updates & such

It's been awhile! Sometimes I think I'll stop blogging forever, and then sometimes, like now, I want to avoid things that need to be done, so I figured I'll finally brain dump everything I've been writing in my head over the last few months. 

I have exactly 13 minutes until my first piano student is here, so let's go. 

First of all, it was a great year for flowers.

A lot has happened over the last few months. 

For starters, we got a puppy! More than one person felt compelled to tell us we're insane or that a dog is a bad choice, but we are loving her. She's such a good pup and fits right into the chaos in our house. I'm still not a crazy dog person and probably never will be, but I do really enjoy having her around. Mostly because my oldest daughter and husband are the ones doing most of the work. I paid my dues getting up with babies at night for years and feeding them--it's their turn.

Our kitchen caught on fire a few months ago. I sat our air fryer on the stove while cleaning and forgot to move it. My husband, under the influence of Benadryl due to an allergic reaction he had for an entire month, hit the wrong knob while cooking dinner, and whoosh! There it went, up in flames. I was, as fate would have it, completely undressed in the bathroom at the time and found out about the fire when my kids ran down the hall screaming. Instead of calling 911 or rushing everyone outside, I stood completely frozen, totally undressed, and I thought of that scene in Little Rascals where they ask what the number to 911 is, because FOR THE LIFE OF ME I couldn't remember how to call 911.

By the time I grabbed my phone and got dressed, the fire had long been put out, because even while on Benadryl, my husband has much faster reflexes than I do while uninhibited. We have a slightly scorched counter and the base of my electric kettle was melted, but everything else is fine. Other than the air fryer, of course.

We started school! This school year has been a bit of a doozy so far for various reasons, but I think we're slowly settling into some kind of rhythm. We are finally getting the point of math where I have to start referencing the answer key occasionally, so we're definitely entering a new era. I've been reading The Four Hour School Day (which happens to be NOTHING about a 4 hour school day) for some homeschool encouragement and it has been exactly what I've needed.

(Didn't quite finish in time for piano, so picking it up this morning.)

My neighbor down the street is teaching a fall ballet class, and Clara has loved going. I've been taking an adult ballet class in the evenings that reminds me every week how far removed I am from my dancing days, but it feels so good. My neighbor and I have also been doing early morning hikes once a week, and there's nothing like being out in the woods as the sun is coming up. 

James and I went away for the weekend to be in a band for a college retreat. It turned out to be the most fun we've had in ages. We played 40 songs that weekend and I had a constant headache from the noise and muscle cramps from playing for hours on end, but it was so worth it. I had to sit in a dark, quiet room for days after from so much noise and stimulation and people, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Last year when we went, the girls came with us and both got incredibly sick. This year, we left them with their grandparents and James and I both got sick. Oh well.

And that pretty much brings us up to date. 

currently, july ed.

Well friends, it's been awhile. 2024 has been one curveball after another and I feel like I've been holding on for dear life. Life has finally settled down, and now that it's the end of July and schools here go back NEXT WEEK, I'm finally in summer mode.

reading: One Summer: America,  1927 by Bill Bryson, Habits for a Sacred Home by Jennifer Pepito, and A Lady's Guide to Fortune Hunting by Sophie Irwin. All three are delightful. One thing about my reading this year is that it's been slow. I usually have lulls here and there, but this entire year has been a lull. I'm only at 31 books when I'm usually closer to 40 or 50 by this point. I've had to return so many unread books to the library and I hate that this is the thing I beat myself up over. 

feeling: headachey from a playdate and then a hair appointment with my chatty hair stylist. I hadn't gotten my hair done since early March, before my life blew up this year, and I was looking rough. I think I'm finally on the other side of this insanely rough stretch of life and I needed a haircut and root touch up to mark it.

hoping: that the worst of the year is behind me. We had months of difficult spring travel, came home to sickness and end of school year stuff, had a wildly exhausting week at VBS, went to a doctor appt and was told the weird lump I found on my ribs might be nothing but might be something bad, had to wait 3 weeks for an ultrasound (the longest three weeks of my life), and finally got the results and everything is fine. I feel like I have lived 7 lives since March. People close to us have gone through horrific trials, my daughter lost her neighborhood playmates as their family has had to figure out a new normal with health issues. So many aspects of life have turned upside down this year. I've spent the last few weeks trying to recover from chronic stress and just enjoy the last bit of summer with my kids now that nothing huge is looming over me. We've had park playdates, splash pad playdates, pool parties, tie dying t shirts, picnics, swimming in the blowup pool outside, movie nights, bike rides, etc. I'm soaking up some fun while the weather is warm and we don't have schoolwork staring us in the face.  

neglecting: school planning. I actually got my laptop out to research some geography curriculums and then I got sidetracked, and here we are! Last year we stripped back a lot of subjects and focused on the basics, and it was a WILDLY successful. My struggling reader went from hating to read a simple sentence to pulling a YA chapter book out of a Little Free Library and sitting down and reading. I cannot stress enough the need to listen to your intuition on these things--I know she wouldn't be the fluent reader she is now if I hadn't pivoted everything. Now, I need to add a bunch of things back in, and I want to add it ALL in and need to figure out a way to do that that isn't overwhelming to us all. I'm trying to slowly get myself back in school mode while not raising my stress levels, because hello. 2024 has been a doozy.

loving: we finally got on the list for raw milk pickups, and while I use the milk for homemade pudding and baking and whatever else (I'm not actually a milk drinker, and my kids are hit or miss with it), I think I do this more for the experience of driving out to the country and visiting the farm than I do for the milk itself. Zero regrets. We all love our Monday afternoon farm visit.

giving up: on my garden. Last year it was the chipmunks and deer and squirrels. They've mostly left my garden alone this year since we put traps out, but this is the year of pests. My tomatoes are covered in some kind of fungus gnat (thanks, google)??? Aphids have set up camp on my container flower garden. The zucchini leaves have some kind of eggs all over. I give up. I'm not really even mad. I don't have the energy for it. It's almost August and I've gotten one green tomato. That's my harvest. People were posting their vegetable harvests and garden bouquets in June (in the same gardening zone I'm in! How!) and my garden is just in its own world, growing huge but not producing a dang thing. 

loving: dresses and skirts. I've bought a good handful of them this year and I've actually been wearing them. I've always wanted to be a dress person, and it finally clicked. I've also been in a weird and unsettling hot pink phase for the past 5 or 6 months. This is the girliest I've been since childhood and I don't hate it.

wondering: where mid-30s women are supposed to shop for clothes? I'm too old for Forever 21 but too young for everything else. I literally typed "where do 35 year old women buy clothes" into google, and listen: it showed me two websites owned by possibly mennonites? I don't know what this says about me, but I loved every single thing and bought a blouse and a dress. Maybe I just need to hang with the mennonites. I'm not into the prairie dress style Mennonite/trad wife, but more the boho look. It's a fine line. I thought when I was 35 I would feel 35, and other than sore joints, I catch myself thinking I'm in my 20s more than I'd like to admit.

signing up for: the Idyll challenge. Any Charlotte Mason moms will know what I'm talking about. I'm not going to go into the deep dive of why I signed up for this 2 year reading challenge from hell when I somewhat ~deconstructed~ from the Charlotte Mason philosophy, but as a homeschool mom I do want to read through her books even though they're as dry as the Sahara Desert, and I need the accountability. For those that don't know, there's a reading schedule to get through all 6 massive books over the course of 2 years, and there are monthly zoom meetings (this is the part that made me almost not do it). Charlotte Mason is worshipped in the homeschool world even though most of her ideals are somewhat common sense, and she had some bizarre understandings of science. I didn't slog through multiple British Lit classes in college for nothing! It trained me to became the Ultimate Homeschool Mom. 

Anyway, we are meeting friends at an Emergency Expo where kids can climb in emergency vehicles and play with the sirens, etc., so I will stop rambling. Great for my headache!!!! 

Tell me about your summers.

currently, may ed.

recovering: from truly the wildest spring. We had the birthday bonanza, Easter, a month in California (in which every possible thing went wrong), a cross-country roadtrip with a stomach bug, a visit from my MIL (she helped with the kids SO much), and James and I went to Florida for our anniversary where we were plagued with record-breaking heat and then held hostage by American Airlines on a plane for 8 hours with no food and water (cancelled flight due to weather, then diverted to Miami, then the flight crew timed out and we needed a new one, then a maintenance issue, then waiting for no reason??? All in all we spent 8 hours sitting on the same plane with zero food or water and I hadn't eaten that day due to airport drama)(and then we had another flight after that!). And then I came home to end-of-year mom's ministry stuff, a billion make-up piano lessons, a broken key on my new piano, etc. I also picked up a wicked cold on the aforementioned plane thanks to the recirculated air and the sick couple sitting next to us. It's been almost 2 weeks and I'm still not feeling great, and now it's slowly working its way through all of us. We are doing GREAT and not at all hanging by a thread!

prepping: my garden. Thanks to this insane spring, I'm doing a very minimal garden this year with zero expectations. Last summer's pest drama destroyed my will to live. I bought 2 tomato plants and a few flowers, and they're still sitting on my patio table, waiting to be planted. That's the level of care I have this year. I'm going to try to grow some flowers from seed on my deck so I have something pretty to look at. That's as good as it's going to get. 

hoping for: a peaceful summer. Last summer was not great and this spring has had my stress levels at an all time high, so I have completely changed my schedule. I don't have to plan my mom's group this year (!!!!), I'm only teaching one afternoon a week (!!!!), we are just going to finish the last few math lessons and be done with school (!!!!!), and I'm not doing ANYTHING aside from volunteering for a week at VBS (beer me strength). I will not be stressed and frazzled. I will not waste my time on social media. I will not scream at the chipmunks in my garden. I will not be overwhelmed. I will not read books that stress me out. I will rest and reset myself so I feel ready to dive back into school and other responsibilities in the fall. 

(please Lord hear my prayer)

worried about: the nest of baby robins in the bush outside our front window. Poor mama bird flew into our picture window and broke her neck, so daddy bird has become a single dad and we are all very invested and concerned. 

love that: we saw the northern lights! That's been a dream of mine. A few days later, James and I toured the Hemingway House in Key West, which was another dream. It was a big week for the bucket list.

watching: Below Deck. Listen--I am ashamed. I am not a Bravo person and I renounced "reality" tv when we backed out of House Hunters, but when we were in Florida and I had a heat rash and nausea from walking and biking in the 104 degree heat and humidity, we hid out in our hotel room and it was the only thing on tv. I became obsessed with Below Deck because the idea of living and working on a boat is my worst nightmare. When we were in California, the social media algorithm started showing me reels of people who live and work on cruise ships, and that became my hyperfixation for awhile. You could not pull me onto a cruise kicking and screaming which means I had to know what it's like to actually live and work on one, and ever since our travel nightmare a few weeks ago, I got hooked on watching pilots who post their day in the life reels. WHY am I like this?

To bring it full circle, I hate relational drama and I hate the feeling of swaying on a boat in the water and I hate the idea of being at someone's beck and call (other than my kids of course) 24/7, so watching Below Deck is like watching astronauts go to space. I cannot get enough of it and I never want to do it myself. We found the entire series on Peacock and we started from the beginning.

To piggy back off that, Flight Radar is my new favorite app. It shows you every single flight currently in the air around the world. You can click on a plane and see where it came from and where it's going, what kind of plane, how long it's been in the air and how much longer it has to go, and what the elevation is. I'll find a plane on a long haul flight when I go to bed, and then watch it land when I get up in the morning. I don't know what has gotten into me. James refuses to ever fly again after our last experience (I haven't even mentioned the turbulence that made me think I was meeting Jesus), so I have to live vicariously through the people currently on flight AFR090 en route to Miami from Paris. 

They have 3 hours and 23 minutes of flight time remaining, if you were wondering.

when you ask God for an adventure and He actually gives you one

Last year, I prayed for more opportunities to play piano. As much as I love to play just for myself in my living room, my skills improve the most when I’m forced to learn new music and play it for others. And that’s how I somehow became a funeral pianist for a stint last fall. Not exactly the answer I was expecting, but it’s the answer God gave me.

I have prayed similar prayers about travel. My friends all post beautiful photos of their frequent travels, and I think “Lord, I see what you’ve done for others, and I want that for me.”

Then the Lord said “Here’s a month in California! But it’s because every square inch of your family is in crisis.”

My girls and I are back from a month away, and let me tell you.

Actually, I'm too tired to know what to tell you. But wow. What a month.

It started with our flight to Dallas being delayed for bad weather, a turbulent flight, and my child throwing up on every inch of the plane and innocent witnesses as we ran for our connecting flight that we made with exactly three minutes to spare. 

We made it to California smelling like vomit but in one piece, and that's pretty much how the trip itself went. 

There's a lot of stuff going on with my family: selling my grandparents' house and settling their estate, moving my other grandma to assisted living and going through her house, saying goodbye to the places I've grown up visiting, visiting my uncle who is starting a long and difficult cancer battle. So much grief and so many changes all at once.

To top it off, my grandmother's house got the memo and gave up on life as well. The garage flooded right before I arrived. The microwave broke, the toaster broke, and TWICE the house flooded with sewage while I was there.

TWICE.

Y'all I was more than happy to pack and cook and clean, I was not expecting to clean sewage out of the shower. I got to know bleach on an intimate level. I also did not expect to learn how to pick a lock, but nothing about this trip went according to plan.

The washer died, two days before we left, so we had to schlep a bag of dirty underwear half an hour away to my other grandparents' house which had just gone on the market and pray there would be no showings. Then we discovered that while THAT washer worked, the dryer died that day, so we had to schlep a bag of wet but clean underwear back to the other house and use that dryer, which actually and mercifully still worked.

I had to share a bedroom with my girls, who had to share a twin bed (Lord have mercy). They passed colds back and forth, it rained more on that trip than I have EVER seen in California in my 35 years. 

I had to say goodbye to my grandma which was extremely painful. We said goodbye to both grandparents' houses. Goodbye to our favorite places to visit. I'm so glad my aunt and uncle and a few of my cousins came down to have one last family gathering. It was so special to sit and reminisce and spend time together in our second home one last time. 

On the not so sad side, we witnessed two SpaceX missile launches, had a couple beach days, celebrated Clara's 4th birthday with some shopping and brunch and a fun little party my great aunt threw, and got to see so much of the country that I hadn't seen before. 

After dealing with lawyers and banks and whatnot, we finally got to leave California after 3 weeks, and my girls and my mom and I roadtripped to Reno, where I spent a good chunk of my childhood. I haven't visited in 15 years and I was an emotional wreck showing my girls where I used to live and go to school. We spent more time with our family who lives there, and it was such a good visit. We drove through all of Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois. My girls came down with a stomach bug in Nebraska, which felt like the cherry on top of an extremely difficult month of travel. We drove through Omaha and Iowa exactly 24 hours before the tornadoes went through, and had we stayed an extra day to let everyone feel better like we considered, we would've been directly in the midst of those storms. 

My favorite part of the roadtrip was the Donner Memorial in the Sierras. I've been obsessed with the Donner Party saga for years, and I hadn't been to the memorial or museum since I went on a field trip as a kid. I've read books on them since and have seriously prayed for an opportunity to go back and see it all through fresh eyes, and we got to do that on our trip! We drove home on the California Trail (kind of the southern Oregon trail) and my kiddos got a lot of history lectures from me. Moments like that made the hellishness of everything worth it.

We have a quick anniversary trip coming up in a week and a half. Let's see if we can get through one trip without vomit!

currently, march ed.

reading: 2024 is the year I get into fantasy, and I have to be honest--I did not see this one coming. Tell me some good books I can download on my kindle--I have a lot of traveling coming up.

feeling: overwhelmed, stressed, like the dog meme saying this is fine while everything is on fire. Currently prepping for a month long trip to California to help with multiple crises on both sides of the family. Several relatives with cancer, one family death, an estate to settle, and two homes to get ready to go on the market. My kiddos will be with me the entire time (but James has to stay home unfortunately) and then my girls and I will road trip home with my mom. California to Illinois. PRAY FOR US. It will be good to see family and the ocean again, but it will be a sad trip too.

celebrating: birthdays! Because what is a family crisis and month long trip without everyone's birthdays and Easter thrown right in the middle?! Mine was two weeks ago, Gracie's is on Friday, Easter is on Sunday, and Clara's is two weeks from today. And in the midst of this I am still homeschooling and teaching piano lessons and trying to learn music for church on Easter. In the words of Ross Gellar: I'M FINE.

thankful: for my neighbor who must have sensed my stress from afar and brought us dinner!

loving: my neighbor happens to be a ballet teacher and taught an adult ballet class every Monday evening in March in her basement studio. I LOVED it. Mondays are my long and difficult days, and every week I would consider not going, but then the music would come on and I'd dance and feel like a whole person again. I haven't danced in about 15 years (and never took ballet) and it felt SO good to move in that way again. It was my weekly therapy. 

very into: spring colors. Making travel plans made me realize I need some major wardrobe upgrades. I bought a few things and all my shirts are lavender or hot pink. I literally have no clue who I--the girl who lives in black & white striped shirts--am anymore. I turned 35 and just transformed into an entirely different person. Bright pastels, fantasy books--I don't even know.

listening to: Brice Davis. He does folksy worship music and hymns. It's so, so good.

Happy Easter everyone!