The Madness Of June
Or: The 1,172nd Baseball Game
Parenting in June is a particular kind of chaos. In the past few weeks (months??), I’ve driven three (417???) children to approximately 217 sports practices. I’ve attended approximately 164 sports games, and have failed to remember 714 end of year “special days” even though I’ve TRIED to enter them into my google calendar. There are chorus concerts, “bandapaloozas,” share days, bring-a-stuffie-to-school days, “dress to impress days,” field days, volunteering at the little league snack shack days, and pool days. One night at 9PM, one of our kids remembered that he needed gummie bears for the following day at school. So Brett drove to the nearest purveyor of gummie bears at 9PM for reasons my brain refused/and continues to refuse to engage with. My brain is on strike.
When I completed Algebra II in high school, I thought I had concluded my tortured math career. But alas. Sitting down with Brett to figure out who’s hauling who where after school (and then coordinating carpooling to account for gaps in the time space continuum) is the WORST KIND OF MATH. Oh, and dinner? What is dinner????
Much of this end-of-year mayhem is of our own making. We could, of course, say no more often when a kid wants to do this or that (and also this, this, and THAT). But we didn’t this time. Maybe we will next time!
The frenzied pace of June is also laced with both dread and excitement for summer vacation, which looms ever closer with each passing day. As a person who runs a business of one from my kitchen table, I find myself frantically trying to log as many kidfree work hours as possible before my brain becomes impossibly cluttered with wet bathing suits and camp lunchboxes. I love a lot about summer with kids, but I hate a lot about it too. The transition from school-year parenting to summer parenting is rarely an easy one.
This is all to say, I hope everyone’s hanging in there. I wrote about my longing for a summer of minimal effort the year Momfluenced came out, chalking this fatigue up to the quite significant effort that goes into publishing a book. But I’m pretty sure longing for LESS is not specific to selling books. I’m pretty sure a desire for rest is consistent with shepherding kids through a school year and more or less making it out in one piece.
My Summer of Minimal Effort
Recently, Virginia Sole-Smith wrote about her Big Fat Summer Plans (all of which are excellent and which you should read more about here), referencing the fact that I had declared this summer my Summer of Minimal Effort.
In the above piece, I wrote about transplanting a bunch of milkweed plants that were invading my garden beds, and I’m so delighted to share that the project is really proving itself a success this spring. My field is so happy to have the milkweed, and my catmint, lavender, hollyhocks, coral bells, and columbine are so happy to no longer be fighting for space.
Cheers to doing and trying less this summer, and cheers to ALL the flowers. Happy Tuesday from my garden (and my milkweed) to yours. Plus a link to my favorite pair of garden clogs that I wear in the garden and also everywhere else. Red shoes are the best shoes.