FROM: STELLA

TO: LAURA

1. I’ve been very intrigued by Aldi for a long time but have never been to the store. I feel like they are constantly being mentioned in podcasts that I listen to and very celebrated by people that live and shop frugally. But I’ve always been a little intimidated. I was happy to stumble upon this article… apparently I am not the only one. It kinda makes me want to go even more though.

2. We’ve been slowly working on decluttering my parent’s house and have found so many wonderful treasures to share with Colby from my childhood. We’ve also found lots of things that are still in great shape but ready for another home so it’s been fun to do lots of thrift store drop-offs and we always keep a box of books in the trunk in case we encounter a Free Little Library.

3. I think this new Oreo packaging is super creative, what a fun marketing tactic!

4. My book club pick this month was Circe by Madeline Miller. I really enjoyed the book but it was hard to keep track of all the characters and I relied heavily upon the family tree. I started with the audio version but ended up switching to the kindle copy to also help me stay focused.

FROM: LAURA

TO: STELLA

1. The Motherly podcast did an episode with Willow Pump CEO Laura Chambers and it was so nice to hear that the world of pumping is (slowly) innovating and coming into the 21st century.

2. Absolutely drooling over this flat-packed cabin retreat. My husband and I are almost always bandying about the idea of a secondary/vacation home somewhere in the nearby California mountains and I love finding “easy” pop-up type cabin builds to fuel the dream.

3. A coworker sent me this writeup on urgency recently, detailing when it’s a valid sense and when it’s an inflated practice that really only results in consequences.

4. I basically speed-read Zakiya Dalila Harris’ ‘The Other Black Girl‘ this week finishing in (I think) less than a day, even with work/parenting/life going on at full force. I love a good genre-breaking read and this one did not disappoint. I hope she writes a dozen more books in the very near future.

5. The Delta variant has been causing me a decent amount of stress and anxiety lately. Two reads I found helpful this week were The Atlantic’s ‘How The Pandemic Ends‘ and Nature’s ‘How do vaccinated people spread Delta? What the science says.’ I think we’re far from the pandemic actually being “over,” but there are things to be done that can speed up that result and alleviate some of the societal stressors we’ve all been feeling for the last ~18 months.