Life Lately

As I type this, the kids are downstairs watching the Olympics. (Raise your hand if screen time rules in your house have also been 1000% relaxed during these two weeks.) I’ve heard cries of “Guys lookit!”, “We won!”, and chants of “USA! USA! USA!”

And as I was typing that Caden flew a paper airplane over to me at my desk which, when unfolded, reads, “we got 1st place in m200 back heat 3!”

Suffice to say we’re a bit Olympic-obsessed.

Tyson and I have had various conversations about various things lately which end with me exclaiming, “But I don’t mean this or that. It’s not one or the other or black and white. It’s in the middle—it’s shades of gray!” (Yay for evolving as an Enneagram One.)

The Olympics this year feel like one big shade of gray. I’m cheering on every single athlete—Can we give them all medals please?—and also rooting for Team USA with all my heart. The empty stands leave me feeling both heartbroken fans can’t be there and grateful that this step, at least, was taken to ensure everyone’s safety. I’m annoyed that Russia gets to compete in all but name despite its doping scandal and outraged that Sha'Carri Richardson was suspended for marijuana, of all things. I’m (obviously) so hyped that the Olympics have gone on and also concerned about the ethics: I understand why every single protester is there in those Tokyo streets. (About the only non-gray part is finding myself a Simone Bile’s stan.)

July itself is filled with shades of gray. Because time still has no meaning, the Fourth seems like it was months ago. I was packing, unpacking, or on two July trips during part of the month and at home for some endless afternoons the other part. We’ve experienced brilliant, blue-sky days and yet as I type this, an eerie haze the sun can’t quite break through has settled over much of my state from wildfires hundreds of miles away. I began the month feeling pretty good about the pandemic, about returning to a sense of normalcy, about school for the fall, and am ending it feeling uncertain about it all, feeling very much like I did exactly a year ago. 

As always, life isn’t all one or all the other of anything. It’s everything all at once, swirled into one big bucket of gray.

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Action Item

I may be in enough of a bubble that this won’t much affect whoever is reading this, but just in case: please, please, please get vaccinated if you haven’t done so already. Encourage—with love and information, not shame and embarrassment—those around you to get vaccinated. We have an entire population in our country, kids under the age of 12, who are unable to get the vaccine even if they want to. School, extracurricular activities, and a general life of normalcy without masks, of parents being able to say “yes” to normal kid things like going to the mall, or museums, or the fair, all hang in the balance. Use this link to find a vaccine near you.

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Around the Internet

• Basically a friendship liturgy.

• “People scoffed about moms ruining Instagram, but I thought they were revolutionary. They’d formed a market for their unpaid labor in the home. Or at least their representation of unpaid labor. These women weren’t being paid to be caretakers or community builders. They were being paid for their online depiction of that labor.”

• Kate Baer forever.

• “Rather than sticking to the script we assigned ourselves (or our structures and society assigned us), maybe we can imagine who we are, what matters to us, and what we need without focusing on “growing into” the next big thing.”

• Simone Biles is the GOAT, always.

• “The victory here is not that my children turn down processed foods. The victory is that they don’t feel out of control around these foods. They don’t feel compelled to eat them just because they’re there—which is what everyone assumes will happen when you have a mountain of processed foods on hand.”

• Find you some friends who will cheer you on like this.

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Eating

• File this one under drinking, not eating, but Real Simple told me to mix equal parts red wine with sparkling lemonade and serve it over ice and I can confirm that this has been one of my best life choices to date.

• I make this pesto cream sauce and serve it over pasta with a bunch of stir-fried bell peppers and it’s one of my favorite summer-y meals.

• These Crunchwrap Supremes were dinner on Tuesday. When I asked Tyson what he thought he said, “You’ve outdone yourself.” Definitely adding these to the rotation and wondering how soon is too soon to make them again.

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Fun Things

• I bought these earrings and they make me very happy. That is all.

• This is my favorite everyday tee. I own at least two and just ordered two more. I find it’s true-to-size for a more fitted tee; size up for a looser fit.

• This nail repair kit is a lifesaver. I’ve had a few nails that have been thin or prone to chipping over the past year and a few weeks of this leaves them strong and healthy again. It’s also easy to remove—I soak a bit of Kleenex in acetone, wrap it around my nail with foil, wait 10 minutes, and it rubs off leaving my nail perfectly clean.

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These posts are always interesting for me to write, as I sit and reflect back on the month that’s passed. A month from now, we’ll be in the middle of State Fair time here in Minnesota, on the edge of the start of school, ready to send all my kids off to elementary school for the first time, and I have no idea where we, where I, will be on that black and white scale. Only that it will, inevitably, be tinted with gray.

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.

Read the rest over on Twin Cities Mom Collective.

Read, Watched, Listened

I love reading just about everything (okay, you won't see any horror or sci-fi picks on here), watching things that make me think and especially if they make me laugh, and wholeheartedly embrace the podcast. Here's my two cents worth.

READ
(Follow the links below or click through to bookshop.org to find all books referenced in this post and past Read, Watched, Listened posts. And here’s your friendly reminder that these are affiliate links!)

The Girl With the Louding Voice
Abi Dare gives Adunni, this book’s young protagonist, a compelling voice. I cheered Adunni on in her own fight against the Nigerian patriarchy she continually finds herself in. In the end, it’s more plot-based than character-based, and I personally need more character to draw me completely into a book.

The Four Winds
Set during the upheaval of the dustbowl, I couldn’t help but compare this to The Grapes of Wrath—especially because I only read that particular American classic for the first time late last summer. The drive/struggle in California is basically Grapes of Wrath revisited; there were so many parallels. I loved the protagonist, Elsa—my only complaint is that I wanted more of Elsa in her pre-dustbowl life. Though my low-key MVP is Elsa’s daughter Loreda. Loreda for president, please.

The Liturgy of Politics
Honestly, I wanted to love this more than I did. I thought the intersection of faith + politics would make this perfect for me but it felt like it was drawn out too long in book-form. Like maybe this would have been better served as a series of essays? I still want to hear more from Kaitlyn Schiess, but I don’t think a book was the best format for what this was.

The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories
Am I a short story reader now? Because apparently, I’m a short story reader now. This collection of stories was on fire. I didn’t think I liked short stories—maybe because I want a good short story to last so much longer than it does—which is exactly how I felt with each and every one of these.

What We Were Promised
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: give me a detailed family drama any day. Set in China, this was a beautifully written novel about family, wealth, class, and society.

Rules of Civility
This was a delight—good for summer. I couldn’t help but think of Elizabeth Gilbert’s City of Girls while reading it. It’s not quite as frothy but is set in the same era and a similar setting. Single girl in NYC in the 1930s is almost always going to be a good time.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
This book was a journey (hello, almost 500 pages) but it was worth it. It follows the lives of Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, and Thomas Merton as they wrestle with their Catholicism, society, their writing, and sometimes each other. I can’t even fathom how much research went into a book like this: studying their lives, reading their works and correspondence, visiting the places they lived, and then compiling and interweaving it all together. Sometimes it was admittedly a slog, but at other times it read a bit like a novel.

One Two Three
I finished this book a couple of weeks ago and still don’t know how I feel about it. On one hand, I couldn’t put it down; I wanted to know what happened next. on the other hand, it took a little bit for me to get used to the three different voices and I wanted more…something? More backstory? More depth? I’m not even sure. It’s no This is How it Always Is, but since that’s one of my favorite books of all time it feels pretty unfair to compare Laurie Frankel’s work from here on out to that one. Tell me you read this and then tell me your thoughts because mine are muddled.

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
I thought this book was lovely. I might need to re-read it in the actual winter. It’s s-l-o-w. I would probably have found it boring at another point in time but it felt like exactly what I needed to read right now. For anyone going through a life change or new season in life.

Crying in H-Mart: A Memoir
This book is as good as everyone says it is. Also, it made me hungry, even though I didn’t know what most of the Korean foods were and lots of them included various types of seafood, and I’m allergic to shellfish.

RE-READS: Pride and Prejudice, Here for It, This Is How it Always Is

WATCHED

The Last Blockbuster
How fun was this documentary? Did they tap into every last bit of millennial nostalgia I possess? Yes, yes they did, and I’m not even mad about it.

Last Chance U
Oof. A docu-series exploring a community college basketball team in East LA as they try to get out of the community college world and break into top-level colleges. I felt like the series was a few episodes too long but the last one was worth all of it.

Bo Burnham: Inside
Bo Burnham wins quarantine. Full stop. Also, he deserves both a Grammy and a top-level comedy award (Do those exist?) for this piece.

Top Chef Portland
We are Top Chef junkies and this may have been the best season yet.

High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America
The worst part of this series is that I can’t reach through the screen to eat all the deliciousness depicted. It should be clear by now that I will read/watch anything to do with food so I couldn’t hit “play” fast enough for this.

In the Heights
How fun is this movie? All the fun. (Also: Tyson and I went back to a movie theater what is this life??) I could watch the pool scene on repeat for infinity.

LISTENED
Sour
Obviously.

No One Is Coming to Save Us
If you’re a parenting America, there’s probably not much that’s going to be groundbreaking here. Yet I still binged this podcast because yes, I am your choir, and yes, you are preaching to me, and yes , I am here for it.

Dirty Rotten Church Kids
If you identify as any sort of exvangelical or were impacted by early 2000s Evangelical church culture at all, this is the podcast for you. The episodes are LONG (it takes me several days to get through one) but they’re always thought-provoking, funny, and I end up saying “YES” out loud to no one and nodding my head vigorously at least once an episode. Also, I can’t recommend their Instagram enough.

The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill
Speaking of Evangelical culture: I am EATING this one up. It’s amazing how Mark Driscoll’s influence leeched out into so much of Christian culture and I’m not even a little sad about dancing on the grave of Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll in a very un-Christian-like way.

Life Lately

Taking a page from Pantsuit Politics’ Instagram page, (who apparently take this practice from Emily P. Freeman, so I’m just another link in the chain at this point), to list the things I learned in June:

• If you have the option for your kid to be bussed to an activity instead of driving them, you should do it. Every time. It will be worth all the dollars.

• I can’t keep up with anything lately and feel like I’m failing at everything. There are too many small children around and also we’re coming out of a pandemic which I’m sure has something (read: almost everything) to do with it, but I don’t have time to unpack that now (see: I can’t keep up with anything). I feel like I’m behind in every area of my life and also things feel like they take between 2-5 times longer than I think they should. The kids should be nicer and the kitchen should be cleaner and I want to get back to doing yoga and I want new furniture for almost every room of my house and maybe the kids would be nicer if I set a better example instead of snapping at them. However, if my little corner of the internet has anything to say about it, apparently that’s how everyone is feeling lately. So maybe that’s just how life is, at least for right now. Solidarity.

• I think number one on this list might have a decent amount to do with number two on this list, since I have spent approximately all of June in my minivan. So. There’s that. Maybe I would have more time to do all the things if I weren’t driving around the entire Twin Cities every single day.

• Driving hours in the car by myself with a bunch of podcasts and good music (read: Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo) is my new favorite form of self-care.

• Grilling anything and throwing chips and a sliced melon on the table is a good enough meal when it’s one million degrees out. We can just pretend the kids ate a fair share of the fruit instead of gorging themselves on chips and processed white buns from a package. It’s fine.

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Action Item

The disaster in Surfside, Florida and the unprecedented heatwave in the Northwest are both on my mind this week. CNN has a great round-up of organizations to support, if you’re able, who are on the ground in the Miami area. Bustle has a list of organizations to support in the Pacific Northwest, as well as general links to organizations who are advocating for climate change solutions. We had our own unheard-of heatwave here in Minnesota in late May/early June, and unfortunately, these climate events are only going to continue. Less unprecedented, much, much more commonplace.

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Around the Internet

• This thread is an entire sermon in ten slides.

• Because I can always have to link to at least one Anne Helen Peterson piece, and this one is everything.

• “Families desperately need help. In other countries, they get it. In the United States, they get empty homilies about the importance of family.”

• An important read about female athletes, especially as we move forward into the Olympics.

• I feel this piece in a very deep way.

• Have you heard of FaceTune? This read was both fascinating and gag-inducing. “Cosmetic surgeons who spoke to HuffPost said they now regularly have patients come in with photos of themselves that have been so heavily Facetuned they would be anatomically impossible to replicate.”

• “A residency is typically designed to give the artist the space to create. In the art world that translates, almost always, to being alone, she explained. ‘It felt quite offensive that somehow you are more creative away from your family than with them,’ she said.”

• In case you haven't seen the “Dear Intern” thread yet. It will make you feel ten types of encouraged with the world.

• I’m in a (usually) happy marriage, but damn if I don’t wish I had someone to break up with so I could blast this perfect mash-up.

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Eating

• These harissa meatballs with whipped feta. Though—UNPOPULAR OPINION ALERT—I don’t actually care for the whipped feta. I make the meatballs and bell peppers, omit the zucchini, and serve it all with homemade pita chips, hummus, sliced cucumbers, and kalamata olives.

• These cheesesteaks but add more bell pepper, onion, mushrooms, and cheese, and buy prepackaged shaved steak from the store so it all comes together ridiculously fast. And deliciously.

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Fun Things

• Back in April, I told you to get a For Days Take Back Bag. Now I’m telling you to buy this relaxing romper because it looks like I put effort into getting dressed but feels like I’m wearing pajamas, which is my exact goal with every outfit.

• The tagline of this product is “the (cashmere) sweatpants of lipstick” and I co-sign that 100%. I’m always on the look for a product that glides on like a chapstick but deposits a little bit of color; something I can use whether I’m in the drop-off line or date night. Ultralip is that thing. I bought it in Lucite but will definitely be back for more.

• This tank. I’ve dressed it up with black shorts and all the way down with athletic shorts and a ponytail. The exaggerated shoulder/extra fabric under the armpit means you don’t have to worry about flashing your bra. It runs large—I tuck it all the way in or it’s a lot of fabric for me. Recommend sizing down if that’s an option for you.

• Okay, I’d seen this Supergoop Unseen Sunscreen going around my corners of the internet and finally tried it out. It’s not shiny or greasy but glides on smooth and matte as the perfect makeup primer. I’m a believer.

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Another thing I learned this month is that June doesn’t quite feel like summer yet. The kids spend the first two weeks wrapping up school. Caden had an activity that’s started at 8 am (!!!) the last few weeks. (See: if there’s a bus option it will be worth all your $$$.) Baseball has largely taken over our evenings. All of these activities have walked us right up to a point where we’ll be traveling for a few days at a time here and there, where it feels like I’m either packing for or unpacking from a trip. And, you might be saying, what do you mean it doesn’t feel like summer? Baseball! What’s more summer than that?

I know. And these things aren’t bad. I’m so glad we’re able to do them this year. And also: it doesn’t feel like summer to me until we’ve had a chance to lay low, sleep in, and do a whole lot of nothing around the house for days at a time.

Those days are coming. I just wrote up our July calendar and am admiring all the blank spots on the calendar. The same blank spots I will then probably curse around the second week of August. Because: balance!