Volume four? Weird. Okay, whatever.
This week has been reentry, which has gone relatively well with the kiddos. But I’m still sick and our schedule is bananas this week (more than most, I’m pretty sure) and it’s hard going from “maybe one scheduled commitment per day” to “your whole day is spoken for except for random and inconvenient snatches here and there.” It’s fine, but I’m feeling a little scattered.
kid quote:
Brian: Mom, can I have cottage cheese with lunch? I really love cottage cheese.
Katherine: You’re in love with cottage cheese? Like you’re gonna marry it?
Brian, laughing mischievously: YEAH, and then I’ll eat it and then I’ll go to jail.
Katherine, to me: Yeah, I bet if Dad ate YOU, he’d go to jail.
book:
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. Y’all, the buzz is REAL. I saw this recommended so many places by so many people whose recommendations routinely delight me, so when Jill gave me her copy in Santa Barbara, I was pretty stoked.
And then I almost put it down like a third of the way through. I don’t want to spoil it, but something happened that bummed me out and pissed me off. I had to check in with Jill: “Please tell me this is going to get better. Should I just abandon now?” She encouraged me to keep going, and I’m SO GLAD I DID.
recommendation:
You guys, the Catlick podcast launched this week (he gave us three episodes to start!) and I’m SO EXCITED. So BT Harman is behind Blue Babies Pink, which is his EXCELLENT autobiographical blog series and podcast about a Southern Baptist preacher’s kid… who is gay. I was so taken with the grace with which he handled both the Church and the LGBTQ community in those 44 episodes. I binged them in like three days. The man can tell a story. So when he launched a kickstarter campaign to fund a podcast about a 56-month period in Atlanta’s history, I was all in. Basically any story he tells, I want to hear. It’s SO GOOD. Dark and sometimes violent, because this particular chunk of time was, well, dark and violent. I’m excited to hear where it goes.
moment of happiness:
There was one night Lilly was feeling pretty drowsy and wanted to cuddle. She fell asleep on me for the first time in ages, and maybe the last time ever. It was precious and a little bittersweet—it may be the last time one of my babies falls asleep in my arms. I’m glad I was holding her and glad Jenna took this picture. I find myself with this (likely) last baby being in a little less of a hurry to put her down, to send her to bed, to grow her up. Lately I find myself in her room at bedtime laying in her bed listening to her Earnest Toddler Nonsense, sometimes until she falls asleep. Sometimes if she wakes in the middle of the night, I do it again. Not because I couldn’t leave—it’s totally reasonable for me to tell her, “It’s time for me to go back to bed now” and often I do—but because I am super aware that it won’t be like this for long, and once she stops doing it, it’s actually over. I look forward to her more grown-up self (I wouldn’t trade my big girls for there preschool selves, so it stands to reason I’ll like this preschooler even more when she’s bigger), but I’m enjoying her little for now.
little bit of nature:
Let’s be real. I’m going to be using images from Santa Barbara as stock photos here for a good, long time. But this moon the first night I got there still takes my breath away. (Also, dark and warm at the same time is quite a novelty to this Alaska girl, so comfortably taking pictures of the moon is super fun. And props to the new camera for the ability to do it.)
This post is part of my series, 31 days of speaking the truth. You can find the whole list of them here on the first post of the series.
grace enough 