Family Fun Board

It’s summer. And every season my family makes a family fun board. My Heart’s Desire, Babyface, and I all come up with ideas and write them down. It’s a list of fun stuff for us to do every season.  We stay busy with regular weekend activities, like swimming lessons, chores and birthday parties, so it’s great to have a list of fun stuff to do.

Summer Fun  

This summer we came up with: plant something, make ice cream, picnic, hike, blow bubbles, spot a rainbow, museum visit, camping, farmer's market, bike ride, leaf blower, draw with chalk, and water slide.

It also changes the question from, “What do you want to do?” to “Which one of these things do you want to do?” When we accomplish one, Babyface puts a sticker or stamp on it.

And it had an unexpected bonus. We keep it up in the kitchen and guests sometimes chime in with ideas, suggestions, or offer to join us.  One of my friends from book club offered to join Babyface and I on a field trip to the Museum of American History.  He wasn't interested in First Lady dresses and she skipped the how to DJ tutorial, but we all liked the America on the Move exhibit.

Winter Fun

Our winter fun board included make treat and deliver to neighbors, visit museum, sledding, picture with Santa, make snowman, snowball fight, drink warm cocoa (Babyface loathes hot cocoa), make gingerbread house, decorate Christmas tree, ice skating with Uncle Dinky, write letter to Santa, have a Christmas movie night, make handprint ornament, and ring in the New Year. 

A Paris All Your Own: Bestselling Women Writers on the City of Light

How to read A Paris All Your Own: Bestselling Women Writers on the City of Light, edited by Eleanor Brown  

1) Get passport

2) Read this book 📖☕️

3) Ponder which you would love more, the bread or chocolate

4) Realize the answer is both and this is why pain au chocolat exists

5) Fantasize about whisking self away to Paris

6) Repeat step #3

7) Wonder if it would ever occur to hubs to whisk you away to Paris [or anywhere]

8) Try to recall dusty high-school French 

9) Look on Yelp where to find #4

10) Start mulling next adventure 

11) Allons-y!

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All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

Bryn Greenwood’s beautifully written novel with a controversial theme (the less you know about the book before you start, the better) sparked one of my book club's most interesting discussions.

My awesome book club organizer (shout out to Amy!) arranged to Skype with the author and we had a long talk about right and wrong, gray areas, and figuring out the answer for yourself. Though I read a lot of books, this one has stayed with me.

A-

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How to Murder Your Life

Reading Cat Marnell's How to Murder Your Life, it took me a long time to realize that this was not a recovery memoir. I thought it would be the Millennial version of other memoirs in the genre, like Augusten Burrough's Dry or Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story (both are excellent books).  Instead, her book reads just like she's telling you a long, pointless story in the most casual way possible.

ohmygod, you guys, she was, like, totally messed up. her wealthy parents did not understand her, like at all. so she got into drugs. like, the bad bad ones. and did, like, too much drugs and hung out with really toxic people and got pregnant a few times and had a glamorous NYC job and her alleged best friend was like a malignant narcissist (she read that book after, tbh) and wore expensive size 25 jeans (bulimia is "a rich-bitch disease") and made a career of being a junkie writer... but instead of recovery (rehab is totally unreasonable!), she, just, like went to thailand? and woke up really early and, like, wrote and got reeeeeaaaally tan. now, off the like bad bad drugs, she just takes adderall and ambien and only doctor shops sometimes tee hee.

Why do anything horrible like abstinence (shudder) or recovery or become a decent-ish human being, when she can take a harm reduction approach and stay shallow and self-centered? Plus, she's like really really ambitious and that will be stronger than her addiction, amirite?

D.

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