5 Friday Favorites: August 13, 2021

It's time for my Friday link up with A Little Bit of Everything and Momfessionals. 

On Fridays I share things that made me happy from the week - a photo, a song, a quote, a beauty product, a recipe, a pair of cute shoes, etc. If it's a product, sometimes it's something I actually own and sometimes something I just saw online that gave me a smile. Sometimes it's serious and sometimes it's silly. I suppose I believe that God is in the simple details of life and yes, I can even find Him in a tube of lipstick.

Happy Friday! It's been a fun, busy week around here. I had my big boys home so the house was full for most of the week which was the best. Drew and I had our last summer baseball trip to Blacksburg, Virginia. Joe left for his new gig as a broadcaster for Wingate University in North Carolina yesterday and Kyle goes back to Knoxville today, so it will be back to the Three Amigos around here for a bit. I'm actually looking forward to staying put and getting into some sort of routine that doesn't involve packing and re-packing a suitcase and using public restrooms more than anyone should.

Here are some favorite things from the week!

1. Fake Wedding Band for Traveling

As I have mentioned each week here, I've been traveling a ton this summer - mostly to baseball tournaments which always seem to be held in the hottest places on Earth. Because of the heat (and all of the fast food) my fingers keep swelling which makes wearing my engagement ring and wedding band so uncomfortable that I'm frequently prying them off and throwing them in my purse. I also don't like sleeping in my rings so I take them off in hotels. This is neither safe nor responsible. I first got the idea of wearing a cheap, fake wedding band when traveling from Landyn of Living with Landyn. She shared this option. $50 is certainly cheaper than the real thing, but I decided if I was going to go cheap, I was going to go cheaper than $50. There are a bunch of options on Amazon, but I ordered this one. I got a size bigger than my normal size to accommodate the swelling and now I don't need to be worried about losing my real rings in some random Courtyard Marriott off of I-95.

2. Outerbanks: The Show & the Bracelets

Y'all. This show is so dumb. It's ridiculous, really. The pretty teenagers? They're always running. Running, running, running. Lots of people should be dead, but they're not. They are lots of near drownings, gunshot wounds, and of course, an alligator fight. My word, but they sure are a pretty group. And I sure did watch two seasons in about two weeks.

PS If you watch this show with your teenager, refrain from saying, "Oh, my gosh. That's the dumbest thing I've ever seen. No way." because he/she will be righteously offended. The teens love this show and they care not about the fact that the girl was dead for five full minutes, but now she is not. Also, you are a grown person who just watched three episodes in a row, so chill.

PPS This show might make you want to buy all the beaded bracelet sets you can get your hands on. I guess pretty, running, still-alive-when-they-should-be-dead-five-times-over teenagers are good at marketing things. Here are some fun sets of bracelets. I like these and these. They might make a good back-to-school gift for your teens. They can wear them when they decide to ditch class to find a hidden treasure. 

PPPS If you find that you're feeling super creepy because you have a little bit of a crush on John B., just know that he's not really 16 years old. He's 28 years old. You're still creepy, but not quite as much as you thought.

3. Teenager Pro Tips on Instagram

In Genesis, Hagar - mistreated by Sarah and alone and pregnant with Ishmael - gives us one of my favorite descriptions of God. She calls him "The God who sees me." I love it. 

Seeing that the angel of the Lord tells Hagar that her son will be "a wild donkey of a man", I feel like by the time Ishmael reached around 14, 15 or 16 years old, Hagar would have benefitted from my new favorite Instagram follow, @teenagerprotips. I've decided it should be called "The Instagram Account who sees me". I feel seen and known and affirmed by this account. It is a delight.

4. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

The novel, Transcendent Kingdom, has been on Best Seller Lists for a long time. It touches on all kinds of themes including the intersection of faith and science, racism, addiction, depression, and family dynamics. I loved this book and highly recommend it. All the thumbs up for this one. Here's the synopsis from Amazon.

Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed.  
 
Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive.

5. My Four Favorite People in the Whole Wide World

We picked up Kyle from the airport on Friday night and went straight to the Georgetown Waterfront to eat dinner - party of five. Sweet mercy, I love these dummies. I really don't understand how I got so lucky to have them and more specifically to love them and like them so much. I'll never get over it.

That's all for today. Have the best weekend, Friends!

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