This is me at the end of the day, a hot mess, hanging on for dear life. Or, alternately, a sloth at the Bronx Zoo. Your choice.
For years now, I have wanted to stop using screens in the evening, at least some of the time. I’ve always been a little jealous of married friends who casually say, “Oh, we don’t really watch TV together.”
But it is our default, after we get the kids to bed. We flop on the sofa in the living room, after both of us have worked hard all day. Then, we turn on the TV and watch something together. We’ve struggled to choose something to watch, even more so lately. A lot of the stuff the Chaplain would normally pick is just too cerebral for me to try to follow after I’m brain dead (NOVA, for instance? Fascinating, but I’m just too burnt to follow it.) The things I would choose are too girly (PBS’s new version of Little Women, for instance. Ah-mazing. But probably not of interest to the Chaplain).
So we were stuck in this rut where we would watch something we both were kind of ok with, but neither of us loved it. And I would trudge up to bed afterward feeling like I had wasted an hour (or two).
That’s One and Two, under the kitchen sink.
When I last left you, we were on color #2ish (while the faux finish took several coats of different colors, I am counting it as one color). I finally got fed up with the baby poop color when I was pregnant with Three. That was October 2008. 
Remember the definition of insanity? I tried another shade of green. For a little while, it seemed like an improvement. We had sprung for granite countertops like the ones we remembered in that first apartment, and that made everything look nicer. When we did that, we bucked the double sink trend at that time and got a single big, deep sink that allows us to pile in a ton of dishes before they start to peek over the edge of it.
But the new green I’d chosen, which I believe was called Scotland Yard, had a high sheen and was next door to a red room, which is only a match made in heaven for one month out of the year.
I knew it wasn’t a keeper, and just a week or so before Three was born in spring of 2009, I painted again.
Last night, three of our kids had dress rehearsals for their upcoming dance recital. If you told me as a young person or even as a young mom that I would be a Dance Mom one day, I likely would have scoffed at you. Yet watching my kids perform last night in their costumes gave me an unaccountable sense of pride. There were many wins yesterday afternoon. Everyone who needed hair, makeup, and tights without holes got them. We managed, against all odds, to make it to the studio on time, everyone in their appropriate costumes.
The Chaplain met us there, and we tag-teamed the little kids. I took scads of pictures that turned out terrible, as I knew they would, due to the dark purple walls of the studio and the unforgiving fluorescent lights. I had used both my camera and my phone so hard that by the end of the practice performances, the batteries for both were limping along and close to death. I thought we were finished, and the Chaplain and I started loading the Littles into the car.
Pictured above, number Two in the kitchen of our first home, when she was one year old. We had just moved in.
When I was in college, I worked in a sporting goods store on breaks from school for a couple of years. I remember one of my coworkers rolling his eyes and sighing because his mom had made him, his dad, and his brother paint their kitchen for a fifth time because it wasn’t the right shade of yellow. I commiserated. Who does that?!
A few years later, I was married and living in our first apartment, the upper floor of an old house on Long Island. It wasn’t a typical apartment; the walls were painted shades of brown and gold. There was original dark trim and wood built-ins were throughout our upstairs dwelling. The kitchen had granite countertops and cheery, sunshine yellow paint.
The house our rental was in was situated in a strange way. It seemed as though it used to have a much bigger plot of land around it. It looked like some previous owner and had gradually sold off bits of the land to different developers, so that our street ended just after our house in a small sort of road that led past one more house and to a nursing home whose entrance was clearly visible from our kitchen window. You can just see the nursing home in the background to the right behind the trees in the photo above. (We used this pic in our immigration interview photo album, but that’s another story. Keep an eye out for it this summer.)
The nursing home employees would come outside to smoke on their breaks and it always felt like they were looking in our windows, but I hated to assume.
Back in April, I mentioned I was trying a new plan for Mother’s Day. I told my family ahead of time what I wanted, and then tried not to feel guilty for asking.
My family delivered. A big part of my plan was not being responsible for preparing meals on Mother’s Day. I honestly can’t remember what we ate that day. Which is fine. Because whatever it was, I had nothing to do with it.
My family actually OVER-delivered, because they willingly let me get more family photos of them than they have in a very long time. We spent time outside together. It was relaxing. There wasn’t a lot of pressure.
It was just what I wanted.
