Category Archives: Love

Walnut Grove 40th Pageant

So, for our anniversary, Josh decided to surprise me with a random nerdy outing. Unfortunately for him, I talked him into giving me a hint and I accidentally figured out what the surprise was. Whoops! Due to my bookwormish tendencies since I was a child, we were heading to Walnut Grove, MN to see the annual pageant that is performed in honor of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It’s a bit of a drive, and made for a late night as it is performed outside and doesn’t start until 9pm, but it ended up being a really fun day since we both appreciate a bit of cheese, but also history, and we of course both took plenty of pictures to share with everyone.

So, the first place on our list was at someone’s house. It was quiet and we weren’t sure if parking there would lead to us being tied up and hidden in a barn or an actual sod house. Turns out they actually have recreated sod houses (very few if any original sod houses remain).

It was extremely hot out, but we made the most of it. It was actually not that hot inside the sod houses, and the main one was surprisingly nice. Apparently at one point the owners actually let people sleep overnight as a fun B&B.

Lap of luxury.

Cozy, but not awful… it stays nicely cool in the summer and I imagine it warms up well in the winter months much as I imagined when reading the books. Granted, we got a more realistic look at what most sod houses started out as with dirt floors and without plastered walls.

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Week In Review – So much beer

Happy Monday!

Linking up with Meghan from Clean Eats, Fast Feets for another Week in Review!

What a week! Josh and I celebrated 7 years of marriage, so we made sure to celebrate throughout the past week, which included plenty of beer sampling and we went and saw Spiderman: Homecoming. The Blood Orange Stout and Red Velvet Cake Stout that I had at the second brewery were amazing.

We had to include the kids in on some of the celebrating, so what better way to do that than to go get ice cream? Not surprisingly the kids picked out the two most technicolor kinds there… Superman and Kryptonite.

Bowser is slowly getting bigger and his new home arrived, we just haven’t put it together yet. Until we can add a few necessary items, we haven’t bothered setting it up. He doesn’t seem to mind his current situation too much, though, especially once I added the two logs. That seems to have made a HUGE difference. He loves snuggles and last night he didn’t want me to put him back in his tank, but he felt cold.

I also managed to take advantage of some nice weather during the week and went for a nice lunchtime walk. It’s been fairly hot and humid, so the drop in heat was highly appreciated.

The highlight of the week was Saturday when we went to Walnut Grove, MN for the Laura Ingalls Wilder Pageant (40th anniversary). More on that later!

Yesterday we were exhausted after a long, late drive home, so we just tried to stay above water… just in time for swim lessons!

All in all, a good week. Have a great Monday!

7 Year Anniversary

Technically our 7 year wedding anniversary was yesterday, but I was away the from computer all day, which seemed like the better idea. Where does the time go? It’s hard to believe that we’ve also been living in Minnesota for 9 years, and together for 10 years. I also never thought I’d still be living in Minnesota, but kids have a way of altering your entire life path, you know? Suddenly you start to worry about which schools are good and where the safest neighborhoods are and what the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow is.

This post is mostly just a nostalgic look back as I reminisce about times gone by and look to the future with googly eyes, imagining future adventures and the journey to come. You may think it’s easy and straight-forward to love someone, but it isn’t always and navigating parenting can be hard, and marriage in general can be a tricky beast to manage, but I really can’t imagine any other path.

Here’s to a lifetime of adventures together!

Preserve your memories… they’re all that’s left you.

Bonus points to those who recognize the lyrics in my blog post.

Some days I feel glued to my phone and pulled in a thousand directions. Some days life feels chaotic and stressful and I feel like if I stop to think about it all I might crumble and fall apart. Then there are days when I turn the sound off my phone and set it aside and just… am. Sometimes that means sitting quietly somewhere without even a book to distract me. It’s amazing how many sounds a house can make if you really sit and listen. With two kids, I’m not often alone in the house, but every Monday I work from home and when I’m finished, I try to take at least 15-20 minutes to just BE while I wait for Josh and the kids to get home. Some days this means sitting quietly on the couch with my feet up and listening to Ziggy sleep (she occasionally snores) and the sounds of construction happening across the street as well as the random sounds that a house makes while watching dust specks in a ray of sun.

whoopie1

It’s easy to take these moments when I’m on my own, but I’m slowly getting better at remembering to put my phone aside and to shove unwanted thoughts away for a few moments at a time. The other night at dinner I couldn’t get over how grown up Enzo seemed. I don’t recall what exactly everyone was talking about, but I felt a tug at my heart as I watched him. Do you ever have those moments where you’re talking to someone and want to commit every little detail to memory? It was one of those. I wanted to remember the exact color of his hair and how in the sunlight you can see bits of gold. I wanted to remember the exact blue of his eyes and the mischievous way they sparkle. I wanted to capture his dimple and his smile and for a moment I wanted to just freeze time because every day he gets bigger and bigger and it seems like more and more I forget the tiny little things and I don’t want to forget Enzo at 4 when he still retains just a hint of babyness.

whoopie2

Thank goodness Phoebe is still very much a toddler in so many ways, despite being almost 3 and pretty much a preschooler. She’s still terribly attached to her nukie and insists on snuggles morning noon and night. Enzo was never a big snuggler and has always been more independent and wanting to do his own thing. I love their differences and am still in awe that we created these tiny people.

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Time is indeed fleeting.

6 or 9 depending on how you look at it.

While we’ll have been married 6 years on Sunday, today marks 9 years that we’ve been together. That also means we’ve been in Minnesota for 8 years, and as cliché as it always sounds, I really don’t know where all the time has gone. Depending on which theory you might agree with, you basically become a new person every 7-10 years what with cells dying off and being replaced, and in some ways I find this to be very true. I’m not necessarily the same person I was when we first met. Age and circumstance have matured me in some ways, and I suppose in many ways marriage and children have changed us as well. At our core we remain the people we were when we first met, though.

Ah, when we first met. We technically first connected on MySpace and that’s where he asked me out. We went out to lunch at a restaurant that he picked after asking a friend where he should take me, and it happened to be a place I really liked, but he didn’t really. At some point there was lettuce massaging, I think because at some point we talked about cows getting massages so the meat was tender… and then at another point we were talking about Follow That Bird (the Sesame Street movie) which led to our second date – the same day. I drove to his apartment after work and we stayed up most of the night watching random movies and went to work the next day and texted back and forth.

So it began. 6 months later I agreed to follow him to Minnesota, I think probably because I knew this was it. I don’t know how, either. It isn’t as though I had dated a lot previously to him, but everything sort of fell into place and each step seemed like a natural progression. We still text and email throughout the day and we still have a mutual love of movies and randomness and don’t always “act our age.” One of the joys of finding your person is that you’ll always have someone who accepts you for who you are, though, even your most annoying traits. Sure, there are disagreements, but what else can you do but forgive the person you’ve chosen to be bound to for better or worse? Nothing in life is simple or easy and perfection is nonexistent.

I hope the next 9 years of our lives are just as imperfect as the first 9.

*Our wedding details*

Dino and Bunnies

Every day adventures