Date night with Drea

This Friday was date night with Drea. My kids are so different sometimes that its awesome getting one-on-one time to remind me of that fact. It gives me a chance to treat them differently (in a good way) and not always lump them together.

Drea wanted to go to the Poky Dot. Mainly because she was reminded of the restaurant last week when I asked Charlotte if she wanted to go there.  She likes the Poky Dot because it's fun, whimsical, and has food she likes. (This is in alternate to Charlotte who couldn't care less about any of that stuff and doesn't really love the food.) Drea loves lots of different places and would enjoy just about anywhere. As you may have noticed by Charlotte's date night post, she has specific tastes and specific places she likes and is in the mood for. 

We had a great night. We went to paint pottery first at Mountain Creative. I knew she would love to do that....she's been begging me to take her there for quite awhile and after I took Charlotte there on her date, I wouldn't dare take Drea anywhere else. :) 

It took Drea a good deal of time to choose what to paint. Once she chose her subject (the mermaid) her creativity started blooming. We were picking out paint and she was asking for all of these variations of colors and I asked her why she needed 3 different yellows. She said "It's to make highlights in her hair, Mom."  She practically could have added a "duh" after that and I would have understood. So it took us a couple hours to paint our creations (I made a wine stopper) and the detail she put into hers was incredible. I love her little creative mind! Makes me so proud!

Then we went to eat and for dessert we made s'mores at our table! It was so cool.

The simple things in life

I've been trying to enjoy more of the simple things in life. I get so busy and task-oriented that I forget to do this.

I had a tea party with the girls for dinner on Monday night. They loved it!! They were very surprised because I got everything ready while they were outside playing with their friends. It was nice to just sit and relax with them and enjoy them.

Yesterday while working outside at my brother's, I was in a lull sitting on top of the ladder waiting for someone and I happened to look up and notice how amazing the clouds were! It was just one of those days where the clouds look like giant cotton puffballs that make amazingly beautiful shapes. It gives you a sense of how small you are and how small our problems are because you can actually see how gigantic these clouds are compared to you. I just sat there and enjoyed that for a few minutes. I love moments like that. And truthfully any moment like this that I actually focus on and enjoy is a WIN for me. It's so easy for me to get wrapped up in busy-ness and never take any moments to enjoy the simple things in life...so when I do, that's a WIN for me that day.

I finished my "You Gotta Love..." doodles the other day. This is a design I saw and wanted to do it for myself. I drew "You Gotta Love" in the middle of my paper and then all around it I wrote different things that I enjoy. For me, it's a way of learning about myself and remembering the small things that I enjoy in life. Then when it's not a great day, I have a quick list of things I know make the day a little bit better. Of course, there are way more things than I have listed and specific people I haven't added but this is still a good start. There's a picture of this below.  There's another lesson in this activity for me....not worrying about perfection in what this looks like but just enjoying what is on it. I'm really enjoying learning more about me!  (I want to make one of these for each of my kids with qualities about them around their name in the middle. Maybe I woul djust put it in their baby books. It would be a cool thing for them to have forever.)

One day last week when the girls were at their dads, I didn't have anything to do when I came home from work. Well, scratch that....I had a million things to do....mow the grass, clean the house, do the dishes....but I knew that I needed some time for me. It was beautiful outside and I really wanted to sit outside and enjoy the sun and read a book. I don't have any chairs on my deck and the only chairs I have inside are straight-backed, not-conducive to relaxing outside chairs. So I just went out and sat on the top step on the deck and layed back across the deck. Before beginning to read, I just layed there and looked up at the sky. I tried hard to think of nothing (lol!) because I overthink everything in my life and I just try to get my mind to stop sometimes. I digress....I enjoyed the warm sunshine on my face. And there's just something about laying parallel to the sky and watching the clouds go by.  Then I grabbed a pillow and my book and laid out there and read for an hour or so. It was awesome! I call that another WIN for me! I'm growing so much and learning to slow myself down enough to enjoy my simple pleasures!

Date night with Charlotte

Andy and I are starting date night with the kids in which we take turns getting done one on one time with the girls. I've been trying get us to do this for awhile and now we have built it into our schedules! I get so excited for this. I have trouble with attention and focus sometime so this really helpful because I can connect more with my girls.

 

Charlotte is Charlotte. I have get done thoughts on places to eat. She wanted Subway. Well, she wanted McDonald's...I vetoed. I reminded her that at subway she usually just gets ham and cheese in a bowl and chips. She said yeah, but it's the best ham and cheese in the world.

 

Then we went to Mountain Creative, a local paint your own pottery place. She was so excited to pick out her own piece to paint. I helped her paint hers instead of painting my own (since she picked a pretty expensive piece).

 

Then we went to Gran's to visit with cousin Theo (oh yeah, and Papaw, Grandma, and Kareen) and then topped off date night with a visit to Dairy Creme Corner.

Here's a couple pictures:

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?