Weekly recap + what we ate: Back to school and back to work

We are now into September! It seems like some switch of nature was flipped and starting on the first day of September we’ve been having breezy, cool morning. I would almost call them crisp! And the rest of the days have been warm, but not overbearingly so. I am glad for the shift away from the oppressive heat of this past summer months.

The two big kids started school this week. Starting before Labor Day still seems early to me, a kind of like a false start. And starting the Monday before Labor day certainly makes a long first week, particularly since I don’t believe we have any full weeks of school until October thanks to various holidays and half days.

I was a little nervous about the five year old starting a French Immersion program. It is total immersion – the teacher won’t speak English to the parents in front of the kids and parent volunteers are not allowed to speak English when they volunteer in the classroom. I’m excited to see how it all plays out, even though I have a billion questions in my head about the practicalities and logistics of how my son is going to get through his day. I have to remember that the program has been in place in our county for over 40 years, so I imagine they’re doing something right!

I did teach the five year old to say “les toilettes” before he started, though.

The ten year old’s bus didn’t come to the stop the first day so the Husband had to drive her to school. I’m so glad he took the morning off for the first day of school. I called the bus depot later that day and received a vague answer to my inquiries as to why the bus didn’t show. “The driver knows to stop there now. It will be there tomorrow,” I was told. And it was.

She is starting a new school, which I imagine must be tough to start new in fifth grade, but she seems to be liking it a lot. I certainly debated whether it was a good idea to pull her from her old school, and now I know for sure it was the right thing to do. She looks so much happier coming off the bus at the end of the day than she did last year. I’m kicking myself for not switching schools sooner, but hindsight is 20/20, they say.

With three kids at three different schools, I was a little nervous about morning logistics. The baby needs to be at daycare by 9, the five year old’s bus picks up at 9:06am at a location about a three minute drive away from home, and the ten year old’s bus comes at 9:00am, two blocks from our house. And through good luck and kind people, it’s been going pretty smoothly. We have neighbors whose oldest kid is also starting in the French immersion program, and whose youngest is in the same daycare class as the baby. So every morning the ten year old walks the baby to the neighbors and brings their older kid to our house. The neighbors do drop off and pick up for the two preschoolers. I take the two kindergarteners to the school bus, and the Husband picks them up from the bus stop at the end of the day. It works out well because my work day starts late and the Husband’s work day ends early whereas our neighbors have a more conventional work day so doing the bus run would be harder for them. It’s only been one week, but I’m optimistic that this can be a good long term solution.

So my first child free morning… I felt a little adrift. For three years, I’ve pretty much always had a kid with me when I wasn’t working – aside from my girls’ weekend earlier this year and that day the Husband and I went to New York. So with my kid free time, I ran some errands then decided to go to the local botanical gardens where I read my book for a little bit and had a phone call with my sister in law. Then one of my good friends texted, asking if I needed anything from Costco. And I texted back, “Can I come too?”

So yeah, I spent part of my first child-free morning at Costco. Buying all the snacks. I think there are times when I have to embrace the fact that I am a suburban mom. Mid morning Costco runs are one of those times. On the other hand, I love having errand dates with friends.

The last two days of the week I started back at work on a show that I’m very very excited about, Leonard Bernstein’s MASS. It’s a piece I’ve always wanted to work on, but it isn’t really an opera, and it requires a lot of singers and musicians so it’s not something I would have done in the course of my regular opera work. However, the symphony is doing the piece this month, and back in May when I found out my friend was stage managing it, I said, “I’m free in September, if you need an assistant.” And yay! Now I get to work on it. I’ve been listening to the music and the score is so so so good!

Some good things this week:

• I confirmed dates for the supertitle job that I did last year. I’m really excited about being able to have more work dates to put in my calendar for the 2022-2023 season, plus I really do like doing supertitle work.
• I found my work ID. I had thought I’d misplaced it but I found it right in time for my new gig. It’s such a silly thing, but finding it made me so happy.
• I helped the 10 year old do something that I was kind of dreading and didn’t think I would have to do quite yet or be any good at. I’m being vague – it’s her story to tell, honestly, but it was a good bonding moment and I’m glad that we figured it out.
• I met up with a friend for a walk, and we saw turtles in the pond along the trail! Also – this friend was just in Canada, and I half jokingly had asked her to bring me back wine gums since the baby had finished off the bag that I had brought home from our Montreal trip. Well my friend brought me back three bags! I was so excited.

• I canned and froze a bunch of peaches. This was also a bit of a loss because I waited a bit too long to can the peaches and some of them had gone bad before I got to them, which made me sad. But I still got seven jars and two trays of August peaches to eat in January.

• Dance parties in the kitchen as I clean up from dinner. The ten year old is great at helping wipe down the table and sweep the dining room, but the two littles are less helpful. They do provide some entertainment with their kitchen dance parties. I don’t listen to music enough to curate a cleaning play list, but luckily many other people have and I’ll often just type “cleaning” into the Spotify search function and hit play on whatever play lists come up. Usually it’s something that makes for great dancing:

• The Husband and I rarely have the same taste in tv watching, but we found a show to binge together – The Year of the Rabbit. It’s on Britbox, so we signed up for the free week trial just to watch this show, which I had read about on the website FrockFlicks. Year of the Rabbit is a hilarious, bizarre, smart comedy about a trio of Victorian era policemen – well two policeman and one aspiring policewoman who is trying to fight the patriarchy. “That isn’t even a thing,” she is told at one point. It came out in 2019 and there are, sadly, only six episodes. But given the Husband and my terribly track record for finishing series, six episodes was a perfect length for binging. Highly recommend.

And here’s the obligatory first day of school picture:

We are headed into the last long weekend of the year. Plans and aspirations:
– Farmer’s market
-meal plan for the week. I’m working several nights, so I want to have solid dinner plans in place.
– Closet re-assessment, especially going into work season, figuring what I’m going to wear since nursing tanks and shorts isn’t really work appropriate.
-Order shoes. My current shoe have holes in the toes. I hate shoe shopping, so will probably just place a huge Zappos order and see what works.
-Pool with kids. Closing weekend of our pool so I want to get one more day in
– Renaissance Faire! I haven’t been since before the five year old was born, so I’m really looking forward to this. Huzzah!
-Run? I’m starting back into it now that I’m back at work. Going slow – a 1/4 mile at a time.
– Relax with a book. I like to rotate books, so I have in my current reading pile: Mother Trucker, The Self Driven Child, Boyfriend Material, Tiny Habits, and A Lovely War on audio.
– A little bit of work – I want to organize my score to feel better prepared for rehearsals to start on Monday.
– Order socks and underwear for the kids.
-Bake muffins for snacking next week.

What We Ate: I did clean out the pantry last weekend! I meal planned around some stuff that I wanted to eat up and made a mental note of things to use up in the near future. I gave myself permission to throw away the random ingredients that someone buys – usually from the Asian grocery store – because they they it will make me happy to figure out how to cook it (Good-bye, honey panko crumbs and dried lily root bulbs and five year old dried cranberries brought home from Canada.) And I set up a snack bin for the two big kids to be able to participate in packing their own lunches.

Actually the ten year old has mostly been packing her own lunches for a while, and I wanted to five year old to start doing it as well. It has been pretty hit or miss with him. I’ll make his sandwich and cut up the fruit and cucumber and he will put it all into his lunch box and then add a snack from the snack bin – I guess that is a good start. And then of course, one morning the baby pulled the lunch snack bin out of the pantry and got a pair of scissors and proceeded to cut open and eat a bunch of the snacks. This is why I can’t shower in the mornings.

We’re trying to have more vegan dinners this month and I managed three out of five weekday dinners to be vegan this week (Monday, Tuesay, and Thursday)- which I think is pretty good.

Saturday: Pizza at a birthday pool party.

Sunday: Pizza (made by the Husband) and Movie. Guardians of the Galaxy vol.2. Even though I hadn’t seen the first Guardian of the Galaxy movie, I was able to enjoy the second one without too much confusion. It was a surprisingly affecting movie.

Monday: Tempeh Arugula Sandwiches from Bad Manner’s Brave New World cookbook – I have the cookbook, but you can find the recipe here. These sandwiches were really good, though they involved a bit of prep – the tempeh had to be marinated and cooked ahead of time and so did the cashew cheese. But once I had all the elements of the sandwich, it was a pretty quick meal. I have to say, it was my first time making cashew cheese, and though I wouldn’t really call it cheese, it was certainly delicious and the leftovers made a great dip for tortilla chips.

Tuesday: Eggplant Pasta from Milk Street’s Tuesday Night Mediterranean. I also added zucchini because we had some to use up from last week.

Wednesday: Couscous with Tomatoes and Shrimp. The Husband was out that night, so I made shrimp, which he doesn’t usually care for. I used up half a package of couscous that had been lingering in the pantry. Recipe from Milk Street’s Tuesday Night Mediterranean.

Thursday: Instant Pot Black-eye Pea and Spinach curry from InstantPot Indian, eaten with naan. This was another of the pantry inspired meals. I was working this day so I wanted to make something for the family to eat in case I didn’t get home in time for dinner. The two littles pretty much ate the naan, but everyone else liked this a lot. I thought that bag of naan from Costco would last us for a few meals. I was wrong. We ate the whole bag.

Friday: Take out sandwiches enjoyed while chatting with friends and listening to music at the local golf courses’ Friday night music concerts.