There’s something special about summertime…
The daylight lasts longer… Time seems to move a bit slower… Even the busy days feel a bit less structured and demanding. There is time to breathe, to inhale deeply, and to live deliberately…
We are one week into our official summer break and have filled it with wonderful moments and many things for which I am thankful. The first is, simply, that it is officially summer break for Zilla, the Hub has switched to his summer work schedule, and we are finding our summer groove.
Last weekend was Zilla’s birthday and we spent the better part of three days celebrating. Her first ever party with friends was a complete success, her party with family went swimmingly, and her special celebration with Mom and Dad was just about perfect. I’m thankful for all of that. I do believe a post-party recap is in order…I’ll get to that this week.
The Fab Hub has been working on some of those necessary home chores. This week he’s tackled replacing a broken doorbell button and a broken doorbell chime, fixed a light switch, steam cleaned the carpet in the foyer, mounted the TV on the wall in our library/viewing room, and super-cleaned all the floors.
Zilla and I have been cleaning and organizing in the areas of our “office.” We’ve worked on things like paperwork, school projects (keep it or toss it?), bookshelves, and craft supplies. We’re getting much closer to a freshly purged and organized system for all of those things.
Even the Rotten Cats are getting involved. We have them testing a new cat litter that claims to be lower on dust, tracking, and odor. For the ridiculous price increase from our usual litter, it had better do all of that and more. Like how about scoop and clean the boxes, too? Jury’s still out, but we think it might be a successful upgrade.
I ran a terrific guest post written by our own Val from My Virtual Vineyard. If you haven’t read Val’s spin on summer reading for young children, hop over here and take a look. Thanks for the great post, Val!
I am enjoying my trusty Vitamix this week. It’s been getting a workout – we’ve made smoothies, watermelon pops, green soup, and tomato juice. That baby is worth its weight in gold.
And speaking of vegetables, week three of this year’s CSA brought us more wonderful fresh produce to enjoy in the days ahead. So far this season we’ve seen a fun variety of greens – a salad mix, leaf lettuce, spinach, kale, something they call an Asian greens mix, zucchini, yellow squash, radishes (fabulous radishes), Hakurei turnips, scallions, garlic scapes, broccoli, bok choy, cucumbers…all delicious and right off the local organic farm.
As weird as this may sound, I’m kind of thankful that I skipped the blog hops I usually join during the week. I was feeling sort of stressed about them and kind of needed a bye week. So that felt pretty good. I’ll be back next week, though, and will very likely read a few when I do my catch-up reading on Monday.
Zilla and I are reading like crazy – and I don’t just mean we’re reading books she’ll enjoy together. I actually checked out a few books from the library just for me. I’m off to jump back into the one I started this afternoon…right before I dozed off for a short mid-afternoon nap. It’s started to storm here and I should probably shut down the computer anyway.
Summertime…and the livin’ is easy…
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This post was previously published on The Meaning of Me and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock