Tag: love

Hello January and 2026!

On By Erin @ Cracker Crumb LifeIn Uncategorized24 Comments

Happy New Year everyone!! It’s a fresh new year out there, full of first sips of coffee to be had, new books to flip through, blank journals to scribble in.

The past few years, my word of the year has been “community”. I wanted to build a bigger community for myself, for Wyatt, for our family. And I feel like I have really done that! Through new blogging friends, our Scout/Blackbirds group, new friendships here, church, and all of our relationships built at our favorite destinations, I feel like we have a nice little community out there for us. As a very shy person, this was actually difficult for me. I had to push past my nerves and learn to find my voice. To engage with other people, to initiate. Sometimes this can be very scary for me, and it is easier for me to stay in my nice cocoon of comfort at home. Which if it was just me, that might be ok. But it is not just me. I mean, Billy is able to do all this for himself, and he is an extremely outgoing and extroverted person so he does, but as Wyatt’s parent at home and the parent who spends the most time with him, I can’t keep him in this cocoon. He needs to do things, experience things, have friends, see all he can. So, I made it my goal to make sure that happens, even if it gave me butterflies. And the more I did it, the easier it became for me. And so this year, my word is “connection”. I want to connect more deeply with what we are doing. I can move past the nerves now, and really experience what we are doing, and who we are with.

I also want to reconnect with nature. This is a part of my life that has been neglected for a few years. Billy and I used to be out in the woods all the time, and that is one area that we haven’t quite figured out yet, accessibility for Wyatt. I did find a front wheel that we can add and remove from his wheelchair and I am going to try to apply for a grant for it this year, but until then, it is tough unless it is paved. But, now with our new deck and ramp in the yard, we can turn our yard into an outdoors area that is accessible right here. Billy is putting in a pond this spring, and we are laying pavers in part of the yard to place wheelchair accessible raised garden beds, and a space for his outdoor toys. Billy and I are also hoping to get some flowers in this year. I dream of adding trees but I have been saying that for years now. Maybe this will be the year!

2025 had it’s challenges – the biggest one being Wyatt’s surgery, which all of you know about it if you read here regularly. That was a difficult time, and I honestly didn’t know before the surgery how we would make it through. And then it happened, and the support we received from people blew me away. We had neighbors send meals for days, friends drop by with food or sending gifts in the mail to make Wyatt’s days easier (and mine), grandparents who stepped in when Billy had to go to back to work and spent the entire day with Wyatt and I, helping me through the hard stuff. Cards and e-cards, comments of support here on the blog. There was just so much love and kindness and encouragement. And that was honestly my biggest takeaway from 2025. Not the hard stuff, but the love.

And we did do some really great, fun things too last year. Wyatt was on a bowling league, and went to music camp. It was a year of bookstores, and dragons. Of milestones – Wyatt turned 10, Billy and I turned 50, and our marriage turned 25. I got my mom’s insurance and medical help all settled, and I know that she is safe and taken care of where she is. It was a year where I found the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe, and the perfect lipstick color.

This year, one thing I want to do is keep reconnecting with myself as well. Somewhere in parenthood I lost a bit of me, which I think is normal. You live for your child. But there are places I can still be me, Erin, not “Wyatt’s mom”, which is what I am known as most of the time when I go places. I used to love getting cute outfits together, and now that I am no longer in my 30s (wahhh) and just didn’t bother much in my 40s, I want to reclaim that part of me now. Maybe not on an everyday basis, but I want to find my style now. One that works for my lifestyle but also is more than a tshirt and yoga pants on the daily. I’ve been on that quest for a while, and I have steps one and two conquered, now I am on to the harder part.

I also joined a movement from Little Truths Studio, the Analog Life Project. I’ve been listening and reading a lot about this new move back to life before all social media all the time. Like life in the 90s, the early 2000s, when we had access to the internet and social media but it wasn’t what it is now. I don’t want to give up social media and the internet, I believe it is important for access to all sorts of things, but I want to reclaim that space. I don’t want it to be a place I retreat to in order to doomscroll because I am bored or need to decompress or whatever. I want to put that energy or lack of energy in some cases, into other things. My journaling, reading, game nights, art nights, daydreaming. Puzzles and crafts. Learning to draw and paint. Pen pals and snail mail. I just don’t want to aimlessly scroll anymore. I also did a crazy thing and bought a book that is written in French. Do I speak French? No. Do I read French? No. I took French in high school, I took Latin for four years, and I took Russian in college, and I have always been pretty good at picking up languages when I try them. So, this will be something I do to decompress. Slowly, slowly translating this book. It might take me a very long time but I will do it!

I am also attempting two different reading challenges this year. The Nonfiction Reading Challenge hosted by Shelleyrae at Book’d Out, and the Books in Translation challenge hosted by Jennifer at Introverted Reader. I think I can manage probably the smallest level of each. Maybe more! We will see. I am excited about both. I am already working on a memoir for the Nonfiction Challenge, Dinner for Vampires by Bethany Joy Lenz.

And that is it from me this morning my friends. I will leave you with some random photos, and as always, I hope that you do something today that makes you smile!

Soup and Story Saturday

On By Erin @ Cracker Crumb LifeIn Uncategorized18 Comments

Hello everyone!! This is just a little Saturday post, where if you want to chat about soup that you have made or eaten or a recipe you have, and tell a story about your life, a memory, a book you are reading, anything, here is your chance! I plan on posting this later in the day like I did today.

Today’s soup was made by my mother-in-law! Homemade wonton soup, and it is delicious and warm and not something I get to eat very often. I love wonton soup though and I needed some soup today! We got up early to go to the Christmas parade and it was very chilly first thing this morning!

It was perfect. I loved that it was not overly salty, and she added water chestnuts which I love. It was very warming and I was thankful to have it.

Last weekend Chrissy, my sister-in-law, and I were standing in the kitchen at my dad’s reminiscing about our grandmothers. It started with spaghetti, and she talked about how when she was little, one of her very favorite things was her grandmother’s house on cold days, because her grandma would always have a pot of bolognese sauce simmering away on the stove. She said it would bubble away for hours, while they played and her mom and grandma visited, and it smelled so good, and she couldn’t wait to eat it. She said it would get a layer of grease on top, and when I asked if she ate that, she emphatically said, yes, that it was part of the experience, and they would dip their bread into it too. Her memory sounded so vivid and I could imagine the feeling that would give, of family and homeliness, and it made me remember my grandmothers’ kitchens.

Neither of them ever really had any money, but you never went hungry when you visited. In fact, quite the opposite. Both would steam the windows of their houses up, cooking and baking. My grandma Marian, whose birthday would have been tomorrow actually, made the best chicken paprikash, the best bean soup (which I don’t have the recipe for and haven’t found anything to replicate it), and the best rice pudding. The chicken paprikash is the one I remember the best. She made it with the dumplings, and they were my favorite part, those little bits of dough were like treasures for some reason, and I would search the bowl for them before moving on to the rest of the bowl. We would all be crammed into her smallish kitchen, seated around her round wooden table, and I would be next to my cousin Melissa in the back, squished along the wall because we were the littlest and youngest.

Now my grandma Keedy, she was also a good cook and baker, and I live in the house that was hers, so I am continuing to make memories here. I remember our crowded Thanksgivings and Christmases, my entire rowdy family spread out wherever we could find a seat until dinner, when we again would cram around a table in the dining room, until the year when my cousin Brian, Meghan, Michael, and my brother Devin and I got our own table in the other room. We had slightly outgrown this tiny house but that didn’t stop us from being together.

The kitchen here, the one that my grandma used, is so tiny. I joke all the time that they built this house and then were like, “Oh no we forgot the kitchen” and managed to squeak one in. Despite its diminutive size, my grandma would turn out a huge feast, complete with turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, peas, corn, salad, cranberry sauce, and Yorkshire pudding, followed by pumpkin pie, cherry pie, coconut tarts and Empire biscuits. We all would fight over the last piece of Yorkshire pudding, and had great debates over which dessert was better, the tarts or the biscuits. I have always been a coconut tarts fan but I am among the minority. The house would be so hot from the stove working hard all day, and after dinner my cousins, brother, and I would go back to the den in the back of the house. We would occupy ourselves with books or and drawing and tv if there was a tv in there, which wasn’t always the case, and my brother and boy cousins would wrestle and Meghan and I would try to stay out of the way because they would get wild and it was not that big of a room.

Inevitably we would get bored and wander back into the dining room and living room, and listen to the stories our parents and grandparents were telling, about dancing at the highland games or the time my uncle scored for the opposite team during a basketball game in middle school or ice skating on the creek, or how my mom was hula-hoop champion in elementary school and got to hula-hoop before a high school football game, where my aunt was a cheerleader.

I feel like I have so many memories wrapped up in these nights, dinners and meals with family, and I hope that I am providing these memories to Wyatt. I want him to remember these holidays with fondness one day, the food that we made, the stories we told.

Marsha from Marsha in the Middle has an awesome soup and story to share as well!! Check out her post here!

And that is it from me today. Thanks for stopping by, and if you have anything you want to share, please leave a link below! InLinkz is still telling me that it is incompatible which is annoying, so if you leave a link in the comments, I will share it in my post!

Soup and Story Saturday

On By Erin @ Cracker Crumb LifeIn Uncategorized14 Comments

Hello everyone! This is my very first Soup and Story Saturday, and if you are not quite sure what it is yet, well, know that I am still working it out too. It is sort of amorphous right now, and that is fine. We can all work with that.

My idea was basically about community. Sharing a meal, sharing a story. You can share a soup you have made, soup you love, soup you have eaten somewhere else, homemade or restaurant made, from a can – it doesn’t matter. As for the story, you can share a story or a memory of your own, you can share the book you are reading, you can share about a book you love, a book you hate – same, it is up to you. Just any sort of story you want to share.

Last Sunday we woke up to the first snow of the season, which is always an exciting day for us. We like to celebrate the first snow and traditionally, we order Chinese for some reason on the first snow. Well, this past Sunday our budget said no to ordering food, so instead we decided to start a few new traditions. We painted and had homemade soup and I baked. However, the soup I made didn’t quite turn out! I used to make it years ago, when I was still a vegetarian, and I must have done something differently in the past because this time there just was not any broth. Lol. It was more like a bowl of beans and dumplings than soup! It was still ok but not quite soup. It was still very hearty and soothing, although a bit stodgy.

The soup I made is called Vegan Chickpea Dumpling. I won’t share the recipe I used since this is not a good representation of it. Lol.

When I conceptualized this idea, I was just about to start reading The Enchanted Greenhouse. By the time I was done reading it, I knew I wanted to do a soup sort of posting linky. That book is full of homemade soup, sitting around a table, protected against the snow outside, and feeling snug. I always got that same feeling reading Little House on the Prairie. Laura would describe the elements outside, how it was always slightly wild and dangerous, but they were safe inside their little house, wherever it was located at that time.

This month is full of milestones for me, my 25th anniversary, my 50th birthday. Billy has been such a safe place for me for so long now- we have been together since we were seventeen, and even then, just starting to date him, he made me feel safe and cared for. There were times in my life that I didn’t necessarily always feel that way, but Billy is one of those people that are just…protective and full of love. He is human and makes mistakes obviously, but that doesn’t take away from how he is. He is an extremely capable person, and so kind to people. I remember one of the moments I really realized I love him, and what a good person he is.

I was working at a retail store, during college, one that sold office supplies, but also had a gifts side, that was sort of Hallmarkish, cards and little figures and ornaments and what have you. I worked on the gifts side of the store, and while the office supply side had more business customers, the gift side had more older people who came in, who would walk down from the senior apartments a block or so away for cards for their grandchildren, little gifts, but some came in just to chat. I would chat with them while I worked, the man named Harold Angel (first and middle name) because he was born on Christmas was one of my favorites, and then there was a little tiny much older woman, who didn’t live in the apartments but in her own home. But she came in one Christmas and wistfully told me that her family lived very far away, and didn’t visit very often, and that she wished that she had someone to visit and to help her set up her Christmas village of houses. Since her husband had died she didn’t have anyone to bring them up from the basement or help her out, and she missed seeing their lights at night. You all know I have a very close family, and it made me sad that she was all alone at the holidays. So you all probably can guess what I did. I volunteered Billy and I to go over and help her out.

Later, I told my nineteen year old boyfriend that we were going to spend the next night at a stranger’s house helping her out. And it was probably the first of Billy’s shrugs and sighs and turning to me saying “What do you want me to do”, acting exasperated but not really being exasperated. So the next night we went over to her home, which turned out to be just around the corner from my home, and she met us at the door, all huge smiles.

She had eggnog for us, which neither of us care for but that we smiled and chugged down, and her house was set a million degrees so we were sweating to death, and I sat and chatted with her on the couch while my very kind boyfriend brought up all the boxes of her decorations and little village houses, set them all up the way she wanted them, made sure they worked, and were safely plugged in. And I watched him, and knew he was a keeper. It wasn’t his ideal night out, probably a far cry, but he did it because he is kind. He has a good heart, a big heart. He is a helper. There he was, in his plaid flannel shirt over a black concert tee of some punk band, wearing his camouflage pants and giant combat boots, doing his best to make this woman happy. No one would have guessed he was that full of kindness if you just looked at him – until he smiled. Then you would know because his eyes are twinkly and his smile welcoming.

And I guess that is my story today. About Billy and his kindness, his spirit, his joy. And I probably wrote this all wrong, because I am no writer and sometimes it is hard to describe a feeling or emotion or a particular event in your life. But I hope you all understand what I am trying to say in this story anyway.

And with that, I hope you all have a great day, and that whatever you do, that you do something that makes you smile.

And, I am having a problem adding the linky today. It just keeps telling me it is incompatible with wordpress. So I apologize! If you want to share a post, add your link in the comments. 🙂 Or if you just want to share a story in the comments, that works as well! I look forward to reading anything anyone wants to share.

Sunday Morning Coffee Catch Up

On By Erin @ Cracker Crumb LifeIn Uncategorized15 Comments

Hello everyone! I think we can all agree that last week was a long week, and I hope that you are all taking care of yourselves and guarding your peace.

In the midst of all this upheaval going on around us, I had a mixed bag of a week myself. I will get the yucky over with first here, because I do have lots of good stuff to share as well. So my mom. I had just finally sighed a breath of relief that she was safe and taken care of – but, I guess I exhaled too soon. On Thursday my brother went over to visit our mom and found blood in her apartment and on her pillow. After searching for the source, and asking my mom what the heck, he discovered the source, which was a small cut on the back of her head. It was small but persistent with bleeding, so the two of us whisked her off to the ER for scans and probably a stitch. We were there only about two hours which is record time around here, and her scans came back good and they put two staples in her head. She is doing well but dang, mom! Lol.

Ok now on to the good stuff!!

It’s been a hot minute I think since I updated here like this. Since then, Wyatt has been seriously kicking butt. He has started back to therapy, and this kid is such a hard worker. It blows my mind sometimes how tough he is. At home, he is a little more… wanting me and Billy to do more for him, but now that I have seen what he is capable of, and getting the all clear from the PT, he will not be getting the kid gloves any longer.

We are also all the way back to school and that is going really well too. We were exhausted from a full week of school, two days of PT, a huge list of home therapy activities to do everyday, and then just everyday things (and some emergencies), but we managed. We also had our first Blackbirds meeting on Thursday! We had such a good time, and the kids were all so happy to be back together. We started the meeting explaining the name change from Cub Scouts to Blackbirds, as we decided to just have our own club, and talked about our new mission statement, motto, and learned the sign for Blackbirds from one of our kids. We passed out the new shirts which my MIL and I had made, and had the kids make a banner for us to hang every meeting. It was a great first meeting back. And for me, the icing on the cake was Wyatt saying “Bye Zane!” to his friend. This is huge. Wyatt doesn’t say hi or bye generally, or any names. However, since this one surprise, he has gone on to say the name of one of his cousins, little wild child, and his uncle Devin. It was an amazing moment for Billy and I.

Yesterday we had a great day of time with family. My dad came to visit and we went out for dinner, and after that I had my two little nieces over for a short time while Devin and Chrissy went out for a quick drink to celebrate Chrissy’s birthday. We had a good time with the girls. We painted nails, played with tons of toys, and played a board game all within an hour and some change.

We also did a little shopping at our city wide garage sale yesterday. One of the animal rescues in our city has a mammoth sale and we headed up there to shop their sale. Wyatt got a book, I got a book, and then I also picked up two mugs as well, because they were so cute! They were also apparently made in Spain. I love them but now I really really do need to go through my mug collection and pick some to have in the cupboard and some to put away for a minute.

And that is it from me!!

Let’s move through this week with grace and peace, for ourselves and for others. Be less quick to reply in anger, to be helpers when we can be. And take of your own self as well. As I say, try to do one thing today that makes you smile.

Thursday Morning Coffee Catch Up

On By Erin @ Cracker Crumb LifeIn Uncategorized19 Comments

Hello everyone!! I am feeling pretty good this morning – I had an actual whole night of sleep and it was amazing. I feel ready to take on the world! Or maybe just my patch of the world. That works too.

We are still at home, and going a bit stir crazy. Wyatt is feeling pretty much back to normal but still has all of the restrictions, which is a difficult pairing. But we are managing. He has really only felt this good beginning this week, and I am so happy that we have gotten to this stage. I just need to shift gears now a bit and figure out this new conundrum. We will get it though. We are through the worst of it now, thank goodness.

His recovery timed nicely with the completion of his Little Free Library! We had the grand opening on Sunday, and Wyatt was so happy and proud of it. We had goodie bags for the kids who came, and my dad came and brought balloons.

Our first visitors were two of my nieces, Mermaid Girl and Little Bit! They promptly plopped down on the lawn and got busy with their goodie bags, and flipped through books. Then we had some friends stop by with their children, and our little neighbor girl has been flitting back and forth to it all week. I need to find a way to keep the inventory “fresh” for the kids who come a lot, like the neighbor girl. Wyatt even got a super cute card from some friends down the street.

It was a really good day!

I joined a Little Free Library group on Facebook, and posted about our new library, and asked for suggestions on how to keep the momentum going, and they were all so welcoming and had great ideas. Just what I would expect from people who love books! One person suggested that I get a map and have Wyatt mark on the map where everyone who responded to my post has charters, or show him how to use the LFL map, which I didn’t even think about doing. Other suggestions were to post on the NextDoor App, in our city’s Buy Nothing group, and to start a FB page just for his library. So I guess I will be doing all of that pretty soon.

Right now though, I am busy planning the school year, or at least up to December. I need organization to stay on track with life, so I have been working very hard this week on plans. I have a good chunk finished and I am pretty excited about how our fall is shaping up. We do have two days of physical therapy that we will be working around as well, as part of Wyatt’s recovery. I am leaving those days light for now.

And because I am who I am, and don’t have enough projects in my life, we made a big change with Cub Scouts. We ended up deciding as a group to continue meeting and doing all of our fun stuff and community work, basically stay the same as what we were doing, but without the umbrella of Cub Scouts. So we are now starting from scratch, sort of. I am going to register our group as a nonprofit organization with the state, and get a name and motto and oath and all that together, so that the kids can still have the bond of an organization, and then also design some ranks and badges. I have a few ideas percolating..

And then in the midst of all this, my long suffering husband turned 50!! I am unsure how he is 50, it feels like we are still the teenagers we were when we started dating. We didn’t do much to celebrate this week, but we are hoping to go out together this weekend. We are just now feeling comfortable leaving Wyatt with a grandparent for an hour or two without us. It will be nice to go out together, even for a short time. I am thinking a hike and a drink somewhere might be fun.

And I feel like I have prattled on long enough this morning! I hope that whatever you all do today, that you do something that makes you smile!