home-ity home home.

hello my lovely blog followers!

these past few weeks have been a blur, but joyful nonetheless.
camp wrapped up mid-august and then I spent a week in Nashville, enjoying coffee dates galore, walking around my favorite neighborhoods, and just relishing in the fact that i was HOME!
my sister, erin, flew to Nashville at the end of that week and we road-tripped all the way back home (as in home-where-we-grew-up-home) to wyo, and that's where i am now.

days here have been full of those simple, only-at-home-in-WY moments that i have been craving for a long time. and by long, i mean prior-to-starting-college-long, as i have not been home for this many consecutive days since i graduated from high school.
it is so nice to wake up and share coffee with my mom, take lunch to frannie at high school, watch her tennis matches, visit my grandparents and sit on their porch swing and eat the cherries (and all the other miscellaneous foods that they feed me :)), etc.

yesterday was especially fun - it was my parents' 25th anniversary.
yowza!
i am so inspired by this.
all six of us were home, which was so special because this rarely happens now that my sisters and I are all (or relatively, at least) grown up. ernie made an incredible dinner of steaks (slash dad grilled the steaks - he does not pass up his grilling job), sweet potato fries, wedge salads (mom and dad love these), and a key lime pie and chocolate sheet cake for dessert. mmm.
i was in charge of the ambiance - thanks for that delegation, e ;) - and set the dining room table, made place cards, set out lots of pictures of mom and dad from different years of their marriage - definitely not necessary, but why not!? 25 years is means for celebration!

it was just the six of us and was absolutely perfect. we ended the night by all trying on my mom's wedding dress from 25 years ago! priceless!
The dress fit all of us and my mom, too. Twas sweet.

other recent bits of joy:
-coming home from the gym tonight and being greeted by 2 neighborhood girls asking for my autograph on their cds! So precious! I proceeded to play coffee shop boy and they sang every word with me. Melt. Laugh. JOY.

-visiting my grandma, baba. sitting in the same yard where all 8 of her children and all 28 of her grandchildren once played. the way the sun sparkled and dipped through the leaves into the area where we sat. seeing intermittent bits of memory flicker across her face, even in the midst of sharing the same conversation over and over again. filling her in on my hopes and dreams and asking her to share whatever wisdom she wished she'd known at my age.
spending time together.

-running. zumba. blue gatorade and a steak and avocado sandwich for dinner (weird, i know, but it was lovely). xo.