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.)

 

 

Making me laugh...

This is so me!!!
I know it's not really funny that I'm delusional but at least I can admit it.
That's the first step! Oh, I enjoy a good laugh every once in awhile.

 

This is how I feel about work lately! LOL!

 

 

Lovin' it!!

...and this is just darn cute.

#BringBackOurGirls

In Nigeria, a terrorist group, Boko Haram, is holding 276 girls who were abducted from a raid on a school in Chibok on 15 April and a further eight, aged between eight and 15, who were snatched from a village on Monday, also in its stronghold in north-eastern Borno state. Abubakar Shekau, the leader of the group's main faction, has threatened to sell the schoolgirls as slaves.

 

I have seen a lot about this in the news lately and many activists have gone to social media to raise awareness to the situation to get the US and other countries to assist in finding these children. Twitter hashtag, #BringBackOurGirls, has so far been tweeted more than 1 million times with Michelle Obama being the latest high profile politician to offer her support.

 

I just decided to join the cause and tweet my sentiments as well with a picture of me and my little girls because I can't imagine the pain these parents are enduring. There are many other issues surrounding this event in Nigeria and whether their government is corrupt or not. But children do not deserve this. Little girls are too often taken advantage of.... This stuff breaks a mother's heart.

 

 

 

 

Read more about the hastag: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/07/bring-back-our-girls-global-protests-abduction-nigerian-schoolgirls?CMP=twt_gu

 

Or read more about the current search for the missing girls, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-27304441

 

 

Titles...positions....who are you?

We all associate ourselves with certain titles or names. Maybe your titles are Mother, Daughter, Sister, Aunt, Wife, Girlfriend, or any combination of these. Would losing one of the statuses affect you? Or do you identify with who you are outside of the titles? What if we are lost in the identity of these people and in fact don't know who we are outside of them?

If you were stripped of ALL of your identifiers, who would you be?

I think this can happen to a lot of moms...and most of them (us) don't mind. Many times I have been introduced at a child's birthday party as "Drea's mom" or "Charlotte's mom" and people will apologize sometimes and say "Oh, of course, you have a name...your name is not 'Charlotte's mom.'" Most of us don't mind being called or identified this way especially as proud mommies and daddies. It's not dangerous if you don't get lost in those identifiers. Unfortunately, I assume it's more common than not to disappear and forget who you are outside of that.

If you were stripped of ALL of your identifiers, who would you be?
Can you stand alone?
Who are you?

My own little editor

Yes, I deserve it...
We will all admit that. I have my own little editor. Her name is Drea.

I organized some of their toys last week and I was excited to use my post it labels so I labeled the bins. My theory is maybe if things have a specific place that is labeled it will be easier to clean up. (I'll let you know how it works for us.)

So I was showing the kids the newly organized area and Drea read one of the labels out loud, "Pet Shop and other Tiny Toes." She started cracking up and kept saying "Tiny Toes!" Tiny Toes!"

I thought it was great that she caught it! I really enjoyed it. And in case you don't know me well....that's usually my job! I'm normally the editor! Like mother, like daughter. 

I told her she could fix it and make a new label herself because I figured she would enjoy that. Then she pointed it out again tonight and started laughing. I reminded her she had to make a new label and she said she would rather leave that and enjoy a good laugh when she sees it.

Here's a picture of some of the organization. Then there's a close up of my lovely messed up label (which in already embarrassed to show you a pic of because it's very sloppy for me and not at all layed out or centered right...this was at the end of my effort and I was just determined to finish up the project.)

Clarksburg Grandprix

What a great day!

I took the girls to the Clarksburg Grandprix today. It was a beautiful, sun shining, day perfect for bike riding.

The Grandprix is a bicycle race that begins with collegiate racing and then amateurs. In between those, they have a kids race. So I signed Drea up for it and we went over after crossfit to check in and then take part in the other activities they have go on. There was free lunch for the kids; they received free helmets and had them properly fitted; they had their faces painted and spent most of the time just riding their bikes around in Jackson Square in Clarksburg.

Also, all kids were entered in to a drawing for bikes. BOTH of my girls won a brand new bike!! That was an awesome blessing because we needed to buy at least a new bike for Drea because she outgrew hers.

And they BOTH participated in the race. I didn't originally sign Charlotte up because I didn't know what it would be like and I didn't know if it would be okay to do with training wheels still on. When I saw it was a small little course and kids of all ages, I let her ride too. They both loved it! They had so much fun! We've already determined that we must do it again next year! And we have too make sure Barrett and Tyler do it too. Theo hung out with us and enjoyed the festivities and you never know he may be able to ride already next year because we saw some tiny tikes out there....it was so cute!

I'm so glad I decided to take them to this. I just happened to see a flyer for it in the Blue Bird and wondered if Drea would like the kids race because she really loves riding her bike.

Here are some pictures. Enjoy.

This is after we first checked in. (By the way, this is also before the new helmets and fittings...Drea has on my helmet which is obviously not fitting her well! Lol)

New Bikes

Ready to start their race

Theo's big fun

My big girls racing

This was them pretending to be on the winners block. All the kids get prizes in this race.

Playing

How come I'm so bad at playing? I just wish I was better at playing with the girls. I'm not creative and I get so bored. I also have a lot of trouble shutting off the "what I need to get done" in my head so I can just play.