Hello! I'll do a family update this week. Alice is hesitantly enjoying her newfound walking ability. She always wants to be walking around the house, but mostly only if she can hold onto one of my fingers while she does it. She's constantly reaching for my finger to get me to take her on a walk around the house. As long as I can listen to a podcast, I am enjoying this baby-walker stage of my career.
Alice is officially down to one nap a day--full stop. When Jack was a baby he toggled between one and two naps for several weeks before the one-nap schedule stuck, but Alice really landed on one nap last week and isn't going back. This is inconvenient timing since our church is now at 10:30 and she usually goes down for her nap around then. She is extremely wiggly and grumpy by the time primary comes around if we skip that morning nap (making it extra challenging for us to teach). So yesterday we put her down for a 30-minute catnap before church, hoping she would take an additional nap after church. Nope. Couldn't do the second nap and it was a rough afternoon. So for future Sundays we'll just keep her up until after church. We only need to make it through two more months until nursery.
Jack had many days of cancelled school last week. Monday was MLK day, Tuesday was a snow day, Wednesday was a half school day, and Thursday there was a burst pipe and school was cancelled. Combined with Alice abandoning her second nap, I felt like I was really white-knuckling my way through the week. I'd better have a good plan in place for getting through summer. I wish we lived in a neighborhood with lots of kids around Jack's age for him to run outside and play with. I'm seriously considering driving to Utah for a month of summer so he can play with the good neighborhood kids and cousins there. My other plan for surviving summer is going into it with lowwwww expectations. I'm going to do my best to abandon all hopes of productivity, and instead focus on fun PNW summer adventures--enjoying time with the kids instead of pining after my to-do list that I'll realistically never get to sink my teeth into over the summer.
Jared has been practicing his oil painting. I'm proud of him--he's wanted to pursue this for a decade and now is his time. I love watching him jump into something he enjoys in the evenings. After he gets better I'd love for him to teach me some basics, but for now I'm enjoying diving into my own interests while he's painting. I've learned over the past decade that I am my happiest self when I'm learning something new and doing something creatively fulfilling (which is why I'm so excited to watch Jared take up a creative hobby!).
For now my "thing" is listening to the Dear Alice design podcast and jotting down notes while I do little home projects like putting up a gallery wall of family pictures. You'd think that would be a one-day project, but it's been tricky. I started out with a wall of thrifted frames I've collected over the past few years. It took me hours and hours to arrange and put it up, but unfortunately it still came out looking off. I like the idea of a gallery wall of all different frames, but something's just not working. I'm leaning toward trying simple black frames and cardstock mats that I'll wrap in bits of linen cut from a fitted linen sheet I recently wore a hole through. I've already redone one frame this way and I love it. It feels very "me" and unique with the linen mats, but I like the uniformity of all black frames. It'll probably take several more weeks to decide on or thrift more black frames and then make the mats. Good thing I like a creative project. For now I'm leaving the gallery wall up so we can enjoy the pictures.
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