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I've hosted an Easter brunch and egg hunt for the last three years and it's one of my favorite traditions. Fine, it's because I serve mimosas. Guilty! Anyway, here's what else is on my menu:
(From left to right, top to bottom: 1, 2, 3, 4)
We're also having deviled eggs, fruit, and bacon. Juice and coffee, too.
What are you having?
I nearly titled this "A Typical Day" but I realized there's just no typical day for us. Our lives are all over the place, and that's probably true for a lot of you, too. We try to create routines but damn if life doesn't make that hard. (Shaking my fist at life...)
Anyway, I wanted to record our steps for an entire day not because my life is all that interesting (oh, it's so not as you'll find out at about 10am) but because this is the kind of thing I'm going to enjoy looking back on one day.
7am: Kyle wakes me up, and I give him my phone to play with so I can steal ten more minutes of sleep.
7:10am: Okay, I'm up! I get Kyle breakfast and he eats while I take a shower. I remind him that when I get out of the shower he'll need to get dressed for school.
7:20am: I'm out of the shower and Kyle goes (slowly, oh so slowly) to his room to get dressed.
7:30am: I'm dressed and getting ready and Kyle comes into the bathroom so I can tie his shoes.
7:35am: Kyle gives Mike a kiss and hug goodbye while I pack his bag for soccer practice after school. Kyle reminds me not to forget his soccer ball.
7:40am: I grab a granola bar to eat in the car.
7:42am: I kiss Mike good-bye and tell him to have a good day. He hugs me for just an extra second. Funny how much I need that extra second.
7:45am: We're out of the house! Not exactly on time but good enough. On the way to the car Kyle sees a bunny that lives in our backyard and he gets so excited. I tell him that means we'll have good luck all day and then we wave good-bye to the bunny. Kyle says, "Have a great day, bunny! And you too Molly!" We drive off, waving.
(Bunny spotting!)
8:05am: We pull up to Kyle's school, which is usually just five minutes door to door. It took so much longer because, well, traffic.
8:07am: Forgot the tuition check, so I run out to the car to get it. We're using the loose definition of run here, of course.
8:10am: Back in the car and on my way to work.
8:23am: Remember my granola bar! It's the little things.
8:27am: Hit some unexpected traffic. (You know those six-word memoirs that were all the rage for a while? One of mine would absolutely be: Well shit, got stuck in traffic.)
(Unexpected traffic face with bonus Kendra Scott earrings!)
9:07am: Finally get to work, a few minutes late.
9:15am: I make a cup of coffee (uh, of course) and chat quickly with my favorite co-worker.
9:20-10:30am: So many emails. I worked late the night before, getting my inbox under control, but I still come in to about 50 new ones I need to respond to or forward along. Also, my to-do list. It's very long.
10:30am-12:00pm: More work. It's a rare morning that I don't have a meeting or call, so it feels downright luxurious to put my head down and charge through my to-do list, uninterrupted. You are now oozing with jealousy of my rocking life, I'm sure.
12pm: Leave for lunch. I have a work meeting with a local author, to go over her marketing plan.
12:13pm: Arrive for lunch, begin perusing the menu. Oh, menu perusing is one of my favorite things.
(Settled on a Caesar salad with a side of salmon.)
1:45pm: Head back to the office.
2pm: Call with a company we hope to advertise with.
2:12pm: Call is done! Oh, under-15-minute calls are my very favorite.
3pm: Afternoon coffee and note writing. I know, afternoon coffee should be a very bad decision but my body is miraculous in that caffeine works on it (as it should) but it doesn't stop me from falling asleep whenever I'd like to.
4:40pm: Head out early, so I can make it to Kyle's school in time for soccer practice.
5:37pm: Pull into Kyle's school. Chat with his teacher for a few minutes and head to the school bathroom to change Kyle into his soccer clothes. Oh, look! I forgot one of his cleats, so he has to wear his regular shoes. He is not thrilled with me for this. (Kyle is very rigid about few things but what he wears is one of them.) We have a brief heart-to-heart about how mommy might disappoint him on a much grander scale in the future, and I'm super sorry about the shoes but can we shake it off and move on? Eventually, we do.
6:03pm: Pull into the soccer field parking lot. Again, the soccer field is five minutes, tops, from Kyle's school. Traffic can suck it.
(He's briefly forgiven me for the cleat incident.)
6:06pm: Kyle realizes I ALSO forgot his water bottle. (There IS a water fountain directly next to the soccer fields, I'd like it noted.) He yells across the field to me, sititng on the bleachers, "MOMMY, YOU FORGOT EVERYTHING." I briefly think about pretending he doesn't belong to me (but all the parents know me) and then I briefly think about yelling back, "OH REALLY? DID I FORGET YOUR SOCCER BALL? NO I DID NOT." but that doesn't seem super mature (although it does seem super accurate). "Sorry, buds!" I yell back. I say a silent "you're welcome" to all the other parents for owning the "lamest soccer parent" award of the night.
7pm: Soccer practice is over. I call Mike to give him a heads up we're on our way home.
(Post-practice silliness and, uh, we're not driving here, I feel the need to clarify. I mean, of course we're not! He's not even buckled in! But "feeling the need to clarify" is one of the gifts the internet has given me.)
7:17pm: We pull into the driveway. Oh, it feels good to be home.
7:19pm: Mike bought me flowers, and they're waiting for me on the table. This feels a little stagey for this post but I swear he is not a regular flower-buyer. He bought me some for Valentine's and then, before that, uh maybe our fourth anniversary in 2011. This night is a coincidence! Swear it!
7:20pm: I'm in yoga pants and QUICKLY. That's how I roll.
7:30pm: Mike makes Kyle a PB&J sandwich for dinner (I wish I had whipped up some delicious meal for dinner on this day, to impress all of you, but sandwiches is ALSO how I roll.) Mike then makes me a fried egg sandwich.
(With Doritos on the side. NUTRITIOUS.)
8pm: Kyle brushes his teeth, washes his face, etc. while I ... tweet, I'm sure.
8:20pm: Story time. I think I read a Berenstain Bear book this night.
8:25pm: Mike came in and we had family story time for a couple minutes. Mike made funny noises, Kyle cracked up, I tried to keep everyone focused on the plot of the story (unsuccessfully). Hugs! Kisses!
8:36pm: Big plans to go work-out.
8:37pm: In bed.
9pm: Asleep.
I'd like to do this once a month (I see a book-type-thing created with my once-a-month "Day in the Life" posts) but, in reality, I bet you get another one of these posts in 2014. No sooner.
When we were 11, I made Natalie buy best friend necklaces. Like, all the time. You know, the really cool yin-yang-type necklaces that turned your skin green ten seconds after you put one on. I made her buy about a million of them.
It's not easy to be friends with me, but this lady has it down. She's been doing it for 20 years.
Good, bad, really good, really bad. She's been there. And even when she wasn't there, she was there. Maybe especially then.
In college, I was having big issues with another friend. I was sad about it, so I called Natalie. When I got engaged at 5am, I called Natalie. (Fine, Mike made me wait a couple hours, so it was more like 7am.) On my honeymoon, when Mike was snorkeling and I was bored of my (really not fit for beach-reading) book, I called Natalie. When I found out I was pregnant, I called Natalie.
She hated the term "friendiversary" that I said about a million times over the weekend. She hated it but laughed while hating it. I like to think that while Natalie and I are so very different, we always find a way to laugh. I like to think that's our language.
When Natalie and I were in middle school, we lived just blocks apart. We'd walk to each other's houses, nearly every day, through our neighbors' yard. Over the course of four years, we created a ditch in that yard. We walked so often through it, we changed it.
This is Natalie's friendship, in a nutshell. It's changed me.
Twenty years. Man, that's a long time to be so lucky.
Mike and I have finally begun putting together a living room we can be proud of. It's only taken four years to start this project and it'll only take (I'm sure) another four, but hell I'm calling any progress a victory at this point.
In January, we painted the walls a nice steel gray, and we've bought frames for the many pictures we want to hang on them. Over our couch, we've decided to hang travel photos, just scenery shots, and it was such a fun ride through vacation memory lane, choosing which pictures we should display. We chose one from Puerto Rico, Chicago, St. John, Boston and in the middle we hope to find just the right photo from College Station. That might not be your vacation city of choice but all this travel, all this everything, began with that tiny Texas town.
Of course we chose a photo from the family roadtrip we took in the summer of 2011 (here, here). You might remember that trip if you've been reading my blog since then. We traveled through Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and a tiny bit of Arizona for a family wedding. We took Kyle, then two and a half, and Molly, then (and now) a giant but lovable pain in the ass.
As I searched through the hundreds of photos from the trip for just the right one to frame, I remembered how we almost didn't go. My car broke down (to the tune of many dollars) the week before the trip and the day before the trip Kyle got a Mystery Fever. No money and a feverish child. Yeah, that screams fun family vacation.
But, against all rational thought, we took the trip. We packed the car, we booked a couple cheap hotel rooms, we filled a cooler with snacks and filled my laptop with Mickey Mouse Clubhouse episodes, and we hoped for the best.
We ate burgers in Amarillo, drank margaritas in Santa Fe. We hiked in Arches National Park while watching a storm roll through one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen before or have ever seen since. Kyle threw up in the backseat on a particularly curvy Colorado mountain road but then we saw a deer inches from our car a few moments later, and he quickly cheered up. We visited the Four Corners. We graffitied the cars at Cadillac Ranch. We introduced Kyle to family he'd never met and we sat around the hotel pool with them, catching up and slapping mosquitoes against our arms. Mike's parents treated us to a once-in-a-lifetime helicopter ride above Gateway Canyons, where we stayed for the wedding. We off-roaded to visit Shiprock.
We also had this one giant fight, on a New Mexico highway late one night as Kyle slept in the backseat. It was ridiculous, as many giant fights tend to be, and Mike and I stewed quietly after it ended. I went to sleep angry. He slept with his back to me. We apologized in the morning, after coffee, a good night's sleep, and a strong dose of perspective, and we shared a family hug in our cheap hotel room before eating the worst continental breakfast we'd ever had.
There was also this beautiful moment on a straight stretch of road, driving out of Utah as the sun was setting one night. Kyle had just fallen asleep and Mike and I were talking about anything, nothing, I don't even remember. Maybe our trip, maybe stopping for gas, maybe Kyle. I think my favorite thing about my relationship with Mike, or maybe just my relationship with anyone I've loved so long, is the ease of conversation. You realize how rare that is, as you get older, when there is no anxiety or self-consciousness or even awareness of what you're saying. You just talk. It's like breathing, talking to Mike, and I realized on that Utah road that I was just so damn grateful we decided to say yes to a trip we nearly said no to.
It was one of the most incredible trips, no weeks, of my entire life. It was magical, it was beautiful, it was exhausting, it was fun, even the fight, even the carsickness, even the bad felt good on that trip.
We almost said no, but then we said yes. We hoped for the best, and that's exactly what we got.
No other reason to write this than I just wanted to remember all of that today.
(I plan to share the living room makeover when the room is done, of course. So see you for that in 2017.)
I nearly emailed Kyle yesterday about the Veronica Mars movie (!!!), like the awesome mother I am. The restraint I showed was really impressive (to myself). Instead, I share this moment:
Tonight we were making wishes on dandelions and you wished for dinosaurs and then got mad when they didn't just appear. Uh. I guess we need to talk about what wishes are. And maybe what dinosaurs are too.
(Not from the dandelion wishing, of course, but from a kite-flying afternoon a couple weeks ago.)
I knew Kyle was a boy.
It's easy to say that with confidence now, of course, since he is indeed a boy but, still, I knew. My (literal) dreams were of raising a boy.
I would have loved a girl. I need to say that for the girl that could have been. I would have taken great pride in raising her. It would have humbled me, sure, but I would have loved it. I have two nieces, one very close to Kyle's age, and I just want to scoop her up whenever I get to see her. Oh, Ella. I love her to pieces. She's adorable, she lets me brush her hair, she sits still for ages, and I get to buy her shoes forever.
Still. I knew I would have a boy. Kyle. My boy.
His little feet began smelling like something died on top of them around 18 months. He began creating guns out of NOTHING, out of thin air, out of the bubbles in the bathtub, at around age three. I couldn't believe he could do that, that his imagination could go to PSHAW PSHAW when I had just handed him a hairbrush or a popsicle or a spoon, my goodness, BIOLOGY YOU ARE WEIRD.
He is usually covered in bruises. He falls, he runs into things, he plays tough, and sometimes I have no earthly idea how he gets a bruise here or there. I look at him at the end of the day and think, I really hope CPS doesn't just randomly show up to count the number or bruises on a four-year-old's legs. Because ooooh my you have quite a lot.
Then there are the Legos. Oh hell, the number of Legos in my house is insane. In fact, here's a new baby shower game for you -- you can use this one free of charge -- blindfold the mom-to-be, toss a hundred tiny Legos on the floor, make her go barefoot across the room and she wins if she gets to the other side without 1) bleeding or 2) using a LOT of profanities. The other night, I stumbled into Kyle's room in the middle of the night after being summoned for some ridiculous reason -- I think he might have seen a moth in the dark at 3am? I don't even know. -- and I stepped on a dozen Legos on the way out while saying a dozen bad words under my breath. That scene was being four-year-old Kyle's mom in a nutshell.
Then there is Kyle with a bunch of his friends. Wow. I just. When you get a bunch of boys together, I don't even know how to capture the noise level in words that are in my current vocabulary. Other than to encourage you to swing by the liquor store before that particular maddening afternoon. There is just something very loud and stressful and ALL CAPSY about a group of little boys together inside four walls. In fact, I'd only recommend getting a group of little boys together outside. Never inside. Without that stop by the liquor store first, that is. Also, little boys together will never be able to hear you. You will say DO NOT THROW A FOOTBALL IN MY KITCHEN and while your one little boy may hear that and listen, a group of little boys will just stop understanding English altogether. They can't help it, I've decided. They have to throw that football! It's just a truth of the universe along with taxes and Mondays being the worst and French fries being the best.
Yet, my side of the bed is the farthest from our bedroom door and he comes to me every single morning, not Mike. He climbs up and snuggles into me, all bed-heady and sleepy-eyed. He is so warm those first moments after he wakes up. He usually says, "Mommy, I love you." Then, "I'm thirsty. Get me juice, please."
When he hugs me, he wraps his arms so tightly around my neck and says, "Ohhhh, Mommy, you are the super best!"
The other night we gave him a quarter to get a piece of candy out of a machine after dinner, and he used that quarter to buy me a ring. He was so proud to give it to me. I will wear that ring until my finger turns completely green, I swear it. Maybe even after that.
He laughs with his whole body. His laughs start in his eyes and they just explode out of him and sometimes he just falls right over from laughing, he can't even help it. Where he can rough-house and fix things and fly kites and kick soccer balls with his Dad, he laughs with me. I just never knew how incredibly fun and perfect and healing that laughter would be.
He is warm and sweet and wonderful and pure. He is so sunny and bright. Raising him is a gift. A dream come true.
When I hear that anyone I know is having a son, my first instinct is to say, "Ohhhhh, you are about to be told the very best secret" because that's the best way I can think to describe it.
You see boys running wildly through the grocery store, you see dirty, smelly boys shooting pretend guns on the playground, you see their bruised, scratched-up legs from afar and you don't get it. I didn't get it. They're so loud, you might think. They're so much. They really do throw footballs around your kitchen EVEN WHEN YOU TELL THEM NOT TO. Their shoes aren't nearly as cute, either, are they?
But, then you have one. A son. Your son. Your boy. And he snuggles into you first thing in the morning and he wraps his arms around your neck and he spends his only quarter on you and he laughs with his whole self and he calls you (his mom!) the super best.
You get it.
You've been told a secret. The very best secret.
The secret of having a son.
Some super fun things:
1. I got a Target gift card for my birthday (thank you, in-laws!) and instead of spending it on laundry detergent or groceries, I bought this purse. I really love it, and I would really love to link to it but where my love for Target is mighty, my love for Target's website is NONEXISTANT, OMG IT'S THE WORST.
2. After I passed on seeing Mumford & Sons when they came to Dallas a few years ago -- when tickets were something like $25, of course -- I swore I wouldn't make that mistake again. Anywhere in the state! I'll go anywhere in the state to see them, I swore! Or one state north, turns out. They'll be in Guthrie, Okla. this September and Mike and I are going. The concert is part of their small Gentleman of the Road series. I'm extremely excited, even if it seems like we might have to camp since hotels in the area are all sold out. I'm trying to convince Mike to buy a tent big enough to house a comfortable armchair. He has not stopped rolling his eyes at this idea since.
3. A couple years ago, I was in San Diego for Comic-Con and I got in a day early for set-up. There was no air-conditioning in the convention center that day and I was so tired when I left that I basically stumbled into the Hopping Pig to kill time before dinner. (Here's a whole list of my San Diego dining highlights!) I ordered a Lagunitas IPA because the brewery is in the town my stepmom and brother live. But, I loved it! Since then, I try an IPA every now and then and more so over the last couple months. I told my co-worker this, and she brought me a couple bottles last week, after a tough, stressful week. We've worked together for almost six years, and I would be such a mess without her. I would say that even if she didn't bring me beers.
4. Natalie and I are headed to College Station later this month, to celebrate being friends for 20 years. I get sappy when I think of Natalie because, well, it's Natalie. She's known me two-thirds of my life and there is really no one who has seen me through so much and still come out the other side to like me, except my mother. I don't know quite how to articulate what it's like to have a friend for so long, through so much, except to say that at some point she (thankfully) became a certainty. She'll be in my life forever. So, we toast that truth in our college town next month, over greasy potatoes and cheap drinks and, lamely but wonderfully, sleeping in. Twenty years!
5. Mike and I were planning an Alaskan trip this year. A dream trip! But, siiiiigh, dream trips are not free. We just couldn't afford it. So, we swapped our tickets for a closer-to-home, much more affordable DC trip. We're still really excited about it. I've only been for work and something tells me the convention center isn't top of the must-see DC list. We have a lot of wonderful people offering us great tips, but if there's a must-try restaurant or an off-the-beaten path suggestion you think we should absolutley know about, let me have it! I love travel spreadsheets. Let me add your picks to this one.
6. My mom turns 65 this year (she looks at least a decade younger, I know) and we've decided to take a girl's trip to Kansas City to celebrate. This is where she's from, and a place I've never been, so I can't wait to go. I can't wait to see where my mom grew up, where she went to school, and to just see this lovely new place through her eyes. I think there will be a bottle of champagne (or a couple cold beers; she's into beer lately) and a lot of good conversation in store for us. And a new map pin for me!
7. I'm hosting a champagne-inspired dinner sometime in the next two months, and I'm excited to invite some of my favorite ladies to my house for a dinner with a bubbly theme. Here's my Pinterest board, but are there any recipes that really need to make this menu?
