Friday Favorites

Happy Friday, friends! I hope it’s been a great week for you. It was another hot one over here and we had a lot we were working on outside of our house. Go figure. We’re off on another camping trip and enjoying some fun family Airstream adventures. You guys, this campsite is something else. In a good way. So many things to do here. I’m looking forward to sharing more with you. We aren’t off the grid by any means. There aren’t a ton of places around here to do that, and most won’t let you camp there, but we have fun anyway. In case you haven’t noticed, we like to pack it in with all the adventures and travels when we can.

Here’s a look at some of my favorites from the week…

I skipped out on my favorites last week since I was in Chicago with my sister visiting our brother, but I did share more about our adorable fur baby, Hoppy. If you’ve been following along over here for a while then you know this has become a yearly tradition for my sister and I. We love visiting Chicago and always end up doing so many fun things. My brother, who also runs Reel Life Fishing, is obviously into fishing. Luckily my sister and I also enjoy fishing so we always hit up a local lake to see what we can all catch. This time around, we rented a boat at a lake closer to Iowa and spent a day on the water. We all caught something which made it a great day all around. After our fishing excursion, we ate and drank our way around Chicago. We found some of the cutest spots and enjoyed some local favorites. I’m hoping to put together a post about some of the places we stopped at because you all were loving them on my stories. For now, if you’re in the area check out Eli’s Ark for a sweet treat.

The boys have been keeping me on my toes this week. I might have raised my voice more than I would like to admit, but I’m continuing to work on grace and having those teachable moments for both myself and them. Most of the times they are a lot of fun and well behaved, and I am so thankful to have this time at home with them, but like most kids, when there’s idle time they get antsy and start getting at each other. Unfortunately this makes it extremely hard for me to get things done when I’m constantly correcting them or them needing my focus and attention. Blogging becomes almost impossible. But I do what I can. I don’t get too caught up on the house being perfect (thank God for my Roomba) or pushing out content just to say I have a post up. It’s a give and take, and that’s what this summer has been about for us.

I know that a lot of you are Friday visitors around here and I never did get a chance to highlight baby C’s dedication. In case you missed that post, we had a beautiful extremely hot day of precious celebrations and honoring our commitment to raising our boys with a faith filled foundation.

Where are my amazon friends at? I think most of us can agree that amazon has been on point lately with just about everything. It’s hard to beat the convenience, easy returns, and large selection. I still enjoy supporting local and small businesses when I can, but for things that I need quick or need to stay on a certain budget, I can usually find a good option here. I shared some of my recent purchases and favorite finds.

Ok, onto the sunflowers. I hate to keep sounding like a broken record or making it seem like I’m pushing my insta stories, but in all honesty, if you aren’t watching them you’re missing a lot. I’ll have people message me for different things or say, oh wait, I didn’t even know you had a rabbit, or a hedgehog, etc. Wellll, if you watch my stories then you would know 🙂 Soooo, if you watched my stories then you probably saw that I planted almost a 100 sunflowers this week and broke in my new Hunter boots to start my little sunflower patch. We are in the very beginning stages of getting our land to how we would like it to be. In case you’re new around here (or miss out on my stories, sorry I couldn’t resist 😉 we have a little over 28 acres that we’re working with. A lot of it is wooded so we’d like to clear some out over time. We had the chance to start clearing a bit so I wanted to take advantage of it. I have always loved sunflowers and thought it would be fun to have a sunflower field. That will happen over time, but not this year. It’s way too late to plant seeds and have those big beautiful ones that I envision. So we settled on smaller seedlings to enjoy for now. We actually decided to plant some pumpkins, too. Let’s hope our days of not having much of a green thumb are over and these actually do somewhat well. I already can’t wait until next spring when we can have more time, experience, and a better idea of how we want it to look. We’ll consider this a practice round and hope for the best. Any green thumb pointers are always welcome around here.