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!

Whoooo-wee. What a week. It's the kind that feels like it's never going to end, but folks, here we are and it is Saturday and I can see the cocktail at the end of the tunnel.

I've been single mom-ing it all week and man, even if I didn't like Ryan,  I'd keep him around because this ish is exhausting. He's at a bike show in Ohio riding motorcycles and handing out my business card to every tent owner in the vicinity (ha!) while I'm trying to talk our toddler into staying in bed for the bobillionth time tonight.

I remember when my niece was really little - and this is a decade ago, so my sister and I were so young then, too -- and she kept popping out of bed. My sister put on her mom voice and sternly told her to march right back to her bed and I cracked up laughing because I couldn't take Dee seriously. This is my karma.

Anyway it's been a party around here, and we've got a busy weekend on the agenda. I'll be sticking around, but I have about 27 things left to do on my before 30 bucket list. I did perhaps, not use the last month as efficiently as I could have, so we'll just be power-packing it all in for the next couple of days.

But let's end with a little enjoying post, because it's been a wild one, but it's been pretty okay too.

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Enjoying pie.

Make a cherry pie was number 22 on my list, and I fixed a late night sweet tooth by spontaneously baking one up on Wednesday. I mean, sort of spontaneously -- I obviously planned to make one, but it wasn't really the plan at 9pm in the middle of the week. Duke B contributed by plucking approximately 74 cherries from the pan while I rolled out the crust and I got that awful thought that I always get when I'm too happy that these are the days. This is what I'll miss when he's older and it literally stops my breath because its all going so fast.

And then we ate pie from the pan together on the couch while watching Places Unknown because I want him to grow up cultured, and we were fine.



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Enjoying a new book.

Okay, so I pretty much stopped reading consistently after I had Duke and my general excuse was that I don't have time. Which is kind of true, but miraculously I've developed time to scroll instagram for two hours a day (I have the Momentum app that tells me how much I use my phone and it is disturbing). Since my life is formally dictated by a list I made a month ago, I had to read a book because I made it a goal and wrote it down and somehow, that means more than just casually thinking I should read or something. We should talk about this actually sometime, because that's a thing, the writing it down piece.

Anyway, I read The Paris Wife, and it was incredible and so engaging. But moreover, I realized that I do have time to read, but I just have to accept that with time constraints, I can't jump into a book, dedicate hours a day to reading it and have a really good one finished up in a  few days. It's a change, because that's my experience and what I thought I don't have time for. I totally have time to read a few pages a day and take a whole month to digest it. I just got Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald in the mail yesterday and I'm excited to get it started. Side note - Kellye, are you the one who told me to read the Zelda book?



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Enjoying 29.

My birthday is a few days away and this is the last weekend of my twenties. I feel -- I don't know, maybe complacent -- about the whole thing. I don't have an negative feelings about getting older and maybe because I don't really feel any different than I did when I was 19 or 24, but I do feel a little more fire to start living more intentionally. I think I just assumed when I was 20 that I'd have things sorted out by the time I turned 30, and I mostly do, and I'm satisfied with where things shook out. But I don't want to be so trusting with the 30s. I want to have a five year plan and a list of goals to accomplish. Just....yeah, more intentionally was the right way to put it.

So the first order of business this weekend is to intentionally visit my mother-in-law's new puppy, Bob. She just brought home an 8-week old Rhodesian Ridgeback and I can't wait to get a whiff of that puppy breath (kidding -- barf).

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Happy Saturday ya'll!

There's a few months every year, that no matter how many times I've lived them, when they roll around, I'm like -- this is my favorite month of the whole year. I feel like way about May when warm weather is so sweet after a long winter. I feel it about October too, when the evenings are crisp and pumpkin bread is in my oven making my house smell like a Williams Sonoma.  Still doesn't look like one, but you know, close your eyes and imagine.
Anyway, July is definitely one of those months. This is for sure the best month of the year.
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We've had friends here all weekend and I've been playing Scattergories until 1am for the last two nights - knowing full well that Duke doesn't care and will totally wake up at 5am as usual, so I've got my heart set on going to bed early and reading until I fall asleep. Doesn't that sound awesome?

Side note - don't the 30's sound freakin' riveting? Scattergories late into the night and dreams of an early bedtime.

Anyway, July is on its way out, but we've been enjoying the heck out of it --
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Birthday things.
 And food that is decidedly not plant-based. A little detox, retox, you know?



Crashing at the end of the day with ice cream still on his face. Tonight,  he went for a bite of soap in the bathtub and cried when I told him he'd start blowing bubbles any day now.

Hey guys, today I come to you during holy hour.

I should tell you, there's a whole variety of "hours" around here these days. First, there's a new kind of happy hour -- usually at 5AM as opposed to the pm, when Duke wakes up for the day, gets a diaper change and eats and he's just excited to be alive. He's happy and smiley and it's so wonderful and fun.  Then, just a few short hours later, we hit crazy hour, usually right around 10am when Duke is all "I don't need a nap but I do need you to hold me until I fall asleep because actually I'm exhausted" and I'm already running on coffee fumes so we're both crying. Then there's holy hour, during his afternoon nap, when he's out for a solid three hours. Hallelujah. Next comes witching hour, at which time he's fussy for no discernible reason (google it, that one I didn't actually make up - it's a thing.) Then we do crazy hour again around 9pm when it's time to go the fuck to sleep.

And I want to elaborate that the other hours of the day are presently filled with lots of fun because Dukers can smile now, and it's so precious. We officially do playtime and it is a delight.

Anyway, it's holy hour right now because baby bear has been knocked out for a full hour and I am officially, finally, in clothes I haven't been wearing since yesterday. I'm also currently spit-up free, but that's a limited engagement. Holy hour wraps up pretty quick, you know?

Anyway, here's what we've been enjoying this week:
A little weekend trip to Frankenmuth for some world famous chicken and Christmas music.

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Baby smiles that sometimes, maybe, if you use your imagination, are starting to be accessorized by little sounds that might be the effervescent beginning of giggles.


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Beautiful fall weather and Jack, our guard dog, keeping watch on the premises.


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My big boy, pissed that mommy tried to stage him up in a laundry basket. He looks two seconds and barely a decade away from rolling his eyes at me.