Category Archives: summer

Leisure Day

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I sat behind the loudly splashing veil of water that tumbles off the “mushroom” in the outdoor pool and squinted through the droplets at my family laughing and shrieking in the blue. The late-afternoon sunshine and the water in my myopic eyes made lens flares JJ Abrams would have envied, and it was one of those perfect moments that I have to write to remember because my camera is not waterproof.

The weather is contractually obliged to be hot as Hades for the long weekend of Labor Day, and I will be very miffed if it’s still this hot tomorrow, though it might be. We’ve had three days of carnival, volunteer obligations, and parade participation, and summer has been closed with a flourish, whatever atmospheric conditions may prevail from now on.

I have great plans for tomorrow, when both children will be back at school. I could sort my paperwork. I could throw out all the broken toys that can’t be touched when they’re here. I could take a bag to the thrift store or mop the kitchen floor unmolested. I could make pastry. I will probably go to Target and ceremonially wander around aimlessly enjoying the solitude and the absence of short people pestering me for toys.

Butterfly days

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Bare shoulders, freckled (mine). Sunkissed legs, growing longer (hers). A constant anthem of “I’m hungry.” (Two growth spurts, ongoing.) Huge butterflies on the orange flowers, they flip and flutter past in yellow, blue, and black; no longer a cause for excitement, taken for granted in these late days of summer.

Butterfly on orange flower

We’re sick of sunscreen and mosquito bites. We yearn for structure. We need a more pressing reason to get dressed than the fact that we’ve run out of frozen waffles again. The summer is done for. It’s dead and dusted and we’re apathetic and dusty and ready to move on.

What will I keep in my heart from the summer my children were seven and four? Turning 40, going to BlogHer; baseball games and campsites and cold-pressed coffee. I feel like the summer didn’t have a theme, a particular game played or toy loved or achievement unlocked. It was the summer Dash started baseball and vision therapy, the summer Mabel got Rapunzel and learned to swim, the year we all went to Ithaca and that I went to Chicago alone with several thousand other bloggers. The summer I had a purple bag, the year Dash had silver trainers and Mabel wouldn’t wear shorts. 

I sometimes feel we’re not doing America right, especially in the summer. We don’t grill enough, we rarely dine on the deck (because of the mosquitoes and because bug spray worries me as much as the bites do). My children do not gorge themselves on berries and watermelon and corn on the cob and as a result I spend a lot more time denying access to ice-cream than enabling it. We haven’t been to the beach once this summer, and the single attempt at seeing a family movie was aborted before the trailers were over. We went camping but never lit a campfire, the kids didn’t love summer camp, and once again we did not grow any vegetables of our own.

Maybe next year we’ll do it better. In the meantime, the butterflies are beautiful.

Points of things

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Sky, sea, land

Tomorrow is the first day of the last week of the summer holidays. Mabel doesn’t go back to school till after Labor Day, but Dash starts second grade on August 19th. The second-grade thing isn’t phasing me, but the fact that the summer is almost gone is a bit stunning. This year seems to be going faster than any one before. If this keeps up, by the time I’m in my eighties, I imagine days will fly by like seconds. No wonder my mother is confused.

I partly feel like I’m just getting back into the groove of our nice laid-back summer (after the disruptions of going away, two weeks of camp, and then BlogHer) but on the other hand I’m looking forward to a bit more peace and the opportunity to throw away some of all the crap that’s been piling up around here. Because apparently I can’t do that when the kids are in the house.

I went to Target on my own for an hour yesterday and realised why I like shopping: it gives me a chance to center myself and plan things, whether it’s figuring out what might help for organizing the house a little more (I bought an in-tray!) or deciding what I want to, um, invest in this autumn. (Found a dress I want as a shirt, decided to e-Bay a bag I never use and buy one I fell in love with in Marshall’s; also tried on boots, but that’s not relevant ahem as I was saying…)

I thought I’d missed my Dad’s birthday and blamed it on the fact that apparently now I only know it’s someone’s birthday when Facebook tells me about it, and my Dad (needless to say) is not on Facebook. But then I realised I just had no idea what the heck date it was in August, and I hadn’t missed it at all. So that’s good.

I might have a freelance editing job lined up for when the kids go back to school. You might not get so much blathering from over here if I find I’m actually working instead.

In the last week both kids have started swimming underwater, Mabel for the first time ever and Dash for the first time since a little last summer. My kids have never been those ones who don’t seem to notice whether they’re on top of the water or the water’s on top of them – they would always crane their necks to keep their faces out of the water, even with goggles on for extra protection. So to see them whooshing around underneath all of a sudden is pretty cool. I told Mabel I didn’t do that till I was twelve, and she was well chuffed.

Technically, I finished the 30-day shred yesterday. That is, it was the tenth day I’ve done the level-3 workout. However, I did take off about ten days in July when I was sick and then away, and almost another two weeks from BlogHer until yesterday, and I spent a few intervening days working back up to it by doing levels one and two a couple of times. I don’t feel any different, though it’s not as hard as it was at the start, so I must be at least a tiny bit fitter and stronger. Dash says I look taller, which has to be a good sign. The scales still say I’m a few pounds lighter even though at no point did I stop eating all the muffins I usually eat. I will try to keep going until I get totally bored or something else happens or they go back to school and I try running again.

Since we didn’t do anything today, here are some photos from last weekend, when we took in some history by going to Fort McHenry in Baltimore. A decisive battle of the War of 1812 took place in Baltimore Harbor, and as the poet Francis Scott Key watched to see which flag would be flying over the fort as dawn broke the following morning, he wrote what would become the lyrics of The Star Spangled Banner.

Stars and stripes over Fort McHenry
Teeny little flag up high; huge enormous flag down low
Three people walking the battlements
Walking the battlements

The other vacation

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This is what I wrote last night:

Tomorrow, my vacation begins.

I mean, the one where the kids both go to camp from 8:45 to 3:30 every day for two weeks, and culminating in my three days away at the BlogHer conference in Chicago.

I’m still feeling a little I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it about the whole thing, really. Mabel has never been away from me for full days like that, and she’s not the lover of organized activities her brother is, as well as being fairly clingy at the moment, what with the Four And A Half Thing. Camp is meant to be fun, so if she’s really not having fun I’ll see if they can refund me the difference and go with the half day instead. Eight forty-five to noon is still 45 minutes longer than her school day has been all year. It wouldn’t be quite as intoxicatingly freedom-y as no kids all day, but I’d still take it.

———————

This morning began with a moan from D’s bedroom. Since he’s a happy cheery morning person (didn’t get that from me), a moan is never exactly a harbinger of good.

“My tummy hurts. And my forehead feels funny.”

Of course. Of course it does. What else would it do? Sigh. I know he’s not faking because he’s the one who really wants to go to camp. His sister, on the other hand, was fine until about ten minutes before we had to leave the house, when she started telling me how maybe she didn’t really want to go to camp after all and maybe she’d much rather stay at home and how it wasn’t fair that Dash got to be sick so he didn’t have to go.

Oh, the injustice.

———————-

I brought Mabel to camp and made it out the door again alone. She was happy to see a friend from school and – more importantly – a large pink doll house WITH PONIES. She looked a bit wobbly when I left but was holding it together.

Dash is now perfectly fine, after three pieces of toast. He’s been making things out of duct tape and making movies of himself fighting/dancing with my old camera. I am going to bring him down for lunch and the afternoon half of today’s camp, because if I don’t he’ll drive me demented and use up all my computer space with uploaded crap.

Blue boy
Luckily for you, I couldn’t get the movie to upload, so you just get a photo

————————

I brought him to camp. He was immediately hailed by at least two kids in the room, and slotted right in to his group with a grin. I dropped by Mabel’s building without seeing her and inquired of a counsellor how she was doing. She’s fine. Totes fine. (They’re not in the same camp, but are based about a minute away from each other.) I went to Old Navy and Safeway and did some shopping.

It’s awfully quiet around here. I wonder what I’ll do next. When’s pickup time again?

Transatlantic subtleties: Homes from home

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Before I go any further I realise that there are some terms that need clarification when discussing one’s holidays ( that is, vacation ) with a transatlantic audience. This is (almost exactly) what we stayed in last week.

The campsite calls it an RV, but it’s not. I wanted to call it a caravan, but it’s not. It might be a mobile home if you were in Ireland, but here a mobile home would probably be bigger. So here are some parameters for your terms if you should be called upon to explain your temporary dwellings to someone from across the pond.

Tent : Fine, a tent’s a tent. I’m not a camper, so that’s all I have to say about that.

Caravan : I believe that if you say “caravan” to an American, they will envisage an old-timey Romany (gypsy) caravan. Or maybe a bunch of camels following each other over the dessert. To an Irish person, a caravan is a tin can with bunks in it that you can pull behind your car. This, obviously, is a lovely vintage one. Newer ones aren’t quite so petite or bijou.

Adorable; but I wouldn’t want to live in it

Trailer : To an American, a trailer is something large and inhabitable that you can pull behind your car – an Irish caravan, in fact. To an Irish person, it’s a base with a tow-hitch and wheels that you would put something like a boat on to transport it.

Trailer
An Irish sort of trailer

Mobile home : To an Irish person, a mobile home is a large caravan, possibly with the wheels taken off. What we stayed in last week was an Irish-style mobile home. To an American, a mobile home is can have actual rooms and a deck built on it and be mobile only in the vaguest of meanings. That it can be easily moved by a tornado, for instance.

Mobile home (US style)
This home is “mobile”, if you’re American

RV : This stands for a Recreational Vehicle. It’s one of those huge caravans with a built-in driver’s seat so you don’t trail it behind your car but might trail your car behind it. Some Americans sell up the family house when they retire, buy an RV, and travel the length and breadth of the continent for some or all of their remaining days. Others just have one to go on vacation with. I cannot imagine trying to drive one on European roads, but I think they’re called motorhomes there.

I have no idea where a camper van fits in all this, or what you’d consider one to be. Is it the orange VW Beetle “bus” my cousins had in 1976?

Vintage VW camper van
Just add (Little Miss) Sunshine

One other thing occurs to me. If you get rained out of your campsite, you might want to check in to a more permanent establishment. Hotels and motels and guesthouses are fine, but B&Bs might cause a hiccup of misunderstanding.

In the US a Bed & Breakfast is a particularly nice guesthouse. It’s usually quite fancy and some of them don’t take children. We will probably never stay in one en famille . An Irish B&B, on the other hand, is usually a private house that rents out a bedroom or two to tourists. Generally speaking, Irish B&B’s are a good budget option and very family-friendly. The one thing both types of B&B have in common is that with any luck the breakfast will be good.

Transatlantic subtleties is an occassional series of posts, to which I add whenever the mood moves me. You can find the others by clicking on the link in my tag cloud on the right.

New-obsessions week, day 2: Cold-pressed iced coffee

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Okay, so coffee is not a new obsession. But this is something new for me: iced coffee at home.

I am a travesty of an American. Don’t tell the people who gave me that certificate , but we don’t have a coffee machine in our house. We drink instant coffee here, mostly. (This also makes me a very bad European. Sorry, everyone.)

But we do have a cafet ière , otherwise known as a French press, otherwise known as a plungy-thingy [imagine me doing dodgy-looking hand movements to indicate the plunging]. And we have a fridge. And I bought some ground coffee in a bag. But the special thing about this is that it’s cold-press coffee, which makes it even easier, as well as smoother and deliciouser. All you need to do is remember to make it before you go to bed.

1. Put four heaped tablespoons of coffee grounds (or more) in the French press.
2. Fill it up with cold water. Stir a little. Do not plunge yet.
3. Put it in the fridge overnight.
4. Get up on a warm summer’s morning. Open fridge. Plunge, and pour into a nice tall glass.
5. Add ice cubes*, milk, and a straw.

* I do not have ice cubes. This is the other reason they’ll throw me out of the country, but if we had ice cubes the children would do nothing but take them out of the freezer, play with them, and crunch them up for their dinner. Besides, I don’t want to dilute my lovely coffee with anything but some nice creamy milk.

You can play around with the quantities until you get the strength you like best – this is weakish, but if you use ice, you might want it stronger. Keep the rest in a sealed jar (or just where it is) for tomorrow and the next day, unless you need to drink the whole thing in one morning.

You can also make a simple syrup to sweeten it a little, or just stir in some sugar if you’re not fussy. I’m sure I’ll get around to that some day soon, but for now I’ve just been enjoying mine along with a rhubarb muffin from the freezer for second breakfast after my workout.

Tune in tomorrow for my new all-purpose household and beauty obsession.

This entry was posted in recipes , summer and tagged drinks , new obsessions on by .

New-obsessions week: Day 1 – Exercise

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When Jillian Michaels says “Just a couple more,” she means ten. When she says “Nearly done” she means “Halfway through, maybe.” When she says “You’re well on your way to being shredded,” it’s true, but maybe not exactly the way she wanted. As I lay panting on the floor this morning with drips of sweat running into my eyes, those are the things that came to mind.

You know, this might be hard to believe but before last week I didn’t really know who Jillian Michaels was. This is what comes of not having had cable TV for three years. Apparently I never really watched The Biggest Loser because I was too busy watching Top Chef and Project Runway when we did have cable, and I think I had her a little mixed up with some red-headed chick in the UK who tells people what they should eat. Is she a different Gillian, maybe?*

Anyway, I heard once again recently about this 30-Day Shred thing that’s only Very Old News, and, always being last to run after the bandwagon and try to jump on board just as it’s leaving town, I decided to give it a go, with my self-imposed motivator of BlogHer attendance coming up apace. It checked a lot of boxes straight away:

  • Not all lying down like Pilates, so the kids have less opportunity to jump on me
  • Level 1 available free on YouTube; I bought Level 2 for just 1.99 from Amazon downloads this morning
  • Indoors in the heat and humidity of the summer
  • Quick – half an hour and I’m done, and I can actually do it with the kids in the house and no extra adult for distracting/restraining

Not that that last is easy, mind you. The first day I had the seven-year old pacing me jumping jack for jumping jack during the entire aerobic part of the workout, and he barely broke a sweat. Which was great for my ego, of course. In between times he was bugging me to have a turn of the weights (I have measly 2lb ones that the kids love to swing around terrifyingly) and getting between me and the screen.

Sometimes the four-year-old would come and try to snuggle up beside me as I lay on the floor trying to do my reverse crunches or my arm flies (see how well I can say all the words now?), and generally my panting would be interspersed with the following monologue:

“Put down the weights. No. At least, don’t hold them there. Move them AWAY from the computer. Don’t hold them over your head. Fine, just do it that way. Yes. NO. No, don’t drop them on the hardwood floor. No… okay, now I need them again.”

At least it distracted me from the pain of the lunges, I suppose. Also, my feet are too small to do lunges without falling over. Some might say it’s bad balance, but I’m going with the small feet thing.

Anyway, the point is that this morning I started level two, which means I have been working out for 30 minutes a day for ten of the past eleven days, and I’m quite pleased about that. I also stepped on the scales this morning and may possibly have lost some pounds too. If things are really spectacular, I might have some before and after pictures in another 20 days, but don’t get your hopes up because I might totally chicken out on that front.

Tomorrow in my new summer obsessions: coffee. Wait and see.

*Aha. That’s Gillian McKeith . Verrry different Gillian, apparently.

Star charts, episode umpty: A new hope

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Sometimes I wonder when having kids became this intricate tango of bribery that you can’t call bribery and reward systems and star charts and calculated praise and natural consequences and parenting strategies and whatever else it is we do to try to outwit or outmaneuver these small people. I’m sure when I was a child – ah, when I were a lass – my parents just said “It’s time for bed,” and off I trotted like a good little girl. (Actually, my dad gave me a piggyback upstairs and read me my stories, but then I turned over and went to sleep and that was that.)

I did not have star charts, I did not have rewards or punishments or a naughty step or time outs. I was spanked a couple of times, but mostly the threat of parental disapproval was enough to keep me on the straight and narrow. (I did have a penny taken off my 20p pocket money every time I said “Yeah” instead of “Yes” for a while, and I admit I went into negative equity pretty quickly on that one.)

So, what? Children these days, eh? Parents these days, more like, being one of them myself. I blame some amount of my good behaviour on my lack of siblings, having seen for myself how much better behaved my kids are one at a time rather than both together, when they egg each other on and rile each other up and kick each other and love each other simultaneously in ways I, a sibling-deficient only, could never even begin to fathom.

But I do keep thinking it should be less complicated. We should just tell them what they have to do, and they should just do it. I’m sure I’m not remembering it wrong. I’m sure my parents had it easy.

———–

And so the summer vacation begins and I haul out a new star chart, a new System, a new set of bribes and routines and things to aim for and fun in return for no fun (also known as cooperation). I am suffused with hope, shot through with organization, filled with plans, inspired by lists.

It’ll probably all fall apart in a couple of weeks, assuming it even gets off the ground. My goals won’t be SMART enough, or my menus won’t be planned enough, and I’ll be winging it daily and we’ll all be yelling at each other and then there’ll be another reset when we’re on vacation, and for camp, and for the second half of the summer.

But we have to start somewhere, right? We can be shiny with optimism and glowing in the delight of our no-failure-yet for a little while longer.

How to blog in the summer vacation

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  • Send the children on a treasure hunt. Forget to bury the treasure.
  • Start a game of hide and seek. Don’t seek.
  • Blog one sentence at a time.
  • Actually, just turn your whole blog over to your Twitter account.
  • Recycle old posts from when nobody used to read your blog. Pretend you just had that baby last week.
  • Send the children out to forage for food instead of going to the supermarket.
  • Make the children cook your dinner.
  • Drunkblog.
  • Send them to camp.
  • Send yourself to camp.
  • Hire a mother’s helper.
  • Hire a ghost writer.
  • Get all your friends to write guest posts.
  • Ask famous people to contribute guest posts. (This entry actually written by the Dalai Lama.)
  • Sacrifice your half hour of TV a night to a noble cause. 
  • Or use that time to blog.
  • Blog while watching TV. You won’t be Jon Stewart’s so funny distracted at all.
  • Stop doing Sporcle quizes.
  • Stop playing GeoGuessr.
  • Embrace the chaos. Liveblog the children’s fights.
  • Photo entries. Lots of photo entries.

Things I may be doing tomorrow

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  • Panicking, because Wednesday is Mabel’s last day of school and Friday is Dash’s.
  • Going to Target and panic-buying ALL THE THINGS.
  • Doing all my grocery shopping for the summer so that I don’t have to bring two children to the supermarket twice a week.
  • Painting my toenails.
  • Paying someone else to paint my toenails while I relax. 
  • Not being able to relax while someone else paints my toenails because of all the other things I could be doing with this very precious morning.
  • Giving myself a home a facial and dying my hair, which sorely needs it.
  • Cleaning the house, which sorely needs it.
  • Reading a book, because when else will I get the chance?
  • Writing a bunch of blog posts and scheduling them in advance so that you don’t all wander off and leave me during the summer when posting dips below acceptable levels.
  • Surfing the Internet.
  • Telling Facebook how it’s my second-last morning of freedom.
  • Telling Twitter ditto.
  • Compiling lists of things we can do during the summer.
  • Compiling lists of things I should do but won’t get done till September.
  • Going to the post office to mail my mother’s birthday present.
  • (I should probably definitely do that last one. Remind me in the morning, ‘kay?)