the roamer writes

October 4th-10th, 2026

I’m currently on maternity leave, but one thing I’ve always done at work is write down a “weekly recap” of sorts for my team. An “in case you missed it” for someone who was out on PTO that week, or an archive for us to search just in case that one edge case or odd question ever comes up again (spoiler alert: it always does, and you’re always 99% sure you remember the answer, but you always really wish you had that paper trail to confirm). 

In the age of outsourcing everything we do to AI, this probably should have been one of the first things I offloaded. Instead, I took a different approach and leaned into any task at work that required me to write. I did my best to capture everything that happened each week in my wittiest commentary, with my funniest jokes (I thought), hoping that it would make the mundane ever so slightly more bearable to read through. At the very least, it made it more enjoyable to write. 

I see so many parallels all the time between my work and my personal life. At work, I manage a small team. At home, I manage a household that’s about the same size, if you include all of our pets. At work, we need this weekly recap because so much happens each week that it’s almost like your brain receives a clean slate every Monday, and you can scarcely remember what happened the week before. At home, in motherhood, there’s such a strange memory fog that occurs as you live each day, where you feel so in it, so present, but then when you try to remember something funny one of your kids said, even hours later, somehow it’s gone.

Each day is filled with such detail that it becomes impossible to capture all of them, even though I’ve tried writing in a daily journal as diligently as I possibly can. And it’s heartbreaking because I want so desperately to cement all of it in my memory so that one day when my kids are grown up, I can play it all back in my head. 

It’s also hard for me, personally, to rest and enjoy seasons of slowness, of the mundane, normal things that make up a happy life, like daily walks in our neighborhood. I love these things, and yet I’m also always planning the next adventure in my head. I want to soak it all in and have the laziest days without a care in the world, and also there’s no time to waste — I have to take my kids to Arches today so they can see Balanced Rock before it topples over. 

So, in conjunction with weekly travel-centric articles, I am planning to write a “this week in review” recap, mostly for myself to look back on someday and remember all of those tiny little things that made up such a big part of my day for such a short time, but also for anyone else who needs that reminder that these tiny little moments make up so much more of our life than the big adventures, and that we’re packing so much more “living” into these normal, mundane weeks than we think.

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This week’s theme was walking. Lots of walking. At least one kid in the stroller. Last week, it rained, and rain is not good for my mental health. I enjoy a good light rain or drizzle. I was raised in the Pacific Northwest. Here, it rains hard, but it’s still warm right now, so you end up stuck in a weird conundrum where it’s much to hot for a rain jacket, but not sensible to go out without one. And if you’re familiar with people from the Pacific Northwest, we have some weird thing where we never use umbrellas. There was a running joke we’d use, that you could spot a tourist in a crowd in Portland because they were the only one with an umbrella. 

We purchased two umbrellas last week and put one in the car and one in the stroller. Somehow, we still ended up in a situation where we didn’t have an umbrella when we needed one. Then, my son and I walked to my daughter’s school to pick her up. We had both umbrellas — I held one and he held the other as we both walked. He’s two-and-a-half, thinks he’s five-and-a-half like his sister, and yet, with all his advanced prowess, I could not have foreseen how slow he would walk while carrying an umbrella. We were nearly late to school, so I ended up folding one umbrella up and carrying him on one hip, umbrella in my other hand. Compared to the newborn, who, thankfully, we’d left at home with daddy for this particular adventure, he felt so heavy. I was momentarily inspired by this chance to complete a really challenging task, but ended up having to set him down a few times so he could walk, realizing how slow the pace was, and repeating the process again. I’m not sure how many times umbrellas were opened, then put away, and then opened again. 

Back to this week, there was no rain in the forecast, and putting the baby in the stroller seems to be the only way I can get her to sleep well during the day without residing in my arms. We took the stroller to school drop-off every morning, with the baby in the top seat, the two year old in the bottom seat, and five year old on the riding board. A recent purchase, the riding board has become the most coveted seat in the whole stroller. We’ve come to an agreement that my daughter gets to ride on it until we get to school. Once we drop her off, my son gets his turn. The baby, thankfully, is content in her space and we have at least a year before we have to add her to the riding board rotation.

(She heard me talking about her telepathically and is now stirring on the couch — I’m proud to say that by baby #3 I am finally used to doing what I want to do in short stretches, sometimes as little as five minutes, before I’m needed again).

On Mondays, we stop by the local bakery and load up on fresh bread and day-old pastries. This week, my daughter asked if we could go before school, because she found out we’d been going on the way home after we dropped her off. The school crossing-guard, who always has a spare piece of candy for each of the kids, was outmatched by giant chocolate croissants. 

After drop-off, my son asks to go on a “neighborhood walk” to enjoy his time on the riding board. We’ve been enjoying looking at the Halloween decorations in our neighborhood. Some of our neighbors go all-out for Halloween, and we’ve seen a lot of really creative homemade decorations too — including a skeleton made entirely from recycled milk cartons. Every time he spots a new pumpkin, skeleton, or ghost, we walk over and take a closer look, and then he says, “Let’s go see more Halloween things” and we keep walking. 

One afternoon, I successfully got both the two year old and the baby to fall asleep on a walk. My son fell asleep sitting up, turned around in his seat so he could better scope out Halloween decorations, his head lolling back and forth from one side to another. He’d been starting to fall asleep for awhile, so when I finally stopped the stroller and turned him around so he was sitting properly, and reclined his seat, he woke up for a moment, looked at his surroundings, eyes blinking, and said, “Where are we? What street is this?” before falling back asleep.

I also took the time to scope out a new neighborhood we’re interested in living in. I made note of some positive political signs I saw in the area — “climate voter”, for instance (and shouldn’t we all be climate voters?). My husband pointed out that this is the best time of the year to be scoping out neighborhoods — voting season! 

There is some rain in the forecast next week so I’m glad I prioritized the extra outdoor time. We’ve also moved into a very small apartment, and I’m sensing that winter will feel cramped a lot of the time, so any amount of time we can spend outdoors is a win.

The kids spent some time on our back deck this week, embarking on a painting project. We’ve been trying to get our son to poop in the potty — he likes to poop, but not tell us, and once the smell gets around or we notice his diaper looks full, it’s quite the undertaking to get him clean again — so to motivate him, I said he could pick out a toy if he pooped in the potty. Then, when we went into the store and I said this was his special thing, my daughter burst into tears, so we all went in. 

The kids re-emerged, victorious, with matching dinosaur and unicorn ceramic statues to paint. In an effort to remain gender-neutral, I suggested that they trade so they each had two unicorns and two dinosaurs, but this became quite the debate, so they ended up keeping their original sets. My daughter meticulously painted one of her unicorns, and my son painted three out of his four dinosaurs, mixing all of his paint colors together and also painting his entire stomach along the way. 

TV has re-emerged in our household after a summer of (mostly) no TV. The kids have enjoyed being able to watch their beloved PBS Kids shows in the morning before school, and I have enjoyed snapping photos of them cuddling their baby sister while they watch tv. This has been the only time I’ve been able to let them hold her and comfortably step a few feet away to snap a photo. They adore her, but also both want to have their turn holding her right now, so we have to carefully manage it.

When they are alone with the baby and can each have their time, they are amazingly gentle and calm. My daughter, being a bit older, is able to hold the baby while I use the bathroom or get a cup of coffee, if her brother isn’t nearby. When it’s my son’s turn to hold the baby, we do have to remind him to have some awareness of his body and the fact that he is much bigger than her and tends to move a little too quickly, but I will never get tired of him lightly stroking her cheek and whispering, “You are my precious baby.”

I tell him that he is my precious baby too, and he tells me, “I’m not a baby, I’m a kid!” And it’s true — now that I have a newborn baby in my arms most of the day, I realize how big he is now, how somehow he is no longer a baby or even a toddler. I had more time with my daughter before we had another baby. I still remember mourning our time together, but she was three-and-a-half when he was born and I was really excited for her to have a companion, a playmate. With this third addition, it’s been so heartwarming to see how much both of the kids love her, but I’m also struggling with the times that they need me and I can’t be with them or focus my attention solely on them because I have to feed the baby or I’m holding the baby and can only give them one hand or one arm. 

When we do bedtime, we lay with the kids until they fall asleep, one on each arm. My daughter asked what I was going to do when the baby was born because I only have two arms. I told her that, eventually, the baby could lay on my chest and they could each have one arm. My daughter really wants us to have one more baby, and I suppose I still have two legs that can be snuggled, but it is so hard to decide to be done, to know for sure that our family is complete. We are contemplating that completeness, but I’m not ready to close the door completely. In a challenging moment, I will say we’re done, and then the baby will do something adorable and I’ll say, “I think I can get one more in.”

We’re off to paint pumpkins with my parents, and my family is waiting for me, so I’ll close out this first weekly recap — if something doesn’t make me stop, I’ll just keep writing. See you all on Monday!