Friday, June 17, 2011

The Livin' Is Easy

Oh dear, where to begin? I am still planning on making that move to my own site, yes I am, but holy heck things have been busy and crazy around here. Good busy, but still. See, all last summer while I was hot and pregnant and contracting and semi-bed resting and then total bed resting, I was all, "Next summer is going to be the BOMB! I am going to be super mom and we are going to do Fun!Stuff! and Be!Outside! all the time!"

I am keeping my little vow to myself, but I realize it doesn't leave a lot of time for, um, anything else. We have road tripped to the zoo multiple times already, got a membership at the kiddie spray park/pool, been on neighborhood walks and playground adventures and ice cream trips and picnic play dates and gone to nature exhibits and summer library programs and blah blah blah bestmomever. We are having a ton of fun, myself included, but yeah... I am falling into bed exhausted most days, just after I finish scraping the nastiness out of Jameson's high chair. He is at long last joining the world of food eaters, and while I am super happy about this since his weight was slipping down the charts there for awhile, I forgot how time consuming and messy and what a lot of extra work it is to have a baby eating with you at mealtimes.

Additional bits of stuff:

-We got viruses on both our computers last week, so half the time my internet is not available to me anyways. Grr. Sorry if you've had an email waiting forever for a reply. I shall check it today!

-I feel frustrated right now, because in the last week or so I had so many post ideas drift through my head. I tried really hard to sort of tack them in there so I could go back and gather them up, but of course as I sit combing my brain right now all I can think of is, "Do we need more sunscreen?"

-I think I spend approximately an hour a day just sun screening kids and then scrubbing them down at bath time. No wonder summer flies by so fast.

-Our landscaping actually looks kind of nice this year. We also put shutters on our giant front window, and it looks so nice I can't believe it took us six years to get around to it.

-I am in the process of finishing all of my required reading for doula training. It's great but it's so hard for me to simultaneously read and be engaged in real life. I get so lost in books.

-Speaking of, while at the library checking out my required books, I also grabbed a few novels. I absolutely loved "My Name Is Memory" by Anne Brashares. She also wrote "The Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants," but oh dear, don't judge by that alone. I mean, I never even read that book, I'm sure it's good; what I'm saying is she's much more than YA fiction and even though this book does deal mainly with fairly youthful characters, it is in no way exclusive to them as an audience. My teaser will be that it deals with the concept of reincarnation, which found me completely engaged despite the fact that I was raised in Judeo-Christian tradition and never once gave reincarnation a serious thought.

I loved the idea of time being only a minor constraint, a movable, shifting element rather than the most finite and concrete aspect of any of our lives from the second we are born and the exact time is recorded on our birth certificate. If you liked "The Time Traveler's Wife," you'll LOVE "My Name Is Memory." (As soon as that sentence entered my mind, I saw it written out on the side of some drug store imitation cologne bottle.)

-I am running out of ideas and motivation for dinners. I just want to make salad ever night, but the kids won't eat it and anyways, we aren't rabbits, after all. But other than cook out stuff, which gets old pretty quickly, I never know what to make in the summer. Can't we just exist on watermelon and Popsicles? And, um, wine?

8 comments:

Nik-Nak said...

Oh my you MUST read Sisterhood of the traveling pants. WAY better than the movies (naturally).

I hate sunscreen. It's so necessary but takes up so much time and is so nasty.

Oh, and can I come be your kid for the rest of the summer? I want to do all of those fun things!

B said...

Definitely going to check out that book!

Your summer sounds amazing (in between sunscreen and food-related activities)!

Nowheymama said...

This is why I am a crockpot girl in the summer. Dump everything in in the morning and go play outside all day, guilt free.

Anonymous said...

Oh goodness, the sunscreen!!! It grosses me out to have my kid go to bed if she's had sunscreen on that day (am I the only one weirded out by that), so the scrubbing off at bathtime seems endless.

Marie Green said...

SHUT THE FRONT DOOR- you're going through doula training??? Why... why didn't I KNOW this? I mean... I guess I DO remember you mentioning that you were interested, but I don't think I knew you were actually starting the process. We should be emailing about this! What are you reading???

Also, I HATE the black-hole-highchair grossness. Some days I couldn't face cleaning it out, so I just blindly stuck my baby inside pretending it was clean. GAG.

Joanne said...

LORD it's hard to find something for dinner, right? Everything I think of making sounds TOO wintery, but we have had burgers every week for months.

d e v a n said...

Watermelon, Popsicles and wine sound fine to me.

GreenMomof2 said...

I'm a weirdo - I love the smell of sunscreen, so it doesnt weird me out to have the babies go to bed in it....we are just gonna get right back up the next day and need it anyways - why waste??? jk - but I really do like the smell ;0)

Love the bestmomever!!!

we just had nacho bar last night.....open up a bag of tortilla chips, brown a couple lbs of hamburger, rip up some lettuce, and whatever fixins you like galore! its fast, fun and easy!!!