Currently

{Trying} to make Friday after school snacks fun, like happy hour.  This past Friday I whipped up some chocolate pudding for the girls and threw in some rainbow sprinkles because just about everything tastes better with rainbow sprinkles. The girls were off the walls a few minutes after eating it, but it was Friday and they’d finished their first week of first and third grade, so I think that being off the walls was in order.

{Thinking} a lot about my Grandpa Ayanoglou lately.  I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned him here, but he was Greek and my grandmother was Armenian and when my mom was two years old, they fled to America. There’s a line from a poem I read last week about how you don’t put your kid in the water unless you know it’s safer than your home. I’m not one for dabbling in politics or that sort of thing, but I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for my Grandpa Ayanoglou. I am thankful for his audacity.

{Worrying} about the black widow spider that may or may not be dead. She’s been living on our front step all summer.  Once, after coming home from the library, Hadley, Harper, and I marveled at the cicada wrapped up nice and snug in her web.  “Where’s the spider?” Harper asked. I said that it probably went to go get its friends to help with the eating of the cicada. “It’s like Thanksgiving!” I said.  Had I known the spider was who she was, I wouldn’t have stopped to make chit chat about what she caught.  I wouldn’t have walked up to the front door at all.

Which brings me to my next thing: We can’t use the front door until we know for sure that spider is dead.  This is ridiculous and materialistic I know, but I adore our front door.  It makes me happy every time I get to walk in or out of it. In the almost 17 years of being married, this is the first front door Jesse and I have had, and walking outside to the car, or especially walking down the block to the library, Starbucks, or the Black Rock Center for the Arts makes me feel like I’m part of a neighborhood.  It makes me feel like I’m in The Cosby Show, and I know I’m not supposed to say anything good about that show but that’s how my front door makes me feel.

Which brings me to my next thing: Maybe I live in La La Land. Maybe I refuse to look at the danger and evil that lurks in the bushes, on TV, outside my front door. I submitted  a piece recently and the editor told me it was nice but there wasn’t any urgency to the story. That was the problem with my writing in 2010 when I began to take it seriously. “Good, but no conflict.” “Get to the conflict.” “Can’t have a story without any conflict.”I’m so tired right now trying to manage school and motherhood and writing, but that comment bit hard. Probably because I’m afraid I’ve lost my urgency and I’m more afraid I won’t get it back.

So there’s the status update. A little chocolate pudding. A bit of history, and something lost.

September 2007: My first post on Notes from Naptime.

September 2008: Off the Hook.

September 2009: Hadley’s first bee sting.

September 2010: Preschool Orientation for Hadley. How was it five years ago?

September 2011: Summer Hangouts.

September 2012: Trying to compare writing annotations to running.

September 2013: Dabbling in the second person.

September 2014: One of my favorite posts from last year.