wearables

Favorites of 2020

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Things I wore:

Things I used:

  • This serum.

  • This makeup remover.

  • An unhealthy amount of social media. (Is that a favorite? Idk. It stays.)

  • This nail polish.

  • Late entry since it was a Christmas gift, but loving my Chemex.

Things I ate:

Things for the kids:

Things I read:

  • This novel about…everything.

  • This book of essays.

  • This novel about faith, marriage, friendship, and life.

  • This anthem for women everywhere.

  • Another anthem because we sure needed it this year.

  • This love letter of a memoir.

  • Could have underlined everything in this one.

Things I watched:

  • This series forever, please.

  • Also this one.

  • Could watch this with the sound off just for the sets and the clothes.

  • This documentary about my forever favorite.

Things I wrote:

(Note: all bookshop.org links are affiliate links. All others are just things I love and think you will, too.)

Week Five

I’ve been writing things down here and there since the coronavirus really started to impact our lives. I’ve shared some of this as snippets on Instagram but if you’re interested in reading more, feel free to read through these lightly-edited words. As this essay says, I’m craving to see what people are thinking/doing/feeling through all of this. Maybe it’s helpful to use my own still, small voice to give some words to what we’re all going through at this moment in time. You can find Week One here , Week Two here, Week Three here, and Week Four here.

2020 04 12 All Easter 01.jpg

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Monday, April 13th
“I've been more aware of the passage of time since Kindergarten began, knowing that at this time next year the twins won’t be in Kindergarten but in first grade, and then second, and so on. Somehow the days of toddlerhood and preschool seemed to shield me a bit more, when our days looked so much the same from one to the next.

I’m acutely aware of their days off of school now, where it feels like we’re just settling back into our normal, three kids snug at home, instead of disrupting what our true, new normal is of packing lunches and backpacks.”

...is a THING I WROTE on December 23rd. Bless my heart.

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I’ve just been assuming, through all of this, that summer is cancelled. I’m assuming they’re not returning to school (though that breaks my heart). I’m assuming there will not be a dance recital (another thing that breaks my heart). I’m assuming there will be no t-ball (again heartbreaking). I’m assuming there will be no PlayNet, zoo camps, Big Chip vacation, or trips to parks and beaches (my heart is gone).

I’ve more or less made my peace with this.

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My light at the end of the tunnel is assuming the kids will go back to school in the fall. School even starts really late here this year; since Labor Day isn’t until September 7th, the first day of school is September 8th. It’s about as late as it can possibly be.

My heart is set on this. My dad dared to suggest that the kids wouldn’t even go back to school in the fall and it’s a good thing we’re practicing social distancing or I would have STABBED him. Even though I understand, in the darkest, most remote corners of my brain, that this won’t really be over by then and that NOT returning to school in the fall is an actual possibility, I just cannot even with the idea of it right now.

Though that didn’t stop me from sending Caden and Brooklyn’s teacher an email last week to request they be in the same class again next year. I don’t want to deal with two different first grade teachers for distance learning. Just in case.

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Wednesday, April 15th
Mornings are the hardest. The waking up and the getting up. It’s just the worst.

Back up. Maybe I shouldn’t say mornings are the hardest. It’s the whole getting out of bed part that is.

I’ve never been a morning person. Never, ever, ever. Mornings are only nice in theory. 5:00 am is NOT a nice time. I don’t even think 6:00 am is a nice time. They are dumb times when reasonable people (and children) should still be sleeping.

Still, I used to get up at 6:30. A mere month or so ago when the kids still had things like buses to catch and there were lunches to pack and I had a minivan to drive to places like preschool. There were things to look forward to in the day, or at least in the week.

Forget 6:00 now. Forget even 6:30. Now, even when 7:00 rolls around, I close my eyes against the inevitable like ugh.

The first couple of weeks were different. Then it was like grief. I woke up with anticipation, the sunlight glinting through the blinds, before it would hit me. I would remember, all over again, that this wasn’t just a bad dream. That we couldn’t go anywhere. That coronavirus was a real thing. That the whole world was dealing with this and the kids don’t have school and what bad news would come today?

Now it doesn’t hit me like a revelation each morning. It’s simply reality. Now 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 it’s own brand of exhausting.

(The coffee helps. So does sunshine.)

2020 04 16 Coffee 01.jpg

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Thursday, April 16th
My moods seem to run in roughly three-day cycles. I usually have a pretty good “this is all fine!” day followed by a day full of “meh” and ending with a “this is awful and terrible and I’m angry and sad and I hate everyone and everything” kind of day.

It’s not always a three-day cycle. I might have one great day followed by three meh days followed by one of pure rage. Meh is more my baseline these days. I rarely have more than one good or truly awful day in a row.

Recognizing the cycle helps. While the good days don’t last, neither do the bad ones.

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Things seem to have leveled off to an extent. Life feels more or less normal now The news cycle has flattened out. A few weeks ago, no matter how often I picked up my phone, I would find new news, new stories, new information. I was getting multiple emails from school each day as they detailed the newest orders from the Governor, here’s when distance learning begins, here’s when you pick up your student(s) materials, here’s your log-in information, here are updated versions of ALL of that.

(And let us never forget the emails from every restaurant and every store and every activity we’ve ever done in the past decade to update us on “here’s how we’re dealing with COVID-19” and/or “let’s stand together in hope” and it got really weird.)

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My phone use has flattened off. It’s still higher than pre-COVID-19 levels but not by much. Life certainly doesn’t look how it did “before”, but the new normal has settled in. I KNEW it would, a few weeks ago, I knew theoretically we would all psychologically adjust and yet it seemed impossible at the same time. But, here we are.

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Friday, April 17th
For the record, these are the clothes I’ve been living in:

These pull-on jeans. (Seriously as comfy as leggings but feels like I’m trying.)
These sweatpants.
This bralette. (RIP bras with hooks and adjustable straps.)
These leggings. (Soft and cotton-y. Not squish-you-in supportive.)
This sweatshirt.

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On Knitting

I learned how to knit recently.

I’d been wanting to learn for a couple of years. I don’t know why. It could have been Sarah Bessey’s “Knit One, Purl Joy” piece or it could have been the knitting of all the cozy things I see on Instagram or it could be that I’m restless and like to multi-task and here is something I could do while watching TV or listening to a podcast.

Whatever it was, I wanted to learn.

When we found a new church last year, I knew there was a knitting group almost from the start. There were a few women I saw carrying around their bags full of yarn and knitting projects. I saw the “Stitching for Peace” group on the calendar a couple of times a month.

Nancy was the one who found out I wanted to learn. I’d seen her on the other side of church, needles moving as she sat and listened to the sermon.

“I’ll teach you!” she said. “You don’t need anything. I have needles and yarn. The next time the choir sings just come find me. I’ve taught lots of people how to knit.”

She saw me a couple of Sundays later as we arrived at church, in a flurry of coats and bags and too many children. The way we always arrive at church. She was in her choir robe.

“Ready to knit?” she asked, conspiratorially.

We sat on the couches as she pulled out a ball of purple yarn and some bamboo needles. “I like the bamboo because it’s soft,” she told me. She told me more things, things I tried to file away in my brain, but it was the bamboo tip that stuck.

She cast on and then showed me the basic knit stitch. My hands were clumsy. 

“Do I go under or over?” I kept asking about the yarn. Every way I stuck my needle in felt like the wrong way— or maybe the right way?— since I had no idea what I was doing. 

“No,” she would tell me patiently, as I stuck my needle in the stitch the wrong way again, “That’s the purl stitch, I’ll teach you that later. This way for the knit stitch.”

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When we got home that day, I picked up the needles and the scant couple of rows I’d fumbled through while we sat together at church. My mind drew a blank. I couldn’t remember what to do. I Googled “knit stitch” and watched a video, kept pausing and re-starting to refresh my fingers and my memory.

I got going for a little bit. Then somehow I slipped half the project off the needles, which had me scrambling to YouTube again to search for “how to cast on knitting” videos.

I properly casted on 20 stitches for my scarf only to realize that, several rows in, they’d somehow multiplied to 28. I unraveled it all and searched for that “how to cast on knitting” video again.

I started and I stopped and I started and I stopped and I began to despair of ever getting anywhere beyond six to eight rows of stitches. People had been doing this for hundreds of years but I was never, ever, ever going to get the hang of it. I despaired of the detailed patterns and projects I’d seen online, grieved even the simplest of projects. I couldn’t get this simple scarf to be long enough for one of my old Beanie Babies, much less for Brooklyn, who’d claimed this project as her own and asked after the status of her scarf on a daily basis, perched on the edge of the couch next to me.

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I realized this was the first new skill I’d learned in I don’t know how long. When’s the last time I learned how to do something for the very first time that was absolutely and completely new to me? 

Baking bread? Kind of, but that built on the knowledge of baking I already had.

Yoga? Maybe. But that just seemed to build off my dance background.

I don’t know. Is it accurate to say this is the first time I’ve picked up something completely new since I was a kid? And if so, isn’t that kind of...sad?

2020 03 26 Scarf 01.jpg

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I finished Brooklyn’s scarf. I made it past eight rows of stitches and then I made it past twenty and then it really seemed to come together. And by “really come together” I mean still little by little. I sat in the evening while we caught up with This is Us or gloried to another season of Ugly Delicious, but I no longer had to rip it all apart and start over. You can see the progression; there’s a hole or two toward the beginning, it’s sort of knobbly and lumpy. Then, you can see it: the stitches even out as you go along.

I’ve started another scarf, for Caden, because if Brooklyn got one he wanted one, too. Now it’s his turn to sit perched next to me. “When will my scarf be done?” he asks. He drags over my knitting bag, usually at inopportune times, and sets it next to me, a wordless nudge to keep working. I’ve tried to tell him that it will be probably 70-degrees and far too warm to wear a scarf before I finish, but he doesn’t care.

Still, despite the rising temperatures, knitting has turned out to be the most appropriate ritual right now.

I thought it would be nice to have something to do while watching TV or reading books to the kids on the couch—look how productive I am!—and it is. But it turns out it’s saving my sanity.

It’s not only giving me something to do while we flip on The Good Place each night, it gives my hands something to do while I listen to our governor give his near-daily press conferences in the afternoon. Every time I tune in I grab my knitting, instinctively, to steady my hands. Tyson and I sit to talk—more often than ever these days—and out comes my knitting, focusing my hands and my attention. I need it, that tactile motion and movement in my hands or I feel as though I could fly apart altogether.

It grounds me when I sit on the couch while the kids watch a movie or laugh uproariously at the antics of Booba. I listen to a podcast: “The Daily” if I want to stay informed, “Pantsuit Politics” if I need therapy. Sometimes my hands shake and I grasp the needles tighter. Sometimes I slip a stitch and I go back now, because I’ve figured out what it’s supposed to look like, what it’s supposed to feel like, and I fix it, without having to unravel it all and begin again.

This post was written as part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to read the next post in this series "All Things New".

Favorites of 2019

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Things I wore:

  • This tee. (I have four colors/patterns.)

  • These shorts. (I have the green and the cinnabar.)

  • This sweater. (I have it in black and pink…I guess you know I like things when I buy them in multiples!)

  • These slip-ons.

Things I used:

Things I ate:

Things for the kids:

Things I read:
(Note: is it just me, or was this a fantastic year for books? I plowed through 56 books this year and it was SO HARD to narrow this down.)

  • This memoir kicked off 2019.

  • This novel was all I hoped it would be.

  • This memoir about everything.

  • This book of essays for all the millennials out there.

  • This memoir about losing everything to find yourself.

  • This novel about family.

Things I watched:

Things I wrote:

  • This tribute to Rachel Held Evans/liberation of myself.

  • This ode to our kitchen tables.

  • What writing looks like.

  • This step into the new decade.

  • This poem.

  • This micro essay on ministry and Happy Meals.

Life Lately

Like many of you, my heart has been with the detention centers at the border. As more and more reporting came out late last week and over the weekend, I couldn’t tear my mind away from it.

Which means that as I washed off a face mask and shaved my legs in the shower, I thought how immigrants to my own country weren’t even provided with soap. And when I started my period on Sunday I thought of all the teenage girls who would get their periods, maybe for the very first time, in an overcrowded detention center. I have little hope these girls are being provided with pads or tampons if they’re not even being given toothbrushes. I pray for a kind female border guard or older teenage girl to help them through. And as I threw away a head of lettuce, a pint of blueberries, and two containers of leftovers that went bad before we could eat them, I thought how these kids are saying they’re not being fed enough, they’re still hungry, that they can’t go out to play because it takes all their energy just to survive another day.

These are kids who are in America. In 2019. I’m tired of being told these people are a threat to us when clearly we are a threat to them.

Sit with that a moment. And then read this Instagram post, and this article, and this one, too. And let it crush you as you imagine your children in such a place and let it make you physically sick to your stomach. Then read them again.

Part of me wants to rush down there and scoop up as many of those children as I can and bring them back home. Obviously that’s not practical or feasible in any way shape or form. It seems like so little, yet if you can, please consider donating to Together Rising. They are working with people on the ground to reunite families, give these children proper medical care, and to get them out of there as fast as they can.

Also contact your representatives. Let them know we’re watching. Because there’s no such thing as other people’s children. And if we’re a country that truly values children, this is not the kind of country we want to be.

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Horrific story adjacent: One thing I’ve been doing to combat mindlessly scrolling through social media is to stop whenever I see something awful, something that hits me to my core. Things like the reports of the treatment of children at the border, a post from a friend about infant loss, etc. When it makes me stop and think, when it makes my heart hurt, I stop what I’m doing and put my phone down. I may click into the article if it’s a news report, but then I put it away. I sit with those feelings and really force myself to think about what I’ve just read.

It can be hard sometimes. Who wants to sit with those shitty feelings? But it feels more honest than to continue to scroll. To continue through photos of happy families on vacation and ads for clothes I don’t need but am tempted to click on, anyway.

Honestly, it felt more shitty when I kept scrolling and tried to shove those feelings down. It’s helped. It’s something.

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In an abrupt shift, because that seems to be how my brain works these days, these two spent the better part of the weekend riding around on two wheels.

One push from me, and a little bit of convincing, was all it took. Those balance bikes are miracle-workers for sure. Teaching them to ride on two wheels, something I thought we could do to kill time - maybe take up the better part of an afternoon - took all of ten minutes. And that included the time it took to take the training wheels off.

“That wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be!” Brooklyn said after her inaugural ride down the sidewalk.

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The food websites have been bringing it lately with their collections of food writing. First was Bon Apetit with their “Welcome to Red Sauce America” essays. (I read it over a period of a week…and had a mad craving for some chicken piccata the whole time. Which has yet to be fulfilled.) Then, less lengthy but no less fun, Taste talked all things 90’s in “The 90’s Issue”. While all the pieces are worth a read, I’m calling out “The Bizarre History of Buca di Beppo” and “The 1990s Boom of California’s Mexican Supermarkets” as my personal favorites. (I also have to give a shout out to a favorite spot in Madison as well as a favorite here.)

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Food adjacent: please read this op-ed from the New York Times: “Smash the Wellness Industry”.

I had paid a lot of money to see a dietitian once before, in New York. When I told her that I loved food, that I’d always had a big appetite, she had nodded sympathetically, as if I had a tough road ahead of me. “The thing is,” she said with a grimace, “you’re a small person and you don’t need a lot of food.”

The new dietitian had a different take. “What a gift,” she said, appreciatively, “to love food. It’s one of the greatest pleasures in life. Can you think of your appetite as a gift?” It took me a moment to wrap my head around such a radical suggestion. Then I began to cry.

It’s. So. Good.

2019 06 07 All Ice Cream 01.jpg

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I made a big batch of homemade freezees a few weeks ago using these. They work great, though the zip-close doesn’t work very well. While they’re not reusable like I was hoping, at least the kids are eating pureed fruit instead of high-fructose corn syrup.

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I promise it’s simple: pulse up some fruit along with just a little orange juice or lemonade in a food processor, add sugar if needed (I used less than a tablespoon with each batch, otherwise they were pretty tart), pour, and freeze. My next step is to just freeze lemonade for some Italian ice-style freezees. So far we’ve made:

  • strawberry (strawberries with orange juice)

  • mixed berry (strawberries, blackberries, and blueberries with lemonade)

  • cantaloupe (cantaloupe with a few strawberries and orange juice)

  • strawberry-banana smoothie (strawberries, a banana, and yogurt instead of juice) (my favorite!)

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I’ve been living in these shorts and these shirts. I bought two pairs of the shorts (dark cinnabar and palm tree - recommend sizing down) and three of the shirts (fit is pretty true-to-size, or size up for a looser fit). They go perfectly together. I wear the shirt tucked in (and consequently feel like a throwback to the early ‘90’s), with a light cardigan thrown over the top for the cooler days (which we’ve had way too many of lately). It’s my summer uniform.

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I’m scared to write this for fear of jinxing myself, but we seem to have entered an era where the kids enjoy playing with each other. Several times recently I’ve discovered them scattered: the twins playing LEGOs together in their room while Nolan flips through books or builds with Duplos in his, Brooklyn and Nolan playing “baby” while Caden plays with (you guessed it) LEGOs on his own. To be fair, Caden and Brooklyn have been able to play well together for years now, it’s the fact that Nolan has been that’s the true miracle.

It’s a nice break. Just this time last year I felt I couldn’t leave the room for fear Nolan would trash the house looking for the remote, sneak into the pantry to steal snacks, or climb on the counter to sneak actual spoonfuls of sugar.

Even outside I’ve been able to pull up a chair and sit - truly get lost in a book - while they play together in the driveway. They’re still riding their bikes and scooters and that old cozy coupe we got for free from a garage sale around the roads they create on the driveway with chalk. But it’s the very first time I don’t fear Nolan dashing into the street. The past couple years it was a game - I always felt there was about a 50/50 chance he would dash into the street for fun. And now he just…doesn’t.

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I wrote this last summer, and it seems relevant again now:

This is what I've been waiting for.

…A moment prior to this realization, guilt had found me. It crept in during the break in the action and began to berate me for not doing more. To write more, volunteer more, accomplish more. Maybe I should even go back to work. Guilt admonished me for the streaks on the kitchen floor and the fruit snacks they ate in the car and for being "just" a stay-at-home mom. Surely, at the very least, I should have cleaner floors.

In the next breath I realized this is what I've been dreaming of. This little break where no one at all needs me. The past four years have been intense. Twin infants and that whole three under three business and the sleep deprivation and the making of all the food and everything else. Of course even a little wiggle room feels like a lot. A pause, a moment to take a breath; it's been seemingly impossible these past few years. Which means my type-A personality kicked in to cue the guilt. Because surely only lazy people sit around their backyards at 3:30 pm on a Thursday with their sparkling water and their sandals and their colorful lawn chairs.

Soon enough a fight will break out or they'll see a bug or rush over all at once to demand freeze pops. Soon enough my backyard will be empty as they grow older and more independent. So I take this afternoon as a blessing. Just me and my sandals, a book in my lap, three small bodies in swimsuits, a blow-up pool, sunshine, and my sparkling water. With a lime.

This is exactly what I've been waiting for.

He’s still exhausting with all that energy, his penchant for anything as long as it’s a little bit life-threatening. But we might be getting there. Instead of holding my breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop during any momentary lull, I’ve been taking deeper breaths, able to recharge and relax just a little bit more into just exactly what I’ve been waiting for.