simple joys

My Kaleidoscope Obsession: How Did I Get Here?!

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I mentioned in my first post of the year that I have grown a bit obsessed with Kaleidoscopes. Aside from loving owning one and using it to help calm my anxiety, I have fallen in love with the theory and artistry and history around them. I have all sorts of thoughts swirling in my head about them and I am wondering if there might be a play waiting to be chipped away in all those thoughts. That’s something I may explore this summer, but in the meantime I wanted to share a little more background about how this obsession began.

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2024 Goals and my Word of the Year

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OK, so… a caveat before we get into the main post: I found a lot of freedom and extra honesty in keeping some of my goals to myself last year, but I also found it much easier not to move forward on some of those goals without the accountability of sharing progress each month. So this year I’m trying to split the difference. I’ll share about some of my goals and check in at least once a quarter, but mostly I want to focus on my word of the year… Continue reading →

Family Road Trips: Why They Bring Me JOY (even when they are occasionally NO FUN)

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I’ve been taking road trips with my littles for many years now. I’ve been writing about it too! You can actually read some tips for road tripping with kids HERE that I wrote back in 2017. But I want to talk a little more about the joy and challenges of this particular adventure since last month we took the longest road trip of our parenting years-

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Where’s the Mountain? Thankful for how far we’ve come…

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Earlier this year, I was hiking with my daughters at our favorite mountain preserve and my middle child told me that she wanted to get to the top of a particular part of the mountain that day. Continue reading →

Saying Goodbye to Our Most Recent Home: A Love Story

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I cried my contacts out the night we signed the paperwork for another family to purchase our house. Partially this was due to the stress of still needing to find our own next home in a truly insane real estate market with very little inventory, and partially because it was the beginning of the end of a very messy, imperfect, beautiful love story between our family and our home. Continue reading →

Holidays: An Excuse to Make the Habitual Something Heartfelt

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When I picked the theme for this year of Holidays, I did it out of a need for a little more joy and fun after how rough 2020 was. It is funny, this has been a weird year so far in which I am also feeling deeply the need to simplify some of the bigger holidays. Continue reading →

A few more good things…

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Oh man… I have really REALLY  felt the weight of the world recently. It is hard to make myself write anything or get through more than basic survival and my mental health has not been at its best. I know one of the best self care things I can do besides moving my body is to cultivate gratitude, even (especially) when I don’t feel like it… so I’ve been brainstorming some more of the good things from our COVID19 lockdown: Continue reading →