Life/Marriage

Posted on by noemikjames / 3 Comments

Thank you for your responses to my last post. They were incredibly validating, and helpful. After 48 hours of frosty interactions, I sent my husband an email in which I briefly and succinctly apologized for screaming, explained how shaming his attitude and actions are, and requesting a family meeting. We are supposed to have the family meeting soon, and we’ll see how it goes.

I haven’t sat down with him and asked him the hard questions many of you so helpfully posed. I do plan on having that conversation when everything else calms down a bit.

Because right now things are hectic. My husband actually stayed home yesterday and today because he has a cold. I am always intensely jealous of how easy it is for him to take a day, especially at the last minute. I was so sick just a couple of weeks ago and I had to trudge through the work days because our district doesn’t have enough subs, and it’s just really hard to have someone covering you when you actually have shit to do with your students. My husband took my son to school yesterday and then just came home because he didn’t feel good. I am so envious of that ability. Blerg. Ironically, not being there is the hardest part about being a teacher.

It’s June 6th and a week from tomorrow is our last day with the kids. This is the part of the school year when it feels like we are the last school district standing. I know that I’d rather have more days off during the year, and a shorter summer (which is what we have), but in the last weeks it’s tough. The good news is three of my classes are either totally, or partially, populated by 8th graders, and they are basically not around all of next week (enjoying fun end-of-year celebrations and preparing for promotion). I’m also taking this Friday off to host my daughter’s birthday party at our local amusement park. Woot!

I have done NOTHING to prepare to move back into my old classroom. I have so much work to do at school. Having said that, I’m happy to pack and unpack because I am SO EXCITED to get my old classroom back. When I think about it, I get tears in my eyes. God how I’ve missed having my own space. This school year has been a special level of hell, one I hope to never live through again.

In more upcoming summer news…

We still haven’t decided if my husband will be joining us in Colombia this summer. I am conflicted. On the one hand I know we will all have a lot of fun with him there, and it would be immensely helpful to have him on the beach leg of the journey. On the other hand, he doesn’t speak Spanish and I know if he’s around I’ll speak a lot less Spanish…

Also, there is something simple about being the only adult; I can make the decisions without consulting another adult, especially when it comes to parenting. My husband and I are clunky simultaneous co-parents. We each have our own comfort levels and ways of doings things and many times the other’s preferences chafe a little. I think that is especially true for me since I spend more time alone with the kids than he does, and I’m used to conducting business a certain way, as it were. I definitely believe that I am the more efficient parent. Having said that, sometimes I want to do too much, and my husband is better at recognizing an almost sure fire fail when I propose one.

There is also the price of another ticket, and the time off work to consider. He is already taking a week off to come to St. Louis, and if he came all the way to Colombia he’d probably want to be there for at least 8-10 days. I’ll be curious to see what he decides.

I want him to decide soon though, because everyone who is going to the coast needs to get the Yellow Fever Vaccine at least, and I’m making the appointment for that in a week.

We leave for St. Louis in less than three weeks and the house still needs SO MUCH WORK. If I think about it for too long I start to hyperventilate. I know it will all eventually get done, or at least enough of it will get done. Still, it stresses me out to no end. I keep reminding myself that when it’s all done, the house will look amazing, and when we come home after all this travel it will still be amazing. Usually that carries me through…

Oh, and…

Happy Birthday to my daughter! I can’t believe she is 8 today!

Uncategorized

Negated

Posted on by noemikjames / 14 Comments

My son had one of his epic meltdowns yesterday. It started at pick up and continued until bedtime. He was screaming, thrashing, insulting, threatening, throwing, and crying for two straight hours. At one point I was reheating the dinner he was refusing to eat, hoping to get a few bites in him before he went to bed, and I dropped food into the dishwasher that was full of clean dishes my husband hadn’t emptied. This was the 2nd time I had done this, and I was frustrated and I kind of lost it and slammed the dishwasher closed. My husband thought my frustration was about him not emptying the dishwasher (it had been over a day) and kind of lost it at me, at which point I yelled at him. Actually, I screamed at him. So loud. The scream was a discharge of all the rage and anger I had been absorbing for the last two hours (and the rest of the day actually). It lasted maybe three seconds, and it was unacceptable, and it negated all the patience I had shown and good choices I had made while navigating the two hour tantrum.

I’m mad at myself because screaming that loud is never acceptable, and I need to learn how to recognize I’m getting to that point and find a way to diffuse my frustration productively.

I’m mad at my husband for not stepping in to help more, and for his zero-tolerance attitude toward anger of any kind, and his refusal to recognize the part he played in what happened.

I’m mad at our continued cycles of me doing too much and him not helping enough and the resentment I end up feeling and the parts both of us play in that cycle.

Now it’s the morning and my husband and I are still not speaking to each other, and I don’t have my ballot ready for him to deliver because he did his without me and I had sub plans to write last night and by the time I was done it was late and I was tired.

I’m sad. And mad. And disappointed. In both of us, but mostly myself.

And now it’s time to start another day.

Uncategorized

Final Stretch(es)

Posted on by noemikjames / 2 Comments

My daughter has three more days of school. Her birthday is Thursday and her party is Friday.

This coming weekend we have a Girl Scout camping trip.

My last day at work is next Friday, the 15th. There are tests to review for, administer, and correct. My desk space in the science hall has to be packed up. Even my boxes in the packing container need to be re-taped (I’ve gone in there countless times this year to find things I needed).

Hopefully they will finalize my schedule for next year before summer starts.

In less than a month we leave for St. Louis, and our home needs to be ready for our first AirBnB guests by then. We also need to prepare the grandparents’ house for our cat’s visit.

In less than two months we fly to Colombia. I am working on those arrangements now.

There is so much going on, it’s easy to get paralyzed by the sheer magnitude. I try to do one thing every day, one future-focused thing, so that the list of things doesn’t feel so overwhelming.

One step at a time. I can do this. And once the summer finally comes, it will be totally worth it.

Connection/Identity/Life

Content with less connection

Posted on by noemikjames / 4 Comments

I am changing. It’s subtle, so subtle that sometimes I don’t realize it, but it’s happening all the same. I’m getting older. More mature. I’m gaining perspective. But it’s also more than that. I feel like my actual personality is changing, like who I am on some of the more fundamental levels is shifting.

This weekend my son had his first “play dates” at our house. Saturday a school friend that we recently realized lived only a couple of blocks away came for a couple of hours. Sunday morning twin boys from his school came to play.

We saw the twin boys at swimming lessons later that afternoon. Their dad always brings them, and I usually bring my kids, and we spend a lot time on the benches, chatting. He also chats with a lot of the other parents. He kind of holds court, actually, chatting it up with the regulars of our time slot, especially the ones that have kids in our kids’ age brackets (he also has an older son, who is a year younger than my daughter). I’ve seen him exchanging numbers, stories, and plans with quite a few parents during the time we spend on the swim lesson benches. I’ve also seen pictures of camping trips he’s taken with other families, and heard all about play dates that turn into play weekends, with bottles of wine opening to entertain the parents as well.

This past weekend he was shooting the shit with another father, and they were talking about how great it is to have a bunch of families in the neighborhood with kids the same age. Evidently their block in San Jose was like that, and every afternoon turned into an impromptu jamboree, with kids and parents having an absolute blast. It was hard to leave that when they moved to San Francisco, but slowly they’ve been recreating a community of like-minded parents with kids the same age, who are ready and willing to get together and party the afternoon away. And soon their best-friend family will be moving 2 blocks away and they will basically be living at each other’s houses, having the best of times.

There was a time in my life when having a ton of families on my block, or at the very least a tight-knit set of families with kids my kids’ ages was everything I ever wanted. Sometimes it felt like the only real thing I actually wanted. I wanted it more than a happy marriage, or a fulfilling job. It was, quite literally, the one thing I was sure would make me happy. I pined for that life with my entire being. Hearing stories of other people having that life, pained me in ways I couldn’t explain, or even comprehend. Jealousy and envy were only the tip of the iceberg of hurt.

I never got to have that life, and I am quite certain I never will. My block is never going to be full of families with kids the same ages as mine, and we’re never going to have a network of families like that either. And that’s okay. We have our few friends, and we’re doing okay.

And I’m totally satisfied with that. Listening to this guy talk on Sunday, I was struck by how little I was affected by his story. There was no twisting in my gut as I wondered why they got to have something I wanted so badly. There was no dredging of those feelings of isolation and loneliness that defined my early experiences of motherhood. It was just a story somebody told, that had nothing to do with me, and didn’t affect me in any way.

In fact, hearing about how their best-friend family was moving in around the block didn’t stir anything in me either. Instead, the whole situation sounded rather exhausting, and I caught myself feeling relief, and even gratitude, that there is no one in my life who expects that kind of near-constant availability from me.

I’m not sure what prompted the change, but I do feel less extroverted than I once was, less needy of other people’s company to refuel my inner-battery. I’m much more content to sit at home and read. I’m less excited for the occasional get-together that we are invited to. It is rare for me to even call a friend to get a catch up drink.

Building friendships and community used to be REALLY important to me. I wrote a lot about that here. And losing important friends in my life were incredibly traumatic and painful events. And while I do sometimes think back on those friendships wistfully, they don’t carry the weight that the once did.

I don’t know if I’ve just become jaded, after so many years of trying, and failing, to create the connections I longed for in my life. Or if I’ve changed so much that they just aren’t as important to me. Or if my kids are old enough that I actually get some of that connection from them. Maybe it’s just that the modest social network I have built for myself and my family absolutely feels like enough, even if they are not what I originally thought I needed. (I do think disengaging myself from social media has helped immensely.)

I don’t know what exactly has changed, but I appreciate that I’m more content now than I was before, that I no longer perceive a gaping hole in my life, that I’m sure will never be filled. I hope this trend continues.

Life

Special

Posted on by noemikjames / 3 Comments

I finally went for a contact fitting eye exam today. As I suspected, contacts are probably not in my future.

Turns out my astigmatism is VERY pronounced. It’s a 4. (A 4 what you ask? I have no idea, but she kept referring to that number to demonstrate the severity of the situation). Evidently if it were a 3 then maybe I could get away with the easier, cheaper, more comfortable throw away contacts, but at a 4, I need to get custom order monthly contacts, and more likely special custom order monthlies (I guess the difference is in the material). These contacts are way more expensive, and generally less comfortable. So yeah. The woman I saw says I’m a very special case, and does NOT think contacts are going to work for me. Boo.

It’s weird because as far as my actual eye sight goes, it’s not that bad. What I mean is that if I’m not wearing my glasses, I can see things relatively well. They just aren’t clear (so I wouldn’t run into anything, but I wouldn’t be able to read mu either). And yet my prescription (in one eye) requires this very thick lens to correct. My facther can’t see anything without his glasses and he can wear contacts. He can also get Rx Oakley sunglasses. I cannot get Rx Oakley sunglasses because my Rx requires very thick lenses, so thick that they can’t be cut to fit Oakley’s bent frames. I find this so odd, since the correction in vision is so much less for me. It’s frustrating.

I’m going to try the monthlies, but I don’t have a lot of hope. I am also increasingly worried that my astigmatism will just keep getting worse and that eventually it will be so severe they won’t be able to correct it to 20/20 (I was alerted of this possibility today). It worsened by a half point since just last year and I know that prescription was a lot stronger than the one prior. She says it’s really important to wear my glasses all day, every day, and I try to, but by the end of the day I can always feel them and I always want to take them off, even my ultra-light comfy pair. (My right eye sees relatively well, so if I shut my left eye I can read things with my glasses off).

So yeah, it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear, but I wasn’t surprised. And I guess the people who told me a long time ago that I wouldn’t be able to wear contacts were right; even then my astigmatism was too pronounced to be a good candidate.

I just hope my eye sight keeps steady for a while. Already I’m becoming farsighted, which is common with age, but with my astigmatism it will complicate things, as far as prescriptive correction. Blerg.

I’m so glad we have vision insurance with my husband’s work. This is my first time ever having it and I sure am taking advantage of the coverage.

Uncategorized

Change of plans

Posted on by noemikjames / 4 Comments

We are no longer traveling to Nicaragua this summer. Our new destination is Colombia.

It turns out my college roommates Freshman and Sophomore year boyfriend works at the US Embassy in Nicaragua. After exchanging a couple of emails over the state of things in the country, it was clear that unless things improved dramatically we wouldn’t be able to travel there with the kids. While I was right that we’d be fine once we got to the beach, what I hadn’t anticipated was how difficult, if not downright impossible, it would be to get there. Other spots I wanted to visit were also not accessible, all because protesters have created an intricate series of barricades around the country, which already has an underdeveloped roadway infrastructure.

Using the information my old acquaintance shared with me, I was able to convince Aéromexico to waive the change fees on my flights. It still cost me $600 to change them, even though the flights were (from what I could see online) the exact same price I had paid for my flights to Nicaragua. I am now flying in to Bogotá and out of Medellín (it was exactly the same price to do that or fly in and out of either) so at least I got that out the extra $600 price tag.

So now are plan is to spend 3ish days in Bogotá, fly to Cartegena to spend about a week at the beach on the Caribbean coast, and then fly back south to spend 3ish days in Medellín. We’re not yet sure if my husband will join us for part of the trip, but if he does he will fly in and out of Cartegena and do the beach with us.

So those are our new plans. I am just starting to look into staying at all these places in Colombia, so if you have any tips for me, please pass them along. I’d much prefer an AirBnB type situation, but I’m not sure how common those are there. I have a friend from Bogotá but she hasn’t lived there in over a decade and she isn’t sure what is available there now. She is reaching out to friends and family, which definitely helps.

I am really excited for this trip, but also weary of the price tag. We’ve already spent $600 more than I intended and I haven’t even looked into how much it will cost to stay. I have a feeling the whole two experience will be WAY more than I budgeted for, which sucks for this year, but will help me budget better for the future. If I really want to do this every summer, it’s going to cost a shit-ton of money.

We are making around $2,400 renting out our house, but after cleaning (and  (between guests – we have two different sets of guest for each of the two times were away) other “start-up” costs (new sheets and towels that will only ever be for guests) that will go down considerably. Still, it’s a welcome, if not necessary offset to the costs of traveling. Hopefully next summer we can offset the costs of travel even more.

My inlaws have agreed (begrudgingly) to take our cat. My husband will be with her at their condo for five days before he joins us in St. Louis during the first trip, so hopefully she will be okay once he leaves and they are taking care of her. She will be back there for the Colombia trip, and my husband might be with her the entire time. I really hope she is a respectful house guest so they won’t mind taking her again in the future.

So those are our new plans. Evidently there is some decent snorkeling in Colombia and my daughter is SUPER excited for that. My son is less excited (Are there sharks?!) but is downplaying his trepidation in front of his sister. We’ll be bringing our new snorkel gear to St. Louis to practice with it in my uncle’s quarry lake. Hopefully by the time we’re in Caribbean we’ll be ready to see some really cool fish!

Growing up in Hong Kong we traveled to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines a lot, and we spent most of those trips on beaches snorkeling. I am very excited to start sharing similar experiences with my kids. This is exactly the kind of thing I most looked forward to when I day dreamed of being a parent.

Of course there will also be the bugs, and the sun, and the humidity, and the unfamiliar foods, and the weird sleeping arrangements, and the sand (evidently my son now hates sand, so that should be… interesting) to contend with. I know it won’t be all shrieking at tropical fish, and I’m reminding myself of the realities every day. Hopefully the good and the challenging will balance each other out somewhat.

Uncategorized

30 minutes

Posted on by noemikjames / 5 Comments

There is so much to do to prepare the house for AirBnB guests that I am paralyzed most night by the sheer length of my to-do list. It’s hard to stop reading my book to get stuff done.

I tell myself 30 minutes. Just do one thing for 30 minutes. If I purge stuff, or write the home guide, or organize the closets, or deep clean the window sills for just 30 minutes each night, in a month I will have 14 hours of work done.

30 minutes feel manageable, and productive, so I’m starting there. I can always find 30 minutes, and I’m always thankful when I’ve spent 30 minutes tackling something on my list.

Hopefully by the time that final week comes, when I actually have 4-5 hours every day to dedicate to the house, I won’t be so overwhelmed.

Uncategorized

This, That and the Other

Posted on by noemikjames / 6 Comments

I am really struggling to show up in this space right now. The truth is, I’m struggling to do anything productive with my afternoons and evenings. All I want to do is curl up on the couch and read stuff on my phone.

I was okay doing this for a while because I knew I needed to decompress after the utter shit show that was March and early April. But it’s now been over a month since all of that and there is way too much to do for me to continue flitting away my week nights.

I’m realizing there is a lot I have to catch this space up on. A lot going on. What happens is there are usually a dozen topics I want to tackle and when I convince myself I should deep-dive into just one, I can’t choose and I end up writing nothing. This has happened many times.

I was also SUPER sick last week and passing out by 8:30pm so there’s that.

I feel myself doing it again now. Maybe listing all the things I want to write about will be a productive compromise for the conflicting voices in my head. Some of the things I hope to write more about soon are:

– My schedule at work next year, and how hard it is to have a teaching job that changes so much from year to year. Uncertainty and I are not fast friends.

– How hard it has been to get back into the habit of exercising. I took two complete months off and now working out just twice a week feels almost impossible. I’m really surprised by how much I’m struggling with this.

– The disparaging things I’ve been thinking about my body (see above topic) and how it looks and feels. It hasn’t gotten to a place of true self-loathing, but I spent a decade there and I am terrified to go back. Even when I told myself I was “better” about this stuff, a part of me knew I was only “better” because I looked “better” and the minute I stopped looking better, the shitty thoughts would resurface. I guess I know myself pretty well.

– I recognize that I REALLY need to the hard work of self-acceptance now because it’s only going to be harder to maintain the weight I want as I get older. It’s already so much harder than it used to be. If anyone has any recommendations for working on body acceptance, please send them along.

– My complicated feelings about my surgery, which I really regret having. It didn’t make anything better (still hurts when I have sex, and there is bleeding after), and it made some things worse (prolapse) and my doctor is flummoxed (she says my vagina is different and this shouldn’t be happening) and I really wish I had just left well enough alone. It’s also super disappointing to think that sex will hurt always, and forever. It’s making me cry just to write that.

– AirBNBing my house. We have people scheduled to come and about a month to get the house ready. There is A LOT of work to do.

– I’ve read some really interesting articles on the upper 10%’s inability (or refusal) to acknowledge their own privilege and what that means for the middle class that I found super interesting and would love to write more about.

– My own financial situation now, and what it might look like after we shed our child care payment in July.

– Our trip this summer. So many updates for that one.

Life/Marriage

Wait and see

Posted on by noemikjames / 18 Comments

My plans to travel to Nicaragua are imploding spectacularly. I have made so many, many mistakes that the only thing I can be sure of is that this will most certainly be a learning experience. A horribly disappointing learning experience.

I’m sure you all know about the civil unrest in Nicaragua right now. In late April there were violent riots against the president, after he announced a plan to basically dismantle the country’s social security. At least 40 people have died. The protests continue, despite the president walking back his original plan. It seems the people of Nicaragua, especially the young people, will not be appeased.

I had been taking a “wait and see” approach to the situation, as far as it concerned my travel plans. I was hoping the protests would die down after Ortega abandoned his very unpopular plan. And while there haven’t been any more protest-related deaths (that I know of), the demonstrations, and general civil unrest, continue intermittently.

Over the weekend I finally decided to change the destination on my tickets, and I picked a new place for us to visit. But after 3 hours on the phone, first with the booking site I used and then with the airline itself, I was left with the daunting realization that it would cost $1000 to change my flights, even though the new ticket prices were basically the same. Change fees x three + additional cost of new tickets is a bitch.

So now I’m not sure what to do. I can’t really afford to spend another $1000 for the flights (on top of the $1700 I already spent) and still afford to actually stay in a foreign country for two weeks. At least not without liquidating some stocks or maintaining a credit card balance until we see some of the savings we’ll get once my son stops being in day care. The other destinations I could fly to are also more expensive, so that will add up after two weeks. I am personally not sure sure I’m ready to spend $5-6K on this trip, which is much more than the $3.5K I was planning on spending. Especially since I’ll be going somewhere I’m not as interested in visiting (at least not at this particular time, in this particular way).

So… I guess I have a couple of options. I can:

(1) wait and see if the political climate in Nicaragua stabilizes, and then make a judgement call about whether or not it seems safe enough for us to travel there, which would result in us either…

… going

… or not going and leaving our tickets open to travel at a later date (this doesn’t cost as much), but that would have to happen before I BOUGHT them, which was in March, so they couldn’t be used next summer, which means we probably wouldn’t be able to use them and we’d have to eat the cost of the tickets.

(2) wait and see if the political climate deteriorates and check again about changing my tickets (evidently if I had called the week OF the riots, instead of three weeks after, they would have waived the change fees).

(3) bite the bullet and spend the $1000 to change the tickets and the additional cost of staying in a more expensive country.

So yeah, none of them are great options. It doesn’t help that it’s hard to know what things are like for tourists in Nicaragua right now. The State Department has changed the travel advisory to a level 3: reconsider travel, but that is the travel advisory for many Central American countries, including Guatemala, which I would be open to traveling to. And the state department / embassy is always going to be very cautious in their rating of the situation. We would also be in more touristy places, that are close enough to Managua so that getting there is relatively simple, but far away enough to distance ourselves from the urban area (I want to go to beaches and lakes that look pretty close on a map).

It doesn’t help that as we get closer to renting our place, my husband has made it clear that he really hates the idea of AirBnBing it. For one thing, we have our cat to consider. Before we thought he could stay at his parents’ house with the cat while I was away with the kids, and that they wouldn’t be there, but now they will be there (my SIL quit her job so she won’t be needing child care – more on this later), so that complicates things some, as they aren’t super excited about living with our cat, even for a couple weeks. We could also board the cat, which would eat into our profit but still make renting the place worth while. Finally we could let the people staying at our place take care of the cat. People do this, but I’m not sure our cat would be amenable to the situation as she is pretty much an asshole. My husband seems to think that I’m a monster for considering any of these situations. I seem to think that she is a cat, and while yes, she may be a little upset for a bit, she’ll eventually get over it.

There is clearly more about the situation he doesn’t like, but he hasn’t been able to articulate it yet. My father always hated renting out their place – for him it was a point of pride. He had lost his job during the recession in 2008, and never got another one. Renting out their house was just a reminder of why they had to make money that way – because he wasn’t making money himself. I don’t think my husband feels similarly about our financial situation (by which I mean, I don’t think he sees us AirBnBing the house as a commentary on his own failings in the earnings department). He has made a couple of statements that suggest he doesn’t like the idea of strangers in his living space, but he hasn’t come out and said it. So maybe that is it? But there is probably more.

So yeah, there is a lot going on surrounding this summer’s travel plans, and none of it is positive. I have to admit that I’m wondering if traveling like this in the summers is something I can actually manage. I wonder if it isn’t time for me to dismantle my dream of speaking, and ensuring my kids speak, really fluent Spanish, and all the shit that goes with that dream. Sometimes it just feels too hard, and I’m tired of fighting all the fights that go with it. I mean, what if the end game is I finally get where I want to be in 10 years, and then what? I can speak Spanish well for a couple decades before I die? What if my kids don’t give two shits about speaking Spanish and never use it again? I don’t know, sometimes my biggest dream feels like way more hassle than its worth.

I guess at this point, I just have to wait and see.

What would you do if you had non-refundable tickets to Nicaragua for late July / early August that cost $1000 to change?

Uncategorized

Taking Back the Afternoons

Posted on by noemikjames / 4 Comments

We recently adopted a new routine in the afternoons and evenings, and I’m so glad we did. Before everything after pick-up felt like an onslaught. Now the two hours before bedtime are much more manageable.

The first thing we do when we get home is enjoy some quiet time. My daughter is required to read for at least 20 minutes. My son can do whatever he wants as long as he does it quietly and by himself. This is when I make dinner and unpack our stuff. They used to spend this time in front of the TV or on their pads, and it was a hard week or two transitioning to the quiet time, but now they rarely complain about it anymore. Sometimes my daughter would rather do something else besides read, but she is learning that if she just gets started quickly, she’ll have time to do an art project or mess around with something else before dinner. My son sometimes requires more attention during this time than I’d like, but he’s learning how to entertain himself.

Once the kids’ dinner is ready we eat at the dinner table. I’m ashamed to say it, but before we were committing the cardinal parenting sin of letting our kids eat dinner in front of the TV. I say we, but really it was me. I was the one at home during dinner, and I was the one who let them eat it while watching TV. (I know, I know, I am positively the worst mother ever – I definitely win some kind of horrible award.)

My husband actually broke them of this habit while I was away. I must say, I was impressed, and a little scared to keep it going. But I did, and it was actually keeping them away from the TV before dinner that inspired me to implement the new “quite time when we get home” routine, so he really deserves the credit for this positive change.

So now we eat at the “back table,” (technically our dining room, but has so rarely been used for dining that we never really called it that) where we share our highs and lows (one good and bad thing that happened to us that day) and talk about other stuff. These meals are still filled with reminding kids to take bites, refereeing fights,  and requesting they please return to their seats, but at least they are at a table eating. (Sometimes my husband and I eat with them, but right now we don’t manage that consistently.)

After dinner they get 25 minutes of screen time. This can be TV or devices. Right now they are choosing TV because they are on Season 2 of Gravity Falls and loving it. When they get new games they want to spend their screen time playing them.

Before they watched at least two, sometimes three programs, or were on their devices for up to an hour. I’m very pleased that now they are spending less time in front of a screen.

After screen time we try to get them to spend five minutes picking up. We aren’t great about implementing this, and our son still needs one-on-one attention if he’s actually going to put anything away, but we want to keep trying. My husband and I both suck at cleaning up, but we want to get better as a family. Next it’s PJs, brushing teeth, and bedtime. This is where everything usually unravels – where it has always unraveled – but with the new routine the unraveling is much less stressful.

I should also mention that after over two months of not working out, I’m starting to re-incorporate exercise into my evenings. I am not at all sure how I will manage to get one workout in a week (that is my current goal), but I’m hoping to figure it out without adding more screen time. We shall see.

I know this is not much to write about – most families probably already have a routine like this – but it really has made a positive change in our lives and I’m proud of us for sticking to it. I look forward to maintaining this routine over the summer and into the next school year.