I wanted to share a few bits with you today — things that I read or thought about this week.

my couch

This is a photo of my corner of the couch. It’s where you will find me almost every night at 8 PM, under my quilt, reading a book. This simple routine has been grounding me over the last few weeks. Matthew joins me after a bit, and then we will watch a movie or the latest episode of whatever TV show we’re currently obsessed with, but the 30-45 minutes where I am just reading in silence is priceless and one of the nicest parts of my day, second only to the 10 minutes every morning after Milo wakes me up, when we lie in bed snuggling and giggling.

Thinking about having a wedding that represented who we are made me want to hunt down a set of photos from a wedding that was going around the internet this summer, so here they are. Aren’t they so inspiring and beautiful? Doesn’t everyone seem insanely happy to be there? It would be nice to be a part of something like that, even though that particular something isn’t right for us.

I like what Matthew wrote about running and coffee over on his Tumblr.

Sweet Sweet Life is one of my favorite blogs, because it’s so consistently optimistic and joyful, and one of the few home design-y blogs which embraces color. This blog post about choosing to home school her 11-year-old daughter really inspired me with it’s braveness. We have often discussed giving Milo the same option some day, since the social aspect of middle school was self-esteem-destroying for both Matthew and me and we would would have preferred to have skipped that whole part, if given the choice.

Abby took some beautiful pictures of my ‘hood that made me fall in love with North Portland all over again.

This post about her son’s newfound love of vinyl over at SouleMama made me smile a whole lot.