Aren't Fridays the best?  Stay with me here -- I sometimes think that Friday afternoon, right after lunch, is one of the best feelings of the entire week. I mean, Saturday and Sunday are really great, but there's just something about the anticipation of something good. Just the way we start getting silly with expectation, man it rocks.

Especially this weekend. My friends, who I'm so jealous get to live in the same town, are packing their kids and coming to celebrate my 30th birthday for the weekend. One's pregnant, one just had a baby like yesterday, and there's me, and I'm still saying I'm "postpartum" to justify falling asleep at 8pm and not washing my hair, so things will be slightly less tuned up that it was, say, nine years ago. Cool with me -- I just want some Doritos, maybe a bottle of wine and a beach to distract our kids for like, five minutes.

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I'm pretty content these days, and I'm trying to drag out these summer days with Duke B while we still have this comfortable in a t-shirt and flip flops weather. Just, you know, enjoying. And trying to not get anxious that freakin' Michaels already has pumpkins in every single aisle.

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Enjoying Duke in his own room. 

Okay, so we've been co-sleeping for the last two years with Duke sporadically sleeping in his crib every once in a while but always ending up in our bed at some point in the night. Then he started casually climbing out of crib pretty regularly and I couldn't even use it to contain him while I took a shower so that's basically useless. So, this week we converted the crib to a big boy bed and ding-ding-ding, he loves it. I should have done this forever ago.

I also got him a motorcycle night light and he has no reason to even hang out with me anymore.

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Enjoying going for a drive.

We do this a lot -- I love popping the baby in his car seat, rolling down the windows and going for a drive before bedtime. We get ice cream, obviously, put on some tunes or The Moth, and just go for a quick cruise. It feels good. it feels like summer.

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Enjoying Duke and Ryan. 

They obviously like each other, but Duke is at such a perfect age and just wants to do everything Ry does. They hang in the garage most nights while I'm making dinner or cleaning up the house and I love peeking out the window to see things like this --


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Enjoying a lot of little things.

Coffee on the front porch. Sleeping with the windows open. The smell of anything on a grill. I guess summer in general. I mentioned it just briefly before now, but I really do start feeling anxious about the end of summer right around this time every year. I just start feeling like fall is thrust upon me by A.) people who love it (valid) and B.) every single store I walk into. I'm not sure why I get that feeling, but it's consistent year after year. Right now, I'm really try to be cognitive that it doesn't matter what anyone is trying to sell me, because summer is still here for a couple more months in terms of weather and temperature and all the flannel in the world can't change that. And summer isn't slipping by at all, there's actually still plenty of time to enjoy it. So, lets beach and bbq tonight, drink Summer Water Rose, and keep a healthy rotation of swimsuits running through the washing machine. Summer lives!


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Alright -- I'm off to fetch that Friday silly feeling. I took a half day to get ready for my friends' arrival and make it look like I keep a semi-clean house. Side note -- I searched some cleaning hacks on Pinterest the other day looking for something specific, and now my entire feed is "organic household cleaners you can make from stuff already in your cabinets" and "mix baking soda and vinegar to reveal blindingly white tile grout"

Pinterest, you got the wrong girl. Pass the bleach, 'kay?

Happy FRIDAY!