summer break

an update on my delusions

hi hi.

As you can probably guess from the long gap between posts, my summer is not going super smoothly.

A couple of weeks ago, there was the sudden and unexpected announcement that my 3-year-old’s preschool would be closing at the end of the summer. Ya’ll. I cannot overstate how much this preschool was my dream for my child and how well he was doing there. Their program focuses on yoga and emotional regulation and it was a great fit for my sensory-seeking kiddo. In June, they knocked their pick-up time back to 2:30, which was annoying and meant I lost about an hour and a half of childcare per day, which is pretty significant, but I was willing to put up with it because of how much I believed in their program.

To then be told, a few weeks after making this shift, that they would be closing, was pretty upsetting. (We were offered a spot at their second location, but it’s not a feasible option for us.) That same week, I also learned that our homeschool co-op was needing to urgently and unexpectedly search for a new meeting location, and that one of my kids’ occupational therapists was leaving the clinic. It was a lot.

Fortunately, I found a spot at another preschool, and while it’s not my dream, the hours are better, it’s closer to our house, and I know a handful of families whose kids already attend. My kid will be fine. The co-op found a new location, and that’s closer to our house, too (note that I almost didn’t sign my kid up for a third period class with the co-op due to third kid’s pick up time, which is now completely irrelevant. Maybe this is my new era of just trusting that everything will work itself out?! Because honestly the logistics of three kids in three different places is what really gets me most weeks). No word yet on a new OT, but that will eventually work itself out, too.

We’ve just returned from our beach trip, where the weather was mostly disappointing, but we still had a pretty good time. Still, the trip was a lot of work and made me realize that we should cancel the big road trip to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone we had planned for August. Annoyingly, this is the second time I’ve planned and cancelled this trip (originally we were going to go summer 2020!), but I think we’ll have a better time if we wait a few more years. Instead, we’ll plan some local trips for the last couple of weeks of summer (school starts mid-August here)— one kid is lobbying hard for the San Antonio zoo, and I am daydreaming about an adults-only visit to these local hot springs.

On the flip side, while I have failed to keep up with a lot of the projects I listed off in my last post, I did complete 20 classes at my yoga studio, and added about 13,000 words to my manuscript thanks to #1000wordsofsummer (most encouragingly, I found some structure for a chapter about an ex that I’ve been puzzling over for years). I’m pretty happy about both of those things (although, actually, the yoga isn’t that impressive— I really enjoy going to yoga and am there as much as I can be, it’s truly a place I can go and get a break from the chaos of the rest of my life). And, I just started Prose Poetry with Rachel and will also take her Flash Memoir class later this month.

multiple visits to this dinosaur park; I’ve said never again

All that to say, it’s been really hard time find the time to show up here (I blame the early preschool pick up) and I’ve paused paid subscriptions for the time being. I will still be sending out Q2 snail mail (paid subscribers can find the link at the end of this post), although I kindly request grace in getting them out (as they are obviously late already!).

I will be back in the fall with (hopefully) new ideas, more journal pages, and tales of creative recharge (on the calendar: a local journal meet-up, the Hello Houston event, and Squam).

Thanks so much for your support! If you’d like a snail mail surprise, please fill out the form below by 7/31!

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