Category: Commonplace

Cozy Corners 🦋✨🌻♥️🌿

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Hello 👋 ~

It’s taken me until today (Friday) to feel a little more relaxed! 😌 I realized I was trying to “force” myself and the kiddos to relax. Ha. 🙃😂 We were able to pop into our lovely small local library and browse. A couple of my kids have been enjoying the summer reading program, so we picked up some more picture books. I’m sure missing my wonderful, curated living books which are packed away, as you know, for continued remodeling. I may treat myself later by pulling out a few bins of our history period we are studying this coming school year. It will satisfy my itch to be among my ‘friends’ for a little while. My 14 yo daughter chose after the library to get an iced matcha and my two boys chose ice cream from our little drive in diner. We love the local hippy coffee shop with cheerful vibes and the fun diner. Our area has SO much natural beauty, too, and we have a couple of places we plan to haunt soon.

Our lovely friends let us chrysalis babysit and we got to watch three Monarchs hatch this week. 😍♥️🌿🦋 Such a rewarding experience!

We spent the afternoon at a nearby lake and I truly felt myself relaxing. The cool wind and toasty sun, flickering through the trees was perfect. I’ve been wanting to reread my Summer Book by Susan Branch and I was able to slowly savor her lovely illustrations, quotes she collects, and recipes. I love her work so much! It made me excited to be a home keeper again. 😍☕️✨🌻 One of my favorite things was sitting on the fishing dock with the sun beating on me. The weather was perfect. We also saw a pair of Belted Kingfishers flying low over the water. 🥰🥰🥰🥰

I did a little journaling set up! I like doing little goals sheets, not religiously or anything, but to give myself a pretty way to track my habits etc that I’m continuing to work on. I’ve done these little symbol keys before! They are fun! ♥️

I made a massive Brain Dump List and some other to-do things because it helps me to focus and calm down without all that rattling around in my brain. I’m also figuring out a way of curating the quotes from my reading that I want to jot into my commonplace. I read a lot and mark my books up, but I want to figure out how to better choose quotes! I loved this video about recently on this topic. I’m letting Jane Austen’s Bookshelf simmer before choosing favorite quotes to add out of the ones I marked.

I’ve been on a Booktube watching break and it’s interesting how many other things I get done and how much actual reading I get in! 🤣 I finished The Opt-Out Family and I must say it may be so far one of my favorite things I’ve read this year. I’m going to slowly go back through it, as I want to note ideas and passages better. Highly recommend! ♥️✨

Finished my reread! Love Miss Austen so much! This isn’t a favorite of hers for me, but the 2nd half was such a wonderful character study. ♥️✨

How was your week? ♥️😍🌿✨☕️🌻

Sunday ✨♥️🌞 {Day 99}

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For the kingdom of God is not just a lot of talk; it is living by God’s power.

I Corinthians 4:20, NLT

~ Happy Sunday and the last week of July. 😨😭🤓♥️✨🌿

Quote for Refection {Day 84}

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I am not going to write this month of the influence others have over us. What I wish to prove is, that if even indifferent people can influence us so much, you must have equal influence over the people you are with. We had better face the fact that we must needs influence other people’s tempers, feelings, opinions, actions. Let us consider how. Let us go through the world in a happy making temper—there is nothing so infectious as a smile, unless it be a frown. Our children are dull and tired, our friends are cross, and our work is trying—don’t let us take these things as grievances, overwork and overworry is the cause. We begin to be sorry instead of cross, and one cordial kindly glance or word dispels the cloud.

“A merry heart goes all the way,
A sad one goes a mile, O.”

And the merry heart never goes alone, but carries a cheerful company along with it. May God keep our hearts sweet and merry for others’ sake as much as of our own.

~Emeline Steinthal

‘Influence’ Essay from PNEU ~ I invite you to read this whole essay and discuss here! Do you agree or disagree? ♥️🌾 Thinking and praying a lot about my heart attitude going into this next coming school year. 🙏🏻

Monday Ponderings 🌿 {Day 80}

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When someone is doing something to hurt you, don’t turn inward, turn toward that person. He is hurting himself. Learn to forgive, knowing that we all need forgiveness. If you want to be true to God, learn from Jesus to be meek, humble, and pure. Learn to forgive.

~ Mother Teresa, Do Something Beautiful for God

June/July Journals ~ Wrap Up & Set Up 📓🖊️📝 {Day 70}

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Sunset reflected ✨

I’m loosely participating in five? July specific Booktube Readathons! I really enjoy just marking off prompts! 📚✅

I decorated some of my July pages ahead in my to-do pocket Moleskine because there’s some travel and family stuff going on. I usually decorate this one the day of use because it’s so small, but I don’t pack all my journaling supplies when going on trips! I especially love the Jane Austen stickers I saved for the start of Jane Austen July! 😍♥️🌸

Deck-a-TBR-a-Thon! Summerween! Private Eye July! Jane Austen July! Zoom in for Prompts, if interested! 😅📚📚📚

These are some summer long prompts! I made a great dent in them in June!

Two June Read-a-Thons that I had a lot of fun with! I just read what I’m in the mood for and make them fit mostly, but I do tailor a few of my choices depending on topic. Read a couple American Revolution type books with my kids etc.

June Reading Journal pages almost full!

I purchased coffee stickers and cute yellow bakery type washi so my July theme is Yellow Coffee & Flower Shop! 🤪😅😍💛🤎💛🤎💛

VERY ambitious health/mental/spiritual/relational goals for July! 🙃😱😂

What are you creating lately? I so enjoy working in my journals.

~

Monday Ponderings: Daisies 💛🤍💛🤍 {Day 56}

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I love daisies.

You told me.

They’re so friendly. Don’t you think daisies are the friendliest flower?

~ “You’ve Got Mail”, Joe and Kathleen

I went on a daisy walk…

Maybe this will become a June birthday month tradition…

It was SO hot, but I absolutely loved it. My body doesn’t love cold anymore, and the sky, clouds, fragrance of the air was sublime.

Look at the birds. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for your heavenly Father feeds them. And aren’t you far more valuable to him than they are? Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?

“And why worry about your clothing? Look at the lilies of the field and how they grow. They don’t work or make their clothing, yet Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they are. And if God cares so wonderfully for wildflowers that are here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, he will certainly care for you. Why do you have so little faith?

“So don’t worry about these things, saying, ‘What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear?’ These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows all your needs. Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.

“So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

~Matthew 6:26-34, NLT

~

May Reading Journal 📖📓 {Day 50}

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My cat May decorations ended up being fun!🤩

Reading and journaling bring me so much joy 🥹 so the marriage of the two is a double dose! I don’t really plan, but just go with whatever is inspiring me in my sticker/washi stash. I had a kind of slow start to my reading in the beginning of May, my reading mood was changing, had some meh/ok-ish reads at the start. I pretty much hated Date with Danger! 🤣 The end of the month reading though was amazing! I loved all the Middle Grade reads for a small readathon on Booktube called Middle Grade May! Especially, Secrets of Shakespeare’s Grave and its sequel, Tower of the Five Orders by Deron R. Hicks. I really enjoyed the Christian historical light fantasy, The Huntress, also. Honorable mention goes to The Little House in the Highlands which is based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s ancestors. It was a slow start but SO cute! I made some good progress on my newest bingo boards I printed off from Pinterest, also. Georgette Heyer is hit or miss for me, but I loved two of her Regency romances, Arabella and Sylvester. Overall, a great reading month.

What are you reading or creating? 😍♥️

Walking & Words {Day 36}

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Boredom is not a condition to be feared or avoided. Instead, it is a crucial element that fosters creativity, independence, and self-discovery among children. Boredom challenges children to engage with their inner world, to invent, and to explore, thereby laying the groundwork for a lifetime of learning and innovation. We must not shield our children from boredom but instead embrace it as a powerful catalyst for growth. It is essential to resist the cultural pressure to fill every moment of a child’s day with structured activities and digital distractions. Instead, we should provide spaces and opportunities for them to experience the fruitful solitude that boredom can offer.

~Ginny Yurich

“The languor of Youth” 🌲{Day 27}

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THE languor of Youth – how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth – all save this – come and go with us through life; again and again in riper years we experience, under a new stimulus, what we thought had been finally left behind, the authentic impulse to action, the renewal of power and its concentration on a new object; again and again a new truth is revealed to us in whose light all our previous knowledge must be rearranged. These things are a part of life itself; but languor – the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse – that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.

Brideshead Revisited, p. 79

Thinking on this quote as I navigate young adult relationships. I’m prayerfully trying to put myself back into “their age shoes” to respond with love, compassion, and a listening spirit.

Monday Ponderings 🦋 {Day 25}

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A few simple things to aim for this spring/summer! Prayerfully asking the Lord to help me focus on relationships and rightly ordering my affections. Do you have anything planned or something on your heart? ♥️
Journaling brings me so much joy! 🥹♥️🥰

Happy Monday! ♥️🌲📚