I love the South, especially in the summer

I love the South.  I was born and raised here in Atlanta and love so much about the history and culture of the South.  I may sound like a Yankee, but I’m a Southerner through and through.  My brother and I still laugh about the hat that I used have, “American by birth, Southern by the grace of God.”  Yep, I was that cool.  

Anywho, one of my favorite things is the incredible fruits and vegetables that are available this time of year.  Both mine and Michael’s family have so many great memories that involved the dinner table.  I still remember helping my grandmother shell butter beans and snap green beans when they came in at the stand down the street. The excitement of when the corn was silver queen and not just white or yellow!  I love hearing the stories that Michael will tell of his grandfather’s garden and all that he and his cousins learned from Paw-Paw.  There is nothing better than fresh butter beans, silver queen corn, tomatoes with homemade ranch dressing, squash, lady peas, okra, vidalia onions, peaches, watermelons, blackberries-you get my drift. So a few weeks ago, Michael and I decided to start a yearly tradition of going berry picking.  We headed south to Adams Farm in Fayetteville to see what magic we could find and oh what magic it was.  Here are Luke and Michael heading to the blueberry bushes:

Luke was quite proud of how he was “heppin fill our buttets.”  It was so cute to hear him down the rows of bushes and the excitement he had to find good berries.

I LOVE blackberries and so Luke was the perfect height to help me pick those.  Especially since I don’t bend over so well these days.

 We also picked raspberries for the first time.  We had no idea what to look for, but we got something right because those things were like eating red sugar cubes-SO GOOD!!  We finished our time picking and finished up in the Farmer’s Market attached to the farm that sells other things they grow.  Here is all our loot:

From this, I froze some blueberries, blackberries, and butter beans.  We had to put the peaches in the brown paper bag to ripen them for the homemade peach ice cream I made.  I fried the corn (still have to work on perfecting that!) to go with our fried chicken & veggie meal. Everything else, we just gorged ourselves on. So yummy!!

All this to say, I am looking forward to this new tradition.  I’m hoping to continue getting better at cooking the vegetables so that I can try to create the memories for my family that Michael and I were so fortunate to have created for us. I look forward to shelling butter beans and lady peas with Luke and Jr. Maybe even snapping and stringing some green beans. I want to actually learn how to fry the corn like Mermer (Michael’s mom) did.  I’m not sure we will ever have a garden like it sounds like Paw-Paw did, but I sure hope Michael gets to teach his boys some of the things he learned from his Paw-Paw.

One Month From Today

One month from today, Jr. Franklin will be here.  Kind of freaks me out because I can’t help but think about what life will be like with 2 procreations running around our house. Will he be like Luke? Will he be as different from Luke as I am from my siblings? Will he be an easy baby like Luke was or will he be the terror everyone has told me he will be? Will he be healthy? Will he be another little Michael clone? Will I freak out when he gets sick the way I do with Luke?  Will I remember what to do with a newborn?  WHAT THE HECK ARE WE GOING TO NAME HIM!?!?!   Will Luke be ok sharing his daddy & Tay-tay with his baby brudder? I’m also a little sad because unless God says otherwise, this will be my last pregnancy.  As much as I hate feeling like a beached whale, I have treasured every  heartburny, cellulitey, alien moving in my belly, can’t bend over, tired, irrational, moment of growing this human.  did i mention heartburney?  All that said, I’m excited to meet my  little man on July 10. Hope I like him!

My Boys

  

These are my boys.  These smiles are what make my day on a daily basis.  Tonight as we were getting Luke ready for bed and he was going through the myriad of things “dat hurt”, I was reminded of how wigged out I get with health things.  I am CONSTANTLY bringing this back to God because I know it does nothing to honor Him, nor can I do a dang thing anyway.  Seriously, He probably giggles at the things I can come up with or is at least impressed with my creativity.  Anyway, I have gotten better over the years, but it really has been a struggle. I mean, when I was 16 I told my mom I thought I was pregnant because I had read in a magazine ALL the potential ways you could get pregnant. When asked if I had ever actually done what it takes to get pregnant and I answered, “no”, I’m sure it took everything in her to not laugh in my face or slap me. So, as I hear my son say everything on his body hurts, I fight the urge to google “toddler ______ pain.”  I have already diagnosed all of us with a myriad of health issues due to my googling problem.  But I have to admit, the thought of missing these smiles scares me.  The only antidote to this is to continue bringing it to the foot of the Cross when I start getting wigged out.  As I heard earlier this year, I’m going to trust more in the one who gives the treasure vs the actual treasure. So, I’m gonna keep trusting my sweet God as I surrender each of my precious boys to Him every moment I start to worry about them or feel the need to google what a bruised arm could mean. In the meantime, I’ll also make sure to keep laughing at this little character.

Shattered Dreams

I really think everyone should read this book. I just love how it puts things into perspective and really wraps words around things that EVERYONE feels.  It also gives permission to not always be ok and not always feel good and peppy about what God is doing in our lives.  It also helps remind us that sometimes the prayer isn’t that things get better, it’s that we stay in the process to become who God wants us to be. Umm, so much easier said than done.  Just really helpful to read it.  I also put this together based on what I read in here, but sometimes God has to break our dreams to put them back together in a more beautiful, radiant way than we would have ever seen them had they not been broken in the first place. Really powerful for me.

 This is the book that helped me so much after my dad died and so many dreams of mine were shattered. This is the book that helped put a diagnosis in perspective.  Turns out the diagnosis was wrong, but the 2 weeks of waiting were spent writhing at the feet of my Jesus.  Thankfully, I’m more who God created me to be because of it. My mind was taught that it is not my master or creator, those spots are reserved for Jesus thankfully.  As a self professed worry wart with a vivid imagination to create worst case scenarios that create DEEP fears, this was a turning point for me in my relationship with Christ and myself.

All this to say, I love this book. I’m sure I’ll have more brilliance to write about from it soon.

Still here

I’m still here, just haven’t had much to say recently.  I know for any of you who know me, you find that hard to believe.  We’ve been doing fun things.  Getting the baby’s room ready, getting Luke into a big boy bed, dealing with 2 and 3 hour crying fits in the middle of the night, really enjoying time with Michael and Luke, trying to maintain my dog hair covered house and growing in my relationship with Christ. See-all kinds of fun stuff, just I forget to get online and tell you 3 about it. Pictures of Luke at Easter to come later this weekend.  Maybe you’ll get lucky enough to see my GROWING belly too.

Firetruck!!!!!!

Have you ever seen such joy?  Oh, he is the best!!  Michael & I took him on his first “etched memory” on Friday to our friend Andrew’s (Tatum’s bro-in-law) fire station.  Luke got to sit in the engine, look at the lights, honk the Haz-Mat truck’s horn-all the fun stuff. It was early in the morning in a neighborhood area so there were no sirens, but Luke made his own. “REEEEEER” Here some more fun pics from our time!  Thanks Andrew and Tatum-You’re the best!!!

Josephine

So today at work was a lot different than every day for the last 4 years. My fabulous friend, JoAnn aka Josephine, Miss JoAnn, Granma Jo wasn’t there.
She is embarking on a new fun life of traveling while consulting with her hubby and other fun trouble I am sure she will get herself into. Now my words here will not do justice to how incredibly special Josephine is to me. She was an answer to prayer in so many ways. She put up with my spastic, whirling dirvish ways on a daily basis. She had the ability to make every single person on our staff feel special and thought about. She always was ready with a listening ear, would boldly tell it like it was, and then laugh at herself and me for something silly one of us did. She would remind me that moms do not always mean to do or say the things they do, they just forget sometimes. She was ready to help me learn to do things around the yard when my precious mom-in-law passed away. She prayed for me when Luke became a forethought and then listened to my freakish fears and worries when he became a reality.  She made sure Luke always had a good lollipop to end his day along with a good push of phone buttons and playing with her keys.  She put up with my obnoxious birthday obsession and even helped encourage it.  She showed me grace under pressure and how to be considerate and thoughtful in so many ways.  She always went above and beyond in EVERYTHING she did and did it with joy and love, even if it was unloading 500 pounds of creamer, candy, and other office junk from her car.  I’m quite excited for JoAnn’s new job and freedom to be a mom, grandmom, and wife, but I sure do miss her whole bunch already.  She taught me so much in our 4 years together and I so look forward to introducing Lil’ Frankie #2 to Granma Jo.  She is a true angel walking on this earth and I am so grateful that she is my Atlanta mom.  Here’s a real picture of her that she may not get mad at me for posting.

I have always been a goal setter. As far back as I can remember, I can remember having goals and then trying to reach them. From learning how to read to making certain soccer teams to when to be able to walk again after breaking my thigh all the way to sales goals when I was in sales. I just have always done it. Michael, however, has not. It’s not his fault, he just didn’t grow up thinking about intentionally going after the thing he wanted. Well, a couple of weeks ago we were able to get on the same page as a couple about where our family is going. We had the opportunity to go to Blackberry Farm for a couples retreat where we learned about how to set our priorities, go about setting goals that are in alignment with those priorities and then focus on the things that we have determined TRULY matter.  This place is AMAZING!!  Here was the view from our room: It was like a dream come true for us.  We have wanted to go to this place since we got married but couldn’t even THINK about it because of the cost.  They have incredible food, an amazing piece of land and just all around incredible amenities.  For example, here was what we came back to in our room after dinner one night: Umm, are you kidding me??  So, all that to say, the environment was one to definitely cultivate our relationship as a couple.  We spent all day Friday and a lot of Saturday learning about setting goals and then going off on our own and determining what we wanted the vision of our marriage to be as well as the qualities our family would be known for. We also spent the majority of Saturday down by the river with Michael fly-fishing and me just hanging out.  Did I mention it was 24 degrees? I got MAJOR wife brownie points.  It was just great to get to hang out together and talk or sleep or do nothing!  I could write forever about what all this retreat did for us as a family, but I won’t bore you with the details.  However, I will tell you that Michael and I determined we want to be a purpose driven, God honoring couple who by love, laughter and generosity leave a Godly legacy.  We want to be a family that stands for God, integrity, and love.  We want to create etched memories with each other and Luke (& kid to be) with romantic dinners, fun trips to the fire station and zoo, weekends away to Ro-Ro’s house, adopting a family at Christmas and taking a day trip to Dahlonega to see the Fall leaves.  All things we were able to make our priorities during this weekend away.  Now if we could just figure out a way to get to Blackberry Farm every year!

Gotta Potty

Our friends, Tague & Lisa just adopted 2 little boys from Uganda, Philip and Zach.  They are absolutely adorable.  You can read more about their incredible journey on their blog, but I wanted to share with you one of my favorite videos yet! 

They have been working on potty training with Philip but were having some difficulty understanding him when he was telling them he had to go.  Tague is incredibly creative when it comes to problem solving and he came up with a solution. So, we get this…

Fridays

One of the perks of my job is that I get Fridays off and I absolutely LOVE it. Being an introvert who needs big amounts of “Kristen” time makes it a perfect schedule for me. I am usually VERY protective of my Fridays and the way I use the time I have at home. Luke & I will play, run errands, organize, watch TV, nap, read, really anything-it’s just my day to do what I want to do. As I get further along in this pregnancy, I am also trying to make sure I am intentional about truly playing with Luke and having great times with just me and him. Treasuring every one of his giggles, his “a-wead its”, his firetruck impersonations, his love songs to his Tay- Tay , his obsessions with helmets & pea’ut butr. So, all that to say, I am looking forward to what tomorrow will bring.

What about you?