EvY at HomE

On July 10 Alice turned a ripe old FIVE years old. We celebrated at home and then on Sunday the 14th we had a birthday party for her at Chuck E. Cheese. Dude, those parties are worth it. They do everything for you! All you have to do is pay money and show up! Usually I'm all about party throwing but the gift of having someone else do it... worth it! And guess what, Alice LOVED it. She was so happy to have her family and friends around and get to play games and eat pizza. What could be better? And we got this killer family photo. LOL.  Who is Alice at 5? Just the funniest. She likes to make us laugh. If a joke works once, she thinks it will always work and keeps trying it over and over. She lands one in 20 and that one that lands she'll milk until it's dry. She still has the most atrocious eating habits and her diet is ridiculous. She rarely tries anything new. She has about 4-5 ticks that we don't understand. We think it's her anxiety showing up in various ways...

I'm part of my church's women's leadership board, did I tell you that? We formed what became the base of the women's ministry, please don't call it that. This year for the summer we ran a pilot program where we had small groups but they were populated by only women and each group met at different times and had different topics. I chose the topic of women in the workplace, called it Women at Work and lead a group of about 14 women weekly for five weeks. We read the book "Dare to Lead" by Brene Brown and discussed it weekly as well as other lady in the workplace hot topics. We'd drink Rosé, I put cute pink and blue things around, turn on the twinkle lights, we'd hang in my backyard, eat cheese... AND USE A CLIPBOARD TO WORK ON EXERCISES FROM THE BOOK THAT KICKED MY ASS EVERY WEEK AS WE TALKED ABOUT SHAME, VULNERABILITY, COURAGE, EMPATHY, VALUES, AND FAILURE. Yeah, that's right. Instead of just some Lean In woo-hoo yeah lady power we got our b...