Here Are Some Unrelated Things

One week from today we will be making our annual pilgrimage to our elementary school's "Meet the Teacher"event. We should have a letter next week telling us who Max's third grade teacher will be. The suspense is killing me.

I am sleeping in a pair of pajama bottoms whose backside is more hole than pajama. These were silky soft cotton pjs that I wore and washed and wore and washed until the material around the back seam just sort of melted away and they ripped, and I am wearing them anyway. Did I mention how soft they are?

Max & I made snickerdoodles this morning and proceeded to get a fine sanding of sugar all over the kitchen floor. The cookies are brilliant. Really, the best cookies we've ever made.

I ran across the book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day: The Discovery that Revolutionizes Home Baking this week and I'm giving their methodology a try. The basic premise is that we fuss too much with all the proofing and the kneading and the multiple risings. They claim to get a true rustic, artisan loaf all you have to do is mix up the dough, let it rise ONE TIME and then put it in the fridge where you can pull out a loaf sized chunk (the basic recipe makes enough dough for four loaves) at a time and have fresh bread anytime you want.

The mixing of the dough was truly a five minute affair. It behaved just as the book claimed it would and is lurking in the fridge, waiting to be yanked out and baked tomorrow morning. I'll let you know how it turns out.

The New Year

As someone who has spent a pretty hefty portion of my adult life in school, finishing my bachelor's degree then graduate school, then married to an academic, plus having a kid in elementary school, I am keenly attuned to the start of the school year. In fact, late August feels like the beginning of a new year to me. January 1^st just feels like the end of the holidays.

This time of year is fraught with change and transition. You can smell it in the air. As a child, it meant new clothes, often a new school and a chance to reinvent myself. In college, it was an escape from my childhood home into the place where I really learned who I was and what mattered most to me. For years, autumn meant the return of someone I loved, someone who would drift away in the late spring and summer and returning to me when the Fall semester breezes began to blow.

My sister and I have commented on this for years, how we both begin to feel a shift, a kind of restlessness in August. It makes me a little anxious and also a little excited about what might lie ahead. It feels like something new is just around the corner, something more substantial than new school clothes and an armload of binders.

I cannot blame it on the weather. August is miserably hot here in South Texas, and we still have a lot of heat ahead of us before things begin to cool off. No matter what the temperature, I still feel the season's change, in my bones, in my heart and head as surely as if there were maples turning crimson in the backyard.

I like the anticipation, leaning hard into what's ahead, even if I don't know what that is.

August and Everything After

It's August, can you believe it? School supplies are everywhere and we are imagining the end of summer as it cruises around the corner. The internet is awash in moms who are fed up with summer and are counting down the days till the first day of school, but I can honestly say, at this very moment, I haven't had enough. Not enough reading and playing and popsicles, not enough long mostly one sided conversations about Pokémon, not enough time with Max, relaxed and in his element.

There have been days when I missed the structure of the school year. There have been moments when I have been so hungry for solitude I could hardly stand it. I have chafed a bit under my summer constraints, but on those days I have always remembered, I will have solitude again. I know I will have long quiet hours to write. Time enough to run as far as I want as often as I want.

What I will not have again is the crazy summer of eight years old. Amid the Pokémon chatter and legos and Bionicles (whose names I still can't keep straight), we have shared so much this summer. It has been pure joy to watch Max grow not only in inches and shoe size but in compassion and understanding. His heart has grown over the summer and I count myself lucky to have been here to witness it.

Ordinary Days

Laura at Center Down Home has reminded me to count some blessings of the ordinary kind.

In summer, there are only ordinary days. It's something that always surprises me, the absence of the school week and weekend arc to give shape to our days. Every day is pretty much the same with a little more Frank thrown in on the weekends. Every day there is breakfast, reading, writing, video games and lunch with 45 minutes of quiet time afterwards, then more playing, maybe popsicles, maybe a movie, maybe a swim, then dinner, bath and bed. There are special events and play dates, but for the most part our days just rise and fall over and over, as if some giant animal of summer is breathing in the background.

RAIN

After dinner last night, I heard a strange sound, half-gurgle, half-thunk. I called Frank thinking that the air conditioner was making a funny sound. (It's been over 100 degrees for three weeks in a row, though I weep at the thought of the electric bill, the last thing we need is strange noises coming from the AC.) We stood there, straining, listening to the sound and Max walked up behind us, listened for two seconds and said, "It's raining."

We are in the grips of a historic drought, stage two water restrictions with stage three looming any day now. It has been a while since the last time we had 10 minutes of rain, so long it seems we had forgotten what rain sounds like.



We had about twenty minutes of steady rain. We ran outside and played in it, trying to appreciate every single moment of wet as our crunchy lawn soaked up every single drop.

See How We Are

If you are one of those people who want to believe that it is all goodness and light over here at One of Three - that we are always one small, happy family with just more hair than other families, then look away. Skip this one and come back later.

We mean well, we really do. We started with the very best of intentions. Keep that in mind as I tell the woeful tale of our fourth of July.

We were invited to a party thrown by a "Distinguished Professor" in Lefty's department, who despite the sort of prissy title, is an awesome, friendly guy – someone we really like. With his tenure review just around the corner, Lefty thought it would be good to attend so we drove an hour and a half through the rolling hills west of San Antonio

to the ranch where the party was being held. It was really beautiful, a view to die for with a gorgeous pool,

and all kinds of lovely places to sit and looked out at the hills around us. We sat on a swing suspended from a tree and sighed collectively.

The Kid really wanted to swim (we had promised him swimming) and Lefty had to be in the pool with him because he's not a very strong swimmer and I could not be in the pool because I am a fair damsel with a skin cancer diagnosis under my belt and I don't do full on South Texas afternoon sun when it is, I kid you not, 105 degrees. So, The Kid wanted to swim and swim some more and thus did not eat enough food and got cranky, sulky, back-talk-your-mama-cranky. I didn't eat much because I was busy encouraging The Kid to eat and dealing with his side order of attitude. I was miserably hot and lightheaded from the heat. Frank was frustrated that he got very little time to hang out with his colleagues. Can you see the exhaustion and hunger and frustration beginning to add up?

It was not a pretty ride home, and not a pretty scene once we got here. There were tears and yelling and finger-pointing. But then there were apologies and kind words and making up. We finished the evening on a good note. We all recovered. We vowed to find a way to do it better next time.

See how we are?

Wreck This Journal: Week Five

Two days. It took my journal two days to dry out in the hot South Texas sun, and by the time it was dry, it was time to leave for our family vacation.


I took the journal with me but it rarely saw the light of day. So, I left a memento in the bed at the hotel


and when we got home, we brought the journal out to play.

Happy Father's Day

Here's to Lefty, the guy who give us the confidence to float around in the deep end!

How to Make It Rain in a Drought

• Get a very bad night's sleep because of a wonky thermostat, night sweats, the John Mellencamp song on permanent loop in your brain, or all of the above.
• Run two miles.
• Leave car window down.
  
• While child is reading books in his room, recline on couch and fall into a deep exhausted middle of the day sleep, the kind where when you wake up you're not quite sure where you are for a few seconds.
• Sleep for 15 minutes.
• Wake to you've-got-to-be-freakin'-kidding-me torrential rain.
• Jump up, run outside and hastily roll up car window, whacking yourself in the jaw with the car door as you close it.
• Ten minutes later, just like the itsy bitsy spider, watch the sun come out and dry up all the rain.
  

Hitting Your Stride

One of the first things you learn when you begin to run is the importance of finding your stride. This is the optimal pace at which to run. This is the pace that feels good and right, any slower and you feel as if you're lumbering along, any faster and you feel stressed and uncomfortable and you have to slow down or fall back to a walk.

I had it pretty well figured out when I was running in my neighborhood. The right music helped. Then the temperatures started climbing and I retreated into the athletic center at Trinity (where as a faculty spouse I can use the equipment for free). Running on a treadmill is a totally different beast. Finding your stride on a treadmill, where you have to manual change the speed is a little less daunting than finding a needle in a hay stack. I'm slowly getting there, one run at a time.

Summer has kind of been like that so far. There are times when I've sort of felt lost without my comfortable routine to ground me. But part of the beauty of summer, and I believe this with all my heart, is releasing those routines, the things that keep us on schedule and letting the day just flow by. Having an eight year old helps a lot. The Kid is the king of living in the moment and he pulls me up there with him.

At times, I've felt as if I'm floundering but I'm learning to let go, let the current of the day take me.

Don't get me wrong, I love structure and routine but I'm learning to love their absence a little bit too.

Eight and a Half

We celebrated The Kid's half-birthday on Sunday afternoon with a few of his friends, a whole lot of play and some cake. We couldn't find a Pokémon cake so we ordered a blank cake and drew the traditional battlefield ourselves. In a true family effort, I sketched, Lefty did the actual icing and The Kid picked out the Pokémon for the battle.

I don't have a lot of photos. I am stuck on these occasions between wanting to document the event and experience the event. I have to tell you, for the most part, experiencing wins the day. I took a few photos but mostly I just enjoyed watching my beautiful kid laugh and play. There are worst way to spend an afternoon.

The Official Beginning of Summer

School's out as of two o'clock today. I've been ready for weeks, looking forward to the way summer slows things down around here. You may remember my concern last year about how I would get writing done with The Kid home from school – and you may also remember my delight as we fell into an easy rhythm that left me able to accomplish a good deal of writing. The key was relinquishing my expectations. I began the summer expecting nothing, thinking I would not write a single word over the summer, then everything I did write felt like a gift, a bonus.

This year I know what to expect. I know I'll be able to get some smallish projects done, that as long as I don't expect great chunks of uninterrupted writing time, I'll be able to write.

I was reminded yesterday of the power of saying things out loud, of holding yourself publicly accountable. (Thanks, Karen.) In light of that, I present my three pronged, TRIDENT OF CREATIVITY for the summer.

1. I'm going to wreck a journal along with Magpie Girl and Jamie Ridler and some other friendly folks. I'll be blogging about this on Fridays.

2. I'm going to do a daily five minute free write exercise with The Kid. I've been doing the ten minute version of these a la Peter Elbow for all of my writing life. The Kid needs a little work on his penmanship, and I'll get to brainstorm some writing ideas. We're going to take turns providing writing prompts.

3. I'm going to focus on sending last year's work out to be published – at least two submissions a week.

So there it is, out loud, in public, and in color – my TRIDENT OF SUMMER CREATIVITY.

What are your plans for the summer?