Good morning! We are at Friday already and I’m logging on for the first time since Monday because Ishu’s been home for most of the week. Ha.

He had a cough earlier in the week and I kept him home Monday through Wednesday. And then yesterday morning, I was eager for him to get back to school (and, surprisingly, he was pretty eager to go back too). The cough is going around and if I kept him home ’til the cough was completely gone, he’d never go back to school.

I was actually pretty surprised with how excited he was to return to school. We are in a completely different phase of life right now; it’s almost hard to believe that this is the same kid that would drag out the goodbyes in the morning for 20 minutes. Or beg us to stay home from school.

It was also a great day to return to school because, at pick-up, there was randomly a petting zoo outside the building. The apartment building next door was having a fall festival event and brought in a petting zoo. And the kiddos were taking turns riding a horse and pony. Never could have imagined that the first time Ishu would ride a horse would be in the middle of the city. Ha.

Other things happening this week:

The foliage is foliage-ing. The fall colors are out in full force right now and it’s making all the cells in my body do a happy dance as we walk by the bright yellows each day.

Ishu drew on our wall with acrylic paint/pen while I thought my kids were playing so well together in the other room. I was in the kitchen thinking I was mom-of-the-year making an entire dinner spread and then when Ankur got home and we walked into their room, SURPRISE. It came off with Magic Eraser but my ego took a nice little nose dive (and then smashed into the ground when, after spending all that time cooking multiple things, they were rejected by both the children).

I attended the Beach Reads & Bubbly book club. We read The God of the Woods and, man oh man, totally worth the read. It was 500 pages long but it was really well written. It’s technically a ‘literary fiction’ book, but I think it could be considered a bit of a mystery as well. There are multiple timelines and multiple perspectives, but the author did a really good job of grounding us in each timeline with the way she presented each chapter’s heading. And, well, I just think it was one of my favorite reads this year. There were a lot of different layers and everything was wrapped up well enough (but not too perfectly, which is also kind of nice).

I finished the book the day before the meeting and I loved getting to dissect it all while it was still fresh in my brain.

I’m moving right along to The Husbands for a little lighter read now.

We’ve got a packed weekend filled with all sorts of Halloween festivities and birthday parties. So something light and easy from my TBR list is the way to go.

Hope you all have a beautiful Halloween-filled weekend!