Fall, We are Ready for You!
Hi friends!
School is officially underway here and has been for 3 weeks, so we are all feeling ready for the 3 day weekend to catch our breath! We started 5th grade and 8th grade and we definitely started the year with a bang! Aidan tried out for the flag football team that first week of school and was thrilled to make it, which has meant we’ve had football 4 days a week since then. It’s thankfully a very short season, done by the end of September, but it’s an intense month that’s for sure! He has had 2 games so far and grabbed an interception that he returned for a touchdown in yesterday’s game! College football starts this week and the NFL is back next week, and I think we are all ready for the season shift that those events signal around here. Yes it’s still too hot for at least another 6 weeks, but these little things always signal to me that my favorite time of year is on it’s way, the fall through the holidays are just the best here.
I started my New Testament class at church that I get the opportunity to teach every fall two weeks ago, and we are thrilled to have another great group of folks sign up to walk through all of the NT with us over the next 14 weeks. It does mean that I won’t make any of Aidan’s Tuesday night football games (his games are all Tuesday/Thursday) but he’s okay with that, we will still have Thursday games and his Saturday basketball games this fall to attend, and honestly, I like that my kids are seeing me do something outside the home that I am so passionate about. Moms get to have interests and passions too, even ones that don’t involve sitting on the sidelines of our kid’s activities!
Earlier in August before school starts I took Asher and his 2 friends and Aidan and his buddy to the waterpark and Chick Fil A and man they had an amazing day, they played for hours and I didn’t have to do anything other than hand out snacks occasionally. I took the boys and a good friend to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the local dinner theater one Saturday which was wonderful, and Ollie wrapped up his puppy training sessions with a field trip to Home Depot to practice. He has a long ways to go, but we were grateful for our trainer’s help and ideas. We’ve walked the beach with Ollie many evenings, we went to see Bad Guys 2 which we enjoyed, and I’ve tried getting back into a routine of going to the gym a couple mornings a week. All of these things feel so normal and ordinary, and yet make up a life I really love. My freezer meals I made at the end of July are truly the MVP of this busy season and will carry us through the fall—it is so amazing in these chaotic days to pull something out each day and know dinner is essentially done! Here are a few photos of our past month.
Making Up Milestones
I mentioned this last month, but in August we went out as a family to celebrate all the reading the boys did this summer. I know. This sounds nuts to some of you. But here’s the thing. This incentive I offered them back in June absolutely worked. I had told them when summer started that in the 10 weeks of summer I wanted them to each try and read 8 novels—new books to them they’d never read at their reading level. I wanted them to get in the habit of picking up a new book when they finished one, which takes a certain amount of effort for some kids, and try and build the muscle of “I always have a book I’m working on, in the car or before bed each night, and when I finish one I start another one.” In year’s past Aidan has read a bit during the summer but really not at all during the school year. I wanted to see if this particular challenge would change that. I’m thrilled to say that it absolutely did. He started working his way through books to get to his 8 novel goal, and he has continued reading even though he’s surpassed that and school has started. He’s taking a book to school with him every day to read during down time and is reading in bed every night. When he finishes one he asks what he should try next and just keeps going. It has been amazing to see and for the first time I can honestly say he’s become a reader on his own, not just because I’m making him.
I believe celebrations are an essential part of life, and something many of us don’t have enough of in our lives. Taking time to set aside an evening to say “we are celebrating this thing” matters to me, and I hope matters to my kids. Not every celebration needs to be big and extravagant, but setting apart time to honor an accomplishment makes a difference as we think about the foundation we’re building for our kids. We’d never taken our kids to The Melting Pot, a place that has some special significance to Chuck and I (we went the night we got engaged and for a few anniversary dinners when we live in Los Angeles), and I knew the kids would love it, they’re finally adventurous enough eaters to make a meal like that worth it. (I was right, they both declared that one of the best meals they’ve ever had and they both ate every bite of everything we ordered). I wanted to mark the occasion with a small gift, and decided to make each of them their own reading journal to track the books they read over the years. I have been doing this in a very simple way for over a decade now and love having the record to look back on. I simply use a Moleskin type notebook and record the book number (I keep this continuous from year to year, so I’m up to book number 645 now), the title, author and date I finished it. If I loved it, I put an asterisk next to it. If it was a book I was reading aloud to the kids I mark it with a triangle. If it was a re-read for me I put a little heart next to it. And that’s about it. So I got notebooks for each of them and wrote them each a note and then started their list of titles for them by writing down all the novels I have read aloud to them since we started reading novels together back in 2019. We’ve read 55 novels together so far and I wrote them all down for each of them in their notebooks. When they opened them and realized what I had just given them they were both absolutely delighted and one of them was brushing away tears, the memories wrapped up in these pages are my favorite memories on their childhoods, and seeing their joy as they remembered all the stories we’d read made me realize they cherish these memories as much as I do. In a world that is changing so rapidly when it comes to information and technology I want to do absolutely everything in my power to make sure my boys have the ability to read something that takes more than 2 minutes to scan through, and like I said in Aidan’s note to him in his journal “My prayer is you will spend the rest of your life constantly reaching for stories that help show us parts of the world we can’t experience for ourselves in our everyday life. Video games can be fun. They cannot expand our hearts and grow our empathy in the way entering into a book can.”
Social Media Fasting
I have about 3 weeks left of my 1 year social media fast, and honestly I’m shocked at how quickly we’re back in September already! I still have a lot of things I’m mentally sorting through and pondering as it comes to making decisions about if and how I want to re-enter that universe. There are things I have missed. A year away hasn’t completely made me believe there is no place for sharing pieces of our lives with one another on these platforms. The biggest thing I have missed is honestly my cousins. I want to see what their kids are up to and while I have texted with them far more this year than in past years I miss getting the regular updates of what their families are doing. I am beyond blessed to have a group of cousins I adore that I truly want to be connected with. I don’t miss the chorus of 10,000 voices whenever anything political, controversial or difficult happens in the world. I don’t miss that at all! I think being away for this year has given me the opportunity to stay a little steadier emotionally and mentally as things happen in the world that are so outside my control. I’m not living in the space of constant rage I know many who spend a lot of time online find themselves in. And that feels far healthier. So I’m not sure what the solution is to all these things, and I’m not sure I’ll figure it all out in the next 3 weeks, but I know I’ll have more to say as I come back next month to further reflect on this topic!
Enjoy the start of football season, throw some chili in the crock pot and pretend the temperature is dropping my friends, and I’ll be back in a few weeks with more thoughts on whatever else is going on around here!
