Not a Wasted Word

We’re coming up on the end of our first trip of the summer. We have three more nights and 2.5 more days in St. Louis. The farm was incredible and I want to write more about what a special experience it is. The location is magic. The people are amazing. Everyone gets along. Everyone has fun. Our kids are old enough and have been enough that we have to do minimal parenting and get to enjoy the other adults who are doing minimal parenting as well. (We of course also help out the adults who are in the thick of it parenting smaller kids during a very intense weekend).

I take a ton of pictures because one of my roles is the “maker of the book.” Every year I put together a photo book and print copies for all the families. I take literally thousands of photos during the weekend, and everyone sends me their best shots, and then I sort through them and put them into a digital photo book. It’s a lot of work but I love making it, and I love knowing it will help the kids remember how amazing the weekend is every year.

We’re only at the farm for four days and three nights, so the rest our trip we’re in St. Louis. We spend some of that time with the same cousins we see at the farm, and other parts of it with cousins on my mom’s side. This year it’s not really working out for us to see the cousins on my mom’s side, which is fine because the cousins we’re closest with – who live in South Carolina and come to town for the farm too – are around the whole time we are.

We’ve been here so many times that we don’t really have anything we’re clamoring to do over the next few days. Tomorrow we may just hang out at my aunt’s and play with the cousins. Friday we want to see the new Thor movie. Saturday we are seeing a cousin on my mom’s side and we may go swimming but then we’d have to pack wet suits on our way home. We swam so much at the farm that my kids might not want to swim again. (Usually we swim a lot in St. Louis because it’s just too cold to swim much in San Francisco.)

It’s been a really great trip, but it’s also a lot to feel pressure to socialize constantly. We’re here mostly to see family so we try to do everything with someone else. I’m hoping our trip to London, where we have way fewer people to see, will be a little less intense.

My husband arrived Thursday night and he’s leaving Tuesday, so yesterday was his only full day in the St. Louis area. He’s been to St. Louis many times and done a lot of the cool touristy stuff with us already. Yesterday was also quite hot so we wanted to do something inside. In the end we settled on Meramec Caverns, which is about an hour outside St. Louis.

I went to Meramec Caverns as a kid and thought it was really cool. I also knew my kids would like it. What I didn’t remember was how cool it was inside. 60* on a 96* day! It felt heavenly in there.

My husband and son were skeptical, but ended up loving it. We all had a great time.

Last night my parents watched our kids at my aunt’s house so we could have drinks with my cousin. This morning we are packing everything up and bringing most of it to my uncle’ farm for our July 4th family reunion. I can’t wait!

Internet at the farm is not great and I’ll be busy soaking in the 72 hours with family, but if I can’t post up there I promise I’ll post when we’re back in St. Louis.

I hope you all have a happy 4th of July weekend!

The kids and I leave this morning. My husband leaves later this week. Our neighbor will be taking care of the house and pets while we’re away.

I have to say, I’m ready to get this first trip started. I really struggled to take advantage of the last two weeks, and instead of allowing myself to get the rest I needed I just beat myself up for all the things I wasn’t getting done. I think I was just wound so tightly that I couldn’t figure out how to unwind.

I was also having some weird feelings around my friends, who were largely quiet this past week, as they chatted on other text chains about the day camps their daughters were in, and the overnight camp they left for this Sunday. I know I wasn’t being left out – I couldn’t participate in getting ready if my daughter wasn’t going – but it still felt like I was being left out. They just didn’t have a lot of extra time to chat on the text thread I’m a part of.

Which is totally fine. I’m not upset, just managing my feelings of not being a part of something they are all a part of. I was also managing my daughter’s very real feelings of disappointment and FOMO that she couldn’t go to overnight camp with them. She is obviously thrilled to be seeing her cousins in St. Louis, but it’s still hard to know they will have shared experiences that she won’t be a part of.

I think we both need another set of friends to fall back on in these situations. My daughter actually is doing a lot better than I am in that regards (she makes friends very easily), which makes me happy. I’ve never been good at making friends or cultivating relationships. I should probably prioritize that more as our daughters grow up and away from each other.

And of course once we’re in St. Louis these feelings will be (largely) behind us, as we’ll have cousins to hang out with for the one time we see them this year.

I’m also managing some other stuff though. I realized at the beginning of the summer that while I may thing I have a decent handle on managing stress and anxiety, the more likely reality is that I manage those things in socially acceptable ways (exercise and over work). Once one or either or those slips away (or both as is right now the case – it being summer and my back pain still impeding my movement), I’m actually a massive hot mess. Those crutches being gone was the other reasons I struggled so much these pages two weeks.

So yeah, the start of summer wasn’t that great. I’m not trying to elicit empathy when I had two weeks of daily child care and no immediately pending professional obligations, but learning to live with this new back pain, not knowing how to let myself rest without feeling crushing guilt about not using the time more productively, and feeling left behind by my friends, made it a rough second half of the month. I’m very grateful that I can distract myself with a visit to my extended family for the next two week stretch.

And I think I am ready to go. I’m typing this Monday night on the elliptical machine. I just wrote the “cat care” document and we’re pretty much all packed (just the electronics and cords in the morning). I’ve heard air travel can be a shit show these days so I’m just hoping we make it to the rental car office before it closes tomorrow afternoon (that requires two flights not only not being cancelled, but arriving on time).

Wish us luck!

I think I was numb all day. I kept reading article after article trying to make sense of it. Trying to remind myself that it was real.

Late tonight I looked away for a moment and the true weight of it hit me. And I was so sad. Just so, so sad. Gutted. Hollow. Grieving.

I sobbed. For a long time.

I think it need to feel this. I think I need to let myself feel this deep pain.

And once I’ve felt it. Once I’ve let myself fall into it, so that I can come back out of it, then I will feel the anger. The rage.

And then I can do something about it. With it.

I have to do something with it. Or it will make me insane. The grief and the rage will destroy me.

They are white hot and burning.

Yesterday it was 95* in San Francisco (a place where literally NOBODY has air conditioning) and I guess that was hot enough to trigger an ant mating swarm at our house. First we noticed a massive swarm of ants coming out of every crevice around our front windows. I put out Terro Liquid Ant Baits and let them be. Then, we noticed some flying ants on our living room table and I kind of freaked out because I had a horrible flying ant situation during my first month living abroad in Spain that has stayed with me for literally 20 years. Some quick googling reminded me that flying ants swarm for a brief period when they are trying to mate and start a new colony. I, of course, didn’t like the sound of that at all.

I read online that spraying them with a mixture of Dawn, water and peppermint oil would kill them, so I quickly put some of those three things in a spray bottle and went at it. About an hour later I realized that our two hanging light fixtures were SWARMING with flying ants. After a mini-freak out, I grabbed a chair and sprayed a ton of that solution into our hanging light fixtures. Then I retreated downstairs, hoping that in the morning the flying ant swarm would be over.

The next morning, the two light fixtures looked like this:

While there are still some ants around two of the liquid baits, the massive swarm by the windows has abated. I’m really hoping that we stopped the new colony’s creation before it could get started.

Every once in a while we have some massive ant invasion that makes me think that, if we ripped out our drywall, the foundation would just be ants swarming in the shape of a house. We have so few significant insect problems in California, and as someone who has had to deal with bed bugs I know how minor ants are in comparison, but I still really hate ants. Last night was super stressful.

Of course my parents live close enough to a grass fire on the peninsula that they’ve been without power for almost 24 hours. So I guess I should just count my blessings and be happy the antvasion has ended.

Also, it’s a lovely 75* here today, and I’ve VERY THANKFUL for that.