Life Lately

Yesterday, I sat at the beach while Caden played in the sand at the edge of the water. It was 80+ degrees out, warmer than they’d predicted, and my hair stuck to the back of my neck until I fished a hair tie out of my bag and pulled it into a ponytail. It’s still August, which signals summer to my brain, but also it’s September tomorrow, which screams nothing but fall. Time to transition. Again.

The kids start school next week and I feel all the normal excitement that goes along with a fresh school year—what always feels like more of a new year than January ever does. And also there’s the anxiety that’s become the norm around masking and local case counts and how long before one of my kids is in quarantine?

I’ve been in a flurry of ordering things because it seems like I’ve either been running out or needing all the things all at once. Clothes for kids who have outgrown everything from pants to socks to shoes. Refill tablets of hand soap and house cleaner. Boy brow and yes that is an affiliate link in case you’d like to help feed my addiction to the product that I would bring with me even to a deserted island. Three whole sets of school supplies. A fresh box of contacts. Laundry detergent. Parchment paper and tin foil and plastic wrap. A fresh bottle of elderberry gummies because besides masking, it’s the thing that feels like I’m doing something to help my kids stay healthy. Name labels for the aforementioned school supplies which have somehow been held up in customs for weeks and I am crossing my fingers they arrive before the first day of school. Tea and a new sweater because despite that 80-degree temperature, fall is coming, dammit, and I intend to be prepared.

Everything around me feels in or about in transition. Though thinking back to a year ago, things were largely the same. The start of school was pushed back a week but I was still buying up masks and elderberry and school supplies and Costco orders made up entirely of snacks. (Mental note: place Costco order.) We didn’t know exactly what the school year would bring and we largely still don’t have the answer to that question this year.

I don’t know what else to do except to continue keeping under control what I can, even if it’s just stocking the snack shelf in the pantry and baking first day of school treats and emailing the teachers to see who in their class needs school supplies. Remembering that this, too, is important work, even if it doesn’t always (ever?) feel like quite enough.

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Action Item

I’m not sure how you can feel anything but sick to your stomach after the way things unfolded in Afghanistan this month. TIME magazine has an excellent round-up of ways to support refugees and people still in Afghanistan: from organizations taking donations to contacting your representatives.

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Around the Internet

• Tom Daly knitting is one of my favorite things this summer and R. Eric Thomas is one of my favorite things on the internet, so put them together and it brings me an enormous amount of joy.

• “But I think the real problem is that life is still exhausting because the pandemic was and remains exhausting in so many invisible ways — and we still haven’t given ourselves space to even begin to recover. Instead, we’re just softly boiling over, emptying and evaporating whatever stores of energy and patience and grace remain.”

• We Could Have Changed the World (really the title says it all)

• For those of us who have or are about to send our kids back to school.

• “This is parenting these days, for us and too many people we know. Peak inconsistency. Complete incoherence. Just decision after decision based on a little bit of science, a little bit of outdated guidance, and a little bit of how much time or energy we have to think it through.”

• Did I go down the rabbit hole of ‘Bama Rush in an attempt to understand why all of America was suddenly invested? Yes I did. And then this deep-dive on Greek fashion.

• This feels like it sums up 2021.

• So does this.

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Eating

• Have I told you to make falafel before? Because you should definitely make falafel. And then serve it with pita bread and roasted veggie (team bell peppers over here) and kalamata olives and a healthy scoop of caramelized onion hummus.

• This mushroom pasta stir-fry is delicious. Unfortunately, I can almost never seem to find broccolini around here so I subbed regular broccoli and it was fine (but if you can get your hands on it actual broccolini would be better!).

• I will now evangelize you to the ways of dark chocolate hummus. I will continue to pretend it is the healthiest of healthy snacks because the first ingredient is chickpeas and continue to ignore that the second ingredient is sugar. Mostly because I don’t care. It’s delicious.

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Fun Things

• Currently wearing a late summer/early fall pink and gray ombre mani of my own creation using AW, RP, MG, Wild & Free, and BI from Olive and June and the Gen Z barista told me she loved my nails this morning so #winning.

• This button-up shirt was an impulse buy earlier this summer which will go down as one of my favorite purchases of 2021.

• This tee. The color is more of a gray-washed lavender in person. Love the fit, love the rolled sleeves, love that I foresee wearing it under lots of cardigans come cooler temperatures.

What Self-Care Isn't

Self-care.

Could there be a buzzier, more millennial mom catch-phrase than that? Honestly, I roll my eyes a little at myself just typing it.

Not at what it entails: I am here for all the self-care. It’s important to know what fills us up, whether a book, a movie, or the now synonymous with self-care pampering that is a bubble bath with a glass of wine. I applaud the fact that women are stepping up to say they are no longer interested in being martyrs, but in the care of ourselves as entire people with emotions and thoughts and physical and mental well-being to think about. I don’t want to go back to the time before self-care was part of our collective consciousness.

No, I’m rolling my eyes at how ubiquitous the phrase has become. It’s been co-opted by capitalism as virtually every other post in my Instagram feed tries to sell me everything from skin serums to beach towels to smoothies all under the umbrella of “self-care.” (Okay, but I did buy the skin serum, though.)

But what makes me roll my eyes most of all is when I see things labeled as self-care that just…aren’t.

A few years ago, an influencer I followed posted a photo of herself at a doctor’s appointment. In the caption, she discussed how she’d finally made a doctor’s appointment to get something checked out that she should have been seen for a long time ago. How she got a babysitter and that was self-care. How she was so proud of taking this step in self-care. And ended with a rejoinder to her fellow moms to make their own doctor’s appointments that day for the sake of their own self-care. (Really, the post was littered with “self-care.”)

It was then that my brain exploded.

Because hear me out: taking yourself to the doctor for something that should be medically checked out by a professional is not self-care. It’s just what you should do.

Read the rest over on Twin Cities Mom Collective

We Have A Lot of Stuff Going On Here

“Mommy, I have a lot of stuff going on here,” my daughter complains, staring at the screen of her iPad during distance learning, a scene that’s become all too familiar in our house. Remnants from a full morning of schooling—papers, crayons, snack wrappers, a whiteboard—are scattered across her desk: a very literal visual of a lot of stuff going on over here. I wander over and watch as she stumbles over some of the longer words in an assignment’s written instructions.

I look at her screen, at the bevy of assignments related to sight words and skip counting and something called fact families. I swipe down on the screen to view the directions.

“You can listen to the instructions,” I tell her. The first-grade teachers have prepared for the exact situation, of their still-young readers being overwhelmed by large blocks of text, “Remember? Press play right here. It will tell you exactly what to do next.”

I tiptoe away so I don’t interrupt her brother’s voice recording. I sit down at my own computer screen in the kitchen, far enough away I can’t see them, but close enough to be interrupted if they need me, which is approximately every 2.65 minutes. I look at my own screen with six tabs too many open and find similar words bouncing around my own brain.

What was I doing?
Where was I?
I’ve got a lot of stuff going on here.

Unlike my daughter, I don’t have an older, wiser person nearby to help me figure it all out. There’s no one around to check that I’ve done my work, for me to interrupt every couple of minutes to ask what I need to do next. Also, I’m 33 years old. In the language of the millennial memes I see around me, it’s my job to get this adulting done on my own.

But adulting is frequently the actual last thing I want to do. At my worst, when I’m feeling anxious and lazy and anything but capable, this devolves into a social media doomscroll on my phone. Or I wander around, half-completing tasks, as I wait out the minute or two or five I have before the inevitable interruption that is distance learning with three kids.

Read more about “all the stuff we have going on here” over on Twin Cities Mom Collective.

Finding Rest...Not Just Sleep

“But my body doesn’t feel tired,” my daughter says, her bright eyes looking up at me from her pillow, just barely visible in the dark room she shares with her twin brother. She wiggles around; he’s been asleep for awhile now.

“Okay,” I whisper, “But it’s still time for bed. Remember what I’ve told you about falling asleep. Make your body as still as a statue, close your eyes, and think about breathing in...and out. And in...and out. Before you know it you’ll be asleep.”

She closes her eyes, though she seems unconvinced, and I creep out of the room, closing the door quietly behind me.

It’s 7:16 pm and as I silently walk down the hall to my own room to finish putting laundry away, I wonder how long it’s been since my body has truly felt not tired. What would it be like, I wonder, to lay down in bed and not immediately surrender to my pillow and, ultimately, sleep?

Because I do sleep now. Five years ago, with infant twins who woke us consistently every hour or two, when having at least one uninterrupted stretch of 120 minutes was the benchmark for a “good” night’s sleep, when they didn’t sleep through the night until they were well over a year old, I thought this day would never come. Back then, rocking first one baby and then another, I thought such incredibly broken sleep would be my entire life, both then and forevermore. People told me they would grow out of it and figure out how to sleep eventually, but my own sleep-deprived brain, still fully in the thick of it, didn’t believe them.

Though even now it’s not always uninterrupted. Many nights a kid or two steal in to find my husband and me, blessedly asleep in our own bed, because they need to use the bathroom, because they need more water, because they’ve had a bad dream. Occasionally, with three kids, we’ll have a night where I swear they’ve made a deal with each other to wake up at perfectly spaced two-hour intervals, and it feels like the horror of those newborn days all over again.

Still. Those people were right. Most nights, I get the sleep experts say I’m supposed to—the 7 or 8 hours recommended for an adult my age to feel my best. This was the holy grail five years ago, when virtually all I could think about was the next time I would get to sleep, when sleep came in nothing more than stolen fragments in my day. I’ve made it.

So then why am I still so tired?

Read the rest over on the Twin Cities Mom Collective.

So You're a LEGO Mom

Maybe it was when you stepped on a LEGO brick (for the 14th time today). Or when you found little LEGO creations in every nook and corner of your house. Maybe it was when you were warned to “never ever touch” some sort of sprawling creation in the middle of the living room floor. Or when you couldn’t remember the last time you made it out of the store without a stop by the LEGO aisle.

That’s when you realized it.

You’re a LEGO mom.

I remember specifically when it began in my house: Spring Break 2018. My twin four-year-olds and their two-year-old brother were going stir-crazy. They were driving me batty. Preschool had given some structure to our days but no school loomed in front of us for an entire week, and it was a cold one at that. We did what any mom in my situation would do: drove to Target to wander the aisles.

I found some small LEGO sets for $4.99. They were cute. The box said they were for ages “4-99”.

Hmmm… I thought, Let’s give these a try.

We got home and I set my twins up at the kitchen table with their new toys. I even remember taking a picture of them, thinking, Maybe they’ll like this.

That became the understatement of my life.

Read more about being a LEGO mom over on the Twin Cities Mom Collective.