October 11-15th
Happy Friday, my friends! I’m hoping to get this out on Friday mornings going forward (fingers crossed), but holding onto a schedule with a one-month-old is not for the faint of heart! We’ll see how I do.
This week started off with a heavy dose of ambition. My husband decided to try this new meal prepping idea. Well, I found it, and then asked if he’d be willing to try it out. The idea is to spend several hours prepping all of your meals for the week so you don’t have to spend a bunch of time cooking dinner every night! Thank you to the bare minimum for the amazing life hack — it’s like when I would house-sit in college, except the food is actually good and isn’t just bland rice, chicken and broccoli — I’m frowning at you, gym/diet culture of the 2010s. Spoiler alert: the meals were amazing and we will be doing this again next week!
My daughter has swim practice early on Sunday mornings — 8am — so, to add to the cooking ambition, I decided I was going to take all 3 kids to swim practice by myself, then take them to my parents’ for brunch after. We’ve made this into a little Sunday morning ritual. The kids get to spend some time with their friends in my parents’ neighborhood who we met this summer when we lived with my parents (again) in between moves. We get to eat some delicious food and give my parents a chance to fight over baby snuggles for a few hours.
The swim practice couldn’t have gone better. My son found some friends to play with for the entire hour, the baby slept for almost the entire hour, and my daughter got herself dressed after swimming for the first time. We made it to my parents’ house just as the baby started fussing. Our neighbor friends were sick, so we had a little more Gigi & PoPo time than maybe they bargained for, but the kids had fun playing in the sand by the garden and doing some crafts on the deck. My son made me a sand cake in a bucket, complete with a candle, handed it to me and said, “Come to my birthday party, be my special guest” which is from his very favorite podcast episode “The Lone Dragon”. He’s listened to it at least two dozen times, maybe more.
Despite the weather being nice and sunny, my daughter said she was cold and asked to borrow one of my mom’s sweatshirts. This brought back some memories of my brother and I asking to wear “momma shirts” to bed at night. We’d even ask my mom to sleep in them first so they smelled like her. Now it was a full-circle moment!
Well, my daughter came out wearing a crewneck sweatshirt that said “Merry Christmas Ya Filthy Animal”. Momma shirts sure have a different vibe these days!
We got home around 1pm, most of the cooking was done, and the two youngest kids had a decent-ish nap in the car. It’s always overwhelming to do things on my own when I’m in the postpartum period, so I felt triumphant to have had such a spectacularly calm and chill day, with the help of my parents, of course!
We ate out that evening, because there’s just something about cooking all day that makes you not want to eat anything you just cooked and I knew this was how my husband was going to feel, so I suggested it. And it turned out to be a good thing we were armed with our pre-cooked meals, because, after a few weeks of hot lunch at school which she had requested (much to my dismay, my mom made our lunches through high school and I was ready and excited to be that kind of mom for my kids), my daughter decided she was done with hot lunch and ready for “home lunch” again!
My husband loved hot lunch as a kid, so he said, “You win this round.”
He did not prep every single meal, so we ran into a few roadblocks the next morning when he was attempting to make homemade yogurt parfaits, complete with some tasty chopped and cooked apples, and this was unsurprisingly difficult with two kids riding a bike and a scooter in the house and a baby crying at full volume, but the parfaits got made and they were divine.
We forgot that my daughter had an after-school activity this week, so we ended up on another lovely Halloween decoration sightseeing adventure — in some surprising 80-degree weather! We circled back to our house and picked up my husband who, begrudgingly, joined us on a hot and sweaty walk to pick up trash at our local park. Someone took the trash bin a few weeks ago and it hasn’t returned, and our kids have started playing with and collecting the trash. Last week, my daughter came over to show me what looked like the leg of a small animal and, while not human-made trash, that was too much for me.
We’ve been enjoying our brand new stroller and newly purchased riding board, but a crucial (and literal) piece of the puzzle was revealed this week. A few weeks ago, our stroller broke. One of the metal pieces of the frame had broken this summer and I had duct taped it back into place. The tape stopped holding and we sent an email to the company asking them if they sold replacement parts for the frame. To our absolute shock, they sent us a brand new $400 frame for free. When they emailed back, they made sure to say, “Please don’t use your stroller until your new frame gets here.”
The next day, while using the stroller like we weren’t supposed to, it quite literally broke in half and my son flew out of it backwards. Thankfully, the baby was not in it — she was at home with me — and my son was still contained in the seat when the stroller came apart at the seams, so his landing was padded. He didn’t feel that way, though, and immediately sprinted the rest of the way home, ran inside and told me, “Daddy broke the stroller and I fell and I hit my head on the concrete.”
This week, my husband was cleaning out some things that had been in the bottom of the old stroller frame and found a bag of replacement parts. “Hey look,” he says to me. “These must be those parts that were supposed to go on the stroller, you know, where it broke…because of that recall. But I must have forgotten to put them on!”
Since we are now in “Kevin roast” mode, as we say when we’re hanging out with my parents, I’ll go ahead and introduce you to the Great Recycling Battle. It’s Kevin’s job to take out the recycling, but there comes a point where we reach a stalemate every so often, and even if the cabinet is overflowing I’ll never give in. Especially in this season when I’m caring for a newborn, sorry babe!
To close out the Kevin roast, I can’t end this week’s recap without mentioning that it was a rough week for dinnerware in our household. The tile on our kitchen floor didn’t fare too well either. Our son is learning about the fragility of our bowls and plates and his own strength and power, in parallel. This week, we lost two bowls, one plate, and our french press of more than a decade (before it lived with us, it was my brother’s!). We have been letting the kids put their own dishes in the sink, and we let them use real plates and bowls, so this is to be expected, but the french press was a heavy loss. I was feeding the baby and couldn’t get to it fast enough.
I had forgotten about the french press incident until later, when I went to switch the laundry, and found an impressive amount of coffee grounds in the washer and on all of the clothing that was supposed to be clean. I walked upstairs and said something like, “It’s astonishing how badly you can mess something up.” I had to clean out the washer and dryer (because of course I’d started switching it to the dryer before I noticed all of the coffee grounds) and re-wash the load, after shaking out every piece of clothing individually.
Well, Kevin, if you’re reading this — I remembered that one of the kids had “helped” clean up the mess, so it wasn’t you who let all of the coffee grounds get into the dirty laundry. Let the record show that I’m absolving you this public forum.
Thanks for reading the roamer writes! This post is public so feel free to share it.
As I work on finishing this, I’m torn between continuing to write, to look through the photos on my camera roll and the little notes I jotted down this week, out of the fear of not capturing every single little detail, or missing out on all the little details happening in this moment right now. My family is sitting on the couch having “movie night” as I sit at the dining table, which is conveniently less than six feet from the couch in this cozy little apartment of ours. Our Friday night movie tradition has morphed into a “rainy afternoon movie night”, but we’re all loving it. Eating a delicious pot roast that we didn’t have to cook, and having some candy after. Even the baby has been watching in between crying and feedings.
The baby and I have been waking up between 6 and 6:30, a little before the kids, so I get to (usually) be calm and cozy on the couch when either my son or both of them open the door and run out of their room at full speed. The other morning, my daughter told me, “Daddy read us the article you wrote.”
So now the pressure is on to get these out each week so they can be integrated into the bedtime rituals! Kids (a little nod to How I Met Your Mother), if you’re listening to your daddy read this, I love you all the way to the death star and back!
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