Life lately

Life lately has been a bit crazy!  Frank has been traveling A LOT for work, which is always harder on me because it means I get to do wake up, dinner time, bath time, bed time, and overnight duty, on top of working a full time demanding job.  Frank has been gone 3-4 days each week for the last 5 weeks, and he is going to be traveling every week until we go on vacation in mid-July!  I am sooo ready for this traveling season to be over.  It is exhausting!

In the meantime, we have been doing a lot of swimming, entertaining, and enjoying summer.  Lily turned three last week, and we celebrated with a family dinner at Glorias, a mommy-daughter-nana date at Sweet & Sassy to get her first manicure and get her ears pierced, and a big party at our house with a bounce house!  It was so much fun to celebrate our sweet girl.

I took Liliana to the doctor this morning for her three-year well checkup.  She is getting so big.  At 3, Lily is...

-28 lbs and 36 inches.  She is still a petite little miss!
-wearing size 3T clothes.  I have gone a little crazy with buying her matilda jane dresses lately, so she has a lot of those.  She also has a lot of gorgeous shoes, but she only ever wants to wear her "cool shoes" (natives).
-mostly daytime potty trained, but we still have some accidents here and there.  We have not attempted nap/nighttime training yet.
-a horrendous sleeper.  She gets out of bed most nights 2-4 times, stands at the top of the stairs, and cries until we come up there and put her back to bed.  She has always been a poor sleeper, but we really need to figure out how to get her to stay in her bed!
-no more mysterious fevers!  usually by this time of year, she has had several fever episodes, but by the grace of god, she has so far been fever-free!
-the sweetest little girl.  She loves to give hugs and kisses and is very sensitive.  But she is also tough and can be very sassy if she doesn't get her way!

Frankie graduated from preschool last month, and he is home for summer before starting kindergarten in the fall!  Our neighbor Hannah is coming over twice a week to "tutor" him, and I know he is really enjoying that.  This boy loves to learn.  His new obsession is writing.  He and I have been writing poems together, and it is just the sweetest thing.  He will come up with the rhyming words, and then together we will put together sentences with the rhyming words to form the poems.  His love of learning reminds me how much I loved school, and how much I miss writing non-legal documents!  I still need to get started on that novel...

Both kids are doing swim lessons at the Southlake aquatic center, and they are both doing great.  Frankie is a really good swimmer, and Lily has no fear.

I have been doing the insanity workout program again, and I LOVE it!  It makes me feel so good to complete the workouts, and I only have 2.5 more weeks until I am done with the program.  The only hard part is finding an hour to work out each day.  It usually ends up happening after 9:00 p.m. or around 5:30 a.m., and both of those times suck the life out of me.

Work is going great.  I am so blessed and lucky to have found a great firm and to work for such great partners.  Our group recently moved to another floor, and I got to move into a *HUGE* partner office!  I am not a partner, so I am not really sure how I scored this sweet arrangement, but I will take it.  There is room for couches in there!  I can't wait to decorate.

Speaking of decorating, we are still plugging along on all of our house projects.  We are ordering a few more sets of doors from my sister, updating the wood room fireplace, updating the upstairs bathroom cabinets and floors, and then tackling the rest of our kitchen updates.  I have had such a clear vision of how I want our kitchen to look since we moved in, and I will be so excited once we are done.  We are also going to start getting bids on our big outdoor kitchen/living project and pool updates, and we hope to get all of that completed next spring!

This weekend we celebrated Father's Day with Frank.  We went to church, went to lunch at Feedstore, and spent the afternoon swimming and playing corn hole.  Frank is such a wonderful Daddy, and our kids are so lucky to have such an honest, honorable, hard working man as their role model.  At church they played the Tim McGraw song "Humble and kind," and I always think of Frank when I hear that song.  We all miss him so much when he is gone!

Finally, last week our beloved dog Katy Didd died.  She had been battling blood cancer and heart disease for about a year, and she was almost 14 years old, so it was not completely unexpected, but it was still a very tough time, especially for Frank.  I am not sure that I have seen him this emotional since his brother was injured in Afghanistan.  We all loved Katy very much, and I especially miss her when Frank is out of town.  I always felt safer with her here, but I know that she is up in Heaven watching over us, chasing balls, and running gleefully.

Frank lately

Frank has been such a good boy lately.  In the last few months, he has really transitioned from a boundary-testing, strong-willed kid into a helpful, kind, and respectful boy.  He is doing so well in school, and he is excited about starting kindergarten.  He is also doing great in baseball.  I do not remember the last time I had to put him in time out.  He earned "Top Dog" at school last week and again today, and he also got a "star student" award today for excelling in his music class.  He is FINALLY night time potty trained, and he is so proud of that.  I am really, really enjoying this time with my son.

Frank's likes right now:

TV - my little pony, PJ masks, wild cratts, scooby doo, ninja turtles, rescue bots
playing - science experiments, drawing pictures, crafts, legos, playing outside, riding bikes, helping to work in the garden, cleaning.  He is so creative!
food - his favorites are chicken salad sandwiches [Eatzi's is his favorite place to go eat], chicken nuggets, pickles, cinnamon toast crunch, candy, peas, and pizza
best friends - Bennett, Ethan, Jonah, Harper, Lucy.  Lucy adores Frank.  Her mom recently told me that she writes him a note every single day after school.  Frank still adores Harper.  His very best friend is his sister.

Frank was sick a couple of weeks ago for the first time in a very long time.  He had a fever for 5 days and then was extremely congested.  Turns out it was a sinus infection.  The day he went to the doctor he asked Frank how he got a "science" infection.  It was so cute.

He gets jealous of time I spend with Lily and with Frank.  When Frank and I go on a date, he always tells me he wants to go on a special date with me too.  We went to the sunshine glaze pottery place last week and painted crosses, and this Friday we are going to get donuts and coffee before school.  I sure do love this boy and all of the special time we get to spend together!

NYC trip [very belated post!]

Frank and I spent a whirlwind two days/two nights in New York City this week on an impromptu adults-only vacation.  We got super cheap plane tickets on Southwest, so we decided to go for it.  Frank and I have both been to NYC several times, but we have never been together, and neither of us had been in several years.  We stayed at a nice boutique hotel called the Library which was really conveniently located and had a lot of great amenities, including a wine/cheese cocktail hour, complimentary breakfast, and amazing coffee/lattes available all day.  Our first day we just enjoyed exploring the city, strolling from Bryant Park all along Fifth Avenue, shopping, drinking coffee, and enjoying our time together.  We took a carriage ride through Central Park, saw the big tree in Rockefeller Center, and took in all the amazing decorations at Saks, Bergdorf Goodman, and other NYC stores.  That night we met up with Frank's sister Ariela and enjoyed a nice italian dinner.  The next day we woke up bright and early (no relaxing on this trip!) and headed to Battery Park to catch a ferry out to the Statue of Liberty!  This was on Frank's bucket list, and I was excited to share the experience with him, even though I had already been there once as a child.  We enjoyed the ferry ride and our time with Lady Liberty before heading over to Ellis Island and exploring the immigration museum.  I will be honest, I was about history-ed out at this point, but Frank really wanted to explore the whole museum so we stuck around for quite awhile before heading back to Manhattan.  We were STARVING when we returned, so we found a little cafe and enjoyed some delicious NY pizza.  We strolled along Wall Street before making our way to the 9/11 museum and memorial.  I was actually in NYC on 9/10, the day before the 9/11 attacks, with one of my ex-boyfriends, and neither Frank nor I had been to ground zero since the 9/11 attacks.  Frank was very emotional at the memorial and did not even want to go in the museum, but I convinced him to go, and I am so glad we did.  It was a wonderful museum - probably the best museum I have ever been to.  I loved the way it was laid out, and it was really cool (although also very emotional) to re-live that day.  We went out to a big fancy dinner at Tavern on the Green and had one of the best meals of our lives.  It was a gorgeous restaurant, and it was so pretty all decked out for Christmas.  We really had a wonderful trip!  It was great to take time to reconnect with my sweetheart.

The sweetest day

I am so far behind on blogging, and it is hard to pick it back up when there is so much I haven't written about!  Frank and I took a quick trip to NYC in December, and it was GREAT to get away for a few nights without the kids.  Kiersten watched them for us, and it was wonderful.  Speaking of Kiersten, she has been out of town for the last few days, and we have missed her so much.  She does so much more than just watch our kids.  She is really a positive influence in their lives, and she does so much to help out around the house.  As I was folding 5 loads of laundry over the weekend, I quickly realized how blessed we are to have her help!

December came and went with tons of Christmas-related activities including a trip on the Polar Express with Rylie and Allison, a night at the famous Arlington neighborhood Christmas lights (never again!), and hosting my family for Christmas.  We had a wonderful holiday season!

We have just completed three really big home improvement projects, and we are thrilled with the results.  We replaced all of our windows, painted the exterior of the house, and replaced all of the plantation shutters.  The windows were an enormous headache, but we are so happy they are done!  We are planning several more projects for this year including painting the upstairs interior, new doors, updating the wood room fireplace, new drapes for the master bedroom, replacing part of our fence, fixing our drainage issue, and doing some major landscaping projects in the back yard.  I love our house, but it is so nice to feel like we are updating it and making it ours.

January flew by with trips to the zoo, the Kimball art museum in Fort Worth, and the McKinney Heard conservatory to see the dinosaurs!  We enjoyed a lot of time outside in the unseasonably warm weather and spent a lot of quality time together as a family.  I have been very slow at work the last couple of months, so it has been nice to relax and work less and play more.

Yesterday I took off work because Kiersten was out of town and my mom was not able to come watch the kids (she came up last week to help out on Thursday and Friday but was not able to stay all weekend).  I dropped Frankie off to school at 9:00 and then got to spend a wonderful day with my sweet girl.  We played Candy Land approximately 20 times, and she loved it.  She doesn't care if she wins or I win, she just loves to play - so different from her brother, who has a hissy fit if he does not win.  Then we read about 10 books up in her room and played with her stuffed friends.  I took her to her gym class, and she did so great!  She is really fearless, and she was always the first one to volunteer to work on new skills.  After gym we went to Central Market for a mommy daughter lunch date, play time on the play ground, and a little grocery shopping.  By the time we got home, it was time to head up to White's chapel to pick Frankie up.  During our day together, Lily did not cry, whine, or yell.  She did not complain.  She gave tons of hugs and kisses.  It was THE sweetest day.