Oh look, Baby Harry is teaching swim lessons:
We had our second day in a row of 90+ temperatures, our 9th day this year (boo hiss), so the kids and I tried again to bake cookies in the car.
This is after 6 hours of baking in the sun: SAD TROMBONE. Luckily, I am sure next year it will be even hotter, and we will try again (maybe next week even).
Honestly, though, summer is stressful, even with the addition of another driver (which, actually, really does lessen the load). I think the real problem is that I have NO MARGIN. I teach on Monday and Tuesday morning, and then I have to rush home immediately so Ben can go to work or at least take calls from home and it's a lot. The other days I am home and free (except for asynchronous online course things, but I have been juggling those for a decade and am so used to it). And Ben! Just, like, accepts in-person meeting invites willy-nilly, doesn’t put things like all day seminars that randomly take him to campus on odd days on our shared calendar, and casually told me yesterday that he will need to go to work on a day we had previously scheduled as mine ALL SEMESTER, and it’s not like he checked to see if I have commitments that day (which I don’t— it’s totally fine). I like being the person everyone can count on, do not get me wrong. I literally planned my life around being a mostly at-home parent because it’s really what I want, and I also LOVE keeping my foot in the academic door. But damn! I need some wider margins. You know?
It doesn’t help that my entire life in the summer is putting sunscreen on angry, squirming people who would prefer to just set their skin on fire, taking those people places, unpacking the bags they took with them washing their wet stuff and their water bottles, and then packing up new stuff to go back out the door. Also cleaning pee off the boys’ bathroom floor, nagging people to eat before they go to tennis so they don’t hulk out from hanger, and being a pop-up referee whenever fights emerge. THIS IS WHY I GOT A PhD??
We adopted the German way of peeing because I’d had it with cleaning up pee everywhere.
ReplyDeletehttps://berlinerisch.com/blog/2016/03/07/sitzpinkeln-germanys-dark-secret/
Margins are so, so important to me and yet it's SO HARD TO not have all the margin fill in.
ReplyDeleteI feel your pain and hope you find some ways to tweak your schedule to make things a bit less daunting? White space tends to make life much more enjoyable.
Also, the pictures of Minnie are, as always, adorable. And sometimes kids are at their absolute sweetest when they're grumpy (unless I'm overtired because in that case it is literally the end of the world).