this past weekend was a little unusual for us, Robb had a work show in Grand Rapids Friday afternonn and Saturday all day. Friday night the boys and I went out to visit and Saturday we spent the day at the cottage.

after church on Sunday I went with a friend to an antique sale at the fair grounds. we had lots of fun looking through the junk to find some treasures!
a couple of my fave finds:

Hope you are all having a good week, we’re enjoying the Olympics a lot.

( don’t miss the $100 Visa gift card giveaway here!)

we’re scratching off our summer list again!

in the last couple of weeks we hit the beach, flew a kite, made a trip to sandy pines with my friend angie and her son Tatum, watched the street performers, had a campfire and ran through sprinklers

*pick berries

*feed ducks

*Fillmore park

*outdoor discovery center

*kollen’s park

*timber town

*Lawrence st. park

*farmer’s market/ market kid’s activities

*whitecaps game

*downtown fountain

*zoo

*coast guard festival (July 27-August 5)

*hot air balloon show (June 30, July 1) * this was on our calendar but ended up being TOO HOT THAT WEEKEND!*

*truck parade (labor day) *not going to happen, made plans to go out of town that weekend!*

*memorial day parade

*have picnic

*bubbles

*water bed (Pinterest)

*run through sprinklers

*fly kite

*sidewalk chalk

*go garage sale-ing

*beach

*Meijer gardens

*library programs

*lemonade stand

*downtown street performers (thursday nights)

*play tennis

*go to cottage

*swimming lessons

*pool time

*bike ride

*mini golf

*soccer camp for Gray

*water table

*little pool

*sand box/swing set

*campfires

*hike trails

*trip to sandy pines

Friday night we all went to our former youth pastor’s home for dinner. Robb and I were youth group leaders for 3 years while he was the youth pastor of our church so it was fun to see them again and catch up a little, even though we had to chase our boys around all night!

Saturday morning we went to Robb’s grandma’s place to celebrate her 87th birthday, she gave Gray a ride on her walker!

from there we took our first family trip to the beach, we grabbed Wendy’s for lunch on the way, and got there at 12:00.

grayden learned how to fly a kite!

We had a great time, but we headed home around 2:30 so the boys could nap.

The boys took super long naps, we ended up waking Gray up at 6:00 so we could eat.

Robb roasted some hotdogs over the fire and we had a little cook out for dinner.

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then we headed to Fennville to meet my parents and mindy, kyle, and makenna at Crane’s for dessert!

Sunday we went to church in the morning, came home, had lunch and the kids once again, took really long naps. By the time they woke up it was almost time for church again!

After the evening service we meet our friends at a park for pizza and play time.

after we played for a few hours, a few of the girls came over to our house watch the Bachelorette together and we chatted until 2am!

It was another awesome weekend!

monday morning workout, hefty 2 lbs weights at all :)

sweet man

tennis tourney champ. love-love ha, pun intended!

dinner

brothers by love, not by blood. precious

‘safe’ sprinkler fun

aunt Mindy's bday dinner

dancing in the rain

story time fun at the library

mommy’s helper. sorta

new sign. psalms 1 love

sweet sleepy boy after 15 month shots

have a great weekend everyone! and be sure to enter the giveaway for $100 visa gift card here

finishing up the last couple of questions today.

a few of you have wondered what Robb does for a living and questioned our finances. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I don’t think many people (myself included) think the latter is an appropriate thing to talk about, so I won’t be going into that but I’m happy to tell you about Robb’s job!

Robb has worked as a truck salesmen for the past 11 years and he does a great job at it! I know I don’t tell him this enough, but I am so proud of him and all his hard work! Sometimes he works more hours than I’d like him to, or he’s on the phone a lot but I know it’s all part of the job and he does it to provide for our family.

Chelsea  asked  “what are some of your favorite kids brands/products?”

For my boys, at the ages they are at now, affordability is key, they can be rough on their clothes and toys so I don’t spend much money on that stuff at all! I always use a coupon or wait for a sale. I love to shop at Old Navy for the boys, they have cute and trendy styles that hold up well and at great prices. I also buy a lot of their clothes from Children’s place and Gap outlet, they both have great sales going on often. I used to shop at Carter’s for them a lot but we’re starting to phase out of there a little.

I rarely buy toys and when I do I don’t particularly look for certain brands, but I do love Melissa and Doug products. We have lots of their puzzles!

After the tragic loss of her son Jonathon, Diane asked, “how did you get through the painful year of ‘firsts’?

Diane, I am so heartbroken and devastated for you. So tragic and awful. I am so sorry you are walking this difficult road. The first year was the hardest for me and many others in the grieving process. The ‘firsts’ are so hard.  I could not have gotten through it without the support of many people; my husband, friends and family. I hope you have people there who can support you and pray for you during this time. Nothing made me feel ‘better’ other than the promise of Heaven and the future of spending eternity in Heaven with my son someday. Lean on Jesus, He loves you and will give you strength to make it through the day. Day by day, girl! Again, I am so sorry and I’ll be praying for you and your family.

Until we meet at Jesus’ feet,

Katie

anonymous wondered if we’ll adopt another child. We are not pursuing another adoption at this point, but you never know what God has planned. If an opportunity arose though, it would be hard to say no. We love adoption and have been so blessed by it!

I’ve gotten lots of questions/requests about our new home. Anonymous wrote:

Katie- Why do you always avoid questions regarding your home you and your husband built? I regularly follow your blog (and LOVE reading it) and have seen over the last few months lots of people comment on wanting to see pictures of your home. And if you have made the choice not to, you never even acknowledge their questions, instead seem to avoid it completely. Is there at least a specific reason you have chosen not to? You did lots of posts on the progression of it being built, but once you moved in haven't mentioned it at all. Just curious!

You’re right, I admitted before that I haven’t been doing a good job of replying to questions, it’s important to remember we have a busy life outside of this blog! But I’m devoting some time now to answer them. I want to first point out that these posts take me a long time to write, I always try to be careful how I write things and not step on anyone’s toes about my personal opinions and thoughts.

So that being said, here’s the deal on the house, at this point I do not planning on posting picture of our house in a ‘tour’ format. It’s not that I’m trying to hide anything or be mysterious about it, if you look back over the past months there are plenty of videos and pictures of our home in the background. Even during our building process I only posted a handful of pictures and they are mostly of the outside. This is because of a couple things, first off I honestly don’t feel comfortable ‘showing off’ the house, it feels like bragging to me and that the last thing I want to do. Even in real life I feel so awkward at times, giving tours. I’ve even had my mom or grayden do it for me a couple times! It just sometimes puts me in an uncomfortable position to say to some guests, “here’s our closet, and look at at our shower, yada, yada, yada.”

And the other reason is that I can’t handle the rude comments that may come up. With the few pictures I have posted I’ve had a handful of ‘opinions’ that really upset me. I think it’s still too new and too fresh right now.  This is our dream home, we’ve put lots of time and work into designing it and decorating it just they way we wanted and we LOVE it. I don’t want or need anyone’s rude opinions about the size, or the fact that we have kitchenette in our basement (which by the way, is quite common here) to take that away.

Maybe someday I’ll grow some thicker skin or the rude commenters will go away and then I would love to show you some pictures, just not right now. Sorry.

Last question for now comes from Emily:

Hi Katie! My question is: What is your favorite thing about being a stay at home mom? And also what is your least favorite? Do you ever think you will go back to work? Or always stay home, and so hair like you do now.

I love staying home with my boys at their young age, maybe at some point when they are both in school I will look for something part time, but it would still be important to me to be able to be available for school trips, and be right there to pick them up if they got sick, etc.

I think I have the best of both worlds right now, I get to spend all day with my kids and work at night when Robb is home to watch them, for some adult interaction!

My favorite thing about staying home is just being able to be with them, they are growing up so fast and I love that I don’t miss a thing! I’m not saying there is anything wrong with working outside the home, I think everyone has to do what works best for them. For me, I think it comes down to me being a control freak and me wanting to do things just so and stick to their routine, etc. That’s probably also the reason we’ve only had a babysitter (other than family) once, that was 2 years ago! I know, I have issues! I seriously typed out a list on how we do things and it was only for a few hours!

My least favorite is probably just that is gets tiring, day after day, especially on those grumpy days. Sometimes it would be nice to have a break but that would mean I’d have to work and I would have a hard time going back to a ‘real job’, unless I’m doing hair and being my own boss, setting my own hours and pay like I do now! I feel so blessed to have the opportunity to stay home and work a little on the side, in my eyes, I have the best of both worlds!

Thanks for the questions, I’m hoping to finish up tonight

My hair client tonight went a little faster than I thought, and the guys are still out and about, so I have a little time to bang out a few more questions!

Shakira wondered what Gray is swimming in, in the picture of him in he life jacket.

I don’t have a picture of this particular one, but here’s a similar one we had last year,

its called a relaxation station, from Sam’s Club, that we have anchored to the bottom of the lake, we spent 90% of our time at the cottage relaxing on this thing!
sadly, we just discovered a hole and it no longer holds air :( hoping to get a new one soon (hint hint, mom and dad!)

The middle mesh part fills up with water depending on how much you jump around on it. The water depth around the float is over his head so if he were to fall off the side, we have him wear a life jacket.

But in all honestly, he prefers to wear it in any water depth! I started calling Gray Mr. Careful today b/c he wanted to wear a life jacket in the sprinkler!! True story. He is SO unlike his brother in that way, I’m thankful to have at least one child who sees danger, even if its not there!

Rachel C wondered where to find the freezer meal recipes, click here!

Amy asked if I had done “a day in the life post” yet.  Yes, I do it every year on July 7, click here to check it out!

Last one for today, I get a lot of questions about how I do my hair. I did a quick little tutorial awhile back, you can find it here. I’ve thought about doing a vlog to show you how I do it, but I know I would want to redo it 100 times because I can only imagine how dumb I would look talking to the camera in front of the mirror while I do my hair! That would take A LOT of convincing, maybe someday! In the mean time, check out some volume tricks on pinterest. That’s my top hair tip, make sure you have some volume, and in some my case, a lot of volume!

I’m breaking these Q&A posts up into parts, so here’s round 1 of the answers to your questions!

I’ll start with a super fun one from Jordyn.

“How did you chose your three boys names? Brenham, Grayden and Sadler are very unusual and I wanted to know how you came to find them? Also were there any back up names and if you were to have a future child, do you have any name ideas?”

I love baby names so this is so fun for me to talk about! When we were working on naming our boys we obviously choose different names, if we knew anyone with a certain name, it was thrown out.

When I was pregnant with Brenham we didn’t find out the baby’s gender, but that was the only time we had to come up with a boy and a girl name, we knew both Grayden and Sadler were boys shortly after we were chosen by their birthparents. Obviously, with Brenham we thought we had a while yet to finalize on a name but the forerunners for a girl were Elsie (rhymes with Kelsey) but once I found out that Borden Cheese’s mascot was “Elsie the Cow” we became a little hesitant. We also liked Edyn, (pronounced like Eden/the garden of Eden) after my dad, Ed, who doesn’t have any sons to pass on the family name to so we considered. For boys, we had liked Brecken, Grayden and Brenham and decided on Brenham just a few days before he was born. I found his name on a baby name website. His middle name, Jay, is also Robb’s as well as both our dad’s middle names.

Before Grayden was born we made a list of a few names and let his birth mom choose because she wanted some input on naming him, and we just couldn’t decide! Also on the list was Deacon, Grayden, Breton and Sadler. I came up with Grayden’s name on my own, back when we were pregnant with Brenham, we still liked it and so did his birth mom. I had liked the name Grayson but it was becoming a little more popular and I had also heard of a few girls named Gracyn so I switched it up a bit to Grayden! His middle name, Robert was chosen by his birth mom, it was her father’s name and Robb’s given name, so we thought it was perfect!

Sadler’s name was left over from when we were choosing names for Grayden and we both still loved it! We also didn’t have much time to decide, so Sadler it was! I  found it on a baby name website. The other option for him was Crue (pronounced Crew) but Robb was not a fan.  His middle name, Graham, is a combo of both his big brothers names GRAyden and BrenHAM.

I always feared I would have naming regret and spent HOURS AND HOURS choosing their names. But I can still say I love all 3 of the boys names just as much as I did when we named them. They each fit them perfectly!!

Other names we threw around but for whatever reason didn’t make the cut: Sutton, Sullivan, Coleson, Lincoln, (love that name but sadly I don’t think it flows with our last name) Parker, Easton, Griffin…should i keep going?! haha!

Girl names were SO hard for us, luckily we only had to think about them once and that was 4 years ago! I honestly can’t think of ANY girl names off the top of my head that I’d consider if we had a baby girl land on our doorstep one day (although I’m sure I could find something if the need arose!)  Edyn is out (sorry, dad!), too rhyme-y with Grayden, I like Sadie, but its too close to Sadler, Evie is cute but I don’t know if I could just name her “evie” we like a few more letters for the given name (picky, picky, i know!)  but Evelyn is a little to common for me…see what I mean, girls are hard!

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Okay next up I’ve been asked about the baked oatmeal and laundry detergent recipes. Click here for the baked oatmeal, found it on pinterest! Sadler liked it the most, it was good but I have to be honest and say I only made it/ate it because it was healthy-ish!

My friend Anne, gave me the laundry detergent recipe, its super easy!
Grate a bar of Fels.nap.tha and add it to a cup of washing soda and a cup of borax (all found in the laundry aisle) you need 1-2 tablespoons for a regular load!

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Last topic for today, 3-school!

Yes, Grayden is going to three-school. He’ll go 2 mornings a week for 2 hours. Next year he’ll be in pre-school and then Kindergarten. This is mainly just a way that I can ease him and myself into all day, everyday kindergarten the schools are now offering. I also know he’ll love the social interaction with kids his age, that he typically doesn’t get other than an hour or so during Sunday School each week.

I haven’t been good about answering questions left in the comment section that some of you have left lately, but I’m hoping to get to them in the next couple days. So, if you have one that I haven’t replied too, leave it in the comment section and I’ll answer them in a post coming up.

But one quick answer to a question I remember off the top of my head; “you bake in this heat"?” yes, i do (rarely) bake and I cook too! we typically only go out to eat on the weekends so we gotta eat somehow! Also, it hasn’t been quite as hot here the last few days as it had been the week before, so baking the oatmeal for 25 minutes in the air conditioned house didn’t bother me one bit. random! (I took that question to be a little snarky so if it wasn’t meant that way, then I apologize for the snarky, but true, response!)

(I hate to even have to mention this but, just a reminder, rude questions/comments will be answered in the same manner or ignored, but I’m sure that wont be an issue, right?! ;) Honestly, I’m a pretty open book and I’m happy to answer just about any question you have, but we all know what’s acceptable and what’s not, so let’s just keep it friendly and clean!)

Hi All!
Hope you had a nice weekend! (Remember to enter to win the $100 Visa gift card here)

Friday night was spent making freezer meals with my girls!

I made ham and pineapple kabobs with a marinade to add later. We have lots of great recipes from the other girls going on the freezer meal blog soon!

Saturday I went to Zumba in the morning and then we headed to the cottage for the afternoon. Robb and I left around 3:00 and got ready for our guys/girls nights!

We left the boys with Aunt Lisa at the cottage where she watched them for the night!

Making bird feeders with Aunt Lisa:

Enjoying dinner:

A bedtime movie outside:

thanks for watching them Lisa, looks like they had fun!

Robb went with his buddies to watch a race and I went out with my friend Anne!

We always have a blast together!

I had the house all to myself when I got home, so I enjoyed an iced coffee while I soaked my feet and painted my nails! What would you do with an evening to yourself!?

Sunday we headed to church and got to see the boys, who we missed so much! (yes, aunt lisa had the boys over night and got them ready for church!)

Then we spent the rest of the day at the cottage!

A fun weekend for sure!