weekly recap – Page 4 – Life Off Headset

Weekly recap + What We ate – First weeks of 2024!

Two weeks down, 50 more to go until next year.

The first week of January was a pretty chill week – the kids went back to school, I started working on a new show. My mother was here, but then she got sick so we did not see as much of her as we would have liked.

And then this past week has been a rainy rainy one here. Maybe snow this weekend? The week has not gone as I thought it would – a lot of rain and water, including some water in the basement of my parents’ rental property, derailing some plans. We went over with towels and tools, to clean up the water and see if we could see where the water was coming from. The basement had flooded a couple weeks ago, and at that time we thought the water was coming from a clogged outside drain. We cleared the drain, pulled up the flooring and the carpet. Then the rains came again and we were wrong about the source of water, clearly. So more phone calls, more clean up. We were at Home Depot at 9:30pm buying a wet dry vac. Along with six or seven other people. But we are fortunate in that we have the time and money to deal with these problems. I read somewhere that if you have the money to deal with a problem, it is not a problem. I try to remember that.

And now I’m battling a cough and congestion, which is making me super dried out and negatively affecting my sleep. On the one hand, I’ve been so exhausted that I’ve gone to be before midnight most nights (which is early for me!), but on the other hand, I’ve been woken up by frequent bouts of coughing and a super dry mouth so even though I’ve been getting more sleep than I normally do, it hasn’t been really great sleep. But perhaps this is a good sign to myself that I can go to bed before midnight if I want to. It’s that thing bout priorities, right?

The schools closed early on Tuesday because of the rainy weather. The communication from the schools hit our inboxes at 8:30am, just as we were getting ready to head for the bus. Luckily the first part of the week was pretty flexible for me, so I was able to pick up the kids. I had intended to work from home after pick up, but my friend called and said that the voice teacher our kids saw had openings in the early afternoon, so we could move our evening lesson to the afternoon if that was better for us weather wise. So spent the afternoon shuttling the two girls to voice lessons. A bright spot was that we stopped for Boba on the way home, and I’ve discovered the joy of hot boba tea! As in Boba in hot tea. Brilliant and warm and cozy! Boba tea has always been a cold drink for warm weather so I never thought about having it hot.

The weekend before was a nice mix of kids’ activates and house projects.. We had the 11 year old’s first basketball game, then we decided to go get dumplings for lunch from our favorite dumpling house. The restaurant has been undergoing some renovations and the newest addition was a boba counter! Woot. They had a really tasty Mango Pomelo Sago Smoothie which was a nice blend of fruity beverage and and a variety of chewy toppings, with a bit of sour bite from the pomelo. The 11 year old ordered it but didn’t really care for it, so I got to enjoy it. Yay!

Since it was a rainy rainy day, I decided to spend some time purging our book collection. We have a linen closet that we filled with books since we have a linen closet in our bathroom and didn’t actually need another linen closet in the house. We jokingly call it our library. I’ve been determined to pare down our bookshelves, so I took everything out of the library and went through each and every book. It was hard! Ultimately, I only came up with one small box of books to be taken to the donation pile. I had had grand thoughts of bags and bags of books, but came well short. I made a pile of books that I still have yet to read, some of which I’ve been carrying around for almost 20 years. Making my way through some of these books is one of my goals this year. I managed to confine all my books to one shelf of our “library”, stacked three deep. (I do also have a small pile of books up in my room, in addition to the stack of books from the library by my chair in the living room. )

The TBR pile. I think I’m going to start with My Name is Lucy Barton and East of Eden.

The book project took all weekend, while at the same time the Husband took down Christmas. Between the books everywhere and the storage boxes for the Christmas stuff, one had to tread carefully around the house.

Sunday we continued our book and de-Christmasing project, but we also had agility class for the 4 year old and then skating for the 4 and 6 year old. Since skating lessons also come with passes to open skate, we stayed after lessons to do some extra skating. I bought a book of skating passes for myself too so that I could go skating with the kids. It’s fun now that both kids can skate very independently – I can actually feel like I’m getting some active movement in when I skate with them since I don’t have a child clinging to me on the ice.

I might have overbooked us for kids’ activities for this first quarter, but since I’m light on work and can drive carpool, it seemed like a good opportunity to sign kids up for things that they wanted to do but which would be logistically hard for us to do when I’m working evenings and weekends. On the docket:
11 year old – piano, voice lessons (she’s been asking for a while so we started these last month), basket ball (rec league and skill development work out – she’s playing basketball 3-4 times a week right now.), swimming, and religious ed classes.
6 year old- piano, skating lessons, religious ed classes. He mentioned wanting to do coding class, and those are offered as an after school activity so we might do that. Also sewing classes next month. (I asked him what he wanted to learn to do and he said he wanted to learn to sew!)
4 year old – agility class, skating, and trampoline classes. The trampoline classes are mid afternoon, so I’m taking advantage of my lighter work schedule to get her to these. I have such mixed feelings about enrolling her in full on gymnastics – probably my own baggage from having done it before – I think she would be very good and enjoy it, but I have a lot of trepidation about gymnastics as a toxic environment and also it being a dangerous activity. Probably something I need to unpack for myself….
And then also for the grown ups – I’ve enrolled in watercolor classes and the Husband signed up for a semester of teaching ESL. I’m really excited that we’re both taking time to pursue something outside of the daily grind of kids and work. The rest of the year is looking to be really full for me work-wise, so I want to take this time to lean into the “life” part of work/life.

Also – speaking of activities – Summer camp registration has started and it is majorly stressing me out! I have a tentative work offer so I know when we need to have coverage. The summer camp provided by our after care was already full when I checked in the first week of January. That would have been the easy option since the 6 year old has lots of friends there and it’s not too expensive. So I guess we’ll be quilting together summer care for him – that’ll probably be a project for next week. The oldest will probably have a combination of theatre camp, basketball camp, and doing nothing around the house.

Random new skill learned. I figured out how to do a fishtail braid! Even though the fishtail braid had been explained to me before, I never could quite do it. A few weeks ago, the 11 year old borrowed a book on braids from the library and wanted me to do some of the braids from the book in her hair. So I gave the fishtail another try, and I think I got it! I love how tiny detailed it looks. It does take more time than a regular three strand braid, though. Yay for learning new things.

Two Podcasts at the right time for me:

This episode of Radical Candor: “Podcast Season 5, Episode 27: “Your ‘Nice’ Workplace Culture is Fraught With False Harmony” I’m newly in a position at work where it is now part of my job to have feedback sessions, and as someone who strives to provide a kind work environment, I want to be positive in feedback sessions – but is that useful? Where is the line between feedback on how one does something vs. micromanaging someone else’s style? This episode talks about how being nice can be counterproductive and even toxic, and it was good food for thought for me when thinking of how I want the culture of our stage management team to work.

This episode from The Puberty Podcast: Consequences and Discipline with Tina Payne Bryson. I’ve been struggling with how I react to the 11 year old (well, now 12 year old)’s moments of … well, tween-ness. I thought this episode was really great for reminding me that part of my work as a parent is to help my kids figure out how to “life”. Payne Bryson points out that the word discipline comes from the Latin word for “learning”. One thing I really love about the Puberty Podcast is that it gives me actual things to say, and one great phrase from this episode is: “I know that you know that X needs to happen. What’s your plan?” I love that the phrase allows the kid to realize that you know they can think for themselves. It’s a great episode.

Grateful for:
–The Return of my Rain coat. Back in November, I got home after the last performance of my fall show and realized that I had left my rain coat at the theatre. I was so frustrated! I had finally splurged and purchased a good quality raincoat and now I had gone and lost it. All December I had a replacement raincoat in my online shopping cart, but I couldn’t bring myself to spend another $130 on a raincoat, when I had been so stupid as to have lost my original one. Luckily I had a windbreaker that I could use, but it wasn’t long like my raincoat and it didn’t fit as well. Anyhow, my first day back at work after the new year, I walked into my office and there, outside my office was my raincoat! I guess the costume crew had found it when they were loading out of the theatre so they sent it back to the costume shop/rehearsal studio. Amazing! I felt so lucky – I got my coat back just in time for the rains to start.

–Past me for putting my keys in a safe place. I always put my office keys in the same pocket of my purse. I hadn’t been to my office in almost three weeks, and as I was walking up to the door, I reached into that pocket and pulled out my keys. It’s such a small thing, but I’m really glad that past me is so consistent about putting keys in the same spot so I can find them even after two weeks of not being in the office.

–Hand me down baby clothes. The Husband has a coworker who just adopted a baby so I gathered some baby clothes we still had laying around, and bundled them up to pass along. I have to e honest – I’ve been having a hard time getting rid of the baby clothes. We aren’t having any more kids, but I have so many cozy, sweet memories associated with the baby clothes that it’s been hard for me to let go. Anyhow, as I was pulling together clothes to give to my Husband’s coworker, I remembered how most of the clothes that we had when our kids were infants were hand me downs from friends and acquaintances. How lucky we were! It made me a little wistful to pass along the baby clothes, but I’m glad another little baby will get to wear them.

–The 11 year old, who is now 12! Speaking of baby clothes… This week we celebrated another birthday – it’s hard to believe that we have been parents for 12 years. We celebrated by going to Indian Food and, as is tradition in our family, she got to choose a breakfast cereal (she chose Kellogg’s Smart Start). She’ll have a sleepover party next weekend, since I was working this weekend and didn’t think it fair to have the Husband solo parent a sleepover with 5 tweens. I’m so grateful for this big-hearted, kind, observant, sympathetic, creative person who loves to read, draw, play with her siblings, and make messes in the kitchen. She teaches me so much about patience and listening. I had made a cake for her, but I was lazy so I just oil and floured the pan, rather than lining with parchment as I usually do. So when I tried to turn the cake out of the pan, half of it stuck and it fell apart. Bummer. And then I had to go to work and didn’t have time to deal with it or try to patch it back with frosting. We ended up just eating it with whipped cream when we got home from the Indian restaurant, which was probably just as well since none of us likes frosting that much.

the newly 12 year old and her sad cake! Why is she wearing maternity ward blanket around her neck??

Looking Forward To:
– We’ve booked plane tickets to visit my brother in California for Spring Break! We haven’t been to California since pre-pandemic. I always feel bad that my brother comes to visit us at least once every 18 months or so. Of course he only has one kid, so it’s cheaper for him to come to us, but still…

-Speaking of travel – I finally sent off my passport for renewal. Yay. Looking forward to getting that. I really hope my grandfather in Taiwan stays healthy until I get my passport back.

-Getting through birthday season. I always think I should plan something social for January, but then I realize that two kids have birthdays so we have to plan those, and that is enough planning for me. We haven’t really figured out the logistics of the 6 year old’s party, so that might actually happen in February. He wanted a Chuck E. Cheese party again, but upon further probing, we realized that he just wants to play the games – the actual birthday yay! part with the person in the mouse costume actually freaks him out. So I think we’ll just take a couple friends to Chuck E. Cheese to play games and then take the out to our favorite dumpling for lunch. I think the idea is have him plan his perfect day and take some friends along too.

-Tech and performances of my current show. Another short project, but even still, short projects require a lot of the same amount of work as longer projects. But… balls get dropped (in life and in work.) Some might re-frame these dropped balls as prioritizing… It certainly is an exercise in that. Anyhow, on the docket for my free day to prep for tech week:
*boil eggs (so I have easy protein on hand)
*plan my outfits for the week
*meal plan – figure out which days I can prep dinner before I go to work and which the Husband can cook. Also think through what I can bring for dinner.
*re-schedule the 4 year old’s tumbling class
*stock up on fruits and veggies so I have healthy things to eat
*baking for quick breakfast options to grab on harried mornings.

What We Ate:
Monday (New Year’s Day): Pizza (take out) and Holiday Road (cute Hallmark movie.)

Tuesday: Chili, which the Husband made.

Wednesday: Broccoli Spoon Salad, (mostly) from the New York Times. This was a great salad – farro (the original recipe was for quinoa, but we had farro in the pantry), broccoli, pecans, apples, and cheddar. The original recipe also called for dried cranberries, but I didn’t have those. Mix up a Dijon mustard vinaigrette to go over it. I think they call it a spoon salad because it has all the good stuff you can eat it with a spoon, and it doesn’t have lettuce which requires a fork. Super easy and tasty recipe.

Thursday: Leftover Chili from Tuesday.

Friday: Lentil Soup – from the Good Housekeeping Instant Pot cook book. A quick and easy recipe before basketball practice. The family was definitley mixed on this recipe, but I told the kids that lentils were really good for your body and good for the environment and they decided that was an okay reason to eat it.

Saturday: Pizza (Take out) and Sing. I had forgotten what a good movie Sing was. Such a good movie!

Sunday: Leftover day. I had Brussel sprouts sauteed with kimchi. We had been gifted a huge stalk of Brussel sprouts last month and hadn’t touched it. Those things laaaaaaast, though. This week I started sautéing Brussel sprouts for breakfast because I was determined to finish the stalk. I think the rest of the family had leftover pizza from the night before.

Monday: Miso Mushroom Ragout from Hetty Liu McKinnon’s Tenderheart cookbook. Tasty, but it doesn’t actually make that much sauce so I added a bunch of extra mushrooms.

Tuesday: Roasted Salmon, Cesar Salad (from a bag), and Israeli couscous salad. This dinner came together surprisingly quickly given that the salmon was still mostly frozen when we started. The couscous salad was really tasty – full of feta cheese cucumbers, parsley.

Wednesday: White beans in the Instant Pot (New York Times recipe), served with toast and gochujang Brussel Sprouts (again from Tenderheart) with rice. The Brussel Sprouts used up the last of the stalk. I kept some brussel sprouts without the spicy glaze for the kids. Their loss – it was really good. toast and rice seems redundant, but the 6 year old wanted to rice to go with his Brussel Sprouts, so there you go.

Thursday: Indian food take-out.

Friday: pizza (take out) and Stargate SG-1. The oldest came back pretty late from basketball and there wasn’t time for a full movie, so I looked up good tv shows to watch with kids and Stargate SG-1 came up. The kids have been really into the Mandalorian, so I thought another sci-fi show might be up their alley. I though the story telling was really good, but the show is definitely dated. At one point, the oldest turned to me and said, “Why are there so many white people on this show?” And there’s all sorts of sexist stuff going on. I’m mildly interested in seeing the rest of the series (and there are something like 10 seasons), I don’t quite feel that invested quite yet.

Saturday: Parmesan mint pasta – a Mark Bittman recipe from the NYTimes.

(I wrote most of the above t this morning, but didn’t publish before having to run kids to all their activities. The day ended up being sunny on one horizon and grey on another, with rain in the forecast. I had planned to go for a run while the kids were at skating lessons and decided to chance it, even though it seemed like we were minutes from rain. I hadn’t run in a while and I didn’t know if I would be able to fit in a run this week since I would be at the theatre, so I wanted to get one in. I dropped the kids at skating then took off outside. I got a few steps into my run and I heard rather than felt something start pelting down and I thought, somewhat peevishly “Oh man, my one chance to run and it’s going to rain on me!” But then I realized – it wasn’t raining, it was snowing! Big fluffy flakes. “I can run in snow!” I thought. Snow isn’t as wet as rain – it floats down and kind of just dissipates, as opposed to rain that just drenches and gets into my bones. So I just kept running and breathed the cold, fresh air and watched the flakes come down fast and sideways. It was actually pretty cold – in the mid 40s – so I didn’t run too long – just 20 mins with a 5 minute walk. Nonetheless, I’m so glad I decided to stick it out. It turns out there’s a lovely trail next to the skating arena, so fitting in a run while the kids skate might not be a bad way to get my run in.

Hope everyone is staying cozy and safe!

Christmas 2023 + the rest of December

Happy New Year!

Here we are in a brand new year. I wrote a check for the kids’ piano lessons this morning, and wrote 2024 for the first time. It always seems special writing that first check of the year, and remembering to write in the right year.

Everyone is back in school and back at work (except me – I go back to work at the end of the week), and I feel like I finally have time and room and capacity to think and be and not just do. The Husband had a therapist once who always reminded him that we are human beings not human doings. There has been a lot of doing these past few weeks. Five people at home on vacation makes for a lot of meals and dishes and laundry and picking up, I’m finding. And the pockets of time I did find, I just felt so scattered – I couldn’t sustain concentrate on things like writing here or reading books for more than a page at a time. So there was some aimless drifting and puttering and a lot of Hallmark movies. And baking and cooking – making food always seems like a nice activity to pull me out of being idle, yet not being too mentally taxing. And scrolling. And random internet surfing. It seems like whenever I sat down to write, I’d get distracted by some internet errand – holiday gifts still to research and procure, plans to make, other people’s news… All in all I’ve been feeling a kind of mental malaise and not quite sure how to kick it. So I’m just going to start with the run down of how the rest of December and our holiday went.

Fun and Festive Things, Pre-Christmas:
Our first Snow delay! This was mid December – There was a smattering of snow on the ground and we woke up to a two hour delay at school. The 4 year old and the 6 year old wanted to play in the scant snow, so I bundled them up and sent them in the backyard where they played for about an hour or so. Of course the snow was gone by the afternoon – it seemed hardly worth a two hour delay, but it was nice to have a change up to the routine.

Tuba Christmas! I feel like we didn’t do our usual full slate of holiday activities this year, but even so Tuba Christmas is a must for us. We go every year. It is pretty much the same concert every year – hundreds of tuba (and euphoniums and baritones), playing Christmas carols, audience sing a long, “Santa Wants a Tuba for Christmas”, the kids going up onstage to sing “Jingle Bells”. Even the patter between songs is always the same. This year, hilariously, the MC gave the wrong introduction to one carol. Which made us laugh and laugh because it’s been the same MC for as long as I can remember. It was an excellent lesson in making a mistake in front of a thousand people and being able to laugh at oneself.

Celebrating our anniversary. The Husband and I celebrated our anniversary by taking the train into DC to have dinner at the restaurant where we had our wedding dinner. On the way down, we stopped by Union Station where our friend’s string quartet was playing holiday music. It was a fun mix of seasonal tunes and pop hits. She later told me that at one point they noticed that no one was stopping to listen, so she suggested they start playing Beetles and Taylor Swift. And the crowds started gathering. I guess there is something about playing Christmas songs in December that people take for granted, but a string quartet playing Love Story – well that’s special.
After listening to our friend play, we walked to the restaurant and enjoyed much to much indulgent food. And… when the waiter found out that it was our anniversary and that we had had our wedding dinner at that restaurant, he comped up our dessert. What a nice surprise! We finished up the evening by walking through the holiday market – enjoying the cold and the holiday crafts and lights before we got on the train and went home.

We made and decorated cookies. I wasn’t really feeling this, but I rallied and decided to just make two kinds of cookies – sugar cookies for decorating and molasses cookies because those are my favorite. The kids really wanted to decorate cookies and were asking, so I’m glad I managed to do this. I used the leftover royal icing mix from the 4 year old’s birthday which helps simplify the process a lot. I tried a new sugar cookie recipe and it wasn’t great – the cookies ended up spreading too much when they baked and were rather shapeless. I’ll have to research a try a different recipe next year.

Not seeing Christmas Lights. We did not go to any of the many option for seeing Christmas lights, but we did take a a walk after dinner one night and looked at the lights in our neighborhood. There is one house that goes all out for Christmas that is always fun to see.

Work Things – I’m off work until January 4th. Since closing my last show, I worked two vocal recitals (one as stage manager, one doing the super titles). After a fall of opera, a voice recital is a nice balm on my work soul. No chorus of thousands to wrangle, no sets, no costumes, no props. Just a singer, a pianist, and some really great music.

Not so Festive Things:
-Life. Life. Life. Between two kids, I spent six hours at the dentist in the past two weeks. They now have enough crowns between the two of them for a small monarchy. Sigh. At least I got some reading done and they got to watch TV. The dentist has tvs on the ceiling. The four year old watched two straight hours of Bluey while the dentist worked on her teeth.
-General holiday shopping fatigue. I feel this every year. I need to find a less stressful/tiring method of Christmas shopping.

Christmas Day: We had a quiet Christmas at home. I think that is how everyone prefers it, especially the 11 year old. Whenever we float the idea of travelling for Christmas, she is always vehemently opposed. And I get it – there is something nice about waking up in one’s own bed, with the Christmas tree.

Christmas even my mother arrived. We went for a walk at the Botantical Gardens becuase they have a train display, but whe we got there, we found that it was closed because – either because it was Chrstmas Eve or because it was Sunday, not sure which. We spent an hour wandering around anyway, just enjoying the bare beauty of the garden in winter. Then we went home, and got ready for Church. Our Church was having a living Nativity for the first time, so we went a little early to see that. There were donkeys and oxen and a little tiny baby, all bundled up in the manger. Our church has a children’s procession on Christmas Eve, where all the children lead the opening procession, and it was really sweet to see the four year old walking with her hands in prayer position, more docile than I’ve ever seen her. After church, we came home and had chicken curry for dinner then watched the Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas Special before sending the kids to bed. After that, I was up late on cooking (as I usually am) – I made meatballs, rainbow jello, and prepped the cinnamon buns.

Christmas Day we slept in a little bit, waking up around 8:00am. I had to proof the cinnamon buns in the oven. I had hoped that they could do a slow cool rise in the sun room, but that proved to be too cool and they didn’t rise much, so I had to put them in the oven to proof for another hour before I baked them. The kids did stockings first thing, then we talked to the Husband’s sister and family who were in the Netherlands. Then we had cinnamon buns. Then, finally, we did presents around 10pm. I’m surprised the kids were patient to wait that long.

After presents things took a leisurely pace. I picked up wrapping paper, read some, watched the kids play with their presents. At some point, I thought it might be nice to start dinner, so I did that and that took the rest of the day.

The Christmas Day Menu:
-Seafood Paella as the main dish. Ever since a family brought a paella to the 6 year old’s class for their Thanksgiving celebration, I’ve wanted to try to make one. So I decided that it would be Christmas dinner. There are about a gazillion paella recipes online and I couldn’t choose. On Christmas Day, I was texting with my friend in Jordan – her husband was in the foreign service and they had been in Barcelona for a stint – I was lamenting that I didn’t know where to start for my paella recipe and she texted me a recipe from a paella cookbook. The recipe was simple and my friend’s husband said it was pretty flexible and I could use all the seafood that I had bought – calamari, shrimp, scallops and cod. Yay. It turns out paella is simpler to make than I had thought – and it is kind of festive and feeds a lot of people. This won’t be my last time making it!
-Meatballs from a Tapas cookbook we had. I wanted something meaty to complement the paella. Everything I googled said paella is supposed to be it’s own meal, but I don’t know – there is something incimplete about just having a rice dish for dinner, so I made meatballs to go with.
-Rainbow Jello. As always. Though I made it this time since none of the kids were up for making it.
-Orange salad. Something bright and slightly acidic to balance the paella. Most Orange salads call for fennel, but I’m the only one in the family that likes fennel, so I just made this dressing and tossed it over sliced oranges with kalamata olives on the side.
-Green Beans. The Husband steamed and then sauteed some green beans for something a little green.
-Tomato Garlic bread, also from the Tapas Cookbook. Basically toasted bread with garlic olive oil and rub tomato on it.

After dinner, we watched It’s a Wonderful Life and then went to bed. All in all, a nice day.

The week after Christmas had lots of adventures – here’s the highlight reel:

–Taking the two girls and a friend to ClimbZone and then out for Korean food afterwards. I even got to climb too! It is very exhausting. One of my goals for family fun this year is to book a session at the climbing gym for the whole family. After ClimbZone, we went to this Korean place that makes their own noodles and it was fascinating to watch the whole process of pulling and stretching the dough into long strings. I was unfamiliar with a lot of the food and ended up mixing the noodles with the sauce for the shrimp. oops.

–An overnight trip to Lancaster, PA where we visited the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania:

And we went on a quest for licorice. I had gotten a few bags of Klepper and Klepper salty licorice when we were in Amsterdam, and, as the package says, it is the best licorice ever.

I was very sad when I finished the licorice that I brought home, so I lookonline and the closest place to us to find it is at a candy store in Lancaster, PA called Sweetish, which specializes in candy from Sweden. So when the Husband suggested a trip to the Railroad museum near Lancaster, I immediately suggested we stop by Sweetish as well. The store was amazing. Bins and bins of salty licorice, in addition to Klepper and Klepper. And all sorts of other candy as well. We walked away with a small fortune in candy – In addition to salt licorice of many varieties I also got a smoked licorice. (Of course the two kids who had crowns were not allowed any gummy candy, so they had lots of lollipops. Funny enough, the dentist told them that they could have as much ice cream as they wanted. They just had to remember to brush.).

We stayed in a hotel that night and had some pool time and the next morning we went to Longwood Gardens. The Christmas displays were still up, and even though we didn’t stay to see everything lit up after sundown, we still got a good dose of the holiday display. It was a drizzly, misty day, which has a beauty of its own, I think. A totally precious moment was when the 4 year old started getting tired, so we all took turns carrying her, even the 11 year old. What a good big sister she is!

–Theatre trips. I took my mother to see Fiddler on the Roof as a Christmas present. It was a beautiful production, really well done. The director had framed the show as a story told by a group of immigrants in an Ellis Island-type waiting room. So the different people arriving to America took on the roles of the various characters in Anatevka. I love seeing diversity onstage and I thought this was a reall thoughtful way to have coour conscious, but not colour blind casting. This framework, I thought, also really brought the idea of leaving home front and center in a way that I didn’t usually think of. I mean I knew that Tevye and his family leave Anatevka at the end of the musical, but so much of the beginning of the musical is about the homes and traditions they have established that to think about the beginning of the show through the lens of the end was certainly sobering. Also sobering was the presence of security guards and bag checks throughout the theatre. I feel a little abashed that I go to see a show about a Jewish village and take safety for granted, but there are many people who don’t. Of course going to a show is a bit of escapism, but there was also something very timely about this particular show at this particular time.

The next day, the whole family went to see A Year with Frog and Toad, which was a delightful. I laughed so hard throughout the show. The six year old, who looooves Frog and Toad, kept telling me when things were different from the book. At the end the show, he said, “In the book, they don’t explain how the clock gets broken. And now I know!” Because the breaking of the clock is a major plot point in the musical. Highly recommend this show! We’ve been listening and singing along to the soundtrack ever since. It’s ostensibly a kids’ show, but there were certainly many moments that I identified with. I will admit, Frog and Toad aren’t my favorite books, but there is something incredibly astute about them.

Bike ride – A friend passed along bike that his kids had outgrown and one of them was just right for the 4 year old, so we took them out for a bike ride one day. During the pandemic, they closed off one of the major parkways during the weekends and it continues to be closed to cars on weekends and holidays, making for a perfect place to practice riding bikes. We met up wit some friends and biked down to a playground. The Husband has always been anti-training wheels, but I feel like at this point, the 4 year old just wants to keep up with her siblings so giving her training wheels is the best tactic. I’m sure she will outgrow them soon – goals for 2024?

Hallmark Movie Marathon – we did not have an all day movie marathon, but we did do an entire afternoon where we watched two Hallmark movies back to back. I paired this with a decluttering activity and went through all the 11 year olds’ clothes and got rid of the stuff that didn’t fit and made of list of things that she needed. Apparently she has a gazillion t-shirts and only four pairs of pants. (Also – this was my dilemma at one point – is what does a pre-teen wear for a “nice” outfit??? She has fancy recital dresses and t-shirts and hoodies, but nothing in between that she could wear to the theatre or to a nice dinner. We need to figure this one out…) I’ve watched many many Hallmark movies this year… recap coming!

Trip Downtown to visit the U.S. Botanic Gardens and Trains: Every year the trains have a different theme and this year the theme was pollinators – they had all these models of pollinators, constructed from plant and vegetations. Also – we found a great new restaurant. Food now on the National Mall is always hit or miss, so I’m always on the look out for good food options and we found this place called Rice Bar that has customizable noodle and rice bowls. It was really tasty and had lots of vegetables, which is rare for food places down on the Mall. I was really excited to find this place.

New Years: The 11 year old likes to stay up to watch the ball drop, so we did, though the Husband was in bed by 11:30pm and the two little kids were asleep on the couch before midnight as well. Earlier in the day, the Husband made an apple crisp in a cast iron skillet – a super simple recipe, which we proceeded to eat out of the skillet – 5 forks and dig in! On New Years Day, we did some more cleaning and then went for a hike at Great Falls. It was a little rainy and a little chilly, but once we got going, everyone had a great time. The kids invented this game where they were each rulers of rock kingdoms and would gather for summits to discuss world issues. Seeing all three kids play together always feels so special since they are all at such different ages.

So that’s the rundown of the last bit of December into the New Year. I’m sure there are lots of moments I didn’t remember. I had sort of also fallen off the journaling wagon in all the holiday happenings. Something that I want to make sure to made time for again.

Grateful For:
– My mother being here. The kids enjoy having so much grandma time.

-Zoom – so we can talk to family far and wide. We don’t live near any family and we are very bad at keeping in touch. Zoom allows us to be a little less bad at it.

-All the good and love and peace of the holiday season. Health and family and friends.

-The Husband scraping the frost off my car in the morning.

Looking Forward To:
– Filling my planner and new pens. I have several blank planners for 2024 that I’m looking forward to filling. I use the Hobonichi Weeks Mega as my every day planner. Last year I used the Hobonichi Techo Cousin as a journal/habit tracker. I ordered both another Cousin but also the Jibun Techo Lite for journal/tracking this year. Not sure which I’ll use. I like having the pages for each day that the Cousin has, but truthfully, I don’t use every day, so it kind of seems like a waste of a planner. I also ordered a fountain pen sampler from Jetpens. I love the scratchy resistance of the Preppy Fountain Pen that came in my pen sampler last year, so I thought I’d try more fountain pens. Jet Pens only has a black ink fountain pen sampler, and I prefer blue ink, but even still, I’m excited to try them out.

-The 11 year old’s basketball season is starting, so I’m looking forward to cheering her on.

-A few light months of work. I’m taking advantage of not having to be at rehearsal or at the theatre in the evenings to take on some life fun things – for everyone in the family. I’ve encouraged the Husband to sign up for some volunteer work, I’m adding some activities for the kids, and I’m looking into a class for myself too. I feel like while I’m able to be home to drive carpool or watch the kids while the Husband does something for himself, we should take advantage of the time. My job puts such limits on what we can do as a family sometimes that I feel bad, so I’m eager to lean into life things rather than work things for a few months.

-and of course, all the things that 2024 might bring and that I might plan for the year.

What We Ate:
Well, again, since I did really poorly at tracking and journalling this month, I don’t really remember what we ate, but here’s a few memorable dishes:

-Tourtiere for New Year’s Eve Dinner. I’ve made this Canadian meat pie before, and it’s a super cozy meal, which I feel was what the day called for. I used the recipe from the King Arthur’s Baking cook book.

-Egg Curry. One of our new hit recipes from 2023 and a perfect pantry meal. I threw in some kabocha squash as well.

-Congee. I often end up having to throw out leftover rice because I’m never inspired to do anything with it. This time, I decided to make congee with it. I had a loose recipe to start, but then I just started adding whatever I had around – leftover chicken wings from a get together with friends, a bit of that kabocha squash, the last stalks of celery, some jujube berries. It made such a cozy meal. I find kitchen sink meals so satisfying – something about being able to use up the last bit of something in the fridge just makes food taste better to me.

-Chicken Curry in the Instant Pot from Melissa Clark’s Dinner in and Instant. Perfect make ahead meal for Christmas Eve.

-And there was lots of pizza. I think we had at least two or three pizza and movie nights in the past few weeks.

Weekly recap + What we ate: Tech/Open/Closing

Well, this post has been sitting in my draft folder for over a week, so no, it is really, not “last” week’s recap, but from two weeks ago, but this time has been very full, so where we are. But this is what I’ve been up to….

~~Last week~~ Two weeks ago, was a whirlwind week in the theatre. We were in the theatre Tuesday and then we had tech, opening, four shows over the weekend (really five if you count the 11:30am dress rehearsal on the day of Opening), and then closing. It’s been a super intense schedule.

Things that made the week great despite often working 12 hours a day with barely a dinner break:
– The show itself. It’s a beautiful show. The music is by turns catchy and moving, the story makes me cry and laugh and makes my heart grow.
– The other people on the stage management team. Who care just enough to do an amazing job but not so much that the hard stuff gets in the way of just getting stuff done.
–The crew at the theatre. So this show went up in the smallest of the theatres that we perform in. I love this crew so much! The two lead technicians are always positive while at the same time being realistic about the limitations of the space – they solve problems without drama and don’t get annoyed when we ask for too much. Everyone is really nice and really good at what they do. There was one day when I wanted to take spike measurements (Spikes are the pieces of tape we put on the floor to tell us where the furniture or people or props need to be placed – we measure where they are so when we remount the show, we know where we put everything). This isn’t something we always have time to do, and sometimes is is painfully slow because we only have two crew members helping us. This time, after one show, the crew basically swarmed the stage and got it done in twenty minutes. I don’t know if I can convey how amazing it was, but it was amazing.
Also – the crew moved my stage management console to the house (what we call where the audience sits) so that I could spend the first few days of tech out front. This is only important because usually I tech from backstage, where I can’t really see anything, and being able to tech from the front and see the show is actually quite helpful.

The Lighting designer snapped this picture of me at my console, which is kind of fun.

I very rarely get pictures of me working, so I was tickled by this. I’m standing at my console, which has four tiny monitors – one so I can see the conductor, one so I can see the stage, one infared so I can see the stage when it’s dark, and one that has the lighting cues so I can keep track and make sure we are in the correct light cue. The monitors are kind of small, so it was nice to start tech rehearsals out front to I could better see what was going on before moving backstage. Also, yes, I stand on a box to call because I’m short and the console was sized for someone taller than me.
–The audience. Seeing families and little kids coming to the theatre – man, nothing warms my heart like that.
–The Husband. I know I say this all the time, but I really couldn’t have my job without him. The gold star this time, though, goes to him for bringing all three kids to a dress rehearsal for my show. Taking kids to an 8pm show on a weeknight isn’t exactly a stress-free activity, so major props to him for doing that. I love that the kids got to see what I was working on – apart from it being a great show for kids, it lets them see what mom is doing when she isn’t at home in the evenings. I think it’s kind of abstract to them what I do and why I’m gone, and I feel like it helps when they get to see me at work.
-Climbing 13 flights of stairs to the theatre every morning. My show was in one of the smaller theatres, way at the top of the arts complex. There is an elevator, but to get there from the parking garage involves either cutting through the backstage of another theatre, or walking through the orchestra pit, where there is this sign:

So the most direct route is to take the stairs. Some days, I figured, if I did nothing else that day, at least I climbed 13 flights of stairs.

The one moment I lost my will to continue.
This is my work computer:

As you can see, the power button is, brilliantly, located next to the backspace and delete button. There was one evening, I had about an hour before rehearsal to crank out a piece of paperwork that was kind of key to the top of show sequence. It had been a crazy busy day and I finally had time to sit down and do this chart and people were arriving for their make-up calls and the hallways were starting to buzz with anticipation and activity as people got ready for the rehearsal. I made a typo, and hit “backspace” to correct it, but accidentally hit the power button and the computer shut down, taking my paperwork into the ether. I put my head down on my computer for five seconds of utter despair, screamed a little inside and then sighed and moved on with life.

So all in all, a good but exhausting week. It has left me very behind on all things holiday, and so that part of life feels a little … unprepared.

The Annoying/Upsetting life admin:

In my continuing saga to renew my driver’s liscence – I finally got to the MVA and… their card reader was down. Argh. I had to yet again re-schedule my driver’s license renewal.

Then the four year old finally had her dentist appointment and has a jaw-dropping five cavities. So she also has to be scheduled for crowns, which requires sedating her, and the next available appointment they had was actually the day that I had re-scheduled my driver’s license appointment. Wump wump. So I guess the license is being re-scheduled again. I am completely flabbergasted by the state of my children’s teeth. And the four year old even flosses. I mean not every day, but at least a couple times a week. So I am going to have to be more diligent about the teeth:
1) consistent brushing in the morning – I’ve set an alarm reminder for this.
2) I need to do a pass with the toothbrush when they are done. I’ve been told that my kids have naturally very deep grooves in their teeth, which makes for good places for bacteria to grow.
3) no more gummy candies and cut down on the sugar. I love Welch’s fruit snacks, but I guess I’ll take one for the team and stop buying them. Or just stash them at the office.

On the bright side, the dentist said that once they had crowns, they wouldn’t have to floss those teeth. He actually almost said they wouldn’t really have to brush back there, but I think he realized he shouldn’t really be saying that and stopped himself.

Outfit of the week –
Not very interesting this week because we’ve been in tech and performances. Tech is the one time where I always wear pants because I have to be up and moving around a lot. I try to wear colourful clothes during tech so I can be seen easily onstage. I didn’t take any photos this time, but maybe next tech I will – I basically pretty much wear the same two or three outfits every time I tech a show. For performances, I wear all black. People sometimes say, “You must have a lot of black clothes since you work backstage.” Truth to tell, nope. Here are the two outfits that I cycle between when I’m running a show:

My black wardrobe for cooler weather is basically:
-two pairs of black pants – one is a pair of Betabrand’s dress pants yoga pants that look polished but are so stretchy, and the other is a pair of black cords/jeans. Though I mysteriously can’t find that latter pair, so I basically wore the Betabrand pants for five days in a row last week (those are the ones in the picture).
– 2 black long sleeve shirts. The one in the picture is actually a maternity top from Gap that I’ve been wearing for six years or so. By other long sleeve black shirt is a dolman sleeved cotton shirt from Uniqlo.
-1 black v-neck short sleeve t-shirt. It’s from Pact, though I bought it on super sale at Whole Foods. (tip! Whole Foods sells Pact clothing, and they always seem to be on sale when I see them.) This t-shirt is made of very sturdy, smooth cotton.
-1 black v-neck 3/4 sleeve dress from Wool&. It’s the Willow dress. Super versatile. (Also in the picture, you’ll see I’m wearing my FlipBelt – I wear the Flipbelt backstage with my dress because I need to clip the belt pack of my headset to it.)
-1 sweatshirt blazer. Also a work horse. It looks like a blazer, but feels like a sweatshirt. I’ve gotten lots of complements on it backstage, where it is dark and people can’t tell I’m just wearing a glorified cardigan.
– black leggings – I have 3 or 4 pair of Jockey pocket leggings that I wear all the time, not just for backstage. I love them because they are mostly cotton and have side pockets.
-1 pair of black shoes, Wolky Passion Mary Janes. I feel like I should also get a pair of Chelsea boots or sneakers as well, but these Mary Janes go with everything and are pretty comfortable, so I’m probably fine. I do occasionally wear my running shoes backstage since they are black, but that always feels a little weird.
-I don’t usually wear a hat because then the headset won’t fit on my head, but for some reason on this show, I had a headset that could go over the hat, so I wore my hats backstage. That hat was given to me fourteen years ago by a friend at my bachelorette party.
-For opening nights, I also have a chiffon-y top and skirt that feels a little fancy.
So between those 10 items of black clothing, I manage to get through a whole run of a show. I repeat clothes a lot, but like I said, no one really cares what you’re wearing when you are moving around in the dark backstage. Every so often, I’ll feel uninspired by my black capsule wardrobe and then I remind myself that I don’t actually wear much black when I’m not working, so no point in spending money to expand that part of my wardrobe. When I’m feeling meh about putting on my blacks, I just do it anyway and then I get over it pretty quickly.

Tech snack discovery of the week: One of my go to quick foods to pack during tech is an avocado. I just chuck the whole thing in my bag and then at work, I split it in half and eat it with a spoon. Well, this time, I had also packed these Tamari Soy Sauce Rice Crackers from Trader Joe’s and I thought, “We put avocado on sushi, why not on Tamari Soy Sauce Rice Crackers?” And I used the crackers to scoop out and eat the avocado and it was delicious. Definitely going in my “easy emergency dinner” ideas list.

Tech Steps Stats:
Average Steps/Day: 6913 (Definitely lower than when I am an Assistant Stage Manager since being an ASM requires running around backstage a lot more.)
Average Miles/day: 2.8 miles
Average Floors/Day: 8 floors.

Grateful for – in addition to all the above things that made our week in the theatre so fulfilling:
1) The colleague who recommended me for my supertitle job. I was prepping the translation slides for my next voice recital gig and realizing how much I actually love doing supertitles. This gig wasn’t something I was actively looking for; the organization was looking for a supertitle coordinator and asked my friend if they knew anyone who could do it and he gave them my contact info. I’m so grateful that my friend thought of me.

2) My friend, who sent us a copy of her new cd of music for children. It’s brilliant and I am in awe of her talent. She has one song that she said was inspired by my 11 year old years ago when she must have been 5 or so and asked for a song about being bored. The result was a song called “It’s the End of Your Screentime.” And there is one song that is a riff on “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” where she talks about stars and the atmosphere and rhymes the phrase “Blue Super Giants” with “I love Science.” I mean how awesome is that? You should check it out! The CD is called Because He Was A Weasel – her website is here. I feel so lucky to know such a smart and witty and thoughtful person.

Looking Forward to:
1) My mother’s coming to visit. She is spending three weeks with us. Yay. I’m hoping I can convince her to make dumpling when while she is here.

2) Hallmark Holiday Movie marathon. The 11 year old’s request. Seems like the perfect way to spend a day since the weather has gotten decidedly chilly.

4) Theatre trips. I’ve booked tickets to see A Year with Frog and Toad for the family – the two little kids LOVE Frog and Toad – and also tickets to see Fiddler on the Roof with my mother. Fiddler on the Roof was her favorite movie, and I thought this was a good Christmas present for her since it wasn’t something that she would have to store or take back to California. I so rarely go to theatre that I’m not working on that to have actually bought tickets seem novel and special.

5) Pants. I was lamenting my lack of pants – I have one pair suitable for winter, not counting the aforementioned black pants for working backstage; I’ve been wearing my linen pants to supplement, but that seems… not seasonally appropriate. When Duluth Trading company had their holiday sales this month, I ordered many many pairs of pants to try on. I don’t love pants, but I’m excited to potentially have more than one pair for cooler weather. One pair I ordered is flannel lined!

What We Ate:

Monday: Kabocha squash curry from Meerah Sodha’s East. East is cookbook I borrow from the library at least twice a year – it has such great and flavorful vegetarian recipes. I should just buy it, I love it so much. (Funny story, I bought this cookbook for a cousin gift exchange a few years ago, I love it so much. Then my meat eating/vegetable hating cousin ended up drawing it. My other kind-hearted cousin graciously stole it from him, saying “I love vegetables!” But to be honest, I don’t know that she actually cooks.) The recipe for the curry floating around online, though.

And that’s the sum total of what I remember from dinners last week. I’m sure the Husband fed the kids quite well. There was a movie night where they watched Candy Cane Lane. I might have made instant pot soup another night, but I can’t remember. One day for lunch, I did make a really tasty Cheesy Kale and Rice Cake bake from Hetty Liu McKinnon’s Tenderheart cookbook. I had rice cakes (the Korean kind that are dense and chewy), and some kale languishing and I just used whatever cheese I had on hand and the result was amazing. The recipe isn’t online, but you can see a picture of it on McKinnon’s IG feed, and, if that is your thing, get the cookbook because there are so many terrific vegetable heavy recipes in there.

So that was the recap of tech/opening/closing week. Clearly I’m past that, but I’m still playing catch up and counting down to the holidays. I’m looking forward to having time to to sit and reflect on my day, rather than collapse in exhaustion when I get home from work at midnight.

Weekly recap + what we ate: Best Laid Plans and a Good Thursday

And now we have turned the corner into December! I have just one show and two recitals and a bit of office work to get through and then I’m off contract until after the new year. Of course that’s still two weeks to get through, and with the holidays bearing down …

I had to work all weekend, but the Husband took the kids to buy a tree and they put it up and decorated it while I was still at work. And not just the tree, but they also put up Christmas lights on our porch and pulled out the decorations for the mantel and top of the piano. Also, an added touch this year, they wrapped coloured lights around the railings to our upper level. We go back and forth as to to coloured lights or white lights on our tree, and this year, the white lights won out.

The Husband also got the kids Advent calendars. These ones had a nativity scene and stickers for each day that you are supposed to add to fill in the picture, ending, of course, with the baby Jesus. The four year old got really excited and did the first three days on day one. We’re going to have to hold her back lest she finishes all the stickers before Jesus is supposed to arrive. I had toyed with the idea of doing this watercolour advent paint along – every day the company releases a new small watercolour tutorial. I really love the idea, but I don’t see it fitting into my day. Or maybe when I’m off ontract, I’ll jump in.

Things that didn’t go according to plan this week – all those appointments for life admin that I had scheduled into the pockets of free time this week. I know things have a better chance of happening when I schedule them, but still… so frustrating when I feel like I finally did some adulting and made appointments and then have to cancel them. The sad: various bodily ailments. I had plans to knock out a bunch of life tasks this week, but plans had to be changed. The appointment for my drivers license renewal that I had booked was waylaid by a vomiting child, and had to be re-scheduled. The same vomiting child woke up two nights later complaining of an ear ache, which turned out to be a double ear infection. So her long awaited appointment at the pediatric dentist was also re-scheduled. (She also woke up in the middle of the night the next evening. No good reason, crying inconsolably. I let her stay up and watch Hallmark holiday movies with me and that seemed to make life better.)

Which, actually was a good thing that I had to cancel the morning dentist appointment because the 11 year old injured her thumb on Monday and couldn’t move it on Thursday. This was concerning because she had a piano recital on Friday. Since I wasn’t taking the youngest to the dentist on Thursday anymore, I could take the oldest to the doctor to look at her thumb. It’s like those puzzles of sliding pieces – move one piece over to create a space and slide another thing it its place. Anyhow, turns out the 11 year old had a minor sprain. “Take three Advil and you’ll be fine,” the pediatrician said. I was somewhat surprised by this advice, but okay. It’s better than having to get an x-ray and an MRI.

Thursday actually turned out to be a lovely full day. Not lovely in that it had any special adventures or big events, but just lovely in that things just flowed. It was my one free day this week, so I wanted to get as much life admin done as I could – I did the school bus drop, then I came home put away the laundry that had been sitting there for days (That the laundry even gets done is thanks entirely to the Husband who washes, dries, and folds mountains of laundry every week.) At 9:45, I picked up the 11 year old from school and took her to the Pediatrician’s appointment for her thumb. Took her back to school. Went home and put away more laundry. Then went back to pick up the 11 year old from school for her passport appointment. Submitted passport application. Hooray! Crossed that off the list and bought stamps for Christmas cards while at the Post Office. (Not that the cards are even started, but that’s one step done.)

Then it was 1:30p and the 11 year old and I decided that she could ditch the last two periods of the day – so we went to get Panda Express (her first time!) and walk through Joann’s Fabrics before heading home. I had work meeting – even though it was my free day from the show, I still had some departmental duties to do. Then once that call was over, the 11 year old and I walked down to pick up the 4 year old from school, which was nice because the 11 year old and I don’t get much time together – a combination of my work schedule this fall and prickly tween. After that, I did the school bus pick up and came home and cooked dinner while the Husband took the 11 year old to buy a dress for her recital.

After dinner, we did something new and fun (okay, so maybe we did have a mini adventure after all…) We had a pajama library excursion. Returning library books and checking out Christmas books was the one thing on my Thursday to do list that I didn’t get to, so I decided that after dinner, the kids would get into their pjs and we would go to the library for an hour. It was actually a nice fun break from routine, and I was glad to give the Husband and hour of alone time since he’s been on single parent duty pretty much since September. (Actually now that I think of it, an hour seems like barely enough for all that he’s done this fall.) I’m definitely putting this on my list of “Winter Weekday Evening Fun” – I think when I’m not working, on the nights that we can finish dinner by 6:30p, a pajama library excursion is very doable.

Thursday planning Post-it. Yes, I plan on a Post-it. I do have a planner, but for some reason, this is what I default to

So Thursday was a very satisfying day. It all felt like a very full day – one in which I didn’t have time to idly scroll my phone and lose half an hour of my life, or think about what to do with my day because there were enough scheduled things to give me structure, but not so many that I couldn’t breathe. I managed to do almost everything on my planning Post-it – it was very satisfying to scratch things off the list.

Pet Peeve of the Week – I adore the Husband for doing all the laundry in the house (except mine – I like to do my own laundry.) (also – he does the laundry even though the 11 year old is perfectly capable of doing it, so props to him) Anyhow – he hauls it down to the laundry room, puts it in the machine, starts the machine, comes back and puts it in the dryer, then he folds it. When I have time, I will put the kids’ clothes out on their bed so that they can put it away before they go to bed. BUT…. one of my pet peeves is that he does not fold the shirts with the design on the front visible. It is very important to the six year old that he wears certain shirts with certain pants. But, if the shirts are all folded with the design on the inside, how will he find the shirt he is looking for? He will take every. single. shirt. out of the drawer, strewing them across the room. What havoc!

Now, I know this chaos is not the Husband’s fault, so really this pet peeve is not directed at him. Anyhow, now when I am laying the folded clothes out for the kids to put away, I will refold all the shirts with the designs facing out. Truth be told, it does not completely alleviate the strewing of the shirts. But I can wish. Also – I use this 2 second method to fold shirts. Changed my life.

Outfit of the week:

I love this sweater vest, but I don’t wear it too much because it is somewhat bulky. But if you look, you’ll see that the front is made up of overlapping panels. I bought this vest right after my youngest was born. The Husband had given me a subscription to Rent the Runway earlier that year because I was feeling a little down about not having any cute clothes that fit. RTR carries maternity and nursing clothes, but I also got really good at looking at non-maternity/nursing clothes and figuring out if I could nurse in them. This sweater vest with it’s overlapping panels felt like it would fit in the “nursing friendly” category. So I added it to my monthly rental and when it arrived, I found that it indeed was perfect for nursing. Anyhow, that was three years ago and I ended up loving the vest so much that I bought it. (I guess this follows the trend set last week with my nursing dress that I still wear).
Continuing on in the vein of “clothes that I bought when pregnant” that little skirt I bought when I was pregnant with my first – it has a wide waist band that you can fold over, which was great for my expanding stomach at the time. At some point, the skirt developed a hole near the hem, but the skirt was so comfy and versatile that I just took scissors and trimmed six inches off it, making it the perfect mini skirt to wear with leggings. (Also that skirt/legging combination is often what I wear when I bike to work, since I can bike easily in it but also if I put on the right top once I get to work, it all looks okay for going to rehearsal, and not like I just biked five miles.) The leggings and shirt are from Duluth Trading Company – their clothes are solid, but a little unexciting, which makes them good for layering. The hat was a gift almost twenty years ago from a colleague whom I worked with. I used to have a red tam that I wore all. the. time. But then I lost it, and my friend bought me this hat because she said I didn’t look like me without a red hat.

This quote made me laugh: from the New York Times’ By The Book section featuring Rick Riordon:

I’ve always found this question a little… I don’t know… snobbish. I read a lot of romance novels, a genre that often is put into the “guilty pleasure” category, and I always feel like that is such a misogynistic take on the genre. What ever is wrong with the world that stories about happily ever after and people finding joy and pleasure in life are considered lesser than a 700 page tome about misery and suffering? Anyhow, I appreciate Riordon’s tongue in cheek point about the guilt one feels from reading should not be from the book itself.

Food discovery: Marmite! I had always heard of marmite and how some people find it awful. Which immediately makes it intriguing to me. So when I saw it at the store last week, I had to buy a jar. I ate it on a buttered crumpet (also one of my recent joys – a hot buttered crumpet for breakfast). My verdict: salty, very salty, umami filled but only palatable in small doses, with a slightly bitter after-taste. My first impression was that it kind of tasted like spreadable beer – and then I googled it and that made sense because it is made of yeast, originally invented as a use for leftover brewer’s yeast. I’ve been reading a few recipes for noodles that involve marmite, and I want to try that too.

Grateful For:
-Flexibility to stay home with a sick child. I don’t really have formal sick leave. The Husband, who works a “normal” white collar job, takes leave to stay home with kids when they are sick, or works from home. I don’t have benefits like that (or at all…) But, I do have understanding colleagues who, when I text in the morning and say, “I need to stay home today because the 4 year old is vomiting. Can you guys cover rehearsal without me?” They always say, “Of course!” Granted, this isn’t something I would feel comfortable doing if it were a tech rehearsal or a performance, but for a regular staging rehearsal – I’m grateful that I can do it.

– the 4 year old, who, after spending her sick day with me, says, as I am packing up to go to work for the evening, “It was nice hanging out with you!” Melted my heart and made staying home with a sick kid and listening to Llama Llama audiobooks in repeat not so thankless a job.

– The kids’ piano teacher for teaching them piano and for having a recital for kids to play. It was the six year old’s first recital. He played Jolly Old St. Nicholas. It wasn’t perfect, but he doggedly kept going. The 11 year old played a piece with lots of notes and chords and arpeggios. Afterwards there were cookies.

-Rehearsal ending early. There were a couple of days when we ended rehearsals really early. One was the Friday of the aforementioned piano recital, and I was able to get to the recital in time. And then another day, the last two hours of rehearsal were cancelled and I then had time to update some paperwork and clean up the markings in my score. Getting those couple of hours back so that I could get ahead with my paperwork was such a gift. I guess this is an example of things not going to plan, but in a good way.

Looking Forward To:
-Tech week! It feels like I just teched a show, and here we are again. I have a free day tomorrow, which is filled with the cancelled appointments from last week, but I’m also going to do some food prep: make boiled eggs, make soup, marinate some beans, stock up on fruits and vegetables and healthy snacks. Maybe make some chai concentrate so I can have a tasty hot beverage in the mornings. I heard about this condensed milk chai based, and I want to try it, though I worry about it being too sweet. I want to plan my outfits for the week as well. I’m always nervous going into tech because so much can go wrong and I feel a lot of pressure to keep things moving. I know some stage managers thrive on the adrenaline of tech, but it honestly, is not my favorite part of the process. Honestly, I’m dragging a little this week and I need to really dig down and remind myself of why I love this little show I’m working on and how lucky I am to work with some very excellent people.

-I have a supertitle gig for another voice recital coming up. I know the pianist and it’s always fun to see people I know play.

-Finding time to read. Right now reading:

Fiction Read – part of mother daughter book club

What We Ate: I cooked! Well, two out of seven meals, but it’s a start.
Monday: Husband cooked, I have no idea what they ate. Maybe eggs?

Tuesday: Sweet Potato and Black Bean tacos from Dinner Illustrated. I actually didn’t cook this, but I did plan and prep everything for the Husband before I went to work.

Wednesday: Mac and Cheese and green beans

Thursday: Bahn Mi Noodle bowls, from this recipe, though I used tofu instead of pork and noodles instead of cauliflower rice. Always a tasty meal.

Friday: First dinner was butternut squash soup I pulled from the freezer. After the piano recital we ordered pizza and watched Spirited. Holiday movie season is not open at our house.

Saturday: Peanut butter toast and yogurt. I had Thanksgiving leftovers after I got home from work.

Sunday: Not sure what the family had, tortellini, I thinn. I ate Tuesday’s sweet potatoes and black beans in a wrap. It was actually supposed to be my lunch, but I had a packed day at work and didn’t eat lunch that day. I actually ate this at the pool while the 11 year old had swim clinic. Usually she carpools to swim clinic with our friends, but this week they were sick so the Husband took her. Then, in order to avoid him sitting with the two other kids until swim clinic was over, I offered to leave work in time to pick the 11 year old up. Okay, the sad thing is that after I ate my wrap, I packed up to go meet the 11 year old as she came out of the dressing rooms, only I didn’t pay attention and I ended up leaving my Tupperware at the pool! Not sure if I’ll ever see it back now. Wump wump.

Weekly Recap + What We Ate: Being Thankful and Straight on to Christmas

The kids love any occasion to make a sign. Notice the handprint turkeys!

In a lot of ways, while Hallowe’en feels to me like the start of the end of the year, Thanksgiving kicks off the the true, inevitable, unstoppable slide. I mean I can’t stop time either way, but Hallowe’en feels full no on of possibilities and plans while Thanksgiving fills me with “Oh shit! I’m not going to be ready!” I’m working full time until mid December, but there are things that can’t be put off until then – Christmas cards, tickets for events we want to attend, Christmas shopping, the tree. I mean I guess we could delay the tree until I’m done my current spate of shows and recitals, but then it would only be up for ten days, and where’s the joy in that? I think the Husband has a plan, though. I came home from work on Sunday night to this:

A couple years ago, I decided that we needed to up our exterior Christmas light game and so we got this from Home Depot. It makes me ridiculously happy, even though it might be though of as just this side of tacky. There are a variety of slides that the projector can display, so after Christmas, we can switch to just snowflakes and enjoy the festive lights into the New Year. (It also comes with a Hallowe’en slide, but I don’t know that we’ve ever used that.)

Thanksgiving itself was quiet and cozy. I was up late the night before baking pies. In the morning, the 11 year old made waffles, and let me sleep until 8:30am before telling me I needed to come down for waffles. We then watched the Macy’s Day Parade while the Husband and kids made sausage balls – this is one of our Thanksgiving traditions. Followed by watching the dog show, also tradition here. I went for a run around noon, then came home and popped the turkey in the oven. One of my friends, in town to work on the show with me, came over for Thanksgiving Dinner. She essentially played with the kids for 5 hours while I got everything ready. What an absolutely wonderful friend she is!

Thanksgiving dinner. Missing is the Rainbow Jello and the rolls. And of course the pies.

For dinner we had:
-Turkey – buttermilk brined and spatchcocked. I had spatchcocked a chicken before, never a turkey. The main appeal was that the recipe said a spatchcocked turkey would cook in 80-100 mins. Yes please. I actually took it out at 90 mins and it was a little dry .
-Stuffing, made separately. The sausage dressing from A Year of Miracles. I’m not usually a stuffing person, and particularly since I was spatchcocking the turkey, hadn’t originally planned it on the menu. But then I wanted to make something from Ella Risbridger’s cookbook, and there was a recipe for sausage stuffing with apples and chestnuts and I immediately wanted to try it. I’m not sorry at all.
-Grilled zucchini with gremolata, also from The Year of Miracles. This was a last minute add as well. I didn’t think there were enough green things on the menu and I had some zucchini in the fridge.
-Green beans – the Husband’s specialty. He steams them then sautes them with garlic and soy sauce. So tasty.
-cranberry sauce – the cooked kind. Pretty basic recipe with some fresh ginger added.
-Rainbow Jello aka Ribbon Salad. The 11 year old made this from a recipe card from my late Mother-in-Law’s recipe box. Also another thing we have every holiday dinner. Also the only thing the two little kids wanted to eat. I used the Rainbow Jello to bribe them to eat the other things.

-gravy made from dippings
-German Potato Salad – my friend brought this. When we were at her house this summer, she made this for us and it was so good that I requested it for Thanksgiving dinner
-cranberry relish – my friend also brought this. I’d never had cranberry relish before, and I really liked it, especially sprinkled with pecans.
-rolls. Last year I didn’t have rolls and we all agreed that was a mistake. This year we had the Pillsbury crescent rolls and Hawaiian rolls.
-Apple Pie – when I made it the night before, I couldn’t tell if the bottom cooked through. Last year’s pie had a bit of a soggy bottom, so I was a little paranoid that I’d repeated the mistakes. So the next morning, I covered the pie in foil and popped it back in the oven for 20 minutes. Not sure if that was the reason, but the crust was in much better shape this year. I use the apple recipe from Serious Eats and the crust recipe from King Arthur’s Flour Baking Companion.
-Pumpkin pie. I use the recipe from Tartine, with an extra egg yolk added. (I’m glad I noted that in the blog because I always think I’m going to remember and I never do.) Only, I didn’t have pumpkin. I don’t know where I think a pumpkin was going to magically appear from, but I didn’t have pumpkin. But… I did have a plethora of butternut squash from the Hungry Harvest box. So I roasted that up, and in a fit of panic that it wasn’t going to be enough, threw in a sweet potato as well. The verdict from the Husband, “It’s good, but it’s not pumpkin pie.” So for those of you who think that pumpkin has no taste and pumpkin pie is merely a vessel for sugar, cream and pumpkin pie spice … well, I guess you’re wrong. The pumpkin does matter.

It was a lovely day. We watched some dog show, then ate some (lots) of food. Then after dinner, we played Codenames – which was kind of hilarious becasue the 6 year old insists on being the Codemaster and he’s … well, he’s six. There was a minor meltdown when his team (consisting of him, the 4 year old, and the Husband) kept losing to my team (me, my friend, and the 11 year old). “You NEVER give me a chance to win!!!!” he yelled.

“Um…” I said, trying not to laugh, “every time you play is a chance to win, honey.”

That did not go over well. So we declared it was time for pie, and that seemed to mollify him.

After my friend went home, we put on our pjs and watched the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special, though I don’t guarantee that I stayed awake. We were all full and exhausted and agreed to leave the dishes for the next day.

(Also – update on our broken dishwasher. It does need replacing because it is old and all its parts don’t really talk to each other anymore. But the repair guy said that if we turn the machine off at the breaker and back on again, it will re-set itself and we can run it. So I did not have to handwash Thanksgiving after all. Frugal me thinks, “Great! The dishwasher still is going strong! We’ll get another ten years out of it!” But the Husband thinks that having to turn it on and off at the breaker is not an ideal solution, so we have taken advantage of the Black Friday sales and ordered a new one.)

The day after Thanksgiving, the Husband took the kids away on an overnight. I so wish I could have gone with them – they went to the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia. We hadn’t been to this museum in several years. We used to go several times a year – combining it with a trip to Longwood Gardens. But the 11 year old sort of aged out of it before the other two kids were really into it and then 2020 happened. Anyhow, the Husband decided that this weekend was a good time to go back with the kids so he took them on an a great little trip: Please Touch, then Hotel (with pool!, which I take it was a key component of any hotel stay) and hotel breakfast bar (also important.) The Please Touch Museum apparently was a great hit, and parts of it had been redone since we last went. We were a little unsure whether the 11 year old would be an active participant in a visit to the children’s museum, but she apparently really had a good time too.

Then the next day, the Husband took the kids to the Brandywine Museum. Back in September, when he went to the Minnesota State Fair, he and his friends had also gone to the Walker Art Museum. Well, it turns out it was cheaper for all of them to go if he bought a membership, so he did. And it turns out the Walker is part of the North American Reciprocal Museums Association so that his Walker membership gets us into many many many other museums too. One of which is the Brandywine Museum. I had suggested that it would be a good museum to take the kids to because they had their Holiday Trains up, but also they had an exhibit of art from children’s books and a dollhouse, which is always a draw for the oldest. I think children’s book illustrations are a hugely underrated slice of the art world and there should be more art exhibits devoted to that. I’m kind of sad I didn’t get to go along because it sounds like it was a really nice exhibit. The Husband did send some pictures, though:

This is a picture from Sophie Blackall’s most recent book Farmhouse. Can’t wait to read it! I wish I could have seen it in real life.

The Husband reported that the kids seemed to enjoy the art and that the museum had a reading nook set up so you could read all the books featured in the exhibit. He also said that he wrote down the names of almost all the books that were showcased – I’m excited to check them out from the library.

I’m determined to make the most of our reciprocal museum membership in the next 10 months. There are so many art and history museums that we could visit. There is a Duck Decoy museum in Havre de Grace, MD, which is probably about 90 minutes from us!

As for me, I had rehearsal from 12:00p-7:00p Friday, Saturday, and Sunday so I wasn’t home to enjoy the quiet house. Friday, I carpooled with my friend to work, and we went to Trader Joe’s after work, so that kind of felt like a fun friend date. There are a lot of things I love getting at Trader Joe’s (Everything Bagel Seasoning! Pound Plus Dark Chocolate! Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups! Nuts! Dried Fruit! Rice cracker snack mx!). I don’t go very often, however, because I can’t do all my shopping there, and it’s a little out of the way. So it always feels like a treat to go.

Saturday I got to bike to work, which is always exhilarating. When I first stepped out of the house in the morning, though, the sun was shining warmly so even though it was 45 degrees out side, I decided I didn’t need my windbreaker or gloves. About a half mile into my ride, I realized that was a mistake. I was very cold. I leaned into the brisk weather and tried to savor the chill and made it to work. I did, however, walk the bike up that last hill – I wasn’t going to make it up that hill.

Fun things this week:

-In the Fall of 2020, deep in the thick of being home with kids all the time, I decided to do something I’d always wanted to do and signed up for an art class the local community college. I’d always wanted to take a class, but it never worked out with my work schedule. Well, during the pandemic, all the classes moved to be online, and I was unemployed, so I figured it would be a good time to take a class. It turns out to be one of the best things I’ve ever done. (You can see posts with pictures of my work here.) Having that weekly drawing assignment gave me something to do that wasn’t changing diapers or feeding the family or supervising online learning and there was a sweet group of people to interact with every week. Anyhow, at the end of the second class I took, the instructor suggested I submit a drawing to be included in the course catalogue. This was two years ago, and I didn’t think anything of it, knowing that they must get many submissions and my picture was no where as polished at the stuff usually featured in the catalogue. Last week, the latest course catalogue came to our door, and to my surprise, I opened it up, and there was my picture!

It’s not quite like being published or anything, but it tickles me to have a picture of my art out there.

-The six year olds’ classroom had a “Classgiving” potluck. The week before sign ups were sent out for each child to contribute a dish if they wished. I asked the six year old what he wanted to bring. “A turkey,” he said.

Whoa what? No. Try again.

“Rainbow Jello!” That sounds more reasonable. Except when I looked at the food sign ups, it was like six or seven different kinds of baked goods. This was supposed to be the kids’ lunch on the last day of school before the break, and I was a little wary of adding yet another sugary dish to the mix. So we thought about it for a few days. This was the dilemma – do I send what the kid wants to send, or do I send something that will balance the rest of what is on the sign up? Given that it was meant to be a lunch potluck, I was leaning towards the latter. “What about your dad’s sausage balls?” I suggested, thinking a protein option might be a good thing to add. He heaved a sigh, “Okay…”

Which was a win for me on two counts: 1) savory protein (albeit wrapped in carbs), and 2) the Husband got to make them. He’s such a trooper.

On the day of the Classgiving party, parents were allowed to join, so I dutifully went to his classroom, even though I find these things terribly awkward as I am not good at small talk with other parents. Participating in classroom activities solidly falls into the “Will make my kid happy” category for me. When I got there the kids were watching Inspector Gadget and the six year old barely registered my presence. Oh well.

Oh the best part, though – after all my over thinking the potluck sign up of carbs and sugar – I didn’t have to worry that lunch would be unbalanced … someone brought in a paella. Like in a pan, beautifully presented with asparagus and peppers and chicken. It was awesome. It’s now one of my goals for 2024 to make a paella. Also, as I was leaving someone brought in this delicious looking meat stew with couscous. Only by that point the kids were so full of baked goods that I’m sure they didn’t give the meat stew a second glance. Sad. Oh well, I’m sure the other parents got to enjoy it.

-Also highly recommend this poem, by Clint Smith, which I heard on an episode of On Being from earlier this month. It’s entitled “Ode to Those First Fifteen Minutes After the Kids Are Finally Asleep.” Here are the first few lines, but you must click the link and read (or listen) to the whole thing:

Praise the couch that welcomes you back into its embrace
as it does every night around this time. Praise the loose
cereal that crunches beneath your weight, the whole‐grain
golden dust that now shimmers on the backside of your pants.
Praise the cushion, the one in the middle that sinks like a lifeboat
leaking air, and the ottoman covered in crayon stains that you
have now accepted as aesthetic.

Clint Smith’s poem “Dance Party” is also pretty great too. Smith perfectly captures the energy sapping joy of caring for other beings.

-One of the nice things about working on Sunday is that there is a Sunday farmer’s market next to work. So I stopped by before rehearsal to pick up some apples and vegetables (arugula, cucumber, onions, and carrots) as well as lunch (a berry smoothie and chicken empanadas). On my way out, I passed a stall that had a sign that said, “Pickled mushrooms! Try one! It will change your life!” Well, who am I to turn that down, so I did. They were pretty tasty, maybe not life-changingly tasty, but very tasty all the same. The pickled mushroom stand was one that specialized in fermented food and before I knew it, I was walking away with their kimchi, pickles, sauerkraut and, yes, a jar of pickled mushrooms. The ironic thing is that morning the Husband and I had just cleared out the fridge, getting rid of all manner of science experiments and eating up other things, including a bucket of pickles. I was a little abashed to fill that pickle vacuum so soon, but I’ve always been a sucker for fermented food…

Oksana’s Produce Farm. Why make space in the fridge if you can’t fill it with more pickles???

Outfit of the week: Last week was also the first day of rehearsal for the holiday show I’m working on. For the past few years, I almost always wear the same thing for the first day of rehearsal. The outfit is a little more polished than what I usually wear because I like to look relatively put together the first time I meet the singers and the conductor and director. Wearing this outfit is a bit like putting a a uniform- it gets me in the right mindset to start rehearsals.

The grey dress is actually a nursing dress from Latched Mama. If you look closely, there are slits in the side for nursing access. I bought it when the 4 year old was born and it turns out it is such a versatile dress that I wear it all the time even though I’m not nursing anymore. And it has pockets!! The jacket is Eileen Fisher which I picked up at Nordstrom Rack five or six years ago. I like how it looks a little vintage-y and I love the colour. It’s also a jacket that can elevate any outfit. I’ve worn it with sweats and a t-shirt and ended up looking cooler than I have any business looking. The boots need a serious polish, but I also have had them for ages and even had them re-soled a few years ago. They have a wingtip look and feel fancy but are really comfy. The tights are Uniqlo HeatTech because it suddenly got cold last week. And the scarf is super cool – the little circles are actually the digits of pi, written in a spiral. My sister in law got the scarf for me from a company that specializes in STEM based prints. I always get lots of compliments on that scarf. The hat is from my other sister in law (I think it has appeared before in other posts.)

Grateful for:
-Thanksgiving and friends and food and family. Not just on this one day, but all the days.

-Finding my gloves! Several years ago, the Husband gave me some lovely red gloves for Christmas. They were warm, leather Isotoners, and they had touch fingertips so I could use my phone while wearing them. But last year I couldn’t find them. I was distraught. They were not inexpensive so I was hesitant to replace them. Well, this week, I lost my raincoat (sad!), so I had to grab a spare coat from our closet one rainy day. It was a windbreaker that had belonged to my late mother-in-law, which we had kept just for this kind of back up need. Well, I put it on and reached into the lump in the pocket and there were my red gloves!! I was even better than that feeling you get when you find a $20 bill in your pocket!

– Leftovers! One of the most wonderful things about Thanksgiving is having leftovers for easy lunches for days afterwards.

Looking forward to:
-Errands getting done. because I don’t have to be at work until 11:30 most days, I have booked morning appointments this week for driver’s license renewal (mine), and then on my free day, I’ve booked a passport renewal (the 11 year old), and a pediatric dentist visit (the 4 year old.) Boy will it feel good to get some of the stuff off my plate. (spoiler alert – the 4 year old has a stomach bug so the license renewal has to be rescheduled since I have to stay home with her. Let’s hope the rest of the things will happen, though.)

-The two older kids’ piano recital. It’s the six year old’s first piano recital. He will be playing Jolly Old St. Nicholas. As you do when you’ve only been taking lessons for four months. The 11 year old is playing a more complicated piece called Sleighride. She’s been working really hard. At first her teacher was going to make some cuts to the piece because she hadn’t been really practicing and the whole piece wasn’t going to be ready, but then 11 year old buckled down and learned the whole piece. I’m going to be honest – piano, specifically practicing piano, has been a huge struggle. I vacillate between not caring and caring very (too) much.

– Christmas books! I love reading holiday and winter theme picture books in December. I used to make it an Advent calendar type event and wrap them all individually to read one per night. But that was a lot of work, and one year the Grinch was due back at the library, but it was still wrapped so I didn’t know which book it was and that was annoying. So now I just bring them home in a big reusable shopping bag and leave them out and we just grab what we want.

What We Ate: It feels like we ate out more than usual last week. Partly the lead busyness around Thanksgiving, also partly me working until 8pm most nights and the Husband and I not sitting down to meal plan. I don’t love eating out all the time, but I guess it’s just that season for us right now.
Monday: Bahn mi sandwiches (take-out)

Tuesday: Tofu stir fry with noodles (the Husband cooked)

Wednesday: We had tacos out after the six year old and Husband got haircuts. I had shrimp ceviche and a really tasty fish taco from Fish Taco, a local chain.

Thursday: Thanksgiving – see above.

Friday, Saturday, Sunday – leftovers from Thanksgiving. The Husband hot the kids pizza on their road trip. Sunday was dumplings and broccoli.

I don’t really see myself getting back into the dinner cooking groove anytime soon, which makes me a little sad. I miss having that time to putter in the kitchen and then producing something nourishing for everyone to eat. I had thought that I might be able to do more morning meal prep with my later morning starts, but to meal prep, I have to meal plan, and I haven’t had a lot of time for that lately either. I’m instead focusing on having good basics – fruits, veggies, eggs, kimchi, cheese – in the fridge so that even if I’m not cooking, there are options for solid snack meals for me. The Husband actually does really well for getting everyone fed. Honestly, the kids like his cooking more than mine.

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! How is the rest of the year looking? Is it frenetic or calm? Or somewhere in between?

(bi) Weekly recap +what we ate: Closing and catching up.

We closed the show last night. It’s been some very long days since opening. Usually the pace slows down, but with this show we had a second cast to prepare and also a children’s version to put up (more on that below.). But in between, I had plumber visits (the upstairs bathroom faucet wouldn’t turn off, the downstairs toilet ran), and school runs, and dentist appointments (the long delayed dentist appointment that I wrote about earlier. Turns out the six year old has so many cavities he needs to be sedated to have them taken care of. So that is yet another dentist appointment in my future. Only because of the sedation, we need to find a day when someone can stay home with the six year old afterwards, so that’s another piece of the scheduling puzzle.

Fun things:
-The 11 year old’s school play. It was a play about aliens masquerading as students and the drama group presented the play in the school cafeteria. The 11 year old did great! She remembered all her lines, prompted a fellow colleague with a loud whisper when he forgot his lines, and generally seemed to have a good time. Seeing a bunch of middle schoolers present a play in their cafeteria with just one single lighting instrument and everyone wearing their own clothes is such a contrast to the work I do where sets cost millions of dollars and there are so many complicated details. Watching these students, I’m reminded that theatre is storytelling, and for all the spectacle of opera or Broadway, storytelling is at it’s core a very simple thing.

-Fall Trip to Longwood Gardens. On my day off one recent Sunday, we went to Longwood Gardens. The chrysanthemum exhibit was still going on, and the holiday train display just went up. The day was perfect for being outside – sunny and crisp and almost warm.

The kids and I do this rainbow photo project whenever we go to Longwood Gardens where we try to find something every colour of the rainbow. Blue is always tricks and we usually end up taking a picture of the sky. Even still, I love how many different nuances of colour there is to be found at Longwood. Here’s this trip’s rainbow photo collage:

After our trip to Longwood Gardens, we drove back home and met up with a friend who was in town for work. He was someone the Husband met contradancing twenty-some years ago, but who since had moved to the other side of the country. We talked a lot about what a wonderful contra-dance community there was in DC, and how he hasn’t found anything like it in his new city. We talked about how COVID must have hit the contradance community hard. It so funny how contradancing is something that we use to do once or even twice a week, yet we haven’t gone in five or six years. I’ve been listening to contra dance music when I run lately, and it’s really taken me back to a younger me, to a time when we would dance til 11pm, when the music was live and hot and pounding and flowing. I’m sort of sad, too, that we don’t go dancing anymore, but maybe this is just not the season and we will find our way back one day.

-Scone-apalooza! For the children’s show we did (more on that below), we had to be at the theatre at 9am, so I brought in scones. I stayed up later than I should have the night before to make scones, but I love baking and hadn’t done it for a while. Baking is definitely one of my flow activities. By the time I got done all the scones, it was almost 2am. I made blueberry scones (America’s Test Kitchen Recipe), chocolate walnut scones (from The Irish Pantry cookbook) and I also wanted to make a savory scone so I made cheddar ham scones (King Arthur’s Baking Cheddar Scones with ham added.) I accidentally put twice the amount of garlic powder in the cheddar and ham scones, so they were particularly tasty.

Scones for miles. From back to front: Chocolate Walnut, Blueberry, and Ham and Cheddar.

– Ground plans. One of the fun this that that after we finish each show, I get to bring the ground plans home for this kids to use as scrap paper. When they were little, we would draw body outlines on the paper, but now they have gotten too big for that. Once during the pandemic, my mother covered a whole page with a drawing of a neighborhood that she designed for the kids.

The not fun:
-Sick kids. Not sure what it was, but 2 out of 3 kids were home vomiting last week and missed a couple days of school. And then there was one day when I wasn’t feeling well and I really felt like I was going to collapse while calling the show. Luckily I didn’t, but I did spend most of the show sitting down, which is something I rarely do.
-More really long hours and a sleep deficit. Not having downtime after a show opens is really hard. With rehearsals continuing for various show-related things and prepping for the next show, I’m not getting the days free that I’m used to after a show opens. I’m feeling behind on life and self things. I did start to make appointments to get life admin tasks done – renewing drivers licenses and passports. And we did schedule a plumber visit for the one day id week that I could work from home so now we can use the sink in the upstairs bathroom again. The house seems like a constant state of mess; I want to figure out better systems for that. I’m looking forward to December when I can re-set life a little bit.

Something I contemplated this week:
There is a lot of construction going on in the lot behind where I work. It’s actually been quite fun to see the construction vehicles work and machines moving. The other day, I looked up and snapped this picture:

And as I was looking at the men and machine work, I thought with a little bit of awe, “It’s all just wood and nails. Look at that building going up – it’s wood, so much wood. I thought it would be more complicated than that, and maybe it will be, but this stage is just wood.” Seeing buildings under construction, particularly with all their framing exposed, I always marvel at how fragile and basic a building can be.

Grateful for:
-windows. I spend a lot of time working in dark buildings with no windows, no way to see what the world is outside. It can feel a little insular. (It’s funny, on our company intranet site, there is a “virtual window” – a camera on the roof that shows employees what it’s like outside. Can’t decide if this is a cute idea or just kind of sad.). The other day, I woke up, got out of bed and pulled up the blinds and in streamed sunshine and I could look outside and see trees and streets and brightness and day. It was amazing. So I’m grateful for windows and being able to see outside when there are many days when I don’t get to actually go outside.

– the enthusiasm of children and the chance to give them something to be enthusiastic about. We did shortened version of our show for 1500 school kids this week. It was a whirlwind to rehearse – we performed excerpts of our show and in between we talked about the different things that go into making an opera – costumes, scenery, lights, stage hands, stage managers, supertitles, etc. The students were loud and rambunctious and very entertained. I hope that maybe in that crowd is at least one kid who grows up to be a singer, or a conductor, or an actor, or a theatre technician. And at least more than one kid who grows up to be someone who gives money to support the work of singers, conductors, actors, theatre technicians, etc.

-Not having to be at work at 9am most days. The above mentioned school show was at 11am, which mean I had to be at the theatre at 9am, something that I do maybe three or four times a year. And let me tell you, every time I get to go to work at 9am, I am very grateful that I don’t have to do it every day. First of all, the traffic between 8:00a – 9:00am is terrible. My non-peak commute to the theatre takes 35 minutes. Between 8:00am and 9:00am, it takes 50-60 mins. And people just seemed more stress at that time, less likely to let you in, more likely to behave irrationally. (Or maybe the driving is less predictable because there are more drivers out there?). Also a 9am start means that I have to find someone to take the kids to the bus in the morning. Luckily the Husband often can shift his schedule or the family we carpool with will switch shifts with me, but the school schedule is not made to accommodate parents who have to be at work at 9am. (Though I guess that is what before care is for…) And then just the general rush of having to leave 45 minutes earlier – it takes all the breath and space out of my morning. So all in all, I’m grateful that I don’t have to be at work at 9am most days.

-rehearsal pants. On the last day of the show, I went to our rehearsal office to do a couple hours work for the upcoming show before heading to the theatre for the final performance. As I was wrapping up to head to the theatre, I realized that I had forgotten my backstage running black clothes at home. I don’t usually wear a lot of black unless I’m working backstage, so I hadn’t put on my running blacks in the morning. wump wump. I didn’t have time to go home to get my black clothes. What to do? I had a black t-shirt on, but I was wearing a bright red skirt what wasn’t quite appropriate for backstage. Then I remembered that in our office was a pair of black rehearsal pants. (“Rehearsal” clothes are what we call clothes that we use in rehearsal instead of the “real” clothes or costumes. Like, say, if a singer wanted to wear a skirt in rehearsal that mimicked the fullness and length of her costume, we would get her a rehearsal skirt because the real dress probably would not be available to use.) The show we had been performing had a scene where the leading man gets dressed and so we had a pair of nylon pants that we used in rehearsal for him. So when I got to the theatre, I tried those on. I don’t think I’m the same size as our tenor, but thankfully the pants had a drawstring waistband and then I cuffed them in my best 90s tween manner. I think it was the cuffing that gave the pants a stylishly current jogger vibe and made it not so ridiculous that I was wearing men’s exercise pants backstage. Not that anyone truly cares what I’m wearing – we’re standing around in the dark, after all – but I am very grateful for rehearsal pants.

Looking forward to:
-Thanksgiving! I have to work the day before and the day after Thanksgiving, so we are having Thanksgiving at home, with maybe an opera friend or two joining us. I’ve figured out roughly the menu and written down the action plan for the next couple of days. The Husband did the grocery shopping over the weekend, so we should be set. (Though the dishwasher broke… again. So there’s that… I’m not looking forward to the dishes.) Here’s the plan for the week:
Monday (yesterday): I spatchcocked and brined the Turkey. When I put the turkey in the InstantPot pot, the turkey didn’t fit and I was confused because I had used the same container last year. Then I remembered that last year I only did a turkey breast. So I’m contemplating either getting a roasting bag or just flipping the turkey every so often.
Tuesday: Go to the 6 year old’s class Thanksgiving cerebration. Work from 11:30a – 8pm, come home. Make pie dough and cranberry sauce and cranberry relish. (The kids have a 1/2 day of school, but the Husband is covering that.)
Wednesday: Kids are off school, but I work 9:30a – 4:00pm. Come home – make pies, steam green beans. The 11 year old hopefully would have made the rainbow Jello during her day off.
Wednesday: Macy’s Day Parade and Sausage ball making. Cook Turkey, finish off the green beans. I’m contemplating making stuffing. TBD.
I’m so glad I wrote notes to myself last year on things to remember for this year. One of the main notes was thatt year I decided I didn’t have the energy to make rolls, then on the day we all missed having rolls. So we bought rolls this year.

– Holiday movies! Last year, I watched a lot of Holiday movies and I’m super excited to plunge in again. The 2023 holiday movies don’t look as diverse or interesting as last year but there are a few that I’m putting on my definitely watch list, and a few from last year that I missed. (Someone highly recommended to me Mistletoe and Menorahs…). I am kind of sad that there isn’t an Asian Holiday movie; last year there were two. The 11 year old has requested as her Holiday Fun List item is an all day Hallmark Holiday Movie marathon. Doesn’t that sound like the most indulgent cozy thing?

-The holiday opera that I’m working on. It’s kind of a whirlwind quick process, but I love this show, having done it twice before. It’s a beautiful piece, fun and festive and full of heart.

– I think I’m going to take an art class this winter when my work load lightens up a little bit. I haven’t signed up for it yet, but perhaps putting it into the universe will make it so.

What We Ate:
Since I’m pretty sure I wasn’t responsible for dinner the majority of the past two weeks, here’s what I do remember making:
Coconut Rice with shrimp – This was a ridiculously easy recipe I found in the free magazine they hand out at the Giant. It involved cooking rice in a can of coconut milk, adding frozen veggies for the last 5 mins or so (I did frozen edamame and corn) and adding shrimp for the last 3 mins and then letting the whole thing sit covered for another 5 mins to let the shrimp cook. It was super fast and tasty – on the table in less than 30 mins and that’s with having to take time to defrost the shrimp under running water. I would eat again.

Butternut squash soup. I had a surfeit of butternut squash in our Hungry Harvest box, so one morning, before I went to work, I sauteed some onions and garlic in the Instant Pot, added some red curry paste, sauteed some more. Then I peeled and cubed one butternut squash and added it to the pot with one quart of vegetable stock. I set the IP for high pressure, 20 mins and left for work. I texted the husband: “Dinner’s in the IP. Add one can of coconut milk and puree.” Super simple and tasty. Vegan

Brussel Sprout Fried Rice. This is the recipe from Meera Sodha’s East. I love this recipe. Some days the kids love it, some days they don’t. This was one of the “don’t” days. Oh well, more for me!

Then there was the one day where we just had breakfast all day long. The Husband made the kids eggs for breakfast. Then at lunch, I didn’t know what to give them and I needed it to be fast, so I made breakfast sandwiches. Then for dinner, we clearly were exhausted, because that was the night we all just ate cereal for dinner. A Triple Breakfast Day!!! #lifegoals.

–

Weekly recap + what we ate: Halloween and Opening Night

Another show opened! Yay. That feeling of relief and achievement and being able to get back to the rest of life.

Through the brilliance of opera scheduling, we had Halloween night off from rehearsals and performances. I took the kids over to a friend’s house to trick or treat since our own street is pretty quiet. The Husband stayed home to pass out candy, though I don’t think we had anyone come to our door. He’d been solo parenting in the evening for over a week now and thoroughly deserved a night to himself.

I only got one picture of the kids in their Hallowe’en Costumes:

Back in August, I had told all the kids that if they wanted me to make their costumes, the designs had to be in by the end of September since I would be in tech the week before Hallowe’en and unavailable for costume construction. The oldest wanted to be “The Taylor Swift House.” Which was not a reference I understood. To which her response was, “Why can’t you just Google it yourself!?!?!” There was probably an eye roll in there as well. At any rate, I’m sure I could have Googled it, but I wasn’t going to put effort into it if she wasn’t going to, so I left her to her own devices. Then a couple days before Hallowe’en – she woke me up on morning waving a piece of paper, saying, “I’ve designed a house!” She decided just to be a house. Of course it was the weekend before Hallowe’en, and not on my to do list. The Husband went out and bought her two pieces of plastic sheeting and a bunch of markers and she made the costume herself. I wish I got a picture of the back because the rooms she drew were amazingly detailed. I did attach the straps for her, though if I were to do it again, I would not use hot glue. The hot glue did not hold and half way through the evening, the straps came off and she just held the costume up for the remainder of the evening.

The 6 year old wanted to be a builder. I was initially going to make him a cardboard truck to be part of his costume, but then I saw Kiwi Co. makes kits where you can make an excavator arm – a working excavator arm – and attach it to a box. Well, that was much cooler than anything I could make on my own, so I ordered the kit. The morning of our first orchestra tech rehearsal, I got up at 6am to put together this cardboard excavator arm with the “help” of the children before going into work. You know when you roll into work at 10:30am and everyone else looks like they just got out of bed and are saying how tired they are and how early they had to get up to get to the theatre by 10:30am, and you don’t want to say anything because there is no competitive suffering in opera, but really you were up at 6am making a freaking cardboard excavator so they can all shove it, but you don’t really say that… ? Just me? Never mind. Anyhow, the excavator arm was every bit as cool as I had hoped.

The 4 year old made it easy and just pulled the astronaut suit from the dress up clothes and called it a day. It was brilliant because she could also wear the NASA bomber jacket that my father had given the 6 year old, and was toasty warm all evening. Or would have been except at one point she declared that she was hot and took it off.

It actually turned out quite chilly on Thanksgiving. This after a weekend of 75/80 degree weather. I think the cold discouraged people from staying out very long. By the time 8pm rolled around, the streets were pretty empty. We went back to my friend’s house, where we had some turkey chili and minestrone soup for dinner and the kids traded candy. Then I took the kids home and we watched It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown with the Husband while we sorted the candy. By “we” I really meant “me.” The little kids didn’t quite understand the joy of candy sorting. An added bonus of the candy sorting was that I used it as an opportunity to combine the two little kids’ candy and then let them pick 30 pieces to eat and there was no jealous cries of “That’s my candy!” The rest of their candy, I put in a bag and set aside. By which I mean, I set aside so I can eat it myself. I feel like I can probably get away with taking all my kids’ candy for another year or so before they wise up and realize that I’m doing that. Case in point, the 11 year old who would not let me near her candy and sorted her piles on the other side of the room.

One thing I love is that the 11 year old always gives her 100 Grands to the Husband. In fact, if she ever is given the option to choose candy from a bowl and there is a 100 Grand, she will almost always choose that one, “For daddy,” she says.

The day after Hallowe’en was a day off of school for the two kids in public school. I think it was just a fluke of scheduling; it was an end of quarter grading day for the teachers. Fluke though it might have been, it was kind of brilliant. The kids could stay up late the night before and sleep in the next day. Only they couldn’t sleep in because the day after Hallowe’en was a Wednesday and the kids have back to back piano lessons starting at 7:15am on Wednesday. Gotta admit that was a tough lesson to get them to. If i had had more foresight, I probably would have cancelled for the week, but I am very much a slave to scheduled routines and didn’t even think about cancelling. But after that, the kids got to lounge around the house the rest of the day while the Husband worked from home and I went to rehearsal.

After rehearsal on that Wednesday, I took the 11 year old to participate in a study at the nearby University. When she was a couple months old, I saw a flyer for the University’s Child Development Center saying they needed babies and children to participate in studies. I wasn’t working at the time, so I thought it would be fun to do, and for the first few years of our kids’ lives we participated in three or four studies a year. Some of them paid, some of them didn’t but I always thought it fascinating to go to them. I think one of my favorite studies is the one from Gallaudet University which centered around a robot they were making that could communicate with deaf people – they wanted both hearing and hearing impaired babies to interact with the robot. When the youngest was four months old, I signed up for a study that involved putting her in an MRI machine – that one was kind of a disaster because we had to go during her bedtime so they could swaddle her and cover her ears to go into the machine while asleep, but she kept waking up once in the MRI machine and so we eventually gave up on that one. Anyhow, when people ask for things to do with one’s baby, I always suggest participating in research studies as a fun way to get out of the house.

The 11 year old had been feeling left out because her younger siblings were always being asked to be in studies, but she wasn’t. I don’t know if it’s because there are fewer people researching preteens? Or just in our area? So when an opportunity for a study for children 8-12, I signed up the eleven year old to go. It was a study about mother child interactions and anxiety and involved filling out a survey prior to the lab visit and then the lab visit where we wore eye trackers while participating in simulated conversations based on topics the researchers prompted. The study visit took 90 minutes and at the end we were $50 richer and the 11 year old got some sparkly gel pens. Afterwards I took her out for BBQ, which was nice because I’ve been feeling like we haven’t been getting a lot of mother-daughter time.

Random musings:

I just spent $80 on pads and hair ties for myself and my daughters. Now I know that pads and hair ties are not solely the domain of women/girls, but given that the majority of people who menstruate and/or have long hair seem to be female, I feel like I was just hit with some kind of penalty for being female and having daughters. I guess, men get their hair cut more so have to pay that expense more often? But in truth, my Husband’s hair cut costs about a quarter on mine, so it doesn’t seem to even out at all.

Also- Daylight Saving Time after Opening Night seems like a good idea. I got to feel like I slept in on Sunday morning. I had all sorts of thoughts as to what I would want to do with my gained hour. It involved aspirations of reading, and journaling and yoga. Yeah nope. In reality it just involved sleep. of course I didn’t get home until nearly 2am after the opening night party, so sleep would seem to be the best use of my gained hour.

I came home one day to find this in our yard:

A new tree! Earlier this year the county had taken down a tree in front of our house because it was not quite alive and also because it posed a hazard to the electrical lines above. I guess they have now replaced the tree. I’m not even sure what kind of tree it is, but it’s kind of exciting to have a new tree, to think about how big it will get. To wonder if it too will one day be cut down because it is growing into the power lines, or if by then all the powerlines will be underground…

More Fall Fashion:
I’ve posted before on how much I love dressing for fall, so I thought I’d do another mini fall fashion post. One day, I put on this outfit:

The 11 year old took this picture and was very specific that my hand had to be on the doorknob.

The outfit is a grey plaid flannel button down from Uniqlo, a dress from Wool&, black leggings, the “not for Amsterdam” blue boots, and a knit hat that was a present from my sister in law. The Wool& dress I bought this year and it quickly became one of my most worn garments – I’ve worn it at least twice a week since April. It’s not a terribly interesting dress, but it layers well and can be worn in many different combinations. Anyhow, I put on this outfit and the six year old said, “You look like a teenager.” Not at all sure what that means.

So I added my favorite and ubiquitous Uniqlo puffer vest:

And the six year old said, “Now you look like a mom!” Hmmm…. When I first got my puffer vest six or seven years ago, I did kind of feel like I was falling into a suburban mom cliche, but… but but… it is such a practical piece of clothing – keeps me warm without being bulky, and I can throw it on over anything. I might look like a mom cliche, but at least I’m not cold.

(On an incidental note – you see all that wood paneling? That is in our foyer. This wood paneling is 85% of my living room window treatment dilemma. I would love to have natural woven or bamboo blinds in the living room. But the living room is directly off of this foyer and I just can’t picture whether or not having bamboo blinds will clash with all that wood paneling in the foyer. Like whether or not the vintage/mid century vibe of the foyer needs to dictate the window treatment of the living room and whether bamboo blinds are too beachy for the vibe our foyer gives off…. this is something I’ve been pondering for over a year now. Opinions welcome.)

Grateful for:
– The Assistant Stage Managers, who are my eyes on stage and backstage when I’m too busy calling cues to look up, and the Assistant Director who, for me, is the real soul of this show. Getting to opening always is the work of many and having good ASMs and a great AD to share an office with is foundational to me getting where the show needs to go.

-The Husband, as always, for holding down the fort. For making dinner, picking up the kids, putting them to bed, laundry, keeping the house clean… all of it. Tech week is always a lot of hours away from home, but this fall, seems harder than normal. I think I’m still trying to balance some new responsibilities at work with the parts of the job I’ve always done and I haven’t quite figured out how to spread my time yet so I’m at work a lot more and I’m bringing home work to do a lot more than I used to. It’s been rough. There will never be a tech week where I’m not grateful for the Husband, but this tech period, I feel like has been particularly demanding.

– Bike store by work. Two weeks ago, I had ridden my bike to work and ended up leaving it there because it was dark when I got off work and I don’t have lights for the bike. Well, I finally went back to pick it up on my day off last week only to find the front tire had gotten flat. This was super discouraging because I had decided not to go running that morning because I knew I was going to be biking home later that day. The I remembered that there was a bike shop four or five blocks from work, so I wheeled my sad limpy bike there. Only to find a note on the door, “We’re moving!” and it listed a new address along with their re-opening date which, luckily, was the day before. So I wheeled my sad limpy bike down four more blocks to the bike store. I feel very ignorant about bikes – I want to be able to do my own maintenance, but I never got around to learning how to do it. At any rate, the technician at the bike store put my bike up on the rack and took the inner tube out, checked it for holes, found a hole on a seam, which indicated that it was just a bad innertube, but the still checked the tire for pointy bits anyway, then replaced the innertube while answering questions about training wheels, and I was soon on my way home. It was the best $25 I spent all week.

– County Rec Program. I signed up the 6 year old and 4 year old for a new session of skating lessons and while I did, I thought how awesome it is that they can take 6 weeks of skating lessons + a card for 6 admissions to open skate, all for $114. The expense of kids activities can really build up, so I’m grateful that we have access to really great, relatively low cost, activities through the county program. Our tax dollars at work, I guess.

-Guavas in the mail. My parents sent us a box of guavas from the tree in their yard. I love guavas – the rest of the family not so much. I guess they don’t appreciate the crunchy, sweet, and tropical taste. Yippeee, more for me! There were a few days when I realized that we were low on fruit in the house, but because we had these guavas, I could pack the apples for my kids and take the guavas myself and we would get through another couple of days without a grocery run.

Looking forward to:

– planning meals and cooking again. I haven’t made dinner in a long long long time. I got this cookbook from the library and I’m really excited about the recipes in it:

Hetty Lui McKinnon wrote To Asia With Love, which is another cookbook I’ve loved this year. This book is already overdue, but I’m hoping to sneak a few recipes out before the Library starts banging on my door asking for it back. There is a mushroom ragout that looks amazing, and a butternut squash lasagna that uses butternut squash in place of noodles. Which is fortunate because my Hungry Harvest box came with 4 butternut squashes this week.

– evenings not at the theatre. Evenings and bedtime is a slog, but I miss that routine and being able to snuggle at night.

-The 11 year old’s school play. She’s been working so hard learning her lines; I’m excited to see the lines in context. (This actually just happened – it was fun!)

What we ate: once again, I couldn’t say.

There was some kind of tofu/noodle/ thai-ish stir fry. The leftovers of which I accidentally three out because I thought it was the leftover Thai food that made me sick and had me vomiting at work one day. But it wasn’t and now I’m sad I didn’t get to eat any of my Husband’s yummy cooking.

There was an eat down the freezer meal- a handful of this, a handful of that to finish off some nearly empty packages in the freezer. From the Husband’s account it was something like six dumplings and a handful of tater tots.

There was a pizza and movie night, but I’m not at all sure what they watched.

Weekly Recap + what we ate: tech week!

Saturday was a day off after three looong days in the theatre. It’s been an exhausting week. Luckily the rehearsal schedule lightens up a little bit after this, but I’m behind on putting the cues into my score, so I’ll have to spend several hours on that when we’re not on stage or in a lighting session.

view from my station out front. I have many buttons to push.

Being out and about on the day off was something of a shock. I feel as if I started prepping for this show in summer and yesterday, I went outside and had to blink twice because it is fall. Trees blazing with colour and light. Leaves barely clinging on to branches, their cohorts carpeting the ground. Yet also it’s unseasonably warm this week – in the 70s and 80s. Our choreographer, who is from England, asked me the other day if this warm temperature was normal, and I started to say, “No, it’s not normal,” but then I stopped because I can’t remember what is “normal” weather anymore. I mean I certainly don’t remember it being 80 degrees the week before Hallowe’en, but I don’t think we’ve had a truly cold Hallowe’en in ages. Not the cool nights that I remember growing up, of layers and sweatpants under Hallowe’en costumes.

Some Fun Things This Week:
-Soup Swap At Work! This was absolutely an awesome idea. Four of us brought soup – we had butternut squash soup, cream of mushroom, matzoh ball soup, and I made kale and sausage soup. Someone brought bread, and I picked up apples from the Farmer’s market that morning. Since there were so many soup options, we decided to serve ourselves soup in mugs so that we could each try all of the options without filling up on big bowls of any one soup. Then we started mixing the soups and putting the matzoh balls in different soups. We had lots of leftovers. Definitely goes on our “Let’s do it again” list for work.

-The 11 year old went on a two night overnight trip with her school. I didn’t know this beforehand, but every sixth grader has the opportunity to go on an overnight trip, called Outdoor Education. It’s not really camping because everyone stays in a cabin, but they do spend the day in the wood – suburban woods, but still, outside among trees – and roast marshmallows at night. She apparently had a great time, which surprised me a little because she has always rejected the idea of sleepaway camp. Anyhow, the first day she was gone, I got home form work at midnight and saw that she had left her lunch on the living room floor and I got so sad because day 1 lunch was the one meal that was not provided. And I proceeded to worry about her for the next two days. (Would I have been this upset about it if it hadn’t been tech week, and I had gotten a full night’s sleep? Maybe not.) When she came home, I asked her about it, and she said that she just got a PB&J from the cafeteria and it was fine. I’m so proud of her for figuring it out. Also – I completely forgot to pay the Outdoor Ed fee because the online system was down. I don’t know … the whole thing was somehow utterly mentally exhausting for me. The important thing, though… she had a good time and no one had to pick her up at midnight from the camp because she wanted to come home.

-This fun jigsaw puzzle that one of my co-workers brought in for our office. We may have stayed later than prudent to finish it one night…

What a perfect puzzle for a bunch of theatre nerds!

Some genius things this week:
1) My favorite farm stand is my go to source for apples this time of year. The guy at the register once told me that they have about thirty varieties of apples over the course of Fall. I love trying all the different varieties of apples, but I could never keep straight what I was bringing home. Well, recently, they’ve started putting out paper bags for customers to buy apples. Brilliant! I can write the names of the apples on the bag. I feel like I’ve just been able to up my apple tasting game.

Just one small section of the apples available

2) The use of technology so casually and easily in rehearsal continues to amaze me. I mean when I first started working at this company, we were still faxing things back and forth. In fact there are some ways we notate things on paperwork because it was the only way that it would be clear when the fax came through on the other end. I used to have to make really complicated drawings on paperwork using Word or Paint or what not to show the crew how things should be set up. (My friend could make the most amazing line drawings in Word. They were truly works of art.) But now, I can just take a picture and add it to the paperwork.

The other easy use of our phones/cameras these days is to make study videos of parts of rehearsal so that the director can review them at night and come in with new ideas the next day. It used to be if we wanted to make study videos, we would have to get a camera and a tripod. But now, everyone has a phone with a camera and lots of memory and it’s so easy just to use that. The other week we were making lots of study videos and I had to hold the camera and it got tedious – my arms got tired and shaky. I thought, “How amazing is this technology, and yet, how much are we not set up to use it like this in rehearsal the way we need?” I went looking for a way to rig something to hold the camera up so I wouldn’t have to do it. I ended up finding two book ends and just wedging the phone between them, but it still wasn’t perfect because the bookends kept sliding apart.

Then the fight choreographer started prowling around the room, as if on a mission. And he came back with two rubber bands and a pencil and set this up for me:

The combination of high tech and low tech made me giggle.

What didn’t go so well this week – as usual, home life suffers during tech week. I barely see the Husband or the kids and when I do, it’s very functional. Pack lunches, brush teeth, empty backpacks, fold laundry (just half a load)… Next tech week, I want to find ways to be more… human with my family. Not sure what that means yet… find moments of connection and not just function?

Tech week treats – For me, tech week is a combination of meticulously planned healthy meals and also unlimited snacking. Two indulgences in this latter category which I discovered this week, one sweet and one savory:

Nerds Gummy Clusters! Where have you been all my life? I like have a variety of flavor and texture combinations in my candy and these are the perfect blend of sweet and sour and crunchy and chewy. Apparently there’s Nerd rope too? That might be a little much for me – I like that I can just pop one or two of these in my mouth at a time.

And then buffalo wing pretzels. Buffalo wings are one of my favorite things – and these pretzels – crunchy, tangy, spicy – are like having wings without all the bones and stringy bits.

Grateful for (tech week edition):

– post its notes and removable stickers. This is how I mark up my book. Post Its and removable stickers in all colors so I can color code all the things. On the wall of the theatre there are stage manager prompt books from the 70s and 80s and it’s all pencil and ruler lines and impeccably neat handwriting. I think I did learn to use ruler and lines when i first started marking up a score, but now I use post its, 0.9 lead mechanical pencils, and Frixion pens.

– sunshine and warm weather. Being in a dark theatre for 12-14 hours a day, the few moments of sunshine that I was able to steal are divine. (There was one day where I worked straight through two meal breaks and did not see the sun at all and that made me sad.) I managed to carve out at least 10 minutes, sometimes 30, every day to walk outside and soak up the sun.

– my lunchbox. I have a special lunch box for tech that is the size of a small cooler. It’s huge. But it has to be so that I can pack all my food. I have a huge aversion to being hungry, so I always make sure I pack a lot of food to get me through tech. There is a cafeteria at work, and restaurants in walking distance, but I like the security of knowing what all I have planned to eat that day. The first few days are usually 12+ hours at the theatre so I pack lunch and dinner and two or three substantial snacks as well as a snack to eat on the way home. It all fits in my lunch box, along with an ice pack or two. (One of my co-workers has a tech meal planning spreadsheet – stage managers love a good spreadsheet.) Thank you lunch box for keeping me from having to think about what I’m going to eat. The fewer decisions I have to make once I’m at the theatre, the better.

-Sleep and Showers. Full disclosure – I’m not a “shower every day” person. I think I shower every two or three days. This is how bad it is – I lose count. But I have to say, after working a really rough rehearsal, getting home from work after midnight and waking up 5-6 hours later to do the breakfast/lunch/kids/school bus thing and then being at the theatre by 10am, I just feel groggy and dragging. I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck. On those mornings, a shower does wonders for me. It makes me feel like it’s a new day, I’ve washed off all the baggage and criticism of the night before and am ready to face whatever is thrown at me. I am grateful for the chance to shower and start fresh.

Looking forward to:

-opening night. Actually final dress rehearsal. I know that opening night is supposed to be the big night, but for me it’s really about the final dress rehearsal. In opera, the final dress rehearsal usually has an invited audience and sometimes it’s the first time we get to run the show all the way through, including bows. (Side bar on Bows … there is never time to stage bows and usually it’s just crammed in at the end of rehearsals, in the five minutes between when the orchestra is released and when the stage crew gets to go home. And some shows… “staging bows” falls by the wayside and the stage management team is handed a sheet of paper on final dress with the bow order and we are supposed to just make it happen. Bows always seem so simple, but there is still a little bit to it – you have to tell the singers which side of stage to enter from, which side to go to after the bow, what the order is, how many bows, where to stand at the end of bow so they don’t get hit by the curtain coming in…. Final dress is the first time we really get to run bows and it is ALWAYS awkward.) Anyhow, I’m looking forward to final dress and getting all the elements lined up line up properly. It’s where I really feel like I’ve gotten the show to the finish line. Opening night is the victory lap.

-Hallowe’en. (okay, Hallowe’en was last night, but I drafted this earlier in the week and didn’t get a chance to post. It happened. More of a recap later). Last year, I was working on Hallowe’en, but this year, the schedule worked out that I’m off. Of course, Hallowe’en falls during tech week, which meant that I was up at 6am assembling one kid’s costume before going to the theatre, and hot gluing another kid’s costume ten minutes before we were out the door. Thankfully the third kid just wants something from our dress up bin. I hadn’t planned on carving pumpkins this year because of the tech schedule, but at the last minute, our neighbors invited us over for a pumpkin carving party so we had jack o’lanterns after all. usually we design our own jack o’lanterns, but the neighbors had some cool stencils and the kids really liked them, so I carved then ones they wanted. I thought they turned out really well.

-sleep. Because it’s been tech and 14 hour days at the theatre and still having to get up in time to pack lunches and get the kids to school. The Husband has been great and telling the kids to let me sleep in until 7am.

What We Ate – I have nothing for this. The Husband, as always during tech week, held down the fort, and he made dinner all week. I was gone every night so I didn’t even get to eat any of his yummy cookings. I think there was broccoli and pasta one night, there was an eggs night. Of course, pizza and a movie. He did make a pickle pizza, which I had leftovers of, and it was very tasty. I ate mostly leftovers, except for the one day when I was at the theatre on Farmer’s Market day and I got, in addition to Kimchi, an eggplant parmesan sandwich.

As for family movie night – I heard they watched Ghostbusters. I’m a little jealous they didn’t wait for me, but it is very seasonally appropriate.

Weekly recap + what we ate: Another Week in October.

The Husband took the kids camping with some friends this weekend. I had to work all weekend, or I would have gone as well. It makes me a little sad since I’ve only gone camping once this year.

Anyhow, it’s been a pretty run of the mill week. I get up in the morning, I make lunches, and breakfasts (if the Husband hasn’t already fed the kids), 10 mins of yoga sometimes, then school bus drop off, and work/rehearsal all day. Home (later than I want), and bed (also later than I ought.) There’s been some running (twice), and I even biked to work again this morning since I didn’t have to think about squeezing out a couple more minutes with the kids. AND I made it up the hill that takes me into the part of town I work in. Last week, I did not make it up that hill – I shifted slightly too late and it was game over. That hill is definitely tough though and I don’t know if it will ever get easier. Maybe there’s a baseline hard that the hill will always have? (Is this a metaphor for life?)

One of the joys for me of settling into fall is that it become cozy clothes weather, which I am fully embracing. I love the turn from hot weather to cool weather when I get to pull things out of my closet and say, “Hello, old friend! I’ve missed you! Let’s go out for a spin!” Flannel and corduroy and all the cozy knits. And I love being able to accessorize again. Summer dressing is so simple for me – usually it’s a dress, sometimes with a gauzy cover up, or a t-shirt layered. Fall dressing, though – bring out the cute boots, the colourful scarves, the jaunty hats! And my favorite Uniqlo puffer vest. I wear this sooooo much. It makes me wonder where the line is between a signature item and lazy dressing.

Someone at work called this outfit “hipster fall.” Not sure what that means. I’m not cool enough for the things people label me. (Also this picture – taken by the 11 year old – is terribly awkward, but I thought the outfit cute, so I’m sharing with the world.):

I love that skirt, though I accidentally put it through the dryer so the hem isn’t even anymore. I still wear it a lot. Those are the boots I bought to go to Amsterdam.

And a peek at this outfit – a corduroy dress I bought last spring and I’d forgotten I had since it hadn’t been corduroy dress weather. My grandmother’s knitted vest. My rain coat and lunch box – important things. And these fabulous blue boots that I had bought last spring when we went to Amsterdam, but which I hadn’t taken with me because they aren’t waterproof, but I thought they were too cute not to keep:

I do have a distinct lack of pants in my cooler weather wardrobe, so I have to do something about that. If I weren’t working, it wouldn’t be a problem, because I usually just wear dresses and leggings, but I do prefer to wear pants when I’m teching a show since I might be up and down stairs and ladders and what not.

Some things on my mind this week:

I follow many many sites via feedly, but two daily ones that I love are Diaries of Note and A Poem A Day (actually there are a couple daily poetry sites I follow). The former site features diary entries written on that day in history and it’s a wide range of people – artists, writers, scientist, thinkers… I love getting a glimpse into what one person was thinking on that day. Some days there are historical events lived through, and some days it the entry featured on the blog is quite quotidian – life, lunches, work. Reading other people’s diary entries also gives me inspiration to keep journaling. Not that I think my words will one day be published or given to the world, but rather reading other journal entries makes me realize that everyday is worth mentioning.

The variety of poetry sites that I get in my feed offer both classic and contemporary poems. I don’t read every day, but I find that whenever I need a quiet moment of stillness and I can’t calm my mind, sometimes reading a poem helps to focus my brain. A couple weeks ago, I read a poem that I liked and bookmarked it so that I could return to it. This poem, called A Man in His Life – opens with the lines:

A man doesn’t have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

This poem is by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, who was new to me, and I loved how perfectly he captured that urgency of “two things are true,” a mantra that parenting guru Dr. Becky often offers up. It’s not precisely a temporal urgency, that Amichai writes of, but an emotional one – this acknowledgement of how complicated and messy life can be. “To laugh and cry with the same eyes…” how beautiful a thought is that? To give ourselves permission to feel all the feelings at one time.

I have since gone on a bit of an internet dive on Amichai, and especially in light of the war raging these past few weeks, though he died in 2000, his words seem like something to be carried close these days. Go read his poem, “Memorial Day for a War Dead” as you read the news. Heavy thoughts on human lives.

Continuing in the vein of reflection exercises I mentioned last week, which I learned from the podcast The Fix:
What Went Well: On the personal front – I ran three times and had one bike ride and did 10 minutes of yoga 6 out of 7 days last week. On the family front – I had one evening where I managed to get home in time to take the 11 year old to basketball, and then came home and practiced piano with the 6 year old for 20 minutes before going back to pick up the 11 year old. It was just one of those evenings that felt packed, but the time felt well used – sometimes empty pockets of time are needed, but sometimes they make me feel restless. It just felt good that I was able to take control of my schedule to do some of the parenting tasks because I know, with tech week coming up, I won’t be able to be as physically present for a few weeks, which is hard on everyone.
On the work front, we had a rehearsal where we went through the whole show and it felt really nice to know that, after two week of rehearsing in bits and bobs and out of order, there is indeed a whole show emerging.

What didn’t go so well: Some bad family scheduling this week. On a couple later nights, didn’t make it to pick up the 11 year old from a couple activities like I had hoped because I didn’t leave work on time. And then, I hadn’t tracked that the Husband was going on this camping trip this weekend – I knew it was happening, just not when – and I scheduled a night out with some friends I hadn’t seen in several years. The dinner was fun, but then I wasn’t home to help the Husband pack for camping, which, since I’m the one who does most of the camping, made things more difficult.

Also I’m a little behind in work. I’m still haven’t figured out the best way to balance of my added work responsibilities so I can devote time to the needs of the stage management team and also get my own stage manager work done.

What do I want to do differently: I need to go back to putting thing in my planner so I can see work and life in one place. I’ve been working purely off my work calendar these days, so I’m missing the big picture of life happenings. And the Husband and I missed our weekly check in and week overview – which is where we usually talk through these things and plan.

Grateful for:
-The support I have at work. I had to have some Big Stage Manager in Charge type conversations this week. I know it’s part of the job as the stage manager to have the awkward and sometimes difficult conversations, and being a little non-confrontational, it’s always hard for me. I admire the stage managers who can have conversations confidently and without hesitation. I struggle a little because I find that I can always see the arguments from every side, and I want all sides to be right. But sometimes what is right for one person is not what is right for the rehearsal room or the show. Which is all to say, I am grateful that I have the support structure at work that I feel like I can have these conversations.

-Being able to afford bi-weekly cleanings. I am not a neat person, but being forced to pick up around the house twice a month in anticipation of the house being cleaned is certainly good for me. And then there is something so calming about coming home to a house with a sheen of clean and fresh sheets. It feels like a luxury to be able to afford this.

-Sticks. I took the 6 year old to the park one day and he proceeded to spend 90 minutes playing with sticks. Well maybe not the whole 90 minutes, but he was at it for a good long time – pretending that the sticks were his tools and using them to scrape each other. I am grateful for sticks for being a perfect toy.

Looking forward to:

-The Sunday Paper. We started subscribing to the Sunday paper this month. Like a “physical real life paper to touch, inky smelling, rolled up and cocooned in a plastic bag and deposited at the foot of our driveway” newspaper. When I was growing up, we always got the daily newspaper and I remember how excited I was every morning to see the fat cylinder in our driveway. On Sundays, my brother and I would I always fight over who got to read the coloured comics first. The comics and the advice columns were always what I read first. (I still do, let’s be honest.) Even though we have digital subscriptions, I thought it might be fun for the family to start getting a physical paper on Sundays. That excitement of “What’s going on today?” with my morning cup of tea, the kids fighting over the funny pages, and maybe reading some of the other sections. I don’t know how to describe it- it’s not the same as opening up the app on my phone. Also – there is something very insular about reading the newspaper on one’s phone. To the kids, it’s hard to distinguish between “Mom reading the news” and “Mom scrolling aimlessly.” With a physical newspaper, the kids can be involved and see that news and journalism is is important to us. I’m hoping it will foster a little more engagement from the kids with the world we live in.
And also – the crossword puzzle! I’m finding a lot of joy in having a crossword puzzle to work on in the mornings as I sip my tea. And even more joy when I manage to finish it!

Yes, I do it in pen. Pencil just doesn’t show up well enough for me. I also test drive words in the margins before I commit.

-Soup Swap! Someone suggested we do a soup swap at work so today we are each bringing in soup to share. I’m making Zuppa Toscana – sausage, kale, potato soup, an Olive Garden copycat. (note: this happened yesterday and it was so awesome!)

-Kimchi. Next week begins tech week for my show, which means I need to start thinking about tech week food. Kimchi is one of my tech week staples – it makes everything taste better and I don’t have to cook it. Only drage is the kimchi that I like to buy is sold at a Farmer’s market that I don’t often get to – it’s the farmer’s market down the street from work, but I don’t often work on Sundays so sometimes I go months without restocking. This weekend, though, I’m working on a Sunday, so I’ll get to visit my favorite kimchi vendor. Makes me happy. (Note: the kimchi vendor is not at this particular Farmer’s Market anymore!! Sad Face. I think they are at the farmer’s market near the theatre, so ‘ll hopefully stock up later in the week. )

-A Night at the Opera with a friend. The opera that is is being produced concurrently with my show is having it’s final dress rehearsal next week, so I have plans to go with my friend. I’m excited to see both my friend and this opera. It’s a new opera, and seeing a world premiere is always interesting. I’ve seen some rehearsals of it and it is quite impressive.

What We Ate:

Saturday: We went over to a friends’ house for meat. He has one of those Big Green Egg smokers and it makes the most delicious meat. The Husband also brought over his milk shake machine and we had milk shakes for dessert.

Sunday: Egg and toast and leftovers. Kitchen pantry Sunday, as is our habit.

Monday: Eggplant stirfry with noodles. The Husband cooked.

Tuesday: Lemon Chicken and Potatoes in the InstantPot. Recipe from the Washington Post. This was really tasty and very easy to throw together before I left for work. I used leeks instead of onions because I had one to use up and I think it made a big difference in the taste. (Oh now that I looked up the recipe to share, I see that it’s from a cookbook written by the author of one of my favorite Indian Instant Pot cookbooks – the famous Butter Chicken Lady. I need to check out this new cookbook.)

Wednesday: Pinto bean soup, made in the InstantPot before I left for work. Recipe from Dad Cooks Dinner. I added some frozen corn becuase it was a little spicy.

Thurdasy: Dinner with friends. I think the rest of the family had take out pizza.

Friday: Leftovers. When the family isn’t home, I mostly scrounge in the fridge.

(Tri) Weekly recap + what we ate: FOUR!!!!

We are deep into October! Even though the weather has been in the so very up and down here, it does feel as if we are firmly into fall. The trees have started to take on crimson and gold tips and tinges, I wake up in pre-dawn darkness, and we dine as the sun is slipping away. One of the true indications of fall for me is when the morning sunlight slants sharply into the kitchen through the window over the sink so that washing dishes in the morning is a blinding exercise. Sometimes I do dishes leaning to one side so I can avoid the sun’s rays piercing my eyeballs. Sometimes I just decide that the dishes can wait until the sun move on. Then I tell myself- just wait a few weeks and this timing of sunlight will pass. Like many things things in life…

In the mean time I will enjoy pumpkins…

The gourd situation at my favorite market

Leaves…

and making applesauce:

I mentioned last post that we were having a birthday party for the youngest and all my anxiety about last minute planning and lack of party guests. Well, the lack of RSVPs actually turned out for the best because it was raining all weekend, banishing the possibility of having any part of the festivities outside. And given that the party was at our house – well, it seems like 11 kids and 10 adults made for a plenty big enough party inside our house. House size is certainly relative – our current house is definitely bigger than our first house, yet is not as big as houses you would find in our area- but all the same, I wouldn’t objectively call our house small, yet I can’t imagine having any more people inside than we had for this birthday party.

We basically set up three areas for everyone: the living/dining room for food and cookie decorating; the toy room for, well, toys and playing and we have a Swedish climbing ladder there that was very popular; and the basement where we cleared everything breakable and set up music for a dance party. I will say the toy room was at max capacity what with everyone wanting to play with the toys and try out the climbing ladder, and parents in there to make sure no one fell off the climbing wall. Or at least no one got seriously hurt falling off the climbing wall. If we had to do this again, I might clear more toys out of the toy room to give more space – that whole room was a disaster zone. It still is. Also maybe make parents sign waivers if their kids are going to try the climbing ladder. Kidding. But maybe I shouldn’t be.

The cookie decorating, which was the main activity went rather well, I think. People seemed to really like it. I had gotten the idea from seeing a local sweet shop offer the same thing, but there the kids would also bake the cookies. I figured a bunch of four year olds would not have the patience to roll out and bake and decorate cookies, so we just went with the decorating bit.

We put two kid sized tables in the living room, covered them with paper and set out bowls of icing and jars of sprinkles. We gave each kid a piece of parchment paper on which to decorate their cookies, in an attempt to try to contain the mess.

Things that I think made the cookie decorating go well:

– We ordered the cookies rather than trying to bake them myself. We called our local bakery and ordered 48 unfrosted cookies. They make the best cookies and I didn’t have to bake any. And the cookies came in a variety of shapes, which was fun.

– We made all the frosting using a royal icing mix. I was just going to go get a few tubs of Duncan Hines frosting, but the Husband went to a cake decorating store by his office and they showed him royal icing mix- you just mix it with water and voila! This was waaaaaay better than Duncan Hines- it was spreadable but stiff enough not to be too messy. I mixed it with gel food colouring so we had three different colours plus white. Another great thing about royal icing is that it hardens as it dries, which gives the cookies that professional cookie sheen. I have an extra bag of royal icing mix and I’m excited to use it for Christmas.

– We used old spice jars for the sprinkles. This was the Husband’s brilliant idea. The Husband had bought six different kinds of sprinkles from the cake decorating store. I was going to put the sprinkles in a small bowl. The Husband had the idea to wash out the old spice containers that we had been keeping for a rainy day and put the sprinkles in those so the kids could just shake them out. It was still messy, but so much less messy than bowls.

-For spreading the icing, we bought 4” offset spatulas from a restaurant supply store. The small size was good for little hands and much easier to use than plastic knives. Plus I had the kids take them home as their party favor.

One thing I wasn’t prepared for was that the kids would want to eat their cookies right away. We had bought cute boxes for everyone to take their cookies home, but I think only used half of them. Kids were very eager to try their colorful efforts as soon as they were done. At the end of the party, one kid asked me, “Are there goody bags?” and I thought, “Well… you were supposed to take your cookies home…” We did also get mini rolling pins to go in the boxes, which were super cute and I had a parent tell me a couple days later that they are great for playing with kinetic sand.

Birthday cookies. Not sure what’s with the random hands.

My other favorite thing from the party is that we ordered soft pretzels. I was driving down the major street by us when I saw a yard signs advertising The DC Pretzel Company. I love soft pretzels, so of course I had to look them up. Turns out a guy, originally from Philadelphia, started a weekend business making soft pretzels. During the week, he works for the federal government, and then on the weekend, he makes pretzels out of one of those shared industrial kitchens. And the service was great! I had all sorts of questions on how many to order, and my email was answered promptly (with a 10% off coupon!) and then when I had to add additional pretzels to my original order, the owner texted me to reassure me that the two orders would be combined. And the pretzels were sooooo tasty! Chewy, malty, and flavorful. And vegan. And since we ordered too many, we were lucky to eat them for days – we reheated them in the oven and they were just as chewy and tasty. 10/10!!! I would definitely order again. (Thank you for coming to my Yelp review.)

The morning of the four year old’s birthday, the Husband said, “It’s going to be so weird- we won’t have a baby in the house anymore. After twelve years!” And it’s true- there’s something bittersweet for me about no longer being in the baby phase. I loved having babies – the soft cheeks and unformed blob of sweetness. Now it feels like my kids are all muscles and limbs. And opinions and thoughts. I know time only moves forward, and watching kids grow from helpless bundles into real people really makes that thought hit home, showing me every day that there is no going backwards.

Other things and happenings – I was listening to the podcast The Fix, which talks about work, more specifically advancing equality in the workplace. I find the hosts and her guests very insightful on issues that I do think about a lot especially since I work in an industry that is historically (and let’s be honest continues to be) not terribly diverse. The episode I was listening to talked about the importance of building self-awareness at work – and one exercise is for ten days to take 15 minutes a day and write down: What went well today, What didn’t go so great, what could I do differently? I’ve been trying to do this reflection on a work and personal level lately and I think it’s been a good frame for thinking back.

Going well – Chore spinner! It used to be that the kids each had their specific chores to do after dinner. Then it came up that the kids were always wanting to do someone else’s chore, and it wasn’t fair that all one kid got to do was take the napkins down to laundry, or it wasn’t fair that so and so got to use the broom. So a couple weeks ago, we instituted a chore spinner. There are six evening chores and each kid spins to find out which two chores they will be responsible for. The chores are:
-dining room (wipe down table and sweep floor)
-dry dishes and help put them away
-pick up the living room and the foyer
-take the napkins and dirty towels down to the laundry room
-pick up the bedroom and make the beds
-wipe down the bathroom counter after teeth brushing.
Clearly some chores are faster than others, but the beauty of the new system is that one person doesn’t have the easy task all the time – it’s totally up to chance who will get the much coveted bathroom counter wipe down. (Also – side note, the kids at some point also started wiping down the toilet in addition to the bathroom counter. Not sure how I feel about this – on the one hand, it’s the toilet can be a little gross, but on the other hand, they are using Clorox wipes, so it’s should be pretty sanitary. Also – I find it fascinating that they don’t really know yet that wiping down the toilet is considered gross to some people. ) WE do help the little kids with the dining room and the living room if they draw that because those are bigger tasks and they kind of still suck at sweeping. All in all, though, it has made the kids less grumbly about chores. Who know how long the novelty of the chore spinner will work as a means to more cleaning/less whining evenings, but I’ll take whatever I can get on the kids and chores front these days.

Another thing that went well recently: Biking to work. I got to bike to work this week. At some point last spring I did something to one my bike inner tubes and then the bike languished in the shed for many months. The Husband actually fixed it a while ago but I just hadn’t found time to get the bike out. But this week, I pulled it out and biked to work on a day when I didn’t have to do the school bus run. I was reminded about how much I love riding to work. I did have to walk the bike up the last hill before work because I misjudged my shifting and didn’t shift in time to make the climb easier, but all in all, it was a nice ride.

Things not really going well right now: I’m adjusting to being back at work. The work part is fine, the home part has been a bit of a mess. I’ve been very bad at predicting when I’ll get home, which, understandably, causes much consternation. I think I’ll be home by 6:30p, and I don’t get home until 8:30pm and it makes bedtime tricky. This issue for me is two fold:
1) getting sucked into lengthy last minute conversations and tasks at work. I’ve gotten pretty good at finishing all the tangible tasks on my own to do list in a timely manner, but I’m discovering that having more responsibility means more people want your attention on things. Which is great and all, and I want to have thoughtful and thorough conversations, but sometimes I need to figure out how to put a pin in something and get out the door. Or to have more succinct conversations?
2) not communicating with the Husband when I’m coming home when these last minute things pop up. Rehearsal is done at 5:30pm, so I tell him I can be home by 6:30pm, but then one thing and another and suddenly it’s 6:15 and I’m still typing the rehearsal notes and then someone asks my input on something and I get sucked back into work things and then when I next look up, it’s 7:00pm. I know the answer is to text at 6:15pm saying “I’ll be home at 7pm”, but I’m always optimistic at 6:15pm that I’m about to hit send and walk out the door and I’ll only be ten minutes late home, so is that really worth a text or should I just plow right on so I can leave? That’s the internal monologue. And the answer should be, “yes, just send that text.”
Anyhow, I’m working on it. I think from the work perspective I have good work-life balance, but from the life perspective, work is winning out a little right now. hmmmm…. maybe I should unpack that a little.

What can I do differently: (I like the framing of do “differently” vs. do “better”. because if the expectation is that changes *must* improve things, it feels so daunting. But if the idea is just to change the way something is done, then it makes the process of change much more forgiving.) I think I need an automated system or reminder to help me track time after rehearsal is over so I continue to be efficient and conscious of time. Maybe an alarm at 6:25 to remember that the intern needs to wrap up and I should send a status report to the Husband?

Podcast recommendation: On Being is back! I love this podcast for the meandering and thoughtful conversations. The first episode of the new season is a hilarious, wise, and touching conversation with theologian Kate Bowler who learned that she had cancer when she was 35 and wrote a book (or perhaps a couple) about it. As expected the conversation dissects on the idea of mortality and how lucky we are to be alive – “Ageing is an effing privilege,” she says at one point. And I loved the idea Bowler brings up about our 2pm/2am self – that the former is where we have it all together and the latter is the vulnerable, darker self who feels alone. This idea that there will be moments of every day where you feel like a completely different person, where your ability to deal with life completely evaporates. And that is okay. Because you are still you. It’s a little hard to describe why I loved this episode so much, but it was a perfect contemplative listen for a long walk. And Kate Bowler is so very, very funny too. I laughed out loud many times.

Other updates on my litany of complaints:
– I’ve booked dentist appointments with a pediatric dentist for the two littles, so hopefully that will get the ball rolling on taking care of their cavities.
– The Husband and I went to test drive a mini van. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that there will be a minivan in our family. It won’t be my main vehicle, but it will likely replace my 20 year old car. I will move over to driving the Husband’s current car and he will drive the mini van.
-still no progress on window treatments in the living room…

Grateful For:

-The now four year old for being such a bright spot in my life. She is such a happy ball of energy. Never one to shy from a challenge, she climbs playgrounds and cabinets fearlessly. She is independent and capable, yet quite agreeable. When she falls, she bounces right back up with a cheerful, “I’m okay!” She is always telling us, “I got this!” She is the child most likely to mischievously cause mayhem and mess, but also the child most likely to clean that mess up. I hope she carries that sense of adventure and responsibility into the rest of her life.

– Being able to shower with the kids at home. It hasn’t always been the case, but as I got in the shower one morning, I thought, “Wow, it’s nice to be able to disappear for fifteen or twenty minutes and not worry about someone hurting themselves or doing something irrevocable to the house.

– Kimchi. There have been many a time when I get home late at night and I’m hungry and I look in the fridge and pull out the bag of kimchi and whatever else might be in there. And the kimchi makes the whatever else taste amazing. I’m grateful for kimchi for being a pretty healthy thing to eat at 10:30pm at night and for being delicious.

Looking Forward to:

-My show. Last week, I started rehearsal for my next opera. It’s been lovely so far. Certainly there have been things to navigate, but overall it’s been a good process and I do actually look forward to going to rehearsals everyday.

– Instant Pot meals. Opera season means I’m gone many many evenings, so when I can, I like to make dinner in the morning for the family to eat when they get home in the afternoon. I borrowed several Instant Pot cookbooks from the library and am excited to explore them.

-This book:

I’ve been in kind of a reading slump lately – In September I started many many books but they all had to be returned before I could finish them. I’m not sure if it’s a time thing or a motivation thing. I started reading this book this week and I can’t wait to find time every day to read it. It’s about three women who, after years of living with the casual misogyny of everyday life, discover in middle age how powerful they really are. It’s a little magical and a lot angry. I’m sucked in.

What We Ate (The First half of October version):

Friday: Pizza and movie night. Captain America. Fun, shiny entertainment.

Saturday: Birthday party leftovers – pretzels, veggies adn hummus, chips and salsa, cookies, cake, charcuterie plate. All the tasty things.

Sunday: Snack dinner from Birthday party leftovers again. This was such a lazy day – we didn’t have afternoon activities, so we stayed home and watched A Knight’s Tale. I had seen the 2001 Heath Ledger movie in the theatre when it first came out and thought it would make a fun movie to watch with the kids. It is just as stylish and cheeky as I remember. Though, of course watching it twenty years later and with kids, I found myself wishing that the storyline with the father were more fleshed out. It’s so interesting to watch movies of my youth with older eyes and brain and heart.

Monday: Mac and cheese (from the blue box) and edemame.

Tuesday: Nachos. We had a lot of chips leftover from the birthday party, so we sprinkled some beans, cheese, peppers, and jalapenos on them and made a couple pans of nachos.

Wednesday: Eggplant curry. vegan. I had some yellow curry paste to use up. It was definitely spicier than I thought it would be. I ate leftovers all week, tucked into a wrap.

Thursday: I worked this night. The Husband and kids got wings for dinner.

Friday: pizza and movie. I think this was the night they watched the Lego Batman movie.

Saturday: Dumplings and green beans.

Sunday: Leftovers and toast. I want ot get back ot Sunday night being leftovers/clean out the fridge night.

Monday: Garlic-y pork in the Instant Pot. Recipe from Melissa Clark’s book Dinner in and Instant. Eaten with tortillas.

Tuesday: no clue. I don’t think I was home, so the Husband cooked.

Wednesday: Lentils and sweet potato in the Instant Pot from the Good Housekeeping IP cookbook. The family liked this much better than I thought they would and the leftovers were great taken for lunch in wraps later the week.

Thursday: Noodles and tofu, the Husband cooked.

Friday: Pizza and Lilo and Stich. (I was working) When the 11 year old was a toddler we tried to watch this movie, but she got really upset by the chaos caused by Stitch and we had to turn it off. Clearly chaos does not bother her anymore.

Saturday: Dumplings and Broccoli. There is a theme to our Saturday nights

Sunday: Tuna potato salad. Kitchen sink meal. I had some potatoes to used up, and canned tuna is an easy protein, so I combined a can of tuna, steamed potatoes, pickled onion, radishes, and green pepper together. Olive oil, a dash of Dijon mustard and lots of black pepper. It was a lot tastier than I thought it would have been twenty minute earlier when I was staring in despair at the fridge without a plan for dinner.

Monday: Eggplant with pickled raisins and mint from the cookbook Ruffage. The Husband cooked. He had picked up this gorgeous cookbook from the library and it has a lot of surprising ways to prepare vegetables.

Tuesday: Green beans sauteed with tomatoes and garlic. The Husband cooked. I think this was also from Ruffage.

Wednesday: Bahn mi sandwiches from our favorite Vietnamese place. My father was in town and he bought us dinner.

Thursday: Dinner out with a Friend. I had mussels and paprika cauliflower.

Friday: Pizza and Lilo and Stitch 2. I was working that evening – there was no comment about the movie, so I guess it was entertaining?