Life Lately- April 2023 & Wisconsin

Hi everyone!

I'm sharing our April Life Lately with you today.

April was a month where things really seemed to pick up for us here. It feels like I'm finally getting back to my normal life of having busy and full days written out in my planner, thankfully! We are meeting more and more people and we're starting to get our routines down.  Yay for that!

In the month of April, we celebrated Easter, of course. While we unfortunately aren’t absolutely loving our church here yet (we have high standards from our previous 2 churches!), we have committed to trying it out more and more regularly lately. We started Easter morning off with a coffee date with the two of us and then headed to church where the door greeter insisted that we had to take a pic at the photo opp to show off the baby bump.

After church, we hurried home to get set up for Easter brunch that we were hosting for Shane's longtime family friends. 

I whipped up lots of brunch food for us to enjoy together...and everyone's favorite was ironically the box mix of g-free muffins, hah!

Lindsey brought the ham. I'm typically not a huge ham girl, but I LOVE her ham!

Yay for bright and colorful spring foods and holidays!

Haha- my dad gave Shane some old shirts of his, so I had to snap a pic to send to him of Shane repping this Easter colorful polo. Life has come full circle from my dad to my husband, I guess!

Olaf came too to play with the pups until they all wore themselves out and needed some shade time.

We made sure to get a group pic together before they headed back home and Shane and I had a chill rest of our Easter day together. The calm before the storm of holidays really taking off, right??

These two decided to chill in the shade in the front yard while we said our goodbyes.

We love getting our holiday pics of Brecks!

On another super warm weekend here, our neighborhood had a yard sale. We didn't sell anything at all (but we tried!) but it was a really nice morning/afternoon of walking around the neighborhood and sitting in our courtyard while we met a bunch of neighbors and other couples/families that live on base. It was a great social event! Ain’t nobody clears out stuff like a military family clears out stuff.

We set up with our next door neighbors and their youngest loved getting that time with Cash and Caylor instead of having to play with them over the fence.

We had another Sunday with really nice weather so Shane and I had a little outdoor Jersey Mike's lunch date after church. Jersey Mike's has the best g-free sandwich bread! I've been avoiding deli meat this pregnancy (I don't think I would be this careful if it weren't for the 2 previous miscarriages...), but I had them toast mine and it was so good to have a sandwich again!

It seems like Shane had a lot of days this past month where he didn't have to work quite as late. Does anyone else's husband fall asleep anywhere and everywhere so easily though? I wish I could do this!

Oh boy...and then it was time for us to fly out of town for a few days for Shane's Grandma's (belated) funeral. We were so glad that we were able to be there for that; however, we have yet to ever find a Rover dogsitter that we trust, so we decided to go the daycare/boarding route this time. I was hoping it would give me more peace of mind since they used to love our North Carolina daycare, although we had never boarded them there before either. 

From the camera views that I tried to limit myself on checking, Cash stayed by the door in the corner the whole time and Caylor stayed near him/would come into camera view to follow the workers around. Ugh! These dogs live to play with other dogs but they were too anxious to do that with having to stay there for a longer time.

In Wisconsin, we met Shane's mom and brother, who also traveled up there. We were able to spend time with Shane's mom's side of the family again and meet some of that side of the family that we hadn't met before. I really hit it off with his cousin's wife, so we had a fun weekend chatting together! We all stayed up/out until 11:30 central both nights, so needless to say- I crashed when we got back to Virginia!

My brother-in-law, Shane and I drove around to see downtown Superior. Can you tell how cold it was? Superior is at the very northernmost part of Wisconsin- next to Minnesota and just below Canada. I felt like we were living that mid-January life again. There were still some piles of snow, snow flurries, and patches of ice. That’s not exactly what my heart is searching for at the very end of April!

We went to Shane's Grandma's bingo hall for her funeral reception and celebration of life. It was very well done with lots of guests coming to honor her life. I guess she went to play bingo there multiple times a week, so it was the perfect way to honor her.

This was taken the day before I hit 28 weeks of pregnancy aka 3rd trimester aka 7 months!

Shane's mom, sisters, and niece all wore some of his Grandma's housedresses and nylons that she always wore. It definitely was another way to make this celebration of life more upbeat, which is what she wanted.

We played some Bingo to honor Grandma Christensen.

After the burial, Shane's mom showed us some sightseeing places around the area- including the exact place where her and Shane's dad got married. There we are standing in the exact same place they stood when they said their vows so long ago.

These two were all smiles when we were able to go pick them up and they were finally able to break free-but they were so exhausted for the next day or so! I guess that in itself was worth the money of daycare/boarding. Sadly, Cash lost his voice from crying so much there 🙁 ... but they survived! (And I admittedly survived too.) 

We spontaneously got a new sectional couch while we were out one night before going bowling and grabbing dinner with friends. The intention was to get more seating space so we can fit more people...and these two of course claimed that extra space as their own right from the get go!

One Saturday, we went to Shane's family friend's house to visit with another one of the siblings (and her family) who was in town-including this little one.

THIS is how my mornings start off...with these two goof balls being silly and loudly/dramatically fighting over who gets to lay closest to me/on top of me starting the second my eyes open.

It was another month of Cash tolerating our love and cuddles...hah! I think he's finally coming around to fully forgiving Shane for deployment, although you sure can't tell that from his faces here.

We always have to finish off the Life Lately post with our Caylor! Such a happy girl just doing what a Caylor girl does.

That's it for our April 2023! Hopefully things continue to pick up with our "new life" here in Virginia in May. Wishing you all an amazing May as well!