A little less conversation, a little more action

Summer is finally over and school is here. Hurray! Hurray!

So I promised to blog every day. I made it three days. I think the last few days (and the lack of blogging) illustrate the core of my problem. I have been telling myself all summer that the projects and personal stuff I want to work on can all happen when the kids go back to school. As soon as school started, I wanted to do IT ALL. Right NOW. Suddenly I have so much to do and so little time after a summer of so much time and so little to do. Or at least so little actual doing.

I ran into a friend at my son’s soccer game this morning and she was all “you’re so lucky! I had to work all summer and you got to go to the beach all the time!” Meanwhile, I spent the whole summer saying “ugh … I guess I’ll take the kids to the beach again.” I know, I know … I shouldn’t complain … but sometimes I still do. I think the problem is that I don’t feel I am “relaxing” at the beach, I feel like I am waiting and waiting and waiting to get to the ideas that rattle around my head.

It was cool and rainy on the last day of summer vacation and it soon turned into the rainy day - closet cleanout organizational freak-out. I guess I need my deadlines if I pick the last day of summer vacation to do what I have needed to do for months. I pulled everything out of my closet, my son’s closet and the downstairs closet where we keep everything from jackets to shoes to sports equipment. My nine-year-old daughter pointed out that we start a lot of big projects when we don’t have the time to finish them. We always have to stop for one reason or another before they are done, so nothing ends up being organized and we are always re-organizing the stuff we already sorted through. We need to be able to start and finish the job in one go. Very astute.

Aimee planning how to organize my life.

Now we are in the organizational in-between phase — where things seem worse before they get better. Every organizational blitz seems to give rise to more projects I want to take on. Should we build shelves in the closets? Do we even use any of this stuff? I am feeling really motivated. The summer seemed to be one long motivation suck … nothing got done. Nothing. Now the kids are off at school for six hours a day and my mind is full of possibilities, ideas, revelations, and regrets.

Besides making a mess in my attempts to organize and streamline everything around here I have made lots of lists and come up with lots of ideas for artsy, Etsy-able projects. I need to find more paying work. It is amazing how much more creative I feel without the constant “Mama!?” all the live long day. I can put my thoughts together and make a plan, rather than trying to grab at the random ideas that float and bounce through my mind like balloons. I have lists of what I want to do, what I need to do, what I wish I could do, what I wish I could stop doing … lists and more lists. I am really trying to write ideas down before they evaporate away, which I think will have to entail me walking around scribbling into a little notebook like a TV private eye.

I feel a little guilty and a little gleeful about my kids being at school all day. I don’t want feel like I wish I was away from them more, but after three months of never being away from them at all, I am glad to have my time back. It still doesn’t feel like enough time. The second I pick up my kids from school, the chance for me to do any of my stuff is done for the day. I need to figure out how to turn my time into productive action. I need to move from planning to doing.

Extreme makeover

Two days ‘till school starts and I am trying to get ready. Towards the end of the school year, we got pretty lazy with breakfast and lunch around here. My 11 year old daughter has to be out of the house by 7:15 am, so breakfast was often Nutella sandwiches and a cup of “coffee milk” — hot milk with a splash of coffee. I may as well give her a Snickers bar and send her on her way.

My other two are in elementary school and don’t have to leave the house until the more civilized hour of 8:25, so they usually get a better breakfast. My kids also bring their lunches to school, which presents a plethora of problems. I have one kid who is a vegetarian, one who doesn’t like sandwiches, one who will only eat peanut butter and honey sandwiches and a strict “no nuts” policy in all the schools. Ugh.

The summer has been an endless stream of chicken fingers, fries, ice cream, and popsicles so this seems like a good time for a nutrition makeover. 

Sausage-tomato fritatta, potato&onion fritatta and apple cinnamon muffins. They look better in person, I promise.

I am trying to get a head start this year by making homemade muffins (gluten free! – that’s another story) and fritattas to have on hand so I don’t have to scramble too much to get these kids fed and packed and off to school.  I am also trying to cut down the junky, carby, processed crap they all eat too much of — all the Goldfish and crackers and chocolate chip granola bars and Pirate Booty that seem to be all my kids want to eat. I need to figure out how to make packable nut-free, sandwich-free, junk-food free lunches that all my kids will like. Back to school time is going to be back to healthy eating time! Watch out, kids!

Happy Mothers' Day

Big Love

Today my kids did a “pretend Mothers’ Day” and woke me up with coffee in bed and showered me with paper hearts and homemade cards. More importantly, they promised to be helpful all day and not to squabble. My husband and kids emptied the dishwasher and set the table and made breakfast. We finished our back-to school shopping and made s’mores in the backyard firepit. There has been no squabbling. Kinda weird. And kinda great.  I am always torn at the end of the summer with this guilty/bittersweet feeling of wanting to hold on to my kids while they are still pretty young and wanting them to get the hell back to school so I can have some time to do something other than be full time mommy/referee. The end is near.

Enough, already.

Making the Family Calendar for Fall ...

I love back-to-school time. It always feels like a fresh start. Time to shake things up. Try something new. The kids are all excited for school to start. I am excited to have six hours of kidlessness every single day. I have to say that my plan to have a carefree, relaxed, unstructured summer really bit me in the ass and I am glad summer is just about over. I don’t know about your kids, but mine can’t wait to go back to school. They love school. They neeeeeeeeeed school. And they really, really need to get away from each other. They have had all the summer fun they can stand and now will bicker all the live long day about anything and everything.

I am ready for some new things as well. Back in June, when I was in Las Vegas with my husband, I met up with my friend Jennifer, who lives near me in New England, but was in Vegas for a conference. Jennifer owns her own design company and I have done some freelance work for her in the past (and hopefully more in the future!) As we chatted and caught up over drinks, she casually mentioned that my days would “start to evaporate away once the kids were out of school.” Boy oh boy was she right. She meant it in the “long, relaxing days where one day runs into the next” kind of way, but in reality it felt like each day I tried to accomplish something, the day just poofed away — gone!

The finished calendar - ready to be filled up! Bring it on!

As part of getting back on track, I am back to blogging every day. Starting today. I want to enjoy the last few days of summer before the craziness begins, but truthfully, I prefer the craziness. After two and a half months of “relaxing” I am all relaxed out and now I am just itching to start something new. I will be revisiting my “thirty day plan” with some major changes … tune in tomorrow to find out more!

Progress is slow

I am a bad blogger. Its not that I don’t have anything to say … I have a lot to say. I just can’t seem to get around to organizing it into any kind of coherent, readable piece. My kids have been on summer vacation for almost a month and it feels like it has been about 5000 years … and not in a good way.

See ... somebody likes summer vacation!

I love summer … or more accurately, I love the idea I have in my head of what summer should be like. The kids have long, warm days to play outside and explore the neighborhood with their friends, the ocean is 20 minutes away, a nice lake is even closer, and they all enthusiastically signed up for the summer reading program at the library. My brain is bursting with projects I want to do around the house, cool crafty things I want to sell on Etsy, art projects I want to do with the kids, and steps I need to take to get more real (as in paying) work. Sounds like a great summer, right? Fun and relaxing and creative and productive all at once! YAY! You know what is really happening? N O T H I N G.

Ok, not nothing, and herein lies my problem. I never seem to think of the stuff I do around the house (cooking, housework, laundry) or the stuff I do with my kids (going to the beach, library, on hikes, etc.) as real stuff. I think of these activities as the things that keep me from doing the real stuff. What do I think I should be doing instead? Why do I feel like sitting on a beach all day is a huge waste of time? Does not having a “job” make me feel like all the time spent on other stuff that takes up my day would be better spent doing something else? I don’t know. I certainly don’t wish I was stuck in an office all day. I know that whatever projects I finish will be replaced by new ones. I am never without creative inspiration … just the motivation and self discipline to devote the time to these projects I feel they deserve. I don’t know why I end every day feeling like I did nothing worthwhile.

So what I have been doing?

·      We’ve been going to the beach a lot. I know that isn’t a tragedy or anything, but it gets boring after a while.

·      Took the kids into Boston to see the tall ships during HarborFest.

·      Watched parades and fireworks with friends.

·      I watched the 1^st season of HBO’s Girls in two days. Brilliant show. Lena Dunham is wiser and braver at 25 than I will ever be. Awesome. Watch it. You won’t be sorry.

·      I have had a little more freelance work, including designing T-shirts for an animal shelter and a logo based on African beetles.

·      I got poison ivy for the second summer in a row. Yay.

I have not:

·      Gone through all the papers and folders the kids brought home from school.

·      Gone to yoga class. (I think I went once since school ended)

·      Cleaned out our home office so it can be used for a sewing/craft studio

·      Figured out what to pack for the trip we are taking later this month.

·      Finished sewing (or really started sewing) the iPad cases I plan to sell on Etsy.

·      Updated my online portfolio

·      Tried to find more freelance work.

One of these days I will get it together. Probably not today.

Leaving Las Vegas

I just got home from five days in Las Vegas with my husband. We have had a few short trips (one or two nights) without the kids, but they were always nearby, and always an easy drive from home. This was a real trip on an airplane that took me far, far away from home, in every sense.

It always amazes me how much work it is to get ready for a trip. There are mountains of laundry to do, shopping for food that I am not going to eat, and writing lists and more lists for the grandparents of everything the kids, cat, and dog will need to do while we are gone. Whew!

Packing for me is so easy. Some clothes, two pairs of shoes, makeup, toiletries … It all fits in one carry-on suitcase— if I can live out of one small bag for several days,  why do I need so much stuff in the rest of my life?

Some observations on the trip … in no particular order.

Travel

For all my husband’s complaining about traveling, it is really pretty nice. Since he flies so much, he often gets free upgrades to First Class. He got one this time too, at least for one leg of the trip, and he talked the airline into upgrading me as well. I got to live the high life from Denver to Las Vegas with my big, cushy seat and my free bloody mary whilst all the peasants in coach fought over their armrests. Let them eat cake! Mwahahhahaha.

Anyway …

I have always lived in the Northeast, which is pretty densely populated (or “thickly settled” as they say here in New England) From the Rockies on westward there seems to be hundreds and hundreds of miles of open deserts and canyons with no signs of human life. We did fly right over the Grand Canyon, though, which looks really cool.

The Grand Canyon from the sky

The VIP treatment

Bigger is always better

The scale and scope of everything in Las Vegas is ridiculous. The casino/shopping/theme park/nightclub/pool party extravaganza that is each hotel along the Strip is like nothing I have ever seen. Each hotel is unbelievably large and intentionally confusing to navigate, making it too easy to get lost, for better or worse. The grand scale of everything also makes it difficult to judge how far away anything is. You can walk along the strip for what seems like an awfully long time and still be in front of the same hotel. I was still getting disoriented in my own hotel on the last day of the trip. Maybe they rearrange everything while everyone is asleep. We kept calling this disorienting weirdness “eating the lotus flowers. “ If you ever saw The Lightning Thief, you know what I mean. I ended up sending and receiving a lot of text messages that said things like “uh oh. Lotus flowers” whenever we were trying to meet up somewhere.

$10 beers and $8 band-aids

For some reason I always thought that Las Vegas was supposed to be relatively cheap to visit, since the hotels make the big bucks off all the gambling, so everything else is inexpensive to lure people in. This is not so. Not at all. Everything was twice as much as it would be in a restaurant or bar or nightclub at home, but lucky for us, it is a work expense for my husband, so we only have to pay for half, so it works out to be about the same … this sounds like the lotus flowers talking again …

Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em

I had no idea people still smoked so much. Here in New England, smoking isn’t allowed indoors anywhere anymore, so I really don’t see it very much. It was weirdly shocking to see so many people smoking. I know that sounds dumb and obvious, but it really was surprising to me. I expected it from the college-age party crowd, but not so much from everyone else.

I am not 22

I had 4 beers one night and I was as loopy as I ever want to be out in public. I was in bed every night before midnight. I wore a skirty, 50s-style bathing suit. I sat in the shade at the pool.  I read books. I often thought the music was too loud. I was yawning every night when a lot of people were just starting their evening out. I thought the girls walking the strip in their string bikinis with their half-yards of margaritas and half in the bag already should go back to the hotel and put some more clothes on.

Feelin hot hot hot

But it’s a dry heat …

Good holy Hell it was hot. I love the heat, and I didn’t mind the weather one bit, but it was hot hot hot. Really hot. Like 110 degrees. What I didn’t expect was the complete and total lack of humidity. My hair did not frizz. I did not sweat. There was no drippy condensation on the outside of my frosty iced coffee. It was weird.

I just don't know where I would wear these ...

Fashion sense

People wear some wacky stuff, which is fine, mostly. There is something confusing about having people in bathing suits, sparkly evening clothes, orthopedic shoes and fanny packs all together in one place at any time of the day or night. Also, a note on tattoos: I don’t have a problem with tattooing per se, but I think in a few years the full-arm-sleeve tattoos and excessive tattooing in general will go the way of MC Hammer pants and Mall Hair — leaving a lot of people stuck in a fashion trend they can’t get out of.

Doing everything I set out to do

My husband was at a conference during the day so my “to-do” list every day was as follows:

·      drink the coffee and eat the breakfast that my husband brought to the room while I was still in bed.

·      lounge around in my jammies for a while.

·      Shower and get dressed and take a long walk before it got too hot.

·       Meet my husband for lunch.

·      Get an iced coffee and bring it to the pool where I would spend the whole afternoon reading.

·      Meet my husband for drinks and dinner.

I love the feeling of accomplishment I get when I finish everything on my list.

The heart grows fonder

I really needed some “grown-up” time where I could just do whatever I wanted, even if what I wanted to do was really nothing at all, and it was great. I also missed my kids. Not every second, but I was away from them for long enough to really miss them and really want to get back. I didn’t miss the laundry and the dishes and the lunchbox packing, but it was nice to get back to my babies.