A good Thursday to you all! I am just back from our massive road trip this month and still getting settled and caught up on laundry and grocery shopping. Not much interesting, but I do find a new energy and happiness to tackle the mundane things after a break. Don’t you?
General Life
To celebrate for this month:
4th of July is always a great celebration!
This was our last birthday of the season here. I have a newly stamped 1st grader now! I only have one more young one left after him. It’s exciting to have my big family growing up.
Something to let go of:
But it is also a little sad too, having all my littles getting bigger every day. I love the freedom that comes with older kids, but it’s a bittersweet thing not to be needed as much.
Traveling
We took a couple of trips this month. This is unusual for us, since we haven’t done any big trips in a while. But as mentioned above, bigger kids mean new freedoms. The ability to plan longer trips is one of the perks! :)
We met our best friend family at Gettysberg and there was much rejoicing! The day was super hot and we had car troubles getting there, but all in all a very good day for us. Seeing friends was maybe the best part!
We also took a 9 day Road Trip to South Dakota for a family reunion on my father’s side of the family. I think of this trip in Title Letters because it was massive. We drove a total of 3400, with all six of our kids, in a Wagoneer. I admit I had a lot of doubts as to how it would go and if we would survive. But, happily, they did survive, and we survived, AND everyone had fun too! Again, kids getting older brings unexpected blessings. We drove 4 days there, then spent two wonderful, magical, unplugged days at the reunion. Many members of this family hadn’t even met my kids, so it was fantastic to introduce them to everyone. I loved seeing them playing on farm equipment I used to play on as a kid. We talked and laughed and played games. It was truly lovely. Then 3 more days back in the car and we were home again!
It also was wonderful to feel like coming home to this new place was really coming home. We were all excited to see the Parsonage again, and that was good too!
Gardening
Because of all our trips, not much happened here in the garden. Happily, nothing died either. And I even got to come home to this beauty:
Isn’t she pretty?!
Reading
I reread To Kill A Mockingbird with the
. I wrote about it a bit last month, so I won’t report on it again. The next book hit a little too close to home for me, so I decided to skip it. Sometimes, when a book gets too close I have to put it down and wait for another time to read it. This was one of those.I’ve also joined a local-ish Well-Read Mom group, and we read Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek together. This book has been on my TBR list for years and I was glad to have a reason to read it. Many many people I ‘listen’ to online have loved this book, but it was a bit of a miss for me. I think I was expecting it to be fiction, but instead, it’s an intense philosophical, theological, and nature observation book. Not what I was expecting, and I think that’s what made me feel off about it.
I finished another Everyman Library’s Pocket Poet book, this one of Emily Bronte’s poetry. I have been on the hunt for an anthology of her work for a few years and when I saw my new favorite edition had one, I jumped for joy (just inside though. ;) ).
On the Road Trip, I also finished Moby Dick! This was super exciting as we had started it as a read-aloud for school last year, but we couldn’t get it done by the end of the year. So I set the goal of finishing it up on the trip, which I did! Even though this was a tougher read for me, I’m still so glad I read it. My kids and I love to read books together and have catchphrases and common imagery to refer to. Inside jokes are always a delight in a bookish family.
Art
I deliberately made myself do art this month. I participated in #junkjournaljuly2024 on Instagram and it was one of the best choices I made for myself this month. I don’t normally love challenges, as I feel like they can become busywork and distract my limited energies, but I know summer is often a dead zone for me creatively, so a time-limited challenge was just the thing! Below is a video flip-through of the whole journal.
The Road Trip also gave me an opportunity to dust off my old travel journal skills. All my kids kept one, though only the older ones really used them well. Below is my video flip-through of that journal as well.
Wrap-Up
In August, school starts again for us. We want to squeeze as many slow summer days in as we can. Then the routine will begin again, something I love after a break. As I said above, taking a break can make the regular mundane things new and fresh again. Thanks for reading and happy summer to you all!