Things I’m Loving Friday #475

Friday is here! I hope you’re all checking in today after a good week. It was yet another “free week” of summer over here (meaning none of the boys had camp) but we filled our days with fishing playdates, swimming playdates and a trip to a local nature museum and Freedom Park. It was a good week and yet another week that has me wishing summer would slooow down!

The weekend ahead should be a good one as we have a birthday party tonight and the boys are competing in a “cardboard boat regatta” tomorrow night where they’ve been tasked with attempting to get a boat made out of cardboard across the pool with them in it. I hope to share more about our weekend on the blog next week but for now I’m ready to dive into this week’s roundup of favorites, Things I’m Loving Friday style. Have a great weekend, my friends!

Things I’m Loving Friday

• Shoulder Workout by Caroline Girvan

During our girls’ trip to the mountains last month, a few of us started talking about our favorite at-home workout options. A handful of my friends said they’re always on the lookout for workouts where the instructor doesn’t talk so they can listen to their own music and not get annoyed with too much talking. If you’re the same way, the shoulder workout I did earlier this week might be right up your alley. You guys know Burn Boot Camp’s streaming workouts are my go-to but sometimes when I’m craving a little variety or when I want to work a muscle group I may have missed at Burn earlier in the week, I’ll do a little browsing on YouTube. This should workout by Caroline Girvan was fantastic! It was only 30 minutes (I actually did it right at my kitchen counter while the boys did puzzles and melty beads) and my delts were on fiiire by the end. I’m keeping this one in my workout video rotation when I’m in the mood for a shoulder burner.

• Beaty Park (Davidson, NC)

I’m sharing this one for my local friends! Yesterday afternoon the boys and I made our way to Beaty Park, a new park that opened in Davidson. We’ve been anxiously awaiting this park for months as it always looked so cool from the street. It officially opened to the public on Saturday and the boys couldn’t wait to check it out.

The playground is smaller than we anticipated (so, perhaps, better for younger kids, as Chase who is almost 8 flew through it) but the structure is made of wood and stands out beautifully among the surrounding trees. Depending on the time of day it could be shady but it was quite sunny when we were there around 4 p.m.

The big highlight of the park for our boys was the looping trail past the main playground that surrounds a little pond. Complete with several bridges to cross and little foot paths the boys enjoyed exploring off the main trails, the trails were our nature-loving boys’ favorite! They’re shady and easy enough for a scrappy little 2-year-old to do (Rhett didn’t struggle at all) and the boys were psyched to find thee little frogs right off the trails as they were exploring.

• Chase Gets Braces!

A big milestone occurred for Chase earlier this week. He got braces! From the time Chase was a tiny toddler, his pediatric dentist told us he’d be quite the orthodontic patient, requiring both a palate expander and braces and she was right! Apparently his mouth is similar to mine (I also had a big crossbite and a small palate) and after one month of only the palate expander in his mouth, braces joined in the fun on Wednesday. He’ll have the palate expander for another 6 months or so and braces for about 10 months. Chase will then get braces again in a couple of years but all of this will be done earlier than I was ever used to back when I was a kid!

So far Chase has handled everything like a champ, never complaining even one time about his palate expander (other than to say the glue tasted weird) and doesn’t seem too bothered by his braces either. Let’s hope his relative indifference lasts because it has certainly made things feel easier than I anticipated. He’s done well so far and was excited to pick out blue rubber bands for on his braces!

• A Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting by Sophie Irwin

My rating: A-

This was just a delight of a book! I listened to this book and read it simultaneously (thanks to double availability through my library + the Libby app!) and I must admit this is one I almost enjoyed listening to more than reading. The narration is great and something about listening to the audiobook of this one made me feel like I was escaping to listen to some kind of a Netflix/Bridgerton show… and I mean that in the best way. It’s fluffy and fun but not so cheesy that I found myself rolling my eyes. It was simply an enjoyable read and a great little escape novel!

The book follows Kitty Talbot, a young woman determined to save her four sisters from ruin. She has a plan: She will find a husband… a very wealthy husband. The only problem is Kitty isn’t exactly “high society” so the chances of her running into someone of stature is slim. She decides to take her destiny into her own hands and, together with her sister Cecily, moves to London to stay with her aunt and find her way into London society. Kitty soon sets her eyes on Archie, a young man set to inherit his family’s fortune. Kitty believes the only thing standing in her way is her past until she comes face-to-face with Archie’s older brother, Lord Radcliffe, a handsome man who immediately sees through the clever ruse Kitty has built around her. Kitty fears her future is in jeopardy but her intellect and quick thinking work together to take her on an unexpected route to amass the fortune she desires so deeply.

• The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel

My rating: A- 

The fact that I stayed up waaay too late reading The Book of Lost Names and finished it in two nights should speak volumes to this book. It’s a page-turner, full of suspense and intrigue and characters you find yourself  fiercely rooting for throughout the book. As a huge fan of historical fiction, I love when novels in this genre teach me something and this book provided a little insight into the life of a forger during WWII which I found particularly interesting. I wish the romance between two of the main characters would’ve been developed a little deeper (while I rooted for them, I didn’t deeply feel their connection) but it was easy enough to get wrapped up in the plot and lean into their developing love story, too. (For what it’s worth, The Winemaker’s Wife is still my favorite novel by this author but I liked this one more than The Forest of Vanishing Stars.)

From Amazon:

Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books when her eyes lock on a photograph in the New York Times. She freezes; it’s an image of a book she hasn’t seen in more than sixty years—a book she recognizes as The Book of Lost Names.

The accompanying article discusses the looting of libraries by the Nazis across Europe during World War II—an experience Eva remembers well—and the search to reunite people with the texts taken from them so long ago. The book in the photograph, an eighteenth-century religious text thought to have been taken from France in the waning days of the war, is one of the most fascinating cases. Now housed in Berlin’s Zentral- und Landesbibliothek library, it appears to contain some sort of code, but researchers don’t know where it came from—or what the code means. Only Eva holds the answer, but does she have the strength to revisit old memories?

As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris and find refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, where she began forging identity documents for Jewish children fleeing to neutral Switzerland. But erasing people comes with a price, and along with a mysterious, handsome forger named Rémy, Eva decides she must find a way to preserve the real names of the children who are too young to remember who they really are. The records they keep in The Book of Lost Names will become even more vital when the resistance cell they work for is betrayed and Rémy disappears.

• June 2023 Top 10

I missed sharing a roundup of the June’s top 10 blog posts and best sellers after the month first wrapped up but I remembered today, so let’s dive in! I began sharing a top 10 list at the end of every month as a way to give you guys a glimpse back into some of the blog posts you may have missed or some of my favorite finds you may have had on your radar that got lost in blogging and social media mayhem.

Top 10 Blog Posts

• Easy Orange Juice Marinated Chicken Thighs
• Our First Time Camping with Kids
• Ryan’s Third Half IronMan + The Boys’ First IronKids Race
• How We Handle Potty Training
• House Tour: Our Laundry Room
• My Favorite Influencer Finds
• Picture an Hour: June 2023
• Three-Minute Egg White Oatmeal
• Roundup of Recent Looks #2
• Our Summer Staples for Kids

Top 10 Favorites

• Kid-Friendly Digital Camera (Glad I’m not the only one who was psyched about this camera! My go-to birthday gift for the boys’ friends this summer!)
• Paperclip Chain Necklace (I’ve had this since 2021 and it still hasn’t tarnished. Amazing price point and a cute little trendy piece.)
• Lululemon Festival Bag (The sneaky-huge crossbody that holds everything. My go-to bag for mom life lately!)
• Cane Storage Cabinet (The Walmart steal of a find that’s even more beautiful in person. We bought two and I’m seriously still blown away!)
• Perler Beads Pattern Book (The book our boys use for a lot of their melty bead pattern inspiration!)
• True & Co. Racerback Bra (So silky soft and the bra I’ve been wearing under tricky summer tanks. Works well with racerback tanks, narrow straps, etc.)
• Large-Capacity Makeup Bag (The bag that holds ALL of my makeup in one place.)
• NYX Lip Oil (Looks beautiful and feels great on my lips!)
• Zebco Kid Fishing Rod (The rod all of our boys used to learn how to fish. So great for practicing casting and comes with a heavy plastic fish little ones enjoy practicing with before they’re even ready to fish, too!)
• Quilted Crossbody Bag (A top seller again this month! This will forever be known as the bag I sprinted across the parking lot to ask another mom where she got it at preschool drop off.)

Question of the Day

What is one thing you are loving this week?