Six and a half hours
It’s no secret that I’ve been struggling this summer. Some days are better than others. It’s been a year since I started taking antidepressants and I alternate between thinking they’re the best thing in the world and wondering if they’re working at all.
I’m a severely introverted mother and wife who desperately needs daily time away from her family, and I’m not getting enough of it these days. Even though it makes sense on paper (or in pixels, in this blog window), it still feels shameful.
School starts in one week for our oldest, and the week after for our youngest. I can’t wait. I seriously CANNOT wait. (Again, more guilt.)
I feel like we’ve been on top of each other all summer and I can’t breathe. Ever. Whenever I do manage to get a bit of time in my office, my back tenses up when I hear footsteps coming towards the door. The sound of the doorknob turning instantly fills me with frustration, no matter who it is or what they want.
I was interrupted twice in the three minutes I took to get dressed this morning. (“Whatcha doin’ Mom?” “What are you doing, Mummy?”) and I had to bite back screams. “Just getting dressed,” I replied. I could hear the tightness in my voice. Both times, they started to say something else and I had to cut them off with “I’ll just be a minute. Please.” I couldn’t listen. I couldn’t.
I’m dreaming of the time I’ll have alone, all alone in this house, to work and think and write and breathe.
It’s not a lot of time, of course. Precisely two hours and 10 minutes, three days a week. Six and a half hours a week. It sounds like a lot when you think of it as six and a half hours, doesn’t it? That’s almost one entire workday in my old life, if you consider taking time for lunch.
I fantasize regularly about freezing time. Moving around the house, completely alone, and picking up the piles of crap accumulating on the stairs. Tackling the disastrous utility room. Sorting through the junk that piles up on the floor of my office/studio. Doing all of the little annoying tasks that there is never time to do these days — tasks that would make me feel so much better. Tasks I’d even enjoy doing if I was listening to a podcast and not stopping every two seconds to deal with someone.
I need summer to be over. I need more moments when I’m not listening to squabbles or Netflix or yells for me to check a wiping job (shudder) or lay out clothes or hand out snacks. I need more moments to work without my heart pounding too quickly, trying to get an inhuman amount done in 30 minutes.
Most of all, I need to ignore the guilt that clogs my throat every time I think about how much I just want to be alone.
How we spent our summer vacation
Some days it feels like I haven’t done anything this summer except yell at the kids to turn down the iPad and that I’d be working “just 10 more minutes.” Like I’ve made dozens of pots of sloshy Kraft Dinner (I always screw up and add too much milk) and even more peanut butter sandwiches on leftover hotdog buns because I didn’t feel like going out to buy bread.
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Everywhere I look, I see families that are “doing summer” better than me. Families who have weeks of vacation and weekends off together, perfect for setting out on road trips and beach adventures. Summer stresses me out because I’m not a sun person or a beach person or even an outdoorsy person. I feel like a quality summer is measured by picture-perfect, sandy-footed beach visits and therefore I always fail.
I see all of this on Facebook, by the way, when I’m on deadline and cranky and the Spongebob Squarepants theme song is echoing in my brain (“Absorbant and yellow and porous is he!”). As I’ve said before, working from home is both the best thing in the world and the worst thing in the world — and it leans towards “worst” during the summer months.
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I’d been planning to send the kids to morning day camp several days a week so I could work without feeling guilty about ignoring them. They must have sensed that camp attendance would be the perfect trifecta of convenient, affordable, and good for Mommy’s mental health: they declined the offer.
I did send them sometimes and they had fun (of course), but other mornings they insisted on staying home. They stayed in their pyjamas until the afternoon, wriggling on the couch in a tangled-up pile until one of them started crying. Sometimes they drove me insane with squabbling and tattling and other times they played very nicely together — organizing pretend weddings and building bionic rabbits out of Lego.
“Only boring people get bored,” I’d tell them when they asked if it was time for a show. I let them be bored and I never regretted it, because they always ended up making crafts and forts and inventing games and teaching themselves magic tricks. The house has been way messier than usual, but I like to think of it as a character-building mess.
We didn’t go to a cottage like just about everybody else on our street, but we flew to Ontario and spent a week at my dad and stepmom’s — swimming two or three times a day. We went on two camping trips with friends — making s’mores, zooming down slip’n’slides and trick-or-treating around the campground. The kids spent a few weekends in Halifax with my mom, gleefully riding the ferry and exploring downtown and even going to the beach.
Even though we decided not to sign up for any summer sports, we did get a membership to our local pool and went for a swim whenever we felt like it. We went to a zoo, got scared silly in a “kid-friendly” (totally not kid-friendly) haunted walk through the woods, and marched in our town’s first Pride parade. We went to playgrounds and splashpads and out for ice cream.
We stayed home a lot, sure. But we played washer toss on the set we bought at the campground earlier in August. We dragged home a new-to-us playset and gave it a makeover, and now we can’t imagine our yard without it — fights over the swings and all. We hung out with neighbours and missed them when they were away (see above, RE: everyone but us has a cottage). We ate pizza and watched movies together most Friday nights.
Even though it sometimes feels like our summer paled in comparison to everyone else’s sun-kissed, Instagram-filtered adventures, it was a good summer. There was a little of everything, including boredom, and it’s left us all feeling very ready for the start of a new school year. Especially me, who may not survive another episode of Spongebob Squarepants.
Two ways to DIY a rug
I started rug-shopping for our living room recently and realized that a rug is something I’ve never bought before. Bathmats and little welcome mats are cheap and easy to pick up, but a rug — a huge area rug that’s going to pull together an entire room — is an investment. So when I say “rug-shopping,” I really mean going online, fainting at the prices and bemoaning that we’ll be rug-less forever.
I’m really intrigued by the idea of making a huge rug out of a drop cloth, so that may get added to the project list (that ever-growing Google Keep list on my phone). For now, though, I tried making two different rugs using fabric.
I started out easy, testing a method where you needed nothing at all but about a metre of fabric and a sewing machine. I chose a fresh, fun white and yellow chevron print from Atlantic Fabrics’ home decor section, prewashed and dried it, just in case, and spread it out on the carpet in our family room.
I’d bought exactly twice the size I wanted the finished rug to be, so I just folded it in half, right sides together, and pinned all the way around …
Continue reading in my weekly DIY column, My Handmade Home
Today’s the day
We bring Annabelle home today.
And I’m kind of freaking out.
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| The kids are oblivious. And weird. |
I admit it. I got a bit psycho today about the MESSY state of the kids’ rooms. I haven’t been… https://t.co/yRLgvqZIdP— Heather Laura Clarke (@HFXHeather) August 25, 2016
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I don’t think the kids’ rooms have EVER been this clean.
(And let’s not talk about the foul mess I discovered under C’s bed, let alone the FLOUR I had to vacuum out of her carpet because she ripped apart one of those squishy balloon stress balls and then attempted to hide the evidence.)
I stopped the cleaning frenzy yesterday, realizing that the house is never going to STAY this perfectly clean. Annabelle is not just coming for the weekend — she’s moving IN with us.
I’m nervous, but I’m also excited. I’m worried about how everyone will adjust, but I’m also strangely calm in the knowledge that we love each other already.
Here we go!
How to save money (and your sanity) at a fair
Ten and a half hours. That’s how long we stayed at our provincial exhibition the other day. TEN AND A HALF HOURS. STRAIGHT.
And you know what? It was pretty great.
Even though we stayed the longest we’ve EVER stayed (I think our previous record was nine straight hours), it went smoothly thanks to a few key things …
Bring cash. So much cash.
(Wait, Heather, didn’t you say something about saving money?) It doesn’t mean you’re going to spend all of it — God no. But we’ve learned the hard way that if you don’t bring enough money, you’re going to need to pay a gazillion dollars in fees at those shady banking machines under a circus tent. They’ll charge you $3 or $4 and then your bank will likely turn around and double it, taking their cut.
Dress carefully.
Socks and sneakers for EVERYONE, people, and yes — I know they’re kind of dweeby because wouldn’t cute sandals also be comfortable? NO. Nothing is more comfortable than socks and sneakers when you’re on your feet for a million hours. We all wore baseball caps (matching, ’cause we’re cool) and Darling Husband and I wore sunglasses. We were all sunscreened, of course, and I tossed the bottle in my bag in case we needed to reapply. Which brings me to my next point …
Pack smart.
Darling Husband and I each carried a backpack but we were *really* careful not to overload them. Our backs are going to ache regardless at the end of a longgggg day at the Exhibition.
He packed granola bars, Goldfish crackers, and a bunch of small water bottles that we could toss when they were empty (less to carry). I packed sunscreen, my wallet, honey-roasted peanuts, lipstick, a notebook and pen (which I never ended up using, see below), phone charger (sadly never found a place to use that either) and earbuds.
We didn’t bring sweatshirts or jackets because it’s been crazy-hot lately, but we probably should have. It got a little chilly around 8 p.m., but it wasn’t too bad.
Make it a marathon.
We paid entrance fees ($8 each for adults, $4 for D, and C was free) but the big expense is really the ride bracelets. They’re $26 each at our exhibition, so we always designate one day as “ride day.” (Sometimes we’ll go to the Exhibition other days, to look around, but the kids know they only go on rides on ONE SUPER AWESOME DAY).
We certainly got our money’s worth this year, though. The rides opened at noon and the kids rode pretty much nonstop until we left at 10 p.m. That’s like eight cents a minute for giving them the time of their lives, if my math is correct (… it like is not).
We also shelled out an additional $20 for tickets so the two of us could join them on a few “grown-up” rides (two runs on the Tilt-a-Whirl, once on the Ferris Wheel and once on the Swizzler). Tickets, in my opinion, are a huge rip-off unless you only want to go on one or two rides. But it was worth it so the kids could experience the really cool rides.
Take breaks — both physical and mental ones!
Kids? Ha! Ours were so high on sugar and adrenaline that they couldn’t care less about sitting down. I’m talking about grown-ups here. If you’re going to make it an insanely long day, that’s hard. It’s a lot of standing around in front of the Go-Gater and the Conway Run, arms crossed, nodding and smiling as your kid passes you for the zillionth loop.
For Darling Husband, taking mental breaks meant walking over to the arena and seeing what kind of show was happening, checking out the planing demonstration, or ambling over to look at the John Deere display. Or the truck display. Or the other truck display.
My mental break? Did not involve any of that stuff. I wore earbuds and listened to podcasts, zoning out while the kids ran through the funhouse for the millionth time. A few times I left them with Darling Husband and went to sit down in the grass and close my eyes for a few minutes (sunglasses hide everything) so I could listen in peace. It helped all of the ride-watching seem FAR less tedious.
Avoid the games.
It goes without saying, but those things are a joke. I didn’t see a single person walking around with those giant emoji pillows the kids wanted, and I told them (very firmly) that we were not playing those games because no one wins. They seemed to accept that and focused on the rides.(But also I would have really liked a poo emoji pillow?)
Eat as a treat.
Fair food is amazing, obviously, but it’s also $$$$ and not at all healthy. We packed granola bars, nuts and Goldfish crackers to eat as little snacks here and there. We drank the water we packed when we were thirsty. We could have brought a cooler bag full of lunch and dinner, if we had wanted, but fair food is FUN and it’s a once-a-year thing, right?
So we bought lunch and dinner but were careful not to overbuy — the kids were too excited to eat much — so we weren’t left with a ton of cold, uneaten fries and chicken fingers. We split a cotton candy and a (very, very sticky) candy apple while we watched a horse show, and picked up a few more candy apples to take home at the end of the night. We ate those the next day, so it stretched out our enjoyment. Mmmm, candy apples for breakfast.
We had a great day and even though certainly isn’t a CHEAP day, it was less expensive than it could have been. We were all comfortable and relatively sane, even when we left, which is really saying something.
What’s your favourite family-at-the-fair tip?
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