CRYSTIR

A glimpse into what it is like to live in our home just this minute...and what a week it's been!! photo credit:  Adliv Collective photo credit:  Adliv Collective  photo credit:  Becky Conn Intentional Outdoor Hours :  137+ hours (of 1000) Only a few hours this week because this weather has been Bleh to the extreme.  We worked together as a family out in the flower bed at the turn in our driveway; trimming bushes, clearing the trimmings, weeding, and cleaning it up.  Brandon and I were joyful over how quickly we finished because all the big kids were pitching in!  So that's why we have all these kids!?  (HAHAHAH, kidding). We also snagged a few hours from baseball and volleyball games. Reading  The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and almost it's finished!  I also passed along The Gift of an Ordinary Day to our aunt and current momma to a teenager.  And I also used the quote from it ( that I wrote a whole blog post on ) in my...

A glimpse into what it is like to live in our home just this minute. Intentional Outdoor Hours : 129+ hours (of 1000) We racked up our outdoor time this week with volunteering at a local event, baseball games, outdoor daily playing, and a mother's day walk! The weather took a turn for the beautiful and warm (mid-80's some days!) and we are all eagerly counting down the days for summer vacation. Reading  The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood  and posting our Inspired Readers  book club Summer Book Checklist.  Make a goal for ten books this summer - or double them up and try to just get them all checked off.  Our book club is all online and open to new readers - join us! Happy Reading! (The Handmaid's Tale is going to count for my first checked box - first the book, then the Hulu Series! yay!) Volunteering at the Rec the Alleghenies expo that my little sis, Tasha, set up for the community.  The event was held on Saturday all day in Greenhouse park and Brando...

I recently finished reading Katrina Kenison's The Gift of an Ordinary Day, A Mother's Memoir and found myself reflecting and dog-earing my whole way through.  Her attention to the minutia of being a mother and raising kids up, while also trying to figure out how you (as your own actual person with dreams and feelings of your own separate from motherhood) were eloquent and so very relatable to my own inner dialogue.  Most of the pages are turned down so I can remind myself in the future during my inevitable re-read of this book that there was a sentence or two that spoke to me directly. In the last chapter titled Pansies though, I had a moment of real connection with the author and the poet she quotes in this section.  This connection is part of the reason I am such a lover of reading - those rare moments as a reader when you feel that maybe the author writes a line specific just for you.  Sentences alone sometimes can bring the two of you together; reader and writer...

The first week of May, our family participated in our fifth annual Screen Free Week where we pulled out the plugs from our screen devices (tvs, laptop, tablets, and the social media on our phones) and spent the week unplugged and looking up. At five years in, everyone in our family is pretty familiar with how the week operates and has turned into basically a standard 'holiday' week that we celebrate at this time year; like Mardi Gras or St. Patrick's Day, or Shark Week.  In fact, at these ages (with no phones or devices of their own), the kids enjoy screen free week mostly because they get us all to themselves as WE (the parents) are not stuck with our noses in our devices. And so, as in years past, I tape up a reminder note on the television and flip off it's surge protector, I tuck the iPad on top of the fridge and let the battery waste away, I close my laptop down, and we stow our phones on the kitchen counter in hopes of forgetting about them. And we get about to li...