You guys, my kids are climbing the walls. They’re threatening to dig a hole in the backyard and fill it with tap water from the hose and call it a pool. They’re saying it’s too hot to play outside when it’s only 78 degrees. They’re daydreaming about places to visit, with the caveat: “some day–but when?” They volunteer to go with me to my mom’s because it means they get to sit in front of Hot Bench and Judge Judy, and maybe just maybe we’ll go get ice cream afterward. You guys, they’ve stopped complaining about us taking them on hikes. That’s how bad it’s gotten. Morale is down in our little corner of PA. We’re slowly starting to venture into the world again, but it’s slow going, and there’s not much on the horizon except more of the same. On a very hot day last week one of the kids actually got upset with me because we’ve never made friends with anyone who has a backyard pool…
Hey. It’s the Tuesday after what has probably been a quiet Memorial Day weekend for many of us (if you, though, are reading this not from your living room couch but from a crowded beach, please know a] I’m mad at you because SOCIAL DISTANCING, and b] I’m jealous of you because BEACH). I noticed this weekend that I managed to mess up Cian’s buzz cut last week (shocked, are you?): there’s a strip of hair above the nape of his neck that’s noticeably longer than any of the hair above it. Which means that as it grows he’s going to get a mullet. Which means that I am never, ever, ever touching the hair on that boy’s head with clippers ever again. He’ll just have to learn how to braid. I made Mom’s deviled eggs again yesterday. They tasted more like how she used to make them, and that made me happy. (My sister-in-law made key lime pie. That, too = happy.) I’m reading Emma Straub’s All Adults Here. I love her books, and…
There are things I’ve done that I regret in this life. That 8 a.m. math class my freshman year in college is a big one (or, rather, the fact that I rarely showed up to it). That pixie cut (“But Cameron Diaz looks so cute in hers!”) circa 2001. Tequila. But here, in this time of pandemic, I’ve done the most clichéd regrettable thing of all: I cut Cian’s hair. When I say “cut,” I mean I took scissors to Cian’s hair the other day, trying to maintain the style he’d had before. I cut it once, then twice to fix the once, then the final, cringe-worthy time to fix the mess I’d made the first two times. My child. My beautiful sweet kid with the longish hair we both liked so much… …now has a buzz cut. He spent all of the day afterward glaring at me while pointing at his head: “I have ELF EARS!” But then the girls, thankfully, spent the rest of the evening telling him how great it was, and that he…
