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…a little annoyed at Spotify. What is up with playing these awful HIP HOP ad things right in the middle of my sleepy Baby Einstein playlist?!? Pick something a little more soothing, PLEASE. Ain’t no one falling asleep with that kind of stuff coming out of the speakers.

…drinking a coconut water, fruit juice, and sparkling water concoction. Coconut water is sorta like nature’s version of a gatorade, full of good-for-you goodness, but I can’t easily drink it on it’s own. So I like to mix equal parts coconut water and sparkling water and then add either some fruit juice (orange, grapefruit, etc.) or some lemon and honey. It’s a perfect afternoon refresher!

…majorly craving a beach vacation. Sometimes I can just feel that sunshine and salty air and sticky sand. We’re hoping to take a little family vacation to either the South Carolina or Florida coast this fall sometime, and I can’t wait! #isitfallyet

…mentally packing up my house. We move in less than a month (!!!) and I feel like I should be doing something to pack up…but basically the only thing left to pack up is things we will use up until we actually move. It’s surreal to think about relocating to a brand new city, and sometimes it feels a little overwhelming…setting up in a new house, finding a new church, making new friends. But we’re excited and it really does feel like the right thing for our little family.

…a part of a ladies Bible study where we’ve been going through the book Me, Myself, and Lies by Jennifer Rothschild. The study focuses on identifying and cleaning out the things in our mind that don’t belong…like the lies we believe and the negative self-talk we so easily give ourselves. We’ve been doing the study for four weeks now, and even though I still have yet to receive my book, the teaching videos we watch each time and the discussions afterwards have been so good. I can’t wait to get my book and dig into it more!

…giving my nails a break from polish. I always notice that if I go too long with keeping polish on my fingernails, my nails start to get brittle and unhealthy. I love wearing polish, but every few weeks I give it a break for a while. But I’m itching to get some polish on them again, especially since one of my sweet friends gifted me a new bottle of pink-nude polish after I saw it on her and thought it was the most lovely color. Some people are so thoughtful!

…reading The Scarlet Thread. I love Francine Rivers, although I have to admit this isn’t one of her best works. My favorites from her collections are The Mark of the Lion series and Redeeming Love. I’ve spent most of my reading time the past months reading pretty much only pregnancy and baby books, and finally it was time for a good ole novel again. The thing I love about Ms. Rivers writings is that they offer so much challenge, truth, and inspiration even in the middle of a fictional story. I often feel like I’m reading more of a devotional book than a novel when I read her stories!

…soaking up the gorgeous summer days that upstate New York offers this time of year. I’m not sure how I feel about trading in this perfect summertime weather for the heat and humidity of the south…

What about you: what are you reading/drinking/learning lately?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

So I turned twenty-seven yesterday.

Unbelievable! Exciting! Unbelievable!

I’m still young enough that I love birthdays, and honestly, I hope I always love them. Perhaps it easy to say it on this side of thirty or forty years old…but age is just a number, and every year is another accomplishment. Every new and older age is full of new possibilities and good things to come! So far I feel like life truly does get better as I get older, so the next fifty years look great to me. Ben and I often talk and laugh about what it will be like to be sixty or seventy or eighty years old…with grand babies and false teeth and wrinkles and experiences and hopefully a ton more wisdom than we have now…we just think it sounds like a grand time of life!

Ben took me out for a birthday date on Tuesday night to my favorite crepe restaurant, and spoiled me with presents and cards! He’s such a romantic! We were talking about the past year during our evening, and he asked me what I felt was the best thing about the past year and what I’ve felt that I’ve learned. I thought about it for a second and realized that I think one of the best things that I’ve learned/am learning is to accept myself as I am and to fully lean into my identity in Christ. One of my biggest weaknesses is to allow external factors and accomplishments to determine my worth and make me feel confident. But in this twenty-sixth year, I feel the Lord changing something in me and taking me deeper in my true identity as a woman hidden in Him. And I believe that next year at this same time I will be able to see how He’s done that even more!

I’ve been so inspired by a few of my friends (her and her) who have made these super neat lists of goals to accomplish before their next birthdays, with the number of goals correlating to her current age (20 before 21, etc.). I think it’s such a splendid idea, but in all reality I don’t know if I could quite conjure up twenty seven goals for the next year! I guess that’s one problem with getting older, hehe.

But I did come up with a few goals for the next 365 days of my life::

– have a baby (haha!)
– make fresh pasta
– send a handwritten card to two people each month
– learn to knit
– try a new cuisine
– learn to make bread
– volunteer at a soup kitchen or homeless shelter
– read a Proverbs every day
– take a culinary class
– make homemade root beer
– walk/run a 5k with Ben + baby

It’s a pretty simple and short list, but this is a big year for us with a lot of changes so I figure I better not overwhelm myself too much! We’ll see how much of this list gets accomplished…

What about you: do you set goals for your year? Do you like having a birthday?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!