People say the weather in Houston is usually 1 of 3 states: hurricane, hot and humid, or at the threshold of hell. We’re in that last phase now. It’s been almost impossible to be outside, let alone MOVING!
I got the rental house all packed up and we moved most things to storage. We have had two sleeps in the apartment and we like it for the most part. Change is hard and I tend to overthink small things so this past week has been tiring for me. But we made the best of the situation and I’m sure we’ll be great here for a couple of months.
Sweet Girl is back from camp and had a blast! She tried so many new things and seems to be more independent. We are so proud of her!
Our house is being prepped for stucco… finally!
And now I’ve got to figure out the rest of the summer. The apartment has a pool, so that’s going to be my #1 go to, along with a few board games we brought. It’s time to set some screen time restrictions, which does make it a little harder for me, but it is what it is.
I was very busy last month and hardly read much at all! However, already in July I’ve almost finished Reading People: How Seeing the World through the Lens of Personality Changes Everything by Anne Bogel, Introverted Mom: Your Guide to More Calm, Less Guilt, and Quiet Joy by Jamie Martin, and Words and Worlds: From Autobiography to Zippers by Alison Lurie. Today Three Women by Lisa Taddeo comes out and I’ve been looking forward to that one.
I brought a few books to read at the apartment too, so I’ll keep myself busy with that!
What are you reading this summer???
Tell Me Three Things by Julie Buxbaum
“Perfect days are for people with small, realizable dreams. Or maybe for all of us, they just happen in retrospect; they’re only now perfect because they contain something irrevocably and irretrievably lost.”
A high school girl loses her mother, moves across the country, and is anonymously emailed by a fellow student who wants to help her. This is a YA novel about a lonely girl trying to fit in. I’d say it was cute and heartfelt but only semi worth the read. Buxbaum describes loss and change very well, I thought.
This Is How It Always Is: A Novel by Laurie Frankel
“Parent time is like fairy time but real. It is magic without pixie dust and spells. It defies physics without bending the laws of time and space. It is that truism everyone offers but no one believes until after they have children: that time will actually speed, fleet enough to leave you jet-lagged and whiplashed and racing all at once. Your tiny, perfect baby nestles in your arms his first afternoon home, and then ten months later, he’s off to his senior year of high school. You give birth to twins so small and alike, they lie mirrored, each with a head in the palm of one hand while their toes reach only to the crooks of your elbows, but it’s only a year before they start looking at colleges. It is so impossible yet so universally experienced that magic is the only explanation. Except then there are also the excruciating rainy Sundays when the kids are whiny, bored, and beastly, and it takes a hundred hours to get from breakfast to bedtime, the long weekends when you wonder whose demonic idea it was to trap you in your home with your bevy of abominable children for a decade without school.”
This is much more than a book about raising a transgendered child. It’s about how parenting is full of family and life challenges, juggling, and what exactly it means to be a good parent. I thought it was beautifully written and very believable.
How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly’s Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life by Heather Havrilesky
A collection of advice columns from former Salon TV critic and “Ask Polly columnist for New York magazine. I read this because I loved Havrilesky’s What If This Were Enough?. This one is about first-world problems for sure… wedding drama, insecurities, infidelity. Perhaps it’s ok for a book to be about the author, but it’s advertised differently. The good in the book was when Havrilesky encourages people to stand up for themselves and fight for what they most need. She empathizes with people and writes well about seemingly universal struggles. The rest was trivial and full of stories of Havrilesky’s past. I have one more I’m going to read by her: Disaster Preparedness: A Memoir. That one is meant to be all about what shaped her and how she developed resilience. We’ll see.
“A lot of people won’t be into you. You will feel the pain of that for your entire life, trust me. You really should accept it and learn to deal with it—not by shutting people out or becoming defensive or rigid, but by (paradoxically!) allowing people space to feel however they happen to feel and making small adjustments to how you move through the world based on what feels good and what doesn’t. It’s okay to be an oversensitive freak. Oversensitive freaks tend to overreact. They tend to spin in circles. But they are some of the most loyal, interesting, intense people around, and they just get better as they age. Welcome to the tribe!”
“A few things that will make your alone time more buoyant: Inspiring music. A clean space. Regular, vigorous exercise. Great books. A nice bath. A wide range of beverages in the fridge. Friendly pets. Engrossing home projects. Your setting matters! I’m not that into decorating, but you have to put a little energy into your surroundings when you live alone.”
