Kalena Langford

In just three months of recapping my months, I’ve realized how quickly we move from one thing to the next. Not necessarily in a bad way. But it does make me want to slow down even more. I’m pretty intentional about not saying “yes” to everything. In fact, I’ve probably lived the opposite of that in a negative way at some points. Mostly since having kids. Because they definitely make you reevaluate everything (and for the better in most cases). But I do want to be more intentional about saving space to just be versus getting caught up in the “do everything” mindset. Even at home sometimes (which is its own can of worms). It’s nice to not have plans all of time. Actually, really nice.

June was a pretty good mix of planned things and not planned things. Here’s some of what we did…

ZOOSIANA

I already posted a few pictures from a zoo outing last month, but wanted to journal a little bit more about it. It was really such a great day with my kids. Just me and them. We were supposed to have gone a couple of weeks before we actually did. But, rain. Lots of it. And there was threat of it (and existence of it) on the makeup day too, but we still went for it. Zoo memberships helped make that decision easier knowing if we needed to leave, we wouldn’t have wasted our money.

So, we planned this out, but it didn’t involve meeting anyone else and was easy and relaxing. Woke up, ate breakfast, then headed there. My kids have been many, many times with their grandpa, so they know the layout well and are always excited to lead the way. So, they did. And I just went at their pace. It was wonderful. We all had a great time taking in each animal, them spouting off allllll the facts they know (mostly from Wild Kratts), and enjoying just being outside. Thankfully, most of the zoo is shaded and a lot of renovations have taken place over the last year or two to make it nicer.

I’m pretty certain we saw every animal, which was awesome. There were tiny baby squirrel monkeys and red ruffed lemurs as well as 1-day old peacocks (SO CUTE). The tiger and porcupines were especially entertaining. We got caught in a super heavy downpour while feeding donkeys. But we were close to the train pavilion, so were able to take cover there (along with a few other visitors and about 20 peacocks). One of the keepers gave the kids peacock feathers while we waited for the rain to stop. I think that’s a fairly common thing if you catch them with enough to hand out. Super fun (and cheap) souvenir. After the rain subsided, we picked up the pace to see the last little bit of the zoo we had not seen up to that point and left just before another rainstorm began.

OYSTERS

I like oysters. At least the smoked, chargrilled/charbroiled, or fried varieties. I’ve yet to try them raw. Maybe one day. Anyway, even though I like them, I don’t eat them often. But they made it to my monthly round-up because I ate them two different times in June. Matt and I went to Uncle T’s Oyster Bar for our anniversary (ha we’re fancy). It was our first visit there. As an appetizer, we got the Holly Beach sampler, which includes four different kinds of fancied up charbroiled oysters. They were good. And when we told our son about it, it piqued his interest. He requested he and I go to Uncle T’s for our next date night together. So, we did. Ordered the same thing as when Matt and I went: the charbroiled oyster sampler and alligator tacos. He loved it all too. Yum.

DOT-TO-DOTS

Every so often, one of the kids decides to pull out a dot-to-dot book. Not just any dot-to-dot book, though. Ha.

I stumbled across a 1,000 dot-to-dot activity book at Sam’s a lot of years ago. I did a couple, then stuffed it away and rediscovered it a few years back. My son, who was (I think) 5 years old at the time took a big interest. So, I shared and ordered another. In fact, he really learned counting to 1,000 well doing these dot-dot-dots. And June happened to be the month for my daughter to start doing the same. She actually started in an up to 500-ish dot-to-dot book that I got at Dollar Tree. Went from needing help several months back to plowing through them fairly quickly. She requested her own 1,000 dot book. I have to admit, they are super cool. Frame-worthy.

500 dot-to-dot book from Dollar Tree

1,000 Dot-to-Dot Wonders of the World book

1,000 Dot-to-Dot Cities book

FLOWERS

I love having flowers at home. Here’s just a few from June:

Bachelor’s Buttons

Montbresia

Zinnias