This week’s newest thing has been swimming. We’re enjoying really warm days here and a little bit lighter of a load. I’ve been working on cleaning out a room, but it seems while I do that, I let the rest of the house go and so the scale remains imbalance. Will I ever have a completely clean house? I’m kinda feeling that probably won’t happen. Oh well. The mess stress will always be there in some way so maybe I just need to get out of the house more to forget about it! HA! Out of sight, out of mind, right?!

This week’s learned, links, and thankfulness…

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One night, True, Brave, and Soul were up late just chatting away in their room. It was dark and all we could hear was little voices and giggles. It’s adorable! They will make many memories together in that little room.

Thankful for our babysitter who comes to help out when I need her (thanks Steph!)! I get so much done when she’s here.

Thankful the girls warmed up to swimming on their second lesson. Whew!

Pray for my sister, she injured her back in a major way and when you’re a dancer, that’s no bueno.

Hello Camp Comfort is always a fave.

Beth’s growing her business and Salvage Life is moving. I can’t wait to see how her business will grow!

I love this vintage jewelry shop on etsy. I’m not in particular need of anything, but it’s just fun to see all the beautiful pieces that stream in. All of them are really gorgeous one of a kind pieces!

Thankful for a very creative husband. He’s been giving me surprises lately and I love them all. Apparently, I get more later today.

We’re planning a trip to Napa in a couple months. I’m so excited!

Enjoy your weekend friends! I have a couple parties to go to, but apparently Ben and the girls have more surprises when I get home tonight. Yippee!!!

Chicken Piccata. We had all the ingredients, so this was an easy thing to whip up. I didn’t use as much butter as the recipe called for and I would quadruple the recipe for the sauce and I just used the .

Broccoli Chickpea Puree and Parsley Hummus with pita bread. This was our quickie dinner after swim class. I didn’t have tahini, so I worked with sesame oil. I definitely need tahini next time. The girls ate it all up, but I wasn’t wild about it. Maybe it would have tasted better with tahini. We’ll see. I’ll get some and try making it again.

This was the last time I meal planned. For awhile in December, Ben was home and just doing it and then my MIL came into town and was cooking up wonderful things for us (migas and fries… oh my!) and we’ve had a lot of quickie Trader Joe stuff in between and I’ll do a meal here, a meal there, but no real meal planning. I’ve totally missed it. If we don’t meal plan, our lunches are kinda eh because we don’t have any good leftovers to eat. So here we are again, well into the new year and picking it back up.

Our meal plans will change slightly because the girls have swim classes twice a week now in the evenings, so we’re thinking quick meals that we can take to the park and have a picnic after swimming. I experimented with hummus for one of the swim nights and I might want to try hummus wraps too. I need ideas for meals that are healthy, quick, and easy to grab and go. If you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them! Or maybe I need to try crock potting.

Week 3/18 – 3/22
Monday: Spring rolls (need to find a recipe)
Tuesday: Crunchy Pork Kimchi Burgers (will probably use ground turkey)
Wednesday: Leftovers
Thursday: Cold Soba Salad with Shiitake Dressing
Friday: Tuna Poke (reader’s recipe from Jozen, so will feature that the week after)

It feels good to get this list down. It gets me mentally prepared for the coming week and I love knowing what to cook instead of trying to figure it out right before a meal. It’s probably not a good idea to plan this out while I’m hungry (because I really am right now), but I’m already excited for next week’s dinners.

We, more like Ben, mostly planted bare root trees for our backyard orchard. Not only that, he chose mini or dwarf sized, so that we would be able to plant multiple trees in one hole following the Dave Wilson style of backyard orchard cultures. The ones pictured here aren’t even all the trees Ben has planted. This was done back in January (I’m slow in blogging this), some of them even have leaves growing now and are starting to look like more than just sticks in the ground.

Since we didn’t plant the trees in the ground right away, Ben decided to heel-in the trees. This is done to help the trees maintain dormancy for a longer period of time and to protect it from ground frost. We left it like this for several days until he had more time to actually dig the holes for the trees.

It’s pretty crazy how much goes into planning this out. Ben has spent countless hours reading and researching about the best way to do this. We laugh about this, but most things he reads recommend starting small. I don’t think Ben really heeded that advice and it seems his motto is “Go big or go home.” I definitely think having about 30 trees is go big. We’re totally learning every season about how to do something better and what we did wrong. Even with all the research he’s done, there’s always a way to improve. Next post, I will list out everything we’re planting, but since Ben’s the one in the know of all of that, he’ll probably have to write the next post. I’d bug him about it now, but he’s downstairs working on a surprise. I like surprises, so I don’t want to disturb him.

Have any of you heeled-in bare root trees before? This is totally something new to me, so I was totally intrigued when Ben was doing it. Read part 1 of how our backyard orchard culture started.

So I was cleaning this (crazy) room today and was coming across all sorts of memories. There were notes from when we were dating, cards from when we just got married, and letters and handmade things from when we just had two little babies (True and Brave), and there were lots of and lots of old pictures. These two particular snapshots feel like ages ago.

The above photo is from when we barely started dating. It was June and we had only been “officially” dating for a month when he took me home to spend time with his family in San Antonio. I was barely 20 and he was was 27, there were so many butterflies and a lot of flirting. Lots. It was on that trip to visit his family that I knew I loved him. Just watching him interact with his parents and his sister made me fall for this guy even more. I remember one night when he tucked me in bed before he went to his own room, I told him, “I’m enamored with you.” He tells me later that when he got to his room, he looked that word up in the dictionary, and then couldn’t sleep. I was seriously enamored. Still am.

The next picture was a year later when he went on a weekend trip to Palm Springs with my family. I don’t remember much from the trip except that when we out during the day, he’d stay in the hotel to study. He was in grad school the whole time we were dating, so our 3 years of dating (and first year of marriage) involved a lot of study dates.

We definitely have the look of young love in those pictures. Now, it’s about 10 years later and I’m hoping we still have the look of love, but it’s obviously a bit more mature and with 4 kids thrown in the mix, we probably look more like crazy love. Yup. Crazy love is probably more like it. Anyways, I loved how my cleaning took me down a trip through memory lane. I always love remembering the beginning stories of Ben and me.

If you ever heard me tell it in person, you’d think I was crazy for how head over heels I was from the moment I met him. I know we started writing our “little love story” a few years ago and never finished. We should really get on that for recording memory’s sake, but when we keep adding to our brood, it gets harder to keep up with certain things. If you want to read what we have up so far, you can check this post out (and there are links to other parts on the bottom). Maybe we can eventually get back to finishing that someday.

Since we’re on the topic of love, a reader, Eunie, emailed me sharing her story and it was so sweet. I watched the video of her engagement and got all teary. Ben had a really good and surprising proposal, so I love when a guy dips into his creativity to bust out something wonderful for the woman he loves. Eunie and her fiance, Eddie, are entered in a contest to win a couture wedding dress, bridesmaid dresses, groomsmen tuxedos, shoes, as well as a professional videographer! We all know that weddings can be pretty costly these days and these two seem so sweet that I wanted to share it with all of you. Seriously, watching the proposal video will make you smile and if you feel so inclined, I’m sure they would appreciate your votes over here! You can also check out their engagement sweet and simple engagement photos here (and her booties are fabulous!). I’ve always been thankful for when you all have cast your vote in for me for some sort of contest and I would love it if we could help out this sweet couple. Check out their story and cast your votes here! They’re in 4th place, but let’s get them to the top (it ends on friday)! Thanks friends!

Sunday afternoon we went hunting for Camellias. I had horrendous allergies attacking me, but still we forged on and went to a nursery. When there’s a will, there’s a way. I went out to look for some on Saturday, but didn’t find what I was looking for and we hit the jackpot on Sunday and ended up buying not only 1, but 2 large Camellias. There were so large (15 gallon containers) in fact, that we had to literally stuff them in our car. I think the gentleman who stuffed them in thought we were crazy and scurried from our car as quick as possible because he didn’t want to be responsible if any mishap should happen to our car or our plants.

We had a blanket that draped between Glow and the plants that prevented her from pulling and chomping on the plants, and thankfully, she fell asleep on the car ride home. The plants were probably mostly up in Soul’s grill, and as we were driving she said, in her cute little Soulie voice, “Mommy, Papi, I can’t see Glowy!” Ben and I just started laughing because besides not being able to see Glow, the plants were literally pretty much covering her from seeing anything. I think this moment will be one of those that the girls will make fun of us for one day. We have a Toyota Highlander, so while it fits our family of 6, it is a tight squeeze, and then we made it even tighter with our large plants!

And don’t you just love how True, Brave, and Soul dress themselves?! Now, I personally wouldn’t have worn leopard pants with that dress, but when Soul put them on, I wasn’t going to contest it. I’m learning everyday, albeit a little slowly, to just go with the flow and relax. And yes, that’s Brave rockin’ that 80’s ponytail. Don’t really know where she learned that from, but that’s her new thing. Speaking of new thing, Lisa Leonard sent me this pretty necklace. I’m so jazzed that she now offers beautiful gold and brass jewelry along with her pretty silver pieces.

It was such a gorgeous day to be out looking for flowers and then spend the rest of the day gardening, even if my allergies were raging. I’ve been reading up on plant care for my Camellias (we use this book as a guide), but if any of you have any experience with those gorgeous flowers, please do share! I want to make sure these thrive so they can be enjoyed for many years to come.

on me: top, thrifted. trousers, vintage from viral threads. necklace, c/o lisa leonard. shoes, anthropologie. on all the girls: mostly misha lulu mixed in with vintage, with little bit of american apparel and soulie’s moccs c/o freshlypicked.

I always mean to get this post up on Friday or Saturday, but never get to.

This week’s learned, links, and thankfulness…

Glow’s okay, but she will need surgery for her tongue. She will have surgery in April and they will have to cut away the scar tissue, then use several stitches to put her tongue back together. We’re thanking God there’s a solution, but I’m still nervous for my baby.

I had such bad allergies all day yesterday that Ben gave me benadryl last night and man oh man. I could not wake up this morning. I woke up to work out (at 6am) and 15 minutes in, I couldn’t hang and was falling asleep, so I went back to bed and didn’t wake up until 9am!

Brave’s totally into the side ponytail these days. She’s an 80’s girl.

This is a big milestone. Glow started sleeping in her own room (well, she shares with Soulie, but Soulie sleeps with the big girls right now). This will sound funny, but she had been sleeping in our closet (it’s a fairly good size walk in) and I just didn’t want to take the baby out of our room. She’s my baby!!! It was time though and I miss having her right there, but this is good for her (and us). It was a very hard step for this mama.

Ben surprised me with some gardening boots! But they’re a size too big so we have to exchange them, but I love them.

I love being out in the garden and so thankful for the time out there all day on Saturday. I have been pinning garden ideas like crazy!

The girls start swim classes today and they are so excited!

This is totally late, but honored to be named as one of Babble’s T0p 50 Mom Craft Blogs. It’s a great list with a lot of my favorite online people. I always appreciate the time you take to visit here. I really do!

Thankful for reminders from friends that I need to reflect God in whatever situation I am put in. I fail miserably at that.

Be back later with another post. It’s hard to be out the computer these days (hence my lack of posting) when all I want to do is go outside and garden. The girls have totally been loving the warm days and sit outside and play for hours. Later this week we’re support to hit the 90’s, so it looks like we will be enjoying the sun a lot more these days.