Last year, we formally became the owners of a dirt pot.
“What’s a dirt pot?” you might ask.
Well, it’s a large planter that sits on our patio that is filled with dirt. Compost dirt, to be exact.
We acquired the dirt pot because I noticed something about Harrison when he was very young. He loved to use Mommy’s garden tools and dig in the dirt. He’d spend a long time for a 1 year old digging, dumping, and exploring.
Edit: My heart is heavy and shattered given the events in Texas yesterday. The fact that we’re here as a nation weeping again at the loss of innocent little lives in America. That we did nothing as a nation to change the course of the future after Newtown makes me sick to my stomach. That we live in a country that it seems the risk we take with sending our children to school in this country includes a higher risk of being shot and killed in their school than every other developed nation. It’s inexcusable. Exhausting. Heart wrenching. It makes me want to hold my babies close to me and never let them out into this seemingly cruel world.
I’m not tone deaf. And truthfully, I considered just pushing delete on this post. All of it was written before this horrific event. But it’s written. And it’s fun to read. So I’m going to leave it here because these are my memories that I want to be able to go back and read for myself. But where I’m personally at tonight, as I sit here in my pj’s having tucked my precious boys into bed, is a mess. Angry. Pleading with my fellow Americans. Can we please compromise to do something to move in the right direction to fix this. We must be better than this.
My favorite post of the month! A post with a little bit of everything. A little bit of food and recipes, a little bit of books, a little bit of looks at family, and lots more! I can’t believe we’re at the end of May getting ready to gear up for summer.
As always, I’m linking up with Shay and Sheaffer to share with you what’s going on in our life!
1: WHAT WE’RE EATING THIS WEEK:
I can not stop. You guys, I love these Chicken gyros, and they are on the menu again this week. AHH. So good!
Some homemade pizza and sundried tomato pasta with creamy burrata rounds out the week. Yum!
2: WHAT I’M REMINISCING ABOUT:
Another fun soccer season for our little man!
We’ve had so much fun watching Harrison play this spring. He truly loves soccer. Every day he comes home and asks to play soccer, so we’ve had so much fun watching him get to do something he really loves with his friends. He may be the most into it four year old soccer player on the team, but we love every minute of getting to watch him!
I married a good guy. Nathan sat down with me back around the Christmas holiday, as I spiraled down on my to-do list, and feelings of being overwhelmed, compounding with thoughts that I wasn’t being the best mom I could be to the boys. And said, quite simply, “I need you to be happy. If you’re happy, I’m happy, and the boys are happy. So what’s missing for you right now?”
And let me tell you, I wasn’t prepared to answer the question. The truth was, I needed more time for Lauren things, and secondary to that, to not feel guilty about it.
The past week and a half have felt more like…many weeks. Both of the boys ended up with Influenza A, and some really terrible side effects of Tamiflu. The washing machine was running non-stop all week, if you know what I mean. But I think we are finally on the up and up again. This year has just seemed particularly bad with viruses. I swear one or both boys has been home every other week since the beginning of the year.
But, dare I say, I’m really excited for this weekend! We are back at soccer on Saturday, and celebrating Mother’s Day on Sunday.
This morning, I’ve got to get myself ready to take the boys to school for Muffins with Mom at their daycare. It’s our very first in-person holiday party at school since December of 2019 when Harrison looked like this…
So to say I’m very excited to get to celebrate with my boys at school is an understatement!
I’ve got almost all of the plants I need for my garden this year! This year’s colors are…all of them. Every last thing that looked pretty and drew my eye.
I learned to love first from my mom. I learned what it means to live for tiny little people who don’t even understand the sacrifices you’ve already made for them. I’ve learned that apologizing to your kids is important. That they need to hear it’s ok to misstep and important that we take ownership of it. That we can course correct again in the morning light.
After no big birthday parties for two years, we were SO READY to celebrate our little man’s fourth birthday with a BIG party!
Nathan and I narrowed it down to two theme possibilities: cars or soccer. Those are Harrison’s most favorite things these days. Given that he spends each Saturday playing soccer, we decided to go with CARS!
We invited the cousins, our neighbors, and a few of Harrison’s friends and their families over to play in our backyard for the afternoon. And they had the best time!
Well just when I think we may be out of the sickness woods of the winter of 2022, I’m proven wrong again. We have one kid home sick with the flu, and the whole family is on tamiflu. Ah! When will the sickness this year end?!
We’ll be focused on getting our little guy better and hopefully having some fun along the way this weekend. Hope you guys have a great weekend!
In the middle of last week, I surprised Harrison at school before lunch, and we played hooky for the rest of the day going to a Royals baseball game together. Since Jonathan was born, the amount of time I’ve gotten to spend one-on-one with Harrison has gone down significantly. I love having both of the boys, and doing things with them, but it’s so interesting how the dynamics change when you get to focus on just one kid at a time.
Many years ago, like pre-kids, I read a fellow blogger doing a skip day with each of their kids, and I’ve held on to that idea for YEARS thinking I wanted to do the same thing when the time came around. It was the best time to just focus on my big, little man for an afternoon.
This might be my favorite post of the month. They’re the most fun to go back and read, it’s a little bit of food, a little bit of my Timehop addiction, reading, watching, all wrapped up in one post.
As always, I’m linking up with Shay and Sheaffer to share with you what’s going on in our life!
1: WHAT WE’RE EATING THIS WEEK:
Aside from leftover pizza galore, I’ve made carne asada tacos this week, and chicken gyros. May round out the week with some stuffed peppers.
2: WHAT I’M REMINISCING ABOUT:
Past Harrison birthdays…This was his first birthday. His only truly ”normal” birthday…
If you’re new here, you’re probably wondering what “quick takes” are exactly. So, let me explain. I like to jot down things that are making me laugh or smile about each boy every once in awhile and commemorate them in a blog post. Truthfully, I adore these posts for very selfish reasons (and I think our extended family probably agrees). They are little windows into the personalities of each boy, and going back to read them from years past just brings me endless joy.
It’s so easy in the slog of day in and day out of parenting littles to forget the little things they say constantly, the games they are into for the moment because you’re so tired of playing the same thing over and over, and then, one day, you realize they haven’t said that phrase they said a million times a day anymore and you can’t remember the last time they said it. Ok, let’s get to what Harrison has been like lately…
-1- At the cabin this past summer, and over the past few months, he’s been learning how to play the card game “Go Fish.” While he doesn’t recognize all of the numbers yet, he loves to tell his opponent to “Goldfish!” And I’m just not correcting that, because I laugh every time he says it.
-2- If you want to know what you sound like to other people, have a kid. They will start to mimic your style and way of speaking that has you thinking, “that sounds oddly familiar.” Harrison follows up nearly every affirmative statement with, “Right? Right Mommy? Right Daddy?” As in, “We don’t play with Mommy’s iPad, RIIIIIGHT?”
-3- He tells me every couple of hours, “Mommy, you look beautiful.” (In background, Mom is in four day old unwashed hair, leggings, and a baggy sweatshirt that has snot smeared on it.) God love him.
-4- Now whenever he scores in soccer or football with us, he wants to “do the replay.” By essentially re-enacting the exact way that he just scored so he can re-live his glory.
-5- At nighttime lately when I’m tucking him in, he’s wanted to play a game where I ask him if he likes each NFL team. I’ll say, “Do you like the Bengals?” “No!” “The Patriots?” “No!” Then when the game is over, he wants to ask me the questions. And he refers to the Carolina Panthers as “the Pantries.” For the record, I do not like the Pantries.
-6- If there is a package to open, he will run it to his craft table and use his scissors to cut if open faster than you can tell him no. No package is safe from the power he now has with his scissors!
-7- I shared it on my Instagram stories awhile back, but he now lines up his cars in a row…a VERY long row, because there are so many cars in this house…and when I asked him the first time what they were doing, he replied, “It’s the Chick-fil-a line.” He’s not wrong.
And one bonus because it’s still Harrison birthday month…
-8- He calls short sleeved shirts “hot sleeves.” He always wants to wear hot sleeves.
Are you as interested in Day in the Life posts as I am? There’s something about getting a peak into someone’s everyday life that satisfies the same piece of me that adores reality TV. (Yes….I know reality TV isn’t actually real. But I love it all the same.) So how about I take you along for a typical spring Saturday with the Lanes?
