Hi friends! This spring has slipped through my fingers and before I knew it school is out next week! We will be entering our last year of middle school for Aidan in the fall, and as I sat in church last week honoring our graduating seniors I had the distinct realization our years with him at home are rapidly dwindling. It makes me catch my breath if I stop to think about it too hard. Life keeps marching forward for all of us doesn’t it? This weekend Chuck and Aidan are headed to South Carolina to help move his folks into an assisted living facility near their home while I take meals to two friends who just gave birth to precious little ones. My niece graduates from 8th grade today, and my youngest has one final year of elementary school, and in the words of Fiddler on the Roof “I don’t remember growing older, when did they?” I promise, this whole post isn’t a melancholy reflection on how quickly time is passing! But man I somehow found myself all in my nostalgic feelings this morning!

Today I’m sharing

Highlights from our family life these past two months
The single most helpful thing I do for our family each season (actually not for our family, for myself!)
Our Summer Bucket List
Favorite books I’ve read these past two months (I’ve been plowing through novels like it’s my job, so I have a great list for you today!)

Alright! Lets dive in!

Family Updates

In April we wrapped up our season tickets to the Broadway series that comes through Jacksonville with two shows, both of which I ended up taking Asher to. One was Les Mis, my all time favorite Broadway production, and one was Michael Jackson the Musical. It had been the plan all along to take one of the boys to Les Mis with me—Chuck has seen it, and while he likes it, he didn’t feel a burning desire to see it again. We watched the movie as a family so the boys could get a sense of the story (they already knew the basic plot because I talk about it all the time), and Asher was the one after the movie who said “I really liked the music in that, I liked how it repeated the same melody throughout the whole show.” Aidan’s response was “It was good. But there’s no way I’m going to sit through something that long!” So Asher went as my date and loved it. I was shocked at how well he tracked with what was going on, who the characters were, and how the story unfolded. Although I was about his age when I saw it for the first time, so I probably shouldn’t have been surprised! The innkeeper and his wife were his favorite, and he really liked the song Red and Black which is one of my favorites too. Sharing the things you love most with your kids and having them love them too is priceless! He enjoyed MJ: The Musical, but not nearly as much. He wasn’t super familiar with Jackson’s music, and didn’t know anything about his past or who he really was, but he enjoyed the dancing and music. I’m so thankful I got to share these shows with him this year (he also came with me to Peter Pan, so out of our 5 shows Asher saw over half of them this year!)

Aidan played in a local spring basketball league through a basketball academy, so he practiced twice a week and played games on Saturdays this spring and it was an amazing program. So good he’s actually going to play in their summer league. The coaching he got was so so valuable (he really hasn’t ever been coached on his game, his school coaches just kind of showed up and didn’t do a whole lot which was super frustrating), and we watched him improve in huge ways these past couple months. He’s also started playing in a Wednesday night pick up league at the Presbyterian church we’ve been attending off and on, and even though it’s a game of 20-40 year olds they have been so good to him and last night he played the entire 2 hours—he’s been coming home at 9:30 at night exhausted and over the moon.

We celebrated Holy Week with a Maundy Thursday worship service at the Presbyterian Church, a Good Friday service I was honored to preach at at Beach Church, and Easter Sunday at the Presbyterian church, followed by a family trip to Top Golf for our 3rd year in a row on Easter evening. It was a lovely weekend of celebrating and remembering what Jesus did for us that weekend.

Sweet Ollie had surgery in early April, so for a week we worked to keep him quiet, manage his discomfort, and get him back to his usual cheerful self. He still brings us enormous amounts of delight, and we cannot imagine our lives without this little ball of joy!

For the boy’s birthdays this year back in Dec/Jan, we gave them each a gift of a year-long Father-Son experience. Asher was given the gift of getting to go do a different escape room every month this year with just him and daddy. Chuck is just letting him take his time, watching his mind work trying to figure out all the puzzles, and if they don’t escape they go back and try that same room the next month.

Aidan was given the gift of a Father-Son program at our karate school called Zone Heroes, where every month dads and sons meet up to do all kinds of different things. They’ve learned to repair bikes, how to jump a bike ramp, met a Jaguars player who came to talk to them about aggression, control and emotion in life, did a ropes course/zip line, and this past month their session was on appearances and how we choose to present ourselves to the world. So they talked to the boys about looking appropriate for the occasion, the importance of wearing deodorant and taking care of their skin, bodies and hair. They learned how to tie a tie and properly wear a dress shirt. Chuck’s so thankful for this time he has one on one with both our boys in these fun environments!

We celebrated Mothers Day and Chuck’s birthdays with quiet family celebrations—dinner out, a family escape room board game, and watching Wicked from home. We’ve been talking lately about how beautiful a quiet life can be, these sweet evenings at home on our couch or around our table are our favorites.

And now we’ve hit the last week of school. Asher’s on a field trip as I write this. Aidan absolutely crushed the year end exams for Civics, Algebra and English which means he’ll be in honors classes next year. Field day is coming next week and then we’ll be ready to embrace our summer rhythm of slower days.

But What’s for Dinner??

Over the past few years, I have become fairly obsessive about freezer cooking and stocking my extra freezer that lives in our garage with meals ready to go. I have tried all kinds of recipes over the years, some amazing and some we never make again, but because I have done SO much freezer cooking over the years I have a huge collection of recipes we love that work great. I’ve found myself in a rhythm of doing a huge cooking session (which usually takes me several days in a given week to accomplish) about 4 times a year—in August when the kids head back to school, in November before the holiday rush, in February before a busy spring, and in May before the kids are home for the summer.

There are so many ways to stock a freezer—it does not have to be in one big weekend of prep work, it can be simply doubling one recipe a week and building a freezer stash that way. Or doing a few meals in a weekend that you can have on hand. I have absolutely done these strategies over the years. Now that I have a bit more time on my hands, and can devote a week every few months to restocking the freezer, I’ve found this is actually my preferred way of doing this—assembling 40-50 meals in a week which will feed us for a couple of months. Yes, is a lot. And yes, it’s a several day process. But I choose a week that has me home during the days for the most part and just crank it out. Over the weekend I’ll put together my menu with a gigantic grocery list of everything required for all these meals—how many total chicken breasts will I need? How is my spice supply and minced garlic stock? Do I need multiple boxes of chicken broth? It takes a few hours to choose all the recipes and get the list together. Monday morning I’ll hit up Costco and Aldi for everything I need, including ziplock bags, foil pans or whatever else I’ll want on hand. Then the rest of the week I’ll devote a couple hours a day to working through my list of meals to put together and by Friday I’ll be done with a full freezer! Two weeks ago Chuck headed up to stay with his folks for a week, so while he was gone I spent that week prepping a ton of meals, I think I put 54 dinners in the freezer that week, which is the most I’d ever done, but already it’s been such a gift. Every night this week I’ve pulled something out, stuck it in the fridge overnight to defrost a bit, and then most of the meals have gone straight into the crock pot the next day (or straight to the grill).

I’m sharing this because in a conversation with a friend recently she said “man I like the idea of freezer meals but I don’t really want to eat chili or soup in the summer! What else would I freeze?” and I was like “well I’m so glad you asked!” Because I’ve done this for so long I’ve developed lists of meals that work great in the freezer for each season. I agree, I don’t want to touch chili or cornbread until it’s football season again, but you know what I do want in the summer? Lots of grilled kabobs and burgers! This past month I prepped a TON of meals that will go straight to the grill, and a lot that will go to the crock pot but aren’t soups or roasts or things that scream “January” to most of us.

I think one of the misconceptions about freezer meals is that they are all fully cooked and take forever to make. While I do have a few recipes I make that are more labor intensive, like pans of our favorite chicken enchiladas where the sauce is made from scratch, the vast majority of these 50 meals took me about 5-10 minutes each—they’re simply adding a protein to a bag, mixing up a marinade, and sealing. Or adding raw ground beef to a bag, adding in salsa, beans, and taco seasoning and then freezing. The whole bag will be dumped straight into the crock pot, where the ground beef will cook just fine on low throughout the day and taco night is taken care of. The other morning as the kids were getting ready for school I actually made 3 freezer meals for a friend with a new baby and it took a total of 20 minutes. So I’m not over here making 50 lasagnas from scratch or anything, but I am bagging up some basic meals that can easily get dinner on my table. For the summer I did a bunch of different chicken marinades, some I poured over whole chicken breasts that will either cook in the crock pot for shredding or cook on a grill, and some I poured over cubed chicken breasts that will turn into kabobs, so on cooking day all I have to do is thread the defrosted meat which has been marinating onto skewers and grill. We like to do lots of sandwiches in the summer, so I froze chuck roast in a marinade to make shredded bbq beef sandwiches, brisket for bbq brisket, chuck roast in a marinade to make Mississippi Pot Roast sliders, and pork shoulder all marinated and ready for pulled pork either as sandwiches or as a topping of baked potatoes. I like to cut strips of sirloin steak and marinate it in a gyro marinade for beef gyros that cook in the crock pot, and I do the same with strips of chicken for a chicken shawarma flavor marinade. I make a bunch of our favorite teriyaki burger patties and freeze those so they’re ready for the grill on burger night, and made sloppy joe mixtures and a couple different chicken drumstick marinades that all cook in the crock pot. Adding meals to your freezer does not have to be a huge and involved process, it can be as easy as taking 10 minutes to mix up two different marinades, pouring them over chicken breasts and before you know it you’ll have 4 meals ready to go. I wanted to share links here to a few of the meals I made, in case you’re feeling like you want to stash a few dinners for those nights you know you’ll be at the pool late and need dinner ready to go when you walk in! I don’t have linkable recipes for all of these, but if something looks good that I didn’t link let me know and I’ll type it out and send it to you!

I have used Thriving Home’s recipes for freezer meals for years. They are truly experts, so a bunch of these come straight from their blog or cookbooks on freezer food, they are my go to recommendation when people want to dip their toes into freezer cooking! This summer some of the things we’ll be eating are:

Lemon Garlic Chicken (I’ll grill this and put it on top of Costco’s Caesar salad bags—I don’t know if you know this, but Costco’s bagged Caesar is the absolute best!).

Asian Chicken (I’ll grill this and put it on an Asian inspired salad or in wraps).

Mexican Chicken (we made this last night, cooks in the crock pot all day and was delicious over rice in a bowl!)

Chicken Nachos—look my people LOVE nacho night. I do ground beef sometimes or chicken sometimes but when I make some queso and cook up some seasoned chicken, it’s a GOOD night around here!

Grilled steak kabobs, BBQ Chicken Drumsticks, Ground beef tacos, Chicken Shawarma, Honey Garlic Chicken Kabobs, Sloppy Joes, Honey Glazed Salmon, hawaiian chicken kabobs, ravioli lasagna, lemon butter shrimp, Sesame pork tenderloin, teriyaki drumsticks, and more.

When I do my fall freezer cooking at the end of summer I’ll share some of those ideas here as well, but for now, that’s probably enough words about freezer food. Just know that any little steps you want to do to prep something ahead of time truly is a gift to your future self!

Our Summer Bucket List

Honestly, one of the main motivations for doing all the above cooking is to free up space to do all the fun things a season has to offer! If I know dinners taken care of or in the crock pot, I can say yes when the kids ask to stay at the pool 30 more minutes, or even more common, they get screen time from about 3-5 in the summer, and if dinners taken care of I can sit and read during that time instead of prepping a meal! This summer is going to look a little different. We usually are gone about 3 weeks each July, the 4 of us usually go somewhere for a week and then I spend about 2 weeks with my folks and sister in the midwest, but this year we have a puppy. And that puppy hasn’t ever been left before. So we aren’t taking off for weeks at a time. We are heading to the midwest for 1 week to a lake house in Wisconsin with my folks and sister’s family, but otherwise we’ll be here at home, and that is making me a little anxious—summer here gets SO hot and so long. But we have a couple camps scheduled for the boys, and our bucket list this year consists of a trying a new ice cream shop every week (I made a list of all the local ones we haven’t been to before!), a few summer movies that are coming out, lots of books, and places involving water. Our bucket lists in years past have been a lot more specific to vacations we had planned, “eat a lobster roll, go whale watching, see mountains,” and this year feels like a much different kind of list, but we are looking forward to slower days, and hopefully some good rhythms that don’t involve rotting our brains on screens TOO much….I’ll report back at the end of June how that’s going!

Reading Corner

I have read a lot these past two months, so I won’t share all the titles, but a few favorites that I LOVED are:

Say You’ll Remember Me by Abby Jimenez—Abby has become a “must read” author for me, her books never disappoint, and her newest release is excellent. It does deal with some weighty topics, the main characters mother has dementia and the book deals with the question of who are we when we can no longer remember those things that make up our lives? There’s a love story, family dynamics, and some awfully adorable pets in this one that will make you laugh and cry.

Passion Project by London Sperry—this is a debut novel that was excellent. Bennett’s first real love has passed away, she’s in her 20s, grieving, aimless, living in New York, lonely and miserable. She meets Henry who decides to make it his goal to help her find her passion and learn to live again. Every weekend they try different ridiculous things to see if any of them spark a passion for Bennett and through their adventures and friendship she learns to live and love again this time with a community around her. I loved this one.

Ordinary Time by Annie B Jones—This was one of the few non-fiction books I read these past two months and it was truly lovely. Annie is the owner of a bookstore in south Georgia who I have followed for years now—she hosts the podcast From the Front Porch about books and life in the south. This book is a collection of essays about staying. She reflects on how, growing up in the south, it seems as if the world tells people they need to move to New York or LA to truly “make it” in life, this is the plot line of so many movies and books—small town girl moves to NYC to open a bookstore or find her big break. She’s reflecting on the question “Can life be an adventure even when it’s just ordinary? What about those of us who stay put? Who put down roots in soil only 30 minutes from home? Who stay in a faith when everyone else seems to be leaving? Who stay in friendships and relationships for years, building new ones but holding onto those from our past?” So much beauty is found in the quiet life, the roots we let grow, the marriages, friendships and relationships that go the distance, even though those stories aren’t full of drama or as sexy as the big moves and wild adventures others live. Her writing was beautiful and some of the stories she told about her grandparents, her faith, running a small business as a very young woman, and her marriage were absolutely gorgeous. I would highly recommend this one.

Fun for the Whole Family by Jennifer E Smith—I read this one in about 24 hours—it was such a wonderful read! Four siblings who used to be inseparable haven’t really talked in several years. One night, Jude, now a famous actress, sends a text to her siblings asking them to meet her in a tiny town in the middle of North Dakota for the weekend. Curiosity gets the better of the other 3 and they all show up. They are all struggling with their own issues, and over the course of the weekend secrets emerge, both from their pasts as they reconcile their memories of their mom and from their current lives. I really loved all these characters, the bonds that connected them, and how love and forgiveness were at the core of this whole book.

The Seven Day Switch by Kelly Harms—My final book I want to share this month was this delightful comedy with quite a bit of depth. Next door neighbors Wendy and Celeste appear to be opposites in how they live their lives. Wendy is the high powered productivity expert who makes a living telling other women how to fit more into a day. Celeste is the stay at home Pinterest-perfect mom (at least that’s how it looks on the outside). They can’t stand each other and do nothing but pass judgment on the other. After a night of drinking way too much sangria at a fundraiser, they somehow pull a freaky Friday moment and wake up in the other’s body. For 7 days they are forced to live the other person’s life, care for each other’s kids and literally walk a week in another’s shoes. The lessons they learn have a lot to say to all of us who are just doing our best to love our kids in our unique situations in life. This was hilarious and so heartwarming!

That’s it for today my friends! I will be back later in June to share about the start of summer and how our summer rhythm is going! Have a wonderful rest of your week!