Remember all the complaining about the weather back in the early part of spring? Well now that we are 2/3 of the way through the spring season, it has finally decided to arrive this week. But we did have a few really beautifully mild days in the beginning of April that we took great advantage of with the children. It was precisely the second weekend in April when we experienced warmer temperatures (around 70˚F / 21˚C) and ventured out for some outdoor family activities. This week is the first week that we are seeing these temperatures with daily consistency and I am so ready to bare my painted toes! But…

Mother’s Day is one of those holidays that has a tendency to just pass me by. After my mother passed away in 2006, the next few Mother’s Days just sort of made me sad and so I ignored the holiday altogether. Then I became a mother myself just before Mother’s Day in 2011. But still, I felt indifferent at best to this annual celebration of mothers. I still don’t make any fuss about the day nor do I really want much of a fuss made about me on Mother’s Day (although I joke and tell Jeff all day long that the day is about me)! But every once in while…

I know it is the very end of April and you are probably thinking I should be less layered up. But let’s face it, it will not be warm enough here for true spring fashions until June at the earliest. In fact, just this morning my weather app was predicting snow flurries again this weekend…when the calendar flips to May. So bear with me for a few weeks longer and I will start to show a little more skin…it will be very pale pasty white skin, but a little exposure to the sun will do my translucent epidermis a world of good! Until then, however, I have been combining some…

I am back after a relaxing and productive holiday weekend and I wanted to share a bit of our Easter activities with you. We are not a religious family and so we do not plan much for the Easter holiday. Instead, we view it as an opportunity to spend some family time celebrating the hopefulness that comes with the arrival of spring. The day began for the boys with a little sweet treat and some cash to spend on video games. I also had promised them that we would try Dee’s Coke with Peanuts so I figured that would be a nice Easter surprise as well. We tried the Coke…

I spotted this new graffiti art the other day and it immediately caught my attention as I nodded my head in agreement. Indeed, it is okay to be sad. I have felt more sadness in the past year than I have felt in probably the past 10 years combined. And I kept fighting against it so much that I was fueling its power. Instead of taking my own advice that all of our feelings, even the negative ones, are valid and deserve to be recognized. But then I quickly remembered that I am feeling very much the opposite of sad these days…since Spring has finally arrived and is breathing new…