I finally found a tiny block of time in my day for a little blogging, so I asked Javier what I should write about. His response was to “do like that book of yours” and write a “short history of everything” – if you haven’t read a Short History of Nearly Everything, I highly recommend it. One of my favorite nonfiction books ever. Anyway, on to our life over the last few months…

The last time I posted, I wrote about making the big head posters for Penny’s birthday – and now she’s 18 months! I never did a recap of the time we spent with his family here in Louisville, but we had a fabulous couple of weeks with Javier’s parents. We toured the Maker’s Mark distillery, went to Mammoth Cave (I grew up in Louisville and NEVER went! how?!), spent an evening in a box at Churchill Downs betting on losing horses, watched a ton of Chilean soap operas during dinner, celebrated P’s birthday, and enjoyed each others company. We miss them!!

The holidays happened and were wonderful and busy. Javi and I gifted ourselves a living room makeover – I should have done a before and after photo, but trust me the before was sad. We never used the room except at night to watch TV when it was dark – so we decided to brighten it up a bit with a rug, a new TV, a working gas fireplace insert, and new tables (that Javi built, of course!). We still want to paint it and add a few more things to the walls, but the room is so much cozier. I also found an amazing Bernhardt sofa chair for cheap that I’ll have to write about another time – it’s SO COMFY and is my go-to spot in the morning with my coffee. Anyway, now that room gets MUCH more use – it’s cozy and lovely and feels like home (after 2 years!).

Speaking of sprucing up the house, we also fixed up our play room / multipurpose room a little more. You may recall that we removed the carpet and added vinyl floors last summer – but the built-ins were BUMMING ME OUT. I constantly felt pressure to add visual “layers” of decor to them or color-code our limited collection of books (we’ve donated most of them!) and all it ever amounted to was useless, cluttered space. We don’t have alot of storage in this old house, so we decided to add cabinet doors to cover the shelves and use half of the shelves as a pantry and the other half as storage for Penny’s toys. Javi built and painted the cabinets himself and added magical, luxurious slow-close hinges. I feel like millennial royalty now, living all my DIY pastel home dreams. Aren’t the cabinets beautiful now? We left the middle row open so we could put plants and other little decorative items there, and then I painted the whole room white. It’s so inviting and lovely and not stressful now with the open shelves…yay!

Above – the family room last July before we took the carpet out

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Above – the family room after we laid the floor down but BEFORE we closed the built-in cabinets

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Above – the room after Javi closed the cabinets and I painted the walls white! SO LOVELY!

In January we took a trip to the Alabama gulf and spent a long weekend reveling in calm, quiet (except for Penny haha but she let us have our moments!), slow and easy time together. We drove around on the golf cart, watched some beautiful sunsets on the dock, went on nature walks with P around the property, ate delicious food, and watched a bunch of movies. We also took a week-long staycation for the second year in a row in February, and spent the entire week relaxing and doing all of the things we want to do but never seem to have time to accomplish. I highly recommend a staycation to everyone…for all of the reasons I described in this post last year!

What else what else…in March I got a tattoo – I’ve been wanting one (or several) for years, and I’ve been following the artist Evan Davis for awhile and finally contacted him about my idea. I wanted one (or several) of Javier’s orchids, specifically Cosmos this time around. Cosmos blooms about every 3-4 months, he’s super faithful, and absolutely GORGEOUS. Evan Davis is especially superb with his tattoos featuring flora of any kind, and I’ve always liked the fine lines, details, and zero color. He took my idea and made it exactly what I wanted and more – he even added the leaves which I LOVE but had no idea how to incorporate. I am so happy – and of course I can’t wait for the next one.

Not everything is peachy, but the unpleasant things are just that: unpleasant. Nothing terribly unfortunate or devastating. But since we’re updating, I’ll say that just this past weekend as I was showing the termite inspector around (yes, we have termites, ugh), we noticed that a giant tree had fallen in our backyard and taken down half of our beautiful holly tree and favorite pink dogwood. We didn’t even hear it fall, and I walked right past the window as I was talking to the termite guy and Javi said behind me “oh shit! There’s a giant tree in our yard!” A day later the radio in my car went out for the second time, so that’ll need fixing (P SERIOUSLY cannot handle being in the car without her Disney music), and then my phone finally broke – my trusty ol 6s Plus that I’m proud to say I had for 5 whole years. The termites, tree, car, and phone all happened in the span of 3 days – good thing we have a rainy day fund! It’s all very first-world-problem-y, but annoying nonetheless. Still, if that’s the worst I can think of to report, then life is pretty damn good.

I have other things I want to write about…our second minimalism kick (read about our first one here), the beginning phases of adding photos and art to our wall, photography developments in my life, woodworking projects that Javi has taken on, more home renovation updates, and of course all things P. Hopefully this short history of nearly everything has brought me up to date enough that I can start tackling little posts one at a time…we’ll see!