of bits and blue sky.

The days melt one into the other, though not unpleasantly.

What I’ve completed:

• Lots of baking (including ye olde apple galette).
• A career leveling framework for my team at work that’ll promote transparency in what’s expected at various levels and help with knowing how to grow.
• Caught up on the Castlevania animated series, whew 💀💀💀😅
• A couple of books, miraculously! I know, what a surprise. It was accomplished only by brute-force-ignoring other things that needed my attention.
• Slack guidelines for my org at work, which should promote healthy Slack usage and banish distractions (with a big emphasis on setting good boundaries).
• Starting to feel genuinely rested again, maybe for the first time since becoming a mother ~seven years ago?

What I’m working on:

• Finding and nominating officers for next year’s PTA, with a goal for officers’ demographics to mirror the school’s as closely as possible.
• Going through and labeling all the photos from the past year and a half that I just finished editing, so I can actually find them when searching.
• Digitizing all my recipes so I can properly archive or trash the paper.
• Updating more documentation at work 🤓 and trying to continue to support my team through this year, which has been rough on some of them (especially those who are used to and very much enjoy being in the office).
• Thinking of more / creative things to do outdoors with the girls, who at some point will tire of the kiddie pool.

Things I want to remember:

• Cora’s voice yelling “Mama! Time sushi!” from my office doorway. 🍣
• Cupcakes are a powerful motivational tool for small girls.
• Sweating and picking up trash with friends around the neighborhood.
• Looking at a picture of a friend’s new baby and feeling my life force restored.
• Chatting with neighbors over the fence in the June heat.
• Morella sniffling as I read the chapter in On the Banks of Plum Creek where the grasshoppers destroy the wheat crop.
• A friend delivering good news from her front porch as I dropped off a bottle of wine.
• Two little stir-crazy faces in the rearview mirror in the packed-full car on the way back from the beach.
• Sinking into a plastic adirondack chair, dropping my feet into cold kiddie pool water, leaning back, and listening to the wind.

of well-mannered frivolity.

Things I want to remember:

• Shutting my laptop at the end of work every day, walking directly into the yard, and lying down on my back in the soft, overgrown clover.
• Friends on bicycles stopping to chat over the fence.
• Cora going very suddenly from babbling incoherently most of the time to holding up a stuffed Snoopy and saying, very clearly, “This is a beagle.”
• The first time Morella ever mixed up cake batter all by herself and got every single bit of dry ingredients moistened, without leaving a seam of undisturbed flour in the bottom of the bowl.
• New vinca vines finally filling out the pot I put them in a month ago.
• Cora sashaying pantsless across the yard to the kiddie pool.
• The fact that Morella thought I said Moody turned Draco into a “parrot” when I was reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire aloud to her, so when we watched the movie she yelled “FERRET?! I thought you said ‘parrot!'”
• A visit from a coworker and her husband on her way back to New York, stopping for a distanced yard hangout which filled my heart completely, though Cora glared at them mistrustfully the whole time.
• The big, crisp head of lettuce a neighbor gave us because their order from the farmer’s market was too big (and how perfectly it went with homemade caesar dressing).
• Purple queen that I was about to give up on and tear out of its pot on the porch, suddenly exploding with life and growing what seems like inches per day.
• Talking about the church gymnasiums of our youths with Matt right before we drift off to sleep at night.
• The constant, constant questions about whether they can have another snack, whether they can have more screen time, how many days ’til they get to see the family again, whether it’s time for dinner yet, why there aren’t any croissants at the bakery, whether they can have just one more cupcake, and a million other things.
• Quietly re-tetris-ing the contents of Morella’s shelves all afternoon, and moving many old toys to Cora’s shelves: end of one era, beginning of another.
• Morella’s face when opening up her birthday gifts and seeing that gigantic Hogwarts Great Hall LEGO set.
• Barefoot porch breakfasts and bike rides during that short period every morning when it’s still cool outside, before the humidity hits fully.

of rage and rescue.

“Things are pretty quiet around here,” I wrote when I started this draft a little over a week ago.

of parcels and plague times.

Greetings from day 40-something of quarantine! 💌

Some very stream-of-consciousness ramblings about the pace of life, productivity, photography, and sabbath follow:

Pages: 1 2

playing catch-up.

Wow, last time I wrote was November 2018: about a year and a half ago. 😳

I’m not even going to remotely try to catch you up fully on things since then, but I’ll say that life has seasons, and this has been a season of just trying to survive day by day while working full-time and having two kids and an old house, and that’s okay. I’m grateful for the squeals of little girls in the yard and the drone of a talk I’m listening to for work and the clattering of Matt making coffee in the kitchen and all the other sounds that interrupt my thoughts right now. Life is full.