I only angrily walked away from my kids once last month!

Tales of growing children, including me

Hello and happy September. How was your August? Ours went by fast, but also had this muddy, spacey feeling that maybe was a result of the cicadas, perimenopause brain fog, or finally going through that damn portal.

Here were some of the things I got up to. Some of the slightly more personal stuff is behind a paywall.

A few days with the kids out of the house:

The boys went to summer camp for a short week, and my husband and I did some fun stuff like a downtown dinner date and a round of golf together. But it was still hard to shake off the shutdown feeling I get at the end of the day, even with the kids gone. Sometimes my husband tried to talk to me when the iron gate of engagement had come down, and even without bedtime, dinnertime, and laundry time, some nights I was still tired mom even if I wasn’t momming.

He later took them out of town for two nights later on for a music fest thingie. Each time the kids were gone, I kicked it off by doing a big clean on the first floor so I could get their gigantic baseball bags and strewn crocs out of my sight. Simple pleasures: a house that is not continuously getting fucked up every morning and night like the tide coming and going.

At one point, I even cleaned off the tops of the washer and dryer in the basement, a catchall type of place. You all would be proud of me: without looking inside it, I threw away a crumpled-up shopping bag that had come from my kid’s backpack many months ago. What was inside it? Probably crayons and shit. Fidgets and jibbitz. Little sticks and erasers. I’ll never know for sure. #freedom

A trip to Wisconsin with the boys and my parents:

My parents treated us to a trip to Kohler, WI, to celebrate their anniversary. I was a bit nervous about this because my husband couldn’t come with us, and my parents are doing that bummer aging thing. I was worried I’d be a stressed-out, irritable depresso the whole time, only catering to folks a generation above and below me. But it was a pretty nice short week, with a few bullets:

• Leaning into what the kids wanted was the move. Normally, we don’t let them do screentime before the afternoon, for instance, but what was I going to do when the three of us all woke up before 7 and were sharing a room? So, screentime was every day 7-9 a.m. before breakfast (for me too.) Bedtime was watching sitcoms in bed til around 10-11 p.m. I was a chill mom who was less likely to grouse about things like “If you had just eaten dinner you wouldn’t feel like eating Tostitos in bed.” I just let them eat the Tostitos in bed. The only bad part was having to smell Tostitos breath at bedtime.
  

• Because it has more space, I drove my husband’s pickup truck to Wisconsin, but it’s so tall I have to take a derpy little hop when I get out of it. He loaned me an apple box to put down for my creaky folks to get in and out of the truck, as I did all the driving while we were there. I felt like an old-timey carriage footman. The one time I snapped at my parents, they had both said something along the lines of “There’s a car coming, Claire,” while we were driving, and I was like, “I KNOW,” but I think I was otherwise a pretty good daughter.
  

• The boys and I played a round of golf with my dad. My younger kid, the ADHD one, got a little hot a few times (golf is frustrating), but he kept his shit together pretty well instead of having a baby meltdown that would tarnish everyone’s entire experience. In fact, he was quite complimentary to the other players, which I was proud of because he used to be so unpleasantly competitive. I was trying to explain to a childfree friend what a huge relief and sense of pride it is to see your kid tone down from being someone who loses his shit a lot to someone who loses his shit a bit less and she told me about a nephew of hers that had a similar vibe and thus earned the nickname “Volcano Head” as a child, so she got it.
  

• On my parents’ anniversary, while they had a fancy dinner, I took the kids to a Milwaukee Brewers game. I only walked away from the kids angrily/passive aggressively once on this trip, and it was at the game after I’d navigated an hour past several accidents to the stadium to arrive right when the game started. I wanted to get to our seats, but the boys wanted to linger by a table where some insurance company or bank was giving away free garbage. It was one of those “Okay BYE” kind of moments.
  
  Aside from that, the game was good. I like having older kids a lot. I got up and walked around the stadium on my own at one point after the boys promised they wouldn’t go off and wander. In this instance, I felt comforted by the police state because I knew if someone kidnapped them, it would be on multiple security cameras.
  
  Also, during the game, a nice man gave my younger kid a ball he’d caught from a player. He was so excited. I told him about the concept of karma and how he had to make sure he did a random good deed (or more.) He kept trying to show the ball to his salty older brother, who would rather die than acknowledge or touch the ball his brother had unfairly received
  
  (You know, of course, we have 9,000 MLB baseballs at home.)
  

• Shout out to Evil Witch

  Sarah Miller
  for recommending the game Quicktionary (which I think would be a great classroom game for you teacher witches out there.) That and a card game version of “Would You Rather?” helped kill some time at a few dinners with my parents. My older son was otherwise trying to show us some card tricks he’d learned at camp, which wasa little boring for everyone but him (“Yes, that’s my card. No, that’s not my card. Oooh. Wow.”)
  

• During the longer drives, we listened to Nate Bargatze’s book (absolutely one of those book deal books and not a “I really have something to say” books, but still pleasant and kid-appropriate.) We also listened to the podcast Criminal, along with Criminal+, where the host Phoebe chats with her producer. The boys love Phoebe Judge. Sometimes she drives me nuts, especially when she acts like she just woke up in the 21st century after being frozen for 80 years, but I like that my boys enjoy listening to a conversation between two women.

Back to school and home again.

Something I learned: I don’t need to be there when the boys leave the house for the first day of school. In fact, it is perhaps better if I’m not! If I’m not there, I don’t add to the general hype of the moment, including getting that damn first day photo. This time, I left before they did in order to take the dog to an appointment. My husband got the required photo. Nobody yelled too much.

Of course, merely 3.5 days after school started, our 13-year-old came down with strep throat. Again, there are benefits to bigger kids. I’m grateful he could articulate that his throat extra-hurt instead of just scream-crying over it, that he tolerated a strep test without me holding him down, and that he can handle taking large pills (thank you, Mexico illness.) He improved so much that by the end of Day 1, he was asking if he could ride his bike over to the park and meet his friend (No.)