spring

Life Lately

I’ve seen words in a few different places the past week that in effect have said: You don’t have to say something wholly original and new and surprising in your writing. You just need to further the conversation.

Caden has been writing books since he was four. Back then I stapled together a couple sheets of construction paper. He was in a major Batman phase and most pages were a drawing of Batman and words to the effect of, “Batman sees a bad guy. Baman wins!” Simple, preschool-ish sentences.

Today he fills notebooks with words. He recently had to write a fable and filled up 10 straight pages in his college-ruled notebook with his tiny, spiky handwriting about the origin of fire. I’m guessing the other kids in his 2nd-grade class wrote a page or two. At home, he’s progressed from construction paper and now insists on 8-10 pages of plain white printer paper, carefully folded in half and creased with my bone folder, then stapled along the edge with exactly five staples. (A child of mine being particular. Imagine!)

His stories now are heavily influenced by his Wings of Fire obsession. (Heads up: affiliate link!) We own every. single. book. Graphic novel, regular chapter book, prequel, and all 16 books in the series. He fills pages with his own dragon-inspired stories, fitting illustrations of dragons in the margins. He stays up I don’t know how late working on them. He says he’s working on a series of 15 right now, because of course he is.

Batman. Dragons. He’s not creating anything fresh and wholly original. He’s letting his mind go, influenced by some of his favorite things. He’s not thinking too hard about any of it. He’s too busy furthering the conversation.

Something to think about, isn’t it?

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Around the Internet

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Eating

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Fun Things

  • I’ve been on a Madewell spree (Um, possibly always?) and am currently snuggling in this sweatshirt. It’s very soft and at least the colors feel like spring, since apparently it will never be warm here ever again. RIP sunshine.

  • I’m re-watching Mad Men, one of my favorite shows of all time, and decided the occasion merited a new mug. Might I recommend to you a purchase based on a beloved fandom? It’s ridiculous the amount of joy it brings me.

  • Sometimes the day’s Wordle isn’t enough for me, and that’s when I check out Letter Boxed. Though it can be depressing when I view the previous day’s answers and discover that letters like COSDYAENR around the square could have been turned into SECONDARY, and what I did was something more like NOD and DONE plus three other words. Oh well.

Life Lately

Happy Almost-April!

That exclamation point is much more optimistic than I actually feel. Really it feels blah. Y’know that whole “in like a lion out like a lamb” thing? We entered March with major lamb energy: there was sunshine! And the snow was melting! And we had a whole week of 40 and 50-degree weather! Now we’re exiting March to snow and wind and cold. I feel like I haven’t been properly warm for a solid two weeks. That lion showed up. Rude.

Just us here. Perpetually indoors and eating snacks. Guess it could be worse.

But! Enough about the weather (sorry, Midwestern hazard). If you follow me on Instagram, you know I went back to work as an interior designer this month for the first time since the twins were born. Though “went back” is actually defined as “sitting at my desk in the corner of our bedroom.” Which honestly, is what I was hoping for. I’m working for my previous employer, but remotely. Same but different.

This has been in the works since late January. (When one of my co-workers called me up and was all, “This is really random but would you ever want to come back and work remotely?” And I was like, “Absolutely yes.”). Despite wanting to go back to work in some capacity for a while, once I had a start date on the calendar, it got real. Did I really want to go back to work? To have my time not be my own? (As though my time was my own with three kids around.) To give up my early retirement? Gah.

But? I’m loving it. It feels good to work with floor plans again. To interpret wants and needs into reality. Even to fight with the design program over dimensions and try to chase down elusive countertop materials again. Things long-forgotten, pushed from my brain by motherhood, have started to come back, like NKBA guidelines and building codes.

It’s a vibe shift but honestly what hasn’t been a vibe shift the past two years? Since 2016? Since having two babies and then another one? You get a vibe shift and you get a vibe shift! Vibe shifts all around.

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Thing I’m Doing

Honestly just adjusting to a new schedule. Sometimes life is like that.

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Around the Internet

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Eating

  • I made this Thai-style basil chicken for the first time in a long time and remembered how delicious it is. Equally great as leftovers.

  • I’m sure I’ve mentioned this pasta with prosciutto and snow peas before, but it’s worth bringing up again. It’s spring on a plate. I don’t like mint so I replace it with basil. Yum.

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Fun Things

A Little Bit Tired

What strikes me first is how little they are. Their cheeks are plumper. They’re shorter, more miniature. As I scroll through photos from the spring of 2020, I spy Nolan running in his monster shoes. Those ridiculous shoes place this in the landscape of time; I bought them when he started preschool in the fall and he would wear those shoes and only those shoes. I’d forgotten about them. Time passed, life felt like survival mode, and somewhere in the tumult they were outgrown or scuffed beyond wearing before they were discarded.

He turned four and the twins turned six not three weeks before the world shut down. Two Kindergarteners and a preschooler. Old enough to understand that things were weird. Young enough that it was hard to explain why. They were so little.

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My first pandemic purchase was a printer.

“They’re not going back to school,” I said to Tyson matter-of-factly. It was dark, evening. Most likely we’d gotten the kids to bed and I’d been staring into my phone, scrolling through social media, looking to other people to try to make sense of everything. What were other people doing? Was I the only one feeling this sense of dread? What did the New York Times have to say? Which resulted in me ordering a black and white printer from Amazon so I could print…worksheets? For the kids? I guess? Because Spring Break had just been extended and I was positive, had this gut-level feeling they wouldn’t return to the classroom. 

My second pandemic purchase was the Anne of Green Gables books. The same set I had when I was a kid. Because $47.92 buys you comfort in the form of books.

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I wrote snippets during the first few weeks of the pandemic.

March 18: “Just 10 days ago it was over 50 degrees outside and we bought ice cream from the ice cream truck that rolled through the neighborhood. From a stranger. In a truck. Who handed us food and we handed him money. With our unsanitized, unwashed hands. In a crowd of neighborhood kids.”

March 25th: “Caden and Brooklyn’s school sent out a video with three of the teachers singing a parody of ‘Some Things Never Change’ to the kids today and I cried.”

April 3rd: “I seem to roll with a cycle of ‘this isn’t so bad’ to a big ol’ ‘meh’ where I exist without feelings before plummeting to ‘everything is terrible let’s burn down the house and start over.’”

April 6th: “I’m so entrenched in this now it seems like this is how life always has been, is now, and shall be forevermore.”

April 15th: “I wake up and think, ‘Oh. Here we go again.’  And it takes every ounce of strength I have to pull myself out of bed. Even though I just throw on my glasses and some sweatpants and walk downstairs to get coffee. The monotony of our days is its own brand of exhausting.”

Bright little ray of sunshine, wasn’t I?

There’s a song going around on TikTok. “Do you get a little bit tired of life? Like you’re not really happy but you don’t want to die? Like you’re hanging by a thread but you gotta survive?”

If that song had been around two years ago, it would have been our pandemic anthem. Even now, this side of the pandemic, it hits different than it would have before.

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Recently, Beth from Pantsuit Politics said “I’m stressed because what else would I be?”

I’m not sure I’ve heard a truer sentence

If I were to make a list of stressors—and you know this Enneagram One loves a list—there wouldn’t be anything surprising on it. March 2022 is almost nothing like March 2020, when we woke up to new news every single day. We were all home all the time. We thought vaccines were years—plural—away. We actually wiped down our packages and groceries with bleach, bless our little early pandemic hearts.

My days are largely back to the ordinary of life. We need to eat dinner. Again. The kids are on break and Tyson and I are both working now and what do we do with them? My body is stiff because I haven’t been doing yoga. We need to solidify our summer plans. 

But my corner of the internet keeps reminding me that the body keeps the score. And mine is tighter, tightening more as Spring Break approached; the week two years ago that marks the time life changed forever. I’ve had these unusual, near-constant headaches. I feel unsettled, though I can’t put words to emotions. Something inside me is busy keeping score, remembering what happened two years ago.

And really, what else would a millennial be but stressed? What else would we be but a little bit tired of living our unprecedented lives?

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I wonder if the coming of spring will ever be normal again. It still feels hopeful—when you live in a state with five solid months of winter, warm weather and budding trees will never feel anything short of miraculous. Dread follows that feeling of hope, though. At least for me. My body still keeping the score.

Sometimes it feels like the kids should still be four and six. Their very early elementary years feel misplaced. Nolan’s preschool years were completely lost in the shuffle. Can they really have just turned six and eight? How did they get so tall? What happened to those monster shoes anyway? Can’t we just rewind two years? Aren’t we in some infinite 2020 time loop? Aren’t we all, still, just a little bit tired?

They were so little. We all were.

This post is part of a blog hop to share our pandemic stories. It's hosted by www.laurapbass.com and you can read the next post in the blog hop by clicking here.

Life Lately

May is a whole thing. School and school year activities start to wrap up. Summer activities and warm weather begin to creep in. We had dance and dress rehearsals and recitals and baseball practices and games and swim lessons and school and gymnastics. Tomorrow is Nolan’s last day of preschool.

May is survival.

I gave myself permission this month to do only what I needed to get us through. We had seven dance recitals in a span of three days, all with various combinations of kids and costumes and routines. We also had a baseball game crammed in the middle of all that for good measure. We literally haven’t had a weeknight this month without at least one kid activity, and at least half of those nights have been double or even triple-booked. I thought we had a free night this past Monday but then realized Nolan’s t-ball coach had called a practice. June 2nd now looks like the first night since April that’s wide open.

Phew.

Part of me loves this. I love mapping out a schedule. I love writing lists. I don’t even mind all the carpooling of children from point A to point B to point C. One of the biggest losses I felt last year was of the kids’ activities. My kids love activities. Glory be to sitting in a high school auditorium for dance recitals or on the sidelines of a t-ball game, yelling at the four and five-year-olds to remind them where first base is.

The other part of me finds it totally and completely draining. It’s draining to constantly be packing up costumes or uniforms and some semblance of dinner. It’s draining to pick up the kids from school and immediately hit the ground running: dinner at 4:30 because they need to be changed into whatever combo of costumes/uniforms and out the door by 5:15 in two separate cars.

So what I gave myself permission to do this month was to just be mom. I took a big step back from writing. I took a big step back from keeping on top of emails. (Did you know you can delete emails without reading them? I mean, not like important ones, but like random newsletters. It’s possible to actually push past the FOMO and hit the delete button. Magic.) I took a big step back from the feeling I have to produce, to create, to volunteer or work or push to prove my own worth.

In some ways, this felt like walking back 40 years of feminism. Let me be the most housewifey housewife to ever have housewifed. (Though not so much, actually. My hair was nowhere near as coiffed and we relied far too much on Lunchables as a viable dinner option.) In other ways, freeing myself up from the societal pressure to be productive all. the. time. felt like the most feminist thing I could do. It felt like the most radical thing I’d done in a long time.

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Action Item

I’m still working to understand the conflict in Israel and Palestine. The roots are deep, the conflict is decades (if not centuries) old, and the politics of this part of the world are so different from what I’m used to here. I found this episode of Pantsuit Politics and this one and this one of The Daily helpful, though I’ll still admit to often being deeply confused. I’d love any recommendations to help better my understanding of this topic!

Education is great, but it doesn’t help Israeli and Palestinian families in the here and now. The reports of the sheet number of people—the sheer number of children—killed and injured in the latest conflict are horrific. These are people, who by sheer accident of birth had the misfortune to be born into a part of the world embroiled in discord. I found this round-up of aid organizations from CNN helpful and encourage you to donate to one if you’re able.

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Around the Internet

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Eating

  • Make these lemon poppyseed muffins. Then eat them all and make them again three days later. Repeat indefinitely. (I don’t use the rose water but make a glaze with just the lemon juice and powdered sugar.)

  • If I can give you another sweet thing to eat, it would be Chez Panisse’s blueberry cobbler, which I’m planning to make for Memorial Day. Top with vanilla ice cream. Die happy.

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Fun Things

  • Long-live these Cat & Jack quick-dry shorts. The boys love them. They can double as a swimsuit if necessary. I wish they came in about 18 more colors.

  • I love wearing slippers but even in the winter they often feel too hot. (How do people wear sherpa-lined slippers? Do my feet just run warm? Do sweaty feet not bother other people? So many questions.) Still, I’d worn my old pair of Mahabis slippers into the ground and asked for their “breathe” version for Mother’s Day. They’re lined with cork and made from a sort of woven mesh. My feet are no longer sweaty. #winning

  • Summer and humidity go hand-in-hand here in the Midwest. This humidity shield helps tame my mane on the most humid of days. I don’t really get frizz—my hair is naturally almost strick-straight, with only the smallest amount of wave—but when it’s humid it gets poofy, loses any style I may have had, and adds waves where there shouldn’t be waves. It’s a whole situation. This spray doesn’t work as well on a day where I’m outside for hours at a time, but when I’m in and out of the house or grabbing dinner on a patio it works miracles.

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Beyond being a labor-intensive month, May is also an emotionally exhaustive month. I’m not much of a crier, but May gets me every time. The kids’ birthdays don’t get to me. The first day of school doesn’t get to me. (Because hallelujah they’re back in school!) But their dance recitals? The end of the school year? Nothing marks the passage of time so much for me as seeing their little dance photos all lined up in a row on our refrigerator or comparing the last day of school pictures with the first-day ones. I can’t even think about the fact that one day they will graduate from high school at this time of year. And Caden and Brooklyn will graduate at the same time. Like, who thought that was a good idea?

I spent the rest of my time this month, when I wasn’t labeling dance costumes or driving somewhere (everywhere), as an emotional wreck. And I lean into it hard. I will play every sad song. I can even turn the not-sad ones into something weepy. It’s like my tear ducts make up for malfunctioning the rest of the year all within this one month. 

And that’s the other thing I gave myself permission to do this month: to feel the feelings. To take what little time and space I had to be sad if I needed or read a book if I needed and to take what pauses I could in a month where there were few to take. I gave myself permission to do the things that needed to be done and then to take care of myself, instead of pushing ahead into more, more, more.

I read this from Rachel Cargle yesterday and it’s made me think that maybe…life could be like this all the time? I don’t know. The push to produce, to be productive, to be “on” is ingrained deep within in my bones. But I think it might be possible. It’s something I’m ruminating on.

Life Lately

Sarah Bessey wrote this week in her newsletter about the “Kin-dom of God…or what theologians call the ‘Now and Not Yet’ of God’s goodness at this moment in time and space.”

I was thinking about that “Now and Not Yet” part the next day, except I’d bastardized it to “Almost but Not Yet.” Until I looked up her post to refresh my memory because “Almost but Not Yet” didn’t sound quite right.

Then I realized it sounded exactly right. Because my life now feels like nothing but Almost but Not Yet.

We’re almost to summer and a major change in our schedule, but not yet.
Nolan is almost in school full-time, but not yet.
I’m almost to a new stage in life, but not yet.

It’s not exactly the middle, but it’s also not quite the end, and it’s definitely not the beginning. It’s like the end of the middle? Or the beginning of the end? (Well, that sounds terrifying.)

I guess we’re all living in a version of the Almost but Not Yet.

The Almost but Not Yet of vaccinations, or of second vaccinations, or of reaching herd immunity.
The Almost but Not Yet of summer, of warm weather that lasts, of the possibility of taking vacations, of playdates and restaurants and gatherings with our people.
The Almost but Not Yet of taking meaningful action on climate change, on healthcare for all, on paid family leave, on racial justice. (I mean, I hope these are Almosts but Not Yets.)

I suppose a pandemic’s worth of Almost but Not Yets piled on top of launching my youngest into the elementary school world only adds, enormously, to this feeling. It’s a restless kind of feeling. I’m tired of feeling restless. Staying in this Almost place so often feels impossible. I feel it most in the afternoon before it’s time to pick Caden and Brooklyn up from school when there’s not much to do around the house. When the laundry is done and the dishes are clean and there’s not quite enough time to tackle anything meaningful and I’m in this limbo—its own Almost but Not Yet—where a good chunk of the day is done and the after-school marathon of activities and dinner and bedtime is on the horizon, but we’re not quite there. When it’s 3:00 pm and Nolan asks to play another game of Sequence, or for a snack, or to read another book and I could scream at this day, just another in a long string of days.

Everything will be different this summer. And again, in a big way in the fall.

Almost. But not yet.

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Action Item

I’ve been looking for a way to recycle old clothes for years. Especially kids’ clothes—it’s one thing to donate old shirts or jeans that are still in good shape, but what about the ones that are stained or ripped or worn beyond reasonable use? I can’t in good conscience donate those items.

Enter: the For Days Take Back Bag. I ordered the large bag, filled it up (EASILY. There will be more Take Back Bags in my future FOR SURE.), scheduled a USPS pick up, and will receive a $20 credit to their website once they receive it. Easy-peasy.

For Days doesn't take undergarments, but NEVER FEAR because I’ve figured that out for you, too. Please see the Knickey Recycling Program. They take your old undies, bras, tights, and socks and give you a free pair of underwear with your next order as soon as the post office picks up your package. Their underwear are my new favorites-comfortable and they stay in place. Be forewarned that the high rise briefs are prettttyyy high, even for me, a self-proclaimed high-rise enthusiast. I still recommend a couple of pairs of those and a couple of mid-rise hipsters, though my sweet spot seems to be the mid-rise briefs.

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Around the Internet

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Eating

  • These noodles remind me so much of the lo mein my family ordered on a weekly basis from our favorite Chinese restaurant growing up. (RIP Tai Pan.) The texture of these noodles is perfection. (I use four packets of noodles for our family of five, so the box gives us two dinners + some lunch leftovers.) I omit the bean sprouts but add in one diced chicken breast and some snow peas, seared in some oil over very high heat.

  • I picked up a box of these chocolate-covered Greek yogurt bars from Costco and they are the best midday treat.

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Fun Things

  • I’m loving this Vitamin C serum. Love the bottle, love the price, and love that it’s faded some old acne scars within a matter of weeks.

  • I bought this mirror for our living room. Now looking for the perfect little succulent to place on its shelf.

  • How cute is this shirt? I feel like spring when I put it on, even when the weather is 38 degrees and cloudy. (Of which we endured far too much this past month.)

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I’m supposed to say, I think, that we should embrace our Almost but Not Yets. It’s just a season! I’ve got this! We’ve got this! Lean into it! Rah-rah-rah.

And I do feel that. At least, to a certain extent I do. But to completely dismiss and try to paper over the Almost but Not Yet limbo feelings doesn’t sit well with me.

I think a lot of the Almost but Not Yet ties into the feeling of languishing which Adam Grant so geniously introduced us all to this month:

It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.

Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield.

Grant goes on to say that “Psychologists find that one of the best strategies for managing emotions is to name them.” This makes sense to me, even though I might have said one of the best strategies is to sip on a good margarita. I think it’s why my entire Internet bubble seemed to grasp onto the label of “languishing” over the past couple of weeks—a name for that thing we’ve all been feeling!

Honestly, realizing that a lot of what I’ve been feeling lately is being in this place of Almost but Not Yet helps me feel at least a bit more content with where I am now. Not to dismiss where I am, but to name it. This Almost but Not Yet place. We’re all dealing with it, the best we can these days. Feel free to join me. We might be languishing but at least we can name it. And I can mix us up a mean batch of margaritas.