Sunday Snapshots

 

                I’m writing this recap on Saturday night. Ryan has worked so hard all day, and Lexi took zero naps so she could walk beside me and help me in all my endeavors. Both of them are crashed on the couch, and I’m watching a Christmas movie on TV while I work. It’s quiet and cozy and sweet. My heart is full and happy.

                In fact, the week has been full…full of stories! One of my friends said to me that my emails to her this week were like a collection of short stories. The life of a writer is never dull, I guess. Always full of stories that can be fodder. I’ll save the mind-blowing stories, but here are some of the fun moments from the week.

Last Sunday afternoon, I traveled back to Kokomo for Ryan’s Grandma’s birthday party. The party wasn’t put together until after Ryan already committed to helping lead a GriefShare holiday session, so he went to that, and I represented at the party. Ryan’s dad even made the birthday cake from scratch! I was impressed!

We woke up Monday to measurable snowfall. (In fact, the roads were so slick that our schools canceled that day.) I’m not ready for snow yet, but I was grateful that I was able to work from home until the late afternoon, so at least I could appreciate it! By the time I had to venture forth, the roads were in much better shape.

Tuesday night I hopped on Instagram to post a picture of a dessert I made for Ryan’s GriefShare dinner, and that’s when I learned via posts I saw there…that we could see the Northern Lights! I scurried right outside in my jammies to see if I could get some pictures, and I DID!!!

Lexi received a much-needed haircut this week. Poor girl was so shaggy that we couldn’t even see her eyes anymore! (Her haircuts are always timed the same, but sometimes her hair seems to grow faster than others.) Anyway, it was a delight to see her pretty face again. (The haircut itself was fraught with delays that nearly made me late to church, but the result on Miss Lexi was pretty.)

Ryan brought in all the Christmas tubs so I could commence decorating. Lexi wanted to help so much, so she sat on the porch furniture to observe the commute of the Christmas tubs. Made her entire day.

There is a relatively new coffee truck in our area…I think it opened this summer. It parked at Swiss Village on Friday, and Ryan treated me to a fun drink for my Christmas decorating extravaganza! He was also able to come home a little early on Friday, and it was GORGEOUS outside. It was warm and sunny and he had the best time pulling the dead landscaping out, organizing the garage, and pulling the fall décor off the porch. I was so glad he had a great day for that. Meanwhile, I got busy decorating inside!

Ryan helped a friend roof his house yesterday – it was pretty warm outside, but he said it was the windiest day he’d ever roofed. I finished the bulk of our decorating and ran to the store to grab a couple little things I needed to finish up. Whilst there, I was publicly shamed by a woman (I don’t even know) in line for choosing to decorate. That was a little crazy!

Saturday Suggestions: Inspirations for Your Weekend

 

                Good morning and happy Saturday! We had the most lovely day yesterday. It was a warm (t-shirt level!) day, and Ryan was able to come home from work a little early! He finished tearing out the plants and landscaping from this year and took down all the fall décor that was on the porch. I was so happy he was able to enjoy a warm day to work outside!

                Meanwhile, I started Christmas decorating! This weekend is my only chance to do it, so I’m cramming all of it into a day and a half. I’m excited to finish it today. While I’m working on that, I have some fun things for you to read!

Sarah wrote a really helpful post to give you ideas for prepping for holiday decorating. From the supplies you might need to secure your decorations to the places you might need to store your regular decorations, to cleaning info, she has lots of helpful hints!

The idea of making Christmas ornaments always intrigues me. Here are a couple of cute ones! This one is a Christmas sweater upcycled into ornaments, and this one is gingerbread ornaments.

Groceries are expensive, and I know right now they are even more challenging for some families because of the loss of assistance in the past few days/weeks.Callie wrote a great post on how she saves money for her family’s grocery budget. She notes that each family is different for many reasons. Size of family, age of kids (the bottomless pit years are real!!!), accessibility to multiple stores, personal choices (organic, etc.) Even if you don’t/can’t do each of her ideas, I think you can find some good guides in here!

If you’re hosting Thanksgiving and are feeling overwhelmed, look at Suzy’s menu and timeline. She has it all written out in great detail. IMPRESSIVE!!!! (Also…it does get easier each time you do it. Or at least I found that to be true the years I hosted!) And Andrea has a whole roundup of her Thanksgiving tablescapes over the years. Inspiration awaits.

Remember when I told you about the Olive and June kit I purchased a few weeks ago? Here is the same kit I purchased, but with winter colors instead! I love the colors in this kit…rich and sparkly!

I love this article about “humble photography,” because that feels doable to me! It’s all about capturing what you see around you, rather than lamenting if you can’t go on grand adventures all around the world. I love this so much!

Annual Photo Shoot Reveal!

 

It’s not even been a month since our friend Barb came to take our pictures, and I wanted to share with you some of what she took!!

                Someone recommended Barb to us when we lived in Kokomo. She took our pictures three times, I think, and she also took pictures at my surprise party for my 40^th birthday! When we moved, we had other photographers for a few years, but we missed her, so we asked her if she’d be willing to travel to us. She said YES! So this is the third time she’s driven up here to take our annual fall pictures, and we were so thrilled to have her back.

                This year we did something a little bit different: a lifestyle shoot! I know that most people who do these have little kids that they want to capture in their home environment, and obviously we don’t. But it was fun to have her here to capture us in our home, enjoying our space. The night she came was pretty cold, so it was nice that so many of our pictures were inside!!

                I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves. Lexi was in a bit of a fiery mood that night, so I’m sure the outtakes are otherworldly. Even so, we got some cute ones!

Thanks, Barb!! You made the day so much fun!! :) 

Adams County Coffee Experience: Java Bean

 

                Our Adams County Coffee Experience continued this past weekend! We are having the best time visiting all the coffee shops and getting stickers in our passport. It’s genius.

                Our next stop was the Java Bean in Decatur. We’ve visited the Java Bean many times before – mostly when Ryan worked at Love INC and was in Decatur during the day. Actually, now that I say that, I’m not sure if we’ve been there since he stopped working at Love INC.

                We parked in their back lot, and I had fond memories of sitting at these back patio tables (in much warmer weather) with Ryan enjoying our coffee after the shop closed.

                Want to see my favorite thing in the coffee shop? The Friends Lego Set!

                The place was PACKED when we arrived, so I grabbed a seat in the front window.

                I took this picture later, once it emptied out a bit, so I could capture the cuteness of the counter. 😊

                I got a cinnamon muffin and Americano.

                Ryan chose coffeecake, a croissant, and coffee.

                We had volunteered at our church boutique that morning, so we were pretty hungry, and the food was good! We spent some time talking and enjoying our date.

                I was glad to see this shop doing so well. We have now done both coffee shops in Decatur, one of the two in Monroe, and none of the Berne shops. (We tried to knock out those farthest from home first.)

Favorites from Previous Years' Favorites Lists!

 

Last week I shared a post of some of our favorite purchases from this year, and I got caught up in looking through our similar posts from years past. I was pleased to see there are still many of those items we’re using regularly, so I thought today I’d tell you the main thing we love the most from each of the previous years’ posts! (Do you ever wonder if people who post gift lists ever use some of what they recommend…and if so…if they still use them down the road a bit? I do!)

From 2016…We still really love our set of weights. We purchased it when we lived in Marion and I was doing the 21 Day Fix program. It has served us well in each of our homes, and we still use it regularly! The link above is similar to what we have. We purchased ours in a store…maybe Dunham’s? We have supplemented with some in-between weights, but this set (5-25) is great!

From 2017…We still use our Ninja System every single day. The link I shared that year is apparently no longer an exact set they sell, but this is a similar one. Ryan bought this for me, and it has been the BEST. It works so well. I use the two bigger blender pieces for all kinds of cooking, and I use the shake cups to make my smoothies almost every day. WORTH IT.

From 2018…Ryan still uses this phone case! In fairness, I do believe he got a new one when he got a different phone, but the style of case still works really well for him.

From 2019…Our weighted blanket!!! Oh my goodness we still love this blanket so much. If we are going to be gone from home for more than a couple of nights, we take it with us. We talk regularly about how much we love it and what a great purchase it was. I don’t have a link to our exact blanket, but this one is the same weight and fabric as what we have.

From 2020…I adore our flat knife block set. They don’t seem to sell our exact set anymore, but here is a similar one. Because our kitchen is small with minimal counter space, I love it that this set doesn’t take up too much room!

From 2021…I continue to gush over my beloved interleaved journaling Bible. I’m still using the very same one, and it’s starting to be awfully lived-in. I recommend it all the time and will do so again to you right now!

From 2022…Ryan still shakes his head and smiles when I pull out the laminator and start my laminating parties. I love it SO MUCH!!!!!

From 2023…Still loving our wheat mill and bread making adventures! This was a great decision and hobby for us. (And you might remember that on my 50 before 50 list, one of my goals is to try all the recipes on their website.)

From 2024…The phone tripod has been amazing and perfect for travel. It folds up so beautifully to fit in our backpacks, and this one raises up tall enough to get great pictures!

                It was hard to pick just one from each year, but these were some of our favorites!! I’m so glad we have made some of these investments that have proven worth it over the long haul of several years!

Watercolor Paintings

 

                Back in 2016, in the fall, just a few months after we sold our Marion house, my dear Julie Crandall handed me a gift. There wasn’t an occasion at hand, so I was surprised to be a gift recipient, but I do love a good gift, so I was excited! Inside? A watercolor painting of our first home. She had pulled the photos from the listing, shared them with a friend of hers, and commissioned this painting of our Marion home.

                I wrote here about all the (beautiful!) emotions that stirred in me. Ryan and I loved the painting so much that we asked for the contact information of the artist and commissioned a painting of our Kokomo house to hang alongside it.

                Then you know what happened, right? We moved to WillowBridge…and Bluffton…and then to the lake. And before we knew it, we were really behind on watercolors for our wall of homes.

                Two years ago, in the fall, after we had moved to the lake, I reached out to my friend Amber, who I’ve talked about many times on this blog. She’s a phenomenal artist, and I wanted to support her endeavors, so I asked if she would paint the remainder of our homes. She has a full time job and busy life aside from her art, so I told her we weren’t in a hurry. For the waiting season, as I wrote about here, I purchased an inexpensive app and created “watercolors” from photos of our other homes so the frames wouldn’t be empty on the wall. But the app pictures are not the same as a handcrafted painting.

                A couple of weeks ago, when we were in Kokomo for Ryan’s grandpa’s funeral, Amber came to the visitation. On her way out, she pulled me aside and said, “I have your paintings…do you want them?” We hurried out to the parking lot and transferred them from her car to ours, and I wanted to cry on the spot over the beauty of her work!

                She hasn’t done the lake house yet, per our request, because we were waiting for it to look more like our transformed vision before she painted it. But she did WillowBridge and our Bluffton house.

                Here is WillowBridge.

                The funny thing about this painting is that only one of the windows you see shows the apartment where we lived. The window on the first floor behind the white railing was our guest room. The rest of our windows were on the back side of the building, and you can’t see them here. But it doesn’t matter, because I can see and hear so many memories when I look at this picture.

                I can hear the gray door on the left slamming when people hurried out the side of the building. (We were the only ones who closed it carefully.) I can see our upstairs neighbor leaning out his window to talk to us when we went to our car in the parking lot on our days off. (He wasn’t supposed to do that, but he always did.) I can smell the nauseating rotten food from the refrigerator in the upstairs front apartment after a tenant got angry with us and unplugged her refrigerator before she moved out. When I opened the door and found all that spoiled food…WHOA. I think of all the meals and meetings we shared with tenants and coworkers – right there in the community room. The front doors remind me of the message board that hung in the entry. I’d go out every morning to write a verse or note on that board. And then over there hidden behind the tree were two more apartments where I spent hours talking through life’s problems with the tenants who lived in there.

                And then there’s the new and improved WillowBridge sign, replaced after a tenant learning to drive got the brake and gas pedal confused and plowed over the old sign. And the blue siding that was added while we lived there…starting at 6 a.m. on our day off!

                You might notice the bear beneath the sign. It was never really there, of course. It was Amber’s nod to our ongoing relationship with our godson, because we met him in this place.

                I found the quote on Pinterest and asked her to add it: Much of who we are is where we have been. It’s true of us with this home. We are forever changed and marked because of this season of our lives – for better and worse.

                Amber also painted our Bluffton house, which was the shortest house experience we ever had. And I will tell you right now that the yard looks 1000 times better in this picture than it ever looked in real life. Oh that summer of trying to grow grass in a drought! It was abysmal.

                We do miss our three car garage. We miss having an attached garage! But we don’t miss fighting with the yard or the view into the dining room of the house behind us. The lake has been a gift in that respect.

                In this picture I see the window to my office, where I spent hours writing and working – many times with the blinds down because we had some overzealous visitors sometimes.

                And then there’s sweet Lexi Grae’s room, where she slept every night while we watched her on a Lexi-cam.

                Our time here was brief, and the quote feels appropriate. It was unexpected that we landed her, and it wasn’t quite home – but we found home while we lived in this place.

                Our gallery wall looks stunning with these two additions. We’re currently wrestling through whether we should have Amber paint the lake house from the street side or the lake side. (We learned at one of the HOA meetings that when you live on a like, your lakeside door is technically your front door. Is this true?)

                We never dreamed we’d live in five homes within the first (almost) decade of our marriage. We hope this gallery wall is complete at this time. But we sure do love the memories we see/hear/feel when we look at this wall! Thanks, Amber, for your masterful paintings!

A Thanksgiving Meal Capsule

 

                I’m not a huge fan of traditional Thanksgiving food. (Gulp!! I’m sorry!) It actually works out well, because I’m rarely tempted to overeat on the day that seems to sabotage most people. But it does make it awkward when trying to enjoy (in community) a holiday centered around food!

                In November 2020, Ryan and I were newly employed at WillowBridge, and we had to work Thanksgiving Day. We only had one resident staying in town for Thanksgiving, and she was quarantined, so we were completely on our own. For the first time ever, I planned and prepared an entire Thanksgiving meal for the two of us, and guess what? I loved it. I tried to keep it traditional enough for Ryan to enjoy while also providing some things I could like too!

                Now that my parents are at Swiss Village, we have the luxury of having a Thanksgiving meal there with them, which means no prep or days of leftovers here! (Also – sometimes we’re traveling on Thanksgiving, if it falls near our anniversary.) Even so, I spent some time putting together a “Thanksgiving menu capsule” that I am going to print out and keep on hand for future years when I might need to prepare a meal for the two of us. I thought I’d share it with you today! It includes healthier spins on the classics and also includes things I might enjoy more than the traditional menu offerings.

                Are you ready?

Thanksgiving Meal Capsule

Breakfast: We don’t eat a huge breakfast on Thanksgiving (and I probably don’t need to explain why), but it is fun to have a little holiday-themed breakfast something or other to munch on while prepping all the rest of the food! So I would make these:

Petite Pumpkin Scones – They are small, healthier, and pumpkin-flavored, so they’re a win for Thanksgiving morning! Plus, you can make them ahead and eat them as you move around the house, so that helps.

Appetizers: I might not make both of these if it’s just the two of us, but I did grab a couple of recipes in case we’re ever hosting. Everyone needs snack foods ahead of the meal. Waiting is so hard!

Spinach Artichoke Cups – Is this traditional? Not at all. Is it fun and cute? Absolutely! These little cups are made with a wonton wrapper base – tucked into a muffin tin. Filled with spinach, artichokes, cottage cheese, Feta, Parmesan, and Greek Yogurt, they look so tasty, and yet they offer protein instead of lots of heavy calories and fat.

High Protein Ranch Dip with Fresh Veggies  - I’ve made this ranch dip before, and it’s really good! It has a cottage cheese base (blended, so the texture is more traditional) and offers protein and flavor. I’d make a little tray of peppers/carrots/cucumbers/celery, etc. to munch on with this.

Main Meal: Here are the things I’d make for the main meal, and I’d probably also do a batch of dinner rolls using our freshly milled wheat. That recipe isn’t reflected here, because it’s not online, but I feel like you can’t have a proper Thanksgiving dinner without a batch of dinner rolls!

Fall Salad – Our family never did a traditional salad on Thanksgiving. Not a lettuce/spinach salad, anyway. Broccoli salad usually made an appearance! But I like this fall salad, which features Romaine, Brussels Sprouts, apples, nuts, cheese, and bacon – with a homemade vinaigrette.

Crock Pot Stuffing – Right out of college, a friend of mine shared with me her stuffing recipe, and I loved it. (It’s in my recipe tab, actually.) It’s a buttery, dry stuffing with celery and all kinds of herbs. I’ve taken it to Thanksgiving many times over the years. I still love it, but it is a lottttttttttttttttt of butter. So this recipe is really similar, but lighter. I’d use cubed bread (leftover) instead of the boxed stuffing mix, but otherwise, I’d stick to the recipe.

Butternut Squash Mac and Cheese – For me, Thanksgiving isn’t complete without macaroni and cheese. I like this version that also includes cubed butternut squash, in addition the pasta (I’d use chickpea pasta).

Roasted Fall Vegetables – Rather than mashed potatoes, I’d do these roasted veggies: carrots, onions, sweet potatoes, and parsnips (which are not as bad as you might think) with a seasoning covering them.

Slow Cooker Turkey Breast with Gravy – Despite not really being a turkey girl on Thanksgiving, I would do this turkey breast with gravy recipe. Our family was never one to actually present a whole turkey on a platter at the table – and then carve it. I don’t (personally) have a need for that tradition, so a little slow cooker turkey breast like this one would be plenty and fine for us.

Dessert: If it was just the two of us, I’d pick one and not do both. But it was fun to pick out a couple of spins on the classic dessert recipes!

Pumpkin Cheesecake Gingerbread Trifle – I love the flavor of pumpkin but not the texture of pumpkin pie. I also love the forgiving nature of a trifle. This is easy to make a day ahead, looks pretty, and gives the flavor without the texture I can’t handle!

Pecan Pie Bars – Pecan pie was ALWAYS a staple at our house growing up, but it’s really terrible for you, and also, I can’t make a pretty pie. So this lightened, corn-syrup-free version of a pumpkin pie in bar form is a win all the way around for me!

                Again, I would not make all this food for just the two of us. But this is the capsule I plan to keep to pull from when planning Thanksgiving meals. I’ll pick and choose what fits us best on that day and make those dishes!

Sunday Snapshots: Memorable Moments from the Week

 

                Good morning, friends! Happy Sunday to you! Ryan and I have had quite the week – full of a mix of good and hard! Here is just a tiny sampling of our favorite moments!

Last Sunday was our monthiversary, and it was also my very first time to participate in a baby dedication at church! That was a complete privilege that I don’t take for granted, and I also appreciated the chance to get the entire day with Ryan.

The weather has been changing around here this week, but toward the start of the week, we still had some gorgeous sunrises. This was my favorite.

I had a much-needed hair overhaul this week. I got quite a bit of the length cut off and fresh color applied. I felt so much better when I left!

I just LOVE this picture of Ryan and Lexi hugging it out. Sweet girl was on her own more than usual this week, and she was all about the cuddles and snuggles whenever we were all together.

As I blogged about earlier this week, I enjoyed doing a manicure this week and went for a light pink. I’d been wearing a pretty dark color, so this was a huge change!

Ryan and I went on a date Friday night, and we tried to eat at a pizza place we’d gone to before, but alas, the wait was far too long. We ended up at Arby’s, and we were so proud of the crew working that night. It was a young group, but they were working hard, collaborating well, problem solving, and being SO kind to their long line of customers. A really rude customer barged in and took them to task, and they handled it with such class. I even filled out a survey online to make sure their goodness didn’t get overlooked! (Picture from the failed pizza attempt.)

We had another stop on the Coffee Experience trail yesterday! I’ll tell you more about it later, but it was fun! We are enjoying this adventure.