—1—
The 14-year-old continues to be our resident dessert-maker. Look at these ridiculous S'more cookies she came up with.
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| Each one of these is a million calories. |
Chocolate chip cookies topped with half a marshmallow, drizzled with melted Hershey's chocolate bars, and dusted with crumbled graham crackers. I forgot to ask what her inspiration was, I was too busy stuffing my face. I'm pretty sure she made up this recipe, which means she's following in her dad's footsteps.
—2—
I usually pick my 6th grader up from school, but sometimes when they have an early release day I'll have him ride the bus home. The last day of school was an early release, so when I dropped him off he asked "Are you just going to pick me up like normal?"
"Well, I was going to pick you up in an inflatable dinosaur costume," I said. "But I guess I can do it normally."
He did not appreciate the joke.
—3—
Is everyone excited for Father's Day? I had to laugh at this promotional email from J.C. Penney:
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| This better not be a Father's Day fart joke, I hate those. |
The full subject line was "Father's Day is gonna smell good," and it was about a sale on cologne.
I also saw this funny promotion at the hardware store when I went to go get a paint sample for our living room:
It's like Supermarket Sweep from the 90s, but for men.
—4—
The 12-year-old has always been on the small side, so most of his life I've been sneaking butter into his food, counting calories, and pushing snacks at every opportunity like a corner drug dealer. How intense I am about this usually depends on how his last pediatrician's visit went, and 2 months ago his growth curve looked bad for the second year in a row — so I hitched up my big girl pants and got ready for another season of boot camp.
I can't overstate how exhausting it is to constantly be plotting how to get calories into someone who can't really be bothered to eat. It's like those hazy days of feeding a newborn on loop every 2-3 hours, except this time you also have to convince the newborn it's time instead of them reminding you. Now that my son is older, he can at least understand the importance of taking in enough calories to live, so it's a little easier. But not much.
Recently I've been using AI to invent energy-dense recipes, and I'm thrilled that yesterday I found not one, but two recipes that he rated "five stars" and requested the next day.
I'll share one that we named "Mango Tango." Just combine in a blender and you've got a 400-calorie drink on your hands:
- 5 oz whole milk
- ¼ cup frozen mango chunks
- ¼ cup coconut cream
- 2 Tbsp vanilla Greek yogurt
The good news is, he has gained three pounds in the last two months! So I'm encouraged as well as exhausted.
—5—
Here are some things I love as an English major:
These illustrated adaptations of Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey that were given to my 10-year-old:
Everything is a graphic novel now, and that sometimes drives me crazy. Like, do kids really not have the attention span to read books anymore? But if I'm "being so for real right now" — to borrow a phrase from my 14-year-old — this is an undeniably brilliant way to hook an elementary schooler on 2,700 year old Greek epics. If a comic book is what it takes, then so be it.
I also love this article on the em dash and how AI has changed how we see it. Here's my favorite quote:
"If the comma, the semicolon and the period each approximate the breaths a politician takes while delivering an eloquent speech, the em dash represents a mind wandering off course. It’s the people’s punctuation mark. That is, it used to be. These days, I’m more likely to encounter an em dash in someone’s ChatGPT-produced LinkedIn post than in literature. There’s an overeager jauntiness to its latest incarnation, as if it’s trying to sell you something: The em dash isn’t just functional — it’s profound. All this has inspired a debate: Is the em dash still a worthy punctuation mark, or has chatbot output devalued it?"
I hope you're able to read the full article, but sometimes a paywall locks it and sometimes it doesn't. I have better luck on my computer than on my phone.
—6—
In other English major news, I discovered that I've been pronouncing the word "automaton" wrong my entire life. Look it up, some of you may be devastated, too.
This information came to me from my 10-year-old, by the way.
—7—
Now that school is out and everyone is home 24/7, I'm anticipating the place being a total disaster. We had a family meeting yesterday about how to keep it clean, and we identified two main things we could do.
First, everyone is going to do 10 minutes daily of cleaning chores (we track these using the Tody app.) This isn't tidying, this is actively dusting, sweeping, mopping, or wiping something. I briefly debated implementing some system of rewards or punishments, but in the end I just asked them to be decent humans who spend a measly 10 minutes a day taking care of the place in which they live. We'll see how long the honor system lasts before I have to start yelling.
Second, the kids are going to pick up after themselves, and to make sure they do I'm throwing everything in a big storage bin at the end of the day that's still sitting out. They can only get their stuff out at dinnertime the next day, so maybe it will make them think twice about leaving out the book they're reading or their beloved earbuds when they're done with them.
Any other tips for living with a bunch of people who care about a clean house way less than you do?
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