1. Starting the week with my food already prepped. Yesterday my husband took B out for about an hour and a half, and I used that time to furiously cook. It makes the whole week feel better.
2. That my kid no longer seems disastrously tired in the evening when he doesn’t nap. A couple weeks ago I included in my gratitude post that he was back to napping every day, and then he immediately stopped napping again. With a kid, all you can count on is that you can’t count on anything. Anyway, previously when he didn’t nap he was a mess by bedtime. Now he seems fine. So I guess whatever he decides to do each day is fine with me.
3. Spring flowers. It has still been frigid and often wet, but spring flowers give me hope that better weather is around the corner.
4. A few recent opportunities to hang out with grown-ups. Last Thursday, after a preschool meeting, I hung out with some of the moms until midnight. MIDNIGHT. I died the next day and I’m dead now, but it was fun. Then on Saturday my ghost went to a drag brunch for a friend’s birthday.
5. In a few short weeks we’ll be traveling to San Diego. This morning when the boy, the dog and I went for a walk it was 35 degrees and my fingers were so cold they hurt by the time we got back. It will be April in two days. THIS IS NOT OKAY. It’s really got me looking forward to our upcoming vacation.
I’m posting this on a Tuesday because our son turned three on Saturday and my husband took yesterday off to make it a three-day weekend. So basically, today is my Monday this week.
Things I’m grateful for going into this week (mostly birthday-related!):
1. For our neighborhood playground. It’s not actually private but it’s not visible from the street, so nobody knows it’s here and it’s always empty. It was the perfect location for a birthday party.
2. That the weather cooperated for our party. It’s been terribly cold, wet and windy here for weeks but the day of our party was sunny and in the high 50s. We got really lucky.
3. That we were healthy for the party. We’ve had really bad luck with illnesses whenever we make big plans, most recently our failed Friendsgiving in December when B came down with hand/foot/mouth. I was pretty nervous as this one approached, because half the kids in our co-op have been sick. We made it, though!
4. That we have a new dishwasher. Our old one has been acting up for months, and last week we scheduled the installation of a new one. The old one broke completely over the weekend, which added some difficulty to our celebrations. But how fortunate that we had already purchased a new one, and weren’t stuck without a working dishwasher for long.
5. That we have a few slow weeks coming up. This past week felt really hectic getting ready for the party. In four weeks we’re going out of town, which will be fun but will also feel a bit hectic. Between now and then, though, we can take it a little easier.
1. That our absurd mid-March snowstorm was short-lived. On Friday it began snowing around 1am and snowed for nearly 24 hours, even though absolutely nobody forecasted significant snow and everyone continued to say “no accumulation” throughout the day. We probably got about three inches of snow, which I know isn’t much by some standards, but for a completely unexpected snow in mid-March, it sure felt like a lot. It doesn’t snow much in Seattle, and this was our first (and hopefully only) snow of the year. Patches of snow stuck around throughout the day Saturday, but it was all gone by Sunday morning. And because it’s March and was never actually that cold, the roads were never icy. I just hope it hasn’t completely killed off all the spring flowers that were near to blooming.
2. That my son got a chance to play in snow this year. We usually get one real snow each year, although it’s not uncommon to get none. Given that it’s March, I didn’t think we were going to see any this year. I may be dying for Spring weather here, but it was still fun to see him get excited about snow at this age. He still won’t stop saying “remember when the doggy was covered in snow” (she had a few snowflakes on her back after our walk).
3. That I finally walked into a hair salon and walked out with a haircut I love. Last summer I decided to cut my long hair short, and I had a very clear idea of how I wanted it to turn out. I showed photos. I explained that I was looking for a lot of layers, including some very short layers about the same length as the bangs I was also getting. But for whatever reason, every stylist I’ve tried has been really hesitant to actually cut short layers. I’ve invariably wound up with triangle hair.
I’ve tried multiple salons and stylists in the neighborhood and never liked the result, and the cut I got in January was particularly disappointing. We have a salon in the neighborhood that costs next to nothing for a cut because the ladies there are REALLY fast, and a lot of people take their kids there for cuts because it’s so cheap and because, at least with young kids, quicker is better. This salon was actually the one that first cut my hair in the summer, and I went home with the aforementioned triangle. I wound up going back – something I’ve never done – and asking for it to be changed. After it was changed I felt like I had a Ronald McDonald ball of hair, but it was better than the triangle, so when we got my kid a haircut there this past weekend I decided to get mine cut too. And miracle of miracles, it turned out exactly like I wanted. I’m so happy with it.
4. That my son has consistently been napping again. In October we took the front of his crib off because he’d started trying to climb out of it, and with that newfound freedom he decided he was never napping again. We kept putting him in his room for nap-time, but he would just play for an hour, and then each evening was a struggle because he was overtired. About a month ago he inexplicably started napping again, and now naps nearly every day. It has become something we can count on and schedule around again, and that has been nice. It’s also nice that he’s getting enough sleep again. Evenings are still a struggle, but now for other reasons. 🙃
5. For this line from Pema Chodron about settling into uncertainty, which I’ve found myself reflecting on a lot: “what we call uncertainty is actually the open quality of any given moment.”
1. I got some time yesterday to do my food prep. I have some extra soup to use up this week, so I didn’t have to do quite as much – just some oatmeal, roasted broccoli and sautéed garlicy kale. It makes going into the week feel much more peaceful when my food is ready.
2. Mangos have been on sale recently. For the last few weeks Safeway has had good prices on mangos, and eating them makes me happy. They are, I believe, my favorite fruit. I think sometimes about which fruits I’d choose if I could only have five for the rest of my life, and I think I’ve settled on mangos, bananas, apples (cosmic crisp, specifically), red grapes and strawberries (frozen when fresh aren’t in season). The last one is tough, though – sometimes I lean toward a different berry. I love raspberries in my oatmeal, blueberries are so versatile, and there’s little better than the fresh blackberries that grow all over my neighborhood in the summer. Anyway, it’s important to have answers prepared for questions like that. You never know when you’ll need them.
Also, on the subject of fruit – before having a child, I always thought green grapes were the superior grape. However, having a toddler requires some flexibility with fruit and to my surprise, red grapes have emerged as the clear winner.
3. Our memberships to fun places to take B on rainy days. We are members at the aquarium, the Burke Museum and the Museum of Flight, which all offer a lot of indoor play space. We usually request these memberships for Christmas and birthdays in lieu of gifts. Our Burke membership also gets us into several other local museums, which we haven’t explored much but may soon because it’s supposed to rain allweek.
🥲
4. Longer days. Enough daylight for one parent to take B to a playground while the other gets dinner ready is really a life-changing difference this time each year.
5. A healthy stretch of days. It feels risky to even acknowledge this out loud, but our house has been illness-free for about six weeks and with a toddler that feels miraculous. I know our luck will run out at some point, but sometimes when the back-to-back illnesses hit I look back and realize we weren’t sick for a while and wish I’d been aware and appreciative while we were in that healthy stretch. So, I’m aware right now that we’ve been healthy and I’m grateful. It’s wonderful to not be sick.
Here are a few things I’m grateful for going into this week:
1. That I feel fairly rested. Some weekends I feel like I spend my time chasing something I’ll never catch, and then I start my week feeling physically exhausted and also disappointed that I didn’t do better, which always feels like a moving target anyway. This past weekend, though, felt both energizing and restful and for that I’m grateful.
2. For a nice meeting with my writing group friends. Over the summer I roped a couple of my old grad school classmates into creating a writing group with me where we create a new prompt each month (ish) and we each write a short story based on that prompt. It’s always a lot of fun reading the stories and seeing how different (or sometimes similar!) they turned out. We hadn’t met since November because of the holidays, and it was fun getting back together and chatting.
3. We do yoga in the mornings now. Some rainy day last week I was trying to figure out how to keep my kid occupied indoors and I decided to try doing yoga together. I got out a mat for him and a mat for myself, put a 15-minute yoga video on the TV and he stomped gleefully on his mat the whole time. He now expects yoga every morning. He isn’t as participatory now, one week in – usually he hangs out on his mat for a minute or two before moving on to something else – but it still means I get to do yoga and that’s something I had not otherwise been able to fit into my day regularly.
More rainy-day activities
4. My husband took the kid out a couple times yesterday so I could get my food prep done for the week. They went to the Museum of Flight in the morning and a brewery with a play area in the afternoon, and that got me about 3.5 solo hours for cooking. They had fun, and having all the food I need for the kid and I ready before Monday makes going into the week feel much more relaxed.
5. We had a great time at a party on Saturday night. We received the invitation just the night before from some down-the-street neighbors with a kid the same age as ours. As a person prone to social anxiety, a last-minute invitation typically makes me assume I’m not actually wanted there. But this party – a family-friendly Lunar New Year dumpling party hosted by some neighbors who have always seemed very nice – sounded too good for my anxiety to get in the way of. Their house was PACKED, but full of friendly faces and great food. We ran into several people we already knew and chatted with lots of new people. We’ve been struggling with doing this whole parenting thing alone, and are always hoping we’ll start forming relationships with other parents near us. Was this party a stepping stone to get us there? Who knows, but it was fun nonetheless.
Denise Resting 