Saturday, September 2, 2017

It's been awhile



September is here and it feels like the summer blew by.  Not because we were any busier than usual, it was one of our more relaxing summers but I guess everything goes faster as you get older.  


We didn't take our normal big family vacation this summer.  Since we went to London & Paris earlier in the year, we decided to just do a Colorado trip to visit Josh's family and then go up to Estes Park.  The trip ended early due to a horrible hotel experience, an episode of car sickness, and rainy weather.  The highlight for me was the day we spent in Boulder doing some shopping and taking a tour of the Celestial Seasonings Tea Factory.  Celestial Seasonings isn't my favorite but I still love all tea.  And who can resist the cute bear mascot?



It also was the summer of weddings.  I do love a good wedding and one of them was a friend's Star Wars themed wedding.  Josh was in heaven and planned months in advance for his costume.  He now also has something to wear to the opening of the next Star Wars wedding.  It really was a neat wedding.  The other was more traditional style wedding and both Josh and Tori got plenty of dancing in that night (see first pic).



Penny celebrated her 10th birthday in August.  Grandma hosted a Unicorn Trampoline Park party. This was the first year that Penny has actually been able to be in touch with friends over the summer so we were able to have a "friend" party and it seems she had a great birthday.  She also managed to top off her Nintendo Switch savings and have enough to go buy herself a Nintendo Switch.  We have 3 in my house now...sigh.


We did spend some time swimming this summer both at my sister's pool in KC and at the YMCA. While in KC we also hit a up cookie dough stand to try out the cookie dough craze... it was really good and I cheated for it. The girls did the Girls Who Rock Camp for a week and they both loved it.  They played a rock concert at Central Standard Brewing.  I really love how empowering this program is for young girls.


Speaking of music now not only do I have a guitar player I now have a drummer.  Penny finally decided on playing the drums and started lessons a few weeks ago.  We new she was naturally inclined to play the drums because she has always had such a good sense of rhythm.  Tori also upgraded her acoustic guitar to a new electric guitar.  She played bass guitar during rock camp and although she had fun, she decided that she would rather stay with lead guitar on electric.  We ended up keeping her acoustic which now hangs on her bedroom wall. 




Also to celebrate Josh's birthday this year we all got tickets to see Sir Paul McCartney.  The girls are as big of Beatles fans as we are.  The concert was awesome and there was plenty of singing by all of us. 



We redid Penny's room.  She has wanted a cupcake wall for awhile and I figured how to make that happen.  Also she desperately needed a better desk space that she could use for all her arts & crafts as well as working on the computer.  I sought out an Ikea hack that worked out great.  Here is the sneak peak but I plan to do a more involved post about her room later.

I have been working from home almost 100% these days which has been nice.  I get so much more done and life is just more balanced.  I am getting ready to go into a period of travel for work over the next month.  I will be spending a week in Minneapolis, a week in San Francisco, and a week in Bangalore, India.  The India trip is a big one that will take two weekends up in order to travel the 20 hours each way.  My connection is through London... who would have thought I would be in London twice in one year?  My only hope is that I have time to hit up M&S Food in my short layover!

I did take a break from keto the month of July but have been back since the first of August.  I feel like my body isn't adapting as easily as it has in the past.  Unfortunately it is gong to be difficult to stay keto with all the travel.  I'm not worried about Minneapolis or San Francisco but India just isn't going to happen. I love Indian food so I want to eat the carbs but also, it would be difficult to seek out foods that are't made with rice or potatoes.  I am looking forward to the chai though. I can only imagine how yummy it is in India.

Josh & I have also started on our goal to get tattoos that we have been wanting.  He went first.  We spent 5 hours a couple of weeks ago and he has about 2-3 hours left to go to complete his.  It is rather large and includes a silhouette of the girls faces with scenes in each one that are special to each daughter.