The June Edit

After our family vacation, I feel refreshed and motivated to write again. I originally thought my writing would slow down this summer, but I find myself landing in your inbox more often. I hope you don’t mind.

If you’re a new subscriber, the monthly edit is a big brain dump of everything I consumed or consumed me throughout the month.

Best in Books

It was another great month for romances, especially on audio. My hold on Daisy Haites took months to come in through the library but the audiobook was worth the wait! The narrators’ accents were dreamy and added to the drama of the story. Speaking of accents, The Irish Goodbye was one of my most anticipated summer romances and it’s another one I highly recommend you read in the audiobook format.

I read 11 books in total in June! If you’re interested, all my reviews are in the post below.

The Watch List

Movies

• I loved the new characters Anxiety and Ennui in Inside Out 2. I think the sequel did a great job of capturing all the complicated teen emotions in a way that kids can easily grasp. As a child (and adult) who struggled with anxiety, it’s a movie I think my younger self would have appreciated a whole lot. I give the first movie an edge over the second but still highly recommend taking your entire family to see it on the big screen!

• The Boys in the Boat, a 1930s story centered on the University of Washington's rowing team, was a delight. While there are some elements of romance and struggles during the depression, the story centers around teamwork. The acting and costumes were great! I wanted to see more development of each character. It leans on a lot of cliches that will be familiar if you like sports movies.

TV

• If you enjoy dark comedies, murder mysteries, and a bit of Celtic lore, I highly recommend watching Bodkin on Netflix. The accents and idyllic Irish setting had me hooked from the first episode. The show blurb is “A hard-nosed journalist grudgingly works with a true-crime podcaster on a strange case in a small Irish town where the locals want to bury the past.” I was surprised to see Barrack and Michelle Obama listed as Executive Producers!

• My husband and I finally finished Dark Matter on Apple TV+. By Episode 5 I was starting to get bored of Jason and Amanda’s pit stops through the multiverse. I think they lingered too long on a certain aspect of the story and didn’t tease enough in each episode to propel the action forward. This is one book to screen adaptation where I think I might have enjoyed reading the book to better understand the science and psychology of it all.

• I really enjoyed seeing some of the side characters develop in Outlander Season 6. There were several tender parenting moments from Roger, Ian, and Fergus. This season showed vulnerabilities in all the men that haven’t been explored before. Each season ends on a heartwrenching cliffhanger so I guess I’ll be waiting another two years for Netflix to get the next season.

• I decided to wait to start Bridgerton until all the episodes came out on Netflix. I can’t stand a cliffhanger but I’m questioning my choice to wait because it was hard impossible to avoid spoilers! Between the algorithm and endless memes, most of the key scenes were revealed on the Internet without me seeking out any of the information. I enjoyed this season but I still hold Season 1 and the Queen Charlotte spinoff on a pedestal.

Tunes

Brat by Charlie XCX is giving me all the 2010s club vibes and I’m here for it. The girlies are really popping off with the dance hits this summer. Camilla Cabello also dropped a new album called C, XOXO.

Purchases + Wish List

• You know you’re getting older when you’re excited about purchasing orthotics. I was sized for insole inserts at the Merrell store at the outlets and bought some from Aetrex to help with some pronation and plantar fasciitis in my feet.

• We’re big fans of Crocs in my house. You can’t beat them as house shoes, for grocery pickup, or to throw on to go check on things in the yard. I bought my first pair of platform Crush clogs so now I can match my daughter. She’s very into shoe twinning at the moment (we have matching New Balance 327s).

• I added these shoelaces to my wish list. I think ribbon would be a cute way to dress up any pair of sneakers.

Organization + Cleaning

• I enter Goodreads giveaways daily (not all of them, just books that catch my eye and I’d consider reading) and amassed a virtual TBR shelf with 5000+ books. If you don’t know how it works, when you enter a giveaway you agree to have the book added to your want-to-read shelf. I’ve ignored that number for a long time but when someone visits your profile it gives a skewed sense of their book count. Consider this my official petition to change that number to books read or books reviews instead of ALL books shelved. After a process that was incredibly complicated and time-consuming compared to Storygraph, I finally cleared my “want to read” shelf. I’m sharing this learning experience as a reminder to cull through my shelves once a week or once a month at a minimum so I don’t have to spend half an afternoon in the background working on a massive virtual organization project. Whew.

• It was time for a big girl room reset so we spent hours on the floor deciding which books and toys to sell, donate, or trash. I’m glad my daughter feels comfortable playing by herself in her own space but sometimes the scraps of artwork, tiny Barbie shoes, tubes of chapstick, fidget spinners, and random trinkets from birthday parties all end up on the floor instead of being organized and contained. I’m easily overstimulated by visual clutter and enough was enough. We’ll keep working at it together until we find a system that sticks.

Yummy Bites

• I seem to cycle through afternoon snacks and my most recent hyperfixation has been on Chex Mix. Why does it seem like there are always 5x as many pretzels as anything else? I get to the end of the bag and don’t want a mouth full of dry pretzels so I’ve been saving them to repurpose. This pretzel-crusted chicken recipe was an easy way to use up my crumbs!

• I posted my first thread asking for your Thai food recommendations and have to give you a little update about what we ate! My husband and I were feeling a lighter dinner so we got spring rolls, satay, Tom kha kai, num tok, and mango sticky rice for dessert. It was perfect on a summer day.

Highs + Lows

• The highlight of my month was our family trip to the beach. My kids had a great time and we were able to offer them a lot of experience other than just time in the sun and the sand. Parenting on vacation isn’t magically easier so as nice as it was to be away from work and my normal routine, there were still plenty of challenging moments e.g. it took nearly an hour to get everyone dressed and slathered with sunscreen for maybe 2-3 hours max on the beach every day. It also ended up being a fairly expensive trip between our A.C. going out the day before we left, boarding our dogs, and getting a flat tire while we were away. I still feel really lucky that we were able to connect with our family and my kids had plenty of playtime with their cousins and friends their age. With my husband working on his Master’s degree we won’t have many opportunities to travel this year and it was such a nice start to the summer and this transitional period of our life to have that time away. Even though it feels like everyone we know is in Europe this month, the reality is we’re privileged in this economy to be able to go anywhere at all.

• My husband had to work on Father’s Day but I had my dad over and made a big batch of breakfast burritos for brunch. It was a nice way to transition from the beach back to our normal routine.

• This month marks 10 years of marriage for us and while I regret to inform you that I did not gift my husband any tin or aluminum, we did enjoy our trip to Charleston together earlier this year. We still don’t have a wedding album printed but we’ve grown together and as individuals in more ways than those two kids in those photos could have imagined. I’m not sure either of us pictured ourselves raising two kids in our hometown and changing careers at this stage of life but it sure is fun doing it together and dreaming about what our future might look like.

• I threw together a small Bluey-themed birthday party for my husband and son (who share a birthday). I’ve seen a lot of people on the Internet chasing the nostalgia of simple birthday parties with just cake and ice cream and I’m definitely in the category of moms who are tired of the expectation to throw an elaborate get-together. I ordered a cake from our local grocery store, picked up a giant salad, and made pasta for everyone. I wish I felt like our house was clean enough to host people more often because it’s always nice to have all our family in one place.

A peek into June.

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Fill me in on what you’ve been up to this month! I’m in denial that we have less than 3 weeks left of summer break.

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