Category Archives: SUNSHINE

It’s FriYay! – Pacific North WET Edition

It was a short work week… why do short weeks always screw with me so badly!? I can’t believe it’s Friday. If you remember last week, I was looking forward to planning our first camping trip as a family of 5! But now it’s raining and it’s supposed to continue all weekend. So we’re not going camping. Normally, I’d say let’s go anyway! But tent camping in the rain with 3 kids sounds kinda terrible.

Awesome things from this week…

1. Having an extra day to spend with the family! Sure it was 4th of July, but other than some really yummy BBQ food, it was just like any other day for me because I left the BBQ we were at around 7:30 to get Lincoln home for bed. Fingers crossed next year will be the year we’re finally able to drive one car and stay all together again!

2. It was fun having some friends stay with us on Sunday night. All the kids play so well together and it’s fun to watch Lincoln try and get in on the action with the bigger kids.

3. Monday night I spent some time purging my closet. ThreadYall is gonna get a clothes swap next week. Haha

4. Wednesday night my mom and I took the kids to an outdoor family-friendly karaoke night. The girls LOVED it. They sang two songs, “Trouble” by Taylor Swift and of course “Let it Go” from Frozen. Before we even left, they were saying they want to do it again.

5. The girls both let me french braid their hair this week!

Pics from the week…

Human bowling // Red Neck Waterslide! Oh yes. we. did.

Independence Day Kiddos! All of the heart eyes for this one.

Just Reese. In her truest form. So fiery. I love it.

My morning call buddy.

Karaoke ladies. Terribly quality photos (and terrible singing), but they had so much fun.

Like I said… my morning buddy. This particular morning he was trying to steal my coffee.

Things I’m looking forward to next week…

1. I would say our first camping trip as a family… but rain.

2. The girls have VBS next week. Rylee had SO much fun last year and Reese was so bummed she wasn’t old enough to join in.

3. Since we’re not going camping for the weekend, we’re talking about heading up to Portland on Sunday. We got a family pass to OMSI that we want/need to use and I haven’t seen my sister and nephew for far too long. After getting to see them on a weekly basis for 5 months it’s been really weird to not see them for the last month.

4. I leave Wednesday for ThreadYall! My annual girls weekend with my phone friends also known as TheThread. If you’ve been around here awhile, you know what I’m talking about. This year we’re headed to Raleigh.

Opening Night

On Monday night Rylee suited up in her ugly as all get out tie-dyed uniform and played her first official T-Ball game of the season. It was hilarious, adorable and infuriating all at the same time.

Most of the kids on our team {notice I say our team, and not both teams. ahem.} had no clue what to do…wait, I’m supposed to run after I hit the ball, right?…where on the field to go?…what do you mean home plate?

Rylee did a pretty good job all things considered. She batted three times, and made it home 2 out of the 3. She played left field once, right-center once and catcher once.

Reese enjoyed some serious running around, spent some quality time with my mom and dad, and in true potty training form got to use the port-potty not once, but twice. {seriously my own personal hell}

The game went for an hour and a half, longer than I had thought it would be. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that this program keeps score, plays three outs and there strikes. Our team got killed.

After the game she said she had fun. Then we celebrated with a drive through Dairy Queen stop.

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Opening day!

We walked in the house hungry, exhausted and covered in a fine layer of dirt mixed with sun block. My once white shirt was no more and my pants were covered in gold fish cracker crumbs. We all got washed up and I rushed to put dinner on the table…only an hour later than normal. But this is our new normal, I suppose. The life of kids playing organized sports.

When the coach called me to tell me her practice schedule I was a little thrown off. I had figured we’d be looking at two days a week tops, for about an hour each time. But no. Oh no how I was mistaken. We practice MWF from 5:30-7.

Wait, is this kindergarten TBall or the major leagues!?

Maybe the practices will lighten up once the games start?

Maybe I’m just ridiculously naïve?

{lie to me ok!?}

We’ll get into a new routine…what matters right now is that Reese is mastering the slide solo, going between said slide and the field I’m getting all sorts of steps in on my fitbit and of course Rylee is loving TBall!

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When I asked her what her favorite part of practice was, she said it was the very end where they were “actually playing TBall.” For the record, she was in center field and saw no action whatsoever. She did manage to pick me a daisy while she was out there.

Boy does this all bring back memories...

P.S. One of these days I’ll take my real camera out there to snap some photos and write a real blog post on something other than my iPad so the photos are bigger than your thumb…but for now? This is as good as it’s going to get.

Scenes from the Weekend

Oh man friends, last weekend is exactly what I needed…not only was it picture perfect, it was in fact, perfect all the way around.

I kicked off the weekend with a girl’s night at a winery down the road from my house. Good food. Good friends. Good wine. Win-win-win.

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The girls slept in until almost 7 AM Saturday morning! It was glorious! We also had a good lazy, snuggly morning reading books while we waited for the clouds to burn off.

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Once the sun finally decided to show up we headed outside! Andy was working on the chicken coop and the girls and I just spent some time enjoying our property.

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The chicken coop is SO close to being chicken ready. We probably won’t get chickens until the spring, but we’ll be ready! It’s been fun to see this whole thing come together…Andy had a vision for what he wanted to build. I’m always impressed with his skills. Handy Andy. He’s mine.

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The girls have also been enjoying this process. Rylee has helps with a lot of the process, actually. Once it’s all done, I think I’ll put together a blog post on it.

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We spent Sunday much the same way. The girls and I hit the grocery store while Andy continued work on the coop. Then Rylee went to spend the afternoon with my sister. While Reese napped, I worked on the coop with Andy. I love working on projects with him. We used to do it all the time before we had kids, nowadays it’s less frequent, but I always love it when I get the opportunity.

We ended the weekend eating dinner with my sister and her boyfriend. And eating cookies and ice cream. :)

How was your weekend?

Work hard, play hard. Or something.

Oh Thursday, where did you come from? You sneaky bitch.

As you can probably tell from the lack of, well anything, around these parts that I’ve been a bit…preoccupied lately. Last week was straight up nuts–my birthday Monday, anniversary on Tuesday, then crazy work stuff Wednesday all through the following Monday that had me up late every night and up early every morning.

I spent the weekend in this very fun work-play mish-mash. You see, my company was a sponsor of a big outdoor country music festival. As a sponsor, we had a booth. So I was going to be staying/camping out there in a trailer working throughout the weekend. As a sponsor, we also got tickets for the concerts. I used a set of VIP tickets to treat my very best friend to a “girls weekend” as her birthday present from back in December. Friday, after checking in with the booth, we hung out at the trailer just BS-ing {and drinking} the afternoon away. We went to the concert that night {Carrie Underwood!}. Then I worked literally open to close, 12 hours straight on Saturday. Sunday I worked the morning/early afternoon shift then spent the afternoon hanging out {and possibly drinking some more} before heading in to see Darius Rucker.

Work hard, play hard used to be something I said {and did} quite a bit. But holy moly I think I’m too old for that now. Ok, maybe not too old, but at least very out of practice. I’m just now starting to feel normal again.

But you guys? It was so worth it. Getting to spend some quality, not just at a Thursday lunch date, time with a friend. Not just any friend. My best friend. The one that has been by my side for literally my entire life. Sure, like every friendship, we’ve had our ups and downs, but throughout the years, we know we have each other. No matter what. I know people go their entire lives looking for a friend like that, and I was fortunate enough to find mine the day I was born.

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B, I hope you enjoyed your {belated} birthday weekend. I will cherish that time we spent together for a very long time.