goodbye to summer

Last day in town...surreal. I'm definitely ready for school to start. For most of the summer, I wanted more free time. Every week I worked I counted down the hours to weekend. But, after two weeks of no job and no responsibilities really, I'm starting to realize that, no, I actually do need something to do. I'm driving myself crazy. I hang out with friends, or think about maybe starting to pack, and then I just start baking. Its gotten slightly ridiculous. This whole week, in fact, I've made something that my sister and I devour while watching one of the movies from our summer list (every holiday/break, we make this super ambitious list of things to do, books to read, movies to watch, skills to acquire....rarely is it even close to accomplished.) 

So this is what I've been up to, in pictures. It basically involved combining eating with some other activity.

-Making shepherd's pie (brought on partly out of nostalgia for Shannon's and partly because Karen and I spent the afternoon speaking in our kind-of-passable British/New Zealand accents).

-Watching Inglourious Basterds and spending the rest of the week yelling "Au revoir, Shoshanna!" and "Ob-LIGE him!" at each other.

-Watching Rabbit Hole and then making blueberry crumble to cheer ourselves up.

-Finally reading all the books that have been sitting neglected on my dresser (whilst having a lovely cup of tea). Every time I read something by C.S. Lewis, I'm like "why don't I read this stuff all the time?"

-Watching our deck be torn down and then rebuilt. This is probably the trippiest thing that's ever occurred in our house. For a couple days, our second story door, that used to open onto the deck, opened  to thin air. Unfortunately, my mom decided that my sister and I were not responsible enough to handle dangling ourselves out the door and taking silly pictures, so she duct-taped it shut. 

-And my crowning achievement, beignets de tomates vertes avec fromage du chevre, also known as fried green tomatoes with goat cheese. SO GOOD. This is pretty much the one and only part of Southern cuisine I've fallen in love with. And I'm getting all fancy now and Frenchifying them after a visit to South City Kitchen in Atlanta, which does the whole upscale-Southern food thing with aplomb. 

My little brother and I had a very pleasant lunch/afternoon snack of wilted spinach, fried green tomatoes, more goat cheese, and apples. 

And now, I'm getting back into the college swing of things by catching up on work in Starbucks and seeing my friends for the last time in a while.

Its odd, thinking back to this time a year ago. Last year, leaving meant having to start over. It was an exciting yet completely terrifying experience. Everyone I met, I would think, "Will we end up friends? What will you mean to me? How will you fit into my life, or I into yours?" Everything was fast. This year, I'm not heading off, I'm coming home. 

This isn't how I planned my summer to be, but I ended up enjoying it. Or most of it, anyway. A big thank you to all my hometown friends on that account. Thank you for the support, the love, the encouragement, the crazy random fun, and the endless photos. 

That being said, I'm beyond excited to see all my Wheaties again. I've missed you guys more than I thought possible. And oh my gosh thank you for all the letters! I absolutely love getting mail, and this:

made my day every time a letter/package/postcard arrived.

I don't know what's going to happen blog-wise. The key ingredient for this was free time (which, even without a full time job, is going to be thin on the ground in college). Also, the fact that most of the people who read this go to Wheaton makes it a little redundant. It's been fun though. And hopefully sharpened my photography/writing skills a little. So...we'll see. Thanks to everyone for reading. 

Seeing as I leave first thing tomorrow, I should probably start packing now.

{odds and ends}

I've begun a habit of accidentally collecting things in the front of my purses. Usually it was just a couple things, like plane tickets that I needed to hang onto, maps, etc. But I was looking for a receipt in the purse I use now and I found all this stuff. How exactly I didn't notice this mushrooming collection is beyond me. I was going to clear it out, but its kind of cool to have it all there. Like a little, skewed snapshot of what I've been up to in the last year or so.

-a street map of Paris

-two train tickets

-an info slip for open rehearsal for Gospel Choir

-a ten rupee note (my dad brought it back from his last trip to India)

-a saints bracelet from Notre Dame

-two iTunes/Starbucks music of the week cards

-an El pass

-movie tickets to Super 8 and Deathly Hallows Part 2

-a magnet from my eye doctor

-a slip to reactivate my lost student ID

-a business card from our hotel in Paris

-a card from The Paris Market in Savannah
-a postcard from Prague

-a card from Marie Catrib's (really good sandwich shop) in Grand Rapids

-a postcard from Santa Barbara that I never got around to sending

-ticket from the Noah & the Whale concert I missed

-two hair ties

-a sticker from the blood drive

-a fortune cookie fortune that reads "You will get an offer that will be hard to turn down"

-ticket stub from Billy Elliot on Broadway

-a pin from the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern

and, finally,

-a baggage claim slip from Salt Lake to LAX
It'd be really interesting to see what someone would assume about me based on all this stuff.

{coffeeshop soundtrack}

Ahh. Today is a good day. Yesterday I took my history final and am officially DONE with history classes from this point onward. So now when I hang out in Starbucks (because my house has become a construction zone) I can do more interesting things. Namely, writing lots of emails, uploading photos, researching internships, co-writing my screenplay, read Let the Great World Spin which I just borrowed from a friend, and creep on the other people here. Wow. Between the four moms who have set up court in the back and look Real Housewives-worthy, the two nurses who must have three hour lunch breaks or some neglected patients, my former pastor, a lawyer with a two foot stack of case material (re-thinking law school...), the hipster couple on the couches who are talking really really loud and the cute blonde guy in the corner, its much more interesting in here than you might think. 

Only a week and a half til school starts and I have to start doing real work again. 

I'm really enjoying just hanging out with friends and doing silly things like obsessing over ridiculous TV shows, driving for hours trying to find the town of Serenbe, zumba, and enjoying the fact that for this small window in time, and in life really, we have no obligations.

In some good news from the world, stock market's up (for now) and the London riots are slightly more under control.

Listening to: the entire For Emma, Forever Ago album, Bon Iver (sidebar: the governor of Wisconsin named July 22nd Bon Iver Day. Who knew?)

still i am not from barcelona...

A lovely weekend filled with:

-trying new Middle Eastern restaurants

-celebrating birthdays

-reunions with long-lost (well, for two months anyway) friends

-sleeping in (no more seven am wake-up call!)

-the wonderful feeling that is having your hair newly cut

-trying to sort through the piles of new music I've accumulated

-kind of sort of studying for my history final
-going to a completely adorable wedding for one of my childhood friends

-making stuff for my room next year

-sending little sister and brother, senior and freshman respectively, off to high school

-Fat Phoebe parties

I don't remember where I heard/read the idea, but I think the basic idea was that these girls used to know someone named Phoebe who was like manic-depressive or something and would throw parties with tons of champagne and chocolate when she was in a down cycle (which was apparently a lot), and they continued the tradition by throwing them for friends who were having a rough time. 

Well, my sister, paradoxical overacheiver and procrastinator that she is, still wasn't done with her summer reading. So I stayed up to keep her company and threw this together,

because truffles and chocolate covered strawberries make even annotating All the King's Men bearable.

Listening to: King of Spain--The Tallest Man on Earth

We Turn it Up--Oh Land

Watching: this.

Reading: Franny & Zooey. Again. I should really be working on the stack I collected over freshmen year...

a nanny no longer

The nannying is over, the nannying is done, 

I have minimal responsibilities as school hasn't begun.

Taking care of kids is a much harder job than you think until you actually do it. You, essentially, are a mom without the mom power. You have no control over how the house runs, how the kids were brought up. Factor in being in the suburbs without a car and that leaves a lot of quality together time in a house that is concurrently having the air conditioning, refrigerator and alarm systems repaired and a pool built.

And what people forget is that nannying is a nine-to-five, real job (well, 7.30-to-5.30, but who's counting). I'd never had one of those before. It. is. hard. Knowing that at the end of every day you have  a few hours before you need to sleep and then get up and do it all over again. And again. And although, yeah, sometimes I got to do fun things like go to the pool or get ice cream, I paid for it by the hours spent refereeing, arguing, laying down the law, setting time outs, and playing endless, endless games of two-room hide-and-seek.

I'll admit, I was envious of other friends who nannied this summer. Who got kids who were precocious, sweet, and inquisitive. Who asked questions about heaven and God and right and wrong. I was even envious of some of the kids' friends who came over, kids who were better mannered and frankly more interesting.

I got kids whose only interests were softball and television, who hated reading (and their required reading time), who acted four and seven but were actually ten and twelve, who fought constantly, who didn't listen. who refused to eat anything healthy, who didn't ever want to do anything.

I learned a lot about love and patience this summer. Its easy to show love to a child who is a mini version of yourself. Yes, I probably would have had more fun with kids who loved The Chronicles of Narnia, who liked helping me bake, who wanted to color and create things, who were inventive.

My daily challenge was being patient and understanding with the kids. I got a letter from a friend (and fellow nanny) in which she reminded me how vulnerable kids are how things that seem small are a much bigger deal when you're that age.

So I tried putting myself in their shoes. And I remembered that I always wanted to watch a lot more TV than I got to. And isn't that what summer's about? Getting to do more of what you want than during the school year? I conceded that between softball practice every night, the hundred degree weather and the fact that their backyard was a construction zone, they weren't missing out on a classic childhood summer by staying inside. I compromised by letting them watch TV in the morning while we all woke up and had breakfast, but we had to get out of the house at some point during the day.

My resolve to be eternally kind and understanding didn't always work. Actually, it usually didn't, especially with the twins. But when faced with children (almost ten year olds, mind you) who bite and punch each other in the face and laugh about it, who showed their frustrations by secretly calling their parents at work, who would do things like get a fork for the other one and say "now you owe me", who would bring up things from six months ago as grounds for current retaliation, who broke down in public places when it was time to leave and started throwing their clothes in the pool, who blatantly lied to me, I think it would have taken a saint not to.

They occasionally had their moments, though. I will try and remember things like taking them to the aquarium, playing with Nerf guns, decorating cupcakes for their tenth birthday instead of the screaming matches.

Cupcakes for the birthday kids and their friend Grace 

DeLayne, CassiDee, and Corey

Me, Corey, and CassiDee at the Georgia Aquarium 

I hope I made some kind of lasting impression on them. I tried so hard to make it clear that they could do better, they could behave better, and they would have to in school. I prayed that if my words were ever hurtful that they just wouldn't hear them.

What I got most from this experience was 1) respect for stay at home moms and 2) gratefulness for my own parents and how well they raised me. It is an impossible job.

Also, an encyclopaedic knowledge of Phineas and Ferb, Zeke and Luther, Shake It Up and any other show on Disney XD before ten AM. 

I'm really going to enjoy my two weeks off.  


And in a small departure from my normal music selections, I proudly present:
Lauren's List of Top Songs That Disney/Nickelodeon Specifically Engineered to Get Stuck in One's Head and Make One Feel Ridiculous for Singing Songs Meant for Seven Year Olds:
Best Friend's Brother --Victoria Justice
We Burnin' Up--Adam Hicks
Famous--Big Time Rush
The theme songs to most shows
Now you too can spend hours banging your head against a wall because that one song is just too dang catchy.