June went by in a blink and I’m staring down a couple more months of ridiculous heat and humidity before it starts to let up. But! It really hasn’t been so bad thus far. Last year I tried hard to embrace the summer heat — or if not embrace it, at least accept it. It may sound silly, but it actually works.
Between our big vacation in June and another scheduled for August, July is our lazy summer month this year. I expect it will still be full of activities and fun, but I don’t have any significant plans on the schedule. That feels a little daunting to me, because I often like to have plans. But it also feels like it’s open for possibilities!
Over the weekend, I got a nice glimpse of what a slow summer weekend can be as the girls (and particularly Charlotte) get older. We did a few things, and Jose and I had a date night, but we also spend large chunks of the weekend at home with the girls playing well independently while Jose and I got to indulge our own interests. It was lovely.
Big things happening in July:
+ Independence Day! I’m looking forward to our neighborhood bike parade, some pool time, and fireworks.
+ Another week of “special” camp for Emma. She’ll be doing a week of Camp Invention this month and I’m excited to see what kind of projects she creates!
July goals:
+ Do a digital declutter. I just started reading “Digital Minimalism” by Cal Newport and would like to put a couple of his suggestions into practice this month. I’ve already significantly reduced my time on Facebook in the last 6 months — primarily by deleting the app from my phone, which I did back on January 1. But I know there’s more I can do.
+ Figure out a shoe storage solution for the back door. We enter and leave the house through the back door 95% of the time, and the shoe situation has been out of control since the day we moved in. We had been using a small wicker basket located in the bottom right corner of the photo above. I recently swapped it out for a larger wire basket that was in Charlotte’s room, but that’s not much better. I feel like I need some sort of cabinet? The only real location options are either where that basket is, or right on the opposite side of that short wall by the back door, where we currently have a small cabinet. That cabinet doesn’t work well for shoes, but could be replaced with something more shoe-friendly. Any ideas??
+ Make a photo book of our Disney trip. I always have big ambitions of making fun photo books for various things, and then I never do. But our vacation deserves one, I think, and I want the girls to be able to look back on it in the future. This shouldn’t take more than a couple hours at most.
+ Investigate alternate TV/internet options. We’ve had AT&T Uverse since we moved into this house, and the price took a big jump last year when our initial 2-year deal ran out. There are so many options out there, and I need to spend some time figuring out what would work best for us. The biggest hang-up is sports — we want to be able to watch local sports, and particularly the Astros, and a lot of the streaming TV services don’t seem to offer that.
Happy July!
Ikea has a lot of great options for shoe cabinets, but you’d need wall space.
Yeah, I have looked at the Ikea options online! The ones I like the most are too wide for the small amount of wall/cabinet space we have available, but there are a couple of the smaller options that could work. I’ve been debating how many shoes they can each hold…