Only Slightly Neurotic
This post brought to you by World Market. All opinions are 100% mine.
So when World Market asked if I wanted to create a little event to celebrate Father’s day this year, I responded with an enthusiatic “YES” because I knew just what I wanted to do for Jeff and I was sure that I would be able to find what I needed at World Market because, well, have you ever BEEN to a World Market? I basically love everything they carry. [Read more...]
My gardener is THE CUTEST.
She’s also quite contrary, so that’s fitting.
Scarlette is two and so she has two chores: making her bed (which consists of neatly placing haphazardly throwing her blankets over her bedrail) and watering the plants on the back porch.
She loves watering the flowers and we’re currently working on not drowning them because if she had her way, she would water them ALL DAY LONG. “Da fwowersh tirshty! Da fwowersh need da wahder! Pwease da wahdur? OH NO! A MESSH!”
This is one of my favorite things right now, our mornings on the porch tending to the plants.
“The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord – Psalm 33:5″
I turn thirty in less than three weeks, y’all. This seems surreal. Especially because this weekend, I had a garage sale and someone asked me where my mother was. I’M NOT EVEN KIDDING. Also, a woman walked into my garage while smoking a cigar. I can’t even make this stuff up, y’all. This is the sort of thing that happens when you live in the boonies.
I had a garage sale so that I could finally get some things to finish our living room, like lamps. Why do we not own any lamps? I do not know.
Anyhow, my big gift this year is a trip to the blogging conference Reviewer’s Retreat 2013. I’m incredibly excited to be attending as an RA and to lead a roundtable discussion. I’m really looking forward to taking the photography courses and connecting with other bloggers and SLEEPING THOUGH THE NIGHT. Mostly all the sleeping.
J asked for some suggestions so I put together this list for him. You can tell I’m getting older because it includes things like books about canning. And I am genuinely excited about that. Seriously.
Come Thou Fount Canvas by Lindsay Letters – I can not even describe how much I love this. It’s my favorite hymn and I think the hand lettering against the gray canvas is beautiful.
Antique Pink Infinity Scarf by Gertie Baxter – I’ve been eyeing this scarf for awhile. It’s beautiful and also it’s an actual infinity scarf, as opposed to how I just safety pin my scarf in a circle to fake it. I’m ridiculous. (This is no longer on my wishlist because it is on it’s way to my mailbox! SO EXCITING!)
Aqua Serenity Stone Drop Earrings – I lost my favorite pair that were similar to these and I love the aqua for summertime.
Canning For A New Generation – This is who I am now, y’all. I grow things and then I try to can them. Apparently I’ve grown up or something.
Beautiful In It’s Time Watering Can – Because I need to water my herbs. AGAIN WITH THE GARDENING. But seriously, this one from DaySpring is totally unnecessary but I think it’s cute and will look pretty on my porch when not in use.
(I found those peonies at Joss & Main but they aren’t available anymore. Which is a bummer because it’s hard to find realistic looking fake flowers. Please point me in that direction if you know of any. Also, I think I want to grow some peonies, they are so stinkin’ beautiful.)
Over Easter weekend Scarlette rode a pony for the first time. I’ve never seen her so excited and it was one of my favorite moments that I have experienced as her mother so far.
For me the tears seem to come at the oddest moments. They never fall when they are supposed to, when we’re at another specialists office, holding her down for another invasive procedure, stomach twisting in knots as she screams. They surprise me suddenly at moments like this, when I set her gently in a saddle, unsure, and she turns to me, beaming, with a smile that could melt the hardest of hearts and says “YEAH! I WIKE DIS MOMMY! I WIKE DIS HORSHIE! I WIKE DIS!”
I always worry that the doctors all think that I am unfeeling when she falls and needs staples in her head and I don’t cry. I know it’s a trivial worry, I know that it’s borne of a string of months where self-preservation traded tears for talking bili levels and threading tubes and counting breaths. I’m okay with that because I feel confident in a crisis but I still worry that the stoic will be mistaken for uncaring.
And I go to events like this and then I worry that everyone thinks that I’m an emotional basketcase when I suddenly start sobbing over Scarlette smiling at ponies. Because to a stranger, she’s just another kid riding a horse but to me she is miracle and magic.
(And then if you’d seen the incredible tantrum she threw when she had to get OFF said pony and subsequently be carried screaming out of the arena, you’d have been like “Oh honey, you cry all you want to.” Meaning me. Because OH MY GOSH THAT TANTRUM.)
I was chatting with Tiffani about wanting to find a small sandbox for Scarlette because we keep a running tab for one another on what to look for when we’re garage sale-ing. (That’s friendship in your thirties, y’all.) She mentioned that someone in her homeschool group told her about making a sandbox out of one of those plastic bins that go under the bed.
And I was all A) That is genius and B) I bet they totally found that shiz on Pinterest. That sounds just like something Pinterest would do, making a sandbox out of a storage bin.
So then I went searching on Pinterest and fell down a rabbit hole of completely elaborate homemade sandboxes complete with canopies and lawn gnomes and hidden panels that turn into picnic tables and painted to look like a replica of Hogwarts. I’m just kidding about that last one. (Although someone should totally do that because it would be the most epic sandbox ever.)
I finally found what I was looking for, and it really was as simple as I envisioned.
So here is why this is the best sandbox ever: When we are done playing with it, it just rolls under our table!
I picked up this sterilite one with wheels, which was a great tip from Stuff Parents Need because I put two forty pound bags of sand in that sucker. Turns out, wheels are definitely a necessity when trying to move eighty pounds of play sand if you are commonly mistaken for a twelve year old girl, which I am. I also put our splash mat (we have this one) under it so that I can dump most of the lost sand back in before I close it back up and that seems to work pretty well.
I wanted something small-ish and portable because we spend the majority of our morning doing “stations” on the back porch and I didn’t want to take away from our play space permanently. Also, I was pretty sure Scarlette’s sensory issues would prevent her from actually putting her feet IN said sandbox so I wasn’t worried about it being too small for her to sit in. Turns out, she fits with lots of room to spare seeing as how she is tiny but I was right and she prefers to sit next to it and only play in the sand with her hands.
Ours ended up costing about $10 because of how there were no prices listed for the storage boxes and when we checked out we discovered there was also no bar code on it. The cashier was a very sweet old man who said, “How about I charge you seven dollars?” And I replied “They are definitely more than seven dollars. I think they might be around twelve?” And he said “Well, seven dollars sounds good to me.” And so I was all “OKAY!”
And then he forgot to put all of the food we bought in our cart and we didn’t realize it until we were home and I had to drive all the way back to the store so that we’d have something to eat for dinner. There is probably some sort of lesson in that story.
Anyhow, I didn’t buy her a bunch of sand toys because we had a lot of toys for the water table that I thought would work for both but I did let her pick out a bucket and shovel. She asked for a purple one and then she spent all morning going “YEAH! I BEEYULD DA SHAND CASHLE! OH BOY!” It was basically the cutest thing ever, kind of like my kid.
