5 on Friday: happy

Just five random things that have been making me happy this summer...

1. My peonies. They're done blooming now but were gorgeous a couple weeks ago. I have such fond memories of cutting peonies with my parents for Memorial Day arrangements. 

2. This driftwood suncatcher I made. So...one of the things Nathan requested after his grandparents died was a giant driftwood collection that had been arranged on a big board and hung inside and outside their house for years. When Nathan's parents drove out last year for Noah's graduation, they brought it with them. And then it sat in the basement and took up a decent amount of space. ;) After some discussion, Nathan removed all the pieces from the board and we stored them in a big tub until we could figure out what to do with them.

Seemingly unrelatedly, I have some fun snowflake suncatchers that I put in/on the kitchen window every Christmas. I love how they cast rainbows around the kitchen and am always a little sad to put them away after the holidays. 

These two things came together when I decided to use some of the pieces of driftwood with a prism. We made one for us and one for Nathan's parents...excellent (and smaller, lol) momentoes of the large driftwood piece and fun suncatchers. And now I have rainbows year round...yay!

3. These women. Every so often, as time and schedules allow, a group of us tries to get together. These are women I began our homeschooling journey with (this picture is a subset of all of us...those of us who were able to make it to happy hour last month, lol). We've been through many years and curricula and transitions...and, though our kids may be taking different paths these days, we remain a tribe. And I am thankful and blessed to call them friends.

4. Letters like these. I was sorting through boxes in the basement recently and found a stash of letters. Among them, I found a collection of notes written by my mom and three youngest siblings...notes mailed to me while I was at college. (By the way, they sent me a LOT of letters. I feel kind of bad that we don't send more mail to Noah when he's at college. Then again, it's so much quicker to text, lol. Still. I'm so thankful for the sheer volume of correspondence when I went away.)

This is a sample of the letters from my youngest sister (who was almost 9 when I left for college). It cracks me up.

5. Getting rid of stuff. I was going through the boxes in preparation for our neighborhood garage sale last weekend. I actually went through much of the house and purged a lot of stuff back in February and felt I was doing pretty good. When the neighborhood announced their garage sale, I figured "why not?" (and thought it would be good incentive to get Nathan and the boys to do some sorting) but didn't expect to have too much to sell. But we did end up selling a good lot of stuff and promptly took the leftovers to Goodwill rather than bringing it back in the house. Yay! (Plus, it was a good excuse to visit with a number of our neighbors and even meet a few new ones!)

And those are some of the things making me happy this summer...hope yours is happy, too!