What a wonderful....

....Summer it's been so far! We have been super busy but loving every minute of it!

• I took the first day of summer break off with the girls and we spent the day with Kareen and Theo. We worked out, went to the library, and to the pool. Even though it rained some while at the pool, we really had a great day!
• Then the first weekend of summer break we participated in Relay for Life Friday night and helped raise money for cancer research. Then we babysat Theo on Saturday and Charlotte had her friend Poppy over for a play date. I took them to the new splash pad and then we went to Nunnie and Bob's for Alex's graduation party. Then Sunday we went swimming at Jennifer Dalton's house and then went to CiCi's pizza and Sweet frog! Two of our favs!
• This past week the girls joined VBS at the Nazerene church next door. I have a friend who goes there and she invited the kids and the neighbor kids went too. They ended up knowing lots of kids they know there.
• Our summer gymnastics session is in full swing. My girls take a break from dancing every summer and do gymnastics. They love it! I really enjoy getting to watch them do all of the different events at the gym. And of course, they always love the treat afterwards...usually Rita's or Sweet Frog.
• I took the day off last week and although I helped do some work at Chad's house, the girls got to spend time with Nunnie and Barret and then we went for a dip in the Stevenski's pool.
• Drea and I had a date to go see "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." And first we went to eat at Wings Ole. It was a nice evening and Drea's 2nd time seeing the production! She was mostly excited about getting to give the star of the show a hug afterward.
•  Saturday we went to the Painter's pool to celebrate my cousin Andrew's marriage. The girls were probably in the pool for 4 or 5 hours straight. They are like fish! Charlotte is learning how to swim so we had fun working on that and Drea had a blast playing with her cousin Ansley all day!
• Sunday we spent the day with Uncle Jeremy and Aunt Bri on their boat out on Cheat Lake. It was beautiful! I was thrilled at how relaxing it was. Those are moments when I truly feel God's presence....when you look out upon this beautiful earth that he created with all of it's grogeous trees and peaceful waters. I sat with Drea on my lap (shielding her from some of the bumps from the wakes) and closed my eyes and felt the wind and sun on my face and thought about how blessed I am. This is what I've been talking about....it's only June 24th and I feel like we've had such a wonderful full summer already and I'm grateful for that and then Sunday just spending a beautiful day in the presence of God's beauty with my children. Lovin it!

And yes, my kids pretty much live in their bathing suits all summer. Oh, to be a kid again!

Order

 

 

I HAVE A SLIGHT OBSESSION WITH ORDER.

I realize this as I go to add a contact into my Gmail contacts list and I have now spent probably an hour trying to merge contacts, delete contacts, fill in blanks for contacts, etc......  and I have yet to put in the new contact....my original mission. I don't like blanks. If I have an excel spreadsheet I'm creating at work, I need information in all of the fields. If there are a bunch of holes, your eyes don't flow through the rows and columns smoothly (well, my eyes at least.)



See, your eyes stop on the one turned the wrong way. Your eyes don't naturally flow down the stack.

I know I get more like this depending on whats going on in my life. There are moments when I don't have time for obsessing and then moments when I don't care what else I get done because it will feel great to get this one thing in order.

The word "order", in this sense, could be equally exchanged with the word "control." Sometimes bringing order to something that seems out of control brings a small peace to life. Even something as simple as my contacts list....which by the way, I didn't feel like it was out of order before I looked today...I didn't care that there were tons of double contacts and blanks for names and old emails....I didn't even know it was like that. So it wasn't bothering me. I wasn't obsessing over it..."I really need to get my contacts list organized soon!" Nope. But when I saw some things that bugged me and started making some changes, I realized that it WAS something I could bring order to and a project I could COMPLETE.

That's why I mention what's going on in the rest of our lives. I have MANY, MANY things out of order in my life currently. (That's a whole 'nother blog post.) I have MANY things I can't control. (That's a whole 'nother blog post.) I can't delete, merge, fill in the blanks and add to my life until it looks ordered in an hour today. I can't control the details because many things are outside of my control. BUT for a couple hours in one day I can gain order in an irrelevant place that I wasn't planning on focusing....and you know what?...That's ok. There are fair worse things I could obsess about.

You would think that my house would be perfectly clean, straight, organized and wonderful. But it's not. As I mentioned, there's not time to obsess about everything and I understand that. It depends what bugs me at what moment....and I should add, creativity and design scream order to me at times. For instance, check out the picture below. These book shelves are not in order. But they are organized by color and sorted in a way that is asthetically appealing to me and therefore speaks order to me.



Anyway, I'm going to go add that contact to my list now. And then when I'm done making my changes, I will sit back and look at this beautiful;y ordered list with practically no blanks or doubles and breathe a nice sigh of satisfaction. (I know...I'm weird.)