Hello! Happy Friday!

Where did this week go?! Well, some of it went to treehouse building and driving to the airport and making a gallery wall and catching up with friends. But it’s gone by so fast that Easter has completely snuck up me. (FYI – I just Googled “snuck vs. sneaked” – both are correct!) I usually spend a couple of days creating color-coordinating outfits for our family for Easter – just because I CAN. But not this year. I’m sure we’ll all look fine on Easter morning, but there probably won’t be a match in the bunch.

Here are a few things on my  mind this week:

1. Treehouses. It’s not finished, and I want to do an entire post on it – Husband wants to tell how it REALLY went and how much it REALLY costs, so maybe he’ll guest post one day soon – but it was a ton of work, and the kids love it. For now, we are using that big green ladder for treehouse access, but there will either be a wooden ladder or a cargo net ladder in the front (we are still in negotiations). It is so fun to look out the dining room window and see this. (I’m not gonna lie – it’s also fun to have my car sawdust-free for the first time in a week, too.) Shout out to my father-in-law for helping Husband with this big project – those two were ALL IN on 10-hour days for almost a week. (My job was mainly KP duty – keeping everyone fed and energized – and, of course, throwing out my two cents every chance I got.)

2. Yes, Your Sleep Schedule Is Making You Sick. This was a very interesting read, covering sleep as it relates to our use of screens at night, jet-lag, and depression.

3. Gallery Walls. Over the last few weeks, my friend, Jen, and I have been working on her living room wall. Her husband is a hunter, so she had several duck paintings lined up behind the sofa. She wanted to mix it up a bit and make a gallery wall, so we played around with different arrangements, shopping her house for other pieces, adding in a letter K, a wooden heart that Jen painted, and antlers we found in her garage. We finally installed it on Monday, and I just love how it turned out! The takeaway: when you want to make a change with pieces you already have, the gallery wall is the way to go. (Other “shop your house” takeaway: pillows! Jen wanted to update the ones on the sofa, and she found these darling ones in the closet. Sometimes you don’t need to buy new – you just need to play around with what you’ve got.)

4. This quote. Husband and I had a conversation about this last weekend. These are two things that are constantly on my goals lists – moving my body and quieting my mind. I just finished Into the Magic Shop, in which the author, James R. Doty, tells the story of how he learned meditation and mindfulness and went on to discover how it connects with the power of the brain and of the heart. It is amazing to realize how the brain can actually be rewired through the deliberate practice of stillness. It is also amazing how something so seemingly simple can be so hard to actually DO. But I’m trying. Baby steps.

5. This made me laugh. We are BIG Alexander fans here – the kids love the book (and this one and this one, too) and the movie, and I remember getting in the car after school one day when I was little, telling my mom it had been a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day” after having memorized the line when my teacher read it aloud to us. This is a great updated version.

Hope you have a weekend of being outdoors, rest, beauty, stillness, and laughter. Also hope you have a lovely Easter, and thanks so much for reading!