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July Fourth Shenanigans
If you know me, you know that my favorite holiday is July Fourth. It’s the family and it’s the food. It’s the farm and the fun. It’s being together and it’s tradition and it’s years stacked on years of celebrating a summer day and lives and family and friends. July Fourth on the Farm is the best. It was Ryder’s first July Fourth. That dog legitimately loves the farm. (And spends his days racing to the pond and collecting briars in his thick coat and harboring dirt and mud all over his legs and just in general being a happy go lucky mess. The food is plentiful at the…
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Five Finds Friday (cheesy dip & Otto’s song)
FUNNY Otto told me that he wrote a song for me. I was pretty thrilled of course. Until I heard the lyrics. Here’s his song: You and me together. You and me together. You and me together forever. Or. Until I get married. FASHIONABLE You remember Jo, right? From such places as My Friendship and A Fellow Homeschooler. Her etsy shop has a new logo — designed by Emma (how fun when worlds collide) — and phoebeflock has a couple of really cool new items in stock. They’re all beautiful – the ombre zipper pouch and the throw blanket with wool embroidery. But I currently am loving the library tote…
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adjusting
Here’s one thing that’s weird about being the only parent at home. Deciding an emergency contact person. It’s kind of suddenly an arbitrary decision, when before it was a brainless decision. The form has a blank for “emergency contact” – insert spouse’s name and information. No thought required. But now. Now, it’s like — hmm, maybe today I’ll pick Friend A, maybe tomorrow Friend B. Which friend is more likely to answer her phone if a stranger calls? Which friend could leave what she’s doing to help me out in an emergency? And of course I know that if any of these friends received That Phone Call, they would…
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Tenzi: A Dice Game That Rolls Well Here.
The cardboard box on our doorstep always draws a crowd when the kids see the return address of Timberdoodle. They’ve come to associate the company with really fun products that they get to evaluate with me. I mean, I think their opinion matters, since the Timberdoodle products are primarily educational, even when they are fun. And they are the students, so I love to hear what they really think. We are a family who already loves games so we decided the Tenzi dice would be the first out of the box for the review. I love games, but I love games even more when they have simple directions and multiple…
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thank you . . .
How do you follow a post like yesterday’s? I don’t know. I guess the same way you follow a day like last Thursday and a year like last year, you just do. And, in so many giant and in so many tiny ways, last Thursday was a day not unlike any other day. It was a legal end of a nearly twenty year marriage but the real death of the marriage had happened long before Thursday. I’m certain I’ll write more about this topic in the future – there’s a whole lotta processing and shifting and working through going on in my heart and in my life and I’m…
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…. than all my sorrows
Last Thursday my husband stood in a court room before a judge and officially declared me to be no longer his wife. That morning two kind friends took me out to breakfast. We talked about regular life and hope deferred and hope renewed. We ate cinnamon rolls and shared stories about our kids and our hearts and books we’ve read. Then we went back to my house. And Hilary pulled Jo and I to stand in my bedroom. Bed wildly unmade from the three kids and the one grown up who fitfully slept across its sheets the night before. Ridiculously large loads of laundry piled too high on the…
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Five Finds Friday: (30) (meatloaf you want to eat & sweet london)
As I am typing this I am extra sleepy – so, you know – I’m blaming all errors on that. FUNNY Yeah. I’m late to all things trendy and on time. But this bit called Carpool Karaoke is hilarious to me and this one time that the host picks up Chris Martin is very amusing. (You know you’re funny if you can make a great show by just riding in cars and singing with people.) FASHIONABLE I bought a pair of shorts for the first time in actual years. For real. First time in years. I still can’t decide if I really like them but I’m giving it a…
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what do you think, friends?
Well. Well. Well. I disappear from the internet for a day or two and look what happens. I mean, I was just camping with friends and then suddenly every thing on this website is looking spiffy and shiny. (Truly, camping and this face lift here have little to do with one another, except that they did both occur during the same basic time span. Kind of.) At any rate. I love it. I love the giant photos scrolling across up top. (I need to get watermarks on several of those because Emma at Paper Story & Design took a few of them and they are so fantastic and she…
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everything’s perfectly normal here
Evidence that I live in a bit of a madhouse: _______ About twenty minutes after midnight Ryder places his paws on my face to alert me that he would like to exit the home to use the facilities. (Or to lie down outside where it is cooler than inside our home. Poor hairy fellow.) I note the time. Again. 12:20 am. The Yukon’s back door is cranked wide open. And has been since we loaded the car for a camping trip – oh, I don’t know – SIX hours ago. ________ My eleven year old is sound asleep. Wearing a camping shirt, cargo shorts and with his knife/multipurpose tool attached…
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what I learned in college that I wish I could undo
We try to make our kids vanilla, somehow. Universally, I mean. And also – as educators. Maybe even as parents. (I like vanilla as a flavor for ice cream, but maybe not as a description for a run of the mill, looks and sounds like everyone else kind of recipe for humanity.) Social media, modern culture, fashion, the machine that tells us what to eat and what to watch and what to wear and how to wear it and when to wear it are endlessly fond of this concept of sameness. They thrive on it. (Even while duplicitously declaring it unique.) It’s so good for business. It IS business. When…
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Five Finds Friday (29) (the dress everyone should own & why my car is destined to be dirty)
I think I missed one of these posts because – well – I was doing cool things and my computer was far away from me. But now my computer is all right here and so am I so I guess I can resume my Friday posts. FUNNY I wouldn’t say one of my strengths is having a tidy car. (My dad wouldn’t say one of my strengths is keeping my car’s gas tank full.) We’d both be right. Anyway. The kids were at Jo’s house and I was at the gas station filling up my tank with the stuff. I looked in the car that had just seen some heavy…
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Making Our Trail: Cripple Creek KOA Review
One of the really fantastic ways that God used to make this trip a reality for our family was through this KOA opportunity. The plan is as straight forward as it comes. In exchange for our lodgings, I would write reviews of each location. So I just write what I really think – the good or the bad – and you guys get to see what a few of the KOAs across the United States are like for a family like ours. After we survived Kansas, we pulled right into the square state of Colorado. In Kansas we left behind temperatures in the mid-70’s and in Colorado we pulled into…
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I didn’t miss the internet and I was glad to put my phone away.
One of my favorite parts of being at Lost Valley Ranch was the disconnectedness to regular life. And the lack of cell service. (That and my bed being made every day by someone besides myself.) For that one week I couldn’t see the growing number of e-mails I was missing. My phone was set on permanent airplane mode. Do they make a setting like that for all of my life? It was a sort of freedom, for sure. An intoxicating kind of freedom. Freedom from not only routine responsibility but from being inundated with the continual hard of the world in which we live. I didn’t watch any news or…
