It’s February, which means it’s practically March, which means SPRING is around the corner! I can just about taste it in the air. The sun is up when I take Carla to school, it’s still up when I bring her home. Birds are everywhere chattering about their spring plans. The snow is melting and I think we have a few upcoming days in the 40s. I still hope we get more snow because I love snow, but I do like this little sneak peek of things to come.
Every time I open my news app, there’s something newly horrible and I just can’t tell anymore HOW horrible things are or are not, nor if there’s anything at all I can do about anything, so I have been doing a lot of Avoidance and Diversion. Is this healthy or helpful? No. But is it keeping my mental state fairly steady? I think so? For now?
If you need some avoidance and/or diversion, welcome to my blog where I will only talk about the superficial and the trivial. In that vein, here are a few random bullets.
- Summer Fret: Why, yes, I am already panicking about summer. In years past, I would have been panicking about summer camp (and probably would have already signed Carla up because summer camp is whack), but this year I am panicking about no summer camp. Carla just isn’t interested in camp this year, and that’s fine. I asked her what she wants to do and she said, Play with my friends, play with dogs, and swim. That does sound like an excellent summer. HOWEVER… I am not confident in my ability to execute such a relaxed summer without feeling like I am unable to get my own stuff done, or without devolving into excessive screen time. A schedule is my friend, I think, and I need to create said schedule WELL in advance, possibly with Carla’s input. Something like… one or two days a week where we volunteer at the local animal shelter. One Special Outing each week. One Friend Event each week. And then… fill in the rest of the days with a combo of Keeping Abreast of Our Studies (maybe I could ask her to devote an hour a day to math worksheets and another 30 minutes a day to reading?) (I originally had “an hour a day to reading” which seems reasonable and wonderful to me, but… I don’t know) and Pool/Outdoor Time? There might also be a couple of weeklong camps that she could attend for a few hours a day, but those don’t usually pop up until later in the year and I don’t know if I am chill enough to just slap them in at the last minute. We would also like to go visit my parents in their summer home. My dad is always asking us to come for a whole month – maybe this is the year to do it? Or at least two weeks? My husband won’t be able to join us so I think I/we would miss him too much if we were gone too long. Maybe I could try to make it a Screen Free Summer, except for like… a movie on Fridays or something scheduled. I would love that, and I know Carla would too even if she thinks she wouldn’t. What are you doing for summer? Or are we all just hoping to MAKE IT to summer, which seems like a valid consideration?
- CBBC: Have you joined Engie’s latest iteration of the Cool Bloggers Book Club? She’s leading a reading of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s The Blue Castle. I am having serious FOMO because I am not doing it this month. But I am planning on reading all the summaries and commentary. I confessed this to Nicole recently, but I don’t think I’ve ever read ANYTHING by Lucy Maud Montgomery. (Even though I own the entire Anne of Green Gables box set.) Am I fired??? No – that’s not the right perspective. Just think of all those wonderful books out there that I have yet to read. Yes. That makes me feel like less of a loser.
- Gift Fret: One of my dear friends is having a milestone birthday this year. (If you know me in The Offline World, this is your cue to STOP READING because I am going to discuss your gift in great detail.) (Although I suppose this could be your chance to object to said gift idea? And save us both the awkwardness of a gift that you might not appreciate? It’s up to you, boo.) Anyway, as per my usual mode, I have been thinking about and fretting about this gift for well over a year. WELL OVER A YEAR. One thing that is preventing me from finding The Perfect Gift is that this friend doesn’t particularly enjoy A Fuss being made over her birthday. She does, however, give gifts, so I feel like it’s one of her love languages. We have known each other for more than half a decade now, which boggles my mind, and I consider her one of my closest friends. Not sure if she feels the same, because she is more extroverted than I do, and I have found that extroverts tend to have way more friends than I do, and therefore (?) categorize them differently. But that’s a different matter. I just wanted to give you a little context. Also, my gift idea is something I would usually advise against – I want to get her a piece of art. In fact, I want to commission a piece of art: nothing crazy expensive (I hope; it seems like Etsy has some options in my price range, which I am thinking is roughly the $200-ish range), but something meaningful both to her and to our friendship. The art would be based on a photo, if that makes a difference. And I think I would see if I could get a smallish piece of art – like an 8 x 10 size – so she could put it on a dresser in the guest room if she doesn’t like it enough to hang it up. Why am I LIKE THIS, I overthink gifts so much and I am afraid I am going to overthink myself right into not doing anything at all and then feeling shitty for not commemorating a really special occasion for someone I care deeply for. I think this friend – even if she doesn’t like the artwork itself – will be very touched by the idea, and it feels very personal to her, and so I really, really think this is a good idea. It’s certainly my only idea. ANYWAY, I don’t know why I am telling you all this because I am sort of afraid you will discourage me from doing it and then I will cry because I have no alternatives. I guess I am wondering if you have ever had a piece of art commissioned and if so what that process was like/what the pricing was like, and maybe if you know anyone who does really nice but not horrifically expensive landscapes-based-on-photos. My VERY OWN MOTHER paints landscapes based on photos, so I kind of want to float this idea past her, but also that feels like a lot of pressure to put on one’s mother. GIFT GIVING IS TERRIFYING AND I HATE IT.
- Valentine’s Shopping: I have been channeling my fretting about various things and my news-scrolling energy to shopping for things I do not need. Mainly these things are Valentine’s Day related. I made the delicious mistake of buying a bag of Sour Patch Kids hearts, which I now love with all my being. Carla probably needs a bag of her own for Valentine’s Day (I am not sharing). Maybe she would prefer Nerds Gummy Clusters. Or a bag of lip lollipops she can share with her friends. Carla has recently started reading The Black Stallion (and in fact stayed up until 3:30 am on a school night reading it and was then miserable the next day; that is a lesson she has to learn for herself, alas), so I want to get her the next book (or two) in the series. Perhaps I will also get her A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, which, while not being The Book, is very hot right now among her friends. I am also wondering if she might like a book about being A Teen, since she insists on moving ever closer to being a teen herself. I like this one about general teenagery and this one about etiquette. I am also saving all sorts of adorable heartearrings to my Etsy favorites list, although Carla does already have a couple of pairs. I may get my husband the super romantic gift of O’Keefe’s Working Hands hand cream because he likes it better than the paste-style cream that comes in a tub. Oooh, do either of us (me or Carla, not me or my husband) need a sweater with hearts on it? I feel like a heart sweater could be appropriate on other non-Valentine’s-Day days, yes? What about some adorable heart pajamas? I don’t even really celebrate Valentine’s day, I don’t know why I am getting all in a froth about it this year. I don’t even think I have the energy to make Valentine’s cookies like I did last year. My husband and I don’t get gifts for one another, I don’t decorate. Maybe I get excited because Carla is excited, and each year she is excited in a new way. This year, she and all the girls in her class are doing a Valentine’s gift exchange and she and another friend are being one another’s Galentine’s, so they got each other a small gift of candy. I guess I like to lean into whatever Carla’s latest enthusiasm is, even if it does result in excess sugar in our house and some heart-infused junk we didn’t need.
- To Dos I Am Not Doing: My to-do list is once again out of control. It’s got the normal stuff – grocery shopping, laundry, home improvement projects that keep getting pushed, refilling prescriptions – but it’s also packed with scheduling things I don’t want to do, like medical appointments (my annual mammogram – don’t be like me! schedule yours now!) and car service appointments and meetings with our accountant. I also have yet to follow up on something I should have followed up on EONS ago and it feels kind of too late, but also I don’t want to let it go. Anyway. Maybe today’s the day I will cross something off that list. Do you have any onerous tasks that keep getting kicked down the road?
I intended to write more bullets than these, but these are QUITE long as they are, and I need to get to work. I hope you are hanging in there.
Take it from a quantity time mom (not a quality time mom), you are waaaaaaay overthinking summer. Summer is for kids to be bored and hang with friends and take tennis lessons and go swimming. I think the model of having kids in care from the time they are teeny makes people feel like all time with kids needs to be … special? meaningful? productive? supervised?Maybe it’s because I SAH with my kids through school age and all summer long, but I just don’t buy it. You don’t have to be the cruise director, IMO. I don’t think the choice is either 1:1 time OR screen time, you know? That said, we loved theme days when the kids were younger, and they helped give the weeks a good rhythm. (Sweet treat Tuesday has stuck around, as has fun-fun Friday where we draw an activity from a bag of choices.). Now Coop dives 5 days/week, and Dorothy has 8 weeks of dance tryouts (4 days/week) and both of them have national tournaments, so we WISH for the old, lazy days. Meanwhile Minnie will be taking swim lessons and … chalking the driveway? Playing Calico Critters? Getting super good at Mario Kart? Asking me for 900 snacks a day? (I’m just guessing).
My favorite summer memories are reading under an oak tree and I used to get grumpy when my mom tried to make me do other things, so I say let her play with dogs and hang out with her friends and be a bored kid. You don’t get very much of that in life, do you?
Gift fretting is overrated. You have a thoughtful gift idea. Would you like that gift? Then get it! It’s fun! It will be appreciated!
If I suggested a screen free summer, my kids would die. (BUT it is tempting!). We tend go to with the simple “do non screen things until X:00”. Simple, concrete. X:00 in summer might be, like, 2 pm. (At this point I have one kid who might try to get around this by SLEEPING until that point, but you get my point! Anyway that kid likes camp so I don’t have to worry about that TOO much 🙂 )
I love your gift idea; it’s perfect! Personal and unique. As a teacher I mostly had summers off with my daughters and as you mentioned, a mix of scheduled activities and free time is essential. (in my opinion) I have my mammogram tomorrow. I dread it every year since I’m at that age where I know many people who have had or have breast cancer.
I think that’s a great gift idea. I have not commissioned art before, but a friend had that done for me, and the artwork was not my style but not NOT my style, if you see what I mean, and I love it in part because it is such a fun and interesting and bold idea, and it makes me think of her each time I see it.
I have TWO dearly-loved people having Big Milestone birthdays this year, so I need to get on this. I hope you WILL do this idea and then REPORT BACK!
My rising first grader will be taking a bus for the first time to/from camp each day. I’m a little worried about that, but I know he will love camp.
I have seen those Nerds Gummy Clusters and I am not going to try them because I feel like if I did, I wouldn’t stop. I used to love Nerds back in the day – those little boxes that had two different flavours. And put that with gummies, well, that sounds pretty amazing. I also did not know about Sour Patch Hearts.
A friend of mine gave me a watercolour she did based on a photo I had posted on facebook, and it is one of my most beloved possessions. It was such a surprise, and it was so moving that she had done it. I think a small piece of art is an absolutely beautiful idea. I have many artistic friends and any time they have made and given me art, I have treasured it dearly. One of my former yoga students, her husband was diagnosed with cancer, and the friend that gave me a watercolour had just happened to do a series of paintings of bears. This student loved the outdoors and hiking and bears, so I bought one of those for her and she loved it. What I’m saying is that a gift like that is truly from the heart and I’m sure your friend will love it.
Here’s something to consider…would you go out to your parents’ for a week and then leave Carla there for an extra week? Logistically I’m not sure how that would work, but sometimes that one-on-one grandparent thing is really lovely.
“Healthy and helpful” can mean a lot of things, and Avoidance and Diversion probably IS both those things on some level. Hell if I know, I pingpong wildly between denial and despair. Oh, look, real life. Oh, but I should be brooding, shouldn’t I? We’re supposed to try to buy Canadian, and I both appreciate and resent the posts from my friends telling me which brands to buy and which to avoid, based on how hectoring the tone gets.
DO THE ART GIFT it is a wonderful idea. Think of yourself getting the gift rather than giving it – would you love it? You’d love it, right?
Never enough heart sweaters or heart pajamas in my book. My kids (hahaha my adult offspring) cannot get enough Nerds gummy clusters (I say, pretending I wouldn’t arm wrestle a bitch for Nerds gummy clusters any day of the week).
Birds? Melting snow? Man, it’s a good thing I like you.
I dread summer with our younger girls, because they aren’t great yet at entertaining themselves. They don’t have screens. I am in the same camp as Sarah – hang with friends, relax, read, swim in the pool, do a few themed days to look forward to. We go to the pool a lot here. When the older kids were younger, we went to the pool daily. They saw their friends or hung out together. They wrote in a journal with a prompt in the morning and did a few math pages and they read. It was unstructured and glorious.
I say give the gift – she will be so tickled.
We don’t do much for Valentines day in our house. I don’t decorate, and I don’t buy them stuff. I guess I’m just not ‘that’ mom. Thanks for clarifying that it was you and Carla who were excited for heart sweaters. 😉
That gift idea is PERFECT! Do it. She’ll love it and you won’t regret it.
I agree with those saying blow off camp this year, blow off being in charge of keeping her busy. Let her have a lazy summer. If you really want her to work on her math, maybe get some worksheets or something, have her do that for 1/2 hour. Buy her a bunch of Black Stallion books (I LOVED THOSE BOOKS) or take her to the library, and let the reading happen or not. These are my thoughts. I have an only child, and I was sometimes more successful at this kind of things than others. Sometimes I worried and wanted her to be busy, or didn’t want her to feel left out if friends got together without her. She didn’t have any friends in the neighborhood, so that happened sometimes. I wanted to protect her. But she survived it all, and I think has a better grasp of the world for not being busy all of the time. School is hard, and is getting harder. It’s nice to have some time really, really off. I loved Nicole’s idea of her staying with your parents for some grandparent time, if that’s doable. You could even do 3 weeks…1 with both you and C there, 1 just her, and then 1 with both of you again. You and your husband might be able to have some date nights or something during that time.
Oh, the painting! I LOVE that idea, and especially if it is small, so she can find a place for it if it doesn’t fit her decor or whatever. But I feel like if one of my friends did that for me, I would cherish it.
I know you’re busy, but just sayin’ I hope that you read The Blue Castle when you have time. It’s really lovely.
I vote for a mostly lazy summer, with a few events here and there. I also vote to go with your heart and give your friend the painting!
Ugh- yes, the mammogram. I was supposed to get mine in December but just couldn’t seem to get it scheduled, so here we are. MUST schedule that this week.
I think your gift idea is amazing. NO ONE is going to NOT like that! And it’s a good idea to get it on the smaller side- that way there are more options for where she wants to put it.
Summer? What? Arg.
Ugh. Summer planning was so stressful when the kids were in elementary/middle school. But it sounds like you are putting a lot of thought into it now so it unfolds in an intentional way (at least some of the time).
I still have the summer stress of renting a beach house when it’s time to start looking before the houses all disappear but fully half the potential party can’t give me a yes or a no as to whether they are coming. I don’t want to rent a house for 8 if we are only going to have 4, but I want them to be able to come if they decided yes later on, so I am kind of paralyzed.
Oh yes, definitely get the art for your friend! What a lovely gift. A landscape painting is versatile, in that it won’t make anyone upset or shocked, and can be displayed in a variety of locations.
Just a heads up, A Good Girls Guide to Murder was a) absolutely amazing and b) one of the few books that has kept me awake from terror. The third book of the series, the first two were regular books. It just did such a good job of being too real. That one and the non-fiction book about the Golden State Killer are the only ones that I have actually lost sleep over in the last ten years or so. It could have just hit me at a bad time or something too, but it hit me. Also, embarrassingly, it was loaned to me by a teenager so maybe teenagers are just fine with it. Try Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson maybe? It has a similar vibe but without me lying awake in the dark, jumping at noises.
We do a summer rough schedule. Like Mondays is cleaning day, Tuesday is library and doughnut store day, Wednesday is pool day, Thursday is outing day, etc. And the kids also have lists to do every morning that is like an hour of reading, couple of worksheets, twenty minutes of movement (usually Alex and Ryan play soccer in the backyard), a shower within the last twenty four hours, etc. Just stuff to keep us from stagnating all summer. We skip lists whenever it is convenient for us too, so it’s not like it is a burden.
Does Carla already take riding lessons? Do you think she’d like to start?
Like so many others, I think the art you’re thinking of commissioning sounds heartfelt and will be cherished for that alone, if nothing else. I hope you go for it.
“It’s February, which means it’s practically March, which means SPRING is around the corner!” Is the most hopeful thing I’ve read today!
I want to avoid the news, but I kinda have to keep up since I have to talk about economic outlook and inflation and things like that for my job. It’s a real buzz kill and probably why I have kind of a low-grade depression sort of feeling right now. Low-grade to high depending on the new cycle!
our kids are quite young so we have a pretty detailed and structured approach to Summers. Paul is going to a school base program for most of the summer but this year he’s doing two weeks at a church base camp. The church base camp is new, but we wanted to give him some novelty and they have some really cool camps that they put on. The challenge is that the earliest we can drop them off at 7:30 which is a bit late for us as ideally, we drop them off at seven. So I made sure to register those camps during weeks when I’m not traveling. And then taco will be in daycare until mid August. After that we go to my parents for a week and then the boys stay there for another week and then they all start school after Labor Day at the same place. Hooray. Even though you’re gonna miss your husband a lot, I do think spending two weeks at your parents. Summer home would be a nice large rock in your summer schedule And it will add some novelty to your summer. The thought of no screens sounds intimidating to me. Lol! but screen creep is real!
Your gift sounds perfect!!
Your gift-giving ideas are always so thoughtful—always. I’ve learned from this blog how intentional you are when giving to others, and I love that about you. My best friend is a talented artist, and one year, she drew and painted a picture for me, framed it, and gave it to me as a gift. It’s one of my all-time favorite gifts I’ve ever received.
I’m really enjoying The Blue Castle, which surprised me for some reason. You will get to it when you can.
Leave it to our friend Suzanne to fret over something for a year (a gift) and something four-five months in advance (camp). You must be exhausted.
It’s always so interesting to me to hear how parents handle summertime with camps and schedules and such. When I was a kid, we didn’t do any of that. We had to entertain ourselves! And it was SO NICE to have that unstructured time to myself. I loved it but I was also an introverted kid who wanted to be left alone with my books, haha.
That gift is SO thoughtful and I will be mad if you don’t get it for your friend! SO THERE!
I am definitely trying to divert, but I cannot avoid the terrible news that we’re confronted with every day. I work for the government and things are shitty right now.
I love the gift idea for your friend. I got a personalized piece of art for my 40s and I LOVED it. It was so thoughtful and I enjoy having it in my home!