Spring is slowly giving way to summer here in Kansas, so the girls and I are in full on park mode. I love loading the girls up in the morning and hitting up one of the eighty-three (!!) parks in the city. We spend a few hours swinging and sliding, then roll back home just in time for a quick lunch before the girls collapse into bed for afternoon naps.
It’s incredible to see the change that one year can make. This time last year, Maeve was just starting to enjoy parks as two year old. Ada wasn’t even two months old yet, so she spent a majority of the time tucked away, snoozing in the stroller. But this year, Maeve is pumping her legs on the swing all by herself and Ada is taste testing the playground mulch like a pro.
All of those post-park naps have made for quiet afternoons around the house, which means I’ve gotten some quality time typing away at this newsletter and working through the tall pile of books on my bedside table.
The weather is already sneaking into the mid-90s in the afternoon around here, so I know that these cool mornings at the park will soon turn into afternoons in the kiddie pool on our back porch. Enjoy this edition of Naptime Notes from this well-rested and sunburnt mom, and I’ll catch you poolside next month!
What I’m listening to on repeat this month:
Come Away With Me by Norah Jones. When I think of albums that define my childhood, this is a top runner. Norah Jones’ voice will live forever in my memory as the background music in my parents’ home on Sunday mornings, elbowing my sisters for some mirror space as we all got ready for church. I loved reading Norah reflect on the album twenty years (!!) after its release and crediting its creation to hearing tunes from Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton, and Willie Nelson in her own childhood home.
Gossip in the Grain by Ray LaMontagne. It’s a bit like If You Give a Mouse a Cookie—if you give Chloe a Norah Jones album, she’ll want to listen to some Ray LaMontagne after it. This is another album that makes me think of Sunday mornings growing up. What can I say? My parents have great taste in music.
Robby Hecht by Robby Hecht. The summer before my senior year in college, one of my favorite university librarians let me borrow this album. He’d discovered it via NPR and it became the soundtrack of that summer. Whenever the weather turns warm, I blast it through the speakers and take so many sweet trips down memory lane. Listen to the whole album, but enjoy my favorite tracks, “When I’m With You Now” and “The Sea and the Shore”.
A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle. After discovering Madeleine L’Engle’s poetry a few months ago, I started listening to this book on audio book through Libby. It’s only six hours long, and I devoured it. I particularly love Meg, whose unruly curly hair, braces, and glasses remind me of my own awkward teenage years. The second book in the series is almost available and I can’t wait to continue adventuring with the Murry family.
Something I’m reaching for every day:
My peonies! Two years ago, I transplanted three peony plants from a neighbor into our front yard. Last year we had a few blooms, but this year those three little plants are showing off.
There are so many gorgeous flowers blooming daily, and they don’t last long. I share them with the neighborhood for a little bit, then harvest a few and have them in vases throughout the house. They smell so good. I know peony season is so dang short, so I’m soaking up as much as I can in the next few weeks ahead.
A tiny shift that is making all the difference:
Even with copious amounts of coffee, mornings with toddlers are not for the faint of heart. Somedays, our girls are up by 6am, and others they mercifully sleep in closer to 7am. Up until recently, I was letting the girls’ cries for “Mommy!” or, more often, “Potty!” act as my morning alarm clock. But it always felt like our morning just kind of happened to us. Breakfast, morning naps, and getting ready for the day happened, but rarely in the same order and at the same times daily.
After hearing me relay my morning routine (or lack thereof), my mentor suggested that I get up and get ready for the day before the girls wake up. At first glance, this sounded absolutely horrendous. Roll out of bed, decide what I’m going to wear for the day, and figure out what to do with my bedhead curls before 6am? But I decided to give it a shot, and became a total believer after only one day.
I’m almost a month into this small schedule change and mornings are going so much smoother around here. I’m dressed and ready by the time the girls start stirring. On the days they sleep late, I’ve had a chance to grab my morning cup of coffee, too. That readiness has shifted how alert and present I am, and as a bonus, I’m not hunting for fifteen minutes throughout our morning to get in a quick shower or change out my jammies.
The books on my bedside table:
The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd. I have been in a fiction funk for a hot minute and this book snapped me out of it. The main character, Nell Young, is passionate about cargotaphy, and her dad is a legend in the field. But seven years after he fired her from her dream job over a seemingly worthless cheap gas station map, he’s found dead in his office at The New York Public Library with the same junky map hidden in his desk. It turns out that the map is ridiculously valuable and rare, but a collector is hunting down each copy to destroy it and anyone who gets in the way. The only thing that raced faster than the plot was the three weeks I had this book on loan from the library. The last quarter of the book flies, so I was able to beat the clock and return it, fully read, to the library so they could pass it along to one of the 125 people in line for it.
Perelandra by C.S. Lewis. Joseph and I are reading this together outloud and it’s been a fascinating read so far. We loved Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in Lewis’ Space Trilogy, and Perelandra is a totally different experience. We’re working on sitting down every Thursday night to read a chapter together, which is a great almost-end-of-the-week thing to look forward to (when I don’t fall asleep in the middle of a chapter, that is).
You May Want to Marry My Husband by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. In 2017 piece from The New York Times, Amy shares reasons why she loves her husband, Jason, and how she wishes she had more time with him before she passes away from cancer (which she did, ten days after the piece was published). I stood and read this in my kitchen this past month and the part that reduced me to tears was this line: “This is a man who emerges from the minimart or gas station and says, “Give me your palm.” And, voilà, a colorful gumball appears. (He knows I love all the flavors but white.)”
Pressing Pause: 100 Quiet Moments for Moms to Meet with Jesus by Ruth Schwenk and Karen Ehman. I picked up this sweet daily devotional at a thrift store this past month and I love picking it up and reading through a devotional when I’m making coffee in the morning. I find myself nodding along most days because the writing is ridiculously relatable as a mom of young kids. There’s only one reflection I haven’t jived with because it didn’t sync up with my Catholic understanding of suffering as redemptive. However, all the rest of the devotions come highly recommended!
Curly Girl: The Handbook by Lorraine Massey. Joseph kindly picked this book up for me at our local Buy Nothing Group swap meet a few weekends ago. I started to embrace my wavy hair after Maeve was born three years ago, but I’ve never read what’s considered by many to be the Bible for curly girls. I’ve learned a lot so far, and it’s been fun seeing what works for me and what doesn’t. It’s only been a few weeks, but I think my curls are becoming more defined and I’m more committed than ever to letting them just do their thing.
The books I’m reading (and re-reading!) with the girls:
I Broke My Trunk by Mo Willems. Truly, any book in the Elephant & Piggie series is a guaranteed hit. Maeve thinks Piggie is hilarious and I totally agree. We’ve read this book enough times that I caught Maeve cozied up in the armchair reading it to herself this past week (complete with voices).
Some Moms by Nick Bland. This book was a librarian recommendation for Mother’s Day books and it was adorable. The rhyming lines are fun to read, but what really makes this book shine are the hilarious illustrations of animal moms and their babies.
Llama Llama Meets the Babysitter by Anna Dewdney. Llama is another beloved book character around here and this book had an adorable rhyme and story about the worries kids might have when waiting for a babysitter to arrive. Listening to Maeve reassure Llama that “grownups come back” made the read extra special.
A Piglet Named Mercy by Kate DiCamillo. This sweet picture book is the origin story of how Mercy came to live with the Watsons on Deckawoo drive. Maeve loves the full length Mercy books and amazingly sits through all 60+ pages of story to hear her about Mercy’s adventures, but this little book is the perfect quick bedtime read with all of her favorite characters making an appearance.
Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? by Bill Martin Jr. Call me crazy, but I love this book even more than Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by the same author. The illustrations are vibrant and the featured animals include some of our favorite critters: Flamingos, hippos, and zebras. We have the audio version read by Gwyneth Paltrow, which is charming.
The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor by Amy Alznauer. A stunning picture book biography of Flannery and her search for the strangest, most unusual bird. I laughed out loud at the dedication, taken from Flannery’s Mistaken Identity: “especially prepared and highly intelligent adults and precocious children.” Although I enjoyed this read much more than the girls did, when Maeve sees a picture of a peacock, she says that they “remind me of Flannery,” so my job here is done.
A braggable thrift store find:
A few weeks ago, I was browsing at one of our favorite thrift stores. I happened to look up past the bookshelves and saw that they had a Little Free Library up there. But it was heavy and wouldn’t fit in my backseat with the girls and the stroller. I relayed this amazing find to Joseph, and we take a look at it the next time we are at said thrift store together.
We ultimately decide to think on it, and I assumed it would get snatched up by someone else.
Then, on Mother’s Day, Joseph surprises me by pulling out the Little Free Library from the back of his car. Easily the spring project I’m most looking forward to, I can’t wait to stain it and curate a gorgeous little first collection of books.
The plan is to include a chalkboard on the side of the little library and use it to announce fun different collections that we rotate. In September I want to fill it with a collection of my favorite cozy mysteries, and in February I’m going to set it up with blind dates with a book for our neighbors.
You know it’s a good Naptime Notes when there are two thrift store finds to chat about. At the same thrift store (told you they have great books!), we found a brand new, unused copy of The Adventure Challenge: Couples Edition. Inside the book are fifty different challenges to do together, but you don’t know what your date will be until you scratch off the description (like a scratch-off lottery ticket). Once the challenge is revealed, you have to do it.
We started with a free date night in (because toddlers) and spent the evening creating a comic strip of our relationship . . . with all of the words written in Chinese characters. It was so much fun and something we would have never planned on our own. I can’t wait to see what the other dates are, and it’s been so fun to reach for the book on a free evening and have some fun together.
And guys, the book was only $1. If that’s not a braggable thrift find, I don’t know what is.
A few conversations to tune into:
Worrying comes naturally for me. Whether it’s thinking about all the ways the girls could get hurt around the house to dress rehearsing the worst case scenario, it’s easy for me to spiral into “what if” questions that don’t lead me anywhere helpful. I loved chatting with Melissa Overmyer on the Letters to Women podcast. She’s a fellow natural born worrier, but she’s learned to move from worry to wonder in both little and big situations. Listen to our conversation here.
Do you ever wonder if you missed the day at school where they taught you how to get your stuff together and be confident in who you are? Feeling crushed under the weight of external and internal expectations? Same. I loved this conversation with Julia Marie Hogan Werner, LCPC about reclaiming a sense of direction and purpose in our lives as Catholics. Press play here.
My all-time favorite mom-of-toddler life hacks:
Your toddler comes home with a sheet of stickers, then you spend all day responding to their requests for you to take each sticker off, one by one. Well, let me introduce you to the “all sticker”.
Just remove the large parts of the sticker sheet (the all sticker, as Joseph used to call it as a kid) so that your little can peel back the stickers on their own and stick them everywhere their heart desires.
A quote I’ve been thinking on:
“If a little flower could speak, it seems to me that it would tell us quite simply all that God has done for it, without hiding any of its gifts. It would not, under the pretext of humility, say that it was not pretty, or that it had not a sweet scent, that the sun had withered its petals, or the storm bruised its stem, if it knew that were not the case.”— Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul
A poem to leave you with:
I ran across “Birthday Poem” by Erin Murphy years ago, but recently stumbled on it again and knew it was the poem for this month’s newsletter:
It’s 2 a.m. and I can’t remember the last name of my friend Joy who died of breast cancer. I can see her wig, slightly matted, with the curls she always wanted, see her holding hands with her daughter that afternoon we walked to Long Point. But the name…a W, I think…damn it… Joy, who kicked her drinking husband out the last month, who interviewed the local politician (no sir, tell me what you think, not what you think everyone wants you to think), who drew a thousand yellow smiley faces and called it Portraits of Prozac. Walton? Williams? Winston? I brought her copies of Vanity Fair and People, heated a few cans of tomato soup in her grease-splattered kitchen. I never took an SOS pad to that back-splash or made a homemade stew, never drove her, like her good neighbor did, to the Grand Canyon, i.v. trolley in tow. I just sat with her every few weeks in that dark bedroom that smelled of her daughter’s new kittens, picked up her spilled blue pills from the carpet under her bed and ticked them one by one into the bottle, reaching for them the way I’m combing my mind now for her name: Wilson? Wiggins? The tattered paisley address book is gone so I can’t look her up and anyone who knew her is asleep now so I can’t call–and besides, my stepdaughter is downstairs talking to a boyfriend an ocean away, which is how far I feel from late-night hushed giggles and a phone cord stretched to the front stoop, that is how old I am now, old enough to have forgotten the name of a friend who died, died for God’s sake, not a friend who gave me a ride to Syracuse one weekend or loaned me a gown for a college ball. Her daughter lives with the ex now. He’s remarried and sober, I’m told. Once when my husband and son ran out of gas on Route 213, the new wife picked them up in her red Saab and took them to the Texaco in Galena. She seems nice, they said. Dyes her hair. Gwinner. Joy Gwinner. And her daughter’s name is Hope.
That’s all I have for you this month! I’ll be back in your inbox next month for another round of Naptime Notes. Thanks for reading along!
In His Sacred Heart,
Chloe
p.s. Your turn! Tell me about what music YOU listened to growing up, or what songs always make you think of summer! 👇🏼
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