Content I'm Consuming

I'm all for sharing recommendations. It's why I've kept up with blogs over the years. So much of my entertainment choices come from others telling me about it online. I also often forget to share these one at a time in other posts or the timeliness is off, so I'm putting all this in one place. This is from the last few days.

Watching: This weekend was all the football which was disappointing and annoying but anyway.

I watched all 6 episodes of His & Hers on Netflix this weekend, too. I loved the book a few years ago and I'm glad I read it awhile ago because I didn't remember much! This show is set in Georgia instead of in the UK and I'm okay with that. I am a huge fan of Jon Bernthal, if you remember The Walking Dead days on this blog (first 2 seasons great...all downhill after that). He was the perfect choice to play a detective in Georgia. 

Very much recommend if you need something to binge! And, again, I have NO IDEA how well it matched up to the book because I read the book many thrillers ago but I do remember how much I liked it. I called it one of my best reads of 2022. 

Listening: Hear me out. I'm not a stan for Lila Rose. I agree with her on many things but I actually am not a fan of her personally because I think she (and many other conservative influencers) can be hypocritical. 

However, I love watching or listening to debates. I listened to this while I did some cleaning on Saturday and, my God, does it pull you in....the comments alone are worth a read. Lila represents a normie and Stephanie represents a broken record. Every single American woman should listen to the debate and decide which wagon train they'd prefer to be hitched to because they are going in opposite directions.

Reading: Okay, well, I'm not exactly off to a running start with 2026's reading but that's mostly because I'm a serial do-not-finisher and leave a lot behind me and never think about it again. 

Last week, I read College Girl, Missing by Shawn Cohen and cannot recommend it enough. There's a few true crime cases I cannot get past and desperately want to be solved; Lauren Spierer is one of them. I love that the book gives more information than the podcasts I've heard so far. I'm really hoping The Prosecutors deep-dive into her case, at least with a two or three-parter, because I want to know their opinions. 

Friday Things, 1/16

For my birthday this week, I kind of wanted to share 40 random things and thoughts but I'm pretty lazy and honestly don't have the vanity (currently anyway) or spare time to think on coming up with a list that long. 

Here's what I got to before I gave up:

+The only acceptable topping for a hot dog is mustard. 

+I don't trust people who don't go to the dentist for cleanings at least once a year.

+Friends and How I Met Your Mother are pointless TV shows.

+The only wrong way to educate your child is if you have no idea what they're learning or aren't aware of their academic abilities. Public school isn't inherently good or bad. Private school isn't always the best value. Homeschooling doesn't work for everyone. As long as you understand where your child is, academically, and you're advocating for them, it's all fine. Literally, the only wrong way to do it is to stick your head in the sand. (In the same vein, enrolling your kids in an online program that has virtual teachers and the kids are learning via computer is NOT homeschooling.)

+I have never played Wordle. 

+ Never in my life have I threatened to quit a job. I ride it out and hand in my resignation with proper notice like a responsible adult. I actually see a lot of people I've worked with posting online about how much they love their jobs and they are the same ones threatening to quit every two months and crying in their classrooms. I don't get it.

+I would always rather be cold than hot, but being *out*in*the*cold* is never my preference. 

+I've figured out that you don't need $$$ skincare. I went back to cheap skincare this fall: my skin has never looked better. **If you have a particular issue to solve, that's different. But generally, I think we over-do it.** I went by ingredient instead of brand names. The same ingredients are in e.l.f. compared to the high-end brands. 

+I legitimately do not believe the chem trails theory. Whenever I see someone be extra-crunchy and talk about how the government is poisoning us from above, I unfollow. 

+I do think the moon landing is pretty questionable though.

+I loathe the color "periwinkle".

+I've considered myself an introvert for my entire adult life. Scott told me recently that, actually, I'm an extrovert so I have no idea what I'm talking about. I really had to think about it...I think I may be an extrovert? The evidence for this, honestly, is that I was working as a bartender when I met him and no 22 year old introvert works as a bartender. Also, I hate going places but I do feel a buzz after being with people? Like, that's how I get my energy? Lots of question marks here. I was absolutely an extrovert as a young person. I hated being at home and not out with others. I was a leave-the-house-at-9pm-person for quite awhile there.  

+I will never turn down a massage. It's by far the bougiest thing about me; I've had a massage place I'd frequent in every state we've lived in so far, except Alaska. I would go every couple of months in Colorado. 

+My favorite way to make coffee at home will always be the Keurig. Fool. proof.

+I am anti-ChatGPT. 

+I have unfollowed every cOnTeNt CrEaToR who is also a military spouse. I don't want them in my algorithm. In fact, unless you're a military spouse who I personally have had a friendship with, I'm not following you anymore. I don't want the comparison trap. Same reason I also haven't followed a lot of teachers over the year. I cracked the code on what I want my social media to look like at this point, and honestly it's just niche memes.

I bought one sweater from Shein, one time, for like $9 because a blog friend turned influencer swore by them. It smelled like plastic through multiple washes and then I threw it away. 

Very niche: If you get this, we can be friends. ^^^

If I have to wake them up, someone is either sick or they were already up (and kept me up) all night. 

Linking up with Friday Favorites!

In case you missed it, I did some Amazon buys and a birthday post this week. 

Amazon in December/January (so far)

(Apparently I buy everything in packs of two)

Hair repair treatment. This is worth the money. I tried a few different products because my hair was very dry from, weirdly, just highlighting it two or three times a year. Bleach is bleach is bleach, I guess. I love this stuff. You can buy little single use packs at Walmart to just try it out. I can get 2-3 uses from a little pouch of it, but I have been using it a few times a week. 

LG Universal Remotes. Maverick ate the remote awhile back and eventually it stopped working so this is a two-pack, overnight delivery for free because of Prime <3. 

Beeswax candles. I gifted some for Christmas and also bought myself a couple. I am all-in on these and I recommend everyone give them a try. Here's the benefits to burning beeswax. 

Sourdough Starter Warmer. I gifted this for Christmas and I need one for myself but I'm really just worn out from attempting sourdough. I need to pull my starter out of the fridge. It just seems like one more thing that I don't feel like doing. 

Nuk Orthodontic Pacifiers. Still fighting the battle of the pacifier over here. Taking them away before we left home for 2-3 weeks was not in the cards so I'll work on it this winter. (I honestly just need Scott to leave for a few days.)

Pill organizer. Scout the Dog takes medicine twice a day and, while I understand what and when since I'm in charge of it, I find that Scott gets mixed up when they're hunting. And, since we were leaving the dogs with my parents for a few days, I needed a system for his medicine. This was only $5 and honestly has made life a lot easier because I just reload it once a week. The only thing I don't like is that I have to have a better handle on the refill schedule because I'm not opening the bottles twice a day to notice how much is left. 

Galaxy projector. We had a galaxy projector last year and it broke/stopped working after a few months. VERY annoying. The kids had loved it though so Scott went out and got them a new one for Christmas. This one is different, better quality, and I like it a lot so far. I think it's worth a try if you're in the market for one! They use it as a nightlight (Sutton has a different one and Wells has been using this.)

Not a great pic, but it's very realistic and kind of rotates around the room:

Chiefs onesie. I have a new nephew arriving this year and his dad (my brother) is a Chiefs fan. 

(If you are new here, we live in the KC area and are not Chiefs fans. My brother lives nowhere near KC and is a Chiefs fan.)

Infant headbands. A Christmas buy for our baby niece. You can never have too many of these with a baby girl and the more colors the better. 

Land's End Snowboots. I got these snowboots for our trip east. They are great and I recommend them because they're waterproof and I spent a lot of time in puddles in Buffalo. They run a little big. I've only had two pairs of actual snowboots in my adult life: a $35 pair in Alaska and now these. I expect them to last at least 15 years, doing that math. I bought from Amazon, specifically, for the ease of returns if they didn't fit. 

Maybelline 4-in-1 Instant Perfector. This is my second tube. It's what I use as concealer and instead of actual foundation. I blend it in with a brush and do some light powder over top.  I thought I was ordering one (my original came from Walmart but they don't have it in-store anymore) and they sent me a two-pack for $9. Quite the value!

Some books for Christmas:

The Wild Robot for Wells

The mouse and strawberry book for Sutton. I remember reading this to a kindergarten class two decades ago lol. 

I know a lot of people like to cut back in January on purchases and especially purchases on Amazon. I generally don't buy things unless I need them or require them for something. And if Amazon keeps me out of a store where I'll buy even more or saves me an entire day of driving around town, so be it. 

The last 10 years

For my 30th birthday in January 2016, we went to Denver for the weekend. I was very apprehensive about turning 30 and facing down 2016 because it was a deployment year. Scott was in Afghanistan from February-November 2016. While I’m “grateful” for the “opportunity” to “learn and grow” that year, it was not easy. I didn’t exactly feel like I was being set up for success and had no idea what the rest of the decade would hold for that reason alone. I had already spent full years of my 20s alone because of deployments. 

2017 was failed fertility treatments and, ironically, pregnancy. 

2018 was having a baby and moving. 

2019 was moving. 

2020 was moving. 

2021 was moving. 

2022 was having a baby. 

2025 was moving. 

I also taught at 4 schools in 3 states in the last decade, and took 4 years off to stay at home. 

Sprinkle in lots of TDYs and a few shorter deployments too. 

One dog passed away and we gained a puppy. 

We sold a remodeled house, bought 3 more, and took on remodeling another house as our family’s personality (again). 

We also traded in a truck for a bigger truck and bought a new SUV. 

Truly, almost everything looks different than it did 10 years ago. There is nothing familiar in my surroundings except Scott and Scout the Dog. Super weird, right? I guess we do have a lot of the same furniture. You only buy new furniture as a must when you know it'll get all dinged up during moves. 

While being a military spouse isn’t easy, it’s never boring. I literally had no idea where I would be at 40 so this last 10 years was a lot of big and little decisions that added up to what life became for my 30s. I couldn’t have planned it or done it any better and have been blessed with much more opportunity and goodness than I deserve. 

So I’m going to be super cryptic and superstitious and prayerful when I say I literally have no idea what’s next because I could not have laid out any of this 10 years ago. 

Friday Things. 1/9

 +I'm rebranding Friday Recommendations into Friday Things. I had Stuff and Things on Thursday for years. At some point I couldn't do both Thursday and Friday. And Friday Favorites isn't really my thing, mostly because half of those who ever write the abbreviation for favorite spell it "fav" with the short /a/ and I struggle to get past that. But also because I'm a glass half-empty kinda person and picking out favorites from the week when I'm completely worn down by Friday isn't my thing. I could do it on a Tuesday, I bet. So anyway, just Things for Fridays now. Some favorites, some not, some whatever. 

+I remain unimpressed by the Stranger Things finale, mostly because some of the fan theories were so good that the actual thing was a letdown. Either way, we enjoyed watching it through the years.

+Maverick found the empty dog food bag in the basement yesterday about 3am, got stuck, and Scott sent me this picture. Said he was banging into walls trying to get out. This is after he ate a bag of cough drops the other day. He has been on a tear lately, and seems to have a death wish.

+I made it back from Pennsylvania with these two items from my parents' house because they don't use them. This heavy metal weapon ice cream scoop is at least 40 years old. I have broken two or three ice cream scoops in the last year. We had the same one for 13ish years and it finally gave out and, apparently, they don't make them as well as they used to. I considered buying a heated one but they're like $40, so that was a no. 

And this wooden cutting board was my aunt's and is probably 50 years old. I don't have a wooden board right now so maybe this is just what I need for all that sourdough I don't see myself being successful with this winter. 

+I read that dark showers are supposed to calm. your nervous system. We put in this exhaust fan with different colored lights and connects to bluetooth to play music or whatever too. The kids love that in the bathtub but a dark shower with just this blue light on is really relaxing. 

My parents' bathroom (the one I grew up with) has a window right over the tub and the difference between showering in the dark and showering in bright natural light is really obvious once you compare! 

Scott thinks bathrooms should not have windows. 

Do your bathrooms have windows? It's probably been 50/50 on all the houses we've lived in. 

(don't mind the mess)

+I am constantly going back and forth on my feelings concerning homeschooling and I wrote this the other day on substack. I tend to put more substantive topics over there. What I realized later that I completely forgot to include: a lot of moms I've talked to think of homeschooling as an option only *if* they can find a "co-op" that meets "2-3 days a week". .....that's not homeschooling. That's hybrid schooling. That's part-time schooling. And you pay thousands of dollars for it every year. They will admit that it "still costs $3,000 a year" to "join a co-op" so why bother?

 

...because that's not homeschooling. Our co-op was $50 for the year. It's literally just an extracurricular day most weeks. It has nothing to do with their actual schooling. 

This is what I mean when I say that moms just don't *want* to homeschool. It's fine not to want to, but let's be honest about it. 

+

Speaking of substack! I wrote this too, quite awhile ago!  I stand by it. I can't imagine how exhausting it must be to never post a picture of your child. 

+ 

Linking up with Friday Favorites!

Christmas recap 2025

We spent the weeks around Christmas traveling. Kansas City area to Missouri to Pennsylvania to New York, back to Missouri, back to Kansas. It's hard to post a ton of photos because I don't like to post other people's kids, but let's see what's on my camera roll that's worth sharing. 

Things started out okay when it came to traveling from Kansas to Pennsylvania by myself with two kids, but then I got the call somewhere in Ohio that a tree had fallen on our property in Wyoming and that set the tone for the rest of the trip. 

I felt a lot like Mike McCluskey fielding calls and receiving and delivering bad news while he drives, because I had to keep going back and forth with the management company and with Scott. 

Honestly, we would've left the tree there had it not fallen on the tenant's truck...

Then I parked my gas vehicle in a charging spot at Sheetz because there were no other spots available. I reinforced how electric car owners waste their time when they sit charging their vehicles. Wells is well-versed in this rhetoric by now. 

Scott and I went out to lunch one day. Felt very midwestern, asking for a side of ranch with my fries. 

The Michael Scott plasma screen TV situation happening in my bedroom in PA. This TV wasn't there when I was living there but it's for-real hard to see. 

We've spent the last few weeks watching all the football and all the Stranger Things. 

Honestly, it was just really cold or windy or snowy or icy for our entire trip. I think we had one calm day? Maybe. Scott was working outside on some projects the entire time and winter in PA isn't great for that. 

Santa came to Pennsylvania via nanny and pap. We don't buy big gifts for Christmas because we are legitimately sick of moving things around...I learned my lesson with the Paw Patrol tower in 2022. 

We did some other gifts for the kids when we got back to Kansas.

After Christmas, Scott and I took off for Buffalo, New York, which is another great winter destination! He bought tickets to the Bills game back in September. 

We knew it was going to rain. We knew the weather was going to be miserable. Scott said, "This will be as fun as we make it" and I said "I'm notorious for making things more fun", which he thought was really funny.

Again with the side of ranch. 

We stayed at an air b and b on Lake Ontario. Literally, half a block from the lake so when those Lakeshore Flood Warnings came rolling in, we knew they'd be closing roads down, which means we ended up leaving a day early. It would've been nice to sight-see and check out Niagara Falls and walk along the Erie Canal but..December. 

This reminded me so much of Alaska, to be honest. You don't get weather like this in the midwest. 

Then the forecast for the game:

Every few hours a new warning would pop up. 

We did have really good seats but the rain kept on coming...

The backstory: Scott has always been a Bills fan. I'm not sure where that began, but he has Bills gear from the 90s. 

In 2017-2018, we were living at the University of Wyoming when Wells was born. Josh Allen was the quarterback for the team that year and was drafted to the Bills. So there's a connection there, and it was kind of neat to go to Buffalo and actually see the place. I've been to NY several times but not to Buffalo before this. (I would maybe recommend August/September instead of December :)

Anyway, Buffalo is about 3 hours north of where my parents live, so it was an easy drive. 

The lot where we parked was dirt/gravel. By the end of the night it was a solid ice rink. Again, reminded me of Alaska, where it was common to carry kitty litter in your trunk to give traction if you found yourself stuck. 

Perfect snowflakes in Scout's fur. 

Sorry. Just so much snow and so much cold and so much wind and wet. I was reminded, a few years ago living in Pittsburgh, just how long and dark the northeast winters really can be. I think I would get some seasonal depression living back there again. 

Meanwhile, 60 degrees and sunny in Kansas City this week. 

Anyway, I would like to thank my parents for accommodating us and taking care of the dogs. We don't board them just because but Scout takes medications and Maverick is coming off a month of immuno-suppressive steroids and actually wasn't supposed to be around other dogs....so we would've really been in a tight spot if we'd had plans to board.  

We were able to spend a lot of time with all the grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and Wells did not want to come home. 

Another season of Christmas travels is finished and we're ready to lock-in for winter. 

Mid-taking down the tree on Sunday night

If we had more space in the living room, I'd leave it up for another month.

In 2012, I took it down in March.