Another productive week

 I finished my windowsills and added plants yesterday, huzzah! 

I was concerned if I just had drywall for windowsills that it wouldn’t wear as well, so I custom cut out a sill from a 1x12 primed board. I love how it turned out. Just the finished look I wanted. 

Bill got the toilet installed! He was hoping to do the shower too, but it always takes a bit longer than planned when you’re doing something for the first time. And we went and helped a friend move and that was a very good use of part of our afternoon, so no worries. 

We went on a bit of a shopping spree on Friday night. Spencer was fresh out of clothes that fit. TJMaxx came in clutch. We got a lot of good clothes for him. And for Genevieve, Chloe, and me. Plus some adorable shoes from DSW for the girls and Aaron. We’re in the converse world now! Coming full circle from my 90s life. 

Cute, baggy, cargo pants and converse and repping a shirt of mine from work. 

Couldn’t pass up this adorable dress and purse and the sparkly converse are maybe my favorite thing ever. 

Why are they so cute???? I just love them so much when they’re being so cute together. 

This is my finished living room, which sort of felt like an extension of the basement finish. We moved the tv down to the basement. I painted the wall back to white and moved the piano and couches so the room is open instead of closed off from the kitchen and dining room. We use it so much more now! I really love the change. 

And look at my awesome tennis team! They’re so great! We were missing about five for the picture, but I had 28 players this season. We had to cancel our last match for rain yesterday, but we have a tournament on Saturday and probably the last match rescheduled later in May. It has been so fun to do tennis again. I’m really a fan. I will very likely do this again in the fall. 

Running and Drumming and Tennis

 Chloe has been playing in percussion club every week all year and they had their performance this week. It overlapped Genevieve’s soccer game, so my favorite drummer, Bill, went to the concert and I went to soccer. I saw the video afterward though, and they’re so good! Aaron did the club last year and this year’s was just as good. 

Bill took some amazing pictures of my tennis team. This is one of the ones he got of Aaron. I love it so much. 

I ran the Salt Lake Half Marathon yesterday! It went so well. This year has been intensely busy on a scale I haven’t seen in a while. So I’m still running, but not as many days. One of my run club runs overlaps with tennis practice, so this last month I’ve missed that one. I did get some long runs in this spring and just hoped for the best. I ran with my friend Diane and we had a fantastic race. We stayed together until mile 12 and then I was like let’s go! And I sped up my pace for a negative mile split. I was at about an 8:45 pace for mile 12, but I did 8:20 for mile 13 and it felt amazing! I did not want to leave any effort on the table. I always like to sprint to the finish, but 8:20 was actually all I had, so I just pushed to hold it all the way through the chute  I was so pleased with how it went. 

On the train at ridiculously early 5am hour. 

Last year I did a dedicated marathon training program. I ran a ton of miles. I was very thoughtful about my paces and long slow runs, etc. This year I did none of that save for doing some long runs in March and April. And I managed to finish in less than a minute slower than last year. I’m really pleased with that result. I still have a really good base of running miles this year. I consistently ran all winter, so that’s what is keeping me finding success in my racing. 

Still smiling after the race! 

We’re doing some plant relocations with the new basement. I put plants back on mine and Bill’s bedside tables. They look so good against the gray wall. I love it! 

Not a basement update post 😍

I’m not writing a post about the progress on our basement this week! Because it’s just part of our house now and we’re using the heck out of it! Huzzah! 

When your house isn’t big enough for your workout stuff, but your garage is, so you give up on parking even one car in there and lean into it being an extra room. 

And you have seven bikes and four scooters. Lolol. Next house we want a three-car garage. 😂

I’ve been coaching tennis this last month and it’s everything I ever hoped for in coaching. I love it so much. We got team shirts. My team has Kelly green and I got this one to match. 

We got a new scratching tree for Freya in hopes that she’ll leave this chair be. I’m amused that it’s actually a tree. 

Genevieve, fashion queen. 

Spencer sporting a new, super trendy do. 

It’s done! Mostly.

 We watched general conference this weekend in our NEARLY finished basement. Huzzah! It is SO nice. We need to finish plumbing the shower and install the toilet and vanity. And we need to hang the closet doors and put whatever shelves we want in there. That’s it. Oh, and put windowsills in and touch up paint the window frame. I almost forgot about that. That’s kind of the nature of finishing a basement yourself it turns out. The finish bits drag on and on. But it’s completely usable. We got a new couch delivered Saturday and we also got a new beanbag. Bill set his drum set up. It’s awesome. 

The upstairs carpet feels absolutely horrible now that we have the nicer basement carpet. We got the base model for our upstairs when we built, as we knew nothing about carpet. But now we learned about carpet and got good stuff for our basement. I’m actively contemplating how hard it would be to do the upstairs now, lol. Newsflash: it would be SO hard. Lololol. 

I’m not completely done with the upstairs room. I’m going to paint this green wall back to white. There’s some holes to fill first. I like the green, but my kitchen has a blue accent wall, and I don’t like them opposite each other as much as I hoped I would. There’s one floating shelf left in this picture, but I took them all down. The room is so much more usable now that the tv is downstairs. Basically everything is better with the basement finished. 

We got little diamond art stickers as an activity for while watching conference and it was a huge success.  All of us did some. It’s been a great weekend.