weekly menu – Page 5 – Life Off Headset

Weekly recap + what we ate: Back to School and Labor Day Weekend 2023

A couple years ago, our school district switched the first day of school from after Labor Day start to before Labor day, and I am not a fan. So much momentum and excitement to get back into a routine with kids back onto the school bus, and then it all gets derailed by the last long weekend of the summer. Labor Day weekend is supposed to feel like the last hurrah of summer, but instead it kind of feels like we can’t have too much fun because we are now in school and the routines must be kept. (not that we really did that…) The kids at the bus stop this morning were definitely very low energy. Though that might be the heat.

So last week – First day of school. This is the only picture I got of all the kids:

The 11 year old was in a low level amount of panic and not wanting to take the picture because she wanted to get to school. I get that – she leaves the house at 7:30am, a time at which the other two kids are still in sleepy shinegans mode. This is her face saying, “Fine. We will take this stupid picture, but I don’t want to be late.” She hates being late. The Husband walked her to school that first day. In subsequent days, I’ve walked her to the main road and made sure she gets across safely. Once she’s across, the traffic through the neighborhood is slower and there are sidewalks and other kids that she can walk with. I’m not at all happy with the speed at which cars come down this main road, and with the lack of stopping for people in the crosswalk. The Husband says we can can request traffic monitoring from the County to see if there is anything else that can be done to encourage traffic slow down and stop for pedestrians. We live by the hospital, so I always tell myself that maybe there is a person in labor in that car and to try not to judge. But it still pisses me off. And I do judge. I don’t get Mama Bear about many things, but not stopping for people in a crosswalk is one of them.

The six year old started first grade. The bus has been a source of drama. The first day, another mom at pick up got a call that her kindergartener did not get on the bus and was still at school. She went off in a rage to pick her child up. I guess I’m just glad that the kid didn’t actually get on the wrong bus. That would have been more complicated. Every September, I think about how logistically challenging it must be to get all those kids dismissed to the right bus, or car, or parent, and I’m amazed that it gets done. One child out of 200 sitting at school seems kind of not bad.

The three year old started a new classroom as well – so new classes for everyone! I was a little surprised that they moved her – this would be her third classroom in less than a year. But she is a September birthday, so I guess it’s not a bad idea to move her to the pre-K class. We are contemplating trying to get her into kindergarten next year – one year ahead of schedule. Mainly because we are tired of paying for childcare, but also I think she could be ready. She has a lot of spunk and independence but also is really good at following directions and interacting with people. There is a testing process that we have to go through in order to try to get her into school early, so that’s one of my fall projects is to figure that out. I know she is almost 4, but in my mind she is still 3, and the thought of my baby going to kindergarten… I’m not sure I’m ready for that.

First Day of School Sweetfrog tradition.

Labor Day Weekend was jam packed. The Husband was out of town – he went to Minneapolis with some friends. I guess the Minnesota State Fair has always been on someone’s bucket list, and they decided to go. The Husband had lived in Minneapolis right out of college so I think he was happy to go back for a visit. Which is all to say, I had a three day weekend at home with the kids. I usually like to have a mix of “to do” activities and “for fun” activities on long weekends, but solo parenting, I decided to let the “to do” slide and we did a lot of “for fun” things. I think when I have the kids by myself, I try to spend as much time out of the house as possible. I know they aren’t at an age where they will let me just plow through a house project (see my last post on no flow in parenting….). I suppose if I just handed them screens they would leave me alone, but I didn’t really want to spend the whole weekend locked in screen battles which usually arise when they have too much screentime – so I tried to be a little purposeful about the screens.

Friday we had a chill evening at home. I had thought about going to the music concert at the golf course, but I didn’t want to schlep everyone down there. Plus I knew Saturday was going to be a big day, so I wanted to have a low key Friday night. We had dinner, cleaned up, and then I promised that they could watch something. They chose Superstore, so we watched two episodes of that, then we headed for bed. As they were getting into bed, though, I realized I hadn’t thought through what they were going to wear for our trip to the Renaissance Festival the next day, so we stayed up for another hour or so trying on bits and bobs and things to cobble out costumes.

I always think I don’t need to have the kids in garb for the Ren Faire, but then I always change my mind at the last minute. Dressing up is so much fu, why wouldn’t we want to do it? This is what we came up with. Not bad for thrown together at 10pm the night before.

The 3 year old is wearing:
– a puffy white shirt that I pulled out of the Goodwill bag – it used to belong to the 11 year old, but she had outgrown it and it was a little more crop top than I originally thought so I wasn’t going to keep it as a hand me down.
-a pink party dress that my friend handed down to us. I feel a little bit bad because it’s a really nice flower girl dress and it got pretty trashed at the Ren Faire. But… it had been sitting in our closet for a couple years and I don’t think anyone ever wore it, so I figured at least this way, it got some use.
-a headband I had made for the 11 year old three years ago when she went as Moana for Hallowe’en
-purple fairy wings that we had bought at last year’s Ren Faire.

The six year old is wearing:
-a white blouse of mine from Uniqlo that I bought a couple years ago, but have worn maybe twice. I liked that it was a nice light fabric and a flowy cut, but let’s be honest, I don’t have a job where I wear button up shirts very much.
-A red faux silk scarf of mine, wrapped around his waist and tied
– a black vest made out out an old black shell of mine that no longer fit and which I pulled out of the Goodwill donation bag. I cut the shell down the front to make a vest, and then stitched the boat neckline to make the pointy/cap shoulders.
-his own grey shorts.

The 11 year old is wearing:
-An old skirt of mine that is super twirly and I love, but which I don’t wear anymore because I have little use for clothes without pockets theses days.
-A yellow peasant-y shirt from Uniqlo that I originally bought for myself, but which is a little short for my middle-age/post-3 kids belly, so the 11 year old now wears it.
-And a length of cut up black t-shirt as a sash
So she did not actually end up going to the Ren Faire in costume because we couldn’t get the sash to stay up quite right, but it was fun to create a look. I think next year I should think ahead and get her a costume cincher or corset. I think I could probably make some kind of cincher pretty easily.

Saturday we pretty much spent all day at the Ren Faire. (The official title is the Maryland Renaissance Festival, but I’ve always just called it the Ren Faire.) We left the house at 10:15am and did not get home until 7:30pm. It was a hot hot day, but I had looked at the weather and Saturday was the coolest day of the holiday weekend – only 84 vs. 91 the other two days – so that’s why we picked Saturday to go. We were able to stay in mostly shady spots and by the time we left it had cooled of significantly. And to be honest, I think once we accepted the heat, we barely noticed how much we sweltered. I was amazed at the people who came in head to toe leather garb. That is dedication. Also they looked pretty awesome.

It took a few hours to feel like we were having a good time – I always find the first few hours of the Ren Faire overwhelming with so many choices to be made particularly since a lot of the show are playing simultaneously on different stages. Do we see the juggling ro the acrobats? The Musicians or the magician? But once I accepted that we can’t see it all and leaned into seeing what we could while making time for quiet moments to sit and savor the atmosphere, I started having a great time. (It’s very reminiscent of Oliver Burkeman’s theory that once you accept that you can’t do it all, you start to enjoy what you can do even more.) We saw some shows, listened to some music (bagpipes!), ate food on a stick, played some games, saw the jousting. Jousting was something which I had never in all my years of Ren Faires never actually made it too so this year I was determined to go and we did! Twice! We people watched – which is one of my favorite things to do because there is some pretty entertaining garb going on, from the authentic to the fantastic. It was crowded but not suffocatingly crowded and everyone just seemed happy to be there. At the end of the day we were sweaty and dusty and covered with food stains. But, as a lady told us last year, “I can always tell which kids’ parents let them have the most fun here – they are the dirtiest ones.”

The three year old was asleep before we made it out of the parking lot – I carried her right into the house and put her in bed, wiggling her out of her stained and dirty dress. The other kids were not far behind. I spend the rest of the evening scrolling and cleaning the kitchen before heading to bed myself.

Saturday morning I woke up to the three year old asking me why I was still asleep, after all the clock said “6”. The Husband is the early riser. I am not. So I managed to let the kids amuse themselves until about 7am, when I got out of bed. I decided that we would make waffles for breakfast, and a double batch so that we could have some for breakfast the upcoming week. Our standard is the buttermilk waffle recipe from the King Arthur Flour cookbook, but I subbed in a cup of buckwheat flour for the all purpose flour. I had had this bag of buckwheat flour in the pantry for a while and thought this was a good time to use it. I couldn’t actually tell the difference in taste – maybe a little “nuttier”? They were not as light as waffles made with just AP flour. The 11 year old helped make the waffles and she made some with sprinkles and some with raspberries and blueberries.

Around 11:00am I packed a picnic lunch and we headed out of the day’s adventure – the Labor Day Art Show and Social Dance Showcase at Glen Echo Park. Glen Echo Park is special to us because it was there are a contradance that the Husband and I met. Glen Echo was once an amusement park and people could take the trolly from DC there, but these days it’s the home to a variety of artists and cultural groups. The kids’ summer theatre camp was here. There are a couple dance venues, a playground, and a small aquarium. There is also a carousel that you can ride – $2 for a single ride, or $5 for a wristband to ride all day. That $5 wristband is probably one of the best deals ever.

Glen Echo is one of my favorite places to take the kids. They played on the playground, rode the carousel, then we went to the Social Dance showcase – it’s an all weekend event where the variety of social dance organizations had a free dance – mostly with live music! – so people could come check out what the dances were like. We went for to the Family Dance, which I guess they now call barn dance. The Family Dance is run by the same organization that does the contra dance. It’s so strange to think that the Husband and I used to go contra dancing two or three times a month and now we haven’t been in maybe six or seven years. There were kids, then COVID. How hard COVID must have been for the dance community! The people at contra dances are such kind, smart people who strive for connection – why else would you be drawn to social dancing? To think that suddenly people had to stop dancing in groups, stop gathering to hear live music and move together…

When I walked into the dance with the three kids, it was just like I remembered it. . There was the same guy working the sound board, the same lady calling the dances. So many faces were the same, just seven years older. Though there was one gentleman, an older guy with a snowy beard, who looked exactly the same as I remembered. A few people recognized me, which is surprising because the Husband was the one who was well known back when we were coming – he had been doing it for years before I even got started. One guy said, as we passed each other in line, “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

“In about six years,” I said, gesturing to the six year old.

“You let a little thing like that keep you guys from dancing?” he said as he and his partner danced to the next couple.

Now to be perfectly honest, none of the kids wanted to dance. This was purely something that I wanted to do that I brought the kids along for. It’s like that line in Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here – “Maybe raising children was just giving them the things you loved most in the world and hoping that they loved them too.” I had to bribe them to dance; I told them that if they each did two dances we would go get ice cream afterwards.

So they all agreed and each did two dances with me. The 11 year old was most reluctant, but I saw a smile or two eventually. “That was funner than I thought it would be,” she told me afterwards. The three year old required a lot of guiding on the dance floor, but she seemed to get it – although she didn’t quite grasp the do-si-do and just stood there are I orbited her. The six year old actually ended up doing a contra dance with me. He had only done one dance by the time the family dance was over and the contradance was the next session, so we stayed and he did the first contra, which was not very difficult and he actually did very well and danced the whole dance. Afterwards he said that he liked it, but that it “was a little much.” It was so much fun to be dancing, to remember what it’s like to dance to live music and move in counts of 4 and 8, and how smoothly things can flow. (Dancing must be one of my flow activities!).

After the one contradance with the six year old, I really wanted to stay for more, but decided not to push my luck that the kids would be willing, so we popped in to the art show – it’s a showing of art from artists and students at the various studios at Glen Echo, some pieces which were for sale. The kids got a little squirrely, so the 11 year old took the 3 year old back to the playground while I took another look around with the 6 year old. Then we took one more ride on the carousel and headed out.

On the way out, we stopped to peruse the pottery that was for sale by the Glen Echo Potters. Periodically they have a “seconds” sale where they sell pieces by weight, but this was the regular sale. I have a weakness for pottery and we walked away with a couple things –

This small mug – because I have two small mugs, bought back when I thought we were just going to have two kids. But of course we had a third kid, which makes hot chocolate time difficult.

This sponge holder. I love beautiful and functional things.

And this soap dispenser. Which I picked up and put back so many times because it is so beautiful, but also much more money than I should pay for a soap dispenser. In the end, I decided to splurge and we brought it home.

We then went for the promised ice cream, at the little shop near home. They were out of many flavors – not quite sure what was up with that, so we ended up having banana (three year old), peach (six year old), pumpkin (for the 11 year old) and passionfruit sorbet (for me.) Aside from the passionfruit, they aren’t flavors that we had tried before. The pumpkin was my favorite -it tasted like Thanksgiving! While we were eating our ice cream we decided to order Bahn Mi sandwiches for dinner since the prospect of cooking seemed so daunting.

We picked up our sandwiches and came home. The kids did some picking up and piano practicing and then we ate our sandwiches in front of the tv. We had much debate over what to watch – I wanted to watch some kind of musical. AT first I was going to watch Dear Evan Hansen, but I realized that the kids listening to the soundtrack is one thing – I wasn’t quite ready for them to see the movie yet. Eventually we settled on a movie called Everybody’s Talking About Jamie – a film that came up a couple times in a reddit post for best movie musicals. It’s a movie loosely based on the true story of a gay teenager who dreams of becoming a drag queen. It was a sweet movie – the music wasn’t particularly memorable or catchy, but the dancing was fun and I enjoyed the performances.

Proud Mom moments- the three year old folded the kitchen towels as part of her chores! I don’t have a favorite child, but I do have favorite child moments and this is might be one of them…

After the movie, we watched some trailers, then I sent the two older kids to bed because the three year old had fallen asleep on me. It had been many an age since I had been stuck under a sleeping baby, so it was a sweet, if inconvenient moment. Eventually, with some tips from the Husband via text (he gets trapped under the sleeping three year old a lot when I work evenings…) I got her to bed. then I went and cleaned the kitchen that was still in its’ post-waffle decimated state from the morning.

Labor Day Monday started off much like the day before, only this time with two kids in my bed. Eventually they realized I wasn’t goin to get up, so they took themselves off for other mischief. I have no idea what was going on while I slept, but when I finally got out of bed, the bench that had been at the foot of the bed had been dragged askew and there were papers everywhere. Oh well. We had breakfast and biked/scootered down to meet a friend at a park. It was so so hot, but our park has lots of shade so it wasn’t so bad as long as we stayed out of the sun. We took the scooters on a ride down the road since it is closed to car traffic on weekends and holidays.

We came home and had lunch. Freezer and snack lunch, meaning crackers and cheese and whatever I could find in the freezer, which turned out to be frozen edamame and friend ravioli. The fired ravioli was new to me, but we have friends in St. Louis who have told us how popular it is there, so when I found some at the grocery store last month, I got some to try. It’s basically ravioli with a crunchy breaded filling. I cooked it in the toaster oven and it was actually not bad. It doesn’t seem too healthy, but I think it is a perfectly nice sometimes snack.

After lunch, because it was the last day our pool would be open for the summer, we went to the pool for the afternoon. Even though I’d been to the pools with the little kids at last once a week this summer, the 11 year old hadn’t really come with us at all. (The one time she came, she forgot her bathing suit!). I’m glad she came and participated this time – the diving board was open, which it hadn’t been at all last year, and she loves jumping off the diving board. She later confessed to me that she felt bad about going to the pool because she didn’t join swim team this year and didn’t want to run into any swim team people. I felt so sad that this was what she was hung up on! It just goes to show how we can get into our own heads sometimes with a really false narrative. Anyhow, it was lovely to spend the 90+ degree day at the pool. Afterwards, we came home, ate some Dilly Bars and went to pick up the Husband from the airport.

One the way home we stopped for Indian food, where I had this really awkward exchange:
Waiter: Everything okay?
Me: Yes, but our butter chicken didn’t come.
Waiter, pointing at a dish: That’s the butter chicken.
Me (feeling awkward at not knowing the difference): Oh! I thought that was the chicken makhani.
Waiter: Chicken makhani and butter chicken, they are are the same thing.

Mind blown. And I felt like an idiot. Although, why did they let us order both a butter chicken and and chicken makhani??????

So we got home, put the kids to bed (eventually) and that was the end of our three day weekend. The house looked like a disaster, but I guess that is to be expected when we were home or out having fun all weekend.

And the Husband brought this home with mhim from Minnesota:

Grateful For:
-A smooth first week of school and everyone getting to and from school safely.

-The bag of peach seconds – made into a galette. The whole thing made so much easier because past me made a double batch of pie crust and froze it for future me.

The recipe I used has the galette baked in a frying pan, which I thought was a pretty good idea.

-Music with the kids. We don’t do it a lot but every so often I’ll sit down with the kids at the piano and we’ll sing songs. I don’t play very well, but I can bang out chords enough for us to sing. I discovered that there are lots of easy piano e-books available on Hoopla with our library card. I also recently discovered YouTube karaoke videos which we love doing too. Belting out tunes with the kids is such a fun way to pass 20 or 39 minutes in the evening. Last week, I also showed my kids my hidden talent for playing the spoons. Okay I’m actually pretty terrible at it, but it is a lot of fun. I love that the kids love making music too.

-A long weekend filled with fun adventures.

-Shady roadways, closed to car traffic, giving us a long way to roll

-Pourable mason jar lids. I’ve been very much into making my own fancy drinks this summer. My chai concentrate goes into a large jar, but the lemonade base goes into a mason jar. I’ve also taken advantage of our bounty of basil and made some basil simple syrup and then making basil lemonade. These mason jar lids made storing a pouring the concoctions so easy. I had originally gotten them when I was pumping and storing breastmilk in mason jars because the lids were great for pouring the milk cleanly into bottles. I love that they continue to be useful.

lemonade base on the left. Matcha chia pudding on the right

-Time to run. Now the kids are back in school, I’ve been running three times a week after drop off. I only manage a mile or two and then a very long walk back to the car, and it’s been great for clearing my head, listening to audio books and podcasts.

-Beautiful dusk skies. I love skies – the infinite variety of colours and cloud formations. I’ve never looked at a sky but thought breathlessly, “What an expanse of beauty.”

Looking Forward to:
-Kids activities starting up again. I’m eager to see what the routine will be like and to see where the spaces in our weekends will be. Currently the oldest is doing basketball (1-2 times a week), piano lessons (once a week + practicing), and swim clinic (once a week) and religious ed classes (once a week.) . I think she’s also going to do the school play too if she can get on the crew or cast. The six year old is doing soccer (twice a week, but only for eight weeks) , piano (once a week + practicing) and skating (once week) and religious ed classes (once a week). The three year old is doing agility classes (once a week) and skating (once a week). It seems like a lot to places to be, but it also seems like there is so much more out there that they can learn and do. The six year old wants to learn how to sew – there is a pace locally that has sewing classes, but you have to be 7, so maybe next spring.

-Using our new soap dispenser. I’m so excited to have such a pretty thing as part of my every day mundane experience.

-Billy Elliott, the movie. I have never seen this movie, but I heard it’s a great family film, so I put it on hold from the library and it just came in, so I think we will watch it for movie night. I’m trying to find more live action movies to watch for movie night. Cartoons are great and very well done, but sometimes I want to see real people. Suggestions welcome!

What We Ate:

Monday: Eggplant curry – I had bought some Japanese eggplant at the local produce market and had a can of coconut milk to use up, so I made a simple curry with eggplant and chickpeas. Vegan.

Tuesday: Cornflake chicken, corn and bagged Caesar salad. the 11 year old wanted to cook dinner, so this is what she made – the recipe is from the America’s Test Kitchen Young Chef’s cookbook.

Wednesday: Snack dinner and smoked salmon and green beans. Cheese and crackers and the like.

Thursday: Zucchini Boats.

Friday: Tomato and kale Pasta, recipe from New York Times. We have a bunch of tomatoes to eat from the garden, so we’ve been having some variation of tomatoes and pasta at least once a week. This recipe is cool because it’s pan deal – you cook the pasta, tomatoes together in one pan with a bit of water and it makes a nice sauce as everything cooks down. I also threw in some corn leftover from corflak chickn night. Vegan (we didn’t use the cheese)

Saturday: We just snacked all day at the Ren Faire.

Sunday: Bahn mi and Everybody’s Talking about Jamie

Monday: Indian Food, eating out.

Weekly Recap + what we ate: No flow state

This past week has felt like a disjointed mess. Errands. Play dates. Life. Laundry. Dishes.

Everything just felt fraught, everyone was grumpy. Or maybe just me. Then in the middle of the week, it hit me: I was feeling so off because I wasn’t in a place to have any sense of flow in my life – there is no flow in parenting. Flow. That state of total occupation where time seems to melt away. When an activity is just challenging enough to demand total attention and focus. Much ink has been spilt lately on how flow is essential to well being. When I took the Yale Happiness Course (free online – I found it very insightful and tweaked some life habits after taking this course.), flow was cited as important to achieving well being and reducing stress. When you’re in a flow state, you’re in the zone, totally present with a sense of purpose, which makes for a really enjoyable experience.

I think about activities when I find that sense of flow:

-In the Kitchen. Cooking and baking definitely put me into a flow state – the mixing and combining and seeing yummy things manifest.

-timing scores. At work, one of our jobs is to listen to the opera with a stopwatch and mark every 15 seconds in our score. It helps later on to figure out how much time there is between two moments in the show – say, a singer exiting and re-entering, or if we have live flame onstage we can tell the fire marshal how long the torch will be lit, that kind of thing. Timing the score is one of those moment of flow because I have to really concentrate to follow the music and get the marks in the right place. We all know not to bother someone when they are timing a score. And at the same time, I love it because I get to listen to the music and music is pretty awesome.

-mending. Part of it is I’m not very good at mending, so I have to concentrate very hard on it and I find it a completely absorbing activity, and it’s also really satisfying when it is done to know that I saved a piece of clothing for a few more wears.

-Writing here on the blog. I am a very slow writer, also it doesn’t come easily to me. Or maybe I have a lot to say, and like finding ways of getting words out. When I get a chunk of uninterrupted time to write, the time can fly and I’m usually really happy with the outcome.

But even aside from those “fun flows” I get a certain satisfied sense of flow in being able to just get things done. Like bang out all the “internet errand” (bills, registrations, forms, etc.) in one go, or tidying a room, or organizing a closet. I actually think I get a huge sense of flow from cleaning the kitchen late at night after the kids go go bed.

Which all brings me to my realization: There is no flow in parenting. With the kids at home, there was no chance to get through something uninterrupted, no chance to immerse myself, lose track of time. Someone was always hungry, or needed help with something, or complaining about a sibling. And even when the house was quiet – that in itself also disrupts flow because something in my brain would tick and say, “It’s too quiet, what are the kids up to????” I’d sit down for two minutes to get a task done, or roll out my yoga mat to do ten minutes of yoga… and suddenly footsteps, a knock on my door, a small hand tugging on my arm, a voice in my ear, then my train of thought and sense of purpose is shattered. If flow is about uninterrupted immersion, then yeah… there was not flow during daytime hours last week.

The other thing I found interesting in reading up about flow this week, is that researchers say flow is achieved when peak skill level combines with peak challenge level. So if you don’t feel challenged at something you’re not at all skilled at, you’re going to feel apathetic about it. I like the range of states on the chart below:

from this website, but also it features in Laurie Santos’ talks.

And here, I realized, is another reason I find no flow in parenting – Parenting, for me is a high challenge situation for which I have low skills. Empathy and understanding and doing the right thing and having the perfect response – those come neither naturally or easily for me. So there I am right in the “Anxiety” corner of the chart, though I probably hang out more in the “worry” segment. (I also feel this way about work sometimes. ) So not only does parenting disrupt any flow I may have when I undertake an activity, it also does not provide any kind of venue for intrinsic flow either.

I don’t know if I can spin that into a positive – something about savoring my children while I can despite the challenge? Or if I should just live with the expectation that when the kids are home life will feel abrupt and disjointed and fractured and at sea. After all reasonable expectations are also a component to well being. I think it’s perhaps all of it – setting boundaries with the kids, managing my own work load when they are home so that the tasks can be interrupted, and also leaning into those interruptions. That all sounds very idealistic. Well the kids are all back in school as I write this, so hopefully in the hours between 9:30a and 4:00pm, I can regain some sense of the flow that I was missing the past few weeks.

Speaking of being interrupted, I read this article last week about the importance of curiosity and how we can foster curiosity in ourselves and in children and it really struck a nerve with me. This paragraph:

Children also have to feel that they are free to express their curiosity. Adults need to ‘create environments where children know that it’s safe to ask questions, where there are opportunities to explore, where it’s OK to be wrong and to express uncertainty,’ Bonawitz says. In one high-school classroom that Engel observed, a ninth-grader raised her hand to ask if there had ever been places in the world where no one made art. ‘The teacher stopped her mid-sentence with, “Zoe, no questions now, please; it’s time for learning”,’ Engel recounted.

I think I needed this reminder as I felt myself growing impatient with the constant questions from the 6 year old. He’s very into asking the meaning of words these days, and when I’m trying to achieve a flow state, the constant interruptions for word definitions was so irksome. He’s not old enough for a dictionary yet, but even still, another thing the article points out is that research shows that children display more curiosity if the grown ups around them also engage with a curious mind. So maybe instead of just impatiently rattling off a definition to the six year old, we can get out the dictionary together. Time seems like a precious commodity and I definitely feel myself torn between doing my own thing/encouraging independence vs. engaging with my children. It’s a balance – for everyone’s sake. Constantly responding to never-ending demands certainly taps me out, but I do want to respond to my children in a way that will help them grow and learn and, yes, be curious.

Snapshots of the week:
– The 11 year old had her mini day at middle school. After all my dilemmas about how she should get to school, she ended up just walking. I followed her to school on her mini day, ten steps behind because I had the two little kids behind me. I was really proud of how she looked at her watch before she set out (she’s wearing a watch!!!), and then took note of how long it took her to get to school. It seemed a very mature thing to do. There a lot of kids who walk, so once she crosses the busy road into the next neighborhood, she’ll have lots of walking buddies. I love seeing how she is thriving with the added independence of middle school.

-We went to the 6 year old’s sneak peek at his classroom. His teacher has such boundless enthusiasm, and I’m excited for his school year.

– We went to the local botanical gardens with some friends and their kids. We saw turtles and geese. The 11 year old took over my camera and took a bajillion pictures of all the kids in various locations. It was like a fun photo shoot.

-In an attempt to curb middle of the night visits from the three year old, we’ve given her an alarm clock and told her not to come into our room until the first number is 5 or 6. We are having various degrees of success. Sometimes it works really well. Sometimes she comes when the clock says, 2:05, saying that there is a 5 and therefore it is time to get into mom and dad’s bed. There was the one time at 9:22 pm when she got out of bed, holding the clock upside down claiming that there was a 5 and she should not have to stay in bed anymore. Either she’s still figuring it out, or she’s already figured it out, crafty girl.

-Speaking of time – The kids got into my iPad and set an an alarm:

Every day at 8am. It’s good to have the reminder.

-We went to Longwood Gardens on the Sunday before school started. We hadn’t been all summer and the Husband wanted to go, so we bundled into the car, listening to How To Train Your Dragon on the way up and back. We haven’t been to Longwood Gardens in the summer in a while and I loved seeing all the colors of the blooming flowers.

One of the best parts of Longwood for me is always the vegetable gardens. They grow so many varieties of vegetables, and I always love seeing how vegetables look as they are growing, before they get plucked and delivered to the grocery store. My favorite thing this year was the rows and rows of basil, growing so tall . The smell of it all, sun soaked and fragrant, was just pure summer.

-It took me a while to find PEACE:

Grateful for:
-Siblings. I love that my kids (mostly) get along. They play together. They have the oddest conversations. They hold hands when they walk. They read to each other. They collude against the parents. They encourage each other. Particularly the oldest – she is always encouraging the little ones and can talk them out of a tantrum better than I can. Sure they have moments when they squabble and fight and take each other’s things, but on the whole, the love they have for each other shines so bright. I know you can’t predict how siblings turn out, so I hope they continue to be close as they get older.

-Public school. As I was taking the kids to their various pre-first day activities, I saw all the kids streaming to school and I thought how lucky we are to have schools were kids can go to learn. The six year old is in a French Immersion program that costs us nothing but our taxes. The 11 year old is taking a theatre class as part of the regular curriculum. And I felt grateful not just that my kids could go to school, but that any kid in our county could go to school. I borrowed a picture book from the library last week about two girls who couldn’t go to school because of the hukuo system in China. It’s a system where you have to register your residency in order to, among other things, receive services. Once registered, it is very hard to change so if you move from the rural area to the urban area, your kids aren’t guaranteed a place in the school of your new location. That’s an oversimplification, but the idea that a child would not be able to go to school makes me so sad.

-Public transportation. Another good use of my tax dollars. One day last week, we had another 6 year old over for a play date and we decided to take the bus to the library. It felt so much easier than trying to get the extra booster seat out. I just learned that the 11 year old and the 6 year old can get a bus pass to ride the county bus for free! I’m going to have to put that on my list of things to look into.

Looking forward to:
– September. A New Month! I’ve been thinking of habits and routines that I want to try to cultivate.

– Maryland Renaissance Festival! The Husband is going out of town this weekend – he’s going ot the Minnesota State Fiar with a bunch of friends. I guess it’s a bucket list trip for some of them. So a three day weekend with the kids for me. The Husband does not care for the Renaissance Festival, so I usually take the kids without him. For some reason or other he’s often away labor day weekend. Given the number of trips he’s taken with the kids solo this summer, I feel like he more than deserves a trip with his friends.

-Cooler weather. We’ve had a spate of weather in the low 80s and breezy and it’s been lovely. I’m not ready for autumn life happenings (The Hallowe’en stuff is out at Costco already!!) , but I sure am ready for autumn weather.

What We Ate:

Monday: Pasta with tomato and anchovy sauce. Tomatoes from the Husband’s garden. From the cookbook “Cook What You Have” about easy pantry meals.

Tuesday: Egg Curry. I heard about this on the podcast Didn’t I Just Feed you? I would not have thought of making a curry with hard boiled eggs, but this was really tasty and will go into our rotation. The Husband said, “I knew this was going to be good – it’s two of my favorite things: eggs and curry!”

Wednesday: Tomato Chirashi and tuna sushi bowls. The tomato chirashi bowl was from a Washington Post recipe that calls for marinading tomatoes in soy sauce, mirin, fish sauce so that the tomatoes sort of mimic raw fish. I made brown rice with vinegar and added edamame, cucumbers, carrots, and canned tuna and we topped with nori. It was really satisfying and the kids could pick and choose what they put in their bowl.

Thursday: Corn Dogs and bubble tea. We met up with the Husband after work at a Korean Corndog place in the mall for Happy Hour, which turned out to be not a great food choice, but very tasty.

Friday: Pizza (carry out) and Frozen. It was the 3 year old’s turn ot pick the movie.

Satureday: Pizza (again) at a birthday party.

Sunday: Totellini with sausage and red sauce. Pantry dinner after we got home from Longwood Gardens. I wanted something simple and quick and this was it.

Weekly recap + what we ate: Countdown to end of summer!

Last week, I had one day of work to wrap up things in the office and archive paperwork, and then I was home the rest of the week with the two older kids. The youngest still went to daycare. It was a very full and frustrating week. I felt like I was still catching up on sleep, trying to get my body back on a regular sleep schedule after the week of tech – there were a lot of late nights – my own fault! Revenge bedtime procrastination was definitely in play. And then trying to do fun and productive things. Things definitely skewed fun over than productive. The house definitely becomes a pit much faster when we are all home during the day- clothes, toys, books, food, dishes – it all piles up. And then it’s physically exhausting to be constantly cleaning and mentally/emotionally exhausting to constantly nag the kids to keep things picked up. We do need to think of better systems.

We did have a family meeting about the laundry last week and the kids decided that laundry would be put away when they get into pjs. We aren’t super great about enforcing routine clean up habits. I think this is also because the Husband and I are very different about this – he likes to constantly clean and I like to clean all the one go at the end of the night. So no wonder the kids are getting mixed messages about how to maintain a baseline level of tidiness. I’m hoping getting their input in when the laundry gets put away will help it actually get done.

Something I Learned this Week:
–Nothing draws a kid to step on your toes like your toes being broken It is amazing. It is as if a broken toe exudes a magnetic force that just draws kids (or at least my kids) to step on it. On Sunday, a week ago, I walked into a door frame. I don’t really think I broke my baby toe, but it hurt like a bejeezus for a few days. I have many friends who have broken toes and the verdict was if it wasn’t blue and sticking out sideways it is probably fine. Then a few hours later, I tripped while walking up our exterior back steps and badly stubbed my big toe on the opposite foot – I thought I was going to lose a toenail, but it has stayed in tact so far. I never noticed how much my kids step on my toes until my toes are in excruciating pain. What is with that? Do they have some kind of hidden talent for hurting me where it hurts the most? And they don’t even realize. This is the conversation, repeated many many many times:
Me: Don’t step on my toe!
Child: Ooops! Sorry! I didn’t know your toe was there!
Also – this is what gets me – don’t you notice when you are standing on something? Or is this a princess and the pea situation where only the most sensitive will notice the toe sized lump under their foot??
Okay – my toes seem fine now. A little tender still, but I’ve been walking on it an everything. Haven’t been running, but that is probably more life and having the kids at home than really about the toe.

Fourt Signs of Late Summer:

School supply shopping. While the 6 year old’s school sent a school supply list, there was nothing form the middle school. At first I thought, “Wait, maybe no one expects middle schooler to have school supplies?” If I thought elementary school was a huge information vacuum compared to daycare, it seems like middle school is a black hole. (Is that even an appropriate analogy? I’m not an astrophysicist.) The 11 year old had an ice cream social for incoming sixth graders. We got to the school and there was a sign that said, “Come back and pick up your kids at 1:30pm.” What? I just send them in there? At 1:30pm I came back and the Assistant Principal was out front reminding us of the practice mini day coming up. “Are parents supposed to come to that?” I asked.

“No! No! You just send them to us. They need to get used to figuring it out on their own,” was the reply.

Oh my. Okay.

Anyhow, I hadn’t received a school supply list and I texted a friend with a high schooler to ask, “Do they still get school supply lists in middle school?” I mean maybe this was just one of those things that I don’t know since I’ve never had a middle schooler. Turns out there is a list of sorts. My friend forwarded me the email that was sent via the PTA listerv. Another thing I have to get on. So list in hand we went to Staples.

I love school supplies. While I appreciate the efficiency of schools that create a lump package through some retailer, I do love actually going and wandering the aisles of Staples. Moreso than my kids. They do not appreciate the way I look at every single pen, or Post-It or compare notebooks and binders. They were definitely done with the process before I was. Sigh.

We also got a new back pack for the 11 year old. I figured since she was off to middle school, she needed a new sturdy backpack. She’s had the Lands End backpacks for most of elementary school, but I’ve found that they don’t hold up really well since she is very rough on them. (In kindergarten she had a backpack from Target with a some licensed character on it – I can’t remember what. It was very pink and shiny. That did not last even one year. A friend of mine says if her kids want character backpacks from Target, she always buys two because then when it rips halfway through the school year, she’s prepared.) The 6 year old has an L.L. Bean backpack – and those are nice and sturdy; I’ve had my L.L. Bean backpack since college. But the L.L. Bean backpacks don’t have the sternum clip and the 11 year old really needs something with a sternum clip since she will be walking and maybe biking to school. Someone had suggested that we check out REI for a backpack, and indeed that was where we found her a backpack – The North Face Borealis – lots of pockets, tough material, laptop sleeve, and most importantly a sternum clip. More than I had expected to pay for a backpack, but I think it will really hold up and actually it will be great for travelling adventures too. The patterns aren’t as exciting as Lands End, but I think it’s a nice colour that will grow with her, and she’ll hopefully like it just as much in three years as she does now.

Things from the garden. I’ve been in hard core kitchen nesting phase, where I just make things in the kitchen – It’s probably a result of having not really had any good kitchen puttering time yet this summer. I normally love spending time in the kitchen, whether it’s just cooking dinner, or baking, or making kitchen experiments. The Husband has been growing cucumbers and tomatoes (among other things). He is the kind of gardener that loves to grow things, but doesn’t always harvest it in time. A lot of it is over ripe, not really suitable for eating raw, so I’ve been making other things with it. The cucumber has been made into cucumber agua fresca, cucumber lemonade and cucumber yogurt soup. This latter is not really something I usually am partial to. I like my soup to be hot and chunky with texture and variety. But a friend suggested a cold cucumber curry soup, and I used this recipe as a basis, except using curry powder instead of dill. It was very tasty, but in my mind cold soup is kind of like a savory smoothie – which, once I phrased it to myself like that, it was a very nice snack to have on a very hot day.

The tomatoes I have made into tomato sauce. No recipe – just chopped two large bowls of tomatoes, mixed with a sliced onion or two, lots of garlic (like half a bulb), olive oil, salt. Roasted at 450 for an hour. Let cool, then run through the food mill. The food mill is one of those single function tools which I use maybe twice a year, but which does its one job oh so well.

It feels really satisfying and good to be messing around in the kitchen again.

Summer Day Trip. We also went to see my friend at her new house over on the southern tip of Maryland – it took about two hours to get there. She has a pool and lives on a cove with a dock on said cove. It was just a lovely relaxing day – we swam in her pool, we walked to the dock and saw lots of fish and jelly fish. We even saw a crab swimming. I’d never seen a crab swim before – it swims sideways, paddling furiously all its legs. My friend grilled us a tasty dinner, with a fantastic German potato salad on the side (note to self, get her recipe), and then we went to visit her neighbor who had sheep. I don’t know if I could live so far from the city all the time, but our quiet, calm, and nature filled day with my friend certainly made a case for it.

The County Agricultural Fair. We went to the County fair one day. We saw animals – rabbits, chickens, turkeys, cows. There was a cow giving birth; we stayed to watch the water break then the lady in charge said it might be another hour until the calf was born so we didn’t stay for that. (I did see a calf being born one year – it was kind of amazing. One moment there was one cow, the next moment, all the a whoosh, there was a baby cow, walking and everything.).

We did go check out some of the entertainment, but I found the escape artist kind of cringe-y and chauvinist. He had this act where an audience member puts him in a strait jacket, and I was just really uncomfortable with his double entendres the whole time. I’m sure he’s someone who does the fair circuit, but I would be glad never to see him again.

And then went to the Midway and we rode rides and ate fair food. Our fair feels quite standard and modest. We probably have the same rides and food booths and over priced lemonade that you would see at any other county fair. But even still, it’s a good time. The 11 year old and I like riding rides – I don’t have the courage to do the upside down ones; I’m always afraid that my glasses will fall off. But I like the big swings and the twirly rides and the roller coasters, though there aren’t really roller coasters at the fair. I do not like bumper cars. This year we got the unlimited ride wristbands for the 11 year old and me. In past years I only got a limited number of tickets, but I figured that the oldest is of an age where it makes more sense to get the wrist bands. We got the little kids enough tickets to ride a few rides. The Husband does not like rides, but he is a stellar bag holder and child watcher. The six year old only wanted slow rides and the 3 year old wanted fast rides. She was too small to ride the super fast rides, but we found a couple that were quite zippy for her and she had fun.

The 11 year old said to me at one point that a good ride had to be just scary enough to be fun, which I thought was an interesting metric. Around 7:30pm, the husband took the two little kids home and I stayed and rode rides with the 11 year old, which was nice because we don’t often get just mommy/daughter time since the little kids take a lot of attention.

On the shuttle back to the parking lot we talked to a lady who grew up showing cows at this fair. “You saw the animals, right?” she said to us, “You don’t come to the fair just to ride the rides, right?” I do wish we had spent more time with the animals, but we arrived at 3:30pm, and by then a lot of the animal stuff was winding down. Next year, I think we’ll plan to arrive earlier.

Now I truly understand the term “Sheep eyes”.

Ice Cream Adventures – We haven’t had as many ice cream adventures as we usually do. My how work gets in the way of fun! But last weekend we had no plans so we got in the car and drove to Prigel Family Creamery. On the way, we played this game:

It was a lot of fun – we all laughed so hard. Highly recommend. One of my favorite cards: “Is the Driver driving with just one hand on the wheel? He loses a point.” Hilariously on the way home, the 3 year old fell asleep and still managed to score three points.

In between we had a very relaxed visit to the Prigel Family Creamery. We first visited this place as part of the Maryland Ice Cream Trail – a list of ten or so dairies in Maryland where you could get ice cream. Visit all ten and get entered to win a prize. That first year we went to seven of them. This dairy is a nice outing because you can get sandwiches and meat and cheese plates, and there are cows – we can go, get lunch, eat it while watching the cows, and then get ice cream. I’m glad that we went because it turns out they are shutting down their sandwich counter and we were there on the last day. We ordered lunch then played some CodeNames – one of our new favorite games- then had ice cream. I had lemon ice cream, the six year old had strawberry (I think my favorite of all the cones), the three year old had cookies and cream and the 11 year old had a vanilla milkshakes with cookie dough chunks. I was a little annoyed when she thew out most of the cookie dough chunks – she said they were too big. I was probably disproportionately irked at her for this, but food waste annoys me and I would have eaten them if she had asked around. Oh well, lesson for next time.

The kids picked rocks from the parking lot to keep our cards from blowing away. I like Code Names because you don’t have to be able to read to play so all the kids can participate.

All in all, some good summer adventures for these last few days. Also not as much life admin as I would like – I still feel very behind. But I guess when we look back on the last weeks of August 2023 I want to remember the time I spent with my friends and family and the food and the sunshine, not the time I spent paying the bills. (Though that is important too.)

Grateful For:
-A full summer of work. I haven’t worked all summer in a very long time, so I’m grateful I got to do that this year.

-Friends. Now that I have my evenings back, we’ve started to make plans and see friends. One day we went to Comet Ping Pong and had pizza and played ping pong. One evening a friend came over for dinner, and she brough dessert and marinated anchovies (the way to my heart!). The past week felt very social, but that certainly fills up one my buckets too.

-Friends who cut hair. The 11 year old needed her hair trimmed – seeing as how she wants to keep it long I just wanted to take a few inches off the bottom so that the ends could stay healthy. I texted my friend and asked if she could do it and she said yes! So we went over for dinner one night and my friend did a bathroom trim. Frugal and friendly! Win!

-Bose wireless speaker. The rear speakers on my car don’t work, which makes it hard for the kids riding in the back to hear whenever I play music/audiobooks. The husband had the idea that I should bring his wireless speaker on our drive to see my friend in Sothern Maryland and it worked really well. We listened to the audiobooks of How To Train Your Dragon – hilarious. Highly recommend.

-Our new lawnmower. The 11 year old ran our lawnmower into a stump in the backyard while mowing and pretty much killed it. The lawnmower, not the stump. The stump was dead already. She feels pretty terrible about it so I am practicing putting on my big girl parenting pants on and not getting angry at her. I mean, truth to tell, the Husband is the yard/garden person so I think he took it harder than I did, but even he was the one who told me not to yell at her. I’m trying to embrace the idea that there will be casualties of raising children (My husband’s favorite snow globe, for instance that got smashed last Christmas by toddler hands), and not flip out any time something gets ruined. Seriously there should be some kind of insurance for parents of children. At any rate, as part of our agreement to buy a new mower rather than hiring a lawncare service, I have agreed to mow the lawn every other time. (I think I used to mow maybe twice a summer) The Husband is letting me get away with not using the trimmer or the blower. I just have to mow. The lawn is tiny. It takes about 45 minutes for me. Anyhow, we got a new mower. It’s battery powered. (Our previous one was gas.) It actually makes mowing not feel like an uphill struggle. It’s so quiet that I’m afraid that I’ll forget that it is actually quite dangerous. Something about the ear splitting noise of our gas mower reminded me every moment that I was one absent minded moment from losing a finger or toe. I wouldn’t say I’m looking forward to mowing now, but I guess with our new mower, it does seem like less of an inconvenience than before.

Looking Forward To:
-Having time back to myself after the kids are in school. I haven’t been exercising – first because the kids have been home and I can’t leave the six year old home by himself, then there was the whole smashed toe incident. I did manage a few yoga sessions, but I haven’t been running.
– A trip to Longwood Gardens. We haven’t been all summer, so we’re going to take a day and go before school starts. I’m looking forward to seeing the fountains and the flowers and the trees and eating the mushroom soup.
-Season Two of the Gilded Age! The trailer just dropped – I love a good soapy costume drama. I binged the first season earlier this year – it was my “watch while I do the dishes” temptation bundle. Second season starts end of October. Knowing me, I probably won’t get around to watching it until next spring – I’m horrible at keeping up with tv shows – but just knowing that there is a second season coming is very exciting for me. And I hear that there will be a dueling opera company rivalry as a plot point. Oooh!

What We Ate:

Saturday: Went out for Mexican food at Guapo’s with my sister in law and her family. I had the ceviche sampler plate. I do love ceviche. This was the last day we saw my sister in law’s family before they went back to the Netherlands (which reminds me – I still have to finish those trip recaps!)

Sunday: Grilled salmon and veggies. I did the veggies (onions, peppers, zucchini) on skewers -which isn’t something I usually do because for some reason I thought they don’t cook as well on skewers, but turns out they turn out great. I might be changing up my grilled veggie game now.

Monday: Comet Ping Pong with friends.

Tuesday: Cold Mapo Tofu, stir fried green beans w/ fired tofu, and cucumber salad, brown rice on the side. There was a great collection of recipes in the Washington Post of no-cook meals and the tofu was one of them. Basically it’s marinated silken tofu. It was very tasty, but I think I would like to use soft tofu next time; I don’t think I’m much of a silken tofu fan.

Wednesday: Snack dinner. Both the Husband and the 11 year old had plans this evening so I took the two little kids to the pool. We had crackers and cheese and fruit and whatever else I could pull from the fridge.

Thursday: Fair food. I had the grilled corn. I think the kids had corn dogs and sausages. There were also fries and funnel cake and lemonade. I’m kicking myself because I threw out my lemonade cup and I should have kept it because refills are definitely cheaper than getting a new one. Oh well, lessons for next time.

Friday: Dinner at my friend’s house in Southern Maryland.

Saturday: Pizza (Husband made) and move night. We watched the first How to Train Your Dragon movie. I thought it was quite good, but very different from the book.

Sunday: impromptu dinner at friend’s house – wings, hotdogs, salad, corn. Perfect casual get together.

Weekly Recap + What We Ate: Tech/Opening/Closing

Another show closed. Well there was only one performance, so it opened and closed on the same night. Someone backstage was wishing people “Happy Clopening!” This was unlike any tech period I’d ever done before. First of all, we had fewer onstage rehearsals than I’m used to, so everything felt rather ambitious and there was no day off before closing so I definitely had to pace myself a little bit. But the biggest adjustment for me is that because it is an outdoor venue, we had all our lighting sessions at night, after the evening rehearsal. It doesn’t do much good to write light cues during the day with bright sunlight everywhere. So for three days, we would rehearse until 11 or 11:30pm, the cast would go home, and then we would have a little break and then come back and light from 12:00 midnight until 2:30am. Go home, sleep, and come back the next afternoon. It’s funny how coming back to work at 2 or 3:00pm can feel just like arriving to work at 10am – the same kind of groggy, anticipatory energy as you walk in the door for the first time, chai in hand.

I guess many outdoor opera companies do this over night tech session, but it was my first time experiencing it. Thankfully the company provided us with food after the evening rehearsal and before the midnight tech session. As the big boss said, “It’s easier to work the third shift with a full belly.” I know some jobs, particularly in the for profit sector, the company providing food, or being able to expense food, is a given, but it’s not that way where I work, so I’m always grateful when we are included in company provided meals.

Anyhow, the show is now closed, farewells have been said and the summer opera season is over or me. On to the next.

Tech week stats-
Average Steps / day, over 4 days of tech: 18, 623
Average flights climbed/day: 23. The set had two levels, rather high ones actually. There was one staircase that took you up 30 feet in the air.

Here is the view from the top:

Some other fun tech week photos:

Paperwork – I did the wardrobe/wigs running paperwork, which requires a lot of time math to figure out how long someone has to change their costume.

The swanky outdoor patio off of the space we used for our office. The hammock was wet for most of the week, so I did not get to relax on it as I wanted. I might have taken a ten minute nap in those chairs at one point, though.

Our pretty pretty set. One night only then into the dumpster. Theatre is so ephemeral.

Our fabulous interns lightwalking at 2am.

The tower opens up to reveal these mirrored walls:

The view of the theatre as you drive up – how lucky to work in such a beautiful space!

Also – on a sartorial note – On Opening Night, I saw several ladies in these really elegant caftans. Now I’m at a stage where “cocktail attire” sounds completely uncomfortable and unpleasant to me. Plus there is no longer anything in my closet that might pass for cocktails attire. And heels… forget about it. So when I saw several ladies so elegant and cool looking in soft billowy caftans, I thought… “Am I old enough – and poised enough — to be able to pull that off?” and now I am contemplating adding a beautiful elegant caftan to my wardrobe that might be opening night worthy. Something like:

or this;

Or this one is fun:

From Nieman Marcus – though definitely on the price-y side for me. But alos I appreciate the non-plunging neckline.

I’d have to figure out the heels situations though…. I feel like 75% of what makes something elegant is wearing heels.

The Husband took the kids out of town for three days to visit family, coinciding with the first few days of tech, which was extremely nice. For the second time this summer, I had the house to myself, though this time I was in the theatre for much of the the time so I didn’t get to indulge in my alone time as much as earlier this summer.

My first evening with an empty house, though I had a long date with a friend. It was blazingly hot so she wandered if we could do something in the air conditioning.

So I suggested ice skating. I had, in fact, just been at the ice rink that morning with the kids for their lesson and the 50 degree arena was refreshing. My friend thought it was a brilliant idea, so we went and spent two hours gliding lazy laps around the rink. Then we went for dumplings at my favorite dumpling house. Since the last time I was there the restaurant has expanded into the space next door to become some kind of karaoke bar, and walking in the hip new interior was a bit of a shock. This is the dumpling house that the Husband used to eat at every Friday for lunch when his office was a few blocks away. We used to come with our teeny tiny babies and there is one waitress who would hold our babies and walk around with them so that we could eat. When my friend and I walked in, the waitress asked me, “Where are the kids?”

“My Husband took them out of town,” I said.

“Vacation for you!” She said.

When she took our order, she said, “We have special vegetables today!” Apparently during the summer she grows vegetables in her back yard and then brings them in to the restaurant for them to cook and serve. She even pulled out her phone to show us pictures of her green green plots of land. It was very impressive. “In the Summer we are Farm to Table too!” she laughed. She was explaining what vegetables she brought in today and said we should try one of the dishes, one of which was a shrimp dish. The translation app translated the name of the vegetable as “loofah”. And indeed it was – it was kind of like a spongy cross between a cucumber and a zucchini. Very tasty. The cucumbers in our cucumber salad were also from her garden and they were the lightest crunchiest cucumbers I had ever tasted.

After dinner we walked over to a dessert place called Kyoto Matcha that I had wanted to try for a while. They have a lot of Matcha based desserts, including a “blanket cake” that looks exactly like it sounds – a swaddle of dessert. I got a Kyoto Cream Roll Cake which had a slightly salty cream filling. My friend go the red bean blanket cake – both were really delicious. We got our cake and sat in the plaza and ate cake and talked about life and such until it got late and then we went home. It was so nice to spend time with my friend, one on one, without the ids around, even though she is always the best with my kids.

Things that made life fun last week or so:
-Getting the Wordle in one! I mean statistically it’s bound to happen since I use the same first word, but still it was pretty fun when all the squares turned green the first go around. Though I have to admit it is not as satisfying as getting it in six or three – three because it makes me feel smart and six because it makes me feel lucky. Now I have to find a new first word. Ironically, the weekend thread on Ask A Manager had a threadjack on Wordle first words – some good options. I liked poser and pinky. Stare seems to be a common one too.

-Before they left for the lake, the two older kids had their Theatre Camp performances. It was a harrowing week for camp because the storm the previous weekend had done a lot of damage to the park where they originally had camp, so they had to change locations. The new location was not as convenient for me, but some of the camps at the park had to cancel so I’m glad our camp was able to relocate. Each child was in a different show and it was so fun to see them up on stage – saying lines, singing, dancing, and having a good time. My favorite moment was when the six year old, playing one of the children in a Pied Piper of Hamlin inspired story had to be a frozen statue – he was such a great frozen statue. The little guy is surprisingly good at standing still and staring off into space. Theatre camp is expensive, but I think the kids get so much out of it, so I’m glad we can afford to send them.

-While waiting for the kids’ camp performance to start, I had enough time to take a very muddy run on a nearby trail, where I met this little guy:

-Just down the road from the new camp location is a produce stand. I stopped by one day because they had peaches and peaches are one of my favorite things about summer. “Do you take credit cards?” I asked the guy at the register.
“We only take cash, check, or IOU,” he replied.
I must have given him a funny look, because he said, “My boss has been here for thirty years every summer and it’s the way he does things. If anyone doesn’t have the money, we let them have what they want and tell them to come by when they have the money.”
“That seems so odd!” I said.
“Yeah, it’s not how people do business these days, but it works for us.”

So he sent me on my way with six peaches, and the next day, I came back with cash and bought another six peaches. So I guess it does work out okay for everyone somehow.

Grateful For: Tech Week Edition:

-Water, ice, and Gatorade and my insulated water bottle. Like I mentioned – we were at an outdoor venue. It was in the high 80s and oh so humid last week. The venue provided us with huge coolers of ice and bottled water as well as water coolers with both ice water and room temperature water. During the performance there was Gatorade as well. I’m not a Gatorade person, but I tell you, at intermission after being on my feet since 6pm, and sweating profusely, I drank a bottle and felt better. I had brought my black blazer to wear because I do believe in wearing long sleeves backstage, especially since the venue was so big that there were large swaths of the audience who could see backstage from where they sat. But I soon gave up on the blazer and just wore it when I was standing close in the wings. I also started googling “Black Linen Blazer”. My insulated Kleen Kanteen also got such a lot of use. So glad I bought a straw lid for it. I was having a conversation with my sister in law who lives in Amsterdam about water and she said, “Oh we don’t drink ice water in Europe; I’t sso American.” And I thought with sad dismay, “But ice water on a hot day is one of the great pleasures in life!” She is missing out, I tell you.

-Fans. There were giant fans everywhere backstage. I definitely adjusted my traffic patterns and took the opportunity to walk by them any chance I got.

-The Husband taking the kids away for a few days. Being at the theatre until 2:30am is a lot more manageable when I don’t have to get up at 7:00am to get the kids to camp/school. I did have to get the youngest one to school on the last two days of tech, but the Husband made sure that they didn’t wake me up too early. There was one morning when a child walked in and said, “It’s 8:00 – why are you still in bed? Are you okay?” then she ran downstairs in a panic to tell the Husband.

-2:30am traffic. Much lighter than 3:00pm traffic. Because the last thing I want to do when getting off work at 2:30am is sit in bumper to bumper traffic. So yeah, I’m glad there are only a few poor souls out of the Capital Beltway in the pre-dawn hours. It did also have me wondering who these 2:30am on the beltway souls were. I’m sure there are many tales to be told there.

-The past three productions of Don Giovanni that I’ve done. This is my fourth production of Don Giovanni. (I think the show I’ve done the most is The Marriage of Figaro – I’ve done six of those – there was a period of life when I did a Figaro every year. Good thing it’s my favorite opera.) Anyhow, every production is different, yet a lot is still the same. A lot of the music, even with cuts, is the same. The reason I’m glad for having done so many Giovannis is that I am very familiar with the music. And the score is very heavy – it’s like four hundred pages or something like that, plus it’s in a binder with all my other show running paperwork. (Some people just keep their scores in a separate binder which makes things lighter, but I like having things all together. I have colleagues who are starting to to work off tablets. I’m not sure I’m ready for that yet.) Normally I carry my score with me around while I’m running the show, periodically parking it on a music stand. (This is actually somewhat controversial. Some people think you should always have your score with you. Some people think you should leave it on the music stand and run around unencumbered. I fall somewhere in between but do tend to carry it around a lot. But over all, I’m a “You do you” kind of person.) With a 400 page score, this gets very tiring. It wasn’t that our production was that busy, but with the heat, I was running water to singers practically every time they came off stage. Juggling five water bottles, a towel for wiping sweat plus a 400 page score was kind of ridiculous. So I just left my score on my music stand for most of the show. And the reason I felt like I could do this was because I had done three previous productions and I knew approximately how much time I had between cues. I didn’t have to have the music with me to know where I was in the show. I knew that the start of this aria meant I had three minutes to get to this wing to cue these singers onstage. I knew that the repeat of the A section of this line meant that that singer had two minutes left in their costume change. I mean even with a new score I have the timings written and and I could figure it out and learn the rhythms, but there is something easier about not having to look it up at all.
So yeah, I’m grateful for those three previous productions of of Giovanni and for being able to run around backstage in the summer heat without having to lug my 400 page score with me.

-And as always, my amazing colleagues who are so good at what they do and who makes me laugh and keep my spirits up even at 2:30am. This job is so much harder when I don’t get along with the people I work with.

Looking Forward To:

-The start of School! There is back to school shopping to do and a few more days to wring out all the summer we can before getting back into the school year routine. I feel like I need to get the kids back on a school sleep schedule. They’ve all been staying up til 9:00p/9:30p even 10pm, and waking up around 7:30pm. Well except the 3 year old who wakes up at 6:30am no matter what time she goes to bed. The oldest will be starting middle school, which starts at 8:15am, so that will also be a big adjustment getting out of the house an hour earlier. She has a practice half day coming up, so we’ll see how that goes. Also – not sure how she she is getting to school. Bus is only provided if you live 1.2 miles from school and we live 1.1 miles. So walk, or maybe bike? It feels a little far to walk, but maybe not. There is one pretty busy road to cross and no stop light, only a cross walk, unless you walk two blocks up or down, which adds about five minutes to the walk. I do worry because we live next to the hospital so there is a lot of traffic on that road. But also I don’t have time to walk with her or drive her myself since I have to get the other kids to school (plus our neighbor’s kids). Maybe the first week, I can walk with her to the busy street and make sure she gets across safely. New year, new challenges!

-Also on that note: getting back to routines. I feel like I’m behind in everything – laundry, house chores, life chores, kids activity sign up. I’m looking forward to having time to think things through.

-Going to visit a friend at her house on the shore.

-Going to the County Fair! Rides! Fried Food! Animals!

– Getting my passport renewed. This is one of those “Looking forward to checking off the to do list” tasks. The Husband was going through our box of documents and said, “Hey your passport is about to expire.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “I put a calendar reminder to renew it three months out.”
“Oooookay,” he said.
So I pull it out and looked at it. Friends, it expires NEXT MONTH.
Oops. I thought I had put a calendar reminder to renew my passport this year, but turns out that was a calendar reminder to renew my daughter’s passport. So it must be done and soon. I’m glad I didn’t have any international trips planned. And hope that I won’t have to flee the country any time soon. Also I now need to find one day with perfect hair to have my picture taken.

-Reading this book:

It’s a book that feels quite personal to me and I can’t put it down. All my youthful and middle-age insecurities as an Ivy League student/graduate are right here in every chapter.

What we Ate: We ate pizza multiple times this week, and it’s not even counting the number of times the Husband and kids ate it while visiting his sister. Pizza just seems like the easiest options for these group meals, though I do want to grow my ideas of “food to feed multiple people and kids” beyond the many variations of cheese and carbs (pizza, mac n cheese, grilled cheese sandwiches, quesadillas…) Anyone have any other go-to feeds a crowd with kids ideas?

Monday: Miso Tofu, Broccoli and Udon noodles. There was leftover miso sauce from something the Husband made the week before, so I threw it on tofu, baked it and had broccoli and noodles with it. vegan.

Tuesday: Eggs, The Husband cooked since I was at work.

Wednesday: Pasta and Turkey meatballs. The Husband’s sister was in town and this was an easy meal to throw in the InstantPot. Pasta and sauce cooked separately to accommodate vegetarians. I made a double batch of meatballs and froze them for future me. ( I actually made these for Wednesday, but SIL’s plans changed so I just froze the meatballs and the Husband put them in the IP – I’m so proud of him because he usually avoids the IP…)

Thursday; Pizza take out. We were going to go to the pool, but it got really chilly and rainy so we ordered pizza and ate at home with my Sister In law and her family.

Friday: Pizza and movie night. I think they watched the Lego movie.

Saturday: Dumplings and green beans.

Sunday: Family was gone, and I went to the Dumpling House with my friend.

Monday: Leftovers. Start of single lady eating.

Tuesday – Friday: Made a big pot of mujadara for Tech Week and ate a combination of that and leftovers for the rest of the week. I used this recipe from Feasting at Home.

Weekly recap + what we ate: Dishes

A shady basketball court – on of my grateful things lately.

Welp the dishwasher was broken for much of last week. The last day my brother and his in laws were in town, right after I cooked dinner for 12 people, it decided to not turn on, after the Husband had loaded 12 people’s worth of dishes into it. For a while, we limped along and washed dishes by hand, but eventually we gave up and started eating on paper plates. The Husband had given me a hard time a couple months ago when I bought the Costco sized pack of Chinet for a party. Well, who’s laughing now?

Growing up, we never had a dishwasher. My mother taught me to wash dishes at an early age. I also learned how to wash dishes in Home Ec. Our Home Ec teacher taught us the two sink method – you fill one sink with soapy water, and wash in that sink and then rinse in the other sink. We have only one sink in our kitchen so I fill a bowl with soapy water to wash. The home ec teacher did say that if you only had one sink to fill that sink with soapy water and then rinse under a light trickle of water to prevent diluting the soapy water too much. But we don’t have a sink stopper hence the “fill another bowl” method.

The first time we moved into a house with a dishwasher, I was thirteen. My parents lived in that house for probably twenty years and I don’t think they ever used the dishwasher to wash dishes. They did use it to store dishes, however, so it’s not as if it went completely unused.

Anyhow I think dishwashers are the norm now. I certainly use it to wash the majority of my dishes. Even the week that the family was away and I was all on my own – I still amassed dishes in the dishwasher until there was a full load to run.

But man, this past week or so of being without a dishwasher was tough… A family of 5 generates a lot of dishes, even when we are all out of the house for the majority of the day. Things I realized when we were doing all the dishes by hand:
1) It’s not just about the washing, it’s about the drying too. We don’t have a dish rack, just one of those super absorbent mats on which we put clean, drippy dishes. This was actually a huge disagreement between me and the Husband early in our marriage. He grew up where everything was put in the dishwasher and the counters were kept clear. I grew up without a dishwasher and the dishes just drained in the drying rack on the counter. Anyhow, I couldn’t convince him of the need for a drying rack so we just use drying mats now. Which is fine…. until you have a ga-billion dishes to do all the time and they don’t all fit on the mat. So you have to dry them and put them away so that there is room on the mat for all the other dishes coming down the pipeline. This is partly why it takes so long to get through the dishes. Eventually we realized this and someone always had drying duty during our evening clean up time. I guess I never really understood the phrase, “I wash, you dry” until now. (Although I just had a friend suggest that we should have put the dishes in the non-working dishwasher to dry, clearing off counter space. That’s brilliant. Must remember for next time.)

2) Another dish decision – wash now or wash later? I suppose this is also a decision when the dishwasher is working, but it seems like a bigger decision when hand washing dishes looms in one’s future. Wash everything as I go, after each meal, each snack, each packed lunch? Or let it sit in a pile and do it all in one go? I am definitely a “accumulate and do it all in one go” type of person. But when it’s just one fork or plate, it’s just as easy to put it straight into the dishwasher.

Anyhow, the dishwasher is now fixed, after having one mis-scheduled appointment, for which I sat at home and no one ever arrived….

The other exciting weekend happening was that we lost power for six hours on a Saturday night. A storm came through fast and furious and left huge swaths of the DC area without power. So we decided to go out to eat. The restaurant was bustling and it took a while to get us our food, but we were in no rush to go home and sit in our dark, warm, stuffy house. When we got home, we went for a walk, and I tried to capture the amazing lightning in the sky, though I fail:

That light behind the trees is lightning.

The Sunday after that was such a perfectly chill day. We had waffles in the morning and then spent some time tidying. Then we went to a park for a couple hours, then the two little kids had skating lessons. Then we went grocery shopping and then came home. It was such a nice combination of chores and low key fun stuff None of our adventures were huge or novel – they were familiar and routine. Afterwards, I thought, “If every day could be like today, that would be awesome!”

Other nice things in my life lately:

-Going to the opera and going to the theatre. I went to watch a rehearsal of the other opera that my current company is putting on. It was a beautiful production with some really wonderful performances. How awesome it is to just walk into the building next door and see an opera!
Then a couple days later, the Husband and 11 year old and I went to see The Play That Goes Wrong. The premise is that a group of people are putting on a play and onstage mishaps just keep happening – people keep missing lines, props are misplaced, the doors don’t work, the set falls apart…. I’ve written in the past about onstage mishaps that I’ve experienced… well this was two hours of onstage mishaps. It was side splittingly funny. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard in the theatre. Part of the fun for me was that there was a Stage Manager character and his booth was actually in the house and seeing him do his job (or sometimes screw up his job) was was both nail biting and hilarious. I know some people go to the theatre expecting to be moved to devastation, and that’s what makes it a worthwhile experience, but I think we undersell how powerful joy and laughter can be in a theatre too.

That’s the “stage manger’s booth” on the left.

-One day, I had the afternoon off from work, so I picked up the three year old from school early, and took her to the pool. The pool was pretty empty at 1pm on a weekday afternoon; I think there was only one or two other families there. It was one of the days that was in the mid-nineties, so pool time, broken up by lots of snacks, was such a great way to spend a few hours. Having one on one time with the three year old was pretty great too. I’ve been feeling bad that she goes to day care while I have adventures with the other two kids, and I think she was feeling a little left out too.

Mommy daughter date – pool snacks and swimming on a 90 degree day.

-One day, I treated myself to a boba tea. My usual order of black tea, 25% sweetness (I usually get no sweetness, but this place didn’t have the option), with both boba and lychee jelly. Well, to my delight, the lychee jelly was shaped like stars. That little bit of whimsy really made my day.

– Discovering that there is a stylus on my computer and I can use it to draw on groundplans! My laptop can flip to be used as a tablet, which I knew. I did not know that there was a stylus tucked into the computer as well. I was poking around on the laptop one day, trying to figure out why I didn’t have any internet connection and I discovered a stylus tucked into the bottom.
This was a real game changer for me. One of my jobs is to make “minis” for our books. A mini is a small version of the set’s groundplan, where we write down staging notes. Often time (these days), I get a PDF version of the groundplan, but it usually has all sorts of writing and extraneous lines on it – like measurements and dimensions of various parts of the set, or indicators of where things are hung overhead. So I usually take a PDF snapshot capture of the groundplan and plop it into Paint and edit it there, erasing lines, adding lines, etc. . I am sure there are better ways to do this, but this is how I learned to clean up a mini. And I do all this manipulation on the computer with my mouse. Which can be frustratingly imprecise and tedious.
Well, the stylus has made this process as easy as drawing and erasing with a pencil – this last show, making the minis was so much easier.

A peek at my work life. It’s a round tower with stairs going around it and a table in the middle.

Now that I look at it, the groundplans kind of remind me of those pictures of “cowboys making eggs.”:

Grateful For:
– Dishwashing gloves. When I was younger, my mother always made me wear dishwashing gloves when I did the dishes. I thought they were cumbersome and silly so I once I was out of the house, I didn’t bother to wear them anymore. But then I got eczema on my hands and the dermatologist’s number one recommendation? To stop doing the dishes. His other recommendation was to get a platinum wedding ring. Well neither of those were going to happen. So I started wearing gloves to wash dishes and my hands stopped getting so chapped. Mom was right.
-Shady paths on which to run. Last week was so so so hot. Consistently in the 90s and humid too. The air was thick, the sun was bright. I am so grateful that there are several options for me to run on tree lined paths.
-Shady basketball courts. I’m glad that our local basketball court is surrounded by tall trees, so that it stays shady until at least noon. We’ve gone to shoot hoops early in the morning a few times to beat the heat, but being in the shade also makes it more enjoyable.
– The privilege of knowing some good people. I have two new-ish friends who are moving. One is moving overseas – her husband is in the foreign service. The other friend is moving across the country for work. I’m sad they are leaving because I don’t always find it easy to make friends and these two people were just souls I clicked with right away. One of them, I met at the school bus stop and our casual “Good morning!” over the school year became long walks and coffee and just standing at the bus stop chatting long after the bus had borne our kids off. I just feel so lucky to have been able to connect.
– A new to us bike. The friend who is moving across the country actually gave us her son’s bike as they couldn’t take it with them. Our six year old is finally learning to ride a bike with lots of help from every one!

Looking Forward To:
– More visits from family. My sister in law is in town. They have gone off to the western part of the state for a couple days and then will be back, so I will look forward to them
-Running. I don’t particularly like running – I find it hard and often tedious. I’m slow. It takes a lot of effort. It makes me hot and sweaty. But I do recognize that I feel better physically and more alert mentally when I do get a run in, so I make and effort to fit a run in when I can, often at work. This week, though, I noticed something – as I was packing my running shoes and running clothes into my tote bag to take to work, I was struck with a feeling of excitement. I wasn’t excited to do the actual running, but I was really happy that I could look forward to having the time to run and be outside. I don’t know if that makes sense or not. Just the simple act of packing my running stuff to take to work made the day seem like it was going to be okay – I could start the day hopeful that I could do something good for myself at some point.
– Tech! This week is tech. It’s always exciting and exhausting, taking a show from the rehearsal hall to the stage.

What We Ate : I think I’m behind in writing down our dinner – so here’s two weeks’ worth:

Monday: Fish taco, made by Husband

Tuesday: Sandwiches from The Sandwich Shop before the opera. They had a broccoli rabe and sun-dried tomato sandwich that was divine!

Wednesday: Pasta and Meatballs.

Thursday: Grilled Cheese and dumplings. Fast thrown together meal as we were trying to get to basketball.

Friday: My mom make three cup chicken and rice. A Taiwanese dish that is sooo tasty. Eaten in the theatre lobby before the show.

Saturday: Pizza and The Sandlot. A lovely lovely movie.

Sunday: Chinese food – a new to us place that we wanted to try out. The food was very very spicy. The Husband made milkshakes at home afterwards.

Monday: Zucchini tart and green salad. I always forget how easy a vegetable tart is when you have puff pastry in the freezer.

Tuesday: Greek Chicken and Cabbage Slaw. The Husband made this. I wish I had the recipe because it was really good.

Wednesday: Sauteed tofu and green beans.

Thursday: Lemon and brown rice chicken soup from Grains for Every Season. Really tasty and made for good leftover.

Friday: Pizza and Brooklyn 99. We had friends over and were going to watch Parent Trap but the kids were too busy playing so the grown ups watched six episodes of Brooklyn 99 instead. It’s a great show.

Saturday: The day the power went out.

Sunday: Zucchini Orzo – recipe from New York Times. Meh. The flavors were good, but it was mushy. I always like the idea of orzo, but the reality is always just disapointing.

July so far + what we ate: Catching up

How is it already almost the end of July? It’s been a lot this month – and I drafted this post when it was a weekly update and it’s gotten longer and longer and now it’s practically a monthly update.

So the short version: The husband and kids came home from Chicago! I closed a show! My parents came to town! I went camping! My brother and his family came to visit! It’s a billion degrees outside and we sweltered! We went on all sorts of adventures while falling steadily behind in housework and life admin! The pile of laundry grows mountainous! I started rehearsing a second show! It never. lets. up.

I know most people work and manage life simultaneously all the time (like the Husband, for one), but prioritizing and balancing all the things is hard, and I’m not used to doing it for such long stretches of time. I’ve been working on one show or another – or sometimes two at a time – since February with only three weeks of in that time, and most weeks with only one day off. I’m always grateful for the work, but man… Usually when I’m in the thick of things, I can see a stretch of time off from work and can push tasks off til then, but it’s been harder to do that so far this year. Plus commuting for this summer gig. Spending 60-90 minutes a day in a car might not feel like a lot in the moment, but it does eat up my day. Compared to my regular gig which is like 30-60 minutes a day, this gig is an additional 30 minutes a day that I’m losing. Which might not seem like a lot, but that’s prime laundry folding time right there. Anyhow. I’m really excited by the projects that I’ve worked on and the people I’ve been working with this year, so I’m not saying I regret taking these jobs. It’s just a lot of balls are getting dropped right now. I need to remind myself that I’m lucky to have work in an industry where sustained work in one location can be hard to find and find better ways to tackle life tasks.

Ever since I opened my first show and the family got back from Chicago I’ve felt out of my regular routine – there was adjusting to the family being back and also to not having to be at the theatre every day for the week I was in performance, and being home with the six year old. Then my family visiting and then starting a new show, with a very different rehearsal schedule from my last show. I think I need better anchors in my life so that the constant change does not throw me as much. I haven’t even been keeping with the small habits like ten minutes of yoga or Wordle or Duolingo. Here’s the thing, I’ve realized, is that there are a million tiny adjustments – a combination of school being out and my current job – and it’s thrown a lot of the habits that I make based on my school year routines out of wack. For example:
– Writing here. For my current gig, I use my personal laptop, which means it mostly lives in my laptop bag and goes back and forth to work with me. Small shift. But it also means that the laptop isn’t sitting on my desk, and it then takes two additional steps to actually be able to sit down and write – 1) take laptop out of bag, 2) find a work surface. Two small steps are enough of a barrier that I’m not writing as much as I would like. I supposed I could write on my tablet or phone, but that’s not as easy.
– Duolingo and Wordle. I used to get to work about ten minutes early, sit down and do the daily Wordle and Duolingo before I turned on my work computer. But with my longer commute, I’m not getting to work with that ten minutes to spare. In fact, I’m usually five minutes late to work. So I’ve definitely lost all my streaks. Thanks, guilt-inducing green owl!
– Cleaning out my car. During the school year, I have a routine on Wednesday mornings. I drop the 11 year old at piano lessons at 7:15a, I go get gas, I go pick up breakfast, I pick up the 11 year old and we head home. Wednesday was always gas day. Even if my tank is 3/4 full, I still stop and get gas on Wednesday mornings while the oldest is at piano lessons. I very rarely have to fill my tank more than once a week so having a designated day and time to get gas takes that mental weight off my plate. Also while I fill my tank, I take all the trash out of my car and shake out the floor mats. Well, lately we’ve had a piano lesson hiatus. And then last week, my father filled my gas tank because he was using ti to run errands, so on Wednesday, there was not need to get gas.\. I was driving around the other day and I noticed that there was more trash in my car than normal, and then it hit me… I haven’t been doing my weekly piano lesson/get gas routine. Such a little errand, but the regularity of it ensured that my car got picked up at least once a week. No wonder the car looked kind of like a pit.
– Daily 10 minute yoga. I used to do 10 minutes of yoga the minute the 3 year old left for school. Inspired by B.J. Fogg’s Tiny Habits, I used the door closing behind the 3 year old as the prompt to lay out my yoga mat and do ten minutes of yoga. Well the 3 year old hasn’t been going to school until much later now that it’s summer, so the yoga mat hasn’t been laid out because we are all leaving the house at the same time. Yet another school year habit downed by shift in schedule. I think I might need to shift to doing 10 minutes of yoga first thing in the morning. This is absolutely fixable. Though when I try to do yoga while the 4 year old is home, I become a human jungle gym and it can be very distracting.
Anyhow, I feel like I need new anchor, new prompts- summer time routines, I guess. (Though the summer is now practically over?). Or maybe when each shift happens, I need to look at the schedule, and re-order, add, or delete things. Something to ponder.

So fun happenings…. After coming back from their trip, the eleven year old went to basketball camp for two weeks while the six year old and hung out at home. Since I didn’t have to be at the theatre every day, it didn’t really seem to make sense to put him in camp, so we just hung out all week and had some staycation type adventures. We went to the park (for four hours one day!), we went ice skating (perfect for an 80 degree day), we went to the library, we went to a puppet show at a different park. I know this would have been prime life catch up time, but I wanted to also prioritize having one on one time with six year old. Since he started school I haven’t had as much one on one time with him and I miss just hanging out with him. This is true for all my kids and I want to do better.

We had a fun family food adventure too – one day I had to be up in Rockville to retrieve my phone (see below, gratitude), and decided to check out a new-ish Taiwanese restaurant that was in the back of a gas station. I had heard about this place in the local magazine and looking at the menu, I could see that it had a lot of the foods I remember eating at the night markets in Taiwan. Walking in, I was a little skeptical. I mean this was in a gas station, after all, and the restroom was a little …. Well, let’s just say when we walked in, the six year old said, “I think someone died here.” But we ordered our food and sat down at one of three tables and waited.

And the food was really tasty! The moment it came to our table, the smells transported me to hot sticky evenings wandering the night market, the air heavy with the smell of fried food and five spice. We ordered popcorn chicken, fried chicken wings, dumplings, the pork chop bento box:

And the best was the stinky tofu. Stinky tofu is fried fermented tofu. It does in truth smell like the inside of an outhouse, but dip it in sweet spicy sauce and take a bite, the crispy exterior giving way to pillowy soft tofu inside. So tasty!

Stinky tofu! The six year old is eating the bento box – with pork belly on the rice.

The first weekend in July, we took the Metro down to the Mall and went to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. The two themes this year were the Ozarks and World Religions. We mostly explored the Ozarks section. There was a lot going on, and we only saw a fraction of the offerings. We went to a talk about boat building traditions, we listened to some bluegrass music while the Husband enjoyed some beer from the Ozarks Brewing Company. We talked to a basket maker.

Fishing boat. You stand where the three year old is and stab the fish!

Basketmaking. Making strips of wood from oak planks to weave into a basket.

We had some fried chicken and tamales – I love how the food matches the themes of each year. We talked to a lady who had an exhibit about cooking over an open fire outside with a cast iron pot. We went to a talk by chef Tim Ma, someone who has spent his career reconciling being Chinese American with serving American Chinese food. I really enjoyed hearing him talk about how he didn’t actually learn to cook until he went to culinary school, and how he now tries to. The eleven year old asked a question during the Q&A and I was really proud of her for doing that! Also, he talked about using dehyradted garlic in his cooking because you have to re-constitute it which makes is less likely to burn when you cook with it. Someone asked him where he gets it from, and he said, “I get it from my Chinese food supplier.” which is not helpful for me. I was hoping I could find it at HMart. I’m now on the hunt.

Tim Ma making Springfield Cashew Chicken.

The day was very very hot. At one point we ducked into the American History Museum to fill our water bottles and get a rest from the heat and boy did the air conditioning feel good. I also thought it was a great idea that the Festival was handing out cooling towels as swag. We grabbed one, but should have grabbed two!

After that we walked back up to Chinatown to have dinner at our favorite noodle place, partly inspired by something Tim Ma had said that afternoon. During the Q&A, someone had asked him what his favorite Chinese restaurant was and he said that he always encourages people to eat in Chinatown if they have one because Chinatowns are slowly disappearing across the country due to the pressures of economics and development. Of course we were more than eager to do our part!

The fountain at the Sculpture Garden, looking on to the National Archives.
I love how symmetrical DC can be.

Since it was still pretty early when we got to Chinatown, we decided to stop into the Smithsonian Museum for American Art and Portrait Gallery. The Husband and the 11 year old went to explore the galleries while I took the two little kids to the kids’ creative space where they spent most of their time playing with this video portrait set up where you could take multiple portraits of yourself. It was kid of fun to see a whole screen made up of small squares of the kids.

It was certainly a full day – Festival, Museum, Dinner and home before bedtime. How lucky we are that we can hop on the metro and so easily have such a great day!

The following week, my parents arrived and I took the two younger kids camping along with my parents. The 11 year old had basketball camp so stayed home. I have a whole separate post for that camping trip, but we had a good time and three nights doesn’t seem like enough time for camping anymore. Though I don’t know if I can fit more than three days’ worth of food in my cooler, so that’s a dilemma

The day after we got back from camping, I started my next show and my family came to visit. I didn’t get to spend as much time as I wanted with my family while they were here because I was working, but one fun thing we did was take a boat ride to Mount Vernon. My father has been reading a lot of books on the Revolutionary War lately and I thought it might be nice way to visit Washington’s estate by sailing up the Potomac. Much nicer than driving an hour either way, besides which we wouldn’t have been able to fit everyone in the two cars that we had. So we all got on the metro at 7am on a Sunday morning and rode all the way down to the wharf where we boarded a boat. I have to say my brother’s family and his in laws were such troopers about the 7 am departure, having gotten off a plane just the evening before.

Approaching Mount Vernon from the Potomac River.

The boat departed at 8:30am and after a gentle trip down the Potomac, we arrived at Mount Vernon around 10am. We disembarked at the pier and walked up to the mansion where we took a tour.

Some of the highlights for me –

Seeing this harpsichord – I always like seeing musical instruments:

This key to the Bastille, given to George Washington by Lafayette.

underneath the key is a picture of the Bastille.

George and Martha Washington’s bedroom. Martha had that bed specially made for George because he was so tall.

And I’m always fascinated by kitchens. This one was a separate building from the main mansion. Because of fire hazards and all that.

Also the outhouse. Because I find that fascinating too.

There are three toilet seats in there! Do three people use the facility at once? or is it to spread out the… ahem.. offerings?

I will say, I think going to Mount Vernon by boat didn’t quite leave enough time to fully explore Mount Vernon. We arrived at 10:00am and the return boat was at 1:15pm. Of course we had to eat lunch in there somewhere, so it really only left about 2 hours to explore. We did manage to walk most of the grounds in that time, and visit George and Martha’s grave, but we did not visit the Museum at all, or the farm, and we kind of sped through the gardens. I just wished we had time to stay and linger in the gardens and read every placard.

The rest of my brother’s visit was pretty low key. He and his in laws took off for Shenandoah for a couple days, and I went back to work while my parents stayed home with the kids. When my brother and co. got back they all went down to the Mall to see some museums, but I was working, so I didn’t go. But I think it’s great that there is so much to see in DC via Metro that I don’t have to accompany guests around all the time. I can hand them Metro cards and just say, “Have fun!” and they will be entertained.

We did go to a concert at Wolf Trap – it was actually the reason that my brother’s family came out in the first place. Joe Hisaishi, who composed music for the Studio Ghibli films, was conducting a concert of his film music. My brother and his family are huge Studio Ghibli fans. At first I was a little reluctant to go to the concert because it was late at night, and then it poured rain, and I was even more skeptical since it was an outdoor venue, albiet covered. But the weather cleared up in time for the concert and it was actually quite nice. I’ve worked at this venue, but I’ve never seen a concert there, and now I get why it’s such a big summer event – a warm summer breeze, and music, and fresh air… it just felt like summer in every way.

The last day my brother was here, we went to hot pot with. Hot pot is always fun and the place we went to now also has robot servers which will bring you your order, so that was fun and the kids got a real kick out of that. Originally we were going to get soup pots to share, but the kids all insisted that they get their own pot, so everyone got their own pot, including the 3 year old.

So that was the adventures so far in July. Now we’re back to the normal grind of things.

Fascinating read – this article about the mathematically correct way to tie your shoes. I never gave a thought to which was the proper way to tie my shoes – tie, one loop, wind around, pull through, tighten loops. But apparently, in each step, bringing the lace over or under makes a huge difference between a knot that tightens as it moves and one that loosens. Maybe it was because it was 2am and I was still awake, but I found this article so interesting and immediately grabbed my shoes and started making bows. (Revenge bedtime procrastination at it’s finest!) This also explains why using the bunny rabbit ears method of tying laces has never worked for me – it’s the wrong combination of over/under. Also – the six year old doesn’t know how to tie his shoes yet – well, he doesn’t have lace up shoes right now, so it’s kind of a low priority task – but I’m pretty sure the 11 year old was tying her laces at this age, though I didn’t teach her. I think she learned through a combination of friends and observation. Anyone have a tried and true method for teaching shoe tying?

Grateful For:
1) The kind person who found my phone and turned it in. I had gone with the six year old to meet up with a friend and her son at an outdoor puppet show. After the show, the kids played on the playground nearby while my friend and I caught up. The are moving across the country soon and I’m a little sad – she is someone whom I befriended randomly at an event at a park. One of those, “Hey you’re cool, let’s exchange numbers and hang out!” strangers who become friends. Anyhow, then it started to rain, and we made plans to rendez vous at the ice rink and have lunch at the snack bar there. Well, I got in my car and realized I couldn’t find my phone. (Side note – I thought it notable that not being able to find my phone meant that I had resisted looking at it for 2.5 hours. Part of me thought, “Wow… see, you can go a couple hours without your phone! Try to channel that more!”) But anyhow, I went back to the picnic tables where we were sitting and also to where the puppet show was, but it was pouring rain by then, so I gave up and just headed to the ice rink. Of course, I got in the car and realized that I couldn’t use the phone to navigate me to the ice rink.
Luckily I had a vague idea where we were, yet even still I did have to pull a couple U turns and at one point found myself driving up the drive to the county correctional facility, thinking it was just another residential road. It was not. I did eventually make it to the rink. We had lunch and chatted, and then I went back to the park to try to see if I could find my phone now that the rain had lightened up. Still no. So then I gave up and went home, thinking of all the things that I needed my phone for and low level panicking because we were about to leave to go camping and I didn’t want to leave without a phone.
Anyhow, I got home, all discouraged, and there was, curiously, a note tucked in my storm door. It was from a police officer, saying that my phone was with the Rockville Police. Relief poured euphorically over me and I felt like the luckiest person in the world. (I did wonder how they were able to track me down, but they are the police so I imagine it is in their best interest to be able to figure these things out.)
Anyhow, I called the police station and they said if I could get there before the shift change they could hand me my phone – something about after shift change the phone has to get catalogued and put into a lost and found and it’s more steps to get it. So the six year old and I zipped up there and got the phone – which they handed over without my even having to show any ID, surprisingly. And to celebrate, we got some boba tea (from a new to me tea shop. It was a little sweet for my taste, but the owner was very kind.). And then capped the day off with Taiwanese food. Man, to go from desperation over my lost phone to joy at having it back all in one day was exhausting.

2) Grateful for being hired for a gig and for the crew at the theatre for making sure everything went smoothly. I got a call to stage manage a small concert event for the Embassy of Peru and since I like working for pay, I decided to do it. I don’t do a lot of one off event type gigs – I like the comfort of rehearsing a piece and helping it develop and knowing it very well before we get in front of an audience. These gigs where I come in and a show magically just happens often involve a lot of uncertainty and quick decision making, and let’s just say it’s not my comfort zone. One the one hand, one day gigs are very high pressure because you only have one shot at it. On the other hand, they are kind of low pressure because you only have to do it once. How’s that’s for irony. On top of that, the person who hired me mentioned that the producer did not speak a lot of English. I speak no Spanish. I wasn’t really sure how it would all pan out. But luckily it was at a theatre that I had worked in many times with a crew that was helpful and who I knew had my back. And once I got to the theatre, I learned that the group actually spoke enough English to communicate what track should be played for which dance number, and when a microphone was needed, and which side of stage people were coming from, when something had to be moved in order for there to be space for the dancers. And another performer taught me how to say “Thirty minutes” and “Fifteen minutes” and “Ten minutes” in Spanish. So all in all, things went quite well and everyone was happy and I got to hear some amazing singing.

3)Peaches. It’s stone fruit season, one of my favorite fruit seasons. Is there anything more lovely than a ripe juicy peach – sweet, syrupy and fragrant?

Looking Forward To:
– Having the last half of August off. Like I mentioned above, I haven’t had a whole lot of time off this summer and I want to have day trips and pool days and ice cream trips. I just read about this Icelandic tradition of meandering to find ice cream and meandering back. Sounds lovely.

– Getting my show paperwork done early. I’m trying to be less last minute in getting my show running paperwork done. I used to wait until we’ve staged the whole show in the rehearsal room then just sit down and plug through the running cues for everything in one or two long sessions at the computer, but this time I’m trying to plug in the information into the runsheets as we stage each scene. We have a pretty short tech process for this next show, so I knew I wanted to get ahead of the usual paperwork deadline. It’s probably a more efficient way to do paperwork; I think I usually wait in case there are changes made, but I’m learning it’s easier to get the first draft of a document done then go back and make changes then it is to wait until I have all the information before starting the runsheet – there will always be changes so no point in waiting until there are none.

– Agatha Christie radio plays. I’ve discovered on Libby, a whole series of radio adaptations of Christie’s mystery novels. They are usually only and hour or two long, so perfect for my commute – long enough to really engage me, but short enough that I can get through one in a few days. It makes me almost look forward to my commute. I also have a bunch of CDs that I bought in college that I have never listened to, and since my car has a CD player, I think I might take time to work my way through some new to me works. Last week, I listened to the 2005 musical The Light in the Piazza, which I found touching though not very hummable. I think perhaps it’s better onstage than on CD.

What We Ate: So far in July… it’s been a lot of eating out…

Saturday: Pizza and Star Wars. (I’m pretty sure I was working this night)

Sunday: Chinatown Express -our favorite noodle place in Chinatown

Monday: Salt and Pepper Eggplant and Tomato/Egg Scramble. From Hetty McKinnon’s book To Asia with Love. The sauteed tomato with eggs is a traditional Taiwanese dish – I made it with canned tomatoes since I didn’t have fresh, and it was really tasty. Good pantry recipe. The Salt and Pepper eggplant was tasty, but the eggplant took too much of the oil and was a little soggy. I need to trouble shoot that for next time because I thought the dish was good enough to try again.

Tuesday – Thurday: Camping.

Friday – Pizza (The Husband made) and The Black Stallion. My mother chose this 1979 movie for movie night – I guess she had seen it when it first came out and the six year old reminded her of the boy in the movie. I enjoyed it, though I thought it ended rather abruptly and I do wish they hadn’t tried to race the horse, plotwise.

Saturday: Tortellini with red sauce, garlic bread, roasted zucchini, salad, turkey meatballs. This was the day that my brother and his in-laws arrived. I always feel like it’s nice to have a home cooked meal after getting off a plane, so offered to cook. Even though I was feeding twelve people, this was a pretty easy meal to throw together.

Sunday: We went out to eat with everyone. Sort of to celebrate my parents’ 50th Wedding anniversary. I had mussels and oysters.

Monday: The Husband made kung pao tofu.

Tuesday: The Husband made stir fried garlic eggplant.

Wednesday: I have scribbled down Yogurt/ wings. This can’t possibly be what we had for dinner…. Maybe it’s what I ate while at work?

Thursday: My brother and his family/ in laws came over for dinner again. I basically looked in the freezer and fridge and pulled everything grillable out and picked up some vegetables from the farm stand to supplement. We had: Grilled salmon, grilled tofu and tomatoes (from the Green Barbeque cookbook), grilled pesto gnocchi (also from the Green Barbeque – while I thought this was tasty and clever to grill the gnocchi, I think roasting gnocchi on a sheetpan gets much the same result and is less fussy. One of those, “Glad I tried it, but don’t need to do it again” recipes.), Black Bean Cucumber Cabbage Rice Noodle Salad (from Hetty McKinnon’s To Asia with Love. Love this recipe), also grilled zucchini and corn.

Friday: Dinner at a brewpub near Wolf Trap before our concert. I had mussels. I seem to like having mussels when I go out to eat. Maybe I should investigate making it at home?

Saturday: Hot Pot.

Sunday: Sushi take out.

Weekly recap + what I ate: solo week and opening night!

I opened another show last week. Yay. The opening night show was not flawless – there was a curtain that had to be hung at intermission and we just couldn’t get it to line up as it should so we had to take it down and re-hang it three times and intermission ran long while we did this. The audience loved that, however. They came back from intermission to see us trying to fix the issue and as intermission stretched one, two, three, four.. minutes beyond expected, there was a palpable tension in the air. Every time we tried to close the curtain, I could feel the audience hold their breath, and when it didn’t work, there was a large groan of disappointment. And then when we finally got the curtain hung correctly, there was a huge burst of applause!

Prop Table ready for the start of the show! I tired something new and taped the prop list to the wall above the table. and it seemed to work well.

Tech Week: Tech week itself went fairly smoothly. I was not great about going to bed right as soon as I got home because I found that when I got home I still was faced with a stack of dirty dishes and enticing books and inviting snacks. On the other hand, I did get to sleep in (by which I mean 8:30am) in the morning since I didn’t have to be up with the kids, so sleep-wise things weren’t so bad.

Tech steps average: 14, 490 steps/ day.

Annapolis: A good friend of mine was passing through town on the Monday Juneteenth holiday so I picked her up from the train station and we decided to spend the day exploring Annapolis. I had only been to Annapolis once or twice for the boat show, and it had been many many years, so I was happy for the opportunity to visit again. One of hiking books featured a walk around historic Annapolis, so we decided to do that. Our trip to Annapolis started off with the elation of free parking. I completely understand how parking is dicatated by so much more than my need for a place to put my car, but it still irks me to have to pay for it. But since we only had a couple hours in Annapolis, I decided to put the car in a garage and just pay for parking. And then on the way to pay, I saw this sign:

Scoring free parking always makes me feel like that day is going well. (And I know I’m probably upsetting some balance of economics and city planning, but…) First stop – we had lunch and then visited a hat store.

I had lost my sunhat last year and was looking for a new one. I particularly wanted one with a large brim and which I could pack. This hat store had some veeerry fancy hats- there was a cream and navy striped hat that I loved, but for the price, I couldn’t bring myself to buy a hat that would show dirt and couldn’t be tossed in the washing machine. I decided upon a red hat- my favorite colour!

We then took this walking tour from my hiking book – Best Day Hikes Near Washington, DC. Now a city stroll isn’t what I would typically categorize as a hike, but why not? The walking tour first took us by the Maryland State House – the oldest state house still in use in the U.S. In front of the State House was a statue of Thurgood Marshall, whom I didn’t realize was from Maryland. It was such an odd juxtaposition to see the construction cranes against the colonial architecture of the State House. I didn’t grow up in Maryland and it struck me that my kids will probably learn about Maryland state history and know more about this state than I do. I hear that a visit to the State House is something almost every middle schooler will do.

Thurgood Marshall statue. Also – that dome on top of the state house is the oldest wooden dome in the country.

The walking tour next took us through St. Johns University where we discovered a small art museum, the Mitchell Art Museum. The current exhibition was of African American art from the collection of Alitash Kebede, an art collector based in Los Angeles. It was a varied and thoughtful exhibit and one of the highlights of our walk. How wonderfully serendipitous to just stumble across this museum, and it also made for a nice break from the heat.

We continued on and saw historic row houses:

I can’t resist a good boot scraper. I love such period details that survive through the years:

More 18th century buildings:

Mural:

The walking tour ended up at City Dock where we could see boats sailing to and fro across the Chesapeake Bay. We ended up at a coffeeshop on the dock, Bitty and Beau’s, which was recommended by a friend. I don’t drink coffee, but I’m always happy to pick up beans for the Husband:

Each bag of coffee came with a postcard with a handwritten note on the back. Bitty and Beau’s was started by a couple who wanted to provide employment opportunities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

And then we stopped for ice cream, where I saw this sign:

And then it was time to take my friend to meet up with her family and I headed home. All in all, a very nice day trip. We didn’t even get to the Naval Academy or the Maritime Museum, but I’m looking forward to being back.

The solo week. While the Husband and children were off in Chicago, I was at home trying to wrap my head around how different (yet in certain parts the same) life was like without the Husband or kids.

There were moments like me eating watermelon at 11pm at night because I cut up too much and now the tupperware lid won’t close and now I remember why we never buy watermelon – because it is such a hassle to put into the fridge. A whole watermelon is for sure not a single person endeavor.

There was laying my yoga mat out at the beginning of the week, and leaving it out all week.

There was getting to read while eating, even though it’s something I tell the kids not to do. (I’m re-thinking this now… maybe we can have books at the table for weekend lunches? Reading while eating feels like such an indulgent action, in that it revels in the solitary and almost meditative aspect of a meal rather than the social.)

Lunch on my own: pan fried tempeh, roasted zucchini with chimichurri on a bagel, salted mango salad and a Bronte biography.

There was cleaning out the fridge and reclaiming a dishwasher full of Tupperware from whatever horrific fuzzy former food matter I had stuffed in there an unspeakable number of months ago. I am a leftover food optimist. It doesn’t always work out well.

There was me spooking myself out being all alone at home and not wanting to go into the basement at night. One night I got home from work and I thought I’d just throw in a load of laundry, but then paused at the top of the stairs to the basement, hyper-aware of all the creaks and groans of a house at midnight. Or maybe, my over active imagination said, the creaks and groans of a serial killer hiding among the overflow Tupperware bin. And then I decided to just leave the laundry for the next morning. (Fun fact -when I was growing up, I was convinced that D.B. Cooper – you know that guy who jumped from a plane somewhere over the Rockies in the 70s with a butt load of money and was never seen again – was living in our basement and refused to go down there by myself at night. Of course I never told my parents that was why. I just made up excuses. But then I told my brother and he was merciless and teased me about it all. the. time. Older brother. They can really suck.)

There was going through all the kids’ drawers and organizing their clothes – taming the unorganized explosion of clothes, the lack of specificity in storage. Hooray – now there is a place of underwear, a place for t-shirts, a place for shorts, etc. I’m hopeful that the clothes stay organized, but I don’t know that I’m holding out much hope. The children don’t seem to value having each of their drawers/bins designated for specific clothing types the way that I do. Will this appreciation for sartorial organization come with age?

There was further development in kids’ clothing – I went through all the clothes piled in the guest room and packed clothes away in labelled bins for future use. Even though I’m normally a clothes hoarder, this time I was pretty ruthless about not keeping clothes that I had no interest in putting on my kids. The cute button down shirts. The corduroy pants with buttons and zippers. The pants with drawstrings to keep them up. Love the idea, can’t imagine wanting to spend the time putting my kids in them. Or my kids having the ability to hold their pee while they try to get those pants off. Anything slightly stained, I threw out. This was a big step for my “Oh but they could use them for play clothes” inner voice. “Or for painting their bedroom.” I firmly told that inner voice that 1) all clothes are play clothes, no need to keep dingy and stained clothes just for this, and 2) Seriously? In what world are my kids ever going to be painting their bedroom. Disappointingly, the house does not look more uncluttered for all my work culling a decade of kids’ clothes. I think because these clothes are usually stuffed in closets or behind closed doors, I wouldn’t have seem them anyway and thus did not clock the clothes as a mess. The mess at times is more an emotional burden than a spatial one. Though in the case of the guest room, it certainly is the latter. The clothes are organized, but my house is nowhere near being closer to whatever Pinterest/shelter magazine/influencer minimalism that seems the ideal.

Seven bins of clothes ready to go into the attic until the next child needs them.

There was the night where at 9pm I decided I wanted to bake, so I stayed up and made soy sauce brownies and black sesame banana bread from Hetty McKinnon’s cookbook To Asia With Love.

There was taking myself to a community festival – the One Journey Festival that celebrated refugees and their stories and contributions. I bought Turkish towels from a vendor, enjoyed African food from a food truck, and sat and listened to musicians from Africa and Afghanistan perform. The Festival was on the grounds of the Washington National Cathedral. I think I visited the grounds once before when I first came to DC almost twenty years ago. Between musical acts, I strolled the gardens and there was a wooded trail nearby, though it was a little too buggy for me to to linger.

It was interesting going to a festival on my own – this is the kind of thing that I usually bring the kids to, and I would encourage them to take part in the community art project and to dance to the live band. I really shouldn’t use my kids as a reason to take part in these things, yet somehow, going on my own, I felt a little self conscious about participating. It was a silly hang up, really. Art and dancing – expressions of creativity and exuberance – aren’t just for children. I felt a little jealous of the adults that I saw who participated whole-heartedly and didn’t just sit and watch.

All in all, a full week. Curiously, I didn’t feel like I had a lot more free time than when the kids were home. Freedom, yes, but not time. Half way through the week, I realized that I so far had done a load of laundry every. single. day. The kids were gone but I was still doing daily laundry. And it was their laundry. What the what?!? The house still had to be picked up, I still had to make and eat food, I still had to go to work.

And then I realized… when the Husband is home, I have someone who splits the housework – actually someone who probably in fairness does more of the housework than I do. I think it’s a testament to how much he does that when he was gone, I didn’t feel like I gained that much time. I did sleep more – like 6-7 hours rather than 5 hours. I could do 30 mins of yoga in the morning rather than 10- which is fine; any yoga practice longer than that and I get restless. And I did read more. The mornings did feel more luxurious without a bus to catch or three lunches to pack.

But the bonus projects I took on that took more time- going through the kids’ clothes in the guest room, the One Journey festival, dinner with a friend, baking- these are things I could have done, or would have done and often do, with the kids. And the things I didn’t get done – mostly life admin things, but also blogging – these things are things I struggled to fit in regardless. Which all in all made me think that really my struggle with these tasks is not about time but about managing priorities and life inertia. Not to say one thing is more important than the other – well, maybe paying the bills is more important than finishing that book – but rather the tasks that require me to sit down at a computer and just crank things out are less appealing when I have a juicy novel in front of me. I do like writing, but actually turning on the computer always seems to take so much more effort to me than just picking up my book (or, let’s be honest, scrolling.) Knocking out a to do list requires more motivation than just kid free time I’m discovering.

I think the other place where I found space during my solo week was mentally. I didn’t quite realize how much mental space living with other people takes until I didn’t have to constantly be thinking about what the other people in my life needed on an every day level. I didn’t have to do the calculus of “do the dishes now” vs. “do the dishes later” because no one was coming to use the kitchen after me so I could just “do the dishes later” without even thinking about it. I didn’t have to think, “What will they want to eat?” or “Is someone going to be annoyed if I leave this tote bag there?” or “Do I need to intervene?” or “Do I have to pick them up or can someone else?” or “Is it worth the temper tantrum to insist on that?” or “Should I read my book or read to my kid?” When the only one who cares about what I do is myself, it feels like decisions are easier.

Mini Rant of the Week: Shorts for kids. I had to grab the 11 year old some shorts before she left on this trip. So I went to the Mall, thinking I’d just stop by JC Penny and grab some shorts. I will say that had some really great leggings marked down to $5, so I grabbed a pair of those. But the shorts.. man. Everything I could find in the Girls’ section was itty bitty short. Like in danger of flashing underwear short. “Okay,” I thought, “I’ll just buy her shorts from the Boys’ Department.” Which I do often because sometimes the boys’ stuff is sturdier and the pockets are just better. But everything in the boys’ section was these polyester athletic shorts with like a 10″ inseam. Is there no such thing as a nice 5″ inseam anymore? Or maybe this is a JCP specific issue? I didn’t really have time to go to all the stores, so I bought the boys athletic shorts, a pair of leggings and a couple shorts from the ladies section for the 11 year old to try. But the lack of what I would deem is a regular inseam length for shorts… baffles me.

(Also – when do I stop shopping in the girls’ section. What is after that and before Women’s? I do shop in the women’s for the 11 year old once in a while- the XS fits her okay.)

(Also – I bought new water bottles and socks for the kids in anticipation of summer camp because the current supply of both water bottles and socks, is mismatched and grimy. And wow… do the kids never stop needing things to be replaced/replenishes/restocked? Always something.)

Thing of Beauty of the Week: I packed both the little kids in one suitcase. Since we weren’t sure if there would be laundry, I packed seven outfits for each kid. The Husband must have been impressed because he sent me a picture of the suitcase upon arrival:

Listening to:
The 2022 podcast Sold A Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong, details the story of reading instruction in the U.S. and how one of the predominant methods currently being used is scientifically proven to be flawed yet still is implemented. I learned to read at an early age and took for granted the ability to look at letters on a page and sound them out. The 11 year old was not an early reader, and actually a little behind her peers. I remember when she was in kindergarten thinking, “Wow there are certainly a lot of strategies being taught on how to figure out what a word is.” But it turns out, according to Sold a Story, that a lot of these strategies, mostly revolving around context clues, don’t actually teach a kid to read. In fact, they are what kids rely on when they can’t read. Listening to this podcast was kind of eye-opening to me – it really made the things that bothered me about the 11 year old’s reading journey make sense. The six year old more or less is figuring out on his own how to read, and I am pretty sure it isn’t through context clues. I’m really interested to see how the baby learns, and after listening to this podcast, I feel like I know how I would prefer to support her. This podcast was fascinating.

Also this On Being episode with Vivek Murthy about the need for love and compassion and connection in our world. So many wise thoughts. My favorite quote:
“When we come into this world — as I see with my own kids, and many of you may have seen with other young people in your lives — we are content. My kids don’t care whether we have a big house or a small house. They don’t care about how fancy the clothes are that they wear or not. They care about finding moments of joy. They care about the relationships they have with the people around them.”
Another thing that stuck with me was how Murthy talks about the pandemic of loneliness – something that was indeed magnified by the pandemic. He offers four suggestions on how individuals can create a world with more connection:
1) spend 15 minutes a day connecting with someone you care about (who doesn’t live with you.)
2) give people your full attention when talking to each other.
3) find opportunities for service as this helps connect you with other people but also with your own values.
4) counterintuitively, find time for solitude because in solitude you can rediscover yourself, and connecting with yourself is important for connecting with other people.
I don’t care to put myself on the introvert/extrovert spectrum because I feel like for me, it’s not one or the other, but I do know that I get deep satisfaction from interacting with other people. I’m always hesitant to reach out to other people, but I’m always glad when I do and this podcast episode was a good reminder to reach out more.

Grateful For:
– The Husband for taking the kids away. A ten hour road trip with three kids… not for the faint of heart, but he went and he made sure the kids had a great time. They went to the Aquarium, did the architectural boat tour, visited the Bean. Also, he sent me this hilarious text exchange:

“Why Thank you, Husband, for sparing me a trip to the American Girl Store!”

– The Husband’s Garden. Since the Husband wasn’t home, I mowed the lawn and watered the garden. I will fully admit that I am a spectator in the backyard – I don’t have any interest in getting my hands into gardening or landscaping or what not. My interaction with the garden is pretty much limited to cooking the vegetables that he grows. As I was watering the garden, though, I noticed how thoughtful he is about the plants, and all the little projects that he has going on in his garden. I noticed how colourful and pretty everything looked and I felt really grateful that he put in the effort to make our backyard so green. And I’m also really grateful that these little bits of dirt and growth have given him a hobby and so many hours of not thinking about the kids.

– Our dishwasher. Because when you clean out the fridge, it is a good thing to not have to wash all that science experiment encrusted Tupperware by hand.

Looking Forward To:
– Camping! And Camp Food! I’ve started brainstorming what we’re going to eat on our camping trip to the Shenandoah Mountains. I’ve bought a new cooler and I’m excited to take it camping. I’ve been listening to camping podcasts to also get me excited about three nights in the woods with two little kids.
– A week at home with the six year old. When I realized that this would be a performance week and I would have a lighter work schedule, I decided not to put the six year old in camp and instead he can have Camp Mom – where we go do fun things and go on playdates and spend lots of time outdoors. His sisters will be in school, so we’ll have lots of one on one time, which si something I don’t do enough of.
-The Smithsonian Folklife Festival – starts this weekend. It’s always fun to go down to the Mall and see the exhibits and performances. The theme this year is the Ozarks and also the exploration of the where spirituality and creativity intersect. I used to dismiss this as one of those DC things that made the Mall a crowded madhouse and I’d avoid going, but I’ve come to see what a neat collection of experiences it is. If I ever have the summer free, I would seriously think about volunteering for the Festival.

What I Ate:
Saturday: The leftover Cucumber and Black Bean Salad from last week.

Sunday: I didn’t plan my work day and meals well and as a result did not pack a dinner and was starving by the time I got home from work at 8:30pm. I ate a can of tuna over some cut up cucumbers with hot sauce. And some more leftovers. Sometimes a can of tuna is just the meal I need.

Monday: Whole Roasted Cauliflower and Mashed Beans from Hetty McKinnon’s To Asia with Love. I’ve always wanted to try a whole roasted cauliflower and being home by myself was the perfect time to do it. The family things cauliflower is bland and make faces whenever I propose it. (And then eat it anyway.) The recipe calls for mixing gochujang and yogurt and spreading that over a cauliflower and then roasting it. The roasting turns the yogurt and gochujang into an almost cheesy like spicy layer coating the cauliflower. It was definitely not bland.

Tuesday and Wednesday: Leftovers. Because when home by myself, it’s okay to eat the same thing three nights in a row. (Maybe it would be okay to do this when everyone else is home too, but I feel like it wouldn’t go over as well. We are so spoiled.)

Thursday: Happy Hour with some mom friends. We went to a favorite Mexican restaurant. I ordered the seafood soup, which I always order at the restaurant. It’s this delicious tomato broth based concoction chock full of seafood and flavour. It is delicious. I had it years ago and even though it is no longer on the menu, they will still make it if you ask. (I feel like such a braggy special snowflake for saying, “I just ask for this off menu thing and they make it.” But that’s really how it goes down.). Anyhow, when I got the bill, I realized that the seafood soup is a $38 item. Which I had never realized before because the Husband usually settles the bill when we go out. And I almost had a heart attack to realize that I’ve been eating $38 soup for years. I mean it is kind of understandable – there is half a lobster in this soup. Plus all sorts of other seafood. I told myself that I don’t drink, so ordering the seafood soup is probably an acceptable indulgence when we go out to eat.

Friday: Opening night – I didn’t really have dinner, but I did have some roast beef sliders and these really complicated looking cucumber appetizers at the opening night party.

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.

(bi)Weekly recap + what we ate: Distances

It feels like I’m still struggling through May, but really it’s well into June! The older kids still have a week of school, which feels late to me, but at the same time, I’m thinking, “ALREADY??? Unfettered free time for them?!?!” The 3 year old will go to day care full time, but the older kids are having four weeks of camp and the rest will be trips or time with grandparents or parents. I have finally booked all the camps that we need for the kids, so our child care needs are covered. It’s certainly a relief to have it done, but I am second-guessing myself and wondering if there should be more organized activities. It will be fine. I have to remind myself that done is better than perfect. And really, there is no perfect. Grandparent camp/ camp mom and dad will definitely be on the unstructured side. I’m strangely a little nervous about the lack of plans or routine for the non-camp weeks… I want to fill the summer with joy and fun and good memories, but at the same time that feels like a lot of pressure to have those expectations.

Here, the air has been hazy and we , in an ironic twist, masked to go outdoors for a couple days. I guess I’m glad I stocked up on masks last March, even though the kids weren’t masking in school anymore. I didn’t think much of the reports of poor air quality, but when I woke up Thursday morning, the trees seemed shrouded in a light mist. Of course it wasn’t mist. The air in DC is no where are poor of a quality as those further north, and in Canada – I hope everyone is staying safe; it all sounds really worrisome and stressful.

My May show has closed, and that finishes out the season at that company. I’ll be back in September, though, so I don’t feel too badly about not having time to clean out my desk properly.

One day, when I was doing my pre-show checks, I was struck by how much less time my pre-show checks take by the time I get to performance number four. When we first move to the theatre from the rehearsal room, it can initially take upwards of 45 minutes to talk the crew through setting up the props (presetting the props, we call it), and then for me to double check all the presets. The prop list for this show was quite large and a lot of it is quite specific: candle in the black holder on the stage left prop table, candle in the brass holder onstage, two candle tapers in the wooden box, two inch stack of paper on the crate, one tray with six ashtrays and six candles, one tray with three ashtrays and three candles and two cups, etc., etc., etc. Also – once we get into the theatre I work with a union crew so I can’t just put things where I want it – I have to ask the crew to do it. In the rehearsal hall, the other stage managers and I preset the props ourselves, and it just goes faster when I don’t have to explain the exact angle a box needs to sit at because if it isn’t like that, the singer won’t be able to reach the thing on top of the box that is very important for that bit of stage business. But I am deeply grateful for the crew because sometimes we have very heavy and awkward items in the show and by the time we get to stage, I’m tired of having to move it around myself. So I’m always glad for the crew.

All that to say, the first few days onstage I’m rushing to make sure things get set up at those correct angles, and I feel like the props won’t get set up in time for the start of rehearsal. The prop preset seems huge. Sometimes they aren’t all set when rehearsal starts and I just prioritize – set/check the stuff in the first scene, leave all the stuff in the last scene and check those when we get closer. (This is not the optimal way of going about things.)

But then something happens along the way as we get towards opening night and then through performances – the preset list that was a long and daunting 45 minutes process suddenly becomes manageable and takes only fifteen minutes to check. Often the crew has it done before I come up to stage. I can take one glance at a shelf of trays and tell immediately when something is not right, when a slice of bread or bottle of wine is missing. It’s not that I am become careless in prop checking – though I have been known to miss something (one show, it was a canteen that I had forgotten, and a singer had to improvise with a wine bottle. Then he exited stage with said wine bottle and returned with the canteen. I quipped that he pulled a reverse-Jesus.) I’m not careless – I still methodically check things off the preset list – but certainly by performance #4, what once seemed like a huge task on Day One in the theatre, suddenly seems like a less big task, seems routine and easy. On these big big shows I usually do have a moment when I say to myself, “Just think, this preset used to seem impossibly large, and now it’s … not.” Maybe that’s a metaphor for other things in life… sleep training, weekday mornings, going to the airport after COVID….

Just page one of the prop preset. There is another page and then three pages of diagrams.

Along those lines, in my last recap, I noted that I took an average of 16 000 steps per day during tech. As an exercise, I tallied how many steps I took during a regular performance – it takes in the neighborhood of 3000 steps over the course of four hours to run this particular show. That’s a 13 000 step difference. It got me thinking – that 13 000 step difference is the work it takes to figure out how the show is going to work in the theatre. I think sometimes people think that what we do as Stage Managers is make sure the show happens smoothly every night, but as I was doing the math of the difference in number of steps between a day of tech and a performance call, I realize that a lot of the core of my job is in those 13 000 steps. Being a stage manager is not just the 3000 steps it takes to run the show night after night. Rather it’s the 13 000 steps is the work it took to decide the backstage traffic patterns, to figure out the quick changes and prop presets, to make sure singers had clear instructions on how not to get hit by a piece of scenery, to run out onstage when the conductor or director stopped the rehearsal…. 3000 steps is what the audience sees. 13 000 steps, or roughly 5.5 miles, is what it takes to get there. The distance one travels is decidedly not the destination.

Speaking of distance…. I’ve been back to commuting. I recently read this opinion article: “Office Worker Don’t Hate the Office. They Hate the Commute” and something about it certainly rubbed me the wrong way. That they have to specify “Office Workers” seems to leave out large swaths of the population who don’t have the luxury of choosing to work from home. Similarly, a few weeks ago, I listened to an episode of The Art of Manliness titled The Science of a Better Daily Routine, in which they talked about science based ways to tweak your daily routine, including your commute. The guest mentioned that the optimal commute is 15 minutes and how we should craft our jobs with that in mind. It sort of irked me that he seemed to think tweaking your commute was an easy lifestyle change – like eating vegetables or drinking more water.

Anyhow, commuting has been on my mind recently as it has been taking vast amounts of my time. My current commute takes anywhere from 20 minutes on a Saturday morning to 1h, 5 mins on a weekday at 5pm. On days when it takes 20 minutes, it gives me a certain satisfying sense of flow; between home and work, there is but one traffic light, and that one is around the corner from my house. After that traffic light, I can drive without stopping all the way to work – my favorite is driving with my windows down, singing at the top of my lungs. It’s actually fun … if the traffic is light. If the traffic is not light… well then the commute can be soul sucking. All these people trying to get somewhere in their coffin-like metal pods. Alone, mostly. I find myself very rage-y some days when the traffic is moving particularly slowly. The punishing rays of sun that beat in through my window that I can’t escape from as I crawl along at 15 mph, past accidents and through construction. I am trying to be Zen about commuting, trying to make it an exercise in gratitude. I’m having varying degrees of success with this.

Things that make my commute a little less despairing:
– Snacks. Most days I’m commuting home around dinner time, and being hungry certainly does not improve my mood. I used to have granola bars and candy, and chocolate in the car for commuting, but these past few months, in an attempt to eat more vegetables, I’ve started packing crudités and cut up fruit for my commute. I feel like this little switch is a minor win on many levels. In the morning, I have been having my homemade iced chai in my cup holder, and it makes me happy. I tell myself I can’t drink it until I’m in the car, and it gives me something to look forward to. I do need to figure out some kind of portable breakfast because I’m finding that most mornings, I’m not hungry enough to eat breakfast before I get the kids to the school bus and then I’m starving by the time I get to work. Maybe the solution is to just eat at work, but I like to work when I get into work.
– Ice cold water. Staying hydrated is important, and ice cold water on a hot day can be divine. I’ve been filling up insulated water bottle with ice in the morning and topping it off before I leave work so that I have cold water for the drive home. I find having a sip of very very cold water helps perk me up a little bit.
– Something good to listen to. A good audiobook, an interesting podcast (lately I’ve been listening to Book Friends Forever, What Should I Read Next, and The Puberty Podcast), something good on the radio (This great story from the BBC on how opera companies use singing and breathing techniques to help COVID sufferers.), music. Having something engaging to listen to helps me not be so annoyed at the pace of traffic. I was also thinking that I could use the time to catch up on phone calls, but somehow I never feel like doing that.
– Sunglasses. I never saw the point in sunglasses, but a few years ago I got a pair of prescription sunglasses and it was life changing. Really bright sun tends to make me sleepy, which is dangerous when driving. Having sunglasses helps alleviate some of that sun drowsy feeling for me when I don’t have to constantly squint in the morning/ afternoon brightness.
– Reminding myself that I’m lucky to be able to commute to a job that I love, and one that requires my presence. In our world of AI advances, I’m glad that I’m not replaceable. (yet. Always yet. I don’t want to underestimate what we will do with technology). I don’t always feel like what I do is important in the larger context of world problems, but I do get a lot of satisfaction in how I function in the microcosm of putting on a show, and the in person interactions and experiences that I get to participate in. So on days when I am crawling through traffic I try to be grateful that someone needs me to show up somewhere.

So some fun things that have happened lately:

-On Memorial Day I had thought to take the kids on a hike with some friends, but it rained that morning, making it a little too muddy for that, so we decided to take the Metro into DC and go to a Museum instead. We decided to go to the Portrait Gallery because it’s right off the Red Line so easy to get to. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the best choice of museum for four kids aged 3 to 11. I love that museum – I love seeing all the portraits of people and reading about what they did and how they made their mark. I always am filled with wonder at all the people who did amazing things whom I’ve never even heard about. But… I admit row and rows of portraits is probably not the most engaging for kids. Every time they paused in front of a painting or photograph for more than twenty seconds felt like an achievement. They did spend a whole three minutes in front of this painting, though:

Capture of H.B.M. Frigate Macedonian by U.S. Frigate United States, October 25, 1812 – painting by Thomas Chamber

Something about the energy and movement of the waves and the smoke seemed to capture the kids’ attention. They stood in front of it and talked about canons and shooting and destruction. It felt like a small win.

After the Portrait Gallery we were going to walk to the Natural History Museum, but all the streets were closed down by the Mall. At first I thought it was for the Memorial Day Concert on the Mall, but as we got closer, we realized that there was in fact a Memorial Day Parade. I haven’t seen a parade in ages, and certainly not one with this many marching bands. Of course we stopped to watch. The weather was pretty drizzly by this point, which acutally worked in our favor because the streets weren’t too crowded and we could get a good viewing spot. But all those poor high school students from all over the country, with their polyester uniforms and instruments having to march in the damp weather! I imagine they will always remember this… “Remember that time we got invited to play at the Memorial Day Parade in Washington, DC and it rained and we got soaked as we walked miles and miles down Independence Avenue?” Hard times certainly make for memorable times.

– The 11 year old is graduating from elementary school this year. (OMG.) The PTA got “Proud Graduate Class of 2023” yard signs for all the 5th graders and I walked over one morning to pick one up for our yard. Aside from paying the membership fee and venmo-ing money when staff gifts are being collected, I haven’t been very involved in the PTA. PTAs kind of scare me being the introvert that I am. – I know they are very nice and they do a lot of really great things, but meeting new people and activism has always been hard for me. Plus with kids at two different school I didn’t have it in me to join two separate PTAs. Anyhow, I show up at this person’s house and there are two ladies out front handing out yard sign. They asked the name of my kid and I told them and they said, “Oh my gosh, we love her!” Then they went on about what a good role model she is and how they’ve seen her play basketball, etc. etc. I feel like I spend a lot of time at loggerheads with the 11 year old and to hear other people sing her praises… well it reminded me that she really is a good kid and she tries hard to do the right thing and I need to be less hard on her. I was delighted to hear other people say such good things about her, yet it also made me feel bad that sometimes all our interactions are about things that I want her to do better on, and I should have more interactions that aren’t me naggingly remining her to do things. Definitely one of the things I need to work on.

-I finally opened the bag of Ketchup Chips I brought home from our trip to Montreal last summer. I tend to either abstain from snacks completely or eat the whole package of something. Since I can’t get ketchup chips here in the States, I couldn’t bear to open the one bag I brought home from Montreal knowing that once I opened it, I would devour the whole thing in one sitting. The Husband a few weeks ago, moved the bag of chips to our mantle, with some comment about how they are such a prized possession we should put them on display. Well, one day, after work, I finally decided that it was time to open the bag. Not sure why – something about it being summer and me being home from work early just made it feel like the right time to indulge. I opened the bag, inhaled the tomatoe-y vinergar-y aroma of the chips, then sat in the back yard with a book and my chips and savored every one. It was lovely, and, yes, I’m sad they are now gone.

And afternoon with ketchup chips, working from home Also – as idyllic as this scene seems – we were actually soon driven in by the mosquitoes.

Grateful For:
– All the things mentioned above that make commuting not so terrible. But also for technology and Google Maps. Being able to predict when I’ll be home, being able to see before I get on the road if the Capital Beltway is red or green… I remember when I got my first GPS – back before there was one on every smartphone. It was about the size of a baseball and sat on my dashboard. The first model I had couldn’t tell you traffic delays or anything, it just told you how to get from point A to point B. And before that, all I had to get around was a Thomas Guide. I grew up in Southern California and learned how to drive and get around using a Thomas Guide. Crazy to think that my kids will probably never have to look up a street location on a paper map book.

-The 11 year old’s piano teacher. The 11 year old has been on the fence about continuing with piano lessons. She likes being able to play, but does. not. practice. I’ve gone through phases of pleading, ordering, cajoling, bribing, and just ignoring her in my attempts to get her to practice, and it’s exhausting. I was thinking I should just let her quit, but then I was really struck by a list of things adults wish they could have learned (not sure where I saw the list) and the two top things were 1) play and instrument, and 2) speak a foreign language. (I’m glad I can do both, albeit rather imperfectly.) And then I spoke to a friend who has a side gig as a violinist and she said she is really glad her parents didn’t let her quit when she was my kid’s age. So I don’t want to be all, “You’ll stick with piano because I say so,” but I do want to find a way that the 11 year old will stick with it. I talked to her piano teacher and the teacher said that the 11 year old, when she is pushed can play beautifully, and she would be sad if she were to stop. Then the teacher said this to me, “I have students whose parents think piano is important and want their children to play an instrument even if they don’t practice at home, so they essentially pay me to sit and practice piano with them for thirty minutes once a week.” I don’t know that I feel that is the best use of my child’s activity fund, but at the same time, what if consistent lessons will be enough for her to eventually get over the hump of lacking self-motivation? I think one of the hard thing for me as a parent of a tween is not knowing who my child really is, or wondering if who my child really is is right in front of me, but I can’t see it. Anyhow, I’m glad for the long chat I had with her piano teacher – it gave me a lot of perspective. At first I was inclined to just let the eleven year old quit, but she and I talked about it and about how important it was and how much fun she seems to have when she’s just playing around on the piano and we decided that she’ll take a break for the summer and start again in the fall. I’m cautiously optimistic about this.

-A roof. I literally wrote this in my gratitude journal. One night it rained so so hard, and I was lying in bed with the 6 year old and he said, “It’s a good thing we have a roof.” And I thought… yes. I am very grateful for our roof.

Looking Forward To:
-I’ve booked our summer camping trip! Three nights car camping in the Shenedoahs. It will be me, the two little kids, and my parents. I’m excited for some time outdoors and I’m starting to research hikes for us to go on. I do need to get a new cooler since there is a crack in our old one.

– A visit from a friend. She’s an old friend from college who will be in the area. I haven’t decided what to do yet – maybe we’ll wander around Annapolis, maybe we’ll go on a hike?

-Being home for pizza and movie night. I’ve worked almost every Friday and Saturday night for the past six weeks, or we’ve had an event that we had to attend, so I’ve missed out on pizza and movie night for a while. I get to pick the movie.

– The 11 year old’s fifth grade graduation ceremony. Can’t believe I will have a middle-schooler!

What We Ate: I admit meal planning has been rubbish lately and the Husband has been making most of the dinners. So here is the very vague rundown of the past three weeks since I last did a menu recap…

Monday: Tofu and Broccoli Stir-Fry

Tuesday: Vegan Chickpea Gnocchi Soup. (Made it in the morning before going to work.)

Wednesday: Pasta of some sort

Thursday: Zucchini Boats.

Friday: Pizza and movie night (Zootopia). I think they ordered pizza.

Saturday: Dirty Meat – The was the big grilling party that we have for my work colleagues. This guy I work with marinates meat for a week in a combination of herbs and spices and then we gather to grill and eat it. There were over thirty people at our house for this party since it involved both past and present co-workers. It was a really good time. It might have also involved water balloons.

Sunday: Last minute dinner invite to go to a friends’ house. They had accidentally ordered too much food and needed help eating it. Not that we really need an excuse to see these friends.

Monday: Sauteed green beans, eggs, and Tater Tots. I’m not sure what the Husband/freezer that I can cook and call dinner?”

Tuesday: Pasta Salad with the leftover grilled vegetable from the Dirty Meat party.

Wednesday: Not sure at all.

Thursday: Mac and cheese made from scratch. Go Husband!

Friday: Leftover Pasta salad and pizza. I had to work, but the family watched Kung Fun Panda II (I think? Is there a second one? It was the baby’s turn to choose.)

Saturday: Pizza. On two consecutive nights? Not sure what is up with that.

Sunday: Leftovers scrounged from the fridge.

Monday: Burgers (Turkey and Beef), roasted vegetables, and tater tots. Our friends who came with us to the museum stayed on for dinner. I love having friends who you can just pull tater tots out of the freezer and call it dinner.

Tuesday: Broccoli Tofu Stir Fry

Wednesday: Eat down the fridge night.

Thursday: Pasta Salad. This time using my Friend’s Greek Salad recipe as a base. Made in the morning before I went to work.

Friday: Sandwiches and cookies. And easy dinner because the 11 year old had a piano recital we had to get to.

(bi)Weekly Recap + what we ate: Opening Night and other Miscellaneous things

Another show opened. Woot! Some random thoughts from this month so far:

A few of my tech week MVPs:
– pre-planning my wardrobe and laying out a week’s worth of clothes on Sunday night. I had done this on my Fall show, but had fallen out of the habit the past two shows. I need to remember to do this more often – not having to spend time thinking about what I’m going to wear every morning makes getting dressed go much faster. For some reason, when I have to decide anew every morning what to wear, it takes more time to choose than when I do it on Sunday night.
– Yogurt. I’ve been trying to run or walk on my dinner breaks – I didn’t do as many runs as I usually do, but I did always get outside for at least 30 mins on my dinner break. Of course this meant less time to eat dinner, so I tried to pack things that would be easy and fast to eat. Yogurt was definitely on the “easy and fast” list. I filled a thermos with yogurt, frozen fruit, pecans, chia seeds, and a drizzle of maple syrup. It was a very easy yet filling thing to eat and the thermos kept it cold. At first I felt like yogurt really wasn’t a dinner food, but it actually was pretty filling and got me through the evening rehearsal.
– Amazing colleagues, who are so very good at their jobs that even the hard stuff is not so hard. It’s not always easy, but it’s not so hard that I want to quit.
-The Husband, as always, who holds down the fort, did the after school pick up, fed the kids, took them to basketball practice, and skating lessons, and read to them, and put them to bed. All on his own.

I snapped this picture onstage one day while we were setting lighting cues. It’s the most snow I’ve seen all year. One rehearsal, I found myself standing underneath the snow bags as the snow was coming down and it was the oddest sensation – of being covered in snowflakes but not cold at all.

The most snow I’ve seen all year. Also… it gets into everything.

Tech Week Step Count:
Piano Tech Friday : 22, 475
Piano Dress Saturday: 24, 263
Sitzprobe Sunday: 12, 100
Orchestra Tech Monday: 17, 819
Orchestra Tech Tuesday: 11, 936
Orchestra Tech Wednesday: 15, 948
Final Dress Thursday: 11, 654
(Average of 16, 599 steps/day)

The next weeks will be a little busy because I’ll be in performances for one show while prepping/ rehearsing another show in another part of town. It will be a lot of time in the car, and the commute can be terribly slow, but I’ve started a new audiobook that makes me look forward to getting in the car:

I was looking for an audiobook for my commute and found this on the list of finalists for the 2023 Audie Awards. I’ve never read any Terry Pratchett, and people seem to really love his work, so I thought I’d give it a try. It is proving very funny and layered so far.

Other random ordinary life happenings:

It was Spirit Week for the 5th Grader. I feel somewhat guilty that I’m not the best person at keeping up with the various spirit weeks/ teacher appreciation weeks/etc. at school. I’ll see the email come through and then promptly forget. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the teachers or school spirit, it’s just that these weeks with some specific requirement every. single. day. seems light another kettlebell of mental load that I can’t handle, especially during tech week. I’m glad the 11 year old kept track of Spirit week because I knew it would make her happy to participate but I just couldn’t do it for her. Maybe this is growth? I forget about things so that she can develop a sense of responsibility to remember them? One morning was moustache day and I drew a moustache on her with Sharpie. A few days later, she comes to me with a sock on her hand and says, “It’s sock puppet day today.”

No use getting annoyed at the last minute request for sock puppet help, since I wouldn’t have been home in the evening to help anyway. But we did our best and I think it was pretty cute:

Fun fact – that hat is the hat that the 11 year old came home from the hospital wearing. We didn’t realize that we had to bring clothes to the hospital for our new baby so the nurses had to raid the NICU closet for us.

One day I had the morning off, so I volunteered at Field Day at the six year old’s school. I was put in charge of a volleyball station. Though “volleyball” and “put in charge of” are used very loosely here. It was chaotic – 20-40 kids at a time at my station – and there was lots of yelling of instructions. Also – teachers are amazing. Because they have to do it all. the. time.

A new smoothie shop opened around the corner from the Husband’s work place and they have a papaya smoothie that was very delicious. I discovered this little shop the day that I had to take my car in for a new tire. I had imprudently run up the curb in front of our our house one midnight when I got home from a late rehearsal. Because that’s just what I needed at that hour. Anyhow, the next morning, the Husband helped me change the tire. Also.. I went to open my trunk to get the jack and the spare out, and MY JACK WAS MISSING. What the what?!? You have to dig kind of deep to get to my jack, so I’m completely confounded by this. Or maybe I removed it at some point and couldn’t remember? Anyhow it was a completely bizarre mystery. Spare Tire put on and I went to Firestone to get a new tire. The six year old came with me to Firestone (Thank goodness I had warranty on my tires) and on the way back to the Metro to get home, we saw this new smoothie shop had opened. So we ordered smoothies – berry for him, dragon fruit for me. It was so fresh and tasty that I went back later that week and ordered a papaya smoothie. It sort of reminded me of the Papaya Milk drink that I would get from the Taiwanese drink store back in California. I sat in the spring sunshine in the plaza next to the smoothie shop to drink my papaya smoothie and it was such a wonderful quiet few minutes to myself.

Is there anything more lovely than a special cold beverages, sipped outdoors on a spring-almost-summer day?

There was also Mother’s Day in the mix. I did get to sleep in until 9am. Which was good because I had been up super late the night before at the opening night party. I don’t love going to work parties, because I’m just awkward socially and feel very uncool standing there clutching my Coke while people do suave things like chat with ambassadors and drink champagne. But, I did talk to some nice people – friends of a friend – and there was this amazing cheese spread:

And this was only one tiny corner of the cheese table.

Anyhow, the day after was Mother’s Day. I had a show to work in the afternoon so it didn’t feel very special. I don’t love Mother’s Day – again that whole feeling awkward about the attention thing. The one thing I did ask for Mother’s Day – getting a picture with all my kids – did not happen, so I was a little bummed about that. But the other thing I wanted – to eat dinner outside – that did happen. Granted, it was Chipotle because we had promised the 11 year old Chipotle for an excellent report card, but I still got to enjoy the warm evening. And the kids made a sign for me:

Grateful for:

-Wireless headsets. When I was first starting out in this business, there were no wireless headsets in the theatres where I worked. You got a headset and beltpack which was hard wired into a place in the wall so you either ran the show without a headset – which made it difficult to communicate with your stage manager – or you ran the show attached to this wall, with this really long tail or cable everywhere. Now when I started out I was working in small theatres, so having a wired headset was inconvenient but doable. If you were working in a big theatre, I guess you just ran the show without a headset and everyone just had to trust that things would happen and problems would get solved? It seems so inconceivable to me. Anyhow, we now have wireless headsets and we can roam the backstage and keep in touch with the rest of the stage management team, and I think that’s awesome.

-Our back patio. The weather has tipped into that between spring and summer time when there is longer days but the weather is not yet unbearably hot. My favorite time this time of year is the morning or early evening – when the sun is not at it’s zenith and the weather is slightly cooler – perfect for a light sweater, but okay if not. I love having a back patio and being able to sit back there with my tea in the morning, or a seltzer in the evening. Having a space to be able to enjoy the weather and the fresh air, a little table on which to put my beverage, and a chair to relax in and periodically a book to keep me company – that’s a good time right there.

– My car. And the mechanic who keeps it running. I drive a 2003 Subaru Legacy. It’s not the most fancy car these days, and it certainly has its chronic issues, but it gets me from point A to point B. I know its days are numbered, but I will drive it until it is no longer safe to do so. On my free day week, I took it in for an oil change and to have a belt tightened. My conversation to book the appointment with my mechanic went like this (Also note, we used to have three cars, but now only have two):
Me: I’d like to bring my car in for an oil change.
Mechanic: Yes of course. What is your phone number?
Me: [I tell him]
Mechanic: Oh yes. Which car of your fleet are you bringing in?
Me: The Subaru Legacy.
Mechanic: Oh Yes. The old one.

That made me laugh… I drive “the old one.”

But even still, it’s getting me from point A to point B. And these weeks when I’m working two jobs, I am doing a lot of getting from A to B.

Looking Forward To:
– Grilling with friends and colleagues. One of our traditions at work is to gather for a cookout once in a while and this year will be the first cook out since 2019. There are thirty+ people about to descend on the house. I’ve never hosted that many people before and honestly our yard is not that big. Also… I just realized that this will be more people than were at our wedding. Anyhow I’m hoping it will be pretty low key – grill, chairs, tables, people bring sides/apps/ beer, and we just hang out for an afternoon. Effortless. Easy. Plus, since a good number of them are stage managers, clean up is usually done before I can blink twice and accept the help.

– Summer. I have work booked until mid August this year, so I’ll have to be very purposeful to get some of our usual summer adventures in. It’s a balance, though… since we work six days a week, if I pack the day off with too many adventures, I might not have time to recharge and do the life maintenance things that I need to. But I am looking forward to the pool and outdoor music and hikes and camping and getting on my bike.

-I started watching The Gilded Age, a period drama that came out last year. It is by Julian Fellowes who wrote Downton Abbey and the cast is divine. It features some huge theatrical talents who, from what I understand, were all available for a mini series since COVID had shut down the theatres. I’m only one episode in, but it is proving that same blend of detailed and juicy yet proper that I loved about Downton Abbey. This is my new “while I wash the dishes” incentive.

– Working with a colleague whom I have known for over twenty years, but whom I haven’t seen since 2011. One thing about my work is many people come in and out of my life. Many of the colleagues from the early days when I was just starting out in opera are the most dear to me. We all started out as baby opera makers with big dreams and there is something really bonding about being in that stage of one’s career together. Some of these people are no longer in the industry, some of these people run their own opera companies now – funny the directions life takes you. Whenever we part ways at the end of a gig, I never say good-bye – it’s always, “See you later!” because I believe that our paths will cross again. When we finally do get to work together again, there is a sense of familiarity and growth that brings me so much joy and wonder.

What We Ate: It’s been a few weeks, but the Husband made all the dinners while I was in tech, so not quite so a very vague list…

Monday: Tortilla Soup. This recipe from the Two Sleevers website. Made a couple weeks ago and froze the leftovers. Present Me thanks Past Me for this foresight.

Tuesday: Eggplant Pasta. Vegan. Sautee eggplant with onions in InstantPot, add tomato sauce and pasta on top and cook on high pressure for 15 minutes. I made this to use up an eggplant we had in the fridge. The family was not a fan, but I thought it was perfectly fine. Vegan.

Wednesday: Eggs and leftovers.

Thursday: Take out Sandwiches. Again. This was the night we tried to go to an event at the local park where they had food trucks and live music. The place was swamped and the food trucks couldn’t keep up with the volume of people. Plus it was expensive. I think we paid $20 for 3 plain hotdogs. So we abandoned the park, went to our friends’ house, ordered sandwiches from our favorite deli and ate in the backyard while the kids bounced on their trampoline. I’d say it turned out to be a very nice evening.

Friday: Chana Masala in the Instant Pot. This recipe from the blog Feasting at Home. I thought this was really tasty and I ate it in wraps for lunch for the rest of the week. The family was lukewarm. It might have been because I forgot to turn the IP into “keep warm” and the food was cold by the time they got home.

Saturday: I had leftovers while at work. The family had pizza and movie night. I’m not sure what they watched.

Sunday: Dumplings and leftovers. I was at work and had yogurt for dinner.

Monday: all I have scribbled in my journal is “pasta”…. I think that means the Husband made tortellini and red sauce.

Tuesday: Wings. The Husband ordered wings from one of our favorite places. (Me: leftovers/yogurt at work)

Wednesday: Eggs and Toast. (Me: leftovers at work)

Thursday, Friday, Saturday: Complete Blank. I’m pretty sure the Husband cooked.

Sunday: Mother’s Day and Chipotle.

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