For the most part, summer has been great. Carla, I think, has had a good mix of being in camp and not being in camp. It’s been a good mix for me, too, because I’ve had some nice chunks of Not Driving. We could be doing more friend get-togethers, but those have proven surprisingly difficult to arrange; I’m assuming everyone else is in the same boat of trying to work vacation and camp and downtime into the remaining days before school starts.
The hardest part of summer for me is the lack of a set schedule. Sure, it seems nice, to have loose lazy days where we do not much of anything at all… but in practice, I end up feeling kind of yucky about it. I think if we had a more rigid schedule on most days, an occasional lazy day would feel more like a break than a waste of time.
Well, it feels quite late in the game to be thinking about re-jigging our schedule. Especially as we have both a two-week vacation AND another full week of sleepaway camp coming up which will throw everything into disarray.
It feels kind of stupid to be stressing about schedules in the summer. And yet, I persist. The stress is the result of two pressures. No, three pressures:
Academic Pressure: I want to make sure that Carla stays engaged in things that challenge her brain and encourage critical thinking. Plus, she has a robust array of summer assignments she’s supposed to complete.
Sports Pressure: Carla is an active, athletic kid who likes to participate in sports. We’ve never gotten into the whole travel/club sports scene, about which, frankly, I feel quite relieved. (My god, talk about stress and scheduling complexity.) She’s only participated in sports through school. For my particular child, who is unlikely to play sports in college let alone professionally, sports offer an array of benefits that go beyond Being A Star X Player. I want her to continue to play the sports she likes and continue to feel good about her contribution to her teams. As she gets older, and as her peers advance their own skills, it feels more and more important to encourage her to practice and build up her strength and endurance. I would also love for her to get into the habit of regular exercise, because it’s good and necessary for her. She got this for her birthday, which seems like a way to combine fun and exercise. If the weather would cooperate, maybe we can try it out.
Break Pressure: The counterweight to the above two pressures is the pressure to give Carla a freaking break, and let her experience the pleasure and freedom and, yes, boredom of long, lazy summer days with no commitments and no expectations. When I was her age, I had ZERO summer expectations. I’m pretty sure I either stayed at home with my brother and his nanny all day, or my mom dropped me off at various friends’ houses on her way to work in the morning and the friend and I roamed around town all day until my mom picked me up on her way home from work. I had no summer homework, no summer sports practice, no summer camps, no supervision. It was glorious. Clearly, it was a different time. For many, many reasons, I don’t think trying to recreate that experience for my kid would fly. But I do want her to have SOME of that summer freedom. It’s so fleeting.
My reaction to all these pressures has been to create a daily schedule.
I did a lot of research into schedules, and compromised my morals by asking ChatGPT for help fitting everything we wanted to do into each day. Then I designed the schedule in Canva and had Office Max print it out and laminate it for me, so we can add specifics to each day. It’s taped to the kitchen wall, directly across from Carla’s spot at the table.
I like this schedule because it incorporates all the things I want Carla to experience in a week: dedicated time for schoolwork, exercise, and music alongside plenty of time to do Summer Things. The key for me is that we get all the work done before noon, and then our afternoons are wide open. That feels both doable and like I’m not weighing her down with a grueling workload. I feel like having a half-hour dedicated to music practice, for instance, is a lot less onerous than telling her, “You need to practice your music today.” I want all her to-dos to be finite.
The schedule worked beautifully. For about a week and a half. Then, as is ALWAYS my problem, one little hiccup brought down the whole system. If I had to identify one culprit, it would be going to bed late. Carla still, at thirteen, does best if she gets ten to twelve hours of sleep a night, and sleep has always, always been one of my top priorities for her. Which means I am reluctant to wake her up at seven when she’s gone to bed at eleven the night before.
Nights are SO HARD though! My husband is not on a summer schedule. He is on his regular, everyday work schedule. He gets home at six or seven most nights, works out, and then we eat dinner at eight or so. We like to watch Taskmaster as a family, and it’s very difficult to keep ourselves to one episode a night (although we succeed, most nights). This means that Carla’s 8:30 bedtime creeps up to 9:30 or 10:00 and sometimes later.
Could I be more strict? Certainly. But it’s not easy, and I grow weary of being the Bedtime Bitch who is pushing and nagging and trying to keep everyone on track. (I would also prefer to go to bed at 9:30 or 10:00; but I still read to Carla every night, so when her bedtime gets pushed back, so does mine, and I end up in bed around midnight. I still wake up at 5:30, so I am VERY TIRED a lot of the time. Which also makes it harder for me to keep on top of things.)
Last night was one of the late nights – and I think Carla was up until midnight working on her summer reading, which is both commendable (and relatable) and also go to sleep. This morning, I feel groggy and unmotivated. How am I supposed to motivate my child into action when I struggle with motivating myself??? If I allow her to sleep in, she’ll have more energy for getting things done… but then our schedule will creep into the afternoon, and we won’t have time for the fun stuff… and then I’ll feel like a Mean Mom, or we’ll allow fun stuff to bleed into the evening, and then we’re in bed at midnight and the whole misshapen cycle continues.
Well, there’s not a lot to be done except try to get back on track.
If you have a middle schooler, you are probably well aware that dumpling squishies are the toy trend du jour. I cannot stand squishies; I do not enjoy squishing them, not to mention they strike me as portable petri dishes. But my kid loves squishies and had some spending money in her pocket last week… just as I happened to have an errand at a business right next door to a toy store. The store only had “knock off” dumplings, according to Carla. But she did find a mini ice cube that she liked. (Needoh ice cubes are also So Hot Right Now.) Shall we take bets on how quickly a totally clear cube of goo disappears among the chaos of her bedroom or backpack?
Carla had some money left over, so we went to Five Below after school Friday, just to check out their squishy selection. (By the way, Five Below is now a wild misnomer; it seemed like most things in the store were seven dollars and up.) Carla assessed the situation and determined there were no good squishies. The store was planning a “dumpling drop” for Saturday morning, and already had signage indicating where people should line up on the sidewalk. I recall some news stories from my own childhood about parents stampeding stores on Black Friday to get the latest It Toy, but… now we are lining up for squishies? I am not judging, I am just observing with mild bafflement.
We did not leave empty handed. Carla found a (seven-dollar) hamster-in-a-ball toy that she insisted Lenny would love. He does love it.
You know what else is apparently a big thing among the seventh grade set? Hacky sacks. (Carla informed me yesterday that they are actually called footbags, and that Hacky Sack is a brand name.) (FOOTBAGS? No wonder “hacky sack” became a proprietary eponym for that kind of toy. “Footbag” sounds like an old-timey insult.) Kids in my middle school and high school played hacky sack, and that was back in the 1900s! And by the time my classmates got to them, they’d been around for decades! I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that they are experiencing a renaissance; I saw a bunch of Lisa Frank paraphernalia in Five Below, and hoo boy did I love Lisa Frank in the 80s. I wish it had been this prevalent back when I did Carla’s rainbow leopard birthday party, but I guess we were ahead of the trend.
Anyway, hacky sacks. They’re back. Did you play hacky sack in school? I did not. There was a particular category of kids who played hacky sack, and I was not one of them. I did date one of them though. He was not a good guy, although that had nothing to do with his hacky sack appreciation or his social group.
My parents, though generous and thoughtful gift givers, were not the type to run out and buy the latest toy just because we were foaming at the mouth for it. Not that it was anywhere near as easy to access trends back in the twentieth century, especially in a small, rural town. Some kids managed it, though. One trend I really remember wanting was jelly sandals. Everyone had jelly sandals except me. I wanted them so fervidly.
One friend – one of those who seemed to always be on top of the current trends, and whose parents seemed happy to ensure that she was always on the cutting edge when it came to fashion and toys; did you have That Kid in your class? – grudgingly allowed me to borrow a pair of her jellies. They were not comfortable. My toes got stuck in the holes. The backs of the shoes pinched my heels. Pebbles and grass got trapped between my feet and the soles of the shoes. How could anyone walk around in those things?! Why were they so popular?!
I also remember longing for a Slip ‘N Slide. My friend J’s parents would set up the Slip ‘N Slide at birthday parties and sleepovers, and it was so fun. I have vivid memories of standing in a giggly line of swimsuit-clad girls, digging our toes into J’s lush green lawn, waiting for our turn to slide on the yellow runway amid a spray of cool water.
My family lived out in the country with no access to city water, and the well water was bad for the grass. (My dad literally pumped water out of the river to water our lawn and trees.) So my parents put the kibosh on a Slip ‘N Slide, dashing my childhood dreams to bits. Obviously, the instant Carla was old enough to understand how a Slip ‘N Slide works, I got one for her. I was so excited to be able to provide this childhood joy that I had been so painfully denied to my own child. She… did not like it. I tried it and also did not like it. It kind of… hurt. It wasn’t as slippery as it should have been, and the material kind of stuck to my skin. After a few experiments – more water? more speed? – the thing ripped and that was that.
This is all to say that I am not immune to the siren song of The It Thing. The desire to be part of something is powerful, even now. (So far I have resisted weighted vests and vibration plates, but I am as susceptible to the pull of viral trends as much as the next guy.) I also understand the simple need to know what all the hype is about.
On the other side of the scale sits the haunting image of my high school friend’s mom, who amassed a massive number of Beanie Babies because she was sure – sure – that their value would skyrocket. Was her plan to fund her retirement with their eventual sale? I’m not sure. But I see her Beanie Babies display in my nightmares, a soft-bodied glassy-eyed red-labeled expenditure of hundreds and hundreds of dollars.
Even though Five Below was a miss, squishy-wise, Carla is still positive. We have another toy store to visit, and in the car she was cheerfully imagining that this third establishment would have a whole selection of dumplings and ice cubes for her to choose from.
Carefully, gently, not trying to burst her happy anticipatory bubble, I asked her if she remembered how popular Stanley tumblers were a couple of years ago. Does anyone still use a Stanley? (Carla doesn’t. She uses an Owala that is spillproof, unlike the Stanley.) (I see that Stanley now makes a spillproof tumbler, but that wasn’t the trend when Carla got hers.)
What about the Lululemon belt bag that she had to have? When was the last time she used that?
“This is different, Mom,” she told me. “Everyone loves squishies.”
It seems like I have a bunch of things to write about – I have a whole list of post titles in the document above this one – but my brain is insisting on instead perseverating on some grumbles and frets. Sometimes it helps to write those out; clears some space in the garage of the mind.
Speaking of the garage, this is what my garage door currently looks like. We don’t know what happened to the garage door. What we do know is that my husband came home from work yesterday, tried to open his garage door, and it wouldn’t open. After some examination, we discovered that a pin had been pushed through a bracket (these are totally the right words) when it wasn’t supposed to be, preventing the garage door from opening properly. We pulled the pin, the garage door resumed normal function.
The only thing that happened between when my husband left for work – via a working garage door – and returned, is that Carla and a neighborhood friend did some rollerblading in the garage. Carla insists she did not touch the garage door, or anything on it. Okay, fine.
But then when I left the house, my garage door also wouldn’t open. I checked, and sure enough, the pin was pushed through the bracket. When I removed the pin, the door still wouldn’t open, so I did some jiggling and finally got it to go up enough that I could back out onto the driveway. But it wouldn’t close. The motor was working – I could see the little track that maneuvers the door moving – but the door wouldn’t budge. So I pulled the thing that you pull when your electricity is out, so I could manually close the door. And it moved just fine… for a few feet. Until ANOTHER pin, this one with a wheel on it, for maneuvering the door down the outer tracks of the housing (so many terms that are so definitely accurate), popped out and bopped me on the head.
The garage door is ASKEW, as you can see. My husband and I tried to fix it, but we made it much, much worse. At least it’s CLOSED, now. Time to call the garage door guy, probably. But it is a holiday weekend here in the US so who’s to know if garage door guys are even working right now. Plus, the last time I called a garage door guy, one of them tried to tell me I needed a brand new garage door when the other guy said my door was fixable, and then fixed it, and it has remained operable for nearly two years. Is this newest issue related to the one we dealt with back in 2023? Should I have listened to the first guy all along? No one knows. No one knows, either, why the pins were pushed in the first place. Least of all Carla.
It has been Quite A Week for stuff like that. There’s the air conditioner leak, which I am monitoring per my dad’s instructions. He thinks we just need to get a new threaded fitting for the pipe. All my fingers are crossed, of course, and perhaps I am just being hyper-aware, but it feels like our air conditioner is really struggling to keep the house cool. Is this because it is a million degrees outside? Or because the air conditioner is failing? Okay, okay – let’s not fret too intensely about the air conditioner. I want to tell you about my ATM mishap.
Picture this: It is a million degrees outside, I am picking up my child from camp and then picking up her friend so we can have a sleepover. I have a ten minute window in which I can grab some food for dinner and get some cash to tip the furniture delivery people who are due at my house first thing the next morning. Carla and I swing through the grocery store in record time and there’s only one car ahead of me at the ATM. The car takes forever. I always wonder if people behind me think I am taking forever, too. Or are there some people who save up fifty-eight transactions for a single visit to the ATM. Hard to say. When I finally pull up, the machine takes my card, takes my pin, but then there is no “withdraw cash” option. Sigh.
There is a walk-up ATM on the other side of the bank, so I park and go through the whole thing again. This time, the machine takes my card, takes my pin, and there IS a “withdraw cash” option. I click it and a screen pops up that says “validating pin.” I wait. And wait. And wait. The sun helpfully spotlights me against the building. A woman pulls up and asks if this machine has cash, because the drive-up one doesn’t. I told her it ate my card. She suggests that I see if anyone inside can help, which I reluctantly do (I don’t want to leave my card in the machine), but the bank is closed.
I try to call the bank – first the branch, which is closed to callers as well as customers, and then the customer service hotline, which has eight million prompts that I dutifully type in but can’t get it to understand – and then start pounding on the doors. I can see people inside; maybe they will take pity on me? I am not a bank robber, just a damp, flustered, middle-aged woman. Bless them: someone tries to communicate with me via mouthing and sign language (very ineffective), and then eventually a man comes into the lobby and talks to me through the doors. I explain what happened, he explains he’s not allowed to open the doors to the bank after hours, and we discuss options. I am near tears at this point. The frozen screen still says “validating pin” and my main concern is that the computer will eventually start working again and then my card, with validated pin, will be available for anyone to use. I don’t know if I look plaintive enough, or harmless enough, or annoying enough, but the man finally gets a colleague to unlock the doors for him so he can come check on the situation himself.
I am apparently switching verb tenses now. The solution turned out to be: he reset the machine from inside the building. This, he told me, could result in my card being spit back out at me – so I needed to wait until it completely reset – or it could result in my card disappearing forever into the ether. So I called customer service again to see if I could get to a human. Meanwhile, Carla was sitting in the air-conditioned car, fretting about all the other people (total: 3) who were also trying to withdraw money from this bank and were stuck in the same pointless loop we were. She was particularly worried about one elderly man in a convertible who went through the drive-up ATM twice and pulled up to the walk-up ATM also twice, only to be turned away because I was still there.
HALF AN HOUR LATER – drenched in sweat, but unwilling to leave the machine in case my card popped out – the machine reset and my card was nowhere in sight. I’d finally gotten through to a real person via the customer service hotline and was asking him to send me a new card when the banker appeared out of nowhere and asked if I had my ID. I handed it over and he returned it WITH MY CARD.
I was so very grateful. I know he broke all sorts of rules by leaving the bank, even though he took precautions to make sure that even if I was going to threaten him with a weapon, I still couldn’t access the bank. Sometimes people are so bound by rules that they are unable to exercise any sort of judgment call. How fortunate that this man was able to judge that my situation required some rule bending. I did not even get his name, but he is my hero.
The Balloons. This is just pure complaining now, but something else I despise right up there with “unable to exercise judgment calls” is people who gate-keep rules/information. I went to a local business that sells balloons to get a few for Carla’s birthday. (She still adores balloons.) I took my balloons to the register, where two young people were inflating balloons and tying on ribbon. One of the people came to take my order. “When is your event?” Tomorrow morning, I told her. She looked with dismay at the balloons I’d chosen. “Those won’t last that long,” she said, pointing to the latex balloons. I’ve had twelve years of experience with balloons, and I think they’d be fine, but whatever. I told her I would exchange them for mylar balloons. “Would you like to take the balloons with you now?” Sure, that would prevent me from making a second trip, why not? “We can’t, we have a bunch of orders we’re working on right now.” Okay, that’s fine; I had been prepared to come back anyway. I asked her what time they closed that night. “Eight.” Okay, great. I will pick up the balloons at eight. “We don’t fulfill balloon orders that late. The latest we fulfill balloon orders is seven-thirty.” Oh-kay. Seven-thirty, is fine, I will pick them up at seven-thirty. “Well, probably not seven-thirty. Maybe six-thirty, or seven.” Great, I will pick them up at seven. The other person filling balloons piped up: “We have another order to fulfill at seven.” The person who I was dealing with said, “We’re fulfilling another order at seven so I can’t do seven.” Okay, fine. Six-thirty, I do not care. “Do you want your ribbon floor length?” I had no experience with this unit of measurement, or how it could possibly be a standard length, so I said something like, I want the ribbon long because we have tall ceilings. The person filling balloons said, “We do floor length or table length.” My pleasant smile was beginning to feel more like a grimace. Floor length is fine. “What color ribbon do you want?” I started to answer and then asked what colors they haveand chose the first option she gave me.
If there are very specific parameters, TELL ME THEM. Don’t make me guess.
Update on the sleep situation. One of my top health concerns over the past couple of years has been my increasingly, enduringly terrible sleep and resulting fatigue. I did two at-home sleep studies that were inconclusive. The sleep specialist recommended an in-lab sleep study, which I finally did last week (would anyone be interested in a post about what that was like?) and got my results. Basically, I have very mild obstructive sleep apnea. So mild that usually they don’t treat it (and if it’s so mild they don’t typically treat it, is the sleep apnea what’s causing my sleep problems?). (I also have restless limbs, for which I already take copious supplements and have a prescription to use on really bad nights.) My sleep specialist said that I could try a CPAP machine if I wanted, I could get a dental appliance that is not covered by insurance, or I could – wait for it – lose weight. Sigh. Okay, the last one is free and worth doing anyway, so I guess I’ll try that first.
Possibly I am so easily annoyed right now because I have some un-displaceable worry and regret that’s just… percolating. I just heard some news about a friend that was very troubling. It didn’t come from her; it came, in fact, third hand, but you’ll have to trust me that the source is inarguably trustworthy. I suppose there is still room for some blurring of details, so I’m keeping that in mind. Anyway: I learned that she was going through something horrific some years ago and I had no idea. If I had known, I would have tried to help her. But I didn’t know, and she went through this horrific experience and she went through it alone. Because the revelation about her circumstances didn’t come from her, and because we are the type of friends who now keep in touch via text two or three times a year, and who see each other every decade or so if we happen to be in the same state at the same time, I don’t feel comfortable reaching out to her. Not that I’d even know what to say. “I’m sorry you went through that?” “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you?” I don’t know any details, just broad strokes. I have every reason to believe she is okay now, and that the horrific ordeal is in the past. But it still hurts my heart to know this thing was happening right in front of me and I was so totally oblivious.
DRASTIC TONE AND SUBJECT CHANGE. Even though it required turning on my oven, I did some medicinal baking yesterday. I made my favorite summer treat, a purple plum torte. Typically, I make it in a nine-inch pan but this time I made it in a six-inch pan and it was so good. Because it’s taller, the cake had to cook a little longer for the middle to set, and the edges caramelized into a delicious cookie-like crust, and the plums settled in the middle into a gorgeous jam. A plus, would make again.
Comeuppance. Do you remember, lo these many weeks ago, when I was complaining about the neighbors’ kids being outside late at night playing basketball? Well, we had a friend sleep over on a weeknight and due to manyfactors, including my ATM experience, everything took place much later than I planned. The kids got in the pool at… nine. It was dark, which was not ideal, and resulted in some spooked screeching. But a night swim is a novelty and it was the only time they had to swim and I knew they weren’t going to sleep anyway. I shushed them anytime they spoke above normal conversation volume, and they ended up playing a very nice quiet game until about eleven.
The next day, Carla ran into one of her dog friends and its human companion, and she ended up mentioning that she’d been swimming the previous night. The human said, “Oh yes, I heard.”
GULP. I am a noisy inconsiderate neighbor too, it seems.
Don’t worry. I got my comeuppance. My next-door neighbors – not the basketball family – hosted a party the night before Independence Day and released three hours’ worth of massive fireworks into the night, terrifying the cat and stressing my child out with fears of fire. They stopped at about eleven. The next day, we had spent fireworks cartridges all over our driveway, backyard, and even the top of my car. I picked them all up without complaint.
Are we seriously doing this? Last week, when it was still June, I went to Michael’s to buy birthday candles and what did I see? Halloween décor. Why. Just. Why???????? (Also, I really want the tall ghost with the jack-o-lantern candy dish.)
Introvert vs. extrovert. Carla rejected the idea of day camp this summer. I did sign her up for a bunch of short camps – short in terms of duration (2-3 hours) as well as length (weeklong) – but for a lot of the summer so far, she’s been at home with me. This has been exactly as difficult as I imagined it would be. She’s bored. She’s lonely. She’s unwilling to do the things I want her to do in order to make me feel like she’s Doing Things instead of sitting in front of a screen all day. The weather has been too rainy to spend much time outside or in the pool. The kids in the neighborhood have all been at camp. And because I refuse to let her sit in front of a screen all day, she has been by my side pretty much all day long.
This should be fun! It’s a gift, in fact, to spend unstructured time with my kid. We’ve played a bunch of board games, we had a girls’ day during which we went shopping and went out to lunch, we’ve run errands together, we’ve taken the kitten to the vet. We’ve also done a lot of screen time (which I am only now realizing is a loophole in my No Screens Until You’ve Done X Ruling), watching cat videos, having Modern Family and Brooklyn 99 marathons, watching movies.
I have also arranged playdates and mini golf and invited neighbors over to swim and made dates to go visit our old neighbors.
And yet there are so many hours to fill and so many of them seem to be filled with Carla – and the kitten – needing my attention. Which, again, is precious, and also I would just like some time alone for the love. My battery drains very quickly when I don’t get time to myself, even when those people are my beloved child, and I am at my limit. (Yes, I have tried waking up early but the cat is always already awake and ready to eat and then play, and then the playing wakes Carla up, and there’s never any time alone.)
Poor Carla, born an only child to introverted parents, is a social creature who LOVES people and loves chaos and excitement and busyness. I know she is bored and lonely, and I’m trying to secure additional time with her friends, and I’m trying to remind myself that I am the grownup here, and this is my responsibility as her parent as well as a person who loves her. I am also trying to remind myself that being bored is GOOD for kids. Although I think the reason it’s good for kids is that it supposedly inspires them to be creative, while my child is creatively velcroing herself to my side. I am trying to remind myself that she won’t always want to spend time with me, and that, in fact, any moment now she could decide she never wants to speak to me again, and I should treasure this time. I am TRYING; this summer is TRYING as well, but in a different way.
Okay. Now that I’ve whined all over the internet, I’m going on a hunt for outdoor throw pillows with my husband and child. At a store, not, like, in the yard, in case that wasn’t clear.
What complaints and frets are cluttering up your mental garage?
