Oh hey. It’s me again. Intentionalgirl. You know, about 6 months later. Sheesh. You’d think I’d get my act together with this blog but that thing called life gets in the way.

But, I have the app on my phone now so watch out, y’all.

Okay. Where do I start?

Well I will start with now. We are in the midst of our summer of traveling. And guess, what? I LOVE it!

In May we spent a weekend camping with American Heritage Girls (think Girl Scouts with a faith component). In June Lily turned 10 and we had a backyard campout (that was totally interrupted by a tropical storm!).

We also headed to Savannah, Georgia for her Nationals Gymnastics Competition. She is Level 3 and was so excited to be able to go. We drove down, which was fun and gave us tons of freedom. After the competition element we hooked up with our sweet friends and went ocean kayaking where we saw dolphins, fish, almost took home a hermit crab. It was great!

Then in mid-July our extended families traveled to Wyoming and saw the majestic Tetons and Yellowstone National Parks. Words fail to describe how amazing this trip was. 12 amazing days of hiking, sight-seeing, trail riding, snow-ball fighting, white-water rafting, river floating and so much more. A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.

And now my amazing hubsters and I are about to head to France – by ourselves – did you catch that? By OURSELVES. Kids are being attended to by some family and friends. 9 days to steel away to the place I’ve always wanted to go. To speak the language I love dearly. To hike some mountains. To explore the Provence area of southern France. We leave in 3 days. 3 days y’all.

And yet somewhere in the midst of that I’ve sold 12 houses, with 4 getting ready to close next month and October. So as much as I might be tempted to feel mildly guilty about stepping away, I do not. Not one bit. It’s been a great year of homeschooling and real estating and I need the recharge of stepping away from it all with Craig. We celebrate 15 years of marriage so this is our big celebratory trip. As a French major I am so pumped that I finally get to travel to this country and practice my skills. Rusty skills, but skills nonetheless.

We will be traveling to Paris, Salon-de-Provence, Marseille, and Interlakken in Switzerland. We plan to hike the Hardergrat (more info here about this amazingly scary and hard hike). We are also doing the entire trip by staying at Airbnb homes. Some are studios. Some are private rooms in peoples’ homes.

I will be sure to post about our trip once we return. I am sure, just like we were able to learn from other blog/sites, we will post our favorite pieces of our trip. That is, if we don’t fall off the steep cliffs of the Hardergrat trail.

Another thing to mention would be the rehab work we did over the last month to our homeschool room. Finally ordered and got the ball rolling with our window seat (see Instagram), painted it, installed floating desk, started to paint and generally organized. It’s not finished but it’s 90% there and I couldn’t be more thrilled to have a space. We don’t have to do work there but we have a place for everything and for that I’m grateful. We have made some changes to a Charlotte Mason methodology for schooling. Much thanks to Learning How to Live CM we took the plunge after receiving a very helpful consultation with Amy Snell on how to transition. She gave me insight and advice. She listened and offered suggestions. Two helpful takaways for me were for me to work on our daily rhythms of the morning (get up, pray, brush teeth, make bed, eat breakfast, etc). The other was that I didn’t have to change EVERYTHING to Charlotte Mason ways right away. She suggested we stick with our Teaching Textbooks math for now and just see how the other things go. She suggested we use Alveary by the Charlotte Mason Institute. Books are ordered and should be here by the time we return from France. So excited to dive in!

Catch you all later – and just because I can, I’ll leave you with a little French goodnight! – Cheers – Steph

A la prochaîne mes amis! Je suis très fatiguée et il faut que je dorme maintenant!