Warning: Affiliate links appear in the following post. Although shopping the embedded links won’t cost you any additional dollars, using the links below to shop may result in a small commission for me. Thanks for supporting the brands that make this blog possible. I have a confession to make. I used to read really good books. I wasn't even embarrassed to share my reading list with people when they asked. Now? I've sort of turned into a 19 year old girl when it comes to reading. I don't know what my deal is, but I can devour a cheap romance novel in the space of an hour. There are plenty of free and inexpensive reads that I would never recommend. Sometimes I just need to read for the sake of reading. There are plenty of others that I make sure to pass along to my fellow Kindle-addicts, ...
letters
Dear Ice Skating,
You are way harder than I remember. (Especially while trying to text Jennifer and skate at the same time. She had to ask me to translate my texts more than once. Ha!) When I was a little girl, Ryan & I used to ice skate all the time. I remember exactly what I wore the last time we went. In like, 1992 or something. I remember thinking I had mastered it. Surely I could pull it off again at 35. Right?! We took the kids to the Pelham Convention Center a few weeks ago to celebrate the birthday of that pretty girl in the middle. Isabella lives in Chattanooga, so when she is here visiting her daddy, we try to get in as much time with her as possible. My girls act like it's Christmas morning when it's her weekend at home! We had talked about ice skating and it's similarities and ...
Dear Mercedes Marathon Weekend,
I am so not prepared for you. Yes, there are still eleven weeks left until you find your way onto my calendar, but I usually start training in October. Here I am, eight whole weeks behind. The timing is funny because I asked Josh just a few days ago if it would make me a total wimp for not registering this year. I know myself, though, and I'll be profoundly disappointed. I'll mope about being that girl that ran it two years in a row and then turned into a quitter. Race Day // 2013 As fate would have it, our office decided to put together a men's and women's relay team to run the full marathon and I was asked to take the long leg. It's broken into 5 sections - two 3 mile legs, two 6 mile legs and an 8 mile leg. I tried to convince myself that I would be just as happy about the 8 mile leg ...
Dear Monday,
If you had asked a week ago what today would look like, I would have told you I'd be living in a hotel room, wearing suits every day and missing my people. I was scheduled to be out of town this week for trial and wasn't looking forward to being so far from home during the first week of the holiday season. As it often does, my work plans changed and I made the drive home from vacation yesterday instead of heading out of town.If you had asked me yesterday what today look like, I would have told you I was dreading wearing "business professional" for the first time in eight days and not looking forward to my hour long commute at all. Ella woke up out of sorts yesterday morning, but I chalked it up to spending long days outside in the cold and breathing in wood smoke as we watched endless ...
Letters
Dear Husband, You did good. We've been on a lot of pretty cool dates in the last 17 years, but this was one of my favorites. I kind of laughed when you asked if I wanted to see Moon Taxi since they are actually one of your favorite bands, but I was so pleasantly surprised. For all the years I begged you to go with me to concerts, you have sure made up for it in the last year. I'm not much of a dancer, but dancing with you is my favorite. Thank you for adventures, for fun overnight dates and for knowing exactly what I will love. You are still my favorite. Kristin Friday really was the perfect date. We started out with dinner at Babalu, a new tacos and tapas restaurant in Lakeview. I had heard great things and we were far from disappointed. We had house chips and pico de gallo, ...
Letters
Dear Small Town, You know how some teenage girls dream of big cities and moving far, far away? I don't ever remember doing that. I'm sure I had visions for how my life would turn out that might not exactly mirror what I see today, but I never lamented my smaller than average circle. I dreamed of wide open spaces, red barns and family. Dear Pop & Granmom, Your house was one of my most favorite places to spend time as a child. The vast number of sand buckets, filled with strawberries, that we toted up the front porch steps were too many to count. I remember lazy days on the screened porch, too tall sycamore trees and rope swings. Some of my favorite stories still revolve around fishing in the pond and hearing Pop call the cows. Dear Marley, You did good. First time ...
Letters
Dear October, Where the heck did you go? I feel like I blinked and you were gone. While we did Halloween night up right, there were so many things that we missed. We never made it to the pumpkin patch this year and we didn't carve or paint any jack-o-lanterns. Fortunately, I don't think my girls even realized the error of our ways. Dear Scrooges, I know that everyone is entitled to their own opinion about Christmas and when it's appropriate to begin decorating or singing along with the radio or whatever. I welcome Christmas music whenever the radio stations want to start playing it. Thanksgiving is fine, but so is Halloween. I do kind of hate seeing decorated trees in the stores in early October, but there is a tiny part of me that understands. When I looked at our calendar for November ...
Letters
Dear Sophie, My new favorite thing is to watch you color, or to hear you explain your drawings, or even to thumb through them after you leave a stack near my bed. Ella has always liked coloring books and writing stories, but I don't think anybody loves copy paper as much as you do. I can almost always find you with a crayon box stuffed under your arm and you love to ask us to spell things or to write things down for you to trace and copy. You have such a vivid imagination when you tell us the stories behind your drawings and the color and composition is always so beautiful! I am so hopeful that this isn't a passing phase. Let's plan to keep making beautiful things together. Deal? ...