Pertinent to my Interests

And I’m not big into journaling. It takes special skill to record events and activities in a compelling way and I lack that skill. Nevertheless, if this blog is meant to record memories for my children I think I owe it to them to try to write about this vacation as thoroughly as I can stand to.

I think vacation details are one of the more tiresome conversation topics in existence. Even my four most-devoted readers may wish to skip this entry.

Friday

We landed in Seattle at 9 AM and had to wait in a massively long line for the shuttle bus to the car rental place. Found out later that this Friday was the biggest air travel day in the history of the United States.

My entire living nuclear family met at my sister’s house. We hit two playgrounds, a seafood restaurant, and an ice cream shop that makes their ice cream right in front of you with liquid nitrogen. My nuclear family was still on central time and we all passed out in our hotel early.

Saturday

We drove to Crescent City: two cars, four adults, two kids. We switched around people at every stop, and that helped a lot to make the drive feel faster. Lunch was at In N Out in Roseburg, Oregon.

We drove through the redwoods on the way to our AirBnB and both children were amazed at the giant trees. Those forests really feel like stepping backward in time! We passed a redwood that was growing so close to the highway they had cut a big notch in it for cars!

Our AirBnB was separated from the ocean by a quiet two-lane highway, so as soon as we had dropped our bags we had to go down to the beach with the kids. They were stunned by the enormity, the salt, and the waves. My oldest was especially so excited. He found a rock with a cup-like hole formed in it. He dubbed it “the shot rock” and brought it home.

Sunday

My sister started the day by taking a shot of rum out of the shot rock. It was a special moment.

Some of us went to explore the beach that morning before we headed into to Stout Grove in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park. I had worried we would not be able to find a banana slug during our time in the redwoods, but this turned out to be a very stupid thing to worry about. There were banana slugs everywhere!

The kids climbed and ran all over the fallen trees. They loved it. I remember doing the same as a child. I think the kids could have stayed in Stout Grove all day.

Some of us returned to the beach that afternoon to explore tide pools and look for good rocks. My oldest and I stayed later than everyone else to build a small sandcastle and dig a small hole with the crappy plastic shovels we borrowed from the AirBnB.

This was Father’s Day, and my sister has a tradition of going to the casino on Father’s Day in memory of our deceased dad. So my sister and husband and I drove out to the casino for a few hours that evening. Everyone walked out with thinner wallets.

Then we drove north to Oregon to have dinner at Zola’s, which was fantastic but maybe not worth the extra hour in the car.

Monday

We had family photos planned for this morning, and I was dreading them. I hate family photos, and was annoyed to spend precious vacation time on such a terrible project. But the photographer ended up being great, and she even spent extra time taking us to a hollowed-out cave of a redwood tree which we would never have noticed without her direction.

We had promised my oldest that he could have this entire afternoon as a beach day, and we kept that promise. He was out on the beach for eight hours in total that day, digging and building and digging and building and waiting for the tide to come in to destroy his efforts. The adults engaged in some healthy alcohol consumption between shifts of assisting his work. It is possible that this was the best afternoon of his life.

Tuesday

This was my mom’s birthday, and we had acquired a permit to hike the Fern Canyon in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park.

Fern Canyon was a gorgeous traipse through a crystal-clear creek surrounded by sheer cliffs bursting with ferns. It was one of those hikes that you can’t do anywhere else and was well worth the 2+ hours of driving.

My mom’s birthday dinner that night was at SeaQuake Brewing. Her two college friends, who are local to Crescent City, joined us and it was a good time. Afterward they brought us to the Northcoast Marine Mammal Center to see the recuperating seals and sea lions relaxing in their outdoor pens.

Wednesday

My youngest son and my sister both had bubblegum ice cream on this day.

My mom’s college friends live in Crescent City because their daughter lives just outside Crescent City. We went to visit her family on Wednesday.

The first thing you should know is that my oldest loves bunnies. He’s always wanted a pet rabbit and although I am a sucker for bunnies too I have so far refused his requests. This family had a lovely pet bunny (Baby) which my oldest got to hold multiple times during our visit. I got to hold a chicken, which is something I have somehow never done!

This place was a child’s paradise. They had an archery setup, a small treehouse, a swingset, a swing made from a buoy, a ninja slackline, a dog, a bunny, eleven chickens, and a kitten.

And they had a gorgeous river right behind their house. We spent the afternoon swimming in the cold, crystal-clear waters. My sister found serpentine on the riverbank. My kids tried a stand-up paddleboard for the first time.

It was the kind of place that makes you wonder why anyone would want to live anywhere else in the world.

Thursday

We did Trees of Mystery on Thursday morning. It’s a massive tourist trap right on the 101: great fun. They have a canopy trail, which is just a non-nerdy word for an Ewok village trail. They have a gondola that takes you to the top of a hill. They have a massive gift shop and fudge and I am of the age now where I am interested in fudge.

My youngest so desperately wanted to do the canopy trail but he was also so frightened of it that he never did manage it despite three separate tries. I am proud of him for trying. Twice he got out about 15-20 feet on the first bridge and had to turn around weeping. We told him it was okay and we could come back someday for him to try again when he’s older.

We drove my mom’s Subaru through the Tour-Through Tree in Klamath. I can’t bring my kids all the way to the redwoods and not drive through a tree, right?!

We had sushi for lunch, and then a long afternoon on the beach again, this time with a nice campfire to celebrate the summer solstice. We drank beer and wine and gin & tonic, and ate Little Caesar’s pizza and my sister and the kids dug another giant hole and the ocean filled it back in.

Friday

This was our last full day in Crescent City. We had borrowed boogie boards from my mother’s friends and had been waiting all week for the weather to warm up but it never did.

My sister, husband, and the kids rented wetsuits and went boogie boarding at the local swimming beach. The waves were not really fit for boogie boarding that day, but everyone had a blast and they all stayed in the freezing cold water for several hours.

That evening I sorted through the small collection of rocks I had picked up on the shoreline that week. Ten were coming home with me, but about thirty would stay here for future rockhounds. I walked them back to the ocean, tossing them one by one into the wet sand and then waited for a wave to wash over them and reclaim them.

We all packed up.

Saturday

We left early, driving back the way we came. We stopped at In N Out again (apparently In N Out is famous even among the elementary school set?). Our cars and families parted ways at the French Prairie Rest Area, and my little nuclear family continued on to Portland, Oregon.

Our first stop was to visit old law school friends whom we have not seen in nearly a decade. These are some of my favorite people from our New York City years, and I have many fond memories of drinking too much at their apartment in Astoria and babysitting their cat at our apartment in Woodside. They are still both interesting and lovely and it was somehow reassuring to see them and remember that they still exist in this world! The older kids even got along great and did weird kid stuff in the basement while the adults visited on the main floor (the dream!).

After checking into our hotel, we hit Powell’s Books in Portland. We found a conveyor belt sushi place, and then we went to Voodoo Donuts to get a pink box of delights for dessert.

Sunday

This was a flying day. I enjoyed some Alaska Airlines themed beer on my flight. The kids complained about the Internet on the plane. We got home to some much-missed kitties who actually seemed a little disappointed that we weren’t the cat-sitter. We unpacked. I started laundry. I mourned the end of the 65 degree weather we had been experiencing, and packed away my jeans in preparation for the hot, humid Midwest summer.

“I have to keep reminding myself this isn’t a once in a lifetime thing,” my oldest had told me on our first day in Crescent City as he stared in awe at the ocean having just returned from climbing around a forest full of 2,000-year-old trees.

It was truly an epic vacation and worth the two days of travel on both ends. If you ever get a chance to plan a trip to Crescent City, California, you should take it! And take my oldest kid with you!

We have returned from our trip to Crescent City, California, and after a week of living my life by the tide tables I’m back to concerning myself with the patterns of the pedestrian walk signals in my city instead.

Navigating my urban neighborhood is a completely different skillset than driving on a cliffside road and scrambling over tide pools!

We have reached that stage of summer in Minnesota where I stand at the top of the stairs, shirtless, right in front of the air conditioner when I’m braiding my hair after a shower. So much sweat. I don’t think I’ll ever fully adjust to living in a humid climate.

It feels like the first real week of summer break. The kids are home. All the time. They’re just… here. And they don’t leave unless I bring them somewhere. It’s taking some adjustment on my part; I no longer feel (f)unemployed.

I’m trying to get us eating more produce. I’ve done an excellent job during my mothering years of serving a vegetable with almost every dinner and most lunches, but they rarely get eaten. I’m trying to be okay with making cooking mistakes and wasting money on new vegetables nobody eats. I grilled eggplant the other night and it was delicious. I bought beets that only I will eat. We will see how long this experiment lasts.

This week also marked my triumphant return to the gym after three weeks away. Well, more like my grudging return to the gym. But I’m watching Wednesday and enjoying it.

I also returned to my Japanese study on Duolingo. I had to quit Duolingo during vacation because I started a new unit while we were in California and they wanted me to learn all these new words and it was just too much for me to handle at the time. But wow Duolingo really puts on the guilt trip when you fuck up your streak! I’m back now to my usual routine of one regular lesson and one kana lesson per day.

And I managed to put off my book club book until the very last minute; I just started reading it last night! I never pulled shit like this in college.

I also got started on my summer volunteer project. Remember how I really love to tromp through cemeteries? I thought I should turn my weird hobby into a volunteer project and I’m now fulfilling photo requests on FindAGrave.com while I tromp. My kids are not excited.

We are packing for a big trip and I am feeling some angst about the whole thing.

I’m not a good traveler. I don’t like doing new things or meeting new people, and I definitely don’t enjoy the uncertainties inherent in the act of traveling.

I like to be home. Home is reliable. Home is comfortable and safe.

It occurred to me recently that this desire to be home may be the root of my impatience. Maybe I hate waiting in line at Starbucks because it just prevents me from getting home sooner. The slow cashier at the grocery store is cruelly delaying my reunion with my cats and my piano. The waitress who takes forever to get us our check is diminishing my evening reading time.

I begin anticipating my return to my house pretty much as soon as I depart, and I’m starting to think this is maybe less cute quirk and more… clinical diagnosis?

I also had an insight recently about my travel style and how it differs from my husband’s travel style.

When I am flying I want to get to the airport as early as possible. I plan my airport arrival time based on the assumption that things are going to go horribly wrong. The Uber driver won’t show up. Construction will prevent us from taking the shortest route to the airport. The bag drop line will be a mile long. The precheck line at security will be two miles long. This is why we aim to get there two hours early!

My husband plans his travel based on the assumption that everything will go smoothly. The Uber driver will zoom down the highway at record (but safe!) speed. Bag check will take five minutes, security will take three. With this sort of math we really only have to arrive at the airport maybe forty-five minutes before our flight departs.

So here we are, a pessimist and an optimist trying to travel together with two kids. And what if we have to get Starbucks?!

We went camping this weekend for the first time in almost four years.

Well, we went camper cabin camping. This is significantly easier than tent camping, in my opinion, but I do believe it still counts as camping.

I felt like a camping noob, even during the packing process. How many bottles of propane do we really need? What about the clothesline, can that stay behind? And we made some beginner mistakes too like leaving the chairs out overnight and therefore having wet chairs in the morning. (To be fair, the forecast said no rain, but experienced campers know that everything gets packed up under the picnic table every night.)

I brought a coffee maker, and my husband rolled his eyes but sure seemed to appreciate the fresh, easy coffee every morning. I made an effort to make decent breakfasts on the camp stove, and they actually turned out pretty well and were worth the extra dishes.

The kids found a hidden fort area near our site but out of sight, and spent a great deal of time just hanging out down there. I remember doing the same thing as a kid, exploring the forest and finding secret spaces.

All of our children are old enough to walk to the outhouse by themselves, even in the dark, and that was a major improvement to our camping experience.

We ate Pop-Tarts, the best camping snack.

My oldest fell out of a tree. He thought–for a moment–that he was going to die. Another tree broke his fall, scratching the crap out of him on his way down to the ground. If that second tree hadn’t stepped in this would probably have been an emergency room situation, so I am very grateful to that other tree and grateful that he came out with only a ton of gnarly, superficial scratches. He did appear to be in a little bit of shock when he climbed back up the hill to find us. I made him sit down and drink some cold water while we cleaned up his scratches.

The bugs weren’t great, but they weren’t as bad as I expected. I dislike the permanently dirty feeling of camping, but washing my face in cold water from the bucket every morning really helped.

Camping made me really nostalgic. As I lay awake the first night (sleep is a struggle for me all the time, but especially in new places) I entertained myself by reviewing all my camping memories. There are so many! Camping–in many forms–was a very formative experience for me. Scrubbing dishes in cold water on the ground and attempting to cook over a fire and playing card games at the picnic table reminded me of my parents and my grandparents, a long line of camping enthusiasts.

And we only needed one bottle of propane but I’m glad I brought the extra just in case!

I have been battling acne for more than twenty-five years, and I only recently discovered something that really works: Lush’s Cosmetic Warrior face mask.

I have to give my sister credit for this find. She has the same skin as me but is more adventurous about cosmetic products. I was amazed the first time I tried Cosmetic Warrior. Just one fifteen-minute session per week and my acne was cleared up!

But.

Cosmetic Warrior is one of Lush’s “fresh” face masks. It has to be made fresh, kept in the fridge, and it expires quickly. I cannot order it online, and it was often inexplicably sold out in stores.

My sister may be adventurous and that is to her advantage, but I am very committed to never leaving my house and that is also to my advantage. I decided to experiment with my own recipe for Cosmetic Warrior, and after months of interesting results I think I’ve just about perfected it.

Casey’s Cosmetic Warrior Face Mask Copycat
1 egg white
2 tsps honey
2 tsps garlic paste
1 tbsp vegetable glycerin
2 tbsp Fullers Earth Powder
20 drops tea tree oil

Whisk all the ingredients together, place in a sealed container in the fridge for at least a few hours before applying. Apply to your face twice a week for fifteen minutes each time. This recipe makes at least four applications.

Not only does this recipe allow me to skip the mall, it’s significantly cheaper to make it yourself at home!

This was a very niche post, but I hope it helps someone out there on the Internet who has bad skin but doesn’t have great access to a Lush.

We are going camping this weekend for the first time in almost four years.

This is what happens when you buy a cabin. The cabin is all the good things about camping (catching frogs! morning campfire! drinking beer outside all afternoon!) and none of the bad things about camping (dealing with coolers for days! never feeling clean! having to go outside to pee!). But the kids miss camping and have been begging to go camping again so we are going with friends this weekend.

I am not excited.

I grew up camping, and will probably write an exhaustive post about that someday. We used to take the kids camping at least once every summer, even when they were babies. I do not recommend this. For me at least the combination stress of dealing with toddlers around the fire all day combined with the frustration of trying to get my baby and two-year-old to sleep in the tent while the sun was still up was not worth it. If could go back and do it again I would wait until they were older.

In the summer of 2020 the pandemic was in full swing. My kids were five and seven years old. I spent this entire summer fretting about whether or not schools were going to open in the fall (spoiler alert: ours didn’t). This was also the summer that none of the public pools opened in our area, most summer camps and programs were closed, and for a while we weren’t even supposed to use the public playgrounds.

I think we hit every nature center and every hiking trail within an hour radius of the city that year. There was literally nothing else we could do.

I decided we should go camping a couple times that summer, but when I went to book campsites I realized that everyone else in the area had the same idea. Every weekend, every site was booked. I was irrationally annoyed. Who were all these new campers who thought they could take up space in a campground on the weekend? I had been camping my entire life, and every year since becoming a parent! I had a right to those spots!

I did not have a right to those spots, but that didn’t stop me from grumbling about it.

When I looked more closely, I realized there were a good number of spots available mid-week, particularly Tuesdays and Wednesdays. But… my husband wouldn’t be able to come on those days. I looked at my kids who were currently in the backyard having a swordfight with sticks. One of them was in his underwear and the other was wearing a banana costume. Could I handle these two kids camping by myself?

I decided it was worth a shot as long as the banana costume stayed home. I booked some mid-week trips.

That’s how we ended up spending one night each that summer in William O’Brien State Park, Moose Lake State Park, and Jay Cooke State Park.

It turns out that a one-night camping trip is just about right from the packing perspective. I brought a change of clothes for everyone, but mostly we just stayed dirty for the full 24 hours. I only had to plan one dinner, and I went back to the basics on that: hot dogs roasted on sticks accompanied by a can of beans warmed directly on the fire. Pop-tarts for breakfast.

This was back when my youngest was in his Yoshi phase, so a rainbow of Yoshis often accompanied us on these trips. The Yoshis would perch on the picnic table and judge me while I drank cold instant coffee in the morning. I let the kids do all sorts of weird stuff with the fire and the food. We almost ended up sleeping in the car one night due to thunderstorms. We hiked to an old cemetery at one park and there was an eeriness to the air that made me uneasy. I ushered the kids out of there as fast I could trying to hide the fact that I was a little freaked out.

And it was in one of these state parks that I realized my youngest had somehow learned to read when he started reading out loud from a wayfinding sign on one of our hikes.

“Hey! Are you able to read that?” I asked him, surprised.

“No, I can’t read,” he insisted. “I just know what it says.”

In the past we had almost always gone camping with another family; this was very fun, and we made a lot of good memories that way. I did miss having my husband on these trips. but in some ways it felt much easier to be the only adult. It felt like the kids’ camping trip and I was just along for the ride. We did what they wanted to do, ate when they wanted to eat, stopped to check out all the rotten stumps that they wanted to investigate on the hike. There was no schedule, no pressure.

It was actually kind of great.

Those were the last times we went camping because we bought our cabin in May of the next year. I know the kids miss camping because they have told me so many times since then. I suppose it’s a good thing we’re going again this weekend, even if it means I need to inventory the cabin supply bins and figure out meals and find all the sleeping bags. In fact, now that I’ve gone on this walk through my memories, I am feeling much more positive about the coming weekend, and might even let the kids bring the banana costume this time.

1. A tired-looking woman reading The Family Guide to Getting Over OCD: Reclaim Your Life and Help Your Loved One.
2. A harried mother yelling at her preschooler “Hurry up! We have to go straight to hockey now! No, put that book down, we don’t have time for that! Hocky starts in fifteen minutes!” Lady, what wrong turns have you taken in your life to end up in this predicament at 7:45 PM on a Thursday night?
3. A child weeping loudly in the changing rooms and repeatedly declaring that “everyone is making me sad! everyone is making me sad today!”
4. Me, wearing my Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers t-shirt and my Beauty and the Beast Loungefly purse, reading Bob Iger’s memoir like the ridiculous Disney Adult that I am.

The start of summer has gotten me all nostalgic about the many summers that have come and gone in my life.

The summer that I was fifteen I worked at the local resort as a housekeeper. I had worked at a local pizza place previously and not enjoyed the intense customer service experience (especially when one customer was so angry she made me cry, but more on that later). Surely I, an introvert who enjoyed clean spaces, would do much better as a solitary, silent housekeeper.

There were three white people in the housekeeping department at this resort: the boss lady, me, and another girl my age who was married to a Mexican-American man. Everyone else was from Mexico; some very recently arrived, but many had lived in this town longer than my own family had. Spanish was the common language of our crew, and I was the odd one out with my meager ability to count to ten and name the colors. The other white girl my age was kind enough to translate for me and try to include me when she could despite our extremely different backgrounds and life situations (married at fifteen!!!).

Working as a housekeeper at the local resort was a good job, but it was a hard job too. They were understaffed and most of us worked six days a week all summer long. Every morning I would wake up, put my hair up in a bun and pull on my regulation resort polo and black pants. I would walk down the hill a mile into town. We would all receive our work assignments on clipboards in the morning, and take the master key for our particular hallway and building. Then we headed out.

I usually worked alone, which was how I preferred it. The boss lady and assistant boss lady would circulate with their walkie-talkies all day checking our progress which we all dutifully recorded on our clipboards.

My days that summer were defined by “make-ups” and “check-outs.” Make-ups were easy: wipe down the bathroom, replace towels and toiletries, make the beds, take out the garbage, vacuum. I could easily complete a make-up in fifteen minutes as long as the guests hadn’t trashed the place. The difficulty with make-ups was in the timing, and I became very adept at noticing when people were leaving so I could rush over and do their room immediately. Often I was assigned the same hallway all week and I would learn the habits of the guests and know which families were going to already be at the beach at 8 AM and who wasn’t going to leave their room until lunchtime.

I got tipped less than five times the entire time I worked at this resort, and I don’t know if this is a regional thing or what, but I was very surprised to learn that a lot of normal, middle-class people tip the hotel maid when they check out. They definitely weren’t tipping in my town! One time I went into a make-up with a kitchenette and found a twenty dollar bill along with a note asking me to do all the dishes. I was happy to oblige.

The resort had five big buildings full of hotel rooms and suites, but there were a few special buildings too. The resort owned an older building in town that had several apartments, all un-updated with beautiful wood floors and cabinetry and cool vintage kitchens. I cleaned those a few times and was delighted with the layers of age in those places. There was a big multi-story cabin in the center of the resort and I recall thinking that this cabin was the height of luxury, a rich person’s dream. I am pretty sure I could afford to stay there now and that blows my mind.

If a maid finished her hallway early she would then be assigned to help someone else who was still struggling to finish their hallway. It was in these afternoons when I was working with the other housekeepers that I finally started to learn some useful Spanish. My coworkers always turned the television to El Gordo y La Flaca when we were working, and the ones who knew enough English would translate the especially funny parts for me, teaching me new words along the way. I learned the word for clothes hanger in Spanish, and still remember that each room was supposed to have ocho ganchos in the closet. I vacuumed each rincon very thoroughly.

I don’t remember ever getting yelled at in this job. I think I had an advantage as a white teenage girl because when I knocked on a door and a very tired young mother “on vacation” answered to tell me to please come back later we could easily determine a better time for maid service together. All of my coworkers knew enough English to have the same conversation, but it was stilted and stressful for the white vacationers.

“One o’clock!” I would hear a white lady practically yelling at my coworker down the hall. “You understand? Uno! Uno o’clock is bueno!” The guests weren’t necessarily trying to be rude or mean, they just assumed the brown-skinned lady with the cart full of tiny shampoos didn’t understand a word of English.

I don’t mind cleaning, but cleaning up after other people can be its own special hell. Some guests were extremely messy, and navigating our big heavy vacuums around piles of clothes on the floor made make-ups more difficult than they needed to be. We never wanted to touch a guest’s items so we would very carefully push dirty clothes a few inches with our shoes and then do our best with the vacuum. Some guests totally ripped apart their beds and left wet towels in random places. A lot of people left garbage all over the room, and sometimes it was difficult to determine what was meant to be thrown away and what was being saved.

Overall, the housekeeping team worked well together. The boss lady wasn’t too good to jump in and help make a bed if we were hustling to finish a check-out in time, but there were some… issues. They did not give us toilet brushes to clean the inside of the toilet. I was taught on my first day to spray the inside of the bowl with the usual cleaning spray and then use my hand and a rag to wipe it, getting my bare hand down into the water if needed. I was horrified, and to this day I wonder how common a practice this is in hotels. If I didn’t want to do it, I was told, I could bring in my own toilet brush and carry it with me every day. I didn’t want to do that either, and somehow I managed to put my hand in toilet water only once that whole summer.

I got very efficient with hospital corners and I learned lots of neat tricks for making the bathroom look more clean. Even today I still wipe a little glass cleaner in my bathroom sink after cleaning it to give it that even shinier, cleaner look. I got a lot of practice with always going from top to bottom, cleanest to dirtiest, strategies I use almost every day in my current life. But I also learned that hotels almost never change out the comforter and that any glass cups in the room were probably just wiped down with glass cleaner and not actually cleaned before you showed up.

The summer ended on a sour note when I developed a terrible hacking cough that just wouldn’t go away. I went to the doctor, who was not surprised at my cough once she heard about my summer job.

“It’s that cleaning spray they use,” she explained. “We’ve seen a lot of the resort housekeepers here with the same thing.” My mother was horrified. She wrote a letter to management about their negligence in forcing the housekeepers to use these harsh chemicals, and she bought me a bottle of Soft Scrub so I wouldn’t have to use the harsh green spray. But I continued to use the spray (it was so efficient!) through the end of August at the resort.

I went back to high school in September with a solid start to my savings account and a hacking cough that did eventually go away. It had been a good job, a great learning experience on a lot of levels, and I’m glad I did it. I still think about those old apartments regularly, and that $20 bill I got for doing ten minutes of dishes.

I know you are all wondering: do I tip the maid when I stay at a hotel now? I do not. Having cleaned hundreds of rooms and been tipped so infrequently it still strikes me as odd to tip the maid. But I don’t let my kids scatter clothes all over, and I try to make it obvious that yesterday’s paper is supposed to go in the garbage.

And I try really hard to not touch the comforter. Ew.

I did not realize I was writing a three-part series until I arrived here at part three and the question which troubles me every day.

How busy should kids be?

No, wait, that’s not quite right.

How busy should I make my kids be?

My kids are mostly uninterested in extracurricular activities. They are currently both participating in piano lessons and swim lessons. They tolerate these activities, mostly. We’re really limping to the finish line on piano lessons here, and absolutely nobody was excited to perform in the piano recital last weekend. I sat in the audience and clapped for my kids when they bowed and even though I was proud and happy to be there I still wondered if it was really worth it to force them to do this.

We had an unusual experience recently in that my youngest found an activity he wanted to try, an obscure martial art that I hadn’t even heard of before, but we found a dojo and got him started in the spring. I have never had a kid sign himself up for something before, and it was so refreshing to have him excited to go to the practice sessions and proud to come home and show his brother what he had learned.

But all good things come to an end, and this particular good thing ended around the six-week mark.

“It’s just not for me!” he protested when we told him it was time to go to practice that week. “I tried it, and I decided I don’t like it! Don’t make me go!”

“You can’t quit on a bad day!” I told him. “Keep going for now and we can talk about this again next week!”

That line bought us one more good week of practice, but the next week I found myself sitting in my car in front of the dojo in a stalemate with my nine-year-old who refused to get out.

“I don’t even care if you take away screen time!” he insisted. “I’m done! I’m not going anymore! I don’t want to go! You can’t make me go!”

So what is the point of signing our kids up for extracurriculars they don’t want to do in the first place? The best-case scenario is that they just needed a little push to discover some new activity that will bring them joy and a sense of satisfaction in the years to come. The worst-case scenario is months of resentment for being forced to do an activity, and massive battles to get them to actually get their asses in the car and go to these activities every week.

A high risk, high reward proposition if there ever was one, and I am no ambitious entrepreneur. I’m just a mom who is still grieving the fact that they both quit chess club years ago and refuse to go back.

But I also try to remember that childhood is not forever, and adulthood is full of new opportunities. Sure, my youngest refuses to do Lego Robotics League now, but maybe in his 20s he’ll take up embroidery. Maybe it’ll be scuba diving or cross-country skiing. Maybe my oldest will write really great One Piece fanfic and make great fanfic friends and end up in long-term, weirdly fulfilling book club with them. We just don’t know what the future holds.

For now, their futures hold piano lessons. But I would be willing to give that up if it allowed them to find their true passion elsewhere, even if it’s embroidery.

My essay about piano lessons got me thinking about extracurricular activities.

I do not like to be busy. I never have. When I was a kid my favorite thing to do after a full day of school was to go home. So when my mom would gently encourage me to try some new activity or–even worse–force me to participate, I was rarely enthusiastic.

Here is a list of extracurricular activities in which I participated at some point before the age of eighteen: Campfire Boys & Girls, dance, gymnastics, t-ball, basketball, piano, volleyball, cross-country running, track & field, some math competition thing I can’t remember the name of, MedClub, theater, and a bunch of random church stuff like confirmation class and doing reading or ushering.

I only lasted a season for most of these, with some exceptions. I did Campfire all through elementary school (I think?). I believe we only met once a month and mostly did arts and crafts projects and I enjoyed that. I stuck with gymnastics until 3rd or 4th grade (?). But I never played a sport for more than one season.

I just dislike sports so much. I am extremely unathletic, but also unmotivated by the excitement of competition or team spirit (perhaps because I am so unathletic?). And the time commitment was ridiculous. Practice every day after school and we have stupid fucking away games where I’m stuck on a loud bus for hours? No thanks!

Theater worked well for me because there was a cycle to it. I was never cast in a lead role, so for the first couple weeks I would only have to show up for rehearsal once or twice after school. There was plenty of downtime backstage and I could quietly chat with my weird theater friends while also doing homework. As we got closer to showtime my practice schedule would ramp up until the last two weeks when we were all there every day after school for hours.

This would be my breaking point. I would backslide on piano practice, and major school projects would be ignored. I would be stressed out and spiraling a little bit by the time we rolled into the full weekend of shows.

And then it would be all over. We would strike the set on Sunday night, I would arrive at school exhausted on Monday morning and that afternoon I would do what I loved most: I would go home. Every afternoon. For weeks.

Most people are not like me. I think most people like to have a few obligations on the calendar to force them out of their homes. They maybe find the gym tedious and prefer to be on a soccer team. They derive satisfaction from coaching the local middle school debate team or seeing their friends at choir practice. I respect this about people!

A lot of people enjoy the satisfaction of having accomplished something in their free time, but I enjoy the satisfaction of having accomplished nothing.

No, I take that back. I enjoy the satisfaction of playing piano alone in my house for an hour. I enjoy finishing a really long non-fiction book about the Romanov dynasty. I enjoy mowing the lawn at the cabin and not using the self-propel feature even once. I enjoy watching the Marble Olympics with my kids before bedtime, and going out for drinks with the neighbors on the weekends.

I think my personality just doesn’t mix well with extracurriculars. This is a bad look on paper, particularly when it comes to college applications and resumes.

But you know what? If I had another chance to do high school again, I wouldn’t do it any differently. I’m glad so many extracurricular opportunities exist for kids, and I know so many people who have fond memories of all those away games, but I have no regrets about the many afternoon hours I spent on the couch watching old Star Trek episodes on VHS.