open happiness

everyone has been asking me if i've had any pregnancy cravings and by and large the answer has been no. i haven't had any wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-and-need-to-eat-chicken-wings-or-i'll-die cravings. but lately i have been dying for a coke.

the thing is, carbonation is giving me bad acid reflux and i haven't had any caffeine since i started this whole baby-growing business because i already get kicked in the bladder 500 times a day and i'd rather not give the little lady any more energy.

but man, do i want a coke.

so the other day i was at our regular lunchtime deli, and i saw that they had coke flavored gummy candy. and i thought to myself, maybe this is the answer to all my problems! so i bought them. and i ate the whole bag.

i'll spare you the suspense.

a bag of coke flavored gummies is not the same as a tall, cool glass of coke.

not at all.

family out evening

back in the days when i lived in the slc, some of my favorite friends and i made a little tradition of a twist on the mormon family home evening. we called it family out evening, and instead of staying home for a lesson and a treat, we would all go out together for, well, mostly treats. but togetherness is what matters, says i.

AWD and i have been trying to get in some good family-oriented routines now that we've got a family on the way, and we made a step in the right direction last night with a family out evening of our own. and even better, it could not have been more mormony: shopping for strollers and cribs at target and dinner at cafe rio.

seriously.

i guess this our life now? 

7.11

you know what makes a hot and muggy thursday a little better? (or good at all?)

a free slurpee.

oh, thank heaven.

'til we meet

it was a tuesday this year, april 23rd, that marked two years since briana passed away.

i thought for a long time about what i wanted to do to honor the day. a service project? a small gathering of friends? a donation? a big batch of lemon bars? but life caught up with me and i never really settled on anything and then there i was, sitting at the doctor's office hearing the ultrasound tech telling us that the baby we are expecting in september is a girl and i was so relieved and so happy and i started to cry and then i realized.

it was april 23rd.

i don't miss briana the way i used to, with an intense sadness that would come crashing down unexpectedly and try to stick around, and i think that is as it should be. i miss her now in the sort of way you miss a friend who pops in every once in a while but who you wish popped in more.

i wonder if she would like mumford and sons and the lumineers or what she would think of the wendy davis fillibuster or pinterest. i wish i could ask her why my attempts at her favorite shortbread recipe keep going wrong.

i have had for some time now a strong and satisfying feeling that she is busy, engaged and moving forward with her life on the other side, and that we should be doing the same here. sure, i wish she could see my belly, feel my baby kick, give me assurance and advice. but i am also learning that i can forge my own way and find my own answers. i am proud of that, and i think she is, too.

in my head i have an image of briana on the other side, getting our baby ready to come. telling her stories about me-- what kind of friend i was and what kind of mom i might be. they will never meet on this earth, but i think they are already friends.

and if, a few years down the road, it turns out that my baby can make a perfect batch of buttery, sugary shortbread, i'll know for sure.

no work, all play

our weekends and other free days have been an endless stream of cleaning and weeding and unpacking and organizing and finance-reviewing lately, and there are few things i find more demoralizing than feeling like my life has been taken over by mundane, administrative tasks. so i unilaterally named last saturday no-chore saturday. and, (un)surprisingly, received no complaints.

so, instead of what has become our boring norm, saturday was all sleeping in and homemade muffins for breakfast and more sleeping and  a day trip adventure to leesburg.

ever since i moved here i've wanted to go to old lucketts store, a magical place filled to the brim with every weird and wonderful vintage and antique thing you could ever want. it was everything i had hoped for. i walked through every room and touched almost every treasure. though i think AWD is rubbing off on me because, while i normally would have walked out of there at least with a strange bust or a couple colored mason jars-- something!-- every time i picked something up i thought, where would i put this? or, it would make the house seem too cluttered. people, this is definitely a shift. i wouldn't classify myself as a minimalist, certainly, but AWD seems to have turned my previously maximalist ways into something more middle-of-the-road. (and he couldn't be happier about it.)

i didn't walk away empty-handed from the roadside farm stands, though (corn! peaches! cherries!), and we grabbed a delicious lunch in historic downtown before heading back to washington city.

and you know what? it turned out that putting off those chores didn't matter one single bit.

take me out

the outdoors is a swimming pool lately, all heat and humidity and stickiness, and there has been a lot of unexpected rain to boot, but we braved it all for a nationals game on wednesday, and it was totally worth it.

there was a home run, a stolen base on a passed ball (one of my favorite baseball events ever, second only to a stolen base (preferably home!) on a wild pitch), a huge ice cream cone (unrelated to the play) and the nats won.

i'm a little behind, but hello summer!

bloomers

as it turns out, buying a house and then moving into it and then unpacking all your stuff and then organizing all your stuff and then deciding what new stuff you need to buy and then choosing that new stuff and then getting it delivered/set up/put together is all a pretty time consuming affair.

i have really wanted to be organized from the start this time, so i've spent a lot of time decided exactly where things should go and then putting them there. which isn't to say there aren't some things just tossed into closets to be dealt with later (like when we move out in 38 years), but i've been trying.

and it's coming along. really nicely, actually. maybe some day soon i'll show you?

one thing that we just didn't have the time or energy to tackle this year was the yard. besides the basic maintenance (AWD mowing the lawn, me purchasing and then killing some hanging plants), we haven't done much. but, as it happened, it didn't matter. because we have the most gorgeous hydrangea bushes in the front that bloomed gloriously even in the face of drought and neglect. i added a few impatiens to the window boxes and, voila! we look like we know what we're doing in the garden department.

plus, i can snip flowers from my very own bushes and enjoy them inside, too.

and that, my friends, is bliss.