If Parents Wrote the Headlines

I don’t want to brush aside the importance of following along with the actual news. I typically start my day with a glance at the headlines and a podcast or two—but does anyone else feel like their own day could warrant a headline or two? What if parents wrote the headlines? Really, family life covers all the basic news sections and storylines: we’ve got warring factions (aka siblings), drama (miscellaneous tantrums), business (balancing work and childcare), an arts and culture section (dominated by paper and crayons), food and recipes (staring at the pantry at 5 pm), and even romance (on occasion).

Here are some stories that might make the news if parents wrote the headlines:

Missing Mitten Rocks Morning

The mudroom was overturned this morning as a search was conducted for a missing mitten. “It looks blue and black just like the other one, except the thumb is on the other side,” said a boy familiar with the item. After searching through several backpacks, shelves, and the entirety of the floor, it was eventually found in the storage bin, exactly where it was supposed to be. While the children involved made it to the bus on time, their mother was left to deal with the resulting chaos of the mudroom on her own.

Coffee Shortage Leaves Mom in Crisis

A local mom opened her pantry today to discover she was out of coffee beans. “I don’t know how this happened,” she said, sounding close to tears, “I was just at Target yesterday.” Sources close to the family report that it had been her third trip to the popular big box department store chain this week alone. She was seen again this morning at her local Target, where despite purchasing two pounds of coffee beans, she also left the store with an iced coffee with oat milk from the in-store Starbucks.

Brothers: The Worst Ever

Our special 7-year-old correspondent reports that “brothers are the worst ever” after they “ruined” her day by not listening while playing a game and also taking six crayons. This is despite the fact that other reports suggest a bin filled with hundreds of crayons sitting next to her and that the game was made up with ill-defined rules. Despite those facts, our 7-year-old correspondent advises you to use caution when interacting with someone who could, in fact, be a brother.

Read more parental headlines over on Twin Cities Mom Collective!

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

The Course of a Week

“Do less. We can focus on 50-70% of the stuff we did before the crisis hit.”

This statement was included in an email I received last March about self-care. I saved these words and came across them again recently. My immediate thought was, Oh, please let that be true eleven whole months later.

Even though we’ve been at home (always at home, forever at home), it’s not exactly like we’re staycationing over here. My capacity feels eternally diminished. There are entire days I could scream over the mundane, when I don’t want to make another meal, deal with another fluctuating emotion, step over another LEGO on the floor, or sit for another virtual meeting.

While 50-70% felt impossible during the early days of the pandemic, when the news cycle never stopped with updates on COVID-19 and restrictions and school announcements and all the things, it still doesn’t always feel like we’ve moved past it all. Let’s be honest: sometimes 50-70% still feels like altogether too much. 

On the heels of my first thought came this one: If 50-70% still feels impossible, why do I also feel as though I never stop moving?

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My kids recently went back to school in-person. I’m not used to it yet. We spent 40-plus weeks together and the reality that they’re back to their regularly scheduled programming has yet to sink in. I’m still distracted, unaccustomed to these uninterrupted blocks of time to complete my work.

Until recently, multitasking was less a lifestyle choice, but a necessity. I’d turned it into an art. Not like Renaissance art, with precise lines and a defined one-point perspective, but sloppy, splatter-y, fling-paint-at-the-canvas kind of art. Y’know how Jackson Pollock paintings often have cigarette butts embedded in them? That’s what my multi-tasking felt like: a canvas that’s been flung with paint and embedded with ashes.

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.

Life Lately

Did you remember that we had an election earlier this month? Because we had an election earlier THIS actual calendar month. Even though it still feels as though we’re in year 4 of the 2016 election AND also in day 485 of March 2020 AND simultaneously like the 2020 election was several months ago. But, * checks calendar *, nope. We actually had an election a mere four weeks ago.

This month’s chaos was, in a way, reminiscent of March. The kids, as stipulated by the district, are moving to full-time distance learning. So are their dance classes. They had a week off for Thanksgiving to give the teachers time to prepare. I found myself taking deep breaths during the last Friday morning the kids were all in school, which I think was my body’s reaction to the last time my kids went on a week-long break (and didn’t return to their school buildings for six whole months).

Schedule number 43 of the year but also make it Christmas.

Continuing with those deep breaths.

I won’t pretend that everything is fine because it’s not. As I look down the barrel of this week I see a schedule littered with Google Meets to manage. Tyson and I sat down this weekend to map out and overhaul our schedule which will probably happen at least once more before the year ends.

I don’t want to sugarcoat anything or tie this up with a bow. And yet. We decorated for Christmas this weekend and there’s something about those Christmas tree lights in the background. We might (read: will for sure, totally, definitely) have fights with three kids on three Google meets at the same time, or when two have Google Meets and the third doesn’t, or over using our tablets in the bathroom, or over staying on task during a 2:00 pm call when usually when they’re at home 2:00 = TV time. This is true. But the twinkle lights help. They’re the definition of hopeful. A tradition, a constant, in the midst of so much that’s not. And a reminder that 2021 is on the horizon which should be (read: better be, must be, has to be) so much better than the year we’ve all just lived through.

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Take Action

With Christmas coming, I’d love to urge you to shop local this year. Fellow Minnesotans, here is the ultimate guide to Twin Cities businesses. I’ll urge everyone to give up Amazon and replace it with Bookshop.org (heads up: affiliate link!). And wherever you are, I recommend gifting gift cards to local restaurants and buying beer and spirits made by local breweries and distilleries—these beloved businesses need all the help we can give them right now.

Also: Stay home. Please. As much as you possibly can. We’ve been urged by our Governor here in MN to stay home, to not have gatherings, to order take-out to support bars and restaurants who are banned from serving dine-in customers. It’s not quite as expansive as the shutdown we had in the spring, but it’s up there.

A vaccine (or several) seem to be so close; that light at the end of the tunnel feels like it’s just almost within our grasp. If we can buckle down these next few months, in the snow and the cold and the distance learning, there’s a chance life will return to ”normal” sooner rather than later. Stay safe.

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Around the Internet

• “Because schools are not the major cause of the problem, shutting them down won’t do enough on its own to slow the spread of the disease. When — not if — businesses are forced to shutter temporarily in the near future, we can tide them over with money, and we absolutely should. When schools are closed, however, handing students a check will not replace what they’ve lost.”

• I learned to knit right before the pandemic began and didn’t know how much I would need it this year.

• “My husband and I bought our first home when we were twenty-four. I think it’s important to be honest here. This wasn’t some triumph of good sense and hard work. It wasn’t accomplished by making our avocado toast at home instead of ordering it in a coffee shop. We didn’t work five jobs each to do it. When we got married at 21, we had good credit. Neither of us had ever had to charge rent to a credit card and then fallen behind on payments. We’d never been uninsured and then had a medical emergency that left us swamped with medical bills.”

• Scotland is the first nation to make sanitary products free

• For all my pandemic shoppers out there.

• Well this made me lol.

• “Yet some groups protested, refusing to keep their distance, marching against travel restrictions — as if measures that governments must impose for the good of their people constitute some kind of political assault on autonomy or personal freedom! Looking to the common good is much more than the sum of what is good for individuals. It means having a regard for all citizens and seeking to respond effectively to the needs of the least fortunate.”

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Eating

• Tyson’s company is based in Champaign, IL, a town where there’s astonishingly little to do, besides eat at the equally astonishing amount of really good restaurants. I’ve had actual dreams about this roasted red pepper and gouda soup from a cafe not far from his office. I decided to re-create it by following this recipe and while it was different from the one I remember, it was still SO GOOD. Serve with fresh bread, obviously.

• These fish fingers disappear in my house every time. Serve with a bag of frozen Alexia seasoned waffle fries because #balance.

• Since I won’t be posting another of these round-ups until after the holidays, I feel like it’s my duty to point you to some holiday baking goodness. These cranberry bars, my favorite gingersnap recipe, more gingerbread if you prefer yours in cake form, chocolate sugar cookies to switch things up, and these which you hardly need a recipe for but the kids can practically make on their own and they’re wildly addictive.

• Okay and let’s also include some party food, which you can bet I will make even if we’re only a party of five this year: the only (and easiest) meatball recipe you need, these stuffed mushrooms could basically be my last meal, bacon-wrapped dates and please include the goat cheese, and do yourself a favor and bake up some brie (top with jam, always).

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Fun Things

• This tea is everything. I’m not usually a fan of adding cream to tea but I add a little sugar and the smallest splash of heavy cream and it feels absolutely decadent. Honestly, I like to just hold it in a heavy mug to warm my hands and breathe in the vanilla scent which is divine. At under $6 it’s the best little luxury right now.

• This is a pretty big Fun Thing, but: our 10-year wedding anniversary was in early October. While we thought we’d be celebrating with a trip, that’s been put on hold for obvious reasons. Instead, I discovered that the traditional 10-year anniversary gift = diamonds. While I didn’t actually want new diamonds, I did get my wedding ring re-set. I’ve never had a wedding band, only an engagement ring (raise your hand if you were also a poor college student baby when you got engaged), so I had my original diamond re-set as a solitaire and the smaller diamonds that surrounded it in my original setting used in the wedding band, both in hammered yellow gold. I LOVE it so much. (MN friends: check out Sarah Commers Jewelry. She was so easy to work with and brought my vision to life!)

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Leaving you with those twinkle lights I mentioned earlier. I was skeptical, but they really do make all the difference right now.