Howdy, friends! I’ve wanted to write this post for awhile, and Prime Day seemed like a good time to do so… but then life and work and getting ready for a baby and all that happened, and here we are a day late! Still a few hours left to snag a deal if you’d like, though :)

We bought our Amazon Echo on Prime Day two years ago, and I’m the first to admit I was NOT in favor of the purchase — I didn’t think it was necessary, and I was wary of the effect it would have on our home. I’m also generally reluctant to add new technology, fancy gadgets, or services to our life because I feel like once you have them, it can feel impossible to go back to NOT having them, should you ever have to.

But, this was one instance where I acquiesced to John’s wishes, and a few days later, Alexa took up permanent residence in our kitchen. About a year later, we added a second Echo in our bedroom, a gift from John’s parents.

I’m happy to report that two years on, I’m an Echo fan! I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface of her abilities, but they’ve been fun to explore. Here are a few of the ways she’s added value to our family’s life so far:

A mostly-unrelated photo from John’s birthday celebrations this weekend!

First and most importantly, we use her to play music. Before getting our Echo, we used a laptop, which (needless to say) did not have the best sound quality. It was also a bit of a clunky system, with the result that we didn’t listen to music as much as we’d like to. Now, it’s easy to turn on a Spotify playlist (hands-free!) while we’re prepping a meal, dining, doing dishes, cleaning, or playing in the living room, and I love how this adds to the feel of our life together!

My absolute favorite musical addition, however, has been the “Jazz for Sleep” playlist on Spotify. We’ll ask Alexa to turn it on when we head into our bedroom to start our nightly routine, and it has the same effect as the turn-down service in a fancy hotel. I know it sounds silly, but it’s been such an awesome life upgrade – the perfect way to wind down for bed. (Seriously, if you don’t take anything else away from this post, try this tip!)

On the flip side, John will often ask Alexa to play music to wake me up on a Saturday morning from the other room – I never know what I’m going to get :)

We use the Echo’s timer daily — for cooking, yes, but also for creating transitions for June between activities, as necessary.

We also use her as our white noise machine overnight. (This took a little bit of figuring out — if you’d like to try it, say, “Alexa, tell oscillating fan sounds to loop.”)

Our final most common use for our Echo is the shopping list function. It’s easy to add ingredients on the fly as we run out of them while cooking, for instance, and easy to access on the go via the app if we forget to check the list before shopping. On a related note, we have used her to buy items through Amazon, but only if we’ve ordered the item several times before and have confidence she’ll order the right thing. (Actually, the only example I can think of is Water Wipes, which we clearly have quite the track record of in our order history!)

Aaaand that’s about it! (Aside from playing Jeopardy!) No exploration yet of the smart home features for us, though I’m intrigued. And aside from our Alexa but on the same topic, the only other “new age” technology I can think of in our home is our Brava, which we’ve been really happy with. (Though I’m disappointed that Oliver hasn’t attempted to take a ride on it yet :))

To wrap things up, one of my initial concerns with having an Echo was that the way we speak to Alexa would teach June wrong ideas about how it’s acceptable to speak to a human. So, we try to make the extra effort to say “please” and “thank you” when making requests so as to model the right patterns for her. Seems like a small and kind of strange effort to make, but I think it’s things like that that can have unintended consequences if we’re not careful.

So there you have it! I’d love to hear: do you have an Echo in your home? What do you use it for? Were you an early adopter, or nervous like me? :)

P.S. Affiliate links are used in this post! And Echos are 30% off for Prime members through the end of the day!

Because it’s the summer I grew up with, a Connecticut summer will always seem like the most classic version: green everything, water everywhere, lobster shacks, ice cream cones, country roads… I know June will probably feel differently, and that’s okay! But I hope she also loves her New England visits, and if this year’s week in Connecticut was any indication, we’re off to a good start :) Here are a few highlights from our week at home in June, if you’d like to see!

We kicked off the week with the wedding of a dear high school friend, the impetus for this trip in the first place! John was a groomsman, June was the only child in attendance and had a blast chasing the spotlights on the dance floor, and the weather was perfection. Plus, the wedding was at the Branford House, where Natalie and Joe got married, so that was extra fun!

Every single one of our high school friends was reunited from across the country for the occasion, which was indescribably sweet! And there’s my Junebug, cheesing it up at 10pm just before we left for the night :)

We generally had impeccable weather, which lent itself to several beach days (at Esker Point and Eastern Point, for locals who are wondering!).

One extra-fun quirk in the timing of our trip was that we were home for my childhood church’s strawberry supper, which happens once a year. It cracked me up to get the mini-celebrity treatment (my church is very small and the older ladies were excited to meet June for the first time!), and June clearly enjoyed the signature dessert.

We of course spent lots of time in Mystic — going to the aquarium (baby belugas!), Treehouse for dinner, Red36 for lunch, eating ice cream by the drawbridge, and checking on our house :) We also made a celebratory trip to Sift the day after the owner won Best Baker in America, and all of June’s dreams came true when she was handed a pink and purple macaron with sprinkles!

We made our usual trip to Abbott’s, home of our rehearsal dinner and gigantic fish under the dock you can feed with oyster crackers.

We brought a Mystic Market picnic back to the Branford House, where we had the most beautiful backdrop for an afternoon of kite flying.

We had breakfast at Noah’s (a must-do!) and wandered the streets of Stonington Borough, heaven for this home lover (and her flower-loving child).

And of course, the best part is that we spent plenty of time just hanging around John’s parents’ house, enjoying our family… nothing better.

More to come from our week in Maine soon!

P.S. Our last weeklong summer trip to Connecticut (baby June!!)

We’re back from our 17-day New England adventure!! It wasn’t necessarily my preferred way to take vacation (baby brother’s due date made the back-to-back nature necessary), but I’m so grateful we were able to squeeze in time with so many favorite people and places! More to come soon on our trips to Connecticut and Maine.

But now on to July… is it helpful to say my goals are to cross off everything on my “before baby arrives” list?? Just know that for every baby-related goal below, there are probably four more items I didn’t mention on a to do list somewhere :) Baby brother could very well make his debut this month, so we’re focusing on both preparing and soaking up our last few days as a family of three!

On my calendar this month:
— My dear friend from childhood and her husband are arriving today to stay with us for a few days, with the intention of seeing whether they like the Triangle enough to move here!!
— John’s birthday!
— The Fourth of July!
— Cow Appreciation Day!

What I’m loving right now:
— We were greeted with the above bounty upon arrival home from our trip, so we’ve been enjoying some of our favorite tomato recipes this week, including one of my favorites.
— The “Picnic in the Park” playlist on Spotify is perfect for summer afternoons and dinner parties!
— Not even kidding: THREE different readers sent me the link to this Atlantic article. Clearly, I have a soap box :) I loved it, of course, especially this line: “But that sort of separation is different from the inattention that occurs when a parent is with a child but communicating through his or her nonengagement that the child is less valuable than an email. A mother telling kids to go out and play, a father saying he needs to concentrate on a chore for the next half hour—these are entirely reasonable responses to the competing demands of adult life. What’s going on today, however, is the rise of unpredictable care, governed by the beeps and enticements of smartphones. We seem to have stumbled into the worst model of parenting imaginable—always present physically, thereby blocking children’s autonomy, yet only fitfully present emotionally.”

What I read in June:
— Saints for All Occasions: Kept me up later than it should have – a great summer read!
— Tell Me More: Even though the author and I seem to be polar opposites in some ways, I enjoyed her essays and found a few points in particular rang very true.
— A Gentleman in Moscow: This novel is long and took me a little bit to get into, but once I did I fell in love with the characters! The author’s style of writing is playful and fun, and I even learned a thing or two about Russian history :)

Revisiting my goals for June:
Prepare entertainment for our long road trips
Photograph our backyard to share with y’all!
Attempt to DIY some maternity photos (did not get to this… the extreme heat made it a daunting task)
Make a master list of things to do before baby boy arrives
Upload all random digital photos/videos and sort them into external hard drive folder system
Cull and edit all 2018 iPhone photos and categorize them in our external hard drive folders (made a lot of progress on this but not quite done!)
Decide on a blog series for after baby boy arrives and start working on it (still stumped! Ahh!)
Finish organizing baby boy clothing (progress here!)
Film June in June, Volume 3

July goals:
— Actually get the basics ready for a new baby: buy newborn diapers, pack a hospital bag, install car seat base, get out the Rock and Play, set up the changing pad…
— Make progress on nursery: have room painted, replace light fixture, plan curtains with Aunt Nan, buy crib, finish framing art, choose pillow shams for bed…
— Finish organizing baby boy clothing
— Edit June in June, Volume 3!
— Take an evening neighborhood walk any day we’re home and the weather is good
— Finish all outstanding areas on my 2018 Great House Declutter list
— Plan newborn photos (Graham is taking them again and I am so grateful!!)

On top of all of the work-related things that will be taking up my time and headspace between now and the end of the month, that should about do it for me, I think! If you have goals for the month (or something you’re loving right now!), I’d love to hear in the comments!

Affiliate links are used in this post!

Some of you may recall that June’s nursery was not finished until several months after she was born – ha! Knowing that my life will only get more complicated after baby brother arrives and not less, I’m trying to be a little more on the ball this time around :)

My job is made easier by the fact that the space we have to work with needs to stay simple by necessity. It will be his room, yes, but it’s also going to have our second guest bed in it at least for now, so the “baby” elements will be fairly minimal – basically, a crib. Our glider and changing pad are downstairs in our master bedroom, we keep almost all toys downstairs or in our loft, and you all know how we do kiddo clothing around here!

Still, we basically haven’t touched this room since we moved in (it still has the paint job from the previous owners!), and I’m looking forward to making it a lovely, cohesive space for him AND for guests after five years of living here! The above before photos show what it’s looked like over the years since we moved in – the bottom photo is most recent, taken just before we swapped the queen bed for the full and moved the desk into the loft.

My inspiration for the color palette and style is entirely inspired by the Robert McCloskey book Time of Wonder. I’m not sure how well-known McCloskey is outside of New England — some of his more famous titles include Make Way for Ducklings and Blueberries for Sal — but he is an icon where I’m from, and “Time of Wonder” has always been one of my favorite children’s books. The writing is quite poetic, and the illustrations are gorgeous.

To set the tone, we’re framing three spreads from the book, then building out the color palette from there. (I bought a new copy and cut the pages out verrrrrrry carefully.) Since the pages are a custom job, we opted to go with Framebridge for a reasonably-priced option. They’re still an investment, but I imagine us having these in our home for years, hopefully, maybe even in a kiddo bathroom if brother grows out of wanting them in his own room eventualy. We went with their classic gold Richmond frame, and I’m picturing hanging them on the wall above the crib in a row.

The room had a chair rail when we moved in, and we plan to keep it, painting the top portion a very pale blue and the bottom a kelly green (!), both drawn from McCloskey’s illustrations. I am hopeful about this, but also concerned it might be too much in such a small room?? Fingers crossed it’s not :) Here are a few inspiration images that are setting me at ease:

From The Makerista, Whaling City Cottage, and Sarah Bartholomew

The crib is a big question mark. We have no desire to move June out of her crib and potentially disrupt her sleep at the same time as we’ll be waking up overnight with a newborn, but I obviously don’t want to spend a ton of money on a second crib. (The good part is that June’s crib was $0 – a hand-me-down from my parents!) I’m thinking we’ll do the white Jenny Lind crib and call it a day.

That leaves soft furnishings. The spread and sheets on the full bed are white, so I’d love to add a bit of coordinating color and pattern with pillowcases, shams, and a blanket, as well as in the sheet on the crib and maybe a crib skirt? Since the bed is against the one window, I think we’ll go with a simple valance for it, hopefully in a fun pattern. We’re also planning to switch out the fan for a New England-y light fixture, since I think the fan hangs way too low for the room.

Pillow from Caitlin Wilson, curtains from West Elm, light fixture from CB2, mobile from Aha

Wish us luck that we can knock all of this out by the end of July :)

Affiliate links are used in this post!