Today we woke up early and drove an hour to an apple picking / fall festival kind of farm. We took some cute family photos, hiked a nature trail, got apple cider donuts, kettle corn, browsed the booths, and were home by noon. (Flying past all the traffic heading up into the mountains.)
We had an unscheduled afternoon during which I read a bit, cleaned out and organized 4/5 of the pantry (will finish tomorrow), and Drew started the process of cleaning off and sanding down a dresser we’ve had in the garage for 2 years that we’ll paint to replace B’s 4-drawer dresser we got before he was born.
A friend came over to drop off banana cream pie slices and hang out for a little bit.
Then because B just read The Outsiders in class (and watched the movie) he wanted to show it to us, so we watched that classic 1983 film all together. (Stacked cast, btw.)
Afterward, when H went to bed, we started reading A Wrinkle in Time. I think she’s intrigued.
Oof, I’m starting late this year. I’ve been thinking about this for awhile but just haven’t jumped in yet. (Side note: yesterday I finished Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died—a book that I was vaguely aware of, but then one day realized that this whole time that 10-year-old H has been blasting through early-2000s Nickelodeon shows, I’ve been watching Jennette McCurdy! Anyway, that connection made me curious enough to read her memoir, and it was a heartbreaker, although not quite scary enough to count as a Halloween read.)
So—I went through my Storygraph “to read” list, and pulled out some recent things that I’ve saved that count as horror. Here’s what I’m planning to read for the rest of this month:
The description of this online is “Flowers for the Sea is a dark, dazzling debut novella that reads like Rosemary’s Baby by way of Octavia E. Butler.” Sold.
I really liked Tender is the Flesh last year, and I’ve been thinking about trying to read more short stories, so I think this is perfect.
I requested the audiobook version of this at the library, so we’ll see if it comes in quickly enough—I don’t currently have any audiobooks going and it would be good to have something on hand.
Another short story collection. I recently reread Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Other Stories, and was reminded again how much I like her work and I feel like that’s what I aspire to write like. I hadn’t seen this collection before but picked it up at the local bookstore a few weeks ago because I thought it would be perfect for this month.
And then finally—not exactly horror, but I think I’m going to read this with H at bedtimes. It’s high time she knows this story.
Look at how perfect this plate is to hold this California cookie!
Every year, the 4th graders do this California cookie project—the parents bake these cookies off of a very basic sugar cookie recipe, cut them out according to a template, and send them in to school, where the kids decorate them to show topography, the different zones of California, where is Sacramento, etc.
The paper with the recipe and template looks like it’s been photocopied a thousand times and they just keep copying it and using it again. The recipe very much makes about 3 Californias, or 2 Californias and a tupperware full of scraps, but I don’t think any of us like, plan ahead and halve the recipe, or team up with another family, or anything like that.
I first met the California cookie when B was in 4th grade, three years ago. We were in the middle of moving from one house to another house, and it was like, two nights before we had to be completely moved out of our old place. We had massively underestimated how much time it would take us to move, and hadn’t prepacked enough—I still have stress dreams about it. This was when we were fully in our DOOM box (“didn’t organize, only moved”) phase. At one point, Drew was driving from the old house to the new with his rear car seats folded down, and dishes just…stacked in the trunk area. Not in boxes. Just little stacks. Just driving really, really slowly.
Thank goodness we just moved a mile away.
On B’s California cookie night, we were under an incredible amount of pressure to get everything out of that house (and then! to clean it!) before our Saturday morning walk through with the landlord. Around 11pm that night, we realized we had to make a California cookie, and we didn’t know where the baking sheets were. Luckily, we found a pizza pan, and things like flour, and I threw together a dough. While it baked, at some point just after midnight, I fell asleep sitting up on the couch.
Oh yeah, and his birthday was also that week, and we were in no shape to do things like…decorate. Or plan anything. We did manage to buy presents. Did we get a cake? I honestly can’t remember.
Eventually we did do our walk through with the landlord (it was awful; I’ll never know why she needed to be like that), and we did unpack cookie sheets, and we did celebrate our son’s subsequent birthdays, and Drew got to put his backseats back up, and I got to sleep in a bed again. But it just all came back to me this week, when H’s class did her California cookie project.
We’ve been in this house for three years; in this city for five years. B had just ended 1st grade when we left the Bay Area; he’s now in middle school. H was four years old; she’s ten now. Time passes and you make cookies and you get a new couch and suddenly your kid is taller than you. Celebrate every day, I guess, and go ahead and eat the cookie scraps.
I wrote this in 2019 based off of an online poetry prompt.
A Solstice Lullabye
June 21: it stays light Until nine o’clock. Come on, night.
My kids are not smart enough To tell time. It makes Bedtime tough.
I push their heavy heads down Onto their pillows. They scowl, frown.
“It’s still day!” they cry. “Nope,” says I.
Prime 53 summer poem Total syllables 53, 11 lines First 3 stanzas are 3 lines each with 7/5/3 syllables Final stanza 2 lines with 5/3 syllable count Rhyme scheme aba cdc efe gg
My 9-year-old has gotten really into makeup in the last year or so. She has a battalion of brushes, a parade of powders, an armada of applicators. She has absorbed some of my makeup—which I actually did use sometimes, and definitely wanted to keep for future use—and turned it into hers. Colors are blended. A rainbow of q-tips fills the bathroom trash. I’ve lost light colored hand towels to the cause. Her friends come over fresh faced after school and leave looking like fantastical butterflies.
Our whole thing has been, this is for fun and for those days when you’re feeling fancy or whimsical. Not “you need this to look pretty” and definitely not “you don’t need makeup.”
The crazy thing is, all the play actually is practice and she actually is getting good at it. She did my makeup the other day and it was surprisingly artful. Thick, sure, and did I need quite so much highlighter, I’m not sure, but I was overall impressed.
Look at that left hand, gripping me to hold me in place.
I recently fell for an online ad and bought that Il Makiage perfect match foundation. It looked really good on Alyson Hannigan. It came in a very cool magnetic box that obviously I set aside like, Well I can’t just throw away this cool magnetic box.
I did half my face, and while I didn’t look quite like Alyson Hannigan, I thought I looked smoother. So I did the other half. Then my 9-year-old wanted in.
I allocated her a dab on a sponge and she smeared it over her cheeks.
When she turned into the light, Drew said, “Oh, it’s so…yellow.” Then he looked at me. “It doesn’t look so yellow on you.”
I took another look at my daughter’s pre-adolescent, rosy cheeks and blemish-free skin. She doesn’t get greasy yet. She doesn’t have weird spots. She’s just pink and clear and clean and dewy. The makeup that is a perfect match for me looks…yellow on her.
I used to have 9-year-old skin like hers.
And that’s when I realized…I understand how the Wicked Queen must have felt. It was not just fading beauty but also all the time already gone; not just looking backward for herself but also recognizing what Snow White had to look forward to.
Okay. I saw someone say that if the average life span for women in the US is about 80 years old, then right now we are about halfway there. But unlike the first half, we are going into this part of our lives already knowing who we are, what we want, (generally) how to get it…we’re not dealing with everything that comes with the first half of life. Which I found reassuring. So, I get to wake up tomorrow and live the life I’ve created for myself…and I do it with skin that shows how far I’ve come. Okay. I’ll take it.
And if my 9-year-old can give me any makeup tips for those feeling fancy days, then all the better.
If you have a baby, a toddler, a little kid, here’s what you’re going to do.
Go get a piece of clothing in a size that is like, 4-6 sizes too big for your child. Are they a 2T? Get them something in a 6 or 8. Are they an 8? Get them like, an adult small. Something that they legit can’t wear yet.
Then put it somewhere that you won’t forget about it but they won’t accidentally put it on one day.
Then wait.
Several years ago, my mother-in-law got my oldest child a pair of fleecy Santa Claus pajama pants that are size 14-16. They would drag on the ground—if they would even stay up around his waist, which they absolutely would not back then. This year, I went to the forgotten shelf in the closet where things go to die and I pulled them out and they fit him PERFECTLY—and it even happens to be the right time of year.
(I don’t recommend that you try to time the holiday part of this—that was a fluke and it will never happen again. Just do something generic.)
Then when you sense it’s the right time, retrieve that piece of clothing and watch as that thing that was once so laughably huge—fits them perfectly.
See, the inverse of this is when you save their baby clothes and hold up newborn onesies in front of their tummies and you get weepy at how small they used to be.
What we’re doing here is not reminiscing about where we came from—we’re celebrating where we are now.
Happy holidays! I hope you can make some memories and feel lucky.
My oldest turned 12 a couple months ago. He has spent this entire year in an insane growth spurt, literally bursting out of his clothes. You can hear him creaking as he grows. He’s taller than me (just barely!) (or at least that’s what I keep telling myself). He’s got peach fuzz and his voice is noticeably different than it was six months ago.
In September we bought him this new pair of shoes to take on his school camping trip with his grade – he had grown out of all his summer shoes. In November, he had grown out of the September shoes, so we bought another pair 2 sizes larger. They should fit for a little while longer.
His September shoes are still in great shape since they’re pretty new. But it’s okay, they fit me – so I now have a sweet new pair of shoes.
The first one I learned about at my 12-week scan in the spring, which I had gone to alone, just because of scheduling. I knew something was wrong when the tech wasn’t really talking me through it, and then her measurements were all coming up smaller than 12 weeks, and then she went to turn on the heartbeat and it was silent. She and the doctor were very kind about it and told me how I could exit through a different door so I didn’t have to go back through the waiting room.
That night I started bleeding. I had taken time off of a brand new job (where I hadn’t yet accrued sick days) to go to the scan appointment, and I knew I was going to have to take a day off later that week to go back for a d&c, and so I didn’t feel like I could take the middle day off, so I spent the day in a cubicle, trying not to talk to or make eye contact with anyone, all the while actively miscarrying in the shared employee bathroom.
It was one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve experienced, not just because of the loss, but because of the total shock. I hadn’t had any close experience with miscarriage (that I knew of) and I didn’t realize how incredibly common it is. And I was completely blindsided by it.
By early fall, I was pregnant again, but this time painfully aware of the possibilities. We were, you might say, nauseously optimistic. We didn’t talk much about it. At 7 1/2 weeks I started bleeding. I made a doctor’s appointment and confirmed what we had already figured out. We gritted our teeth and got through it.
That’s what today feels like. It’s the same level of shitty as the first time this happened, but at least we weren’t caught totally off guard, like we were in 2016. At least we knew this level of shitty was always a possibility.
There are a lot of people right now carrying a lot of trauma and feeling a lot of devastation and rage and hopelessness. This experience is part of what’s contributing to my trauma today.
Over the last six months or so, Drew and I have been noticing a lot of out of state license plates in the area. And some states that are kind of surprising—like cars that would have had to do some major traveling to get here.
My parents were driving down the state on I-5 earlier this month, and I said to my mom, “Keep a lookout for out of state plates, I think there are a lot right now.” And then a little bit later I was in the car and sent her a photo of a Hawaii license plate saying, “See??”
And her response was, “We just saw Alaska.”
Alaska and Hawaii?! Those are the wildest ones to get!
So I started keeping track on a map print out to keep track of what we see. The rules are:
a) We’re currently only counting anything we see north of Stockton and south of Sacramento. So we’ve seen more state plates on our way into the Bay Area, but outside of that range, we’re not counting them.
b) We’re not counting big trucks, which are supposed to be traveling all over the place. This is just for your standard personal vehicles.
This map shows what we’ve clocked just in the month of October.
Stay tuned for license plate updates! Let’s see how long it takes to get all 50 states.
This year I haven’t been restricting my horror/thriller reads to October. I’ve been kind of delighting in them all year.
But the good thing is—there are always more out there.
The Girl and the Ghost was on a list of “middle grade horror” that I looked up for Book Riot’s Read Harder challenge. So H and I are reading it out loud to each other.
The theme of my reading this year seems to be slaughterhouses. A Certain Hunger is my third book this year that heavily features the mechanism of slaughterhouses, and not necessarily how they apply to cattle. (See also: Of Cattle and Men, and Tender is the Flesh.)
I thought this book was just…a delight. I love an unreliable, unlikeable narrator. Also when I finished this book (on my Kindle) the “Other books you may like” screen that popped up was populated with—surprise!—other things I’ve read in the last two years. I guess I have a type.
Slewfoot was a “Staff library pick” that I thought, from reading the blurb and the library recommendation, was the inspiration for the movie The Witch, but I have since realized that while they share the same vibe, it’s not the same story. I just started it last night but I’m hooked.
Every October needs a haunted house story, so I just picked this one. Haven’t started it yet, but it’s described as “a cross between Parasite and Get Out” so I have a good feeling about this one.
That’s what I have planned for the moment—I’ll see if I get through more.
(Also fun story: last weekend I was going, “You guys want to watch a movie? Beetlejuice? The Addams Family?” And my kids said, “Those aren’t scary, we want to watch something SCARY.” So I said, “…You wanna watch Scream?” And then we watched Scream. They were not very scared by it, but gratified at getting to watch an R-rated movie.)
The Cameraphone Diaries 