The Doll Sweet Journal.: April 2018 Randoms

The Co-op's chocolate mousse cake is one of my favorite desserts in the world. I miss it so much! I loved buying a slice every time I went.

I really was attached to my magnet collection (no pun intended 😄). I took some more pictures of it before they all had to get taken down. I wish I knew where they all were now. 😔

The collection continued on the fridge in the basement!

This one was ideally apropos (we didn't know it yet, but this is the town to which we would be moving less than three months later. It also happens to be my hometown.)

Because I'm a sentimentalist, I had to take photos of these two suitcases that accompanied us on so many of our travels from 2008-2018. I bought them at T.J. Maxx in Granby, Connecticut before our first international family trip to the island of Grand Cayman in the Caribbean. They held up really well over the years and were very accommodating of my tendency to overpack. 😀 But at 10 years old, they were showing and feeling their age, and it was time to get new ones and donate these to Goodwill. Goodbye you reliable wonderful old suitcases! On to new adventures with new people.

The blue one was the boys' and the green one was mine.

I like to think that I'm a "certain woman"...

Yeah Iowa! I'd like to point out that, surprisingly, Massachusetts was in the top 10 least stressed states as well.

Snow in April...crazy!

Part of me enjoys it when the weather is rebellious and doesn't behave properly. (My apologies to the climate-change activists. But planet earth and Mother Nature are way more powerful than humans, and they're gonna do what they want to do no matter what we do or how we influence things for better or for worse. Take care of the earth and love it, yes, but don't worship it and try to control what happens to it above all other things.

...That's what I think about that!)

One of my last evenings enjoying my reading nook before it got taken apart. A year later, I can say that I genuinely miss this space a lot.

I'm attracted to both, but I'm definitely more of an abundance type. Sadly my house was in the process of going from abundant to simple as we got it ready to go on the market.

I got this for a friend's baby shower. It was on her registry but I upgraded to a luxe boppy instead of a basic one for her. I thought the mommy and baby whale were so cute.

Noooooooooooo!!! 😮😖😱

One of my favorite healthy vegetarian lunches--perfect over-hard fried eggs (always a special accomplishment for me on the rare occasion that they happen) and well-seasoned, perfectly tender stir-fried veggies. 😋

We went to the Iowa Children's Museum at the mall for the last time. Sam was a baby when we first started coming here and John had his kindergarten birthday party here!

The music room was always one of their favorite rooms.

The little grocery store at the museum was always really cute. This would have been my favorite place in this museum when I was a kid. I had that domestic instinct from a young age.

Cute!

Really cute! We found this adorable baby bunny hiding on our back patio, and we rescued it from getting discovered by the dogs, which would have been a sad situation! The teenage daughter of the couple who were working on our house was an animal lover and carried it into the field where it would be safe.

I love baby animals!

I wish I'd bought this pillow at Target. I love the colors. Green and navy blue are my favorites.

I liked this catalog cover. I have a homemaking dream of gathering and arranging flowers for fun (instead of buying them at the grocery store, which is also fun but not quite as rewarding).

I will call this section of the blog post "The Ongoing Sterilization of My Beloved House." I almost gave it it's own blog post but for the sake of time and simplicity (see what I did there), I didn't.

The piano got moved to one of the bookcase walls, which felt very strange to me.

Half of the wrap-around couch was removed, along with other furniture and most of the things from the walls.

It looked nice enough but felt very empty. The house had lost that homey, lived-in, comfortable feel, which I guess was the point.

They moved the table by the stairs into the living room. I thought this was really weird because that table fit that alcove perfectly and looked good there, but they were the experts.

There's the above-mentioned table on the left.

This looks nice but it just doesn't do it for me. After the house sold I put the chaise lounge chair back in front of the window.

But for now it was in the master bedroom and it did look good there.

The master bathroom was so empty! It was depressing and unnatural!

We went on a weekend house-hunting trip to Massachusetts at the end of April. I took hardly any pictures, but I did take this one of the first house we looked at. We really liked this house. It belonged to the Stake Relief Society President who was a friend of my mother's. She and her husband were moving to Utah that summer. This house was so pretty, and it had an awesome third-floor master bedroom suite that I absolutely loved, along with a gorgeous sunroom off the kitchen, and a truly amazing pool that had a hot tub built right into the pool and a waterslide that was landscaped into the ground going down a hill and into the pool. It was awesome! This house was definitely a contender, but the things I/we didn't like were mostly that the town and location didn't feel right, and the awesome pool area in the back took up a lot of space so the backyard wasn't very big. But if this house had been in Hopkinton, we very likely would have bought it.