Good morning, everyone! It’s been a while since I’ve done a coffee date-style post, so I figured I’d do one today. So go grab a cup of the good stuff and lets make believe that if we were having coffee this morning I’d be telling you that …

… Isla has had a great first couple of days at school! Today and tomorrow she does for half-days (morning then afternoon), and then on Wednesday she has her first full day. On Thursday last week we met with her teacher and she seems great. On Friday I dropped her off for a mini-day (1.5hrs) and she was so chill about everything, from walking to school to going into her classroom. I knew she’d be just fine but I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that I have a kindergartener! Someone hold me.

… I started taking online courses to obtain a Administrative Assistant certificate. I’ve been relatively hush-hush about the fact I’m going back to school, only because when I say that people assume I’m going to a classroom and it’s tedious to explain that the courses are via distance learning. Doing things at home make it easier (and cheaper) to care for the girls and I can do my “learning” when it’s convenient for me. So far everything is going good!

… I decided to take said course to help increase my chances at finding a job. While my journalism degree and work history have provided me with some great skills that are extremely useful for the jobs that I’m after, I feel that I’m still under qualified in many ways. My hope is that having this certificate and the knowledge it will provide me with will help me land a great job in the future.

… Kyle and I booked a trip to Las Vegas next month!! We’re tagging it as our long, overdue honeymoon as we never actually had one and it’s our first trip AWAY away just as a couple. We’re staying at Caesar’s Palace and already have a couple of show tickets booked and I’m pretty excited about it all! It’s definitely needed and well deserved, in my opinion. And a big thanks to my mom for taking the girls for a few nights too!

… Kyle planted 5 tomato plants at the beginning of summer: two grape, one Roma, one heirloom and one “regular” plant. They are OUT OF CONTROL, especially the grape tomatoes! I seriously cannot keep up with picking them and we have tomatoes coming out of our eyeballs. So you know, if you want some good snacking tomatoes, come on over!

… We are redoing our deck out back and it’s going to be so amazing when it’s done! The old one was pretty useless as far as functionality goes; you could really only barbecue and sit two chairs side by side. Definitely not something we wanted to entertain on! Our new one will be much better for entertaining and just “being” on.

… I tried my hand at pickling! It’s been forever since I’ve canned anything, and I’ve always had help, but a couple weeks ago we bought a 10lb bag of pickling cukes. I’m fairly certain that Kyle had intended on just snacking on the cukes as they were, but when I mentioned maybe making a few jars of pickles he said to go for it! I managed to find this simple method and went to town! The hardest thing was finding the dill weed but thankfully there was one local produce store in town that had some still. I managed to get 8 jars out of my brine, although I probably had enough pickles for one or two more jars. Everything sealed, so lets hope in a few weeks time I have tasty pickles!

What would you be sharing with me if we were having coffee?