Tag Archives: life these days

Mom Confessions – Smiths in Real Life – Part Six

Mom ConfessionsWhat fun these “confession” posts have been….are you loving them like I am? There is something freeing about laying it all out there. And even though I would love for you all to go on believing that I have it all together, that isn’t my reality. At all. So I am joining up with my friend Anna over at Girl With Blog and sharing some of my Mom Confessions.

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It has been a doozy of a few days around here but we have been bound and determined to make the best of it. Sometimes that is all you can do and I can tell you that having a positive attitude whenever possible sure makes a difference!

I baked some peanut butter M&M cookies the other day. I had ordered this big bag of easter colored M&M’s from Amazon and they came all crushed and broken into pieces…there is something about shards of M&M’s that just don’t taste as good as the full ones. So I found the “best” recipe on the interwebs and got to baking. For the record they aren’t the “best”…they aren’t terrible (as evidenced by the large number of cookies I have eaten in the past few days)..but I am still searching for the best recipe.

Anyways, the last pan was in the oven and then for some reason I walked away…..for waaaayyy too long. So the last batch looked like this.

Burned Cookies

Baking perfection don’t you think? And it is clear that I need some new cookie pans!

I washed a kleenex in the laundry the other day. It was everywhere. EVERYWHERE I tell you. When I cleaned out the lint tray it looked like this…

Dryer lint

It caught most of it, but my black towel didn’t fair so well…I was picking off white specks of kleenex for 3 days.

This weekend we had big plans.

We were supposed to go to Sioux Falls on Saturday after Karlena’s dance dress rehearsal. On Friday night I went to our first ever women’s event at our church (which was amazing btw)…and came home to Karlena with a 104.7 fever. Not good.

I figured it was strep…this is how it always goes down. Fine one minute, really really sick the next. So I took her in on Saturday morning and yep, it’s strep.

Karlena sick

Poor thing was so sick. And then with regular Tylenol and IB dosing, she perked back up. But our plans had to be cancelled because she was contagious.

So we decided to do something over the weekend that I didn’t think would happen until after graduation….

Garden 2015

We planted our garden! I am so excited. We have tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, eggplant, zucchini, carrots, onions and potatoes!! Oh and we threw in a couple of pumpkin plants in a different area of our yard. Maybe we will get  a few of those as well.

And on Monday last week we played hooky from work (thankfully we can do that when we are self-employed) and we built this amazing hanging basket holder for our front lawn. It takes the place of the birch tree we lost last year. I love it and so we also got our flowers planted as well!!

hanging baskets

It was nice to take a bad situation and make something good out of it! Sometimes that is all we can do right?!

How was your week? Did you have an opportunity to make lemonade out of lemons?! 🙂

Life These Days

Last week was a rough one. After I wrote that post our furnace broke. I am not kidding. Thankfully it was (I think, we don’t have a bill yet) an easy fix. And we had heat again by that evening.

And the weekend didn’t get much better when Dominic came home about an hour after he left for the office with the stomach flu. Yuck for him. He was in bed all day and only started feeling better by Sunday afternoon.

As for now, we are all healthy and SO ready for Spring…which by the looks of it may be right around the corner. A girl can hope can’t she?!

forecast

I mentioned in my post last week that I am “fasting”, if you will, from spending money (on myself mostly) that isn’t classified as “necessary”. I felt convicted that I maybe had been a little too “loose” with my purchases as of late.  So I got an accountability partner and told her that I wasn’t going to spend money on myself until after Easter.

Then a picture of this blouse came in my inbox.

Shirt

And it is only $29 and in my favorite color and it’s called the PERFECT BLOUSE..and they only have a few mediums left (justify, rationalize)…ultimately I didn’t buy it. I sent a picture to my friend, said I was struggling but wouldn’t buy it. We talked about self-control and how it is times like these that help us to be more thoughtful about our purchases. It was hard for me but it is good.

A few hours later I got an email from Melanie at Unexpected.org that I had won a giveaway she had earlier this month!

This beauty from Trades of Hope came in the mail yesterday…like a little love letter from God.

Trades of Hope

Speaking of Melanie’s blog…if you haven’t ever read it – start with this post about her Overdramatic Family . It had me busting a gut, much needed laughter for my Thursday!

It has been 6 months since my PRK surgery. For the last month I have been on Restasis eye drops. My eyes haven’t gotten to where they would like to see them, and I was showing symptoms of chronic dry eyes (which makes no sense because they NEVER feel dry)…but I figured it was worth a try. The pharm companies are charging a RACKET for these drops. $187 for 1 month and not covered by insurance. Can you even believe that?!

But they seem to be making a difference, so I am continuing for a month and will check things out again in 3 months. Currently I am 20/15 in my right eye and 20/20, with random blurriness at times, in my left. Overall I am really happy with my results…but to get 20/15 in both eyes would be ideal.

I had an opportunity to review a few pieces of ViBella jewelry  and share a bit of my story over at their blog this week. Their company represents transformation and I loved sharing a bit of my transformation journey with them!

ViBella

I have a big list of things that I need to get done this weekend, mostly projects that I have started and never completely finished. I did a toy room redo, which I will blog about once it is all done. I have 2 long shelves I need to paint and then once they are hung, I would be finished. I just need to paint the darn things.

In addition I started painting my sunroom and am almost done, but after my fall 2 weeks ago I didn’t ever get back to completing it. It WILL be done this weekend.

On my to-do list is also sleeping, because this week and last have left me exhausted.

And I guess that’s all I have for now. Nothing much of substance but at least a record for myself of all we have had going on recently! 🙂 Happy Weekend friends!