summer – Life Off Headset

Weekly recap + what we ate: School’s Out!

I guess summer has begun!

The 11 year old had her 5th Grade Promotion Ceremony. The Husband and I both went. Oh my goodness. There might have been some tears. You know, those happy tears of, “Wasn’t she just a little baby? and I can’t believe that she’s made it all the way through elementary school! and She’s growing up and moving forward and I can’t always be there for her!” You know, that kind of stuff. Man, if I’m this blubbering mess at her elementary school promotion ceremony, I can’t imagine what kind of mess I’ll be as she gets older. I can’t believe that I will have at least two more Promotion/Graduation ceremonies to go though for this kid. More, if she finished college. And I’ll also have to go through this with the two other kids.

There were so many nice touches to the ceremony. The Principal reminding the students to “Find your superpower and always always always remember to be kind.” And then reminding them that they will always be a Sea Turtle (the school mascot). (okay – I might be tearing up remembering that bit.) As each student’s name was read out, the teacher also read a quote by the student – things like favorite memories, advice, hopes for the world. Some of my favorites:
“The world would be a more awesome place if there were more male teachers.”
“My advice for kindergarteners would be to enjoy recess because you don’t have it in middle school.”
“I will always remember to dial in”

There were also a lot of kids who mentioned their friends and teachers in their quote. It made me realize that even though learning is important, what really makes an impact are the friendship and human connections that the kids make – the people who make a child feel seen and heard. I feel like the 11 year old was fortunately place in the pandemic timeline – she had three years of in person learning before the pandemic and then she had a year and a half of in person learning afterwards. While the year of virtual learning was certainly disruptive, she could start and end elementary school surrounded by people and not online.

At the end of the ceremony, the school has a “clap out” where all the other grades line the hallways and the 5th graders walk by every classroom and high five all the other students. And it ended with cake. Then lots of pictures and good-byes and some phone numbers exchanged for future playdates.

That was the big event for the week.

Well, actually only one kid went to school on the Last Day of School. The 11 year old stayed home – the principal said that no one expected fifth graders to show up on the last half day. And the 3 year old had the day off for teachers in service. She actually is quite confused as to why she still has to go to school/ daycare this summer while her siblings don’t. The six year old went to his last day of kindergarten. Whew. We made it.

Other fun things:

This snapshot of life moment: The two younger kids were playing together, while I wrapped a few things up before I took them to a pool. Then I hear the 6 year old say to the 3 year old , “You need a stick! Go get a stick!” And the three year old runs into the kitchen and grabs a chopstick. Now whenever my kids grab sticks, some spidey sense tells me to be a little wary.
“What do you need a stick for?” I asked.
“To wave it!”
I follow them to the living room, and this is what I saw:

The three year old “conducting” while the six year old “plays”. It delighted me to my music loving heart!

For Better of For Worse:

I found this battered copy of a For Better or For Worse volume in a Little Free Library and immediately snatched it up. I grew up reading Lynn Johnston’s comic strip For Better or For Worse in my local newspaper. The family structure was very similar to my own – mom, dad, older brother, younger sister. And the younger sister was about my age as the strip progressed. I always found it so relatable – just an ordinary family and the gentle ironies of life. Johnston has such a gift for seeing the humour in the mundane. There are certain strips that have always stuck in my head. The one where the mother responds to the father’s complaint of the kids dog-earing books, by saying, “At last they are reading!” has always stayed with me.

The 11 year old has also been reading this slim volume and one day she showed me the page where pre-teen Elizabeth is in a prickly foul mood, slamming doors and growling at her parents, but then at the end of the day asks her mom for a hug. “Sometimes,” the 11 year old says to me, “That’s how I feel.” I just wanted to give her all the hugs.

This yummy breakfast: One day the kids wanted oatmeal for breakfast, which isn’t something we have a lot in the summer. They had frozen blueberries and maple syrup on theirs. I wanted a savory version, so I had eggs, ume plum vinegar, sesame oil, cilantro, and chili bamboo shoots on mine. Kind of like congee. I love chili bamboo shoots; I could eat them right out of the jar. But it’s one of those foods that I always forget that I like so I don’t have it too often. On the side, mango with tajin.

Lychees – I went to HMart for groceries the other day, and when I came home I realized that I have three versions of lychees:

There is my favorite Japanese gummy candy, then canned lychee because there is a lychee ice cream recipe that I want to try to make, and then fresh lychee, which we very rarely get, so I always buy some if I see them and they look good. I guess lychees are my favorite fruit! They are so sweet and juicy and have a nice chew to them that it’s just a really perfect eating experience for me. I’m sure the rarity makes them even more special too. They actually had lychees at Costco last week, but those aren’t as sweet at the ones from HMart.

Grateful for:
– My health. I’ve met a lot of people these past few weeks who are dealing with chronic health conditions, and I’ve been feeling really grateful that thanks mainly to genetics and good luck, I’ve always felt very good in my body. It’s also made me realize that medicine is not an exact science – my friends have gone through a battery of tests and visited many doctors and basically get a diagnosis of “Yup, you feel tired/have migraines/inexplicably vomit…” How mentally exhausting that must be, on top of not feeling physically well! I don’t want to come across a smug, but I’m realizing that I can’t take my ability to function without pain or discomfort for granted, especially as I get older. Health issues can be so mysterious and I could very well develop a chronic issue at anytime, so I’m grateful for every day that I’m healthy.

– The 11 year old’s elementary school and especially the staff and teacher. I had so many doubts about having the 11 year old switch schools for 5th grade. Clearly the partial Immersion program that she was in was not serving her well, but was a new school really the answer? What if she didn’t like the school? What if the kids at the new school were just as mean as the kids at the old school? Is it too big of an adjustment to make for the last year of elementary school? But it was absolutely the right decision, and honestly, one that we should have made sooner. The principal runs the school with the authoritative air of a benevolent ruler – a firm and kind man. The office staff is always happy to see people come in; they never act as if you’re being a bother. And the teachers all want to help kids learn and do well. This is our fourth elementary school experience and I’ll say that I didn’t find these things everywhere. The 11 year old found her spot and friends and one fun thing at the promotion ceremony was meeting all the people whom she connected with over the school year.

-The nice weather and the air clearing up. Luckily we only had about two days of really bad air here in the DC area, but then things were back to normal. With this week being tech week, I’m in the theatre at lot, and I haven’t been getting out to run. But I’m grateful that when I do get breaks, there is balmy weather- not quite grossly humid – and sunshine and shade and lush summer green for me to enjoy.

Looking Forward To: So the Husband has taken all three kids on trip. I’ve had to stay home because I’m working this week. It seems so luxurious to have the whole house to myself. These are things I’m looking forward to
– Reading! I went to the library last week on my day off and got a whole stack of books. I’m inspired by Coco who has been spending hours reading in the morning while her family is away!

– Cooking! I am going to cook and eat all the things that I don’t often get to cook when the family is at home – cauliflower, bok choy, fried rice, lots of vegetables. Tempeh. This is a big one. I’ve had tempeh in the fridge for longer than I care to admit, but no one likes tempeh. That’s not true, quite – no one likes the idea of tempeh, so I never make it. (They’re fine when I do finally make it but sometimes it’s not worth listening to the grousing). Also all the things that I want to eat, but the kids eat before I get to it. Like lychees.

– Cleaning out the guest room. This is my big “To Do” item while home by myself. We have family coming to visit in July and currently the guest room is clothes storage. I need to organize and put the clothes in bins and then put the clothes in the attic.

-Blog – finish my Amsterdam recaps.

-And then also all the other life admin stuff – camp forms, pay the bills, etc. I know this doesn’t really go on a “Looking forward to” list… but I’m looking forward to doing it without having a kid come up and interrupt me.

What We Ate – I still feel like every night I’ve had some variation of this conversation with the Husband:
Him: What can I make for dinner?
Me: Well there’s x, y, and z in the fridge.
Him: What can I do with that?
Me: … spits ball some complicated ideas.
Him: We’ll just have eggs.

In truth, he’s doing a great job of keeping the kids fed as I work into the evening. But I look forward to being able to meal plan again some day:

Saturday: Pizza and movie night – School of Rock.

Sunday: Camp food with friends. Our friends had bought a new camp stove and wanted to try it out, so we went on a hike and then they made dinner at the end. Rice and Beans with Sausage and vegetables – they had dehydrated okra and tomatoes and added that. It was really tasty. There was mac and cheese and broccoli rice for the kids.

Monday: Pork chops with gravy and green beans. The Husband cooked. This is the kind of Midwestern meal he makes without a receipe.

Tuesday: Zucchini Boats – the Husband cooked. We seem to eat these a lot, but it’s a good way to get vegetables into the kids.

Wednesday: Breakfast sandwiches.

Thursday: Turkey Chili – I made before heading off to work. This was one of those really satisfying meals to make in that I got to use up lots of leftovers and clean out the fridge a little. I used the leftover zucchini boat filling (ground turkey) and tossed it in in Instant Pot with leftover turkey burgers, a can of crushed tomatoes, celery, carrots, onions, corn, black beans and chili powder and cumin. It was really tasty and I had the leftovers in wraps for lunch all week.

Friday: Sandwiches at the Golf Course. The Summer music series has started at the local golf course – so many a Fridays we just grab sandwiches from the deli and head there with our lawn chairs and picnic blankets. Even when we don’t plan to go with friends, we almost always run into someone we know.

Saturday: Pizza and movie night. It was my turn to choose and I chose The Queen of Katwe, a 2016 movie based on the true story of a chess prodigy living in the slums of Kampala, Uganda. I’m trying to find more family movies that aren’t animated and I really enjoyed this one. The story is by turns inspirational and dramatic and eye-opening.

Monday: Turkey Chili leftovers

Tuesday: Grilled Tofu and Tomatoes – the husband made this from the Green Barbeque Cookbook, a book of vegan and vegetarian recipes to make on the grill. It was very tasty. Vegan.

Wednesday: Eggs and Green Beans. The Husband cooked.

Thursday: Cucumber and Black Bean Noodle Salad from To Asia With Love by Hetty McKinnon. This was really tasty and went over pretty well with the kids, though one kid only at the veggies and one kid only ate the noodles. The dressing base is fermented black bean sauce, one of my favorite ingredients. I added green beans and five spice tofu to bulk it up. Vegan.

Friday: Leftovers for me. Not quite sure what the Husband and kids did.

Eat the Peaches

The mornings hover between spring and summer, just where I like it. The temperatures are low enough that there is a slight chill, the air is dry from having released its humidity in a midnight rainstorm, leaving wet grass and the smell of rain. Yet the earth has tilted so the sunlight is early and direct, warming out faces as I walk the kids to school, and our backs as I walk home after drop off. I know that soon, 8am will be suffocatingly humid and 80 degrees, so I remind myself to savour these favorite mornings.

The other day, I made a to do list for the week. Yes, I’m slowly getting back into the habit, dumping out my brain like the linen closet and putting things back folded and neat, and maybe putting aside those tasks that are no longer useful. The week’s to do list read:

-pay bills
– sort bills from [rental property]
– figure out summer camp
– eat the peaches

One of summer’s greatest gifts is fresh peaches. Bought by the bushel from farmer’s markets, they are so plentiful and sweet, the seconds barely discernable from the firsts. Sometimes I like to go pick them myself, although prime peach season is typically August, when the weather is at its hottest and most humid, so the labor is never as enjoyable as the fruits of said labor. The boxes of peaches pile up in the house and we eat them as fast as we can, then turn to making pies and turnovers and eating them wrapped in ham with a slice of basil and also the peach shortbread recipe from Smitten Kitchen. But inevitably the we can’t eat them fast enough and I end up canning several jars of them and tucking them away in the basement.

Canned summer peaches are a present from my summer self to my future winter self. In the depths of winter, to open a jar of peaches and remember what summer tastes like is like eating nostalgia and warmth wrapped together. Even peaches that I remember being not quite sweet in the heat of summer, taste perfectly sweet when I spoon them into my mouth as I stare at the snow blanketing bare limbs in January.

Of course the kids always want to eat the peaches right away, after they have been put up. But I tell them, no. I want to save the peaches for that moment in winter when it feels like we have been in it for so long that I can’t remember what summer is like. Then, when I feel like summer is so far away, do I bring out a jar, and crack it open, unleashing glistening deep yellow mounds of edible sunshine.

This winter, though… it was unseasonably warm. I thought about my peaches sitting on the filing cabinet in the basement and always said to myself, “Nah. It’s not cold enough yet to bring them out. It surely will get colder and more miserable this winter.” And whether I was having a fit of asceticism, denying myself peaches, or whether the winter truly was a mild one, either way I now found myself mid May and the peaches still had not been eaten.

And so as we turn the corner into May, and I started to make my summer fun list, I realized that the peaches were still sitting in the basement when soon it would be time to bring home more bushels of peaches and can them for next winter. And what would be the point of eating canned peaches in August when the fresh peaches were so abundant?

So I put it on my list – “Eat the peaches”

As if it were a chore. But it’s not a chore. Quite the contrary. It’s just sometimes I need a reminder to do the thing that brings me joy.

Or also, bring the kids joy. The moment I brought the jars up from the basement, their faces lit up. “Peaches!” they exclaimed and crowded around as I popped open the jars, the vacuum sealed lids coming off with a satisfying sucking sound. Thuuuwack!

The baby, in particular, loves to drink the liquid that the peaches were canned in. “Potion!” she calls it, lifting the entire jar to her mouth and chugging greedily. It reminds me of Zero and Stanley in the book Holes, drinking centuries old canned peaches, calling it “Sploosh”.

So we are now down to a couple peach halves floating in “potion” in the fridge, and that is all that remains from last year’s batch. I don’t know what I’m saving those last two peach halves for, why my reluctance to eat them. Perhaps I’m holding on to the memory of last summer, wanting to draw it out as much as possible. Not anything specific at all, even. Just the idea of warm and sun and padding barefoot in my kitchen and the luxury of leisure time. (How strange that canning peaches, once a necessity, is now for me almost a leisure activity.) I have this irrational sense that once I finish those last bits of last year’s peaches, I will have lost last summer, released it into the ether of memory and time.

This is silly, I tell myself. Be practical. I need to clear that jar away to make room for the incoming crop of peaches. Besides I will be so sad if I hold on to those last few peaches so long that they spoil and then I can’t enjoy them at all. Perhaps practicality and planning is the only thing that can overcome my sentimentality over a bit of canned fruit. So I write it on my list:

-Eat the peaches.

Weekly recap + what we ate – back to work

My camera roll is surprisingly empty this week. Well, empty of pictures that I took myself. It is somehow filled with selfies taken by the nine year old. Sometimes she loops her brother and sister into her shenanigans. As a result, I get surprise photos and videos in my feed when the iPad synchs with the cloud. I find it a cute, even while I am annoyed that she is co-opting my iCloud storage. The other day we had words about something and she recorded an apology on the iPad that popped up in my photo roll on my phone. It was hard to stay mad at that.

Anyhow this week was kind of a fresh start. The nine year old started camp and I started prep for my next show. I had enrolled the nine year old in a county camp – nothing fancy, just arts, crafts, games and plenty of time outdoors. The main virtue of the camp, quite honestly, was that it was incredibly inexpensive – $275 for six weeks, when most camps charge at least that much for a single week – and also that it is about a mile and a half from our house. She did walk to camp one morning with my dad, and I’m thinking I might do the walk with her on mornings when I don’t have to be at work in the morning. The one shortcoming of the camp is that it only runs until 3pm. This isn’t a problem for me since my parents pick her up, but I do realize that this makes this super affordable camp a non-option for many working parents.

For me, it was a combination of working from home and a day or two working on site. I’m learning to be more efficient with my time when I’m working at home. Working from home was definitely much easier this week since my parents were in town and could help watch the kids.

Even though I try not obsessively document my life in photos, I do notice that when my photo roll is empty, it means I’ve been particularly immersed in the “doing” of life, rather than remembering to take time to find the things to be savor or to be grateful for.

Good things this week, then:
– long visit with a friend whose kids are at the camp adjacent to the nine year old’s camp. It was great to catch up and talk about deep and frivolous things. The two younger kids came along and the four year old plays cars by himself for ninety minutes. I love that he can get in such a flow state of play. Also – I showed him a transformer and he was adorably amazed. “It’s a truck that turns into a robot!!!!”
– The nine year old had a couple swim meets this week. I took her to one and the Husband took her to one. I’m still finding it a little awkward to make conversation with other parents at these meets, but I do enjoy seeing the event management and planning that goes on to make the meets happen. The parents are all assigned tasks at the meet; I was a timer. Putting stage management skills to work, I guess. I find it interesting to see other pools as we travel for meets.
– I am really excited for this next opera I’m working on because it reunites me with a colleague whom I absolutely love working with. Actually she was one of the reasons I decided to take this job.

What We Ate:

Saturday: Snack dinner – hummus, crackers, cheese, whatever I could scrounge from the fridge. Still recovering from the camping trip.

Sunday: Burrito bowls from Dinner Illustrated. Pantry meal.

Monday: Hot dog at swim meet and Chipotle afterwards

Tuesday: Cacio e Pepe udon noodles and cucumber salad.

Wednesday: Grilled Cheese Sandwiches and cucumbers. (Another swim meet night – the Husband took the nine year old, and I stayed home with the kids)

Thursday: Rice Pilaf with corn and shrimp from Milk Street Fast and Slow. InstantPot recipe to eat after swim practice

Friday: pizza take-out and In the Heights. Big movie – big dance numbers, big bold colours, big emotions, big voices.