Loving Life

We made it! We survived track season and graduation season and had a lot of fun along the way! I'm sorry I didn't post anything during that time. I was working on doing life well and I had to pare down extra things during the season so I could focus on the things that matter most to me. So, now it's time to catch back up and do a mini-recap of our busy season. One of Ana's big excitements right as track began was getting her braces off. She had them on for just a bit over a year. Here are her teeth before braces. Notice the molar growing inward below.  And one year later, she has a beautiful, straight smile!  Scarlet would occasionally set up a little welcome home display for me after a Saturday long run. Here she set this up by the door so I would see it when I came in. My glasses, my phone, a penny, some chocolate, and a love note. It made me smile.   Ana loves tiny things. Including tiny food. We found baby bananas while shopping one day...

I have just over a week until track practice starts. I am winding down with my intense preparation period. My freezer is getting full of suppers to grab on busy nights. Cookies are piling up in the freezer as well in preparation for David's upcoming senior music recital. Lists have been made organizing the various parts of my upcoming busy season. I have this next week to finish up all my prep work and then the fun begins! I am doing all this so that I can relax and fully enjoy this busy season and not feel so overwhelmed with life. All this prep work goes against my laid back take-each-day-as-it-comes lifestyle, but I know it will help me greatly over the next two months and I'll be grateful that I took the time before to do this. Homemade granola bars sitting in the freezer to grab for meets I made a pile of breakfast burritos for a quick breakfast or snack. We are already working through them, so I made another two dozen last night to resupply. I guess they are a hi...

We'll start off the day with a cute little video of Scarlet singing to you. I was prepping for a piano lesson and was getting the chords written down for this song when Scarlet starting singing along. It was so cute that I wanted a video of it. Enjoy! The snow is mostly melted now except for some leftover piles, but we finally had a very nice amount of snow the last few weeks. The girls and I enjoyed a fun afternoon of sledding one of the days. Scarlet learned to enjoy the joys of playing in it. I found a number of really cute little snow angels around the yard. I've been training for a half-marathon coming up this spring. My running adventure buddy Jamie and I had a fun run a couple of Saturdays ago. It had recently snowed and we took a small dirt road that hadn't been plowed with the fresh snow. We had to stop and make a few snow angels of our own. It's a lot harder than it looks to run through 6-8 inches of snow. My prints are the ones on the right, and ...

Hello again! I spent much of last week in bed with a fever, so it feels good to get back into a routine again and to catch back up on the house. Aaron and kids did well fending for themselves during meals and life in general while I laid in bed watching movie after movie on Netflix. Challenge #6 celebrating my upcoming 40th birthday is to clear out 40 bags of junk/things I don't need or want before I turn 40. I tried this a few years ago of doing a bag a day for 40 days. I did really well for about 20 days, but then got derailed a couple of days and lost my motivation. So I figured if I don't put the pressure of doing it every single day, then I will more likely finish it. Some days I may do several bags, other days none. I'm at four having started it a couple of days ago. 1/10 of the way there! My thought process is that if I have less junk in my house, it will be easier to keep it tidy. Ha. I would probably struggle in that area even living a minimalist lifestyle. ...

 Challenge 5 of 40 is maintaining Family Creative Nights. I think this has quickly become one of my favorite nights in the week. It started with Ana reminiscing one day late last fall about how they loved listening to Adventures in Odyssey when they were younger. We would check out the various volumes that our library had (usually on tape) and the kids would listen to them for three weeks straight until they had them all practically memorized. Ana then said that you can go online and listen to all past episodes with a monthly membership to the Adventures in Odyssey club. That piqued everyone's interest since our local library did not have every episode and our knowledge was limited to what we could check out. So after a brief consultation with the rest of the kids, there was enthusiastic consent to instate Family Creative Nights. Our plan is that at least once a week, we gather around the table, log in to our account, and starting from the beginning, we work our way through...

Challenge #4 of 40 was to learn how to knit or crochet something. Thankfully, I have just the friend to teach me. My adventure buddy Jamie is also a knitter extraordinaire. We sat down together last week and she taught me the basics of knitting and sent me home with a pattern for a dishcloth. Here I am snuggled up with her dog and cat on my learning day.  I apologize for the poor lighting. Someday I may buy an actual camera with which to take pictures. I was quite pleased with how it turned out. Not too bad for my first try to knitting. You can see the reflection of the Christmas lights strung up in our living room. Aaron LOVES having white Christmas lights on and wants to leave them up all year. Not sure if I will go that far, but I agreed to leave them here at least for the rest of winter. It is pretty cozy to sit in the glow of the lights at night. David had his trumpet section over last weekend for practice and fun. We had quite the assortment of trumpets and flug...