The Luckiest No Matter What!

During the spring shut down, we worked primarily at our breakfast nook table and dining room table. It was okay, but I realized, the more weeks we were out of school, how distracting that area was. My kids were just steps away from food and toys. Not to mention, for a good chunk of their day, someone was cooking something near them. It was way easier sometimes to watch mom making sandwiches than it was to finish a journal entry. The Space Because of that, we've been working to clear out our main room in the basement so that we can do learning from there. I wanted the space to be inviting, comfortable, but devoid of as many distractions as possible. I also wanted to be able to spread out my three humans so they had an area to clearly focus without getting too distracted by each other. Little by little we've been organizing, sorting, and getting rid of things to make that space work. Restructuring this room isn't necessary, but it has felt really good to feel product...

Dear Baby of the Family, I miss you terribly right now.  As a parent, when you know your littlest is also your last, you hold onto everything with a firm love grip. You know it's the last crawl, the last middle of the night feedings, the last first smile or laugh or word. Babyhood and toddler life slip farther away with every passing day. There is no next time around.  The last baby gets a few perks that maybe other siblings don't get- more alone time, more one-on-one, and the attention from a parent who is watching everything with eyes wide open as if not to miss a single thing. Oldest children get all the shock and awe- everything is new, often times surprising. With the youngest, you anticipate, you get ready, you don't want anything to pass by without you taking in every part of it.  If things were BC (before Covid), my littlest would have his mama to himself for some blocks of time- while one older brother was at preschool for a couple of hours and other two brothe...

The past couple of years, I've spent the summer doing 'camp days' with #hundboysx4. I'll come downstairs in the morning and announce, "It's MOVE-IT MONDAY" or "Get ready for a WACKY WEDNESDAY." If you want more ideas of camp days like this, read more about it here . That's been going really well and kids really like it. It gave a little focus to our days and also kept things fresh. This year, for so many reasons, I decided I wanted to be just a bit more structured and do a little more intentional educational activities. We were already knee deep in a routine where we spent some time in the morning doing school-ish type things because of in person school being canceled since mid March. Since we don't have many places to go or other activities like sports or camps, I felt like having something for 1-3 hours each day might make sense. As I was planning for what that might look like back in June, Carter ended up being my muse.  He was i...

Anyone in my life knows I haven't handled this pandemic very well.  It's a perfect cocktail of the extremely high expectations I put on myself + an incredible sense of responsibility for my children's education, mental health, and well being + wanting to do everything + wanting to do everything well + being an anxious worrier + little to no alone time or break from... well... anything = a sh*t storm for me.  My mom has been on the receiving end of teary phone calls from me more times than I can count.  My group chats have been on the receiving end of many pictures of dumpster fires to describe how it's going at my house on any given day.  And I have been on the receiving end of text messages from friends checking in to see how I am doing (thank you, profusely, by the way).  I sometimes find myself, after an occasional good cry in the shower (shower cries are just the BEST aren't they?! Such a good way to let things out), thinking there HAS to hav...

On our trip out west to Montana, we ended up breaking up the drive a little on the way there and on the way home. The phrase is usually 'against our better judgement', but in this case it was 'against our worse judgement.' We had fully planned on driving straight through, about 24 hours not counting stops, to get TO Montana and ended up staying in Madison Wisconsin for a night. We stayed on Lake Monona- it was gorgeous. From what we were able to see of the city, we LOVED it and will be back for sure. Because we were trying to stay distant from people, we didn't explore much outside of the car and stayed close to our Airbnb. We then continued on our drive through Minnesota and North Dakota before getting to Montana.  Dinner with a view in Madison A little taste of Madison- we will be back! For the way home, we took a bit of a different route, this time driving a ton through Wyoming and South Dakota instead. We spent two nights in Custer, South Dakota an...

I had heard Montana was beautiful, but it truly surpassed any and every expectation. When we weren't spending our days at Yellowstone National Park (read about that part of our trip here ), we stayed close to where we were staying in Emigrant, Montana and took in all the big sky country. Emigrant is located smack dab in Paradise Valley- an area between the Absaroka Mountain Range to the east and the Gallatin Mountain Range to the west. I know things are named for a reason- this place was as close to paradise as my eyes have ever seen. It was green, hilly, and mountainous. You could see for miles and miles and miles and the stars?! I've never seen them so bright. Out every single window at our Airnbn rental, there was a gorgeous view and it never ever got old. Why fold laundry inside when you can sit on a deck with this background? Because Emigrant is such a small town (not even 300 people), civilization was pretty far away and nature was our playground. There was so mu...

The first thing I have to say is that our trip to Montana absolutely enchanted me. I don't know when or if we will be back, but this trip will stick with me... huge.  Sigh, the beauty NEVER got old. As we continued to explore, I would make Josh pull off the road (a lot) so I could try to photograph the scenery. It was just never good enough. I kept trying to preserve it, bottle it up, have something so I didn't forget. I'd look into the lens of my camera or the screen on my phone after taking a picture and I kept getting frustrated! What my eyes were seeing was too magical, too big, too vast to ever be conveyed appropriately in the confines of a photograph. Emigrant Peak Gibbon Falls We are all SO grateful that we were able to have a full week there to experience and soak in all the beauty that we could. During our trip to Montana, we visited Yellowstone National Park for three days. This was our first national park as a family! The north entrance to the par...