Happy Friday! We can’t believe it’s already July over here and it’s making me so sad. Que all the summer things we still want to get done. I’ll be frantically scheduling all the fun from here until August.

I’m linking up today with Erika and Andrea to share some favorites.

The above picture describes our current lives…a slushie a day. Ha;) This day was a peach one from our local orchard and it was so good!

Up first, these PB & J bars from Trader Joes. They are so good. We stop at Trader Joes every time we are in St. Louis (small town problems) and stock up on our favorites, but we had never tried these. Highly recommend!

Ellie had a birthday party last Friday evening with 5 of her friends. I won’t share pictures of the actual party since they weren’t all my own kids, but seeing her shine with her friends and how polite and well behaved they were was a big favorite for my mom heart. She requested an outdoor movie, so we went with black and white decor and kept it pretty minimal decor wise. It was a fun one to plan and so easy in everyway!

The cookies were a favorite with a bunch of middle schoolers…

And for said party we needed outdoor seating. Kidding kind of;) We’d been needing patio furniture for awhile now, but are to frugal to ever spend what stores want for several seats of outdoor furniture. So Brandon built a outdoor sofa a few weeks ago.  With the lumber and the cushion cost, it came in at about a 1/3 of the cost of a store bought patio set. We were going to add a whole other couch to it to be “L” shaped, but decided two chairs that we could separate (or keep in couch form) made more sense for our crew. It’s more flexible in how we configure it now if that makes sense?

I didn’t have the chair cushions on in this picture, but will hopefully get a picture of it all put together soon. I didn’t realize how messy those cushions are in photo either goodness! O well, real life right? You aren’t seeing anything perfect or fake on our little corner of the internet here.

Also, we were counting and Brandon has built almost all our house furniture (indoor and outdoor) how fun is that?! 

Those poufs under the table are inflatable! I was a bit leery, but they seem pretty durable and well made. They made for great extra seats at Ellie’s party.

That’s it for today! I hope you all have a happy and safe 4th of July weekend!