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.