November 2018 - Loving Our Messy

Happy Friday!

My goodness has this seemed like a long week. Iowa got hit with a blizzard on Sunday and our kids were pretty pumped to have a snow day on Monday. Who wouldn’t enjoy an unexpected 6-day Thanksgiving break? So basically, any chance they have gotten to be doing this:

they have been. And there are forever tiny puddles of snow everywhere in my house. Which I then step in when I’m wearing socks.

Love that.

Wet socks aside, I’m here today linking up with Erika, Narci and Andrea for a really good batch of favorites!

Officially, Advent starts this Sunday and we are more than ready for it in my house. If you are looking for a way to keep your Christmas preparation Christ centered with your family, check out this new addition to my Etsy shop.

I’m all about a good Santa focused Christmas movie or story, but it’s so important to me that our children understand and live the true meaning of our Christmas prep and celebration. My Nativity Advent Calendar Cards have 25 days of Scripture verses from December 1 through Christmas Day that tell the story of Jesus’ birth. Each card has an adorable Nativity character and a verse for the day. It comes with an optional file to print the verses on the back or you can choose to list daily activities or something else of your choice on the back.

It’s a $5 instant download in my shop. Ready to print and cut at home!

And – if you are looking for a great Advent Devotional, I loved this one last year. The reflections are short and they list optional readings you can do if you are looking for a little more each day.

I chose this one for this year. I love Max Lucado and am hoping I love this one too!

A few months ago while experiencing a lack of judgment, I promised my best friend that I would train for and run a 7 mile race this summer with her. Before babies, I loved to run and would run 7 miles on a Saturday for a good time. That was 4 children ago. But I love her. So I will run (or at least attempt to).

I’ve started running low mileages on the treadmill but needed something to help me get back into shape on my off days. One of my friends told me about fitnessblender.com and I LOVE it. They have a ton of free workouts on their website that you can filter by time, intensity, etc. and have everything from strength training to kickboxing to yoga. I’m obsessed. If you’ve been looking for an easy way to exercise in these winter months, this is an amazing option!

This was one of my favorites last year at this time and it still is! A few years ago, I found this amazing free gift app called Santa’s Bag. We typically buy for our families, teachers, etc. every year plus our older boys have birthdays right around Christmas. I struggle to keep track of what gives we have yet to plan and purchase.

This app lets you enter a budget and divide it among the people you are buying for. I even include everything for the season like birthday and Christmas gifts, Christmas cards, stocking stuffers, gifts for charities at the boy’s school, etc. You add in the gifts, cost, and what stores you plan to purchase at so you can sort your master list by any of those categories. You can even mark the status of each gift: need to buy, purchase, and wrapped and sort that by list too! The app is free (with an optional choice to upgrade to save all gifts from year to year) and I have not found a better way to track gifts! I just love it!

This weekend during our snowstorm, I was trying to encourage our second grader to spend some time reading. He sat down with his book and I grabbed One Beautiful Dream off my waiting to read stack to sit with him. We read for 20 minutes and then I could not stop. I haven’t finished a book in only two days since the last Harry Potter book way back in the day. (That brings you back doesn’t it?) It was amazing. You know those books that just speak to your soul? This one did for me. Hands down the best book I have read this year.

I highly recommend for those of you who are trying to balance motherhood and all the rest you dream about for yourself- especially if it doesn’t look the way you thought it would. It was SO SO good. Anyone else a Jennifer Fulwiler fan?

Finally, Josh and I watched the newest Netflix Christmas movie this weekend and loved it. It had really cute story and Kurt Russell as Santa was perfect! If you haven’t seen it yet, you should!

Full disclosure: you may want to preview it yourself before watching with young kids. We started watching it with the boys and I ended up stopping it after a few minutes and choosing another movie. There was a bunch of Santa belief talk at the beginning (and some slight language throughout) that our kids weren’t ready for. It probably depends on the age/nature of your kiddos!

Those are my favorites this week! I hope you have a wonderful weekend!

I’m talking books today! I read four books this month and liked all of them but really LOVED one of them.

The Royal We

I heard a lot of hype about the Royal We before I read it and it had been on my ‘to read’ list forever! Even if you look at the Amazon reviews, you can see that some people call it their favorite book of all time. So I went into this one with huge expectations! But you know how they say ‘expectation leads to disappointment’ and maybe that was my problem with The Royal We. I just expected too much! I enjoyed it but I didn’t looovee it like I thought I would.

Overall the storyline was the perfect book for me. It’s about an American girl that goes to college at Oxford in England. In fairytale fashion, she meets and falls in love with the future King of England. It had a clear ‘Will and Kate’ vibe (complete with a Prince Harry character!) and all of that I loved. The story follows their relationship over several years and the difficulties of having a private relationship in the public eye. There were parts that I just really loved about the book and flew through. And then there were parts of this 496-page book that were much slower and difficult to get through. There were a lot of characters introduced as their friends that were difficult to keep straight and truthfully, I just didn’t care enough about their side stories.

I loved the American becoming a princess story and I loved all the parts about their relationship. It was clear that the authors did a ton of research into royal life and British customs. That part was super interesting to read about! It was a cute book and the last quarter of the book brought quite a twist that I did not see coming. It’s worth a read if you are a fan of the royals like I am, but just keep your expectations in check. 😉

The Cinderella Pact

Truthfully, I chose this book by accident but it was the best accident! We had stopped at the library to grab some books for the kids to read in the car on a road trip and I was looking for a different one for myself that happened to be checked out. I was running out of time so I grabbed the first one on the shelf that caught my eye. I was super lucky because The Cinderella Pact was a light, fun read that I absolutely enjoyed.

The story is about a fashion magazine editor struggling with her weight and generally unhappy with her life. She’s single, her little sister is getting married, and her job is tedious and boring. She makes a ‘Cinderella Pact’ with two of her friends with similar struggles to finally lose weight and transform their lives. When she is unable to get promoted at her job because of assumed weight discrimination, she decides to pose as a British writer from London to write an advice column for her magazine. She uses a little Photoshop on an old high school photo, a fake British accent and a lot of little white lies to secretly land the job and earn a second income. As you can imagine, the lie takes on a life of its own and snowballs into a big complicated, hysterical mess when she is asked to appear in person to meet with the magazine’s owner.

I thought this book was adorable and written in a way that was completely relatable and full of humor! I wanted a book that wasn’t super serious and this was just that. Fun, cute and I would absolutely recommend.

Summer House

Hands down, the best book I read this month. This was my first Nancy Thayer book and no way will it be my last. I absolutely loved it.

It told 3 separate stories of women from different generations from the same family. It follows Charlotte, a single woman in her twenties looking for her own path, her mother (who is struggling in her marriage and finding her way now that her kids are grown) and Charlotte’s 90-year-old grandmother looking back on the life she has lived. They all belong to a giant family that has always spent their summers together at the family home in Nantucket. As always when you get a bunch of family together, their summer is full of secrets, miscommunications, and lots of complicated family issues.

I loved this book! At first, I thought it was going to be a predictable story but I was happily surprised! As the author switched between the stories of the 3 women, I kept getting wrapped up and wanting more of each! It’s a cute, quick read that was totally worth it!

The Power of Habit

I should say that I went into this book thinking that it was about how to create/change habits in a step-by-step kind of way. I thought it was going to tell me why my habits were bad and give clear instructions on how to change them. That was not exactly what this book was about even though I ended up really enjoying it.

The book was written more like a textbook – citing studies and examining data to explain how habits are formed and the golden rule of how they can be changed. They used real-life examples like Starbucks, Target, Tony Dungy (coach of the Indianapolis Colts) and Michael Phelps which I found completely fascinating. It was easy to read and I really did learn so much about habits which has made me look at everything differently. The book explains the basic idea of how habits need to be changed and it’s up to you to examine your own life and see if you can dissect your own habits and apply these things to change them.

If you haven’t read it – I definitely recommend it. It has changed the way I look at my routines and daily life!

These 4 books on the bottom are in my ‘waiting to read’ stack and I’m excited to dive in!