Happy first week of school! Alas, it is time. Jack was not excited about school starting soon, until we met his teacher and learned that his best school friend will be in his class. Now he is officially over summer and excited to get started. Alice isn't quite as excited, but she is going to do one day of creative dance class at her school, before class starts, each week. I got lucky that it starts on her first day of school, so that is overshadowing the preschool part and she will be really excited to go to her first dance class.
Over the weekend we snuck in a trip to Jared's extended family Bear Lake cabin. We realized we hadn't gone at all this summer and it was the last weekend before school, so we made a quick, spontaneous drive up there. The weather was starting to feel ever-so-slightly crisp, and it was a wonderful transition out of summer break. I think we may make that a yearly end-of-summer tradition.
Our backyard is at the finish line! At least for this year. There will be future phases to finish the top level and the other half of our patio, but those are on hold for a few years. Our landscape team is done with everything except for the last stretch of fence, which has been ordered (phew--we were getting nervous they would leave us high and dry since the pace was so slow this last month). Did they do a great job? Eh . . . Did they leave plenty of loose ends that they won't be coming to tie up? Absolutely. But most of them are things we can do ourselves (add gravel to the planter beds, paint over the concrete they splattered onto our house). It was like pulling teeth getting them to do anything at the end, so at this point we are happy to have them out of the backyard so we can put out patio furniture and enjoy it. They say you can't have fast, cheap, and good with landscaping. We did get cheap though, and after putting down a big downpayment for our home last year, cheap is what we needed this time around. It is a great and functional backyard, and it isn't perfect but we are sure going to enjoy it. All's well that ends well, hopefully.
Let's do some pictures from our week now:
School is just around the corner for the kids, and they are equal parts ready, and lashing out in anxiety about it. Neat! I am really excited to see what kind of person I'll be when both kids are in school. With Alice's nap gone and Jared's work hours extending til bedtime, this has been the summer of no free time. Alice's preschool will just be 2 hours, but I am beyond excited to have those hours to replace her extinct naps.
Our landscaping seems to be on pause, but my brothers and parents came over on Saturday evening to help us install the park strip landscaping in front of our house. I'm so grateful they came to help, and it looks great!
Last week Jared was out of the country and I was having a solo parenting extravaganza! Hence the missed post, sorry. The timing worked out well--my brother was visiting from Idaho with his kids, and so the kids and I played hard with cousins to stay distracted. It was our busiest and most exhausting summer week yet, but it was a lot of fun. I don't have pictures from Jack going on the annual overnight backpacking trip with grandpa+cousins (I stayed back with Alice, so my brother Jordan took Jack on because he is a real one). But I have pictures from a lot of the other stuff. Too many pictures, probably. Let's get to it:
We've hit the twilight zone of summer. There have been lots of meltdowns this week about, I couldn't even tell you what about. It was a bit of a white-knuckler of a week to make it to Friday, but we made it. I'm going to be mixing some things up this week, including less screen time and more cousin time. We'll see how it goes. For today's post I think I'll share some random things that have been working for me lately:
1. Magnesium. Whoooo, starting out strong! I used to wake up at least once or twice a night. I figured I probably needed to go to the bathroom, and maybe this was just a part of being in my 30s. I had heard people claim that magnesium helped their sleep quality, but I tried it once or twice before and didn't notice much difference. Then a month or two ago, I started nightly magnesium per my cardiologist's recommendation for overall brain+heart health for my POTS diagnosis. And now a month later I've realized that I rarely wake up at night anymore.
2. Bidet seat attachment. This was on my Christmas wish list last year and I must have been a good gurl because Santa brought me one😂 It's just a simple one that attaches to your current toilet seat. The seat isn't heated, and the water isn't heated either so it took a little getting used to, but 7 months later I can say it was a worthwhile investment and I will never go back. What a fun list so far!
3. Mail sorter + cafe curtain. One of my biggest pain points in keeping a clean house in the past has always been the paper clutter. Paper would accumulate in little piles everywhere. In our Washington home my solution was to corral it in a basket on top of our piano and sort through it when it got full. That wasn't a great solution because some papers can be out of sight, but some have to stay somewhat accessible, and the sorting process took a long time. So when I knew we were moving into our forever home, I bought a mail sorter the exact dimensions of the area above our counter but below the upper cabinets in the "command center" portion of our kitchen. It has 12 slots to put different categories of paper in, and I labeled them all--things like Jack Art, Alice Art, Jack School, Medical, Magazines, Documents, Home Design, etc. There is a slot for everything now. I would recommend looking for one on Wayfair because they have a filter where you can insert the exact dimensions you need your item to be. This system has kept random piles of paper clutter from accumulating on every surface in our home. Because the mail sorter is right in our kitchen, I decided to hang a tension rod in front of it and hang little cafe curtains so I could hide it when we're having people over. Now it's cute!
4. Quercetin bromelain (for allergies). I've never been a supplement girlie, but I guess I am now. I came across a recommendation for Quercetin from a blogger who was wildly allergic to cats, but after taking Quercetin for a while her cat allergy disappeared completely. She said she had heard it works for seasonal allergies too. Seeing as I'm allergic to 58 common household and seasonal allergens, I figured I had nothing to lose. Last year's allergy season was brutal on me, so I started Quercetin in the springtime (I just bought one on Amazon). This year's allergy season for me has been my mildest ever, and I credit the daily Quercetin w/ bromelain. You have to take it daily for a week before you can really judge if it's working, but for me it has worked better than any allergy medicine in the past, and without the drowsy side effects.
5. Candle Warmer to keep my morning drink warm. With POTS, my morning wakeup can be brutal. I try and wake up at least half an hour before the kids so I can take my first electrolyte supplement of the day with a ton of water and give it some time to work. Jared often leaves a cup of Perk (a caffeinated hot chocolate I like) on my bedside table for when I wake up, because he is a real one. Jared leaves before anyone wakes up so it would get cold by the time I woke up. Rather than having him switch to an insulated cup or self-heating mug, I put our candle warmer that I never use on my bedside table, and now it keeps my morning drink at the perfect temperature for when I wake up. This has me feeling like Michael Scott in the bacon episode, but I stand by it.
6. Fidget Anklet. I'm a picker. I never had this problem when we lived in humid Washington, but when we moved to Utah I started to get really cracked heels. I found myself picking at them if I was watching a show or doing something mindless like that. When Jack was having problems with biting has nails and chewing on his shirt collar, I bought him a fidget chew necklace to keep his teeth otherwise occupied, and that did the trick. So I decided to get a fidget bracelet that I could wear as an anklet, to try and solve my mindless heel picking problem. Found a cute one on Etsy, and it's been doing the trick! That one's extremely niche, but if you have a nail-biter or hair picker or shirt chewer in your life, maybe a cute Etsy fidget bracelet is worth looking into.
And those are 6 highly specific and random things that are working for me lately. Oh! We spent a day at Splash Summit water park as a family this week. It was fun to compare to our Splash Summit trip last summer, which was also really fun, but this year each of the kids can do more than they could last year. It's a fun barometer of how much the kids are leveling up year by year, and who doesn't love a waterpark? It was a good time. Now for the pictures from our week:
