest of the day. What a blessing it's been to have a pool, even though we kept telling our realtor we did not want a pool. But there are a lot of houses in the southwest that have a pool so it's not always so easy to find the house you want that doesn't have a pool. In the end I'm so glad we have a pool. Lesson learned. Living in the southwest and having a pool is a good thing.

Summer is in full swing now. Kiddo is in a local golf camp this week and I am working as much as I can while also making time for downtime for myself, with the family and with friends. One thing I still want to work on is getting out with friends to do things. I am not very good at initiating plans but am always so happy when friends call and invite us to do things. This summer I want to plan some mom and kids outings and a few night time family picnics. Better get on that!

Saying Goodbye To May: Patio Outdoor Space Ready

May is pretty much my favorite month of the year and I am always sad to see it end. With Mother's Day, my birthday and Memorial Day weekend it's pretty much a month long party. Not complaining!
I have so many beautiful cards on my mantle along with fresh flowers and potted plants that have come my way the past couple of weeks. It just makes everything feel so festive.

I have been working hard on outdoor living spaces as I have talked about repeatedly here. I am happy to report that for the past several night we have been out on our front patio, with the solar lanterns lit playing games and having fun. Every day it seems I add something new. First it was a couple of tea lights in jars, then I broke open a big box of wicker lanterns like these on the table above.

Story about those wicker lanterns. In December 2011 (!!!!), we had just gotten engaged and I was in full-blown, excited wedding planning dream land. I found these wicker lanterns at TJMaxx and ended up driving all over the Los Angeles metro area buying them out of every store so that I had enough to use them on the long tables for our wedding. You can see my original blog post full of enthusiasm about having found them here. Well fast forward 6 1/2 years (oh my gosh....) and we never had our big wedding thanks to a little detour called Afghanistan.....and these lanterns, along with anything else I purchased for our wedding have been languishing in storage ever since.

I didn't have the heart to get rid of them, thought perhaps someday we might actually have a vow ceremony/reception of some kind that we could share with family and friends. So in boxes they have sat. Finally I brought one box out and opened it. Along with six lanterns I found a couple hundred really cute paper napkins I had purchased for a pre-wedding picnic or rehearsal dinner or something. Wow. Anyway I put three of these lanterns out on the coffee table on the front porch and they look so fun and festive and create such a lovely light in the evenings...and I feel a little sad that they are going to get used and get ruined without every having served their true purpose but whatever. I have to get over that...

I started making a small buffet table for the back deck with two towers of four cinder blocks and a pretty wood top that I built. I spent part of Friday night at Home Depot with my building plans, trying to figure out the best materials to use and pushing one of those gigantic pull carts that was so heavy I had to totally lean my entire body into it to get it to move. Then I packed everything into my little VW Golf (crazy amount of cargo space, even fit 6' wood plants and 10 cinderblocks with room to spare!).

I have been working on this table since Friday night and hoped to have it done Saturday but it's definitely a work in progress and I should have it done by Wednesday. I have the top done, just need to even out the edges on each side and then stain it and polyurethane it for outdoor use. It's a bar height and will fit our new little portable barbecue grill and leave room for serving food too. You can see the example of the table I'm building here. I'm not doing the sides, just one long 6' length. I figured we can add the sides later if we feel we need them but I think the three-sided table is more than we need and doesn't fit out space all that well. We have a fairly narrow patio but it's very long so a long table along one wall makes great sense for us. I'll share more details when I have a finished product to show you. Excited about it! Really makes my soul so happy to have a creative project.

We also got our temporary, but large and fabulous, bi-fold door/sawhorse dining table out of the shed last night. Hooray! throw a giant tablecloth over that and we have a table to eat at outside. I made a makeshift grilling table out of a 3x3 stack of cinderblocks to hold the little portable grill I picked up at Ace Hardware on Friday. I was looking for a different grill which they have on line but apparently don't carry in the stores.

While they didn't have the one I wanted, they had this little grill on sale for $12.99 and how could I beat that?! Some day we plan on having a nice big grill in the back - and are so lucky to already have a gas line from the house out to the patio -- but until we decide what we want and how we'll configure it all, this little grill will work just fine. I probably should've bought two or three and we could've had an awesome little grilling station for $36. I might still do that. That would get us through some fun entertaining and they are so small and easy to deal with. I like the idea of having three of these on a long table and cooking up all kinds of fun things that way.

I couldn't let Memorial Day Weekend pass without a barbecue so that was my big goal for the weekend. I kept the menu easy and light. Burgers with cheese, lettuce, tomato and onion. Here's a link to my hamburger recipe I've been refining for a few years now. I think I've found my groove with the spices in these and they always taste good. I picked up some already cut up pineapple, a big watermelon and chips today and we were in business!

We ate dinner just as the sun was setting with our cafe string lights on, wicker lanterns on the table and a delicious, simple summer feast. We had a great time and after the meal we played with Kiddo's plethora of glow-in-the-dark bracelets, necklaces and other trinkets she's been stashing in a drawer. Nights here in Albuquerque are so perfect for outdoor time. Little to no wind, no bugs, perfect temps so you don't need a sweater. It's just lovely being outside on summer nights here! I hope we'll start eating outside every night we can throughout the summer.

Now that we have everything set up, it should be a cinch to enjoy our outdoor areas as much as we can throughout the summer. Looking forward to having friends over and swimming the summer away. Speaking of which, the pool is up and running as of today --- with just one little challenge. Our heaterless pool is still a little cold. Water temps at 63 degrees. We need some hot sunny days!....or I need to finally order that solar pool heating blanket I kept looking at last year that is supposed to heat pool water up by a good 17 degrees. That would work.

I am so happy we're set for summer finally. Being able to go outside to read, have a cup of tea, relax, take a nap or eat a meal is the best and it just makes our home feel tons bigger when you add these outside rooms where one can go. Hooray for summer. Here are a few more things I am thinking about building for the backyard this summer.

Sectional seating
Dining Table
Outdoor Rugs
Two by Four Bench
Simple Concrete Planters

A Little This & That

It's been a busy few days with lots of unexpected interruptions to the regular routine....if there is such a thing? I feel like we've been on the go nonstop lately and this week seems to be no different. I haven't gotten any of my big To Dos done yet, but I certainly haven't been sitting around.

Kiddo had a big school project due on Thursday so that is keeping me busy making sure she is staying busy and on track to get done on time. She needs a tri-fold board, costume, oral presentation, etc. When she was younger I had such a better handle on getting homework done. We lived in a smaller place and it just feels like sitting at the kitchen counter was so conducive to me being able to help her get her homework done quickly.

These days she's is often at the table in the living room working on homework and I am in the kitchen. It's much harder for me to keep track of what's happening and how fast she's working, etc. This makes for a little bit more frustrating homework process. Our kitchen bar/counter area isn't really great for doing homework but I'd like to find a happy medium somewhere in all of it.

Another really goofy thing that has been happening recently is that I feel like our grocery shopping habits have swung out of control. I like to go once a week, with a list and just get it all done. Of course, as with many other families that may mean going to a regular grocery chain, then making another trip to a place like Target or WalMart and then another stop at Trader Joe's. Also a little tiring.

But the past few weeks The Man has been calling me almost daily saying, "I'm at the grocery store, do you need anything?" For some reason he loves to go to the grocery store. In LA when we had a store a few hundred yards away he would go just to wander around. Unfortunately this lead to some fairly frequent impulse grocery shopping. So he's been stopping almost daily getting some little item he needs, then calls me to see if I need anything.

Trying to give instructions over the phone about what brand and type of item to buy, trying to explain where to find it or even texting a list doesn't seem to work too well either, despite both our best hopes. He frequently can't find what I'm asking for or forgets to get an item, etc. and I find myself not giving him a full list because it's too tiring, so I'll give him three or four items and then go without some other things I need.

I hate to make another trip but then find myself without key ingredients I need or any items you would consider "meal" foods. It's all a little silly. But again, not super cost efficient and I feel like we need to reign that in or I just need to never have The Man get anything on my list, make a real list and go once a week myself again. It's so strange how things can just slip out of habit around the house and them you really have to regroup and stop the madness.

Maybe it the big school project Kiddo has do this week. Perhaps we've been running a little too fast the past few weeks. Spring is always so busy for us with a birthday or holiday or other event seeming to come almost weekly from January to June.

Maybe it's the coming of Spring and so many more things to do now that we need to keep the yard and pool up and get it all in shape for the summer. Maybe it's the end of the school year that is exacerbating all this mild chaos. I notice Kiddo is more tired than normal after school and perhaps the parents are tired as well. Haha.

Whatever it is, I am feeling a little pushed to get us back into a good rhythm here at the end of the school year before we jump headlong into summer. In my spare time (hahaha) I am kicking off two businesses and trying to work on decorating our outside living spaces.

I set a goal and budget for decorating four small spaces in the yard. As I started pricing things out, I felt a push to try to do it for a smaller and smaller budget and took that on as a big challenge. I have been searching for best deals and finding less expensive options that will work well for us for a few years.

It's been a very fun challenge and I've been excited to try to find things sourced from businesses that offer discounts and to watch for sale prices on the items I want to buy. I am really excited to watch for some Memorial Day sales on a few items. It's a lot to keep track of. I'll share more of what I'm looking at soon and put together a post on each of the four spaces and how I budgeted.

I thought it would be a bit humorous to post a happy Mother's Day photo with this post because in all honesty this Mama isn't feeling super on the ball right now. It was nice to have that day, last Sunday to celebrate the beauty of motherhood but Monday morning it was right back into the thick of it and feeling a little undone. Life is what it is, isn't it. There is no predicting or directing it much beyond what you try to do.

Impromptu Party Planning

A couple of weeks ago I was thinking it would be great to recreate our California Easter Egg Hunt tradition here in our new town. I talked about it with a friend, we both thought it would be fun and then I kind of forgot about it. Then she reminded me and I quickly pulled together an email and sent it out to a few dozen families.

Having it at a local park made cleaning the house and other advance preparations unnecessary other than just getting our basket of eggs prepped for hiding, making a treat to share and grabbing some Subway sandwiches on our way to the park.

We all arrived, the dads hid the eggs and we sent the kids off to hunt them down. I'm pretty sure there are still a few eggs out in that park but with a couple of dozen kids there, I think they cleaned up pretty good. One tradition we have its to always take a photo at the beginning of the hunt. All the parents get a photo and once we all get chatting we often forget to take more. So it's great to have that one good photo!

The kids combed the park then immediately starting trading eggs and climbing trees and playing on the playground. The grown ups were all hungry so we started eating and kids came and got food as they wanted to.

We decided the party was a huge success because there were never more than a handful of kids anywhere near the grownups and for long periods of time there were no kids in the picnic table area at all. We grownups sat and chatted and munched on fruits, veggies, sandwiches and snacks quite peacefully. The big kids ran around in the big field and climbed trees and the little kids could play on the playground right next to the picnic tables. It was great! Egg Hunt is definitely going to be an annual tradition after this year.

We've decided to try to do this one night a month for the summer and I am really happy about that. It's easy to just bring a treat and some sandwiches and hang out while the kids play. The park we went to is also a great park for kids to ride bikes so we'll encourage bringing bikes and trikes over too. Sounds like a really fun way to spend time with friends over the summer. I find while the kids do need time together we adults need it more! We are going too fast and are too tired and just don't get enough downtime or time with our peers. More grownup playdates please!

This all reminds me that a great event doesn't take a lot of planning or work or decorations or fuss. Just send out a text or email, grab some snacks, bottled water and some chairs or blankets and hit a park with friends. So easy and so much fun and so relaxing. It was fun to hear that everyone had a good time and we need more of that so that's my goal this summer.

Two Things That May Make Kids Feel Unloved

I've been thinking about this for a bit and more importantly looking at ways I can NOT be doing these two things that I believe make kids feel uncared for. The first is Busyness and the second is Tiredness. A big facet of both of these is stress.

These two words seem to be somewhat synonymous with parenting, but I think we have to be very careful that those words do not become more a part of our household than feelings of warmth, welcomeness, love, peace, caring and togetherness. We grown ups seem to get very carried away with talking about our tiredness and our busyness and I think that rubs off on kids which makes them more distant and gives them a sense that they should not bother us which the believe will only cause us to be more tired and more busy - and possibly more grumpy and more unpleasant to be around.

When kids feel their parents are too busy and too tired they are less likely to choose to talk to them about things they are struggling with, that make them sad or that even make them happy and excited. They are more likely to retreat to far spaces in the house to be away from the busyness and tiredness (aka STRESS) and get involved in activities that are not that beneficial to them like long hours of gaming, texting, etc. They are likely not cleaning their rooms, reading, eating healthy food, and being otherwise productive as they might with more parental involvement.

This is a bad cycle to get into! I wonder how often we are actually pushing our kids away and not realizing it. Another big parent distraction that likely all parents will admit to shamefully is time on what my husband calls "fidget devices" - phones and computers. There is likely no parent alive who hasn't let a child walk away feeling a little uncared for when preoccupied on the phone or computer. I know when I am working at the computer, even on worthwhile activities, I can lose track of time and kid and that is not a good thing.

I think for me the goal I have to keep this from being a problem in our home is to avoid busyness and the very appearance of it. I have to keep paring down and cutting back and getting rid of activities that are not my top priorities, even if I love to do them. I have to prioritize what is best for the family and for me -- a mix of those things, but I have to have a very few items that make that list.

Next is self care. I've written about that here many, many times. If I'm not well I can't do my best with other people or myself. That means taking time to unwind, taking care of eating well, getting exercise and doing things that feed our souls. This  year I have been sleeping much more than I have historically and it has been a big difference. I have gone from 4-6 hours of sleep a night to 8-10 hours many nights. The difference in my abilities and functionality is a little big frightening. My physical health has improved a great deal too and gosh darn it, it feels good to actually feel good!

Lastly I think I want to be very cautious about how we talk around our kiddo. I want to take "I'm so busy" and "I'm tired" out of our vocabulary and incorporate the feelings and words that say "I have time for you.", "How can I help  you today?" and "Can we spend some time together?" into our every day. I want to open up the opportunities and dialogues that build stronger relationships, especially as we head into the teen years.

So even if I do feel a little "stressed", "busy" or "tired", I'm not going to put that on my Kiddo. She needs to know I'm "available", "looking for hugs" and am full of love, time and energy for her.

Revisit & Update: Paper Butterflies For The Window

Last month when I took down the Valentine's decorations from our dining room windows, Kiddo asked me not to take down our sparkly, glittery, big silver snowflakes yet. Since it was still winter I obliged. But now that it's quite warm outside it seemed high time to put up something new. We have an Easter garland up and we continually keep up a garland of pinecones from our yard and a string of twinkle lights then I've just been rotating in and out the seasonal garlands.

Here is a little before photo. This is one of the best spaces in our home and it is so hard to photograph. I frequently want to share it or capture it in photos and I have yet to get a photo of the dining room windows that I really like. The backlighting is a challenge.

The snowflakes hang independently from the ceiling from five clips across that window space. I like them because they can last us from post-Halloween right through to Spring. I wanted to come up with something to hang from those clips that might carry us from spring through summer and then I remembered the paper butterflies I made a few years ago. Here's a link to that post, which was Pin Test #13. The link to the original tutorial I based those butterflies off us no longer works and it seems that the website no longer exists. So I found a similar tutorial that can be found here.

In the original tutorial they used brightly colored magazine pages, which is what I used the first time I made these. In the tutorial I am linking to now it's more structured towards a kids craft so they use tissue paper and pipe cleaners. I think you really can upscale or downscale these as much as you want. I photographed these outside hanging from a favorite tree as I might for a party so that the light would be better. I do love having a few decorations blowing in the breeze for a party, big or small.

I initially was going to use magazine pages again and in fact pulled a bunch and started making a butterfly but I realized I wanted bigger butterflies and maybe something a little sturdier and more classic looking. So I grabbed a pack of 12x12 inch scrapbook paper I had in nice spring colors and started pulling sheets that would work together.

If I could do one thing differently I think I would made the bottom half of the butterflies smaller. I started with a 12x12 square for the top and then cut down the bottoms to 10x10. Looking back at the others I had made before I like that the bottoms are smaller in  scale than the ones I made this week. Maybe they would be better if I went 8x8 or 9x9.

Whipping these up didn't take much time at all. I easily whipped up six in about 30 minutes. I stapled each folded section in the middle to hold it together and then bound the top half and bottom half of the body together with white and silver cord, leaving enough to tie them to the ceiling and have them hang down to similar lengths as our snowflakes, not too far above our garlands.

So now we'll have some pretty butterflies fluttering around our dining room instead of sparkly snowflakes. These butterflies would make great party decorations for a baby shower or girl's birthday party and would be really sweet hanging from tree branches for a garden party. Depending on the kind of paper you use these are one-sided or two-sided. Because I used one-sided scrapbook paper mine are only pretty from the front but no one really sees them from the back in that window. If I was going to hang them where they would be twirling more or blowing in the breeze I would probably use tissue paper, two-sided scrapbook paper - something that looks pretty from all sides.

These are a fun craft to do with kids too and using pipe cleaners is an easy way to get butterfly antennae too. Making them from giant sheets of newspaper or butcher paper could be really interesting. Or you could create simple painted sheets of paper, any size with paints or watercolors and then make butterflies from them. There are so many ways to make these that using a little creativity they can be personalized in size, color, shape and materials. If you try these, let me know. I'd love to see a photo and hear how you made them your own!

Spring Break Home Reorganization Recap

Even though we didn't hit all five days last week with home organization projects I'm going to say it was a big success for a few reasons. First it got a lot of reorganization done. Second and probably more important it got some big home fixing up momentum going again. It was great to see progress made and every one of us got into it. Good stuff!

This is one of the corners we tidied last week, heading out to our garage on the left. The doors on the right are the new "mud room closet" for school backpack and other items that seem to get tossed on the family room floor or sofa right inside the entry door from school. Now to instill the discipline for the items to get put away every day. That may be tougher than the actual clean up!

I am trying to hold back from going too "minimalist" on the family but in the last week have put on the minimalist movie on Netflix and put up this quote temporarily (maybe -HA!). The Man doesn't like motivational quotes on walls, He calls them "-ISMs". Clearly he has no idea what's going on in the world of home decor and signage right now because I seriously only have this hanging in the entire house right now. He has no idea how sign crazy his life could be with other women. Ha. He needs to spend some time on Instagram so he can appreciate my restraint. Haha.

But I do feel some responsibility to help our family see that less is more, everything needs to have a place and that we don't need a lot to be happy. I have to regularly remind myself of that too and I am pretty minimalist already. This all plays into having gratitude, living frugally, making good financial decisions, managing our emotions, our recognition of wants vs. needs and so much more. It really is important to our overall well-being.

I'm going to keep trying to schedule in at least one of two projects each week to keep this momentum going. Even if we do 30 minutes on a weeknight once a week and an hour on Saturdays we will still make a lot of progress. I'm convinced that the more we work,the more efficiently we'll work as we go forward so we can get more done, more quickly. I think that will come along in part because along the way we're making final decisions about where things will be stored and what is of value and necessary to keep. As we continue to make these decisions it gets easier and faster to make them. I also think it really helps that we've lived in the house for a little over a year now so we understand out patterns, habits and what entryways we use most often, where we like to keep things handy, etc.

I've never really done this in a house before now but I really think it is wise to continually re-evaluate how you are using your space and what works best for your family. Things change over time, we learn that some things don't work as well as we thought they might and our families living in our homes change too. What worked well for babies might now work well for the grade school era, what works for grade school might benefit from changes made for middle school years and so on.

I think we're all seeing enough progress to see some light at the end of the tunnel. We'll get settled into this house yet! Yay! I hope along the way we're gaining some new skills in working together as a family, learning to live with less, the best ways to organize a home for our needs, appreciating what we have, what we don't need to be happy and other lessons we may not even recognize yet that will be valuable to all of us going forward and will also make our home even better in a variety of ways. This is exciting to think about. It makes me want to jump up and start a little project right now.

Organizational Frustrations

I woke up yesterday morning ready to start our next Spring Break organization project and soon found myself quite frustrated. As I was making our bed I started tidying up the room and while I was putting away a half unpacked suitcase that has been sitting next to my bed for two weeks I got really mad at myself. You can't have organization if you don't take the few seconds or minutes it takes to put things away after you use them.

I put everything from the suitcase up on the freshly made bed and started putting things away two by two, one item for each hand. It took me only about three minutes to get that suitcase cleaned out and put away and I felt so mad at myself for letting that go for so long. Life is so much easier when everything has a place and is put back into place after it is used. I've let that slip, my family is terrible about that and it just hit a breaking point with me yesterday.

Next I quickly cleaned up my bedside table which had gathered an assortment of essential oils, lotions, pens and hairbands and put all that away in the drawer not more than one foot away where all those things have a place. Then I cleaned off my dresser which had gathered an assortment of small recently laundered items that needed to be put away, shopping receipts and dust. This all took me less than 10 minutes to do and that made me even more annoyed that I wasn't doing a better job keeping it tidy.

It's amazing how much lack of organization can wear on a soul, how cranky one feels to be around it and how the solution can be so simple. "A place for everything and everything in it's place" is a motto to live by! I have lived like that in the past and, as I have many times, I credit a dear friend for teaching me this. I was already part of the way there but when I saw her system it changed my life and made my life so much easier and organized. Then I went and got a family and things started eroding.

I had the luxury of living alone for long enough to really settle into that motto and I knew where my things were. Everything had a home, I lived with only what I needed and I could easily put things away and find things. That is not nearly as easy when you are dealing with a family's worth of stuff, have people moving things around, not putting things away and just a ton more stuff. Compound that by the fact that you married someone who finds sentimentality (like tee shirts from high school, 90s jeans, Sunday comics) and "I might need this in the future for something" (like bits of 550 cord and  advertisements for things he might need in five years) to be constants.

I keep thinking that if I can just set the example by keeping all my things tidy that it will serve as an example for the family and that will spread throughout the house, but I have yet not been able to keep my stuff together to a noticeable level. I have talked to enough moms and wives and working women with and without families to recognize that there is only so much time in a day and there has to be some logical realization that you can't do everything perfectly every day and there have to be priorities and that those can change fairly regularly or with changing needs.

Keeping a house tidy all the time with a family is a big challenge. Just upkeeping the kitchen throughout the day is challenging enough, let alone other main living spaces like living rooms, family rooms and bathrooms. Don't even get started on attics, yards and garages. Then there are jobs, church and civic work, family activities, needs for quiet time and attention to family members, doctors appointments, groceries to buy...it seems to never end.

I admire a family who can keep that all organized and together. And then I wonder sometimes at what cost that comes. Do we make our families completely miserable and make them feel unwelcome in their own homes because of our obsession with tidiness and order. Do we just become constant "cleaning police" and lose ourselves in cleaning hypervigilance. Some women just wear themselves out trying to do it all by themselves at the sacrifice of their own mental and physical health. I know that is the pendulum swinging the completely opposite direction but I do think that with each family it is different. Perhaps my situation is a bit unique because I gained a family instead of starting a marriage with one spouse and not much stuff. We already had two full lives of belongings and started with a young child. Some habits at midlife are pretty hard to change.

I don't know exactly what the solution is but it looks like I'm either going to find it or bounce around somewhere near the solution or make myself crazy trying to find it. Ha! How do you manage this and stay in your sane zone? What have you learned to let go of and what have you enforced that helped make your life less crazy and more organized? I'd love to hear your insights!

Spring Break Plans: House Projects & Fun

We're officially on Spring Break and since we aren't traveling I decided we need to make the most of it in two ways: we need to get some house projects done while we are all three at home and second we need to make sure our kiddo has some fun. Last Friday I sat down with a "plan your week" printout and started planning.

When we first closed on our house about 18 months ago we were hard charging to get things done. We ripped out the pond/planter in the kitchen and got the floors replaced, painted the walls, hung a chandelier and replaced the flooring in the office/laundry room, painted the downstairs bedrooms, replaced all the lightbulbs in the house with energy efficient ones...and then the holidays came and the week after that my foot accident. Screech went the brakes.

Then we moved into the house because is was so much easier for me to maneuver around in on crutches. And then we went into survival mode until summer while I hobbled, worked full time and we found ourselves incredibly busy. Now here we are months later and this house has just never gotten organized like it should have with a proper move in. It's just been survival mode and disorganized and I can't take it.

Now unfortunately the rest of the family has developed some bad habits about not putting things away and things not having a proper home and it's going to be crazy hard to create new habits now. But it has to be done for everyone's sanity, most importantly mine. So not only do we need to reorganize the entire house but we really need everyone to commit to keeping it that way. This is going to be a real challenge.

So I came up with a plan for Spring Break week where we'll do a project in the morning and then we'll go have fun in the afternoon. This way there is some earning and ownership of work in the mornings and then we have something to look forward to and relax doing in the afternoon. Hopefully I'll get buy in from the family. I called a Family Meeting on Friday night to have a conversation about how things got to where they are, what we can and need to do and how we can accomplish this during our Spring Break week. Hopefully this is going to get everyone on board for the duration of the week.

I was really committed to starting at the front door and working our way through the house but the more I think about it the more I think we need go start in the garage and work our way through the house from that direction instead. That way we'll have available storage for things we need to move out of the house in the garage. The Man has been working out there from time to time going through boxes and such and I have a feeling there are a ton of half empty or empty boxes that we just need to get out of there or finish cleaning out.

I think we are all ready to get rid of more stuff. I anticipate we'll have a big load for the thrift store this week. It will be great to get the garage in better shape and then move on to the house. I am learning that at times things are much easier to accomplish than expected and sometimes they are much harder. I'm not sure which the garage will be but fingers crossed things are in better shape out there than any of us expect and we'll be able to make some big progress quickly.

We need space in the garage for all the home improvement tools and products that are now set up in our family room. It was great when we were working on the house daily in the winter, but I don't think we need it in the house anymore. It could all be arranged nicely in the garage and we need to reclaim that space in the family room desperately. The Man continues to complain that there is no storage in this house, but in reality we just aren't using any of it to its proper use. We actually have a lot of space it's just not being used well.

I've come to realize what seemed like a very big family room really isn't and it has a terrible walking path from the sliding glass doors at the front of the house that leads right through the middle of the room at a weird angle that makes it almost impossible to place furniture in any reasonable manner in that room. Whomever designed this house really blew it in a few places.

This may sound a little crazy, but I smudged our house with white sage and lavender and gave the house a prayer/blessing. I thought I would hate the smell of the smoke in the house but I didn't mind it at all and it didn't linger or bother anyone else. In fact the family seemed to like It. Ideally you smudge after you've decluttered but I think we needed a little energy burst to get us going again and then I'll do it again sometime soon.

I do feel like the house needs a energy cleansing and fresh start. Whatever it takes. Especially after our neighbor made the mistake of telling The Man that both the previous homeowners died in this house. Fresh start, clean energy for them and for us. I bought the sage a few weeks ago and it had just been sitting on the counter until I studied up and decided to try it. I asked the family if they felt the energy in the house was a little lighter and we all felt it was a strong "maybe." We'll see what happens.

Anyway I digress. So the plan is the cleanse the house in body and soul and have some fun this week adventuring around to more local museums and attractions. Hopefully by the end of Spring Break we'll have a very happily organized house and we'll have had a lot of good adventures too. Fingers crossed!

*Late-breaking update. Okay so our first day of Spring Break went pretty well, despite some crying and me telling a little person I needed to take her to the ER if her legs suddenly weren't working when we headed out to start working. Amazingly they were fine before and all day afterwards including for some pretty hard core play with neighbor boys most of the afternoon. Thankfully 5 minutes with ice on the knees solved that problem and make the work seem much less horrible. To be honest it was little bit of cat wrangling to keep everyone on point but we filled out recycling bin that will go out this morning and my little car is packed up ready for a thrift store drop-off. Everyone contributed and let go of some things too. That is a success. Our garage is a little cleaner. Yay!

I may have secretly odios-ed a few 90s clothing items that I didn't say anything about to the owner. I generally don't believe in doing this but at some point enough is enough and the emotional attachment to hideous old clothing is tooooo strong. If it's been in boxes since for over a decade I think we're done. The comedic highlight of this was when he donned a 90s tee shirt and some of those multi-colored body-builder muscle/workout pants guys wore in the late 80s. To make his point he even wore that outfit around the house for a few hours. Oh my gosh. Kiddo and I laughed so hard. I still can't stop laughing at the thought. I've told him I need to make him a quilt from those because he's obviously very attached! Scary.

I tried to keep the project at two hours but with all the dramatics and cat chasing it lasted more like three hours, but I was happy to shut it all down at a reasonable point. I had to pull everyone off the job and stop the work, which I think was good. I really like stopping BEFORE everyone was exhausted, worn out and cranky. Tomorrow I will try taking some music out with us.

I think we're going to do another day in the garage since we're all in a groove with it and it still needs a lot of work and we're kind of on a roll about what needs to happen in there. Wouldn't it be crazy amazing if we could someday park two cars in there. Wow.

Lessons From Home: You Can't Teach It All

It's so easy as a parent to get caught up in all the things you "need" to teach your child to prepare them for adult life. I have caught myself in the past feeling like we need to be teaching in our home every good thing I see other parents doing. What a folly and too much pressure. I learned to focus on doing what my family needs, not what every other family I know is doing cumulatively. That's not even possible to do every good thing every other family does, let alone worth stressing over. Now I pray and ask what we need to do and try to listen to inspiration as it comes.

Recently I have found myself feeling pressured about all the things we need to teach our kiddo to prepare her to go out in the world as an adult. The time is short, we've only got 7 1/2 years before she's off to college. Panic.

She needs to know how to budget time and money, how to work and earn money, how to manage adult relationships, how to live through a breakup and how to breakup with someone. She needs to learn how to fix things, how to make things, how to solve all kinds of problems from a broken down car to any variety of possible crises.

She needs to know how to keep house, fold sheets, make meals, buy groceries, eat healthily, get enough sleep and take care of her body, keep strong mentally and emotionally, clean house and learn to live with less so she can have less stress and work taking care of things. She needs to know how to get a passport, how to plan a trip....oh the list goes on and on and on.

Seriously between school, extra-curriculars, church, friends and much needed down time there aren't enough hours to teach her all of that to the level I think is needed between now and when she graduates from high school. More parenting stress. I don't want to send our Kiddo out into the world like some girls I've heard of who never learned to make a meal or had never turned on a dishwasher before, etc. Agh!

Then I thought back on my own youth and realized how much I learned once I left for college. There are a lot of people to learn from there. I also learned a lot during my time living in Denmark when I was 21-22. There are lots of opportunities to learn the skills of adult life from other people whether that be during high school, college or young adulthood. It's natural and good because other people may be able to reach her in new and more interesting or inspiring ways that we could.

"Finding myself" as a young adult was very often a reflection of experiences I had with people who grew up in different types of homes or environments that I did. It was inspiring and refreshing and often exciting to see how other people did things differently than we did in our home and it gave me a broader perspective to decide who I wanted to be and how I wanted to do things. It was all that exposure to things that were different than I was used to that taught me there were many ways to do things and many reasons to do them outside of what I experienced in the place and way I grew up. That was so educational and satisfying.

As I looked back on my own experience and made this realization, it was a huge moment for me to take a deep breath and not feel so pressured that we needed to teach her everything she needs to know about life before she graduates high school. There are still many learning opportunities between parents and children after that time too. Those do not stop at age 18. Realizing this helped me to step back and chill out.

So here's another unnecessary stress I'm going to let go of. I'm trusting in good people she will meet all along her path, I'm trusting myself to chill out and be a little more natural about this evolutionary process called raising kids, and I'm trusting her that she will keep making good decisions. I hope she will take opportunities to learn and grow through healthy relationships with others and will take opportunities to see the world through her own eyes, others' eyes and still hopefully sometimes my eyes too.

I'm also going to trust that no matter where she goes, she will take her relationship with God with her and he will watch over her. I don't need to do it all. I don't need to do it perfectly. I just need to do my best. I can keep trying to do that, without feeling overwhelmed or fearful. We can do our best and believe that good will come from it. What a relief....

The Bug's Patio Birthday Party

Yesterday was The Bug's birthday and the weather was so nice that in the late afternoon I decided to have part of our family celebrations outside and invite our dear neighbors over for presents, cake and ice cream. Children's birthdays always feel a little bit overwhelming as parents, covering all the necessary details even if it's just a family party. There are the gifts, a meal, decorations, cards, wrapping presents, and so many little details that start to feel a little overwhelming. It's amazing how exhausted you can feel at the end of a child's birthday. I almost feel like a big birthday last year was about the same amount of work as a family party...maybe less since we ordered pizza in for 15 girls!

Around four o'clock, as I was coming home from grabbing a few last minute groceries and a beautiful cake, I thought it would be more fun if we invited the neighbors, so I sent kiddo over to invite them. Then I started thinking about how nice it would be if we did all that outside. So I started zipping around the house looking for furniture we could take outside to use on the front patio.

I was rummaging around the house and then headed out to the garage where I found a nice fold-up rectangle table I forgot we had. Grabbed that, a bunch of chairs from the dining room table since we were using our more formal dining table seating area for dinner. Then I found a pretty tablecloth that I actually bought for a different purpose all together and threw that over the table. Started grabbing candles, flowers, cake candles, matches and took that and all the presents outside. I found a few little flower garlands to hang out there in my stash from last year's party.

This also gave me a chance to use one of my purchases from last summer, a covered tray to protect food outside. I gathered all the plates, cups, napkins, cutlery, ice cream scoop, cake knife and server there and took that all out to our table and we were ready for a starlight birthday celebration.

Then it was back inside to make dinner. The Bug requested steak, so we did steaks with marinated mushrooms and grilled onions. Earlier in the day I threw some baking potatoes into the slow cooker and I was so glad that got done early, took absolutely no time and didn't require turning on the oven for over an hour. Then I made Crack Broccoli which we are still eating almost weekly. We're on a big push for more leafy greens and so this is a great addition to our regular menu of kale/spinach smoothies and spinach salad.

Dinner was relaxing and delicious and by the time we got done eating we had about 15 minutes before our neighbors would arrive. We gathered the cake and ice cream, went out and turned on the lights and lit candles. It was fully dark by 7:45 when we saw our friends coming through the trees from their yard across the driveway with a flashlight. So fun. Our neighbor Cathy said the patio looked so romantic, which her husband thought sounded odd, but I know just what she meant and was so glad to know that we'd achieved "magical" and "inviting" with the scene.

We opened presents first. Our neighbors were so sweet to bring her a little ornament from their travels. A woodcut with a bear and fish. Her dad and I gave her some piano books, a book on drawing animals - which is a great talent of hers - and then she opened a few bike accessories which was the beginning of a little trick we played on her.

We told her that since she'd been enjoying riding her bike a lot the past few weeks that we thought she would enjoy a few bike accessories. That included a water bottle & cage for it, bike headlight, taillight and lights for spokes, etc. When she had opened them all, her dad said he thought he might have forgotten one of the accessories and he disappeared to go get it. She was fully engrossed in looking at her new books and was not paying attention to where her dad went or what he was doing.

When he walked up next to her chair with a shiny new bike, she still wasn't looking up. As her dad was walking up to her the neighbors were "Oooh"-ing and she looked up and her jaw dropped. She was speechless. She jumped up and threw her arms around her dad and kept saying thank you. She said thank you didn't seem like enough to really say what she felt. It was a little too dark for an initial ride and we need to adjust the handlebars and seat for her but she walked it around, inspected it, threw her leg over and and got a feel for it for a few minutes.

Her old bike was a little too small for her and we've known for a while that she needed a new bike. She was also very tired of pink bikes, three in a row and had made it very clear that she wanted a
mountain bike that didn't have girl colors. So she got the very boyish Gauntlet bike in camo and orange - and loved it. No more girly bikes with tassles around here!

We capped the night off with a beautiful cake from Whole Foods. I was going to make a cake and was looking forward to trying out the "make a box cake taste like homemade" and "make a box cake taste like a bakery cake" tips from Pinterest, but when The Man suggested I just go to Whole Foods and get a cake I thought that sounded pretty good. Once I got there though it was hard to choose. I love their Chantilly Cake and it is a perfect spring/summer cake with white cake and berries inside and out. But that  is my favorite cake and so associated with my birthday now that I thought I wanted to do something else for The Bug.

Chocolate cakes sounded so heavy, carrot cake sounded wintery. So I settled on a cake we hadn't tried before Strawberry Boston Cream Pie Cake. I knew it was flavors that everyone in our family would enjoy and it felt spring-like and not too rich, dense or heavy. When I told everyone at the table what kind of cake it was everyone reacted with oohs and ahhs so I was glad it seemed like the right choice for all five of us. It was delicious and light and creamy, just as I hoped and it paired so well with french vanilla ice cream too. Even after it was served and eaten The Man had another piece and then cut off another small corner and Kiddo was picking at it. We'll definitely enjoy the rest over the next couple of days.

I am so glad we took a few minutes to throw together something a little extra special to enjoy our front patio, which we've never done, and party under the dark, beautiful, star-filled New Mexico skies. It turned out to be a delightful evening and a good reminder that spur of the moment ideas when implemented can make a night one to remember.

Things We Can And Can't Deal With

The other day I was going through a temporary but frequently repeated experience that I really was not enjoying. Because it was an experience that I have to go through somewhat frequently, the thought came to me, I cannot live the rest of my life like this. I can't deal with this forever!

When we are in the midst of unpleasant experiences it does feel like they are taking over our entire lives and that we will break to pieces if you have to live like that all the time. But this thought came to me that completely changed how I was feeling and my thinking. I realized that this unpleasant experience never lasts more than two hours often it is only 30 minutes or so. So that's not nearly my entire life or an entire day. It's a pretty short time and I get through it every time. On a bad day it's not even 1/12 of my 24 hour day.

Then I started thinking about what fills the other 22-24 hours of the day that aren't affected by this situation. I started counting the blessings I do have in those hours and the things I gladly deal with -- that I love and are deeply meaningful. I thought about the day before when I got to spend a leisurely afternoon alone with The Man and how peaceful and relaxing and restorative it was to just be with him, enjoy the outdoors and relax. It was like medicine for my soul! I CAN deal with that and want more and more of those moments.

I thought about the wonderful, sweet, bonding moments I've had hanging out with The Bug the last week and how nice it is to snuggle up to watch a movie, read books and be still together...or to talk lots and laugh and workout together. Sweet, sweet moments, especially when it feels like she is suddenly growing up faster than ever. I CAN deal with more of those moments with her, many, many more.

I thought about sipping my favorite hot cocoa and nibbling toast. In a few weeks it's going to be way too hot to sip cocoa and I will miss the comfort and coziness of those quiet times and needing to warm up. I would gladly take more of that cozy, warm, chocolate-ness. I CAN deal with making the absolute most out of those moments.

I thought about how much I am enjoying workouts and hours at the gym and how motivated I am for progress with my fitness and the recovery of my foot. It's painful, but I'm enjoying pushing through and reaching for goals. That's another thing I CAN deal with in my life right now.

I have a lot of projects that I'm working on and am excited about right now. I am deeply interested in them, enjoying progress and I CAN deal with that. Inspiration and motivation to create are such a big part of who I am and what get me really excited. More good things in my life.

I am really passionate about getting our back patio furnished for entertaining and family enjoyment this summer. That's another thing I don't mind dealing with one bit. Inspiration boards, checking lots of online resources and budgeting out options in my free time is another project I CAN deal with in my life right now and that I am having fun with.

So, while in those few moments of misery when I thought I just can't take this anymore, it struck me that I need to not think in those short periods that the unpleasantness is my entire life! I realized I have so much more in my life that I CAN take, that I do love and that is wonderful and delicious to my soul. That realization really helped me to turn around my attitude about the small, unpleasant moments of life. They truly are just a bit of time and we do get through them over and over again. But they aren't our entire life and we don't have to let them feel like they own our entire life or our happiness.

When I started seeing things in this new light, suddenly being in the midst of an unpleasant experience didn't matter so much because I knew it would end and it would end soon. I saw that I have all those other lovely things to be excited about. Now, the next time I have to endure an unpleasant experience, I hope I'll be able to remember that it will be just for a short time and it isn't my entire life. It's a few minutes of a day with many more minutes still available to enjoy with loved ones and doing things I love.

So next time I'll remember I can deal with those unpleasant experiences and they don't have to color so much of my world and I'll try to focus on all the great things about life, about my life. Good life lesson that will serve me well.

Our Big Kids Need Us Too

As The Bug has gotten older and much more independent, it's been a real process to understand what she needs. It's easier when kids are little. They need to go to the bathroom, they need to eat, they need attention. But when kids get older they start communicating what they need less and it becomes a big learning curve to understand where they are at in life and to connect with them, especially when friends become more important, and grown ups (especially parents) seem less interesting to them.

I've been realizing more and more that even if they act like they don't really need you or want you to spend time with them, that they do and they often communicate this by being a bit challenging or by ignoring you.

We've been reconnecting with our "not to little" Bug lately and I am realizing in a deeper way how much tweens and teens need time with their parents. If you offer they will come. We have been spending time watching TV series together, working on small projects, taking drives, going to museums and running errands. Friday night we did a tough home workout together and a couple of times since then she's mentioned how much she enjoyed it.

Sometimes we watch separate movies, spend time on own tablets or read our favorite books and magazines but we're together, curled up on mom and dad's bed. Even when we're doing separate things together there are still repeated moments of "love you" and stops for hugs and cuddles. Even though she acts like she doesn't need us nearly as much as when she was younger, she still does and she loves having our attention and just spending time relaxing or talking together.

It makes our home calmer, it makes her calmer. It helps us to act with more patience and wisdom in trying moments. It helps her want to be more sweet, a better listener and more obedient. It helps us all remember how much we love each other and to be gentle and kind with each other. We see the good in each other when we spend quiet time together and I find that many more compliments are passed in our home when we enjoy down time together and work time together.

There is more gratitude one for another and we miss each other more when we're not together even if it's just for the school day. She is more likely to share part of her day and things that excite her or bug her when we've spent time together. It provides quiet time to have important conversations, calmly discuss challenges and to encourage and support.

I find that it's very easy to keep myself busy and time can go by very quickly, even just an afternoon. It could be easy to let a day go by without quality time beyond dinner and bedtime. While I try to be very available, especially in the hours after school, I am reaffirming my efforts to make sure we spend quality and quantities of time together. It has brought an added sweetness to our home and I realize it helps all of us get through hard times better and to not let hard things get us down as much when we feel like a team and not alone to tackle life.

Spending time with our big kids has a major impact on the decisions they will make in their tween and teen years and I want to keep working on being a connected and loving parent who can help a child make great decisions and find happiness in life. I can definitely see, feel and hear a difference in our home when we spend time together. Big kids need us!