Friday recommendations, 6/13

1. First, the Friday Slides I wrote a post about on Tuesday. They're great sandals. 

2. I just finished off this bag of protein powder. I completely recommend the vanilla. We have a bag of chocolate, ironically, that Scott bought awhile ago so I'm trying to drink that next but I prefer vanilla and frozen berries in my smoothies. I'm not crazy about chocolate protein powder. I don't feel like there's much you can mix with it. 

3. 

I recommend just letting your kid wear as many bandaids as they want. 

Remember little Maribel Vance at the inauguration in January? Fingers covered in bandaids. Sutton has 1-4 bandaids on her at all times. Leaves them on for days. Probably not great for her skin. But she thinks that having a band-aid on makes a bruise or a bump or a bug bite "go away". Whatever. 

4. 

Primal Kitchen Ranch. I'm super picky about ranch and I usually just get the Chick-fil-a ranch at Walmart. But this PK ranch is all good for you and passes the crunchy test, I suppose. Heavy on the herbs, light on the white, blob-y ingredients if you know what I mean. 

(I've tried to by PK Ketchup and these people won't eat it. I do like their Hawaiian BBQ Sauce and the Buffalo Sauce too. You know, if you feel like spending $8+ on a bottle of sauce :).

5. 

In an effort to use up whatever I find in the cupboards, I'm adding red-dye-filled maraschino cherries to my diet coke and lime. 

Friday Slides Review!

To anyone who is on the fence about spending money on the Bombas Friday Slides, I bought them so you can have an honest review :)

First, I've had the $10 slides from Target. I wore them to the pool 2 years in a row. I have these slides from Amazon and I wear them around the house, currently. I don't love spending money on flip-flops so I usually have a pair of Sanuks and that's it. Bad flip-flops are really bad for your feet, and I haven't worn regular flip-flops out and about in years. To me, they give "stopping at a gas station on a road trip" vibes and I can't do it. (I think that comes from that Where the Heart Is movie, to be honest). 

Four years ago, I splurged on the Birkenstock Arizonas in teal. They are made of a styrofoam material* and are squeaky when wet. The feeling of my toes on that material was more than I could handle. They also have this raised support thing that you can see in the pictures. I don't understand why. It hurt my feet. Like, I couldn't wear them. Anyway, they sat with our outdoor shoes for a couple of years and last year Mav chewed on one a little and I didn't even care. I threw them away. Also, the print/logo rubbed off when wet. Basically, they were awful. 

I say all of that to put out there that I'm not unfamiliar to the game of buying summer slides that aren't flip-flops. 

This spring, I kept getting ads for Bombas and decided to splurge for Mother's Day. I was also riding out my foot issues for all of April and I used that to justify buying higher quality sandals for sure. Though, after the Birkenstock Regret of 2021, I was hesitant. 

I ended up going with the Desert Bloom, I got a size 8, and they were true to size. 

I cannot say enough good things about these shoes!

They don't get all weird and squeaky when they're wet. They dry quickly. They feel like nothing on your feet but are incredibly supportive. The footbed is almost completely flat and the ridges on the bottom actually kind of massage your feet the way those amazing adidas slides did back in the day. (I think I had them in 9th grade?) They also don't have a print logo or anything, just the name on the bottom. 

Honestly, I'm ready to buy another pair because I like them so much. If you are looking for a beach, summer, splashpad (me) sandal that is a little bit more elevated than a flip-flop and you can also wear with a sundress or into the grocery store after the pool (also, me), this is for you. 

*All of these slides have EVA listed as the material but the Birkenstocks were the only ones that felt like walking while encased in a styrofoam cup.

**I wish this post was sponsored, but it's not.**

Funny things. 6/9

 

My friend was driving cross-country last week and we had this really long conversation about how awful Ohio is and how Indiana is just as bad, really.

The fact that they're not releasing the first batch of episodes on Halloween is the biggest miss I've seen in awhile. Is this a holiday season themed season of ST?

It's true: I didn't want it to be that way, but I talk to no one from high school. I talk to people from college and I've made more friends as an adult than I ever did as an adolescent. My two friends I talk to most days: one is from California and grew up everywhere, and one is from KC by way of Korea. Military life will do that to you. In Colorado, my closest friends were from Texas and Michigan. In Alaska, my friends were from everywhere you could imagine. Ironically, the only place I had trouble making friends was when we lived back in PA for 18 months when Wells was a baby. 

I've had two healthcare practitioners in the last few years with fake eyelashes that were so obvious and I'm legitimately confused if they understand how this works.

I have HUGE opinions on tattoos. Don't get me started. 

I have been in a battle with Capital One for a month. They never sent me a new card, prior to the expiration of my old card at the end of May. I called almost a month ago and they said they would send one. Two weeks later, it hadn't arrived. I called last week, they said it was never sent and they would send one with a tracking email. The email never arrived so I called back a couple of days later. They said the card was mailed so it should arrive soon. Sure, okay. 

The Steelers signing Aaron Rodgers was not on my 2025 bingo card.

Friday Recommendations, 6/6

1. Persil laundry detergent. I spent the last two years looking for non-toxic laundry alternatives. I found some good and okay ones. I really like the ones that utilize lemon, vinegar, and essential oils. We've never used Tide because Scott has an allergy to it so mostly it's been All Free and Clear for over a decade. However, a homemaker I respect on Twitter recently posted about "you think your natural alternatives work, you wait til you try Persil to clean your clothes and you'll never go back". I was intrigued. I had been feeling lately that our washer isn't doing what I want it to do. I've added vinegar, etc trying to soften things up and deodorize. So I bought Persil. I don't care and I'm never going back. Clothes get brighter. They smell good. I switched without telling anyone and there's no allergies or irritations popping up. If you want your clothes c-l-e-a-n, try it. 

(I still use All Free and Clear dryer sheets. Don't @ me.) 

2. I've really struggled with an inability to make rice over the last 6 months. I've destroyed pots. The rice cooker would overflow for no good reason. I went from being able to make rice for dinner to...not being able to make rice for dinner. It's like that part of my brain stopped working. Anyway, after buying bagged rice to cook in the microwave for 90 seconds for months, I found this recipe for coconut rice the other day and I tried it with this Korean beef. It was very good. We had something similar from Dinnerly last year and it's one I recreate often! Wells ate two bowls. I let Sutton help me cook it so she'd maybe try it but she proclaimed it "smells really bad" and ran away crying when I gave her a (very small) bowlful. 

3. Here's memes and the books I've been reading over the past few months. I also wrote a post about math instruction, if the overall decline of educational strategies is your kinda thing. 

4. Lastly, I recommend going outside. I was starting to feel like I was actually suffocating, being in the classroom all day. We've been walking dogs, at splashpads, and at parks almost every day. While I'm also convinced that having a potty-trained 3 year old instead of a disgruntled 2 year old is what makes this possible :), I'm enjoying June more this year than I have in years past. 

March and April (and May I guess) Books. 2025

 The Sublet by Greer Hendricks (novella)

This was a what-did-i-just-read? kind of thing. It was weird and predictable and you know something big is coming but, to me, it didn't make sense. I think it was free? This was probably beginning of March though, so I don't really remember. 

Death Row by Freida McFadden (novella)

Again: what-did-i-just-read? It released June 1st. I think it was free? I'm not sure about anything when it comes to this book. I'm actually still confused when I think about it that ending. I read the last section twice and everything, so good luck. 

The Arrangement by Robyn Harding 

This was really good. You have to suspend your belief a little bit but it was a gripping story and I liked the narration if you're into audio. It's a thriller with a few twists that take the story in a different direction than what you assume is going to happen. 

Famous Last Words by Gillian McAllister

This was dull, tropey, and predictable. I caught the twists pretty early on and I found Cam to be a really dull person altogether. She is a literary agent who "just loves to read and lose herself in a book" and Luke is a ghostwriter who was her client and is now her husband and they have a baby together and she is going back to work after maternity leave and he holds 3 people hostage and kills two of them and completely vanishes and they never are able to ID these two men and 7 years later things start happening again. This takes place in London and everyone in the story, even the police, is very scandalized by the idea that guns apparently exist ...and this is why we won the war. 

The Tenant by Frieda McFadden

This was...not great. I like her writing but there was a twist that layered into the plot and it made it very non-believable. I like the idea of "the tenant" but I didn't like the way it was executed in this story.

Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong and What It Means for Our Health by Marty Makary

Ugh. The peanut allergy chapter alone will make you rethink the first decade of the 2000s. I remember when I first went into classrooms, starting in 2007, peanut allergies were everywhere. I would say this is required reading for everyone, even if you might not agree with all of his takes (for example, the over-medicalization of birth doesn't really bother me...but I think we do over-medicalize our kids.)

Kill for Me, Kill for You by Steve Cavanagh

I fell for the 5 star reviews and used a credit on the audio. I got the sense there was something weird in the narrative and any time someone mentions 9/11 in a book, you know something is up (think: that Robert Pattinson movie from way back when). But...there's still like 3 hours of audio left after some twists and it got weird and new characters that didn't make any sense to me and a whole subplot was introduced with, again, 3 hours left. I didn't care at that point. I felt like I'd gotten the gist of the story by then. 

TL;DR: this is not as good as they claim in the reviews. I've not read his other books but this was made out to be a Peter Swanson-style and it just wasn't. 

The Housekeeper by Natalie Bertelli

Another one where I felt like I got the entire essence of the story halfway through. I also did not like the narration. I felt like this could've been a lot better without a narrator who sounds like a grizzled old woman but is supposed to be 30. I struggled a lot with the main character. She was awful and helpless at the same time. It was on sale on Audible. 

An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and the Story of Bad Decisions by David Zweig 

Required reading. If anything would make me pull out the f-bomb in polite company it would be the fact that we destroyed schools for political gain. That's the one sentence summary of what happened in 2020.  President Trump tweeted "open the schools" in July 2020 and, all of a sudden, everyone in anti-Trump areas started closing down the schools for 2020-2021. 

Having taught in classrooms that looked like that ^, I do not accept the false narrative that kids are resilient (they're not) and "if it saves one life". My blood pressure is going up just thinking about it. Some of the potentially best teachers I'd have ever met otherwise, unmasked (pun intended) themselves as not being able to think, reason, or use their brains in a way that moved the needle forward. I lost trust and respect for most educators I knew. Yes, silent lunch was real. No, I would never, ever, ever put my kids in school on a military base after what I experienced in 2020-2022. (And from what I've seen in 2020-2025, I would honestly not put them in school at all...) 

I recently saw some pictures from the end of 2022, with everyone unmasked and un-distanced in a school I'd worked at in 2021. It's almost like "how dare they pretend none of that happened?". Those kids didn't learn how to read in first grade (they also had a rotten curriculum so that didn't help) because of masking and distancing. It just so happens to be where we are moving back to this summer and there's no way I would entrust my kid to that school knowing the terrible decision-making they are capable of. 

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Currently, I was trying to make my way through Bald-Faced Liar by Victoria Helen Stone. It's not great. I'm 20% in and I don't care. Her Jane Doe books were great, so this is a disappointment. I also quit The Crash by Freida McFadden because I don't do books about pregnant women in precarious situations. I did start it but I couldn't keep up once "the crash" actually happened. 

Clearly I'm in need of a recommendation: no rom-coms, thrillers preferred. I also think it's time to cancel that Kindle Unlimited subscription because everything I've gotten from there lately has been a bust. 

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Progress so far this year:

January books.

February books.

Linking up with Share Your Shelf! 

Memes + funny things my kids said this weekend

 

Guys, it's the little things but this nespresso is fantastic. Scott also promised a new kitchen table and couch when we move. 

IT WOULD BE A BLESSING

This weekend, it was me saying that rear-facing carseats probably aren't what you want for your 5 year old. 

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I don't document a whole lot of stuff like this and I don't even read it that much when other people do it but there were some good quotes the other day...

+Sutton had a nightmare, flipping out, throwing herself at me, wailing and inconsolable in the middle of the night. Apparently it was about a frog? At the end of her retelling this nightmare, she wailed And then he said...RIBBIT! 

That's the only thing that could make me laugh at 1:00am.

Scott slept with her for a bit and then she said okay go away and kicked him out of her room an hour later. 

+Scott went to help his friend move yesterday. He left before I got out of bed. Sutton told me while I was making coffee I wish daddy didn't have to go over to his boyfriend's house today. 

+Wells said I got an ad that says you're the best mom ever. I said what? He said Yeah in my dream last night, there was an ad that said you're the best mom. I always have two dreams a night and there's an ad in between them.