something beautiful

panem et circenses

2021-04-30T06:00:00.001-04:00

Surviving the endless months at home required a certain amount of panem et circenses to escape what otherwise could be (and sometimes was) an overwhelming situation. I was (am!) so thankful for social media during this time. I mean, it's certainly a double-edged sword. I could for sure do without knowing how...questionable...some of my acquaintances and family members are on matters of politics, science, and common sense. *sigh* But hey, my 'unfollow' finger got stronger and stronger, so there's that. BUT man did social media come in clutch with solid recommendations for books, shows, podcasts, and products to keep me entertained, distracted, and having things to look forward to. In that vein, I figured I'd pay it forward (slash document for the historical record) with some of my favorite things in the Essentially Meaningless but Fun Anyway category, in case Summer 2021 proves to require some distraction, too. (Please ignore/enjoy the mostly random, old, unrelated pictures...but what's a blog without pictures?)

Books

Turns out pandemics result in a lotttt of reading for me! I completed 77 books in 2020, and am at 30 for 2021 so far. Here are a few of my favorites, and please note that in general, I'm looking for total escapism here. I did read a few more serious nonfiction books, but for the most part, I just wanna live in another world when I'm reading. (As always, you can follow me on Goodreads for more reading goodness!)

(Note that I'm skipping most of the 'hottest books of 2020' here, although I read and enjoyed many of them. These books below are mostly older and widely available through your library or Libby!)

1. A Court of Thorns and Roses (series), by Sarah J. Maas. I recommend all 4 novels and 1 novella currently in the series, but be sure to read them in order. I did not used to be a faeries-in-imaginary-lands type person. I am now. Note that this series is marketed as YA for reasons I do not understand, but I would not suggest letting actual young people read it. This is rated R for suuuuure. These books are an investment of TIME, as each one is like 600+ pages, but hey, that's hours upon hours you get to spend thinking about something other than your normal life, so it's a gift, really.

2. The Book of Longings, by Sue Monk Kidd. An absolutely incredible story written from the perspective of Ana, Jesus' (fictional) wife. This story just sucked me in and blew my mind in the best possible way. Hiiiighly recommend. And don't skip the Author's Note at the end.

3. The Mercies, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave. How's your Norwegian 17th century history knowledge? Not so good? Mine wasn't either, but now it's a lot better because this novel based on a true story SUCKED ME IN and took me on some deep Wikipedia research so now I basically AM an expert on 17th century Nordic witch hunts. Speaking of things I didn't see coming for 2020.

4. The Cruel Prince (series), by Holly Black. Told you I was a faery person now. I can't help it. I adored this trilogy. Honestly the first one wasn't great until maybe the last 25%, but the second and third books were fantastic, so it's still worth the read. These are more normal-length books (compared to ACOTAR) and appropriate for traditional YA audiences.

5. The Book of Strange New Things, by Michel Faber. There's no way to describe this book that doesn't sound insane. A compassionate, ex-addict British minister is recruited by a large, mysterious company to travel to their space base on another planet and serve as a missionary to the native population on that planet. The Bible he brings is their "book of strange new things," and this is a really lovely, slow story that is less action and drama and more interesting ponderings on the nature of faith and culture and relationships. It really sucked me in.

I'm a combo of chaotic neutral, neutral evil, and chaotic evil. SORRY.

Shows

I don't watch as much TV as many folks because I spend all my time reading. But I did manage to keep up with many of the most talked-about shows (because FOMO, and it's nice to have something lighthearted to discuss with folks!) and am thankful for the hours of distraction the following provided.

1. The Wilds (Amazon)- this was described to me as a combination of Lost and Mean Girls, and I'd say that is pretty accurate. Matt and I both enjoyed this one!

2. Bridgerton (Netflix)- If you haven't heard of/watched this by now, there's nothing I can say that's gonna change your mind. It's a delight, and also rated R, and I enjoyed every second of it. It's well-described as Downton Abbey meets Gossip Girl.

3. Naked & Afraid (reruns on Hulu or YouTubeTV)- I've already mentioned how much my whole family loves this one! Trust that everything 'naked' is blurred, so your eyeballs will not be offended, and most of the bad language is bleeped, except for every time someone says "Nature is a B****!!" (which is often, because it is) it is NOT, and so Millie regularly asks what that means. Sigh.

4. The Queen's Gambit (Netflix)- SO GOOD!! Almost good enough to make me want to learn to play chess, but nah. But seriously, this one is essential. Watch it.

5. Ginny & Georgia (Netflix)- This one took me by surprise! The description and branding had me expecting something Gilmore Girls-esque, but that is not what I found. I don't even know what genre I'd put G&G in; it covers a lot of ground and is somehow funny/amusing, deep, and thriller-y all at once. I really enjoyed it.

Movies

Well...I was going to think of some movies I liked this year, but then realized that I never watch movies. Who has 2 hours to commit to one thing, when you could be committing 12 hours to 12 episodes of some other thing?? Honestly now. Matt and I did set a goal a few months ago to work our way through the whole Marvel universe (chronologically) and so far we are averaging about one movie a month, for a grand total of 2 movies so far (and I don't remember the names of either. Why are the names of those movies so complicated?? Also I can't tell superheroes apart.) So I'll report back in *checks watch* 2849 years. At this point they create new content at a faster rate than we can consume it, so if my math checks out (and it always does), we will never finish.

Podcasts

Now podcasts I have time for! I took an unscheduled break from podcasts for the first 6-8 months of the pandemic because my normal 'podcast listening time' was during my commute, which disappeared along with my office. Eventually I started finding new podcast time, and now that I'm back to my usual commute, I'm firing on all cylinders with my old (and some new!) faves.

1. The Popcast. Shoutout to my faithful friends who didn't give up on me, even though they recommended The Popcast for years and I ignored them. Eventually I gave in, and I'm so glad I did. But the bonus that comes along with waiting a million years to start a pod is that now I have 8 years of back episodes to listen to, so I'm constantly laughing. Matt also enjoys listening to this one, so it's perfect for putting on in the car (if Millie isn't there, or is on her iPad. There's nothing objectionable on this one, but she doesn't *get it* and bothers me asking for explanations of every other sentence, so that's a waste of podcast time if you ask me.). I like how this one is totally standalone episodes, so you can just browse the titles and descriptions and find something that sounds fun, and you're good to go for an hour!

2. Pantsuit Politics. Man, Beth and Sarah, the hosts of PP, have been some of my best friends the past few years. I am so thankful for their calm, educated, measured perspective on the news, and I always look forward to new episodes.

3. Dolly Parton's America. It's been awhile since I listened to this one, but I really enjoyed it. Obviously Dolly is our queen, but it was so interesting to understand more about her life, career, and historical and current cultural impact. This is one that needs to be listened to in order!

4. The Lazy Genius. This is one I run to when I want practical tips on how to make one particular thing in my life better in about 20 minutes. Seriously, it's kind of the format. Laundry. Meal planning. Buying gifts. Finding your holiday decorating personality. Each episode (just browse the ep titles) targets a very specific 'thing' with the goal of "being genius about things that matter, and lazy about things that don't." I find this pod to be encouraging and usually super helpful!

5. Planet Money. This is another go-to for one-off, fascinating topics. I'm pretty sure Matt listens to every single episode, and this is one of our favorites for road trips. Planet Money is equal parts entertaining and educational, so you can't beat that!

Stuff

And here's where I'll throw in the miscellaneous things that have made life fun over the last year!

One of our many, many family "scoot-scoots" this year. That's little sis on Matt's back. ;)

1. Scooters. Guys, they're not just for kids anymore. I know I mentioned this the other day, but getting scooters for me and Matt was one of the most fun things about this year! I have this one and I honestly adore it! The handlebars come up high enough that it's a very comfortable ride. (Matt got a different one, and I'm not exactly sure which one, to link, but I don't like it as much. The handlebars don't go as high.) What's really fun is that our cul-de-sac neighbors also have their own adult scooters, and so all 4 adults plus our 2 first graders are often found having a scooter party in the cul-de-sac, and if that's not cool, I don't know what is.

2. Olive & June nail polish. I was swayed by my Instagram ads (they're just so good) and I'm not mad about it. Since I haven't been going to salons for the last year, I decided to redirect that money towards O&J polishes and I am SO happy about it! The top coat is the key, though. The colors are fantastic, but that top coat is clutch and means I don't have a chip for like...an entire week. Unheard of. You can get O&J at Target now, but the display at my local Targets are always somewhere between super picked over and completely empty, so ordering direct is the only way to ensure you have a comprehensive selection.

(Not O&J polish, but the closest thing I had to a professional mani for about a year)

3. Skrewball peanut butter whiskey. I mean, you didn't think we were gonna survive a pandemic acting like teetotalers, did ya?? Ha. Our neighbors introduced us to this delightful beverage and man, is it a treat. You can get it at probably any liquor store near you, and I highly recommend that you do. The sooner the better. We usually drink it straight up, but it's also fantastic mixed into a milkshake or your hot chocolate!

4. Sleeping Queens card game. This is a super fun little game that friends recommended early in the pandemic, and I'm so glad they did! It's simple enough for kids (Millie was 5 when we got it and she could play independently after maybe two or three times of being on a parent's 'team') and not boring or annoying for adults. You know it's not easy to find games in that sweet spot! Plus it's cheap (less than $10) and takes up no space. Grab a spare deck in case you need an emergency birthday present sometime.

5. Educational Instagrammers. Who knew- social media can be for more than just cute pictures of babies and puppies and food! I am thankful for finding some experts in their fields who are both entertaining and very educational, and since most of my friends follow them too, it's been so wonderful being able to have educated, fact-based conversations about things we otherwise might not know much about! Here are two of my faves, both on Instagram:

-@kinggutterbaby- Laurel is an infectious disease specialist at Emory who primarily studied global health and tuberculosis before focusing on Covid this past year. She is hilarious, brilliant, and colorful (in personality and language, haha). She has a million highlight stories that cover basically everything related to Covid, so if you're interested in data-driven information, explained by a scientist who also speaks plain English, I highly recommend her!

-@sharonsaysso- Sharon is "America's Government Teacher" and all-around incredible human. She not only answers questions (only with facts!), she teaches us all how to FIND facts on our own, explains where the facts came from, and what they mean for us now. She is funny, calm, non-partisan, generous, and intersperses her government talk with a lot of whale pictures and facts (besides government, whales are her other passion). I learn something new every day from Sharon, and her language and content is completely appropriate for anyone from your kindergartener to your great-grandma.

100 years later

2021-04-28T16:28:00.000-04:00

You know it's been a minute since you blogged when you go to your blog and then stare at the screen (and the most recent post, from 1.5 years ago) for five minutes trying to figure out what to do to start a new post. Ha. Am I 400 years old, or is it that after faithfully blogging for what felt like a lonnnnng time, I've well and truly forgotten how to do it?! I'll let you decide that one. Also, let it be noted that being out of the habit of blogging does NOT mean I've forgotten the thrill of receiving blog comments. Shout out to the filthy comment-bots that find a 9 year old post every now and then and helpfully leave garbled comments with hot tips about products that can increase my "manhood" and/or make me rich if only I click this link!! I ain't clicking, but I do appreciate y'all thinking of me and finding some ancient story about my deep thoughts on that day's lunch and gym exploits fascinating and worthy of your robot-time.

At any rate, it's turned out to be a slow afternoon, so I was digging deep and trying to remember what I used to do during slow afternoons, and here we are. I highly doubt anyone is anxiously awaiting a Life Update from me, but just in case- why not. (The girls in my Zoom book club, affectionately known as Blog Friends Book Club, since we all met via blogging, regularly harass me about not-blogging, but even they do not need this update, since our monthly meetings + Instagram keep them in the know. But I digress.)

Well, since the last time we spoke here in August 2019, there was a pesky global pandemic that made life quite...interesting. (I'm going for positivity here.) So nothing about the last year+ has been normal for my family, as I know applies to everyone...just need to write it down though, so that the NEXT time I blog (appx 2025, if trends hold) I will remember the context of this year. Because I'm sure otherwise I would never remember what a very special, special time 2020-2021 was. Mmmhmm.

Kiddos

Yep, still plural there. Still can only show you pictures of one of 'em, though. As you may recall, we because foster parents in June 2019. We were quickly placed with twin girlies, who stayed with us for five wonderful and chaotic and lovely and tear-filled months. We said goodbye to them right before the holidays, and took a little over a month off to breathe and focus on our family of 3. In January of 2020, though, we said yes to our next placement, and welcomed the absolutely cutest, sweetest baby girl ever (or since Millie was a baby, obviously) into our home. We expected her to stay for a short time, maybe a few weeks, but you will all be utterly shocked to learn that she is still with us...and we hope this will be the case for, oh, ya know, forever. Fingers crossed and that's all I can say, but keep checking back and maybe in a few months or 5 years I will update again and be able to share pictures. :)

But Millie (or Camilla, as she prefers anyone not family to call her) is doing great! She's 6.5, almost done with first grade, and nothing but personality and opinions. She adores being a big sissy, though she is going to adore it more when little sis can PLAY ACCORDING TO HER EVER-CHANGING RULES. Yes, Millie is in the stage where she likes to micromanage every single aspect of play (thus sucking all potential fun out of it, if you're me)..."OK, now you take the baby and say '_____' and now you go over there and sit down and do ____" and OKAY BUT CAN I NOT PLEASE JUST MAKE A FEW OF MY OWN CHOICES AS WE PLAY HOUSE?!?! Sheesh. Anyway, I too am anxiously awaiting the day baby sis can be bossed around in play so that I can go water the plants or something. For the love.

One thing the whole family can agree on, though? Our favorite family TV show- Naked & Afraid. Haaa. But for real, we watch it together all the time, and this guides most of our outdoor adventures as well. We go on lottttssss of walks around town (shoutout to the #1 and only entertainment option of 2020!!!) and on some trails in the woods nearby, and we have all learned so much from watching that show, we spend our time discussing the best place to make shelters, whether water looks potable or not, and pondering what kinds of predators might be after us in any given place. And then we walk home and enjoy eating and sleeping in our nice, air conditioned home. It's really the best of all worlds, since the Bates fam has no desire to ACTUALLY camp or experience nature too much. So there's your hot parenting tip for today (slash this year and probably next year too)-- a show the whole family can enjoy and learn from!

Exhibit A: a bamboo forest near our home that had a lot of shelter-building potential, and MAYBE even some panda bear potential!

Since we pretty much spent the last year at home (we're the mask-wearing, scientific-advice-following, err on the side of caution type folks), we've had lots of time together as a family and are happy to report that we still like one another. And more importantly, Matt and I both ended up buying adult scooters, and with the baby on one of our backs in an Ergo, we take many "family scoot-scoots" around town and are well-acquainted with basically every human, dog, cat, flowering bush, and holiday decoration within a two mile radius of our house.

We ventured off our street for spring break and made our way down to a house on an empty beach on Cape San Blas and it was a delight. But the water was freezing.

Matt & Erika (or...you could say...Matt y Erika...see what I did there?)

Matt and I both worked from home beginning in March of last year. Matt is still working from home, and will be permanently, as it was apparently a big hit with his company. I started phasing back into my office in January with a hybrid WFH/work at office schedule, and have been full time back in the office since the beginning of April. I truly loved working from home, and even enjoyed the extremely chaotic double dip of working from home full-time while managing Millie's digital learning for the fall semester. We sent her back to in-person school in January, when my office's patience with me being home all the time ran out, haha. She is doing great at school, but I so miss getting to see her throughout the day. Kids, man.

But MOST excitingly....

Matt and I are now both double vaxxed, post-two-weeks, and SO EXCITED! We celebrated by re-joining the YMCA last week, which is great, but not as great as my REAL "congrats on surviving being stuck at home for a year with your very loud children" present to myself, which is a very fancy (by Athens standards) and long-awaited mani/pedi with allll the extras. It's been a LONG TIME (since March 13, 2020, actually, as the first thing my coworker and I did when we got sent home from the office "for two weeks" was stop and get our nails done in case we wouldn't be able to do it again for *gasp* like a whole month or something. OH TO BE SO YOUNG AND INNOCENT.) and I am VERY excited. (Sure, nail salons have been re-opened for a long time here, but spending any unnecessary time indoors in public places is not a thing I have been willing to do until I was fully vaxxed, so NOW IS THE TIME!) I am...perhaps overly excited. It's fine. Just give it to me.

I am so thankful that relatively speaking, the last year has been bad only in a stress and inconvenience sort of way. Though many of our family members and friends got the virus, no one close to us passed away, and I am deeply thankful for that and aware that it certainly is not everyone's situation. As someone who during a "normal" year has a 9-5, lives half an hour out of town, has kids and millions of foster care-related appointments, and is fairly introverted, I don't generally have a busy social life or a group of friends I see regularly (beyond work friends and church friends). By far the best part the last year has been the close friendships I've developed with a group of girls that started with our Bachelor group text (remember how Pilot Pete's season ended JUST as the world shut down?!?!) and just kinda...never stopped. Those girls (a subset of my real-life book club-- ya know, the Bach-watching contingent of the club, haha) were my constant text companions and eventually real-life companions, too, as we started gathering masked-up around someone's fire pit for long conversations after our kids all went to bed. I imagine my feelings for them are something like what soldiers might feel for the people they went to war with. But those ladies were a life-saver this past year, and the joy we've shared as we've slowly all gotten ourselves (and our partners) vaccinated is just...priceless. I cannot wait to sit INSIDE THEIR ACTUAL HOUSES very soon and drink my margaritas WITHOUT A MASK IN MY WAY!!

I guess that sums up the last year-ish, pretty much. I should note that we had to say goodbye to sweet Lola, our beloved doggie, in February 2020 (thanks a lot, 2020). We missed her greatly those first few months of being home all the time, and know she would have been so happy to have her people home all of the time. Thankfully, we welcomed a new furry friend into our home in August, and Lucy is the sweetest little blond ragamuffin dog. She's definitely the girls' favorite member of the family, and our house is just a lot happier with a dog running around in it.

As school wraps up and the hot weather rolls in, we look forward to more walks, more Naked & Afraid marathons, more time with friends, more time working out (hahahahaa...I mean, yes, but am I actually looking FORWARD to it? Debatable), and less time scrubbing makeup off the inside of masks (THE WORST, why do I even bother with makeup, honestly?). More importantly, I look forward to hopefully someday soon telling Millie she's gonna get to be a big sissy forever...that all of her dandelion wishes have paid off (it's legit what she wishes for, every time).

Until next time, friends.

five!

2019-08-21T16:42:00.000-04:00

Well would you look at that? A few months have gone by, our family has gone through some pretty major changes, and my #1 best girl turned FIVE years old! We'll start with a quick update on Millie, and then move to the other big five-- that is, the fact that we've been a family of five now for a few months!

We celebrated Millie's birthday with a party at a local park- apparently she has no respect for the fact that her birthday is in early August and we live in Georgia and it's perpetually 39,000 degrees outside and no one wants to be out in all that. Nevertheless, she begged to have a party "in nature, so we can swim and play on the rocks and run and get sweaty!" and so we did just that.

Man, this girl is something. She remains impossibly adorable, with giant eyes that will just sucker you right into doing whatever it is you thought you weren't going to do. She's smart, fiercely determined, outgoing, and passionate. She loves unicorns, mermaids, rainbows, and glitter. She is a true little earth lover (makes me so proud!!), insisting on picking up litter wherever we go, asking all kinds of questions about how we can take care of the earth better, and being the first person to call you out if you toss something recyclable into the trash. She adores being hot and sweaty, and regularly begs me to turn on the heat in the car (PLEASE RECALL WE LIVE IN GEORGIA AND IT IS AUGUST) so that she can get "nice and sweaty." (Trust me, I know how to say NO to that one.) Millie still thrives on a schedule and plans, and can struggle to deviate from "her plan" even if you're offering something better/more fun. She adores reading books (though she still can't quite read), playing pretend with her dolls, stuffed animals, and other toys, and is equally happy playing by herself or with others. She learned to swim really well this summer and is a regular fish in the pool. She loves dancing and yoga, and is just as happy doing them in the living room at home as going to classes. She took ballet and tap last year, but we aren't planning to do it this year (due to other big family changes, haha), but she goes to a kid yoga class at the Y on Saturdays that she adores, and she hasn't even asked about going back to dance class yet, so hopefully she'll be fine with her "at home" practice!!

At her five-year-old check-up, she weighed in at 44 pounds (75 percentile) and 43.5 inches tall (also 75 percentile). She wears 4T and 5T clothes, or a 4/5 (XS) in girls. (Note: I LOVE this size, which she's been for over a year now, because I can shop from both the toddler AND girls sections of stores. Gimme ALL the clearance clothes!) She wears a size 10 shoe. Although her percentiles would indicate she's on the tall-average size for her age, I find that she generally LOOKS smaller than average in a group of other kindergartners- which could just be because she's on the very young end of her grade. She apparently notices this as well because she regularly asks if she has grown bigger yet. I mean, like as we're eating breakfast before school: "Mommy, did I grow any, or am I still going to be small today?" Bless it.

She started kindergarten at our neighborhood elementary school, the same place she went to pre-k last year. We were absolutely thrilled with our experience at the school last year and are so excited to spend the next six years there too, haha. Millie (or "Camilla," as they call her at school!) is so excited to learn to read this year, and also loving that kindergartners get to go to "specials" each day (PE, music, art, science lab, and computer lab- they rotate through those and go to one each day for an hour). Today she told me that her goal is to be the "special helper" in science lab because the helper gets to wear a lab coat- total #kindergartengoals, right? She loves walking to school (because she can get hot and sweaty, remember?) and on days when I'm not able to walk her, she walks with our neighbors/her best little friend, who is also kindergarten (and also about 4 feet taller than Mills (and 9 months older), which is possibly one reason she is constantly wondering if she's grown yet). She does express dreams of riding on the school bus one day, but thus far we've managed to avoid it- besides, she would hardly be able to get sweaty on a bus, right?!

Being Millie's mama is my favorite thing on earth. She isn't perfect, but she's just perfect for me. And yes, I got her a riding unicorn for her birthday, because the whole point of having kids is to make all your own unfulfilled childhood dreams come true, right? Or something. :) At any rate, she loves it as much as I do, and if you're looking for a ridiculous gift for a kid in your life, I highly recommend.

In other big news...

We finished our foster care classes, paperwork, and home study during the spring and found out on June 10 that we were an approved foster family. And on June 14, we brought home two sweet baby girls- twins!!! So we have been a family of FIVE since then! Millie had about one hot minute to adjust to being a big sister of two extremely cute, crawly, giggly babes, and she's done it as gracefully as I could have hoped for. I am not allowed to share any pictures or personal information about our girlies (not even pictures with their faces covered), which is super sad because they are SUPER CUTE, but it's understandable. It's been pretty interesting adjusting to life with 3 kids, but buying a van immediately really helped, haha! We aren't sure how long the girls will be with us, but we just adore having them in our family, and are so thankful for the opportunity to care for them for this season.

As always, I remain more active on Instagram, so catch me there if you want to keep up more than twice a year, haha. I always like keeping Millie's annual birthday posts here, because it's the easiest place for me to go look back to remember all the important things like how much she weighed and what size she wore at any given age, but otherwise it doesn't look like I'm much good at keeping up with a blog anymore! Though I can't really share a lot of specifics, I do have a highlight story on Instagram about foster care, so if you have questions or want to know more about our experience, you can check that out for some answers. I made my Instagram private a few months ago, but if you "know" me (blog-friends totally count), shoot me a message here or there and I'll let ya follow.

Until next time, friends!

a productive january

2019-02-01T11:28:00.000-05:00

Looking back, I would have to say that January 2019 was a PRODUCTIVE month. That's really the only way to describe it. Not the most exciting, not the most fun...but possibly the most productive month I've had in awhile. And since I like productivity...I'm happy, haha.

Here are some of my productivity highlights:

1. Completed our foster care training classes. This was three weekends of Friday 5:30-9:30 and Saturday 9-1 classes. Although I hadn't really been looking forward to the classes in terms of content (I was looking forward to taking them and being done with them so we could move forward in the foster process, haha), I have to say that Matt and I both really enjoyed them and found them very interesting. Heartbreaking, yes. But really helpful, too- not just for our future in foster care, whatever that will look like, but in our parenting journey with Millie, and in understanding more about the reality of 'the system' in Georgia. Anyway. Since we had to spend so many hours there (and so many of our precious few weekend hours away from Millie), I'm glad it ended up being really worthwhile. And now we're done with it! We've had our first home study visit, and we hope/anticipate being done with those and ready for placement by the end of March or early April!

2. Relatedly, we have made great progress reworking our downstairs guest bedroom into a foster kid bedroom! We ("we" is generous....I) cleaned out and organized the closet, moved a bookshelf, books, and our 'office' upstairs to the other guest room, obtained and repainted a dresser, and Matt assembled the crib. Now the room is empty-ish and ready for kids!

3. I completed two huge JUST BE A GROWNUP, ERIKA, DAMMIT tasks that I've been procrastinating for....uhhhhh....a super long time. I got life insurance!!! I know, I know. To be fair- I used to have life insurance. It was something my grandparents set up and paid for me (and my siblings and cousins) starting when I was a baby. I guess it was whole life insurance or something? Whatever, it was life insurance. But a few years ago they (or their financial advisers, or my parents...I really don't know who, to be honest) stopped doing it (for all of us) and we all got some nice checks for the money that the accounts had accumulated, and that was the end of my life insurance. So it's been on my to-do list since then, but I just dreaded it so much that I never did it. BUT NOW I DID and to be honest, it wasn't bad at all, except for the part where the medical exam nurse lady came to my work to get blood/urine/vitals and I had to pee in a cup in my (public) bathroom and then carry the vials of pee back to my office but when I got up to the sink area of the bathroom to wash my hands there were like TWENTY RANDOM COLLEGE GIRLS THERE (I guess they were in our building for a meeting) and I had to just lay down my pee vials like NBD while I washed my hands and I have probably never been that embarrassed in my whole life. BUT OTHER THAN THAT it was fine, thanks, and now my family is ready for whatever tragedy may befall.

Relatedly, Matt and I finally met with an attorney to get wills written up (and other related boring things like medical directives and such). It is also abominable that we've waited this long to do that, but let's just focus on the fact that now we have done it and we can sleep a little better at night. Hooray!

Are you also failing at doing scary adult tasks like that? Let me encourage you that YOU CAN DO IT and maybe it won't be as bad as you think it will! Unless you have a Pee Vial Situation in your work bathroom, in which case...Godspeed. At least if you die of embarrassment your family will get some money.

4. I read 7 books! According to Goodreads, I am 13% of the way to my 2019 goal of 52 books, and 3 books ahead of schedule. I'll take it! Here are the books I read- this is just a screenshot from Goodreads, but you can see the average rating (which means average of all the Goodreads users) and then my rating (the stars).

The two 'duds' (lowest rated) were both 'twisty thrillers' and the main characters/narrators were male psychotherapists. So I'm just going to say that that isn't my fave book set-up. Hahaha. The middle five books were all fantastic. Notably, 4/5 of them were written by diverse women and featured diverse characters (or...not sure what you call the 'characters' in a memoir...just real people, probably, hahaha). My book club is going to hear Tayari Jones speak next week and I am so excited! I've already raved at length about A Place for Us, so I won't plug it again, but if you haven't read Becoming or An American Marriage yet (they're both SUUUUPER popular, so chances are you have), you should. Circe was the one that surprised me the most- I only read it because my book club picked it. I NEVER would have picked it up otherwise- it's Greek mythology. THANKS BUT NO. But once I got past the dread of reading it and reliving horrid high school memories of drudging through (excerpts from) The Odyssey...it was actually reallllly good. It was MUCH easier to read than I'd anticipated, and a complete lack of knowledge/memory about mythology was not a problem. Most girls in my book club felt the same way, and we had some really fantastic discussion about the book. So while it was definitely one of the most intimidating books I've picked up in awhile, it really was worth it to me.

5. Another more subtle bit of productivity was making some progress towards encouraging Millie to do things independently. This is something we've started to realize we need to work on, particularly in light of the fact that we will likely have another baby or kid who will also have need of parental help in our home soon. So while Millie CAN do many things for herself (change clothes, go to the bathroom, fall asleep at night...) and does them when she has to (at school), we've always been pretty lax at home. I mean...she's our (really old) baby!!! I know she can put pants on by herself. But if she wants me to help her do it, I don't mind. Whatever. I have time. It's time we spend together. It's fine. (And I truly do feel that way.) If she wants me to sit next to her while she goes to the bathroom...why not? She won't always want to spend every second with her mama and daddy, so I'm not just itching to make her do those things on her own (when it's not inconvenient for us to "help" her...although we're not really helping her do anything in the bathroom, just providing company, I suppose). BUT it may not be as convenient for us to keep doing that all the time once there is a baby or toddler that legitimately needs more adult assistance, and the last thing I want is for Millie to think "new kid equals Mom & Dad abandoning me," so we've been trying to start encouraging her to be more independent now. So far she's done great with dressing/undressing herself (I still pick out her clothes because I'm not insane) and pretty good with not needing us to sit next to her in the bathroom every time she goes potty. A surprise success has been teaching her to shower instead of taking a bath- she's always been terrified of the shower, and therefore we still give her a bath every night and it takes like half an hour (and one of us stays with her for the whole time). But recently we started just talking about showers and how 'big kids' usually take showers, and Mommy and Daddy take showers, and all of the sudden this week she was like "I'M TAKING SHOWERS NOW!" and it's been great!! We are still currently staying in there the whole time with her and helping to wash/rinse hair, but she is really doing great (and enjoying it). I feel like she may be able to do this pretty independently in the next few months. The hardest hurdle is going to be getting her to go to sleep at night without laying in bed with her for a long time. We've always just laid with her (we alternate nights) until she falls asleep, which could be five minutes or an hour (always longer with Matt because he puts up with SHENANIGANS during this time. I'm on team 'I will lay here as long as you are quiet and don't move. If you move or talk, I'm leaving,' and then she falls asleep in five minutes and I'm done. But Matt can't handle that harshness, hahahaa, so he's in there til 10:00 p.m. Mainly because he also falls asleep.). Buttttt I think we need to get her to be okay with us leaving after we finish stories and prayers, even if she isn't asleep. It's not fun. She screams and cries and acts like she's been abandoned and sobs things that break my heart. BUT...she does stay in bed and is over it and asleep pretty quickly (probably within like three minutes last night), so I think we need to suck it up and stick with it. This will be harder for Matt than me, hahaha. (Things we will NOT be changing: she always (well, probably 90% of the time) comes and gets in bed with us in the middle of the night and sleeps with us the rest of the night. This is the highlight of my life and I will never stop it or feel bad about it.)

So this has been kind of all over the place, but in conclusion, I am happy with what we accomplished in January! I normally don't require my home life to be all that productive (I get my productivity fix at work!), but this was a happy exception. And now I'm done and can just coast the rest of the year. That's how that works, right??

how I read

2019-01-21T06:00:00.000-05:00

This is probably a pretty niche post, but two of my favorite bookish friends recently blogged based on this prompt and I found it fascinating and wanted to play along! If you're a reader, I recommend following Natasha and Allena's blogs, as they are both BIG readers (as in 100+ books last year for each of them!!!) and I get lots of inspiration/book recommendations from their blogs and social media reviews.

So the topic prompt is How I Read- which, like I said, is possibly of interest to only about a dozen people in the entire world. If I promise to throw in some pictures of Millie, maybe about three more folks might keep reading? I promise. Look, here's a down payment.

Like Allen and Natasha, I'll break down the topic into a few sub-sections:

How I get my books
Where and When I read
What I read

And I'll also start with a disclaimer: I'm a really fast reader. I'm not a certified speed reader or anything (is there a certificate for that?? Haha), but I'd estimate that compared to my peers in school growing up, in college, and coworkers for the 13 years of my 'professional' life, I read faster than almost everyone. I have not had a head-to-head competition with my friends in book club, so I'm not making any claims that I read faster than fellow prolific readers...just the 'general public.' I say that just to explain that one thing that enables me to read a lot of books (relatively) is that when I do read, I cover ground fast.

So!

How I Get my Books

First of all: I rarely pay any actual money for a book of any kind (ebook or physical). I VERY RARELY ever re-read stuff, so buying books doesn't much appeal to me. I generally only buy a book if I think it's something I'll want to loan out to friends a lot, or if it's something impossibly popular that I can't get at the library for ages, or if I'm going to an author event/book signing and feel pressured into buying it (or it's free with ticket purchase) haha. Occasionally if I find a Kindle book I want (and can't readily get at the library) for super cheap (like $3 or less) I'll buy it. But for the most part, I'm 100% a library gal.

(As my book club friends would be quick to point out- it isn't that I don't spend money on books. I just don't spend money on books at bookstores. If we were to add up the amount I spend in library fines each year, though, you would find that I am actually QUITE a generous supporter of the arts!!!)

I go through phases of being a big Kindle reader (either on my physical Kindle or on the Kindle app on my phone) and being a mainly physical book reader. For the last few years, I'd estimate I did most of my reading electronically because my library's ebook loan system was fantastic. They used Overdrive and had a fantastic selection- I was constantly reading everything on my Kindle or phone. But last fall our library changed over to RB Digital and now I read NOTHING on my Kindle. It's devastating. The main issue is that RB Digital doesn't actually work on Kindle Paperwhites, soooo...my device is useless. I could still read on my phone via the RB Digital app, but I haven't yet. I just haven't had the energy to learn a new library ebook system. It's a lot, guys. And my library makes it so easy to just get whatever I want in physical format, I haven't felt up to learning the new ebook system.

The reason I love reading on my Kindle or phone: IT'S SO CONVENIENT. I can keep my Kindle in my purse, and my phone is basically adhered to my body, so I am never without a book. I can get in so much extra reading time just waiting in lines, killing the last 15 minutes of my lunch break at work, etc. If I'm in the middle of an ebook, then all the time I would normally waste on Instagram or Facebook is immediately diverted to reading. Also, reading on my Kindle or phone is physically so much easier than reading a library book. I know, I am like 100 years old and infirm, but seriously. I read mostly giant novels, and then if it's from the library, it's usually hardback, and like...heavy and awkward. I can't throw it in my purse unless I want to spend the next year in physical therapy. And although I'm not ashamed to show up to dance class with a frigging giant book in hand...sometimes I just literally don't have enough hands available to also carry a tome. I mean, I'm a Suburban Mom. I have my purse, Millie's dance bag (and maybe jacket that she refuses to wear, and probably her water bottle, oh and usually HER because clearly she is an infant and can't walk), MY water/coffee/bev of choice, my phone (prob won't fit in my overstuffed purse), my jacket...what I need is a shopping cart. Or just to have my books be electronic. :)

But alas, nowadays I'm reading mostly NOT electronically. The Georgia library system makes it lovely and painless to put books on hold, and delivers them from anywhere in the state right to the front desk of your chosen library, so that's mostly what I do. I almost never actually go to the library and hunt for a book...I just go online a few times a week, add everything new on my TBR list to my holds list, and wait to get the glorious email informing me that I have books ready to pick up! (Please note that the library stops letting you put books on hold once you accumulate $10 in fines, which is how I am forced into paying off my debts to society...)

Where and When I Read

As I've already mentioned...if it's an electronic book, I'm reading it all the time. But most of my dedicated reading time is at night. I work full time, plus I have a high-energy, attention-hungry Millie to devote my pre- and post-work hours to, so I don't usually have much uninterrupted time to read during the day. Once she hits the sack, though...it's on. She goes to bed at 8:30. I'd estimate I'm usually camped out with my blanket, book, and tea by 8:45 p.m., and that's where I stay until about 10:30. All other hobbies have mostly fallen by the wayside. I usually work out either right before or after dinner (depending on who is cooking/who is bathing Millie) and Matt and I tag-team cleaning up the kitchen/house along with cooking, bathing/playing with Millie, laundry folding, and everything else so that once she is in bed, there are no boring household responsibilities left. While I'm reading each night, Matt is also either reading or working from home...we're birds of a feather, I tell ya. Boring birds. But similar birds.

I try not to read a lot when Millie is up and about (because I'm a very focused reader-- I struggle with being a kind/responsive person when I'm trying to read a book, haha), but occasionally on the weekend I'll read while she watches a movie or something. On the one hand, I want her to see Matt and me reading so that she has a model of adults reading for fun (as I did growing up- my mom was rarely without a book!). Butttttt it's hardly escaped her notice that Mommy and Daddy go through stacks of grown-up library books that rival the stacks of picture books she gets each week. She's with me multiple times a week when we stop by the library to pick up my books on hold. She sees me hauling my book du jour around to dance classes and doctor offices, and she knows ALL ABOUT book club (and aspires to join my book club AND be an author so that book club will come hear her speak). And we read to her all the time. I think she understands that Mommy and Daddy love reading and that's all we do after she goes to bed (which also, I've tried to remind her on nights that she "IS NOT TIRED and DOES NOT NEED TO SLEEP, I ONLY WANT TO STAY AWAKE WITH YOU AND DADDY" that we aren't doing anything fun, just sitting on the couch and reading...to which she replies that "reading IS FUN!! I want to read, too!!!"). So I feel like she is getting the memo that reading equals good times without seeing me read/ignore her for hours on end every Saturday!

Preparing to be an author

What I Read

I read probably 92% fiction books. The other 8% (estimated, clearly...although I suppose I could hop over to my Goodreads and do some actual statistical analysis...but nah) is memoirs that read like novels. A negligible statistical amount is other non-fiction...I just don't generally care for self-help/religious inspiration, business/motivational, or pretty much anything else non-fiction. I should probably read more parenting books. Hahahaha. But other than that I don't get caught up in "should." I read what I like. It's my grown-up privilege.

Of my fiction, it's probably an even split between historical fiction and modern. I tend to lean towards more 'literary' books and not as much 'fluff.' I mean, I'll read a popular thriller every now and then, but it's not what I gravitate towards. Same with chick lit. Maybe if enough trusted reader friends recommend something...but I'm not usually reading Elin Hilderbrand/Nora Roberts/James Patterson's backlist. Not judging it, it's just not generally my favorite!

My go-to fiction topical categories are WWII stories (especially if based on a true story!!-- like We Were the Lucky Ones, The Ragged Edge of Night, and The Girl You Left Behind), stories about immigrant families (*cough cough* A Place For Us, Behold the Dreamers, Girl in Translation), and the general format of books that alternate between a modern/historical storyline with some kind of mystery/tales that converge. In general, I like stories that make me think. I want to be entertained, but I want to be challenged, too. And I want the writing to be good. A good story alone is not enough to keep me going, generally. I don't mind crying, I don't mind being disgusted, I don't mind feeling angry. I want to be a better human. Thinking about hard things, thinking about gross things in our nation or world's past or present...these are things that help me grow as a person. So these are the things I want to read about, usually. Except for when I just want to be entertained and escape for a few hours, which also happens, so that's when I'm glad not everyone is as 'heavy' as me and that there are plenty of lighter books there for the taking when I want them!

In general, I only read one book at a time. I am NOT one with five books in progress!! The rare exception would be if I am reading some kind of nonfiction parenting/inspirational book...I can read that AND a novel at the same time. Because in all honesty, I'll read the non-fic book at a snail's pace and it'll probably take me 6 months to finish it (or I'll never finish it)...and at the same time I will have completed 23 novels. Hahaha. Just being honest, though. I will also occasionally work through a Harry Potter re-read at the same time as I'm reading other novels. I know those stories well enough that I don't get it mixed up with whatever else I'm reading. Rereading HP is more like breathing to me, really. :) But if you look on my Goodreads and see it's taking me 4 months to read Order of the Phoenix...well, it isn't that it actually takes me 4 months to read 870 pages...it's just that I'm only reading it in snippets between my other books. And at this point, HP rereads are more just to savor. Not to power through. Ahhhhh....

As for how I choose what to read, I feel like that's where I've grown the most as a reader over the last few years. I've learned to be much more selective with who I take book recommendations from. Just because someone is a friend and fellow reader doesn't mean we like the same kinds of books!! And that's okay! Goodreads comes in really handy for this. If a friend whose reading life I'm not super familiar with recommends a book, I like being able to first browse their Goodreads history. Do we read similar stuff and rate things similarly? Then maybe their recommendation will work for me. Did they give 2 stars to 20 books I gave 5 stars to, and vice versa? Then maybe we just aren't into the same books, so maybe think twice before diving into what they've deemed "must read." Doing a few minutes of research before starting a book has proven REALLY helpful to me during the past few years. If I see a book, read the description and it sounds interesting, and think I might read it...I try to stop and look it up on Goodreads first. Sometimes I'll see that a lot of my friends have read it, and I can browse their ratings and use that to determine whether the book will be a good fit. Sometimes I'll see no one I know has shelved it, but I can browse random people's reviews to make a better guess. But doing a tiny bit of pre-research has really led me to select books I'm more likely to like...which means I'm more likely to read them fast...which helps me read more! In the past, I would just pick up a book if a celeb/lots of randoms on FB/blogs/Insta recommended it...and you know, I may or may not like it. But surrounding myself (virtually) with like-minded readers has really helped me make better choices for me.

Anyway, congrats to anyone who made it through all that! I guess for my benediction here, I'll just say GO READ SOMETHING. Anything! But make it something you'll like!! The end. :)

semi-annual check-in??

2019-01-17T16:48:00.000-05:00

Hello there, strangers. Remember the glory days of 200+ posts per year?? Ha. Yes. Those days are not these days. But may as well drop in with an update when I can!

We're alive and well here. Millie is nearly 4.5 years old and full of drama, opinions, and love. She is thriving in school- I am so, so, so happy with our neighborhood public school experience this year. She's learned so much! I mean, I know all kids learn so much, and I don't think she's actually Mensa material or anything, but I'm just regularly shocked with how smart my girl is. Nothing gets by her these days...which is why you might have noticed me frantically researching and ordering books about where babies come from last week. Because yeah. Don't worry. She actually asked "but HOW does the sperm GET in the mommy's tummy??" annnnnnnnddddd all my best-laid plans of being honest, scientifically accurate, and not awkward got thrown in my face. Bahahaha. WOW. I thought I was gonna have a few more years to formulate the perfect answer to that one, but apparently not. (Also, in case you are a fellow adoptive-after-infertility parent and thought you would be able to get by with "I don't know, I've never been pregnant/had a baby!" as an answer to questions about babies in tummies forever...you will not. Start making a plan for a better answer today!!)

Still- uncomfortable questions aside, this is a really fun age! She is super into drawing and writing and VERY MUCH wants to learn to read. Most days she comes home from school and reports in a terribly disappointed voice that "it was a good day, but they did NOT teach me to read yet." She also regularly informs me that I am mean and I have broken her heart because I won't teach her to read. I know. I'm the worst. Soon, little one!!

Matt and I are in the process of becoming (hopefully!) foster parents! It's something we've been interested in for years, but never felt that the time was really right until recently. And now we're gung-ho. Hahaha. We're 1/3 of the way through our state training, all the way through (I think?) with our paperwork, and approximately 0% through with our home study. And maybe 10% through with our gathering of boring documents/doing things to get said documents (like get a physical so that we can get a medical form completed...get CPR training so we can get a CPR form completed...). So it'll probably be a few months before any actual kids besides Millie come into our home, but we are excited! We are not necessarily looking to adopt again (everyone asks this so I figured I'd just share, haha). We're not opposed, if the situation comes up, but that's not what we're going into it for. We're just hoping to be a warm home and supportive environment for kids while they're away from their parents. Millie is very excited to be a "helper sister" and asks every day if we "can go get some kids today"...like we might just be picking them up at Target. Sooo maybe we have some more sensitivity training to do with her, perhaps. Hahaha. Once (if?? haha) we are approved, we will hope to open our home to kids Millie's age and younger...one or two at a time to start with!

Not much else going on, really. I read a lot? Haha. I completed 71 books in 2018. My goal had been 40, sooo...I met my goal. In June. Ha. This year I set my goal as 52- a nice book-a-week pace that should be manageable for me, even if a new kid (or multiple new kids?!) introduces some chaos into my otherwise predictable life and reading time. My favorite book of 2018 was A Place for Us, by Fatima Mirza. I read it last summer and have never stopped thinking about it, so a few weeks ago I actually BOUGHT IT (in hardback!!) (unheard of) and am currently REREADING IT (also unheard of, I RARELY reread books). It's just as good the second time, so far. So if you're looking for a slow-paced, character-driven (NOT plot-driven), beautifully-written look at family relationships...maybe that's the book for you. I just love it. Also, if you're a reader, I highly recommend joining Goodreads and being my friend. :) It's such fun to have a place to interact with fellow bookish folk, and my reading life has really improved in the years since I've been spending more time on Goodreads!

Annnd that's about it. Life is pretty lovely and predictable these days, hence the need to shake things up a bit with foster care!! Look me up on Instagram (erikab543) if you want to keep up with Millie's antics in real time...she's a nut, for real. Also this morning she told me something was "crazytown," so apparently she is actually 13. And probably by the next time I get around to blogging again...she may actually be 13. See ya then!!

currently

2018-09-26T11:30:00.000-04:00

A little update on what's going on currently...interspersed with completely unrelated but adorable pictures of the Millster.

***

Listening...I listen to random Pandora stations and Amazon playlists all day at work, but my JAM this year (well, since June) is the Binge Mode: Harry Potter podcast. GUYSSSSS. If you are a HP fan (and you should be), you GOTTA be listening to this super deep dive into all facets of the HP universe. It's amazing. Go back and start with Sorcerer's Stone (duh) and get ready to have your mind blown. Fair warning (which they run as a disclaimer before every single episode): spoilers, language, and adult content abound, so this isn't one to listen to while your kids are in the car!!

First manicure she gave herself!

Eating...uhhh one of my coworkers brought in the Krispy Kreme coffee glazed doughnuts today and they are pretty fab. Other than that I'm just trying to convince fall to come to Georgia by cooking and eating lots of fall foods (pumpkin bread, hearty soups, etc.). It hasn't worked yet, but I'll keep trying.

Drinking...lots of flavored fizzy water. Ooh but the other morning my throat was a little sore, so I stopped by Starbucks and got the Medicine Ball tea- one of the fabled 'secret menu' items. I wasn't entirely sure what was in it, but it seemed like a good idea. And it was SO GOOD!!! I'm not a big tea fan, but this was delish. And a lot cheaper than whatever I normally get, haha. And I gotta say, my throat felt a ton better and hasn't hurt again since, and I'm truly a little disappointed because I want an excuse to go get another one. Hahahaha.

Wearing...my summer clothes for the 300th month in a row. I'm willing to eat fall foods to usher in the season, but I'm not quite crazy enough to wear fall clothes in 90 degree heat. I'm actually still wearing my white jeans because I'm just a rebel like that.

Watching...well last night was the Season 3 premiere of This is Us, so you know I was all over that. I also started watching The Handmaid's Tale last weekend!! Aahhhhhhh. Yikes. I've read the book, but it's something else to see it!! I'm only 3 episodes into the first season, but looking forward to getting through the rest of it. Sorta. A little too real, you know?

Wanting...besides cooler weather? Not a whole lot. I'm thankful for a more peaceful season of life right now!

Enjoying...our new house, downtown life, and my smart, funny kid. Her musings and observations are SO funny and spot-on right now, she keeps me and Matt laughing all the time. Oh, and crying sometimes. Rabbit trail, but Exhibit A: this morning we passed a cemetery on our way to work (it's right next to our neighborhood, so we walk by it at least once a day). Sometimes she talks about it/asks questions and sometimes she doesn't, but she has a general understanding that it is a place that we bury people when they have died, and the gravestones have their names on them. Usually she just wants me to read her the names on them, which I do. So this morning she was noting that some of the graves have pretty flowers, some have old, yucky flowers, and some have no flowers. I tried to explain that families who live close by might be able to come over and take care of their loved ones' graves and put pretty flowers, but if the person who died doesn't have any family nearby, then there may not be anyone to come put out pretty flowers. "Well, that is very sad if there are no flowers," she said. "But WE live close by, Mommy, so can we get some flowers for the people that don't have any? We can help take care of them, right?" (Mommy commences sobbing, obviously- "yes, Millie, we can do that. That's very kind of you.") Then she muses out loud to herself: "And I remember when Jesus died, and that was very sad, so people brought flowers to remember him. But then he went to heaven!! And when all THESE people die (gestures to the cemetery), Jesus makes a ladder for them so they can go to heaven, too."

Her sweet, sweet little heart. What a gift.

In related news, guess I need to start a GoFundMe, cause there are a lottttt of graves with no flowers, and there is no stopping my girl once she's decided she's going to do something!

settling in

2018-09-18T16:15:00.000-04:00

Well we moved into our new house August 24, almost a month ago, and we are finally feeling pretty settled! Although we unpacked everything and got rid of boxes very quickly (hello, have you met me?), it was still a few weeks before I didn't constantly feel like I always needed to be doing something: hanging something on a wall, ordering something for a window, hiring someone to do something, whatever. On Sunday we had a pretty low-key, rainy day, and other than going to church, we didn't do anything all day. And I noticed at the end of the day that I didn't even once really think about doing "house stuff." I just enjoyed the day: playing, cooking, doing normal amounts of maintenance cleaning/organizing, reading, etc. Maybe it's because everything is actually DONE...or maybe it's just because I'm tired of it and it's just fine, whatever. Hahaha.

(Judging by the fact that we have exactly ONE set of window blinds actually installed, I guess I have to admit that I'm not actually done, I'm just over it.)

So here ya go: our new BLUE house!

Subtle, isn't it? Ha. There are a few other blue houses in the neighborhood, but ours is the only BLUE house. (Sherwin Williams Naval, if you'd like to know the exact color so that you too can have a BLUE house/wall/chair/whatever.) And as you can see- that large front double window is not the lucky window that actually has blinds yet, so enjoy the tacky view of our curtains instead. Sorry, neighbors.

Here's a shot of the living room from a few weeks ago- we have since had the lighting redone in the kitchen/dining room, so the tacky chandelier you see here is thankfully gone now. But otherwise the room more or less looks like this. Plenty of room for dance parties!

And here's the kitchen area WITH new lights! The pendant lights and chandelier are from AllModern and I am thrilled with how it turned out! Why a builder would put florescent kitchen lighting in a brand new house is truly beyond my comprehension, but I am glad to be done with it, haha. We still have a few holes in the ceiling that we need to get fixed from where the electricians removed the old lights, but I'm sure we'll get around to that eventually...probably...maybe? Haha.

I LOVE love love the layout of the kitchen and living room. Unlike our old house, it's very open and I love that we can all be 'together' even when we're doing three different things- cooking, working on an art project, and doing yoga, for example. It's perfect!

And this little nugget is so, so, so happy to be home. I am SO thankful that her little mind and body are finally at rest and peace again and most of the behavior problems and physical issues we were dealing with over the summer have resolved. I hate that she was experiencing so much stress, and mostly due to things Matt and I willingly chose (you know, we didn't HAVE to move (twice) or change her schools (twice), etc.)...and it broke our hearts to see that stress playing out in her body (horrible sleep, grinding her teeth all night, LOTS of potty problems, difficulty regulating her emotions) and behavior (don't even get me started, but my deepest apologies to the many who were victimized by my raging child this summer). We hoped and prayed that once we settled in and returned to our predictable routine, she would return to her previous normal- and thankfully that has been the case. She has finally stopped anxiously asking multiple times a day where we are going, where she will sleep that night (KILL ME, GUYS- I mean, we weren't couch surfing all summer!! We moved from our old house to my in-laws' house!! We slept in the same place every night!! But for whatever reason, she asked ALL THE TIME, and NEVER slept well, and was always SO uncertain about where we were going and where she would sleep and it just KILLED me- and made me so, so sad for children and families that truly are not sure where they will sleep that night), who will pick her up at school, which school she will go to...it was through all of these constant questions (that she'd never had before) that I really saw how stressed our situation made her this summer. And now that has mostly stopped. And she sleeps, and she can reason again, and she isn't grinding her teeth, and she is SO ADORABLY HAPPY to be reunited with all of her toys that were in storage. And sometimes she just wanders around the house and says adorable things like "I LOVE our new house, Mommy! It is SO pretty! I'm glad we live in our new house!" and it's great.

Hands down, Millie's favorite thing about our new house is that we walk to school now. It's probably on my Top Five list, too. LOVE IT. Well, I walk- she rides in the stroller (God bless Erika of 2013 who thought investing in a good stroller (City Mini GT) was important- now she's 4 years old and I am using it every single day and that thing is a CHAMP!). She loves her new school, but she REALLY LOVES walking to school. It's about a 10-12 minute walk for us (one way) and she just talks and makes genius observations and tells me things and it is maybe the best 10-12 minutes of my day. And then once I drop her off, I have a lovely, quiet 10-minute walk back (with an empty stroller- slightly weird but I'm over it) home, and I listen to music and drink my coffee and I can't lie...that's pretty great too. All in all, it is just the most wonderful start to my weekdays and I am thankful that we can do this now. And in theory, we can do this for the next nine years, because the middle school is also right by our house, maybe a 5-7 minute walk, so we can just keep going even once she's out of elementary school...unless that's too uncool for middle schoolers?? Ha.

(Although she no longer wakes up hysterical in the middle of the night, or asks constantly where she is going to sleep- I must say that she HAS woken up a few times in the middle of the night and asked "is it time to walk to school yet, Mama?? Do we get to walk to school today?! We don't want to be late!!"...it's 3 a.m., I think we can wait a little before we leave, go back to sleeeeeep.)

But seriously, the ability to walk around downtown is one of the main reasons we wanted to move to this neighborhood, and I'm so glad we're actually taking advantage of it. In addition to our daily walks to school (we don't walk home because I pick her up on my way home from work and I have the car...MUCH TO MILLIE'S DEEP DISMAY EVERY SINGLE DAY), we are regularly walking to playgrounds, the library, the bakery/cafe where we eat brunch, lunch, dinner, cupcakes, and ice cream FAR too often, several restaurants, festivals, and random sporting events at the aforementioned middle school. And we go on family runs, taking advantage of downtown's flat roads and abundant shady sidewalks! So far, moving has been very good for meeting my daily step goals, ha!

Family run!

Rewarding ourselves for a successful run with a trip to the playground.

Okay okay, and maaaaaybe we went to brunch after the playground. We earned it!

Walking to the annual fall festival.

This is why she NEEDED the hat and boots. Duh.

So overall, life in the BLUE house is fantastic! Now we are focusing on the next thing: Halloween! This is apparently a Very Big Deal when you're four, so if you need me, I'll be working on costume plans and contingency plans with a four-year-old who changes her mind 12x per day, so wish me luck!

four!

2018-08-09T15:19:00.000-04:00

Millie celebrated her FOURTH birthday on Sunday, which means it's time for a (rare and becoming rarer still) blog update!

The last quarter of Age 3 was a little rougher than we've been used to...I know, I know. It's probably about time we struggle a little, I guess. She's been a textbook "easy baby" (and toddler) since about the day she was born, so I'm sure we were due for a last minute Threenager treatment, but phew!! It was a doozy!! ;) Now that she's four, I expect an immediate return to her previously angelic, happy-go-lucky disposition. Like today. Now. Got it, Millie???!

(Also, I tell myself that Matt and I are at least partially to blame for her sudden emotional imbalance. Since March, she's had to change schools twice, we've packed up/listed/sold/packed up more/moved from our old house, been constantly stressed about building the new house, lived in a semi-disheveled state in my in-laws' basement for two months, Matt changed jobs and has had to travel more...it's bound to be a lot for her poor little brain and heart to manage!! We are hopeful that once we finally move into our new house (next week, hopefully?!?!?!) things will feel more settled and peaceful for her again.)

But it isn't all bad. Her moods and tantrums come and go, and most of the time she is SO much fun! Our girl is full of imagination and stories, "great ideas!!" (always spoken of with wide eyes and a pointer finger sticking up like she just solved a mystery) and plans. She loves adventures (ideal adventures include going to doughnut shops, the library, or a playground) and is a surprisingly helpful "cooker girl" (kitchen helper)! Her passion for unicorns is still fiery, and she loves pretending to be any kind of animal.

(Hot parenting tip Matt and I have discovered: she will do basically anything (including whatever thing she's currently fighting SO HARD AGAINST) as long as you pretend that she's a dog and ask her to do it. I know. Genius. "Millie, let's go brush your teeth, okay?" "NOOOOOOOOOOOOO NEVER!!!! I WILL NEVER DO THAT!!! YOU ARE NOT MY FRIEND AND I AM NEVER, EVER GOING TO BRUSH MY TEEEEEETH!!!!" (writhing on the floor, running to hide behind a couch) Okay. Wait two seconds. Make your voice more high pitched and try this: "Little doggie!!!! Let's put on your collar (pretend to snap a collar around her neck) and go to the bathroom to brush your doggie teeth!!! Come on!!" Walk a few steps and pretend to hold her leash. She will immediately drop down on all fours and start panting and happily scamper after you to the bathroom. If she doesn't hop up onto the stool, say "Doggie, get on your stool so you can get your doggie treat!!"...bam. She's brushing teeth. PARENTING GENIUS.)

In one of the many moving boxes that have ruled our lives for the past 5 months

She constantly surprises me with how aware and smart she is. I love watching her develop emotionally, too (well, not the part that involves frustrations and tantrums, but the other parts!)...in the last few weeks I've noticed her expressing genuine, heartfelt gratitude. On Saturday, while she napped, I set up some decorations for her birthday dinner- nothing huge, just a tablecloth, a cute little cupcake display thing, some unicorn plates (everything was unicorn themed, natch), balloons, etc. When she woke up and saw it, she gasped and oooohed and ahhhhed over everything. Then she said "Mommy, did you DO this for me??!" and I said yes. "THANK you, Mommy!! It is so beautiful and I love it so much!!!" and gave me the biggest hug. Y'ALL!!!!!! I basically melted. She's always been quick with a "thank you!" for whoever hands her a sticker at the Target check-out, or little things like that...but this felt so next-level! Then the other morning I showed her a (unicorn) dress I'd bought her the night before after she went to bed. I knew she'd love the dress, and she did. Then she said "how many dollars did you have to give them, Mommy??" "What?" "At the store, to buy my dress. How many monies did you give them?" "Oh! Eight dollars," I told her. "WOW, Mommy. That's a lot of dollars. THANK you, Mommy!!! I really love this dress!!"

Again, I will buy you a dress every damn day if you react like that, so keep it up, doll.

She started pre-k last week at our neighborhood elementary school. So far she has LOVED it and I can't lie- I love it too. I have been dying to be a "school mom" for like 20 years, I think. I am so excited about her school and getting more involved with our community and getting to know people that actually live in our little town...I have my first PTO meeting next week!!

Unicorn dress, unicorn backpack, mermaid lunchbox. Check, check, check, the gang's all here!

She didn't even shed a tear that first morning- unlike her mama!! She's on the very young side of her grade, but we felt like she was ready, and so far she's proving us right. She is most enthusiastic about "playing centers" and eating in the "restaurant" at lunch time! Her teacher says she's been doing well and is a MOST enthusiastic story-listener...and I expected nothing less! ;) That girl will listen to stories all day if you let her!

Stats wise, she wears 4T clothes and is roughly 38 pounds and 40 inches tall, if our home scale and measuring tape can be trusted! Her four-year check-up isn't until the end of the month. She wears a size 9 or 10 shoe. She would happily exist on fruit and cereal bars alone, but isn't actually a picky eater...she just wants to beg for those things first, before she eats anything else. She sleeps from about 8:45 p.m.-7:00 a.m. and still takes a nap for usually an hour or so during the day. She is still rear-facing in her car seat, and rather committed to it- after riding forward-facing in the seat in her grandmother's car, she informed me that "it's not right and it doesn't feel so comfy!!" so I'm glad we're all on the same page about that still!!!

I'm so proud (and impressed!) by how brave and confident she is. She is unafraid to speak up for herself, to ask for help when she needs it (example: will stop any waiter in a restaurant if she needs a spoon/glass of water/straw and ask them to help her before Matt and I can even stop her), or to approach a child and introduce herself. Last night she started dance classes (ballet and tap!!! SO EXCITING!!!) and within five minutes in the waiting room, she'd found another little girl about her size wearing a leotard, ran over to her, and said "My name is Millie!! What is your name?" and within another 3o seconds, they were holding hands and twirling around together.

She is rarely intimidated by anyone and seems to intuitively understand that any adult she speaks to will respond to her, usually with a smile. No lie, we get free food/stuff EVERYWHERE WE GO just because this bubbly little doll speaks so enthusiastically to whoever is working there. Charismatic barely even starts to describe her ("the charisma award" is actually what she earned in her daycare end-of-year awards ceremony!!), and she knows how to work it to her advantage!! (Although she doesn't quite understand when her charm doesn't work a second time. A few months ago we ate at a restaurant right next to our new house, where we regularly dine. She was extra bubbly that night and the waiter brought us free sopapillas and ice cream at the end of our meal- normally we never order dessert, so Millie found this shockingly wonderful, especially since he TOLD us/her it was because she was so sweet and had such nice manners. So then we ate there a few weeks later, and she absolutely remembered what had happened last time...well, we didn't get free dessert this time. She was appalled. HA. "Wasn't I nice, Mommy??!" Well, yes. But you don't free stuff EVERY TIME you're nice, babe!! But seriously, she does get it more often than I feel is typical, hahaha. Must be nice to be so precious!)

So she's four now- "four and fabulous," as she would tell you. (I said that once. She hasn't forgotten and that's what she says anytime anyone asks how old she is.) It blows my mind how quickly time passes. I am so excited for the year ahead, for settling into our new house and school and routine. As always, I count myself the luckiest person in the world for the privilege of being this girl's mama. Even when it gets a little rough, it's still the greatest job in the world.

currently

2018-05-08T11:04:00.000-04:00

I know you're just beside yourself wondering exactly what I'm doing/liking/thinking right now, so let's dive right into those deep topics, shall we? Also, funny that the last time I did one of these posts was almost exactly a year ago!

Unrelated picture from this morning. Millie was pretending to be a mean witch (hence the broom...how does she even know that witches ride on brooms?!). Isn't she terrifying?

Listening...to my Broadway station on Pandora. That's been a constant for the last few months. It mostly consists of songs from Hamilton, Dear Evan Hanson, The Greatest Showman, and Wicked. I'm not complaining!

Eating...too much. Ugh. Last night we made a super tasty Garlicky Kale and Ricotta Pizza, though, and I highly recommend. We have leftovers for tonight and I'm basically giddy thinking about it, ha! I believe this was Millie's first experience with ricotta cheese and she liked it, but kept poking it and asking what it was (it is an interesting texture when it's been baked). I told her it was "cloud cheese" and that seemed to make sense and sound delicious enough for her. Sometimes I laugh at the dumb 'parent things' I say...but can't argue with the results, right?!

Drinking...nothing exciting, coffee at the moment. Lately Matt and I are obsessed with the Kroger La Croix knock-off seltzer water, though- their Raspberry and Blackberry Citrus (those are two different flavors, fyi) flavors are amazing!!

Wearing...boring work clothes, and when I'm at home I change into workout clothes. I like to think that if I'm wearing workout clothes, I might workout. That works about half the time, so...win? I did order a new pair of sandals yesterday, though- another pair of my beloved semi-fashionable orthotics by Vionic!! And also I'm cracking up because in my post one year ago (I'm referring to it for the categories) I was also singing the praises of Vionics. What can I say. I'm consistent? And I have bad feet!

Feeling...excited about our new house! They poured the foundation yesterday!!!! (please imagine all of the praise hand emoji here.)

This is for sure the most exciting picture I've ever shared, right?

Everyone has said that once the foundation is poured, things move really quickly, and so that has me super jazzed! Now that there is a foundation we can get a much better visualization of the 'lay of the land.' Our lot is VERY small (our current house is on an acre; our new house is roughly .19 acre!!!) and the house's footprint is fairly large, so we will have a VERY VERY small yard...but it just helps to be able to see it. :)

Wanting...oh, you know. I'm moving to a new house. With twice as much square footage as our current house. I can think of MORE than a few things I want to buy!!! On the top of my list is a new outside dining set (this is the one we plan to get), bar stools for the kitchen island (I'm thinking these), a new living room rug (I change my mind every day about what I want here, ugh), some entryway furniture...trust me, the list is long!!!

Enjoying...everything! It's fun to have a fun project (the new house) to think about and plan for, Millie is generally super fun right now...it's all good!!

Organizing her rock collection is an ongoing project...so many rocks, so little time, right?!

(the following category didn't appear on my last 'currently' list, but I feel the need to add it now!!)

Watching...GUYS. You know. Just a little-known show called Downton Abbey, you've prob never heard of it...hahaha. You know I love to be super behind the times when it comes to pop culture stuff, so that's why I waited until last weekend to watch a single episode of Downton. But it's SO GOOD!! I finished Season One last night and can't wait to keep going! If you've been a long-time Downton holdout like I was, I encourage you to go ahead and give in. It's on Amazon Prime, so no excuses.

life lately

2018-05-04T16:20:00.001-04:00

Ohhh man. It's been a minute, but let's just jump right in, shall we??

I'm still here (as in, in life...not so much in the blog world, haha) and life is good! Let's start off with our Millie girl, because that's who we all really care about, right?

Millie is 3.5, closing in on 4, and basically the greatest human in the history of the world. Also, she is 3.5 and totally normal, so that means she has a gift for being infuriating, obnoxious, and terrible, but I prefer to not think about those moments (...hours...). We'll focus on the positive for this rare blog update. ;)

She loves unicorns, mermaids ("I love mermaids, but I love unicorns the MOST, Mommy! And I love lions and dinosaurs and bad guys, but I still love unicorns the MOST."), and anything magical.

She lives for going to the grocery store to visit this inflatable unicorn. And yes, I'm probably going to buy it for her for her birthday, because a) I am a sucker, and b) it will really complete my home decor.

She 100% believes she can do magic (with one of her many wands, of course), and most mornings, after Daddy leaves for work, she points her wand out the window and does a spell to make Daddy's hair turn purple/green/sparkly/whatever so that it "surpwises him in the mirror." It's her favorite thing. But then we always do another spell to turn it back brown later, so it's all fine. She loves doing ballet and yoga, and more than that, pretending she's the ballet and/or yoga teacher. (Hot Tip: if your kids enjoy storytelling at all, you need to check out Cosmic Kids Yoga on YouTube or Amazon Prime...it's SUCH fun story-based yoga, Millie is obsessed!!)

She is playing on a little soccer team this spring. It's the most precious thing ever. Matt is the coach. Again- precious. My gal has not the foggiest idea what she's supposed to be doing out there, but she generally runs around and has a good time, and she sure looks cute, so I consider the season a success. She will be quick to inform you that she prefers yoga, though.

(Also- I have no idea where the obsession with yoga came from. I go to yoga or do it at home on rare occasion and hardly ever talk about it. I only started letting her watch Cosmic Kids Yoga after she'd been 'playing yoga' for several weeks and it occurred to me to turn that on, haha.)

She is 100% a mama's girl right now (annnnd maybe for the last year, who knows) and generally ONLY wants to do anything with/for me. It's wonderful and exhausting, as I'm sure many of you can relate to, haha. She transitions easily and does just fine at school, in the church nursery, with her grandparents, etc., but if I'm around, I'm the only one she wants anything to do with, generally. In her words, "you my BEST FRIEND, Mama. I ONLY LOVE YOU THE MOST. You my best friend FOREVER and even if I not listening, you STILL LOVE ME, and even if I REALLY REALLY BAD, you STILL LOVE ME!!!!!"...she's got that down right. But she frequently brings up the part about how "even when I ______ (insert naughty thing she's currently doing), you STILL LOVE ME!" which is definitely true BUT ALSO PLEASE STOP DOING OBNOXIOUS THINGS THANKS.

We went skating last weekend and she spent the whole time grinning up at us, screaming "this is the best day of my whole life!!!! This is the most fun EVERRRR!!!!" and I had to agree. It might have been the best day ever. Slash I might need to buy a skating rink or something.

She has been at the same daycare with the same little group of buddies since she was a little over a year old, but changes are on the horizon. She got a spot in our neighborhood elementary school pre-k program for next school year (those are lottery spots in Georgia- pre-k isn't required and there are far fewer spots than kids, so you enter an open lottery for the spaces) which we are thrilled about. We found another daycare near the school where she can go for after-school (and the millions of no-school days that public schools seem to take...fall break, fall break 2, a month of Christmas break, twelve additional winter/early spring/mid spring breaks, spring break, late spring break, SUMMER BREAK, oh and teacher workdays every other Tuesday, etc....just kidding, but seriously, it is a lot compared to daycare, hahaha). I am so thankful for how things seem to be working out, but in order to secure a spot at the daycare for after-school (I'm not really interested in having her at the school's after-school program with such a huge number/variety of ages of kids), I had to enroll her for their summer program...so she will be starting there in just a few weeks. I know it will be good, and it'll be nice for her to meet some kids that she will actually see at her big school (she's always gone to daycare in Athens, where Matt and I work, but no other kids there will go to elem school out where we live)...but man, it's gonna be tough to leave the school we've loved so much. She can't really comprehend not seeing her buds every day, even though she tells me she will make NEW BEST FRIENDS, and I know she will. So that's a good but maybe-tough change for the near future.

Our biggest Life Update (if you don't happen to follow me elsewhere on social media, haha) is that we are moving! We're "building" a house VERY near our current house and right across from Millie's future elementary school, so no great distances are being traversed, but it's still an exciting adventure! "Building" warrants quotation marks because we aren't custom building...we just bought a lot in a neighborhood under development before they had started building on that particular lot. We got to pick the house plan (out of like three) and some basic finishes and colors, etc, but no BIG decisions about where the windows should be or how the kitchen should be oriented. So..."building." Ha. So far in the 2.5 months we've been under contract on the house all they've managed to do is build a frame for the foundation. And dig the utilities. Not even a foundation yet. It's very slow and boring and disappointing, to be honest, haha. I eagerly await the day there are boards or walls or basically anything that remotely resembles a house. In theory we will be moving there in mid-July, but given the current pace of work...that may be July of 2023 or something.

Our "new house." Very exciting.

Our current house went under contract very quickly (we had our first offer about 8 hours after it went on the market!!) and has been mostly a smooth process, but still a giant headache, haha. We will close on our current house in mid-June and move into my in-laws' basement until our new house is ready. Good times ahead!

I guess that's about it. I spend my spare time reading and thinking about packing (not ACTUALLY packing too much), so who has time for blogging with all that going on? Ha. As always, catch me on Instagram for Millie in Real Time...she is a mess and well worth seeing more than once every 4 months when I get around to blogging, haha!

full circle

2018-02-06T16:10:00.000-05:00

It's been interesting over the last 3.5 years watching things come "full circle"- in my mind, this is the concept of when something that was once painful comes around again and is redeemed- no longer painful. Throughout the years of infertility and waiting, there were plenty of things that became painful triggers for sadness and grief- but Millie's presence has redeemed them one by one. "Full circle" things tend to be things that are cyclical, that roll around every so often on a schedule, and therefore can accumulate memories and expectations. The first time the event occurs post-trauma (and in my case, the trauma was the years of infertility, waiting, and our failed adoption), I find myself remembering the hurt of the event previously, but now having Millie to make new memories that hopefully wash away the pain previously associated with the day.

Some things came full circle quickly: most holidays, for one. Each pre-Millie Christmas hurt. Each was a reminder that another year had gone by, that this was the Christmas where I was supposed to have a baby...each brought another social media feed full of other people with their happy kids and cute babies. But once Millie was born and a few short months later Christmas rolled around- it just wasn't painful. It was life as I'd thought it should be. The life I'd hoped for. Christmas came full circle.

Christmas 2017. Completely perfect, because she got the Paw Patrol bath toys she'd been religiously begging for all month!

Some things took longer. Her birthday, to be honest. In some ways, her first birthday was difficult- while it was absolutely the anniversary of her birth and her life with us, it was also the anniversary of her losing her birth mother. I felt that. I mourned that when it happened, and I remembered it on her first birthday. It was the anniversary of the enormous, nearly overwhelming stress that covered me during Millie's first few weeks of life, as we waited to pass through each (what felt) excruciatingly slow phase of her adoption to pass and finalize. The stress of those days was pretty damn fresh, even a year later. And so while obviously there were many things to be joyful for and celebrate on her first birthday, I don't really feel like the concept of "hooray, baby's birthday!" was really redeemed until her second birthday. By then, the stressful memories were overwhelmed by the joyful ones and I could really celebrate and eat cupcakes with the reckless abandon one would expect me to. :)

Look at that cute little two-year-old Millie!!!

As we're well into our fourth year with our beloved girl now, most things feel like they've come full circle to me. Name a holiday, any holiday!, and my gut reaction will probably be happiness and excitement. (Whereas in, say 2013, you could say "St. Patrick's Day" and I would get teary because the previous year on St. Patrick's Day I'd just known that next St. P's day I was going to have a baby to dress in green, and now I didn't, and therefore St. P's Day is a big bummer...that's kinda how it worked for me.) I have happy memories of every holiday from the past few years, and excitement and high expectations for happy ones to come. Holidays are happy again. Full circle.

So it's kind of fun and exciting when I find a thing roll around that hasn't yet had the chance to come full circle. I'd kinda thought I'd gone through them all already. But the other day I realized that another one (our last one?) was coming: the Winter Olympics.

You can laugh, but it's true! I love the Olympics, both Summer and Winter. I believe this is well-documented here, haha. But our last Winter Olympics was in February 2014. A few short months after the excruciating loss of our first maybe-baby, and before we knew about Millie (although it should be stated that she was probably an adorable little fetus with lots of opinions hanging out in Mama J's tummy at this point). Although my personal involvement with the Olympics is limited to sitting on a sofa and watching them on TV, I still remember the pain and sadness I felt while watching them last time. It's like this dark cloud that covers my memories of hours on the couch watching other people twirl and speed across ice and do amazing things. (Although I would be remiss not to mention that I do have SOME happy memories of the 2014 Olympics- mainly when we happened to be in Texas for the weekend and stayed with the Joiners and watched the Olympics with them!)

I remember during the summer 2016 games how redemptive it felt to watch them with Millie sitting in my lap. She didn't know what was going on, but I remembered the previous games and just noted the supreme differences in my life from 2012 to 2016. How much greater the joy. It was wonderful. And now I get to do it again- wipe away just a few more less-than-stellar memories and replace them with joy.

And joy it shall be. If you keep up with me on Instagram stories or Facebook, you might have noticed that Millie is SUPER EXCITED about figure skating these days. She is ALL IN!

Behold one of our (many) magnificent lifts.

Her current passion is having us find old Olympic figure skating videos on YouTube. She will watch for two seconds before shrieking "WE DO DAT MOVE!!!! PICK ME UP!!! I NEED TO DO DAT!!!" Matt and I have to take turns being her partner, and we're frequently scolded because we aren't as amazing as the people on TV, but we do our best. I mean, we've lived in Georgia our whole lives. Gonna have to lower those expectations, skating snob.

My favorite is when she's taking a break from her skating and she watches the Olympians, she'll point to the female skater and say "dat's me," and point to the male and say "dat's Daddy." ALL THE HEART EYES.

Oh, my other favorite is how she requests to watch the skating. "Mama, we turn on da TV and watch da skaters so I can DO MY MOVES!!! I need to do my MOVES!"

Over the weekend we were playing outside and Millie was getting some toys from the garage. She noticed my dusty Rollerblades shoved back on a shelf and exclaimed "we have ICE SKATES!?!?!?!" with lots of excitement and wonder in her voice. I pulled them out and explained that they were like ice skates for people that don't have ice. Obviously she demanded that I put them on, so I did, and I very gingerly shuffled around the driveway for a minute. She looks at me, dead-pan. "Show me your MOVES, Mama!"

Ummm...I'm 35 and really, really out of shape. I am likely to perish just standing here on wheels. These are all the moves I've got, sistah.

"Dat not amazing. Can you twirl?"

Do you wanna spend the weekend in the ER with me??

She turns away from me, done with these shenanigans.

"Daddy, where YOU ice skates? Show me you moves!"

She. Is. A. Mess. A really cute mess.

I know I've said it a thousand times, but every minute with this girl is a gift. To be sure, some of the moments are less enjoyable than others, but still- such a gift. The joy she brings, the life she restores to the parts of me that felt dead...I will never get over it. She can diss my skating skills all day long, I don't care- this babe just keeps on filling the world with light, and I cannot get enough.

just wike me.

2018-01-09T12:01:00.000-05:00

It's not atypical for Millie to be walking around with a baby doll or stuffed animal crammed underneath her shirt. This usually means she is pretending one of three things:

She is pregnant and there is a baby in her belly.
She is "wearing" her baby, like in a wrap or Ergo.
She is a kangaroo and the baby is in her pouch.

These are all frequent components of her imaginary play, and it's just as likely that she will want me to stuff a baby under MY shirt and assume the role of one of the above.

So it wasn't out of the ordinary the other night when she came up to me as I was sitting on the floor. She had a doll in her hand, and she started lifting up my shirt, trying to shove the dolly under. I reached out and helped her, stuffing it under down low on my stomach, where a fetus might like to hang out late in a pregnancy.

"Is that right?" I asked.

"No, you need to put it up dere," she said, pointing up closer to my shoulder as she tried to pull up the baby underneath my shirt.

"Oh, okay," I said as I adjusted. "Am I wearing the baby so that I can go on a walk?"

She stopped and looked at me.

"No. Dis baby growing in your heart. Not in your tummy. She growing in your heart, mama! JUST WIKE ME!!!"

And now we have a fourth option, when we see Millie walking around with a doll in her shirt. Maybe there's a baby growing in her heart, the way she grew in ours.

I don't always feel like I'm hitting it out of the park as a parent. In addition to the 'usual' parenting things that all folks deal with and worry about, I also get to wonder whether I'm handling her identity as a child who was adopted properly. Am I saying the right things? Not saying the wrong things? Does she know how incredibly valued she is, how much her birth family loves her, how my heart absolutely overflows with love for her? Am I doing the things now, when she is tiny and easy to talk to and pour love into, that will sustain her and give her a positive sense of self when she is 13?

I don't know, really.

But she is proud to walk around our house with a baby growing in her heart, so that gives me hope that maybe I'm not too far off track. Maybe she thinks that babies grown in hearts are just as wonderful as babies grown in tummies. I sure think so. Goodness gracious, I love this girl.

NO MORE BABY BOYS!

2017-10-16T09:44:00.000-04:00

Millie is ALL ABOUT some imaginative play lately. It honestly makes life really fun- except for when I don't play my role properly and I get reprimanded, of course.

Generally this is how things go:

1. Millie decides she is something else. This is often an animal (typically giraffe, manatee, lion, alligator, or dinosaur), but is sometimes a different type of person (princess, teacher, mommy), or imaginary creature (monster), or my favorite- inanimate object (lately...table. Yep. "I'm a table!").

2. Generally, as soon as she's decided what she is, she will tell me and/or Matt what we are. 99% of the time we all assume the 'mommy, daddy, baby' versions of whatever the creature is: Mommy Manatee, Daddy Manatee, Baby Manatee; Mommy Monster, Daddy Monster, Baby Monster. Sometimes we also get an adjective describing our temperament as well: Nice Mommy Monster, Mean Daddy Alligator. Sometimes our role doesn't match our actual human role- I might be Baby Lion, Matt is Mommy Lion, Millie is Nice Daddy Lion.

3. Then we basically just carry on with our normal activities, but we all have to refer to each other by our proper titles. If there are fitting noises or motions that go with whatever we are (growling, galloping, etc.), we have to do that too.

4. This continues until Millie decides we are done. When she tires of being Baby Giraffe, she will just say "we not giraffes anymore. Now we just people!"

4b. But if in the course of this playtime Matt or I manages to anger/sadden/bother Millie and she is getting huffy, she ends the game by angrily yelling "we not ANYFING!!! You not a lion!! You just NOTHING!!! And I NOTHING!!! We not NOTHING (pronounced 'nuffing') ANYMORE!!!" and I must confess, it's about 50/50 sad and hilarious.

Last week she introduced two new personas to the mix. Each of them basically slayed me, so I need to share.

1. Voldemort.

As in, Harry Potter's Voldemort. "I Baby Voldemort, you Mommy Voldemort, and Daddy is Daddy Voldemort."

Obviously she has no idea who Voldemort is, or why there can't BE a Mommy and Daddy Voldemort. She only knows the word because the other night she said something about how she didn't have a nose, so I offhandedly said "who are you, Voldemort?" and she responded by yelling "YES, I VOLDEMORT!!" and so I (properly) responded by shrieking in fear and hiding under a pillow, which meant that she continued declaring herself to be Voldemort for like 20 minutes, and then declaring us to be her corresponding Mommy and Daddy Voldemort. All she knows is that Voldemort is scary, which is fine because she loves being scary.

The best part is that she has several times since wanted to be Voldemort again but she can't remember the name, so she'll get this 'scary' look on her face and say "I....MOL...VA...DOR...DAT SCARY GUY DAT MAKE YOU SCWEAM!!!"

2. Mean Pharaoh.

We can thank her daycare for this one- last week's Bible story was about Baby Moses. I discovered this when Millie responded to my "what did you learn at school today?" question with "NO MORE BABY BOYS!!!!", complete with a really scary face and waving her arms around in a kinda slicing manner.

"No more baby boys??" I asked.

"NO MORE BABY BOYS!!! I A MEEEEEAN KING!!! You put your baby in a basket, Mommy. NO MORE BABY BOYS!!"

Ooooooh. Pharaoh and baby Moses, got it, thanks.

So in about five minutes, she was Baby Pharaoh, I was Mommy Pharaoh, and Matt was Daddy Pharaoh. Don't worry, that all makes sense. Then we all just ran around screaming "NO MORE BABY BOYS!!!" together, like any family of mean pharaohs.

A few times Millie has changed the rules and become Nice Pharaoh. Nice Pharaoh says "You can have some baby boys, okay?!" and then looks expectantly at me like I might just birth a baby boy then and there out of gratitude. Hasn't happened yet, but I guess she'll keep trying.

I not scared, Mommy- he onwy made of pwastic!!

the books of 2017. so far.

2017-10-11T15:28:00.000-04:00

2017 has proven to be an excellent year of reading for me, so far. With a good 2.5 months to go in the year, I've so far finished 50 books, already surpassing my 2017 goal of 40- it's the first time I've made and met a goal so far (that I remember, haha)! Anyway, since several folks have asked for book recommendations and/or reviews lately, I thought I would share my thoughts about some of my favorites (and not-so-favorites) this year. As always, keeping up with me on Goodreads will give you my real-time reading updates, which is probably fascinating to about maaaybe 4 other people in the world besides me, ha.

(P.S. For those of you who might wonder how I manage to read so much (while working full time, momming so hard (bahaha), etc), here's the deal. For starters, I'm a REALLY FAST READER. I always have been. So I can get a lot of pages read in a short amount of time. That helps. Secondly, I sacrifice basically everything else in my life in my desperation to read, hahaha. Let's be honest. Millie goes to bed by 8:30, so I'd say that four or five nights a week, I'm on the couch reading by 8:45 p.m. I read until 10 or 11, when I go to bed. I don't work out. I don't blog. I rarely watch TV. I barely talk to Matt. I don't clean the house or chat on the phone or bake or craft or go out with friends. So when you look at it like that- I just DON'T do all the other stuff people spend their evenings doing, and then I have lots of time to read! That may or may not be a good thing, so feel free to judge me.)

Favorite Books that Made Me Think:

This is probably my favorite genre of books, overall. I like books that challenge my thinking, or open my eyes to something I didn't know or didn't know enough about. For the past few years, most of my favorite books have been about World War II, something I can probably never learn enough about. But I like to think about other hard things, too, so here are some books that took me there.

The Girl You Left Behind (Jojo Moyes)- This book (based on true stories) alternates between the story of a woman living in occupied France during WWI and a girl in modern-day England, and centers on a painting (the painting's name is the title of the book). I learned a lot about art restitution, something I'd never considered before, and this story absolutely enthralled me. It is perfect. If you're not much into "heavy" reading, I still think you would like this- it's written by Jojo Moyes, author of "Me Before You" and lots of other wonderful stories, and her writing is engaging, her characters well-developed, and her ability to tie together all the loose ends of various plots is unparalleled. I've recommended this book to practically everyone I've met this year!
The Storyteller (Jodi Picoult)- This is another story that flip-flops between WWII and the present. Although I've probably read 100 WWII novels at this point, both fiction and non, I was shocked at how deeply this one touched me. If you've read anything by Jodi before, you KNOW she can tell a good story, and she'll probably find some way to get your emotions and morals all twisted up inside so that you don't even know how to feel about something. Well, she does it here, too. The central question this novel posed to me was this: can you- or are you obligated to- or should you- offer forgiveness to someone if you were not the party who was wronged? It sounds vague, and maybe simple, but I promise that this book will rip your heart around. I read this book in March and I'm still wrestling with some of the questions it brought up.
Necessary Lies (Diane Chamberlain)- This book takes place in North Carolina in the 1960s and is a fictional story about a very real horror: the state's Eugenics Sterilization Program that was in effect from 1929 until 1975. I had never heard of this program or situation before, and it's as chilling as the name indicates. Poor women (and female children) in NC were being forcibly sterilized,without their consent and often without even realizing it, as state social workers would tell them they were having appendectomies or other similar surgeries. This book led me to several days of fevered Googling for more information, which is always the sign of a good read! Despite the topic, it was a relatively easy/quick read, and my book club had PLENTY to discuss that month!
The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)- This book has been around for 30 years, so I doubt I'm the first person to tell you about it, but this was the first time I'd read it and I'm SO GLAD I did. This dystopian fiction tells the story of a monotheocracy in what used to be the United States. The story will make you thankful for separation of church and state, and horrified at what could happen if power were to run unchecked. And if you happen to be reading it for the first time, I would recommend you NOT read the very last chapter (I can't remember if it's called the epilogue or if it's just the last chapter, but you'll recognize it when you see a huge time jump to some unspecified time in the future with new and unfamiliar settings and characters). It's terrible and almost ruins the whole book. Just quit right before then and make up in your own head what you think happened. :) And I still haven't gotten around to watching the Hulu series, but I plan to...when I run out of books to read.
Small Great Things (Jodi Picoult)- I know, I know- another Jodi Picoult. What can I say. When she's good, she's good, and she is on fiyah in this one. This compelling, un-put-down-able story about "race, privilege, prejudice, justice, and compassion" (just shamelessly stole that from the Amazon description, but I can't really improve on that list, so whatever) will challenge and inform and sadden and inspire you, and you won't be able to stop thinking or talking about it.
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (Bryan Stevenson)- Oh look, a nonfiction (memoir!) made it to my list finally! This book. Guys. You just need to read it. It's hard. It's about death row and race. It paints a picture of American history that isn't as pretty as you would maybe like to think. But it's true and it's something we need to be talking about so that we can change. Read it.

Books that Are Just Plain Enjoyable:

These books will probably still make you think, but are not as weighty or emotional as the books on the top list, haha. You will note that I don't normally read a lot of truly "light" reads (chick lit, romance novels, etc.)...so maybe my 'light reads' are not as light as they could be, but whatever. These books were all great.

Dark Matter (Blake Crouch)- This book is a truly fun and mind-bending ride- considering it's a book based in QUANTUM PHYSICS, something I know absolutely nothing about. So I had to work hard to wrap my brain around some things, but this story is compelling enough to make the hard work worth it. A little off my usual path, but the engaging characters, interesting dilemmas, and overall storyline made me really glad I gave it a go!
Crazy Rich Asians (Kevin Kwan)- This book was just plain FUN. There were a LOT of developed characters, and I would highly recommend reading this book in PRINT and not on your Kindle, as I did, because then you will be able to easily refer to a handy family tree at the front of the book. That would have helped me a LOT...but I didn't know it was there because my Kindle just started me on the first page of the story. Anyway. This book was hilarious as well as educational, and I look forward to reading the other two in the trilogy.
The Lake House (Kate Morton)- I was shocked by how much I loved this book. It really took me a little longer than usual to get into it and enjoy the story, but once I did- I was all in. This book was a fun mystery in what I think of as the more "classic" style of mysteries. Not a twisty psychological thriller a la Gone Girl or whatever...this is a good old fashioned whodunnit (and whodunWHAT) that keeps you guessing and I was truly almost giddy towards the end of the book (I believe I solved the mystery like 80% and the other 20% was the MOST FUN REVEAL EVER). I don't know how to describe this other than to say it felt very different than most of the mysteries/thrillers I've read in the past few years, and I very much enjoyed it.
The Sound of Gravel (Ruth Wariner)- Memoir alert!! This was a fantastic true story about a woman who grew up in a polygamist compound in Mexico and harrowingly escaped from it as a teen. Ruth has become one of my favorite people to stalk on social media now. This isn't a light read at all- her childhood stories will break your heart and make you mad, but it's well-written and enlightening.
The Serpent King (Jeff Zentner)- This was a high-quality YA read about a misfit teenage boy growing up in the Bible Belt (the title refers to his snake-handling church). I thought that the characters were well-developed and believable and the story heartbreakingly possible.
Beartown (Fredrik Backman)- I would almost say that Fredrik Backman can do no wrong, but then I read My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, which was fairly terrible, so...I can't say that. BUT I can say that I enjoy ALMOST everything he writes, and Beartown was no exception. This hockey story takes place in a small town full of interesting and engaging characters. It's a coming-of-age story, a story of violence and small-town thinking, and a story that challenges both characters and readers to grapple with the ugly truth. I loved it.
Winter Garden (Kristin Hannah)- I'll be honest- this story was SLOW GOING for me for the first almost half. Slow. I just couldn't get into it, and I couldn't understand all the five-star ratings and glowing reviews. I wasn't connecting with the characters and I would've given up except for a) I'm stubborn, and b) this is KRISTIN HANNAH- she of The Nightingale, one of the most wonderful books ever, and SURELY she would redeem a couple hundred pages of non-excellence!! And MAN- am I glad I stuck with it. The story finally got rolling for me about halfway through, and the last...I don't know, 25%, maybe...INCREDIBLE. Like the ending had me literally sobbing and ugly crying and filled with joy and hope and like, you don't even know. I gave the book 5 stars, even with that rough start, because the final few pages deserved like 20 stars on their own. This is a story that alternates between the present (the storyline that was SO hard for me to get interested in) and the past- occupied Leningrad. If you've got the stamina to power through (and it's not like the first half is terrible, it's just not great...and I just have too many things to read to be wasting my time on 'not great,' normally)...do it.

Noteworthy:

Ugh, come on. There are just so many books I loved. I feel bad if I don't include all of them in some way! (I would be the type that gives all the kids a participation trophy...hahaha...only for books it's like "you are a book! someone wrote you and cared very much about you! you win!") These books all also receive my stamp of approval and enjoyment, only I'm not going to keep writing individual summaries, ha.

Wool (Hugh Howey)
Harry Potter series (reread) (J.K. Rowling)
The Hate U Give (Angie Thomas)
Girl in Translation (Jean Kwok)
The Year of Living Danishly (Helen Russell)
Love Anthony (Lisa Genova)
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (J.D. Vance)
The Hunger Games trilogy (reread) (Suzanne Collins)
Lilac Girls (Martha Hall Kelly)
The Book Thief (Markus Zusak)

SO! This accounts for 31 of the 50 books I've read so far this year. HA. Very exclusive of me to manage to omit 19 from my list of recommendations!!

I do truly tend to be very happy with the books I read, so I often ponder whether it's because I'm just easily satisfied, I have low standards, or what. I've decided that it's because I'm really selective at what I set out to read in the first place. I know what I like. I know authors I like. I know which friends make recommendations that are typically home runs for me. And so I think that means that I just rarely even try a book that has much of a chance of flopping. I mean, I have had a few "flop" books this year- you can see on my Goodreads, if you care. But I think that doing my homework up front, before I crack open the book, results in me being generally thrilled with everything I read. So there's my tip for how to curate a reading life full of five star books, hahaha.

Soooo I doubt anyone really made it this far, but if you did, congratulations, you are a big nerd like me. You shall be rewarded with a picture of Millie in her new dinosaur shirt, aka the cutest thing I've ever seen (the kid AND the shirt).

How I feel when I'm laying on the couch reading a book. Only I'm less cute than this.

So anyone wanna Book Club it up about any of my selections here? Read them? Loved them? Hated them? Want me to tell you why you're wrong for hating them? Ha. Most importantly: based on what you know now about the kinds of books I love...what should I read next?

(P.S. If you're into podcasts AND reading- all three of us- you definitely need to be listening to What Should I Read Next by Anne Bogel. Such a great podcast!)

Note: All book links are Amazon affiliate links!

life lately

2017-10-06T16:00:00.001-04:00

Well...it's been a minute. Haha. Long enough that when I just now went and looked at my blog so that I could see just HOW long...I was surprised to see my "new" design that I'd completely forgotten I did. Ha!

We're trucking right along into fall- in our hearts and outfits and food and decor, if not in our weather. Life is really, really good. Millie is at such a fun age, although she certainly has her challenging moments (and days...hahaha)...but overall, three has been pretty fantastic so far. We're still finding fun "firsts" to celebrate when we can!

Yes, apparently Millie still utilizes the Ergo...

We had our first family trip to a UGA football game! We did go to a G-Day (spring scrimmage) game a few years ago, but this was a legit SEC home game. Interestingly (to me, anyway)- it was also the first game Matt and I have ever been to together, despite both being UGA students who attended games in college! We just didn't happen to meet until right after college, and have never been lucky/dedicated enough to get tickets and go to a game in the 13 years since.

It was funny, though, thinking about the differences between this game and the last game I went to. The last game was in late November of 2004, my senior year of college. It was the last game of the season, versus Georgia Tech, and it was pouring rain and sleet and MISERABLE. We were losing. And we were just frozen solid. And so my friends and I left the game early- truly it may have been the first and only game I ever left early. I HATED people who left games early, haha. But we were too cold and too sad and I stood there knowing it might be a long time until I got to go to a game again, but I left early anyway. And I always regretted it, to be honest.

I definitely didn't know that it would be THIS long- thirteen years- until I returned to Sanford Stadium for a game! And the next game I'd attend would be with my husband of over a decade and our three-year-old. Oh, and there would be drone cameras flying over the field, and every person in the stadium would have a magical device that allowed them to take pictures, text, and access the internet- WHILE THEY WERE AT THE GAME!!! (Bahaha- SMARTPHONES weren't even invented at my last game. THAT is what made me feel oldest.)

Anyway- we had a blast. Hopefully we won't wait another 13 years til we go back, but no promises. We're pretty lazy. Haha.

Millie has developed a pretty intense love of horses lately. It's basically my favorite thing ever. Looks like we're gonna have to move to a farm or something, because girlfriend NEEDS a horsey.

Until we can make THAT happen, though, we've got Adda the stick horsey to fill that void in her life. Adda's doing a pretty good job. That thing goes everywhere with us. And if the stick part isn't convenient, we just carry her head. (crying laughing emoji) Yes, it is as disturbing as you might imagine to see a horse head lying around.

I actually bought Adda to complete Millie's upcoming Halloween costume (you guessed it: cowgirl!!!!), but I underestimated how amazing she would be. I hope she makes it til Halloween, haha. Millie loves hers so much we ended up getting the UNICORN version (complete with neighing and "magical" sounds!!) for my niece for her birthday. I mean, who doesn't need a stick horse? They've come a long way since I was a kid (much like football games, apparently).

We're looking forward to all the usual fall fun- pumpkin patches and mountain trips and hopefully, God willing, some cooler weather at some point. Not much looking forward to the time change and dark evenings, though. The other evening we were playing outside and we heard crickets start chirping. Millie put her hand up behind her ear and said "I hear somesing!"

"What do you hear?"

"I hear da bugs talking!"

"Yes, Millie! That's the crickets."

"Da bugs turn off da lights."

"Huh?"

"When da bugs talk, dey make it dark outside!"

Soooooo where is her Mensa application?? Girlfriend is a genius.

In other exciting family news (haha...don't get TOO excited), we are finally getting a king sized bed! This is "family" news because strangely enough, more than two people usually end up sleeping in our little queen-sized bed most nights, so...gotta accommodate. I would feel more ashamed, but she's just such a cute little snuggler that I can't bring myself to get too worked up over it. Most of the time she just wanders in when she wakes up around 6:30 or 7, and I'm totally fine with her snuggling with us for a few minutes before we get up. Occasionally it's more like 2:00 a.m., and if Daddy catches her first, he will walk her back to her bed...but if she makes it to my side, she just climbs on in and spends the night. Hahahaha. I can't help it. She's too cute, and I'm too tired. (And at least now she actually lays relatively still and SLEEPS, so it's not a miserable experience for anyone. And it'll be even less miserable once we have all that sweet extra rooooommmm!!!)

We're going to do a full-house-shuffle of our other furniture, though, to make room for the new bed in our room, so that should be ~~not~~ exciting. If you see me looking annoyed and haggard over the next week, it'll be due to some deep cleaning and organizing and furniture deconstruction/moving/reconstruction. Bah. But hopefully it'll be worth it in the end! I'm staying true to myself and my lazy ways, ordering the new bed and mattress from Amazon, so we'll have to do the hard labor ourselves, but hopefully it won't be bad. We did the same thing (different brands, but same ideas) for Millie's room this summer and it was pretty easy and we've been SO happy with her big girl bed, so...I have high hopes! I'd like to say I'll come back with updated pictures of our fabulous new master bedroom, but given my blogging track record of late...better look for that update on Instagram, sorry. Ha.

That's about all I can think of...life just keeps zooming by, and I try to savor and appreciate as much as I can. There are so many tragic and terrible things happening in the world right now, I try not to take a single minute or privilege for granted. It feels trite sometimes to focus on all these silly and ordinary things- stick horses and home decorating, fall festivals and mountain trips- but I find that these are the things that keep me from spiraling into fear and anxiety about everything else. So I play dolls with my daughter, and I annoy the hell out of my senators and "representatives" (lol), and I look forward to pumpkin spice everything, and I read books by really smart people that awaken me to the much bigger world and its much bigger problems, and I try to teach and show my daughter kindness, and I pray and sign petitions and donate money to people working to make a difference. It's a weird balance, really, but it's life right now. I'm so thankful for the goodness, wherever I can find it.

millie-isms: part VI

2017-08-11T15:54:00.000-04:00

My best girl has been dropping LOTS of hilarious tidbits on us lately. I don't want to forget this stuff!!

This morning at breakfast, she looks at Matt and says "Daddy I loooove you SOOO much!" While Matt's mopping his puddle of a self off the floor, she turns and says the same to me. "Mommy, I love YOU soooo much!" We both tell her that we love her, too. Then she looks down. "I love Lola...a little bit. Sometimes. But when I poke Lola's ear, she wants to eat me up, and den I not love her so much." Well, at least she's honest. Can't blame Lola for not wanting her ears poked, either. ;)

***

Something Millie said the other night made me think maybe they've talked about the upcoming solar eclipse at school. So I asked her this morning, "Millie, do you know what the eclipse is?"

"No, I not. What dat?"

"Maybe you talked about it at school? When the moon goes in front of the sun and it is going to get dark during the daytime?"

"Hmmm...dark in the daytime? Dat not sound fun!"

***

While driving her home from school the other day, Millie helpfully suggested that I not drive my car off the road and into the woods, because "den you bonk some twees and your car get bwoken and you have to get a new red ("wed") car!" (My current car is gray.)

"A new red car? I don't think I want a new red car, Mills. If I get a new car, I think I want a black car."

"A bwack car? NO. I not wike a bwack car. How about a wed car. Or a gween car!"

"Uhhh...no, I'm not getting a green car. How about a shiny black car?"

"NO. How about a bwue car?"

"Blue? I don't think so. Well, maybe navy blue. How about a nice dark navy blue car, Mills?"

*HUGE SIGH LIKE I AM THE MOST EXASPERATING MOTHER IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD*

"Otay. Dark bwue. Dat be fine. But no bwack car, or I will wide wif Daddy."

***

On the evening of her birthday, a very overtired, sugared up Millie was begging to watch a video after I finished drying her off from her bath.

"Hmmm..." I mused as I dried.

"How about you say YES or NO," she suggested/demanded.

"Hmmmm...."

"How about YES or NO, Mommy!"

"Well...okay, then. No. No video."

She stares at me.

"Okay, how about you say YES or YES?!!! Mommy, can I watch the iPad? Say yes or yes!!"

(I still said no. I'm the worst.)

***

As we were driving home from work/school one afternoon, she yelled out from the back seat "Mommy!! Let's go to a bakery shop and get some doughnuts!!" (And she pronounces it "bo-nuts"...although she can totally make a /d/ sound...but it's adorable so I don't touch it.)

I'm a big joy killer, so I reluctantly said "Well, I'm sorry Mills, but we are reeeeeallly far away from a doughnut store right now, and we're almost home. We can't get doughnuts right now."

She's not deterred.

"Hey, Mommy!! Why don't you just dwive your car to the bakery shop? Then we not be too far from the bo-nuts!! Den you can have a sprinkle bo-nut and you be SO HAPPY!!!!"

She is nothing if not a problem solver.

***

They offer weekly karate classes at her school- kind of like how she did her ballet classes...an outside studio comes in and does the lessons in a multipurpose room once a week (for a fee, of course, haha). During July, the karate school offered two free classes to anyone interested, to see if your kid might want to sign up for the fall session. I let Millie take them, my head filled with adorable visions of her being all disciplined and obedient in a white outfit (sorry, I'm sure there's a name for the outfit, but *SPOILER ALERT* her karate career didn't last long enough to find out...)

I tried to prep her for her first class, which was challenging for someone who knows NOTHING about karate. "You're going to...umm...kick! And chop!"

"Chop what? CHOP MY FOOD AND EAT IT??!!"

No, truly. That is what she said. If there were ever a question about whose daughter she is...it's answered now. Haaaaaa.

When I picked her up from school that day, I was so excited to hear how the class went.

"Millie, did you do karate?"

"No."

"Oh??...soo...what did you do?"

"I look at my fwiends when dey kick. I not kick. I not wike karate."

I looked at her teacher, who nodded to confirm this truth. "We've never actually seen Millie be so uninterested in an activity. She just sat against the wall and stared at her friends for the whole hour."

HAHAHA. When we got home, she ran around kicking and chopping.

"I do my karate now. I not do it at school."

When Week 2 came with the same results, we decided that karate isn't going to be the sport for her right now. She's signed up again for ballet.

three!

2017-08-09T10:24:00.004-04:00

On Saturday my silly girl turned THREE years old. It's insanity. There is no way she is this old!!

She has been over-the-top excited about her birthday since roughly last October, so we knew we had to do it up right this year. We had her first real birthday party, lots of presents and balloons and junk food, and she was the center of attention all weekend- all of her favorite things!

I want to jot down a few updated stats and milestones, but I believe my days of answering all of the same 'monthly update' questions that I've done since her first month update are done. She's just outgrown too many of those categories. BUT it's not a time to be sad- it's time to be JAZZED, because this means she is old enough to answer her OWN questions about herself...I've only been waiting for this moment for like FIFTY BILLION YEARS!!!

But first, the nitty gritty.

Nicknames: Well, I can't quit this one yet. I just love seeing how her nicknames morph over the years!! She is called Millie almost all of the time. I don't know anyone that consistently calls her Camilla. Some of her teachers/school friends (and me) call her Mimi or Mimmy. Matt and I and the rest of my family (her cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles) tend to call her Mill-Mill. And Matt and I still call her Millsie and Nuggie. She calls herself Millie, and she knows her first and last name almost all of the time, and can come up with 'Camilla' maybe half the time that you ask her "but what is your other name? your long name?" Haha.

Stats: She weighs 34 lb 12 oz (84 percentile) and is 37.5 inches tall (60 percentile). She wears 3T clothes, though I'm buying 4T pants for the winter, since even last spring her 3T pants were getting too short. She wears a size 7 shoe.

Big Girl Skills: She is completely potty trained. No more pull-ups at night, even! She's Team Undies all the time, and even made it through our long drives to/from Florida last month with no accidents in the car (and we didn't have to make a bunch of extra potty stops, either!). Like many things (see: sleeping, eating, generally being an awesome baby and toddler) with Millie, she just sorta figured it out on her own with a little help from mama & daddy.

She is still successfully sleeping in her Big Girl Bed and that transition has been much easier than I'd feared! Although she does occasionally decide to bop on into our room if she wakes up in the middle of the night, we can usually get her back to her own bed and asleep pretty painlessly. Also, we have learned that she can be successfully bribed to stay in her room until her green light (OK to Wake clock) comes on. So we do that a lot, too...let's be honest. (Most effective bribe is letting her use the iPad in the car on the way to school. This is worth it on so many levels because a) she stays in her room all night, and b) if she has the iPad, I can listen to NPR and not "Elsa song" 3,000 times during our drive to daycare in the morning...)

She knows the words to many songs and can retell her favorite stories. I love when I see her using dolls and stuffed animals to act out stories- her most favorite story to reenact with dolls right now is the Three Billy Goats Gruff. She is ALL ABOUT that mean ol' troll and the big billy goat that "pokes you and kicks you right off this bridge!!" We spend a lot of time making bridges for her zoo animals (trolls) to hide under to scare off the Polly Pockets walking over the bridge. It's so much fun!!

Although she is very interested in letters and sounds and "what dis letter say, Mommy?", she doesn't seem to reliably identify any letters yet. I'm not worried or pushing it, but I just wanted to record that so that in the future I can remember when she did/didn't learn her letters!

She can count very well- rote counting to 15 or so pretty accurately, and she can count with one-to-one correspondence and quantify up to about 6 or so before she starts getting off track.

She loves to draw and paint but does not yet make art that actually resembles anything- her "people" do not have any sort of discernible heads/bodies, etc. However, I think it's interesting that when she is "writing," her "letters" do look markedly different than her "pictures" (lots of quotation marks)...they definitely aren't letters, but they are smaller, more letter-like forms of scribble-scrabble. I think it is all precious and so much fun to watch these skills develop!

Likes/Dislikes: Well...let's just ask the girl herself, okay?? (Disclaimer: I completely disagree with like half of these answers (as in, that is NOT her favorite color/food/thing/whatever), but...whatever.)

For the record, I would like to correct her answers and note that NORMALLY and in REAL LIFE, her favorite color is purple, her favorite food is probably rice and beans (at a Mexican restaurant), her favorite snack is "gummies" (fruit snacks), I didn't know she had such strong feelings about applesauce (although she was eating some while I surveyed her, haha), and also she found this whole questionnaire to be very challenging "Whew, Mommy! Dis hard!". (All the crying laughing emoji)

I don't think she has any concept of "when I grow up," and I had thought about explaining what that means, but I loved her answer so much that I decided to just leave it. :)

THIS GIRL.

It's just impossible to describe how incredibly thankful I am to be her mommy.

I see these pictures coming up in my TimeHop now, and there are just so many emotions that come over me:

I remember how overjoyed we were. How terrified. How excited and how anxious. How even as we held her, we didn't know if we would still be holding her an hour or a day or a month later. We were thrilled, but we had to be guarded. We fell in love with her, but we feared what could come.

That strange mixture of joy and terror and delight and nerves and anxiety...I can still taste it in my mouth when I see these pictures. I remember what my stomach felt like. I doubt I'll ever really forget.

But now it's three years later. She's an average (though obviously funnier, cuter, and more adorable than average) toddler, we're just regular parents chasing our kid down the aisle at Target and engaging in iPad-related negotiations, and at a glance, you'd never know there was anything unusual about how our family came to be.

I know I say this almost every time I write, but I can't bring myself to stop. She is so, so worth every minute of waiting, every year of struggle, every breath of fear, every sleepless night. She is the answer to my every prayer and a greater gift than I could have hoped for.

Happy birthday to my sweet, strong, brave girl. Being your mommy is my greatest privilege.

Two Point Five Years
Two Years

Nine Months
Eight Months

the one with all the manatees

2017-07-19T17:30:00.000-04:00

We had a wonderful, relaxing trip to the beach last week! It was Millie's third year going to Cocoa Beach with us, and each year gets more and more fun!

Ever since we took our mini-vacation to Cape San Blas in April, Millie has been BEGGING to go back to the beach. Parenting pro tip: maybe don't tell your distraught daughter about your next beach trip while you are leaving from your current beach trip if there is more than about 2 days until the next one. "In July" meant NOTHING to Millie, and so it's been a lonnnng three months of telling her "not today!!" every day when she thinks we are going to the beach that day.

See the line where the sky meets the sea? It calls me...and no one knoooooows how far it gooooooes...

But finally the day came and we got back to her beloved "BIG water!" and all was well with her soul. And mine. But then...

But then.

Then it was Thursday. Thursday, July 13, to be exact. A day I shall forever remember with fondness, joy, and delight.

On Thursday we decided to go kayaking. Same place we've gone before- the Banana River, less than a mile from our condo. The river is where my love of manatees was born back in 2010, when I unexpectedly came upon them while kayaking. I've been a woman obsessed ever since. But I've never had as much success finding them again. Occasional sightings, a glimpse from afar...enough to keep fueling my passion, but not enough to quench it, right? But I get it. It's July. It's hotter than Hades. It's not "manatee season," even though it's a manatee zone. So I keep my expectations ~~low~~ reasonable-ish.

But on Thursday...

OH MY GOSH THERE IS A MANATEE RIGHT NEXT TO MY KAYAK!!!

A manatee? There wasn't a manatee.

There were four.

Four giant, lovely, fat, happy, playful manatees. They were hanging out in a little cove, doing what manatees do. Rolling around, being adorable, and BE STILL MY HEART, curiously checking out the kayakers who happened by.

THIS IS MATT TOUCHING A MANATEE!!!!!!!!!

Like, they just came up to us! They KEPT coming up to us! The swam under us and rubbed their backs on the bottom of our boat! The stuck their noses up and sniffed us!!

I GOT TO PET A MANATEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I cannot even describe this.

Over and over and over, they came up, rolled around, said hi (with their bodies. I speak the body language of the manatees, trust.).

Millie's sweet little hand got to PET A MANATEE!! She was so brave!!

Indescribable, people. Absolutely amazing. I have videos (and videos, and videos) of the whole experience and my voice is like 12 octaves higher than strictly necessary and I am gushing and nearly sobbing and like OH MY GOSH I WAS BEING SWARMED BY HAPPY, ROLY POLY MANATEES!!!

They have whiskers!! Or "beards," if you're Millie.

They showed off with cute party tricks like this!

Oh look, it's ~~Erika tanning on the beach~~ a manatee tanning in the water! (P.S. I touched their bellies too, don't worry. They were much smoother than their backs and didn't have all the algae/barnacles. Very interesting!)

We stayed in that cove and just watched and played for over half an hour. They never left us- they kept swimming around us and coming up. I really just cannot believe it happened. I think I'm still in shock.

This is how we felt about the whole experience.

I am just so incredibly thankful for such an amazing, unexpected opportunity. That my parents, Matt, and Millie got to experience it alongside me was even better. You better believe none of us have stopped talking about it ever since. And now that we're home, with no upcoming beach trips on the agenda, Millie asks "when we see manatees again?" and like...what am I supposed to tell her?! At least I've got a co-manatee lover in the house with me.

July 13, man. July 13. You know, on the Tuesday and Wednesday before, I'd been sick with a stomach bug and stuck in bed (so stupid on vacation!!). But on Thursday, I woke up, felt a bit better, and figured we may as well go for a paddle down the river. What a wonderful spur-of-the-moment decision THAT turned out to be!!!

summer fun

2017-07-07T11:54:00.000-04:00

Well, the summer keeps on trucking along. It's hot. It's humid. It's inexplicably raining and storming nearly EVERY day. But we're having a lot of fun! For example, thanks to the frequent storms (and fireworks...), Lola is getting a lot of opportunities to wear her ThunderShirt. Millie knows this, and knows that Lola gets scared of the storms, and this has resulted in two very funny things.

1. At the first sign (or sound) of a storm, Millie will frantically tell us "Lola needs her BOOM BLANKET!" ThunderShirt...Boom Blanket...I get it. Obviously now we call it the boom blanket all the time, because that's a way better name. If anyone is thinking about starting a company to make knockoff ThunderShirts, you are welcome to use this superior name for your product.

2. Several times when it's been storming at night, we've closed the door to Millie's room while we're putting her to bed and Lola will scratch at the door until we let her in. Therefore, for the past few days, at ALL times of the day, regardless of weather, Millie will stop, fold her hands, and pray for Lola: "Dear Jesus...we just thank you dat Lola NOT scwatch at my door. Pwease make Lola not scared and not scwatch my door. Thank you for her boom blanket. AMEN!"

Gimme all the storms if I get this kind of hilarious payoff. Also, Jesus, please help Lola not be scared and scratch on Millie's door, because apparently it really distresses Millie. ;)

And now, some random pictures and stories.

We're heading to the beach next week (YAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!!!!!!!) and needed to practice setting up (easy) and taking down (what the *@#!) our beach tent. In between those two events, Millie found it to be a good place to have some reading time. It should be noted that Millie has almost completed her second library summer reading program of the summer (you know, read 50 books and get prizes sorta thing). They are going to have to name a shelf of books after us or something by the time summer is through! LOTS of reading going on in our house!

The Big Girl Bed situation is going great!! She is sleeping well and only getting/falling out of bed occasionally in the wee hours...when that happens she tends to seem very confused and discombobulated and goes right back to sleep without a problem, so I am thankful for that! When she does wake up, though, we are treated to alien-ish sights like this as she helpfully goes over to turn off her sound machine.

We played dress-up one afternoon. She apparently thinks princesses have attitudes or something.

WATERCOLORS, guys!! I've finally found the Holy Grail of toddler entertainment. Hours (literally) of fun that ISN'T MESSY!! We all win. She will paint contentedly and independently for a super long time, and then we make "books" (by stapling pages together)...it's the best. For whatever reason, she manages to keep pretty clean with these paints (her other paints end up EVERYWHERE and have to be used basically naked outside) and like...I'm about to hit those back to school sales at Target and STOCK UP on watercolors, yo.

We had some fun firsts this past week!

First fireworks! See also: first intentionally keeping her out and awake WAY past her bedtime. Luckily she did fine!

Well, I mean, until about 10 minutes into the actual fireworks part, when she managed to fall asleep. Hahaha. Poor baby. Luckily for us all, once we actually got home and put her in bed (10:00, so a good 1.5 hours past her normal bedtime), she went right to sleep and even slept in the next morning...so...fireworks every weekend, right?

We also went to the movie theater for the first time!! Well, first time EVER for Millie...first time since Millie was born for us, haha.

A local theater does a "kids movie" thing every Tuesday/Thursday morning during the summer...older movies, but $1.50 tickets, $1.50 popcorn, and $1.50 drinks, so THAT is a win. We enjoyed watching The Secret Life of Pets, which was pretty cute, and Millie was SUPER into the whole theater experience. Possibly my favorite part was watching her deal with the theater chair. Hahahaha. She didn't quite weigh enough to keep it from springing back up into the closed position if she sat towards the back, so she would balance way up at the tip of the chair, but every time she forgot and scooted back, it would try to close her up...haaaa! Free entertainment there. For me, anyway.

All the rain has resulted in LOTS of tomatoes this year! On Monday we picked some and then took some across the street to our elderly neighbors, a practice that Millie found VERY confusing. "Why we give dem our matoes??! Dey hungry? Dey no have matoes?" Later she informed me that she missed the 'matoes' that we gave to our neighbors. Apparently those 20 matoes were her favorites and now they are GONE. Crazy baby!

Well, that about brings us up to speed. Congrats if you made it this far. Also, if you happen to be reading this ON my blog (and not through Bloglovin or something), you might notice that I got a new design! Thanks to an astute blog reader, Jackie, who yesterday pointed out that most of my design images (the header, about me, section labels on the right hand side) had gone WAY wonky and the images were gone and replaced with some ransom thing from Photobucket (where they had been hosted)...it was super weird and unattractive, haha. I couldn't figure out how to easily fix it without tracking down the girl that created the design for me 3.5 years ago, so I decided to just make a new one myself. It was an unexpected turn of events, and I certainly had no plans to redesign a blog I barely ever use, hahaha, but...it had to happen! Anyway, I'm happy with how it turned out and it even encouraged me to actually BLOG so that other people might see it, too. :)

Happy Friday! And happy almost-vacation to meeee!! Counting the minutes til I see my sweet girl running through that sand!

Operation BGB: more emotional than I'd planned

2017-06-22T16:59:00.000-04:00

Well, Operation Big Girl Bed is a wrap, folks. The crib is gone, the bed is in, and Millie stays in her bed and sleeps perfectly like a little angel champ, so go ahead and give me my gold star for parenting. BAHAHA. Or not. But seriously, it wasn't too painful.

We got both the upholstered bed and the mattress on Amazon- I'll keep ya posted, but so far we are very pleased with both items! They both had great reviews and were freaky cheap, so that's how we made those difficult shopping decisions, haha. (FYI- those are affiliate links!)

So the bed was delivered on Friday, but we knew the mattress wasn't going to come until Monday. We knew we would have to a) deconstruct the crib, b) construct the bed, and c) when the mattress came, it would need 24-48 hours to grow to its full mattress size once we released it from the box, so we didn't go into the weekend with a real plan of when and how we were going to do all of these things. However, once Millie and I were up bright and early Saturday morning, I made the executive decision that we should go ahead and take down the crib and build the bed that day. I'll be honest- the main reason I wanted to go ahead and do it was because I knew that losing the crib was going to be the hardest part (emotionally) for me. I didn't want to have a "last night" putting her to bed in it because I would probably have just sobbed for hours and made a big messy deal out of the whole thing. As it was, we'd had a relatively routine "last night" the night before and that was just it. I didn't want to put it off.

But guys- it was hard.

June 17, 2017- our last morning with our crib

I know you know what I mean. The pain of infertility and loss and waiting and heartbreak is not nearly as salient as it once was, but it's not nearly forgotten. That crib is a lot more than a piece of furniture to me. It is a tangible symbol of hope fulfilled, of answered prayers, of beauty and life. It represents what I longed and prayed for for years and years. And I couldn't be any more thankful for the baby that came to sleep in it, who has grown and thrived and now needs to move on from it...but if I had a lot more rooms in my house, I would leave that crib standing forever. A testament to answered prayer. Something to lay my hands on when I need to remember that He heard my cries. And it doesn't make sense to me, logically, because I have Millie for that, right? I can hold her and remember the same things. And I do. But that crib.

I knew it was gonna be tough.

As I started untying the bumpers, I just lost it. Those are the bumpers I sewed. For our other baby, our first maybe-baby...the baby we didn't get to keep. I wept and prayed for another baby as I sewed these bumpers nearly four years ago. And that baby never got to see them, but in the wake of that loss, Millie came. And Millie did see them, and slept with them, and stepped on them, and smooshed them, and they don't look so hot anymore, but that didn't matter a whole lot to me on Saturday as I sat there untying their impossibly tight knots with tears leaking out as I worked. Like nearly everything in her nursery, those bumpers are more than just (hazardous) pieces of foam-filled fabric. They remind me of our wait. Of the months and years of planning and hoping and making ridiculous, unnecessary hand-made mementos for the baby we hoped would come.

She came. We don't need the bumpers anymore.

I knew I wouldn't be able to watch Matt dismantle the crib itself, so Millie and I left to take a trip to Target. She was watching me as I cried, and when she asked why, I tried to explain. "I'm just sad because this really means you're not a baby anymore, Mills. I can't really explain it any better than that."

"I a big girl, Mommy! But dat otay. We get a baby for da cwib."

I didn't have the heart to tell her that it's not really that easy. I don't think there'll be another baby for that crib. But just in case- we're only putting it in the attic. We can always get it back down.

When we came home from Target, I shed a few more tears as I spied the dismantled crib in pieces in the laundry room. But that was it. Then we went into Millie's room and found her bed all assembled and ready- with a suddenly tiny-looking crib mattress plopped down where the big mattress would go someday soon.

Someone was pretty jazzed about the whole situation!

It took us a little while, but we eventually managed to rearrange all of the furniture in her room to fit without having to move out the glider, which was my main hope. No need to mess up our lovely pre-bedtime rocking routine! This is what the room looked like until last night, when the mattress finally got put in place.

Millie went ahead and started sleeping in the bed on Saturday for naptime. And she did great! She's fallen off a few times (I move that truck out of the way before she sleeps, so if she falls, it's only onto the carpet), and it doesn't seem to bother her at all, haha. She just climbs back up and doesn't seem to even fully wake up. Weird, but I won't complain. I have a pool noodle that I may put under the fitted sheet now that she has the real mattress if she keeps falling- I hear that works well.

The mattress ended up getting delayed a day and didn't arrive until Tuesday. It's one of those foam numbers that comes in a small (well, smallish) box and then magically inflates to full size once you take it out of the vacuum-sealed pack. I must say- that was really fun to watch. And as an added bonus, the box it came in makes a mighty fine bear cave.

We let the mattress do its thing for 24 hours and finally, FINALLY last night got to put the whole thing together for a final BGB product!!

Ta daaaaaaa!!! (Please note Millie also taking a picture with her wooden phone.)

We got the 12" mattress and between that and the pillows, you basically can't even see the upholstered headboard anymore, haha. But I love it!! And more importantly, so does Millie.

So far going to bed hasn't been a problem at all- we already tend to rock her until she's nearly asleep, and that hasn't changed, so once I put her in her bed she just rolls over and goes to sleep. She has been getting up and coming to our room whenever she wakes up, which is usually between 6:15-6:45...not so bad on the weekdays, torture on the weekend. Ha. But not really different than when she was in the crib, except that we don't have to get out of bed to go fetch her. But last night (the first night on the new mattress) she did wake up and wander on in at about 1:15 a.m. Not quite sure why, and Matt was able to take her back and put her in her bed and she fell asleep pretty quickly...but hopefully that doesn't become a trend. I'll keep ya posted!

And in somewhat related and EXTREMELY important news, I just figured out how to do Instagram Stories last weekend. If you follow me on IG...you probably noticed. Hahaha. I'm having way too much fun, and Millie is obsessed with the fun filters, so...my apologies if you're tired of seeing it, but then again...how could you ever get tired of Millie??!

And with that, we're done. Even thinking about the crib enough to type this post out has me emotionally drained, so I need to go put bunny ears or princess crowns on myself to recover a little. ;) Until next time, friends!

PS. If you need one last glance of Millie's baby nursery, you could reminisce with my old nursery tour post and cry your eyes out a little. Or maybe that's just me. Ha.

the biggest

2017-06-16T12:00:00.000-04:00

In case you weren't aware...Millie is a BIG GIRL now.

She wears "WEAL" [real] makeup "wike Mommy!!" And she has that smoldering model stare down pat, right?

That's not all. I'll transcribe some Millie narration to tell you what other exciting things are in store for her.

"I get my BIG GUHL BED!! I get a BIG BED wike DADDY and MOMMY!! And I seeeeeep in it. And when I awake, I wake up EVEYONE! I say GOOD MORNING FWIENDS! And den I put on my BIG GUHL makeup. WIKE MOMMY!! And den I eat my nanny [banana]."

That's right. The Big Girl Bed is coming. Should be on my porch this evening, actually. I am both super excited and not at all ready for this.

Reasons I'm Looking Forward to the Big Girl Bed:
1. Not having to heave 35 pounds of love in and out of the crib every day.
2. We can lay down in bed with her to rub her back instead of losing all feeling in our arms reaching over the crib rails.
3. Ummm...I like shopping and buying things. Purchasing a bed, mattress, and bedding was all very fun.
4. When she wakes up in the morning and wants to come lay in bed with us, she can come on over without us having to get out of bed.

Reasons I'm Not So Much:
1. When she wakes up in the middle of the night and wants to come lay in bed with us, she can come on over.
2. When she wakes up in the middle of the night and wants to play with toys, help herself to food in the fridge, wander around the darkened house, turn on the TV, etc....she can.
3. We will have to take apart the crib. The thought makes me sob.

So yes, many mixed emotions. But once we do it, there's really no going back, right? She is SUCH a good sleeper (minus an occasional desire for snuggles in the middle of the night) and I worry that not being confined to her crib could totally ruin that. But once we take the crib apart and move it to the attic...I mean, we're not getting it back down and putting it back together. Not for Millie, anyway. So what do I do if she doesn't stay in her bed?!

Ugh.

We keep telling ourselves that just because they deliver the bed and mattress doesn't mean we have to put it in her room. Hahaha. It can live in boxes in the guest room for a few more weeks or years if the time doesn't feel optimal, right? Right.

How is it possible that this love is almost THREE?! I dressed her up in this smocked number the other week so that I could pretend she was a baby. Ha. She was not impressed with how the long dress cramped her running and climbing style.

Summer is swimming along quite beautifully! Although it's always a bit of a bummer realizing that summer for a dual-working-parent household (where neither of us are teachers) doesn't involve months away from work, there are still plenty of perks to make life feel special. Mainly my in-laws' pool.

We haven't done swimming lessons this summer yet (and not sure if we will...to be honest, I prefer spending my Saturdays actually just playing and lounging around the pool instead of being in lessons, haha), but Millie is doing great in the water! She loves her puddle jumper and paddles all around the pool independently. She definitely can't really swim, but she does a good toddler version of swimming when she's being held afloat by the puddle jumper! She's jumped off the diving board a few times, but prefers to just sit on it. She doesn't mind getting her face wet, but doesn't actively seek out the situation, haha. Which is fine with me, because she still has tubes in her ears and wearing ear plugs never happens, so...no need to spend more time underwater than necessary.

We've worked out a pretty sweet system for most of our Saturdays. We head over to Matt's parents' house around lunchtime, eat, and then Millie goes down for her nap in her crib at their house. Then Matt and I get an hour or two to lounge and read by the pool- BLISS. Then when Millie wakes up, we suit her up and spend the rest of the afternoon splashing and swimming and getting decidedly less reading done. It's wonderful! Although I must admit that every week I think "wow, she has been swimming and jumping and going for five hours...she must be exhausted! I bet she is going to sleep GREAT tonight! We will probably have to wake her up for church tomorrow!"

(picture that emoji face where the eyes and mouth are all horizontal lines)

Sure, she goes to bed great...as usual. Sure, she wakes up at 6:30 a.m...as usual. Apparently the sun and swimming just don't exhaust Millie the same way they exhaust me.

But I wouldn't trade any of it for anything. Not a minute of it.

Oh, speaking of being grown and big... in case you've missed all of our breaking news (lol) on Instagram and/or Facebook, you should know that Millie has a baby in her tummy. The picture above reminded me. The baby had a lot of opinions while we were picking blueberries that day. Generally the baby in her tummy (no name, sorry) just dictates Millie's hunger (not so unlike REAL babies en utero, right? How does she know this?!)..."I yike dese bluebewwies, Mama! Dey make my baby so HAPPY!" "I not eat dat hamburger, Mama. It make my baby cwy. She no wike it." But sometimes the baby gets fussy, as babies do, and then Millie is able to conveniently pull her out and rock her or pat her back until she calms down. Then she puts her back in her belly. So apparently Millie is actually a marsupial, but let's not get hung up on technicalities. THIS KID. She just cracks me up!!

things worth remembering

2017-05-19T13:29:00.000-04:00

Although it seems I'm long past the point where I blog a recap of every holiday (much less every weekend...or DAY...ahhh, the good ol' days of blogging, RIP), there are a few semi-recent events that merit sharing, if only so that I can more easily look back on them in the future (and not just wait for TimeHop to remind me about it).

We had a particularly special Easter this year. I mean, every Easter is special...but this one a little more than most.

We enjoyed egg hunts and extra-cute outfits and church and time with our family as usual.

The cousins on Matt's side of the family! Five and counting!

I'm not going to be able to hold her like this for pictures much longer. HOLY COW SHE IS HEAVY.

After lunch with Matt's family, though, we were thrilled to go across town to attend a huge Easter party on a farm, hosted by Millie's biological family.

Millie's "tummy mama," J, has relatives that live near Athens, which is how we got connected in the first place (her relatives are friends with one of my coworkers). They live on a big awesome farm and throw huge bashes for Easter each year, inviting family, friends, and neighbors (there were about a hundred folks there this year!). We were thrilled to be invited and spend the day with not only J, but with J's mother, grandparents, friends, aunts, and uncles- many of whom we met in the hospital and/or whom came to Millie's dedication, but we haven't seen them in a few years (with the exception of J).

It was a beautiful, sunny day, and there were plenty of games and activities, food and drinks, and people to catch up with. Many members of Millie's biological families have remained in touch with us through social media, so they feel somewhat "in the loop" with her life, which is a blessing for all of us. They were delighted to get to experience her in all of her abundant joy and chaos in person, and we were equally happy to get to spend time with them!

I think one of the sweetest moments for me was when an elderly man (I guess Millie's great-grandfather) came over to us and said "well, I'm not on Facebook, I don't know how to do all of that stuff, but every time you post something, Aunt Suzie [not her real name] calls me to tell me what crazy thing Millie has said, and we just laugh and laugh! Thank you for letting us stay a part of her life." I love thinking that there's a little Millie Phone Tree going on, getting out the news to relatives far and near every time our sweet girl says something wacky.

At any rate, it was a wonderful, nearly magical day. To me, it was a picture of the absolute Best Case Open Adoption Scenario. This is what we had hoped for. What a blessing to live it.

I share this picture with permission. This is our beloved Mama J.

Naturally, Millie ran straight to whatever activities would make us all the messiest. :)

We had a pretty dedicated egg hunter this year, too!

We are so thankful for J and her family's desire to include us in their lives! Happy, happy, happy.

In less emotional (well, maybe not really), more sparkly news: Millie had her first ballet recital this week! After a mere two months of weekly lessons, she and her four classmates were deemed fit to show off for a small group of parents (and large group of adoring relatives known as the Millie Fan Section). GUYS. Seeing my sweet girl all dolled up in a costume and makeup?

CANNOT HANDLE IT.

I guess this will be her headshot for her professional dancing career.

To put it mildly, she was a joy to watch.

In the entire 25 minute performance, this may have been the only thing she did that actually looked like ballet. HAHAHA not even kidding.

One little dance had props! AKA things to distract Millie.

What she lacked in skill, she made up for in enthusiasm.

She's literally floating away from the excitement!

In conclusion, there's not an ounce of stage fright in this one! Although it was a very low-key recital, as you can see- just a few rows of chairs in a church fellowship hall, no stages or lights- I still wasn't sure how she would react once she saw us sitting there and realized she was supposed to be performing. Clearly, though, those weeks of hardcore ballet training (lol) paid off and she went right to her sticker and assumed first position as soon as her teacher said to!

I was SO very proud of her, and proud to be the mama of the child giggling and having a ball and generally causing the rest of the crowd to grin. (A friend asked if this is how I was when I used to have dance recitals. The answer is no. I loved dance and I loved following rules and doing everything exactly right (and I loved costumes, makeup, and recitals!), but I have never been precocious or bubbly or thrived under the spotlight or the attention of strangers! This baby is all her own person in that regard!)

I've said it a million times, and I'll keep saying it: it really just keeps getting better. If her baby days were amazing...well, there are just not even words for how fun and joyful her days are now. I want her to stay exactly like this forever, but she won't- and I can't wait to see what's next.

currently

2017-05-11T18:00:00.000-04:00

I know a "formula" post is probably the biggest cop-out ever for someone who can hardly pull it together to write once a month, but...here we are. I always like reading these when other people do them, so maybe you do too!

Listening...to Amazon Music Playlists. I seriously just discovered these a few weeks ago and I am totally hooked! People have thought of playlists for every imaginable mood and genre, and I highly enjoy tailoring my listening to my mood at work all day long. One of this week's favorite playlists has been "50 Great 90s Alternative Songs," which makes for great conversation when coworkers come in for a chat...

Eating...everything in the world, which is unfortunate. But I must say we've done some good cooking at home lately. If you're looking for new go-to summer dishes, I recommend Roasted Sweet Potato Rainbow Salad with Lime Crema and Roasted Cauliflower Salad with Lemon Tahini Dressing. Cannot get enough of those two recipes!!!

Drinking...lemonade! Not all the time, but after almost 10 years of marriage, Matt decided to reveal that he knows how to make Chickfila lemonade (he worked there for 9 years prior to our marriage). Uhhhh yes. So now we have an unfortunate habit of buying bags of lemons so that Matt can make us fresh lemonade at night. Tasty, but not exactly what my thighs were needing this summer...

Wearing...I am REALLY going to lose most of you here, but maybe there is someone else with the feet of a 70 year old that can benefit from this info. So over the last few years I've developed the WORST plantar fasciitis. I've gone from the typical having bad pain in the mornings and late evenings to some days being in excruciating pain all day long. It's miserable. Anyway, after spending a billionish dollars on inserts, special braces, tools, and all other kinds of nonsense (not really nonsense- some of it really works, glad to share my tips if anyone needs them, haha), I discovered that wearing specifically PF-designed shoes is the key to breaking the cycle of awfulness. I bought these Vionic flip flops a few months ago and they are a GAME CHANGER. I wear them ALL of my non-working hours (NEVER going barefoot- not even to walk from the shower to the closet, etc.), during my lunch hour, and sometimes (on the worst days) even all day at work. Sorry, not business casual, but it's either that or I can't come in because I can't walk. They have made a HUGE difference. Then I bought a pair of Vionic's work-appropriate wedges, and just last week I got a pair of these cute summer sandals that are appropriate for both work AND play. These shoes are more than my normal Target-budget, but have been SO worth it. So there's my plug for the similarly afflicted sistahs (and brothahs?)...get you some good old lady shoes!

Feeling...excited for summer. The extra daylight, the plethora of outdoor opportunities, the vacations on the horizon...summer is the best! Millie had a BLAST on our recent beach trip and she can't stop talking about going back to the "BIG ocean to PWAY PWAY PWAY!! [play play play], so I am super excited for our next trip. In like 3 months, haha. But still.

Wanting...time to slow down. Cliche as all get out, but I just LOVE the stage Millie is in right now and I want it to last forever!

Enjoying...life. See above. I just couldn't ask for more.

This picture is oriented correctly. :) We were laying in the hammock. Lately Millie likes to pretend she is a baby kangaroo and I am the mommy kangaroo and she gets in my "pouch." She walks around requesting to get in my pouch because she "so safe and so warm dere!" See what I mean? Never change, Millie!!! (It is less cute at 3:00 a.m. when she is crying on the monitor "I need seep in Mommy's pouch!!!")

spring happenings

2017-04-13T17:30:00.000-04:00

The spring is trucking right along and it's pretty wonderful. For one- the weather is (mostly) great ("mostly" because we've had some terrible storms and tornado warnings that I could do without, but for the most part...great). Secondly, a new season means a new Millie wardrobe, and not to pat myself on the back too hard or anything, but...I mean, dang. I sure know how to pick the cutest clothes for the cutest babe I've ever seen.

Here she is modeling some of the moves she's learning in ballet class (or so she says). But this also serves to show how extremely adorable she is in a purple romper. UGH. Can't handle it. This is the only one piece "romper" type thing I bought this year because I felt like it wasn't very freshly-potty-trained-toddler-friendly...but #worthit.

We've had some windy days, and it occurred to me that we should get a kite for such days! So we did and it's been great! I must report that kite flying is a more athletic pursuit than I had anticipated. In case it's been awhile, I'll let you know: you pretty much have to keep running the whole time to keep it in the air. Or at least I do. Maybe more advanced flyers or more advanced kites or more windy skies call for less running...but we had to keep moving. I was pleasantly shocked to check my FitBit stats after a half-hour of kite flying!

Check out Millie's face. The tongue don't lie: that girl was working hard!! If you ask her about flying her kite, she will say "you WUN WUN WUN or kite FALL DOWN!!!" and that pretty much sums that up.

In more domestic news, Millie has a new favorite place to grocery shop.

Like most other sentient beings, she knows that Trader Joe's is really the only place worth shopping. Millie-sized carts!! What could be better?! She has so much fun helping pick up items and put them in the cart. Although she naturally wants to grab everything at eye level, she's been good about listening and putting back things that I didn't actually want. It helps that all I have to do is threaten to put the "Millie cart" away and make her sit in my cart (a fate worse than death) if she isn't listening. And then she listens.

In other domestic- but non-Millie- news, Matt put down new floors in our master bathroom! We have had the same nasty linoleum since we moved in. Naturally, it was one of those things that we thought we would replace as soon as we moved in...but then 8 years passed and we are still looking at that stupid gross linoleum. Ha. We are planning to have all of our floors replaced in the somewhat-near future, but we've had friends recently try the DIY vinyl tile route with good results, so Matt wanted to give that a try (in a small, rather inconspicuous space) first. And I've gotta say- I am THRILLED with the results!!

There's no "before" picture- just picture the ugliest linoleum you can, then make it ten times uglier, and you've got a good mental picture of it. So this is a HUGE improvement! You don't have to grout vinyl tile- literally you just peel and stick (and do lots of cutting to get around toilets and such), but I really like the look of grouted tile, so Matt went the extra mile. I am so impressed with how it turned out! So now I will hopefully get him to do the other bathroom, haha.

Now, back to important Millie news. She knows her shapes. Sorry, that's boring, but what's NOT boring was what I heard her say as she was putting this puzzle together the other day.

"Cir-cuh. Twi-an-gul. Star! Phone."

Yup. Good ol' rectangle has been renamed "phone." For obvious reasons.

Last Wednesday was a nasty, stormy, tornado-y day, and I just couldn't bring myself to leave Millie at school (or stay at home in a window-y house with no basement). So she spent the day at work with me (I work in a solid concrete building with lots of window-less interior rooms, in the middle of a downtown with no trees). She actually did a fantastic job, thanks in part to my coworkers who managed to find no end of amusing things to bring her. Here she is starting her open mic night career. She's a natural!

We celebrated a successful tornado day with Mexican food (really, the only way to celebrate anything), and Millie insisted on sitting in our laps and being tickled for basically half an hour. We were happy to acquiesce.

Laughing babies aren't the worst.

We've had some fun egg hunts and Easter activities already, and we are excited for a fun Easter weekend!

Please note the kitty cat face paint. She spends about half her time pretending she's a kitty cat, so this is really living the dream to have the face to go with it.

All ready for her Easter party at school!

On a final important-but-unrelated note, I got a really cute bathing suit this week and I feel compelled to share! I wouldn't call myself "summer body ready," exactly...more like "ready to hibernate or survive a food-less apocalypse for quite some time," but whatever. I still wanted a new bathing suit, and when I saw this mega-cute, mega-cheap one on Amazon, I had to give it a try.

Source

It came in yesterday and I gotta say- SUPER CUTE. At least in my dimly lit, mirror-optimally-angled bedroom. If you look at the other pictures on Amazon you can see that the straps do a cute criss-cross in the back, and the back comes up nice and high, kindly hiding any less-than-optimal BACK FAT ~~you~~ your friend may have. Anyway, for $17 and Prime shipping, I say you can't go wrong. I may even order in another pattern. (And I read all the comments and labored over sizing, but ultimately just decided to go 'true to size' and with what the sizing chart suggested, and it worked out just fine.)

We're heading for a little beach mini-vacay next weekend, just the three of us, and I can't wait! Millie, on the other hand, likes to ask "why" about everything, INCLUDING THIS.

"What dis lotion, Mama?"

"It's suntan lotion, Mills, for when we go to the beach next week!"

"Why we go beach, Mama?"

"Umm...because it is the BEACH, Millie."

"Why?"

"Because it just is."

"Why we go?"

"IT IS THE BEACH, WHY DO YOU NEED FURTHER EXPLANATION!?!??!"

Just kidding, I didn't actually scream that at her, but seriously. One need not question the need for the beach. I can't wait!