Not a Wasted Word

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the things I took out of my bedroom for the AirBnB photo shoot was an ever growing pile of my kids’ artwork. I’ve been meaning to display it in some way around the house but hadn’t determined how best to do that.

Reveling in the empty space where that pile once lived, I told myself it was time to hang the art, or throw it away. I’m glad I chose the former.

This is now the wall of our dining room:

Also this:

It adds so much color to the room, and the kids love seeing their art on the walls. A definite success.

There are seven weeks until summer break. At my daughter’s school, we’re wrapping up the carnival and book fair, and there are only a few more PTA events left. We start standardized testing at my school soon, but that doesn’t affect me much. My daughter’s birthday is the last week of my school year, and I’m actually taking a day off to have her party on a Friday (they get out that Wednesday). Mostly, I’m looking ahead to summer.

I finally got our house listed on AirBnB for the Nicaragua trip, WAAAY later than I had intended. I need to check on dates with my husband for St. Louis. Most of the paper work for that is done with the city too. It took me SO LONG to get all the pictures because each room required SIGNIFICANT work to get it camera ready. I was taking note of how MUCH needed to come out before I felt it looked appropriate. If I don’t want to be hauling multiple Costco bags of stuff from each room to my in-laws garage before we rent it, I’m going to need to get rid of A LOT of shit. But that is part of why I want to do this. I need the impetus to really rid our house of a lot of stuff, and making money is definitely a powerful impetus for me. 😉

I really need to figure out what my plans are for Nicaragua. You’d think that looking into all that would make me really excited, but I get so anxious every time I think about it, I usually end up distracting myself with my phone until I’ve convinced myself it can wait. I hope that once I actually know where we’re going, and have reservations set up, I’ll be more excited.

I’m looking toward the summer a lot right now, mostly because the present has not been a super pleasant place. My son is testing my patience to the limit right now – everything is negative and he is constantly melting down in dramatic, and sustained, fashion. Sometimes his tantrums last, literally, hours. Being with him is incredibly exhausting.

His behavior is not helping things between my husband and I, which have been tense since I came back almost two weeks ago. I’m not quite sure what my husband’s problem is – actually I believe it’s a combination of many things – but I’m increasingly disinclined to care. His latest complaint was surrounding the state of the house, which we (mostly I) spent most of Sunday tidying. If his mood doesn’t improve this week I might entirely disengage.

I’m thinking a lot about the next school year because… I love dwelling anywhere but the present!

There is a lot to think about. Some things changing, some staying the same. Here is what is swirling around my head, in no specific order:

– Daughter is staying at her current school, though we may put in for a transfer during the lottery (if some significant changes aren’t made).

– Son will be at a TK near daughter’s school, though I haven’t gotten the final confirmation we secured a spot in aftercare yet.

– Due to a 5 minute change in my first school’s start time, I can no longer have 1st period prep next year. We still haven’t determined how we’re going to structure drop off, but this adds a significant amount of stress to the equation (we can make it work but it will be harder for all involved).

– I will have my classroom back! (Woot!)

– I will still be traveling to the other campus. (Boo.) This is their plan in perpetuity, not a short term fix.

– I don’t yet know what my final class will be. I dislike this uncertainty and it probably won’t be resolved for a while.

– I am staying on as PTA President. We have a strong board and the only woman who is terming out is the one who basically stopped participating earlier this year. I believe things will be easier next year because we already know what we are doing and I want to continue the progress we have been making. I also want to be involved with the creation of the Beacon at the school next year (a significant amount of money will be coming in to create community support programs at the school).

– My in-laws will most likely (the refuse to confirm this but I would bet my savings on its certainty) be living in Texas to provide child care to my SIL. This no longer stresses me out much because we’ve survive a really stressful year without them, and I know we can do it again. Also…

– My mom will finally be retired! Woot!

So yeah. Lots to think about. Only 7 more weeks until summer break. And them all of the above.