grace in small things #5

This week was not the best, but hey that's an even bigger reason to look for the good, right?

• In the past week or two I've had two friends contact me out of the blue asking for advice on a parenting issue. I'm not entirely convinced that I deserve it, but it feels really nice to know they trust me and respect my opinion enough to want to come to me for advice. 
• Somewhat related and possibly proving my skepticism from above, this week I was invited into a facebook parenting groups called Lazy Parenting FTW. The "welcome" post included this: 'We are the anti-helicopter parents, and our motto is "meh, they'll be fine".'  I think I will totally <3 this group. 
• I finally got my hands on a copy of Karen Walrond's The Beauty of Different. I've only read the first chapter so far, which is about individuality and embracing your quirkiness, and while the text and ideas are relatively simple they also felt incredibly profound and really spoke to me. I want to write a whole post about it (I did, actually, just in my head, and haven't gotten around to typing it out yet... it's always so much easier when it's just in my own head) but it's worth a mention here.
• The trailer for an indie documentary called American Blogger hit the interweb this week, which was interesting and somewhat baffling in its own right, but it inspired Neil Kramer and several other bloggers to come up with this brilliant masterpiece which is totally worth watching. I giggled through the whole thing. 
• The photo above is from a couple days ago, when Quinn and I stopped over at Ethan's house in the afternoon. Ethan wasn't feeling so great, but invited Q to watch him play games on their kindle (Quinn's reaction: "YES PLEASE OH YES ZOMG!!!!!"). With those guys entertained, I got to hang out downstairs with Jody and little Sam. When we arrived at their house I had been feeling tired and just...loaded down. We hung out for a couple hours and when Q and I got back home again I realized I was feeling a lot better, lighter. This is not an uncommon occurrence, spending time with Jody and/or Jeremy often does wonders for my mood, but I still like to notice and appreciate it. Friends like these are worth their weight in gold.