mindset

The Best Days of My Life

The best days of my life are behind me.

At least that’s how I understand it. That’s what those gray-haired women told me time and again over the past eight years. They would see me pushing a cart loaded down with three small children and a week’s worth of food as our paths collided in the dairy aisle, and they would smile before they spoke. 

“Oh,” they would say. And I might be hyperbolic here but I picture them with their hands on their hearts and misty expressions in their eyes. “These are the best days. Enjoy them.”

The conclusion I drew from this was simple: It’s all downhill from here. This is as good as it gets.

But I’m beyond those days now. This past September, on an unseasonably warm Friday morning, all three of my kids stepped on bus number 537. My youngest, the Kindergartener, ran onto the bus without any signs of hesitation. I waved as they went off to elementary school together for the first time.

I watched the bus as it pulled away and walked back to my house to reheat my coffee. Aside from the dull sound of the microwave running it was very, very quiet. Quiet enough that I could hear myself think, which had been a novelty for the better part of a decade. And after all those years of being home with small children, it was terrible, but mostly wonderful.

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It sometimes seems like we have a hard time moving on from things. Society tends to look back on everything with nostalgia. Even things that at the time may have been more “meh” than “time of your life.” Because I remember hearing those “these are the best days of your life” words in high school, too. Family members told me this. Mid-’90s and early-‘00s teen movies tried to sell me this, though my high school broke out into far less spontaneous singing and my wardrobe looked nothing like what Cher Horowitz or Regina George wore. 

As if high school is as good as it gets.

Because then there was college. Another time that might as well have “ENJOY IT WHILE YOU CAN” flashing around campus in neon lights. And yes, college was fun. I went to my share of parties, spent a memorable night building the biggest snowman you’ve ever seen on central campus, and frequently sat up until morning with friends. (Before getting up for an 8 a.m. class, as only a 19-year-old can.) But I spent just as many nights working on projects at midnight as I did having fun. And hanging out with friends often meant walking up sticky apartment staircases smelling of cheap beer at questionable hours of the night.

My husband and I got married fresh out of college. (We were babies. Somehow no one stopped us.) Once we returned from the bubble of our Jamaican honeymoon, it was back to the reality of an apartment so small that if you stood at the edge of the living room, you could see every inch of the place. He was in grad school, and I was trying to make enough money to support us and pay off our student loans. My futon from college and the folding table and chairs that functioned as our dining table were our crowning pieces of furniture. Bless our newlywed hearts.

All the Disney movies and frou-frou wedding cards gushed that this here, this time for real, was as good as it gets. And maybe all you need is love but surely furniture not made for the express purpose of collapsing wasn’t too much to ask?

Soon enough, I made it to those days the gray-haired women were misty-eyed about. Three years into married life, I held twin babes, one in each arm. And just two years later, we added a third to the mix. (No one stopped us. Again.)

Read the rest over at Coffee + Crumbs.

Life Lately

November is a whiplash of holidays. We usher in the month with a candy hangover and carved pumpkins on our porches and end with twinkle lights, Santa Clauses, and all things glitter. In-between, there are earth-toned pumpkins, corn stalks, and turkeys. We rotate through eating Kit Kats and Sour Patch Kids to a feast of fourteen separate dishes to eyeing up peppermint cookies and gingerbread men.

Phew.

I feel stuck in the pumpkin-ish phase of things. We put up our tree over the weekend but I’m worried there won’t be snow for Christmas. It feels impossible, when I look out our windows to the brownish grass outside, that we’re nearly a week past Thanksgiving. The lights glimmer at me from the living room, determined to lend their cheer whatever the weather.

I know many of my friends live in places where not having snow is the norm, where Christmases consist of 70 degrees and palm trees, or at least green grass. But I’m a born-and-bred Minnesotan. To not have snow yet, not even in the extended two-week forecast, makes it feel like we’ve jumped the gun, like we’re closer to Christmas in July than December 25th.

We almost didn’t have snow last year, I remember. I remember because it felt almost unbearable, on top of everything else 2020 dumped on us, to not have snow for Christmas. A brownish Christmas felt like the ultimate insult.

It arrived, unexpectedly, on Christmas Eve. We weren’t supposed to have any snow, or maybe just a dusting, until a storm moved further south than they thought or lasted hours longer than they predicted and so we ended up with a properly white Christmas, after all. I remember how ridiculously grateful I felt for the swirling snowflakes outside. I remember making appetizers in the kitchen while playing Christmas music and it finally felt acceptable. How I felt, for really the first time last year, in any sort of Christmas spirit at all.

This year, though, I still feel like the pre-Christmas Eve me of 2020. Despite trading in our pumpkins and leaves for twinkling lights and all things red and green, I can hardly wrap my head around the month of December. Not yet. Of course the lack of snow just feels like a final insult. Again.

I was reading through Sarah Bessey’s Advent guide on Sunday where she wrote, “In these days, celebration can seem callous and uncaring, if not outright impossible. But here’s the thing, my friend: we enter into Advent now precisely because we are paying attention. It’s because everything hurts that we prepare for Advent.”

I wouldn’t say everything hurts, not exactly, not for me this year. The shock of 2020 has worn off, or at least softened around the edges. 2022 looms, even as it seems impossible that we’ve lived through not only all of 2020 but also 2021. March 2020 still feels thisclose, despite being almost two years past on the calendar. And yet the kids will be officially fully vaccinated as of New Year’s Eve, exactly two weeks past their last dose. Miracle of miracles. We’ll have much to toast to that night.

We enter into December, into Advent, because we’re paying attention. We just spent a holiday giving thanks: for family, for friends, for food, for those vaccines, and now we wait in hope. For more light in the world. For healing for our planet. For stacks of presents from pages and pages of lists and catalogues, if you’re my kids. As for me? I’ll keep hoping for that snow.

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Action Item

I think the best action item of all for December is rest. There are a million people and organizations vying for your money, time, and talent right now. You don’t need me to write up yet another one. Give what and if you can, and then rest. Breathe. It’s been a long couple of years.

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Around the Internet

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Eating

  • These really are the best chocolate cookies. I halved the batch which made more than enough for us (between 15-18 fairly large cookies), but would use the amounts given to bake enough for holiday gifting.

  • I’m pretty sure I sang the praises of this Coconut Chicken Curry last year, but since I’ve made it twice this past month, I’m here to do it again.

  • This is one of my go-to pastas. I can’t eat shrimp, but sub in 1/2 lb. of Italian sausage instead. The sauce is DIVINE. Add in ALL the basil and top with shredded parm. It’s 10:32 in the morning and my mouth is watering.

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Fun Things

  • I’ve been loving a dab of Cloud Paint on my cheeks.

  • Sushi Go! has been our family game of choice lately. We are obsessed.

  • I wore these pants for Thanksgiving and strongly approve. They feel like sweatpants but are acceptable in public and even for holidays. Elastic waists forever.

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See you in 2022, or very close to it. Hopefully with snow.

When Motherhood Begins With Multiples

I was wheeled to the room on one bed before being transferred to another, the bottom half of my body numb and useless. My nurse chattered away the entire time. She oriented me to my new space, giving me details about the TV, the layout of the bathroom, the mechanics of the bed, the call button, the hospital menu. Details I had no capacity to take in, much less process. Her fingers flashed across the keyboard as she spoke.

“The milkshakes are my personal favorite,” she finally told me, the only thing I really took any note of since it was almost lunchtime. I hadn’t eaten since 6:30 pm the night before, when my water had broken in the middle of our dinner.

Besides the milkshake tip (I ordered vanilla), my only thought was, “Does she seriously think I can concentrate on any of this right now?” I’d been awake for well over 24 hours, in labor for 12, and was now in the earliest stages of recovery from having my unbelievably large twin-filled belly sliced open.

Those babies were in the NICU. The infection all three of us developed during labor ensured their stay there for the next few hours. Nothing major, something antibiotics or drugs of some sort took care of. A detail that, again, I was in no capacity to really care for or understand. They had to stay in the NICU for a few hours and then they would be brought to me. Fair enough. Fine. Just let me sleep.

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The days that followed continued in a similar stupor. I draw a blank when I try to remember the first six weeks of the twins’ lives. I can conjure up moments in time, though I have no idea where these scenes fit in the overall timeline:

A stranger at the store or the doctor’s office squealing, “Oh twins! I’ve always wanted twins” as I fail to muster up similar enthusiasm.

The feeling of exhausted dismay, as I remembered the admonition to “sleep when the baby sleeps”, but what do you do when there are two of them and one of them is always awake?

Propping myself up with pillows—every two hours or less each night—as my husband handed them to me. Tandem nursing two football babies as my head continued to nod forward, the motion always startling me awake. My husband removing the first to rock them back to sleep and me taking the second to rock on the other side of the room in some sort of insane synchronized baby sleep dance.

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I know my apathy continued. Twin infants are the textbook example of survival mode. Like Jim Gaffigan says, when he’s asked what it’s like to have four kids, “Just imagine you’re drowning. And then someone hands you a baby.”

I went to my six-week postpartum checkup, congratulating myself for having the foresight to have my mom come to town so I could tackle this very personal appointment alone. Except I was greeted by the nurse practitioner who immediately asked me, “Where are the babies? We like to see them.”

My sleep-deprived, still-hormonal brain interpreted this as an admonition. I started to tell her that my mom was with them, that it was the first time I was without them, that I was grateful for the break. But I stopped. Maybe mothers of six-week-olds weren’t supposed to want to leave their babies.

Read more about adventures in twin babyhood over on The Kindred Voice.

Books to (Re)Read This Fall

Hello, my name is Shannon. (Hi, Shannon!) I am a serial re-reader of books. I come by this honestly. I was the type of kid who devoured stacks of books at a time. There was no way my parents could keep up with the number of library runs or the sheer amount of cash it would have taken to keep me in a steady supply of Scholastic orders. While I read anything I could get my hands on (magazines, the newspaper, cereal boxes, etc.), having an actual book in my hands often meant re-reading from my own bookshelf. I have distinct memories of sitting cuddled in “my” corner of our brown living room couch, reading the last page of a book, and then immediately flipping it around to the front cover to start all over again.

My love of re-reading hasn’t left me. If anything, it’s grown stronger over the past year and a half of the pandemic. There’s something comforting in visiting familiar characters who feel like friends in book form. When there’s so much beyond our control, it’s soothing to visit an old favorite and know exactly what I’ll find there. There’s no risk (I already know it’s a book I love), it’s fun to revisit favorite pieces of dialogue and turns-of-phrase, and I almost always find something new, even in a book I’ve read half a dozen times.

If you’d like to join me in my cult of re-reading this fall, here’s a round-up of cozy, familiar, comforting (re)reads. These are books I think pair best with a blanket, soft pants, and something warm in a mug, even if you only have five minutes to sneak in as children swarm around you.

(See the (re)reads at the top of my list by clicking over to Twin Cities Mom Collective!

The Kids Will Be Fine

A year ago, when the world shut down, I did what any reasonable Type-A person would do: immediately crafted a schedule to structure my days with a four-year-old and twin six-year-olds. Included were daily bike rides, schoolwork, free play, regular meal times, iPad time, and 15 minutes of silent reading time.

It was the last one my daughter protested.

“I don’t waaa-nnaaa read,” she would whine, draped like a spaghetti noodle over the couch. “I don’t even like reading.”

“That’s funny,” I would reply, “Because we read an entire Princess in Black book together last night before bed.”

To which she would try to suppress a smile before sighing and then continue on with her grumbling.

We’d get through the 15 minutes. Some days were better than others. It often felt like I worked for almost every one of those 15 minutes.

Let me be clear: it wasn’t that she couldn’t read. She adored being read to and was a strong Kindergarten+ level reader herself. She just…didn’t want to. Maybe she found it overwhelming. Maybe she wasn’t confident in her own abilities. Maybe it was that the world felt upside down. 

I did what I could to make silent reading appealing. I combined snacks with reading time. I encouraged her to just look at the pictures; she didn’t have to read all the words. I had small crates of books I’d curated specifically for each child’s interests and reading level. (Bless my early pandemic heart.) 

I’m a prolific reader myself. I see memes which say things like “I was the kid who sat up reading under the covers with a flashlight” and feel seen. Books are an enormous part of my life, and all this whining about reading unnerved me.

What if she falls behind? What if enforcing a mere 15 minutes of silent reading time a day turns her off reading forever? What if she never, ever likes reading?

I didn’t always think like this. But in my weaker moments, like during the it’s-day-four-of-this-whining-nonsense moments, my mind definitely went down that path.

It was several months into this schedule, late summer, when I realized she hadn’t whined about reading in…days? Weeks? I realized we’d fallen into a pattern with our silent reading where each kid grabbed a book and I did, too, with 15-20 (mostly) silent reading minutes each morning. I didn’t even know when the whining had stopped. I just knew that silent reading had been a battle I’d dreaded every day until one day, without even noticing…it wasn’t.

brooklyn reading.png

Read the rest over on Twin Cities Mom Collective.