1. My dad was in Texas this past weekend, visiting for a couple days. Kyle hasn't seen him since he visited last summer, so it was great that he took to my dad so quickly. He even asked for him over and over after we dropped him off at the airport yesterday morning. My relationship with my dad is ... complicated (mostly complicated for me, admittedly) but it was still a good visit. I appreciated that he complimented our newly cleaned house and our tiny town and my sweet boy. (He called Kyle "perfect" and although he's not, ohgodno, his grandpa should think he is, so it was nice to hear.)
A visit with him stirs up so much in my head and heart, and I'm still waiting for the stirring to settle. Still, it was good to see him. It was good for Kyle to see him.
2. Let's move on from Family Issues with an uplifting note on Savages (ha), which we saw while my dad was in town (heads-up: kind of an awkward movie to see with your father) and despite it being hide-behind-my-hands violent, I actually liked it. Taylor Kitsch redeems all those John Carter Battlestar Whatever Movies and brings the Tim Riggins-level appeal (apparently what Tim Riggins was missing all this time was FACIAL SCARS, who knew!) and Blake Lively even made me hate her a little less.
I don't know that I'd recommend it--man, it's just so violent and I know there are few people who seek out these kinds of movies--but I felt myself enjoying it in the middle of it, to my own surprise.
3. Hey, don't know if I mentioned it but a couple weeks ago we hosted Hometown week at Food Lush and Style Lush and I'm so crazy proud of the quality of the posts from that week. If you're visiting Texas, Chicago, New York City, California, and many other map dots, bookmark these posts, my friends!
4. My mom and I recently saw Jersey Boys together, and it was such a perfect day. We took in an afternoon show and then had a delicious dinner followed by champagne and cupcakes at my mom's house. Kinda funny, though, while I had definitely heard dozens of Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons songs, I couldn't remember if Frankie Valli was one of the singers on the plane that tragically crashed in the '60s, so the whole time I'm bopping to "Oh What a Night" and "Sherry" and "Big Girls Don't Cry," I kept waiting for Frankie to die in an awful plane crash. (Spoiler alert: He was not on that plane.)
5. Kyle is in this (adorable) phase where everything is "super" something. "Daddy drives super fast!" "That toy is super cool!" "The plane we'll fly on is super big!" and, basically, Mike and I have adopted it in our own vocabularies. Forgive me, boss, if my next marketing plan is "super awesome" or something like that. It's just, man, this kid is cooler than I'll ever be.
6. This is kind of a silly thing to write about but I had the most delicious smoothie from Whole Foods last week and I am STILL THINKING ABOUT IT. My life is thrilling. I've begun talking about smoothies.
7. I'm gearing up to start training for another half-marathon (well, two, actually) this winter and that means training starts in a couple weeks. I'm adjusting last year's plan to take into account that the half-marathon I ran at the end of my training last year was pretty brutally awful those last three miles, and I'd like to feel more rockstar than puking-in-a-Luxor-trashcan this time around. I very highly doubt that I'll be recapping each week's training like I did last year, but I'm sure I'll still talk at length about the training. Really this is all just to warn you that things may get Running Heavy around these parts again after a very Running Light spring. (First things first, I need new shoes, and I think I need them to be a fun color this year.)