Lisa Santa Cruz

Sharing my best secrets on how I always keep my home so clean 🥰 (Spoiler alert: I DON’T 🤪😂✌🏻) Our home is clean when it needs to be, but otherwise it is lived in. Baked in, cooked in, painted in, crafted in, spilled in and played in. Sometimes it still surprises me the rate of mess four kids can generate 😵‍💫😂 and even with an amazing village of helping hands, it’s still nearly impossible to keep up 🤣🤭 Of course this is not to say we neglect our home or don’t care for it, it’s just certainly not always perfect 😉 Anyone relate? 😂

Made with love by @lisa_santacruz 😘🥧

Happy 4th from our red white and blue house and a basket full of pie 🥰🇺🇸🥧 Pie basket @amishbaskets Skirt @littlewomenatelier

Little raw glimpse of our day without trending audio. Walking through the hallway and caught this sweet moment through the hallway window of these three painting in the dining room. This week has honestly been rough, and I’m exhausted. We’ve been battling a slew of sicknesses through the whole family with both urgent care and ER visits, coming right off an emotional family weekend with funerals and burial services. There’s certainly been joy scattered throughout with family gatherings and getaways, but overall I’m just tired. This week of sickness has forced a week off work, and honestly I’m grateful for it. Our work tends to feel all-consuming and never ending, and I’m honestly so tired of fighting the algorithms to attempt to catch people’s attention so we can continue to sell what we’ve made. Making things is exhausting, and selling those things is also exhausting. But running a business leaves no other option, and our life literally depends on it. Anyway, this little glimmer of normal, unrushed life brought me joy. (Even though meanwhile in the background Nathaniel is still working on a new chalkboard- it really never ends 🫠) So for now, I’m going to cherish these fleeting moments and nap with my baby while I pray that we can all be recovered enough to partake in some holiday celebrations this weekend ❤️

To summarize: we’ve been busy!!! 🤭☀️ So far our summer has been full to the brim with new exciting projects, creating and testing new curriculums and resources, supporting a lovely community of homeschooling families, and so much more! Theres truly never a dull moment around here, so when we say we’re working on lots of new things, we mean it! 😅 Cannot wait for you all to see the fruits of our labor come to fruition very soon 🫶🏼

For our anniversary, instead of trying to pull off some extravagant date night, we decided to celebrate 10 years of growing our family and took the kids on a little family vacation to Leavenworth, where we spent part of our honeymoon 🥰 It was so special to return to the same town after a decade, but now with all four of our children. It was truly the perfect, peaceful getaway that we have been needing. Precious family time, nature, exploring, and lots of memories made. 💛 We absolutely loved using our new @campsnapcamera camera to be able to enjoy capturing screen-free memories which allowed us to unplug and be way more present in the moment 📷

I share this every year on our anniversary; my sister’s incredible, hilarious, and perfectly delivered maid of honor speech! Complete with with her hand made book of “The Tale of Princess Lisa and Prince Nathaniel” 🥹 She perfectly captured our little love story in the sweetest way. Every year we listen to her speech and it never fails to make me laugh and cry. 10 years now of living our “Happily Ever After” 🥹💛🥂

Anniversary Post! ✨ A decade married; thirteen years together—every moment like a fairytale. A living, breathing film about two hopeless romantics, born in the wrong era, who defy the odds to be together. And with each turning page, life grows more beautiful than the last. I look at our life and can hardly believe it’s real. It doesn’t feel like mine, yet every day, I pinch myself. Every dream, every hope, every fantasy—our love story is a fairytale. But it didn’t just happen. We made it this way. We struggled together. We suffered together. We stayed committed. You stood by my side through everything—three years of long distance, two years married to a Marine, two degrees, a job at Google two hours away, starting a business, and raising four children, including twin boys. There is nothing—absolutely nothing—we cannot face together. If there were, it would have taken us down already. We’re built for the storms. The same fire that burns wood purifies gold. We’ve been through the furnace and come out glistening. But through every obstacle, we wrote our own story, lived as if cameras followed us, and built our own ideals—working daily to make them real. And by the grace of God, He made our hopes and dreams a reality. Now look at us. Look at who we were. Look at who we have become. Look at who we are becoming. It’s everything we ever hoped for—and so much more. Happy 10 year anniversary, my dearest @lisa_santacruz There is no one else in the world who could be who you are. More importantly, no one could ever be who you are to me. You are everything. Your loving husband, Nathaniel Santa Cruz #anniversary #lovestory #marine #usmc #marriage #love #romantic #romance #wedding #lifestory #story

Anniversary Post! ✨ Celebrating our 10 year wedding anniversary! 🥳🥰 One Decade married ❤️ A little about our story: In 2012, Lisa and I met swing dancing @centuryballroom. On that fateful night, we fell in love, but two weeks later, I shipped out to the Marine Corps. We dated long-distance for 3-years. The first year, I was in Washington D.C. and the next two, I was in Okinawa, Japan. Then, in June 2015, I came home and we were finally married. Our wedding day was the light at the end of a very long tunnel. This is the song Lisa walked down the aisle to and it holds a deep significance to both of us. It’s about a dream Dante Alighieri had about Beatrice Portinari, the woman he loved all his life. In his dream, Dante awakes to find Love personified, and in her arms, she presents to him Beatrice, asleep. Love then awakes Beatrice and she consumes his burning heart then runs away crying. Dante never married Beatrice (he couldn’t) so instead, he immortalized her in the Divine Comedy. Feeling Dante’s sense of longing, Vide Cor Meum, by @cassidycomposer, was the song I selected for our wedding day. As this song played and Lisa walked down the aisle, Love presented to me what I had long for. Yet unlike Dante, my wedding day was not a dream; and I was going to marry the love of my life and keep her forever. An excerpt from my wedding vows: “We have been together for over three years and you have seen me for less than three months. You have waited 1,084 days for me to come home and now, I now can finally say, “Your waiting is over; I am here to stay.” No more sleepless nights; no more crying alone; Gone are the evening freights and darkness unknown; Let me be your light, your comfort, your home, And all will be right until old we have grown.” 10 years ago today, before the altar of God, Lisa and I were finally united in holy matrimony. Our wedding day was perfect and beautiful, a dream come true; a day we will cherish for the rest of our lives. Looking back, there was something truly divine about our union and not a day goes by where I do not feel like the most fortunate man on earth. Here’s to 10 years of happiness, and to many, many more to come! 🥳

Behind every dreamy, homemade baking shot is a kitchen that’s put in some serious work.🤭 But a messy kitchen doesn’t take away from how precious these little moments are. A homemade pie cooling in the windowsill while my little girl hunts for strawberries in the garden are moments I’ve dreamed of, and I’m loving them, dishes and all 🥹🥰

This little mindset shift has been so healing for me recently, to allow the full range of myself and those around me to exist without shame or resistance, and to celebrate it as a reflection of our humanity in this life. ✨

I was digging though Nathaniel’s phone to find curriculum photos and found this shot he took of me preparing Easter bread last month, and for some reason I just love it 😂 Somehow, this photo feels like the real me 💛 Bread-making, apron-wearing, hair sometimes frizzy with postpartum regrowth, laughing, making messes, growing, learning, and trying not to take life too seriously while still creating and sharing beautiful things around me. There’s a lot of new faces around here as I’ve begun to show more “real life” behind the scenes of what’s been a perfectly curated image for the past few years, and while I will always love the inspiration that comes with sharing those perfect moments, I’m finding such joy and freedom in not hiding the “real” moments too. Because behind “perfect Mrs. Lisa” is a very real Lisa. One who still loves making pretty things and twirling in dresses, but one who also has highs and lows, struggles and triumphs, just like anyone else. So to anyone who’s seen any of my recent reels and breathed a sigh of relief, or written “thank you, I needed this;” just know that sharing those things was as equally healing for me, too 💛 So, here’s to the beauty of life in its entirety. The perfect, the beautiful, the raw, the messy, and everything in between 😌 Thanks for being here, friends 🫶🏼