Last week, I finally accomplished a task I've been dreading: cleaning off the shelves in the toyroom. I've needed to do this for more than a year, as they were crowded with a hodge podge of toys that no one plays with anymore. When Haley packed up her room, she had two big boxes of stuff she left behind, and I needed a place to store them, and that was it; necessity made me face the thing I didn't want to face.

It wasn't laziness that caused me to avoid this decluttering. It was just the simple, sad fact that I didn't want to really, really know this: I don't have little kids anymore. And I don't have any grandbabies. So 4 room-length built-in shelves full of toys? Probably a little bit of an overkill. But it feels like getting rid of once-beloved toys is akin to saying "I don't care about the memories attached to those toys."

Even though that's not true. 

And even though it feels like it, taking no-longer-beloved toys to the second-hand shop is not the same as dropping off how much I loved that time in my life—it's not saying it didn't matter. It just means that time has passed and it is time for me to move on.

Plus we needed the shelf space.

So last week, I went through every single toy bin in the playroom. Many toys I kept for future grandchildren: most of the dinosaurs, all of the trains and the Cars cars, the beanie babies, the Littlest Pet Shops. Definitely the farm and the farm animals. Some toys went to the second-hand shop. Some were just too worn out and so were thrown away. And the things that were still good but still too beloved to just give to anyone: those things I decided to see if my neighbors wanted. So this week, my front room has looked like this:

(Minus the floating letters of course.)

I got rid of:

A1 + A2: the big Legos, even though Haley and Jake loved these. They take up SO much space and I decided that if I do have a grandbaby who loves big Legos, I can buy a new bucket.

B: the Cars cars racetrack/carrying case, which was empty because I kept all the cars. Kaleb loved those cars, and I thought he'd love this track when he was three, but he didn't.

C: the Thomas the Tank Engine roundhouse. I kept all the trains and the tracks, but again with the space. This is going to one of my neighbors' kids for his birthday.

D: the big yellow dump truck. At one time, when Jake and Nathan were little, we had two of these. They'd fill the back up with their favorite toys and then, holding on to the handles, race them up and down the hall. I think I need to make a scrapbook layout about that.

E: My boys were all big fans of Rescue Heroes. When they discontinued them and came out with Space Heroes instead, I got them for Kaleb. I think he played with them three times. This sack is still waiting for a good home, but I think they'll end up at goodwill.

F: All of the Twilight books. I just...gah. I wanted to keep them because, you know, I bought them. And I even didn't hate the first one. But the rest I read because I wanted to make sure they were OK for Haley to read. And I'm never going to read them again, nor is she, and the boys certainly aren't, so why keep them? (I usually donate books I don't want to the library, but I am fairly certain they don't need anymore.)

G1 +G2: the car rugs. You know...these are printed with a cityscape to drive your cars around. We had a little one and a big one, and many, many happy hours were spent driving cars on them. My friend Becki sent me a picture of how much her little three-year-old loved his new treasure (the big one) and it eased my heart at letting it go. It will be loved again by someone I know!

H: Flo's Diner. I actually debated pretty hard over this one. In the end, I didn't keep it just because of space. But it is SO CUTE!

I: I have three boys. You do the math on how many Matchbox cars we owned. We kept the favorites.

J: Chevron cars. I don't know...do they still sell these? They are bigger than Matchbox cars and when you drive them their eyes wiggle. They were a particular favorite of Jake at age three; they went along with the big car mat to the happy 3-year-old.

K: The left over reptiles. My mom gave Jake the Bucket o' Reptiles for Christmas right before he turned four. He loved them almost as much as the Bucket o' Dinosaurs. We kept several.

L: The left over dinosaurs. When Jake was barely three, if you asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he'd say "a paleontologist." Without even a lisp. Cutest. Thing. Ever. We kept a lot of dinos, too; these were the duplicates.

M: the Noah's Arc. Kaleb got this for Christmas when he was one. He liked collecting the animals: arranging them in pairs and then stirring them up and then doing it again. But he didn't love it like he loved the farm (which he pronounced "sarm"). This is going to my niece, Lydia, who is two and loves animals and will love this beyond words. It's even less sad when the toys stay in the family!

(In typing this up, I realized that Nathan and Haley seem under represented. This is because A---you can store a LOT of beanie babies & littlest pet shops (Haley's favorite) in one big Rubbermaid bin and B---Nathan's favorite toys were the Playmobile knights, and as they are also Kaleb's favorites, and he still plays with them all the time, they're not going anywhere.)

Almost all of the toys have left my house now. (Some actually delivered to the wrong freaking neighbor, but doing stupid embarrassing stuff like delivering to Ashley Jones instead of Ashley Nelson? Totally an Amy thing to do.) A few are still waiting to be picked up or delivered. 

The toy shelves, while not currently barren (they are the temporary house of many buckets of other stuff, while we are rearranging rooms and getting carpets cleaned and painting walls), feel...skinnier. They feel ready to house something else—some books, I think, and boxes of fabric, perhaps. Nathan's hiking gear and Jake's violin case. It is nice to be more organized. But I'm not sure I'll ever really stop feeling that sadness over time moving on. (Which I have obviously been feeling a lot of lately, yes? Note to self: blog about something different.)

I just really, really hope that one day (but not too soon) (I am perfectly willing to wait until the right time), I'll have a grandchild who will run into my house and ask to play with his (or her) mom's (or dad's) old toys. Because they are waiting for them—the toys. And me, too.

What do you do with your too-young toys? And is it hard for you to let go of them?

...and it wasn't even because they woman in front of me in line had six different ads she wanted to do price matching on.

It should’ve been because I’ve gone to four different Wal-Marts in the past eight days, a disturbingly high amount of trips to a store I’m morally opposed to. Back-to-school season, however (which I’m beginning to see is more expensive than Christmas), demands multiple trips somewhere, and as Target seems to have decided to fairly severely understock their school-supply shelves this year (at least, mine has; it looks like the zombie apocalypse swept through), my only other choice has been Wal-Mart. This last trip failed to produce the one thing I can’t seem to find, a non-feminine pencil case (the kind with three holes so you can clip it into your binder). I did find some this morning, but I don’t think Jake nor Nathan would appreciate a pink one with black and grey glittery swirls and hot-pink furry trim at the zipper, so I didn’t actually buy them.

Partly the high concentration of trips to Wal-Mart has to do with Haley going off to college. The town where she’s living has two Wal-Marts, but no Targets, and both times we’ve been up there (once to drop her off and then again this weekend to bring up the forgotten necessities) we’ve taken her to buy groceries. It’s disconcerting to find yourself weepy inside of a Wal-Mart, as it’s perhaps the most utilitarian place in contemporary America (read: hardly the place for overwhelming emotion, let alone an epiphany of sorts), but it happened to me both times we took her. It might seem like a case of tomato soup, a bunch of angel hair pasta, milk, eggs, cheese, butter and bagels would be enough to feel like she’d be OK, but providing food is one thing. Feeling like I taught her enough is another thing, and a shopping cart full of food, shampoo, and a cheese grater hardly compensates.

But really, what made me cry was apple cider.

I was ok in Wal-Mart this morning, mostly. While I shopped I thought about Haley sitting in her first university classroom. I thought about Jake, who already hates school, and how I might somehow help him and not make the mistakes with him that I made with Haley. I thought about Nathan’s current dilemma, which is needing new jeans; it’s nearly impossible to find him pants as he needs a 26 waist and a 32 leg. I thought about Kaleb and his dislike of reading and how it feels impossible to fix as I’ve already been doing, his entire life, the things you’re supposed to do to help your kids love to read.

I was OK until I saw the apple cider.

It’s a kind of cider that my Wal-Mart only carries in the fall, and seeing the big end-cap of it stopped me right in my tracks. Because it means that fall is here, and as much as autumn is my favorite season, I don’t want it to be here. Maybe because it is my favorite season, I don’t want it to start. Because if it starts, it will only end, and probably that is why I got teary in Wal-Mart this morning: because my life, right now, feels like a season of endings. The end of Haley’s childhood (which I know, I’ve blogged about way too much lately), the end of Jake & Nathan going to junior high together, the end of Kaleb’s littleness (an 8-year-old in third grade just seems so non-little to me; it feels like the middle of childhood instead of its beginning). Sure: Jake starting high school is a beginning for him. But it’s so close to the end, too, to the end of his childhood, and then Nathan is hot on his heels, and it feels like a cascade of endings just piling up one after another. The end of how my life was just last month, of how my family’s life was.

Fall will come. I’ll do everything I can to savor it, hiking and taking pictures and admiring the mountains. But it will end. Just like I did everything I could to savor the last eighteen years of motherhood, but now it is ending. The golden summer of it. I know: they will all still need me. Actually, I don’t know that. I hope that, but most of me is afraid that they will all not need me at all, will move on and away and that I’ll become mostly an antique curiosity in their lives. All I could do, standing in front of apple cider at Wal-Mart and trying not to completely lose it, was think about the mistakes I’ve made and the ways I’ve failed to give them what they needed and all of the things I should’ve done differently.

I didn’t buy any apple cider.

I finished shopping, my heart heavy. I let these lines slide over my thoughts, over and over: doesn’t everything end, at last, and too soon? (Even though I know the real quote is die, doesn’t everything die too soon, but "end" fit better.) My grasshoppers are flying away, autumn is starting, the leaves are changing, and no matter what I do, time won’t stop.

Last night I was up late. Not because I was sad about Haley leaving (like Sunday night) or mad (furious, actually) at Kendell like Saturday night, or waiting for Haley to get home (like Friday night).

I couldn't sleep because I was full of lightness.

I tried to put a name to it, to why I wasn't so gobsmackingly exhausted that keeping my eyes open felt like lifting the world's heaviest weight. And then I realized: that was it. Weight. I feel like I've been carrying not just my own life around (trying to keep it organized and spinning), but my kids', too. Haley for obvious reasons, but I've been just as stressed (although not as emotional!) about getting the boys ready for school.

Jake had a tough time this summer trying to decide which high school to go to, and he still needs to study more so he can take the test to get his learner's permit.

Nathan wants to take boxing and guitar lessons and join the mountain climbing gym and he's just so ambitious that I can't help but feel I'm letting him down.

My mom needs help with de-cluttering her house and then trying to sell it.

Kaleb has not been happy about going back to school.

Neighbors needed dinner and the lawn needs to be mowed and I need to read my book club book.

Plus there was how stressed I was about Haley's high school graduation, and before that trying to get her quilt done (which wasn't stressful but I was anxious about finishing it in time) and teaching my Big Picture class and before that preparing my Big Picture class, and I think I have to go all the way back to the end of January to not remember feeling stressed and anxious.

I feel a little bit like Atlas: carrying several lives on my shoulders. Or maybe just on my heavy, heavy eyelids.

But last night? I felt at peace. Haley seemed happy in her new situation, and she'd found a job that day, which felt like the last big hurdle. Kaleb hadn't minded his first day of school. Jake and Nathan were ready for their first days. I'd made the neighbor's dinner (although, I totally botched it by getting it there so late that they'd already eaten something else), Nathan mowed the lawn. I still hadn't cracked open my book yet, nor solved my mom's problems, but they seemed smaller now that my own kids were taken care of.

So I said it aloud to Kendell, who was taking to me instead of sleeping. "I think," I said, "this is the first time I haven't felt stressed since winter." It was that deliciously light feeling, like when you've gone for a walk with ankle weights and then finally taken them off. Like I was floating.

And listen. I love my kids, and I love taking care of them. I wouldn't ever not want to help them out. I will always carry as much of their burden as they'll let me (or as my shoulders have strength for) (or as is healthy for them). Sometimes it's just more stressful than other times.

And it felt so lovely to feel like everyone was in a good spot that I actually tempted fate enough by saying it out loud: "I'm hardly stressed at all."

Never say that out loud.

Here it is, a little more than 24 hours later, and I can't sleep again, only this time not out of lightness. This time out of stress, because we discovered that the bus system in the town where Haley's going to school (the much-touted FREE bus system that was a part of her decision to go to that school because it meant she could still work and not have a car) shuts down every day. At five o'freaking clock in the afternoon.

And the problem with that is that her job (which she was so excited about!) (and which felt like the last hoop to jump through before she was comfortably situated) quite often would require her to work until 10:30.

And it's 2.2 miles away from her dorm.

Call me overprotective but isn't walking 2.2 miles at 10:30 a bad idea?

I am out of steam. I've run on adrenaline and chocolate acai berries for too long. I'm too stressed to talk myself out of being stressed.

I just want so badly for things to be workable for her. For her not to be overwhelmed by all the working and the classes and the studying and the busses. I want her to not have to run on adrenaline and diet vanilla Coke.

Probably there is a lesson here. About letting her figure things out for herself. About me needing to know that I can't fix everything for her anymore—much as I would like to. About me needing to have more faith instead of doubting that things will work out somehow. Or even about me just barely touching with my toe the enormous massif of the world, of her world she has to navigate without me.

But I don't know how to take that in yet, because it feels like I am letting her down. It feels like to her it might feel like her mother doesn't want to help her. Even though I do. Even though carrying her own life on her shoulders is a thing she has to learn how to do, I still want to take some of the weight.

So I am sleepless, and worrying, and anxious.

The little one we bought for her when she was two years and three months old, when we moved her out of her crib and into a big girl bed. The one that’s been by the side of her bed for 16 years and one month. The one that has held, at different times, the small accouterments of her age:

• the little terry cloth scrunchies that were the only things we could make ponytails with because of her tender head (back when her hair was bright gold-blonde and curly) (and they weren’t only hair accessories, they were toys; they came on little cardboard tubes, five to a pack, and she’d sit on the floor in my closet and arrange them on the tubes in different color patterns)
• the farm animals
• her big box of crayons, which we replaced about every three months because she liked them sharp
• her little pastel-colored horses that I found one day in a toy store in the mall and I never saw again anywhere else (they were tiny, like three inches tall, with delicate details but sturdy legs, perfect for toddler hands) (and she only kept them in the drawer at bedtime because she took them with us everywhere until slowly they were all eventually lost) (except for the yellow one, which she put in the port of Kendell’s very-expensive brand-new speakers and he had to have his audiophile friend come get it out for us and we also found a spoon sitting next to the horse. In the speaker.)
• her very favorite puzzle, a Winnie-the-Pooh floor mat sort of puzzle that I'm convinced was the first step in her learning to read
• Pooh, Piglet, Tiger, Kanga, and Roo, holding hands
• the tiny silver bangle bracelet she wore as a baby, which she loved even though it was too small for her
• her box of Barbies, which she loved passionately for a very short time (and as I always hated Barbies I didn’t play with them enough with her, which I regret desperately now even though I still hate Barbies) (but I do have a very fond memory of Becky, who loved Barbies, coming over to our house on the Christmas morning when Haley was three or four, and Santa had brought her the Barbie who came with a horse, and they sat in front of the tree and put the whole set together, my little sister and my daughter)
• her color books from Miss Cathie’s preschool
• whatever Junie B. Jones book she was currently reading
• whatever Harry Potter book she was currently reading (and she did jump right from Junie B. Jones to Harry Potter and I didn’t even know how astounding it was that she could read them in second grade)
• her five favorite Beanie Babies (always a constant rotation of favorites)
• her collection of Littlest Petshops (until it got too big to fit there) (she collected them until she was twelve or thirteen) (she would’ve loved them when she was three)
• her alarm clock
• her collection of earrings, until it got too big for her jewelry box
• her hair straightener and hairbrush
• her Caboodle full of make up and fingernail polish
• a box of rubber bands for her braces
• seashells
• her scriptures
• her class schedule
• her retainers
• her journals (meaning all her hopes, dreams, wishes, memories, heartaches, joys, accomplishments, normal days, exuberant days, and whatever else she might’ve written down) (she wrote in her journal almost every night before bed) (I take very solemnly my responsibility—nearly, really, a vow—as her mother to never, ever read her journals, even though during those prickly, leave-me-alone teenage years I wished sometimes to read them just so I could know one thing about her other than "fine")

It wasn’t when we got in the van that was stuffed with her stuff and drove away. (Although I did cry then.) And not when we walked into her dorm and I saw the space that she’ll be living in for the next nine months or so. (I was too excited for her.) And not even when she walked across the grass to her building, once we’d organized all her stuff in her room and helped her hang things up and taken her to get groceries and hugged her goodbye, and she walked into her new world and we drove away. (Because I cried then too.)

No. It was when I wiped off her empty night stand—scrubbed off a lump of chocolate and a sticky spot, got rid of all the dust—that I really lost it. When I really, really realized: it’s over. I’m at the end of her childhood. I have to move on and let go when what I really want to do is turn time back, to the seashells and the earrings and the day I showed her how to set her alarm, to the Pet Shops and the pastel horses and the hair scrunchies. (Or even further, to the day when Kendell set up the crib in her otherwise-empty room.) I leaned against the wall of her (old) bedroom and I cried. Cried hard and long. If no one else would’ve been there I’d have maybe even wailed.

Because it’s just such a complicated feeling.

Of course I want her to go to college. I want her to move forward and become the person she is capable of becoming. I want her to move forward.

I also don’t want it to be over.

Kendell tried to comfort me, but you know? I didn’t want to be comforted. I didn’t want to be talked out of feeling what I was feeling: the grief of something ending. I wanted to feel it because it is a way of marking the transition. When you have a baby there’s so many ways that it is celebrated: showers, and flowers and balloons and gifts and people stopping by with cookies. When you deliver your teenager to her new life, there isn’t any pomp. There are no balloons. There is just the letting go, literally: hugging, and then letting her walk out of your arms and across the grass.

Probably I will cry more over this. (I am crying as I write in fact.) But that first real, long cry in her bedroom next to her empty night stand: that was my transition. The moment I passed into being the parent of an adult, and all the things that will entail, trailing my string of memories behind me.

This morning while I was showering, I found myself thinking about one of my neighbors. She is a kind woman, and a good mom (and by "good" I mean...she’s kind to her kids, with that edge of firmness that means she also doesn’t let them get away with much); she projects a sort of confidence and light that I think comes from following Christ’s example.

I can’t picture her ever doing something really, really wrong.

In the shower, I was thinking about something she has that I wish I had been able to have too, when I was her age (a young mom), so that I could have the outcome of that desire even now. It’s not a possession but a situation, or a set of circumstances, and my heart aches for not having had what she has. I suppose I could label this feeling "envy," except it isn’t malicious. I’m happy for her that she has these circumstances.  But, of course, I thought, she didn’t make the choices I made. She didn’t grow up hard, and angry, and rebellious. She’s never done anything really, really wrong so of course she deserves it.

(Even though I don’t know anything about her past.)

Then I thought about a much-needed conversation I had with my sister on Sunday evening. I sat on my back patio in the gathering summer-night darkness and poured out some of my current troubles to her. It is so good for me to have someone who has already been through what I’m experiencing, so that I know I’m not alone in this and because I needed, desperately, her advice. Which was something that I didn’t expect. Not a suggestion for how to fix things, but this idea:

"I think to see things more clearly, and to understand what your role in this situation is, you need to forgive yourself."

I sat there, on my lawn chair in the dark, just thinking about what she said. About how many times (all the time) when something goes wrong I think but of course this is happening because remember all those bad choices I made? even though it’s completely ridiculous to think that. In my brain I know that isn’t how the atonement works. Bad things happen, and good things, but the bad things aren’t always punishments and the good things aren’t always rewards. God isn’t Santa Claus.

My brain knows this.

But my heart, in an effort to make sense of the world, says no. This bad thing is what you deserve because of your imperfections. This belief makes it harder for me to want to change the hard things, because if I am never to be free of the consequences of my past, then any change I make will lead only to a different form of sadness. It keeps me in darkness. It remains a burden.

My sister is right: I do need to forgive myself. How is entirely another thing, but for now it is enough, this light to go by, this thought. And life, as it turned out, reinforced this for me tonight, when I found out that my sweet, good, kind neighbor had lost, just this morning, part of what I envy her for having.

And, you know: among my pity and sorrow for her, I never found a thought like this must’ve happened because of some wrong choice she made. (Who would think that about her? Or about anyone who has suffered a loss?) Even though if I had lost what she lost, that is what I would’ve thought about myself.

I had a little glimmer: if I can feel compassion for my neighbor, then why can’t I feel it for myself? Isn’t that part of what the atonement is about—it happened so we can be forgiven for our mistakes. And I don’t quite believe, deep down, that it really applies to me. But maybe this knowledge that I gained from my neighbor’s sorrow might be a first step to figuring out how to believe. How to forgive myself.

This has been such a strange summer for us. It started with Kendell and I getting in a fender bender—on his birthday! Someone rear-ended us. I was OK, but he had a pretty good case of whiplash, so he did a few PT appointments. (The only damage to the car was on the bumper, which was repaired.) Then there was my spectacular fall at Ragner (which I still need to blog about!), which resulted in the fact that I've only gone running once this summer. We took our swing set down. We've been getting Haley ready to leave for college. Jake's been busy with his job. Nathan cut his finger open. Well, I suppose that isn't really so strange in our family; maybe the strangeness is that no one else has been taken, spurting blood, to the doctor's office.

Until yesterday.

Haley's gotten in the habit of riding her bike to her nanny job in the mornings. I've gotten out of the habit of nagging her about wearing her helmet. It's not too far—about three miles—and I thought she was taking the road without much traffic.

Yesterday, when she got home, I was lying in bed, as I've got a cold and I wanted to lazy it away. She walked back into my bedroom and said "I just got hit by a car" and I was like, "what? that's not funny to joke about" as I totally thought she was kidding.

Then I saw her bloody knee and I realized: nope, not kidding. My daughter got hit by a car. Riding her bike. without her helmet.

We've had more than our share of injuries in my family, so I'm pretty good at not freaking out. I took her into the bathroom and cleaned her wounds: a big scrape on her wrist, a few little ones on her elbow, and a long gash on her knee. I didn't think it was deep enough to stitch, but I wasn't sure. Then I examined her head and found she had an enormous goose egg. I got her bandaged up, gave her some Advil, and then I started thinking: OK, what do I do now? Do I take her to the doctor? Do I call the police? (The person who hit her, who ran a red light, did stop to help her; he also gave her his contact information, but they didn't call the police.)

I called Kendell and he wasn't at his desk. I called my sister and she didn't answer her phone. I called the doctor but the nurse's line went to the answering machine. So I left a message, and then my sister called back, and then I freaked out.

I mean...not a big freak out. Just a meltdown. Just saying the words "Haley got hit by a car" was hard to do, given the lump in my throat. Washing away the blood, bandaging the wounds, checking her pupils? Those things didn't make it real. saying it did. So I cried a little, and tried to breath, and then followed my instinct, which was the same thing Suzette said: yeah, take her in to the doctor.

So we did, and she's OK. She has an enormous bruise on her thigh. But no concussion, seemingly. The cut on her knee wasn't deep enough for stitches, so the doctor steri-stripped it instead. I think she might be a little bit scared of riding her bike anymore—we'll need to do a get-back-on-your-horse bike ride soon.

But what I'm left with is a huge spurt of anxiety. The little accident she had could've easily been a bigger one, if she'd hit the car differently or he'd accelerated faster or she'd landed in a different way. And it all balloons from there. If she'd chosen to ride on the less-busy road, she wouldn't have been in that accident, but maybe the day before she would've been in a different one. The anxiety melted me down to a razor-sharp knowledge: just getting out of bed every day is a miracle. How do you choose what you need to so that every day doesn't end in the potential disaster it could?

I guess you just take a deep breath and do it anyway. I guess you just don't think about all the awful turns your life could take. You rely on it going forward steadily, and hope that the detours aren't seriously life-changing. You pray a lot. You encourage the wearing of helmets—in whatever form the helmet takes. 

But you just never know: when everyone you love could be taken away, and so really what you do, once you get out of bed, is love them as hard and as well as you can. What else is there?

On the day of the quail, when I was sitting out in the grass watching them, my neighbor and her son, who is a little bit older than Kaleb, came over to see what I was doing and to show me something: a tiny garter snake. This is one of the components of summer in our neighborhood, the random discoveries of snakes. It took me by surprise when we first moved here, as I had never in my life found a snake in a suburban yard. I think they're here because our area used to be an orchard and I imagine it's in the snakes' collective memory, living here, even though most of the trees and the long orchard grasses are gone. (Our apple tree is one of the left-overs from the orchard, which makes me love it so much more than if I had planted it myself.) Plus, several of the older neighbors still own their water rights, so every three weeks or so their yards (and for a few, their fields) are flooded. The yards that border the water-turn yards always have snakes.

We've only found a snake in our yard once or twice, but there are still plenty to go around. The kids hold them and play with them and then let them go in the field down the street.

As my neighbor and I watched the quail and talked about snakes (she doesn't like them, I'm not bothered by them, but we both agree it's a pretty cool thing for the kids), I was making a strange sort of connection in my mind, because just that afternoon I'd been working on a layout about the garter snakes in our neighborhood:

I made it for my Write post, which I write most months for Write. Click. Scrapbook. Its design is based on the same one I used for my WCS gallery layout this month:

The gallery's focus is on go-to design, the approach or layout or technique you tend to use most comfortably. It is one of my favorite galleries, because I learned so many new things and found so many new ideas.

The design aspect I wrote about is this layout scheme, with three 4x6 photos spread across the width of a 12x12 layout, journaling on the bottom and title on the top. I still remember the first layout I made with this design, one about Haley in kindergarten. I've been using it for a long time.

These are some of the only-a-handful of layouts I've made this summer. It's been so busy! My scrapbooking desk is piled high with supplies that need to be sorted out and put away, but it's also dusty. I feel a sort of shift in my relationship with scrapbooking happening, especially lately as the new supplies have started to appear. I'm starting to question my relevance in the industry, as the current look, which is beautiful but very supply-focused, is so not my design approach. I've always been about the story more than the supply.

At any rate, all of this talk of design and connections has left me quoting Robert Frost in my head, even though it doesn't truly apply:

What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.

(Learning about that poem is one of my earliest school memories, though why we read it in second grade is baffling. Or maybe explains a lot about my psyche.)

Like the spider, the moth, the white flower, only with less menace, the layout, the snakes, the connections make me think that design is more a part of things than I realize. 

• Sometimes it's easier to just take vacation time than to get your whole department worked up because you're trying to switch schedules with someone.
• It is so much easier to pack everyone for a trip when everyone has a good bag of his/her own. (Also, Ogio bags are pretty awesome, despite my initial wish for a pretty bag instead of a functional one distrust.)
• Haley and I really should've gone to the Nordstrom sale way, way earlier than 4 days before the end.
• But! Like last year, we found way more stuff (and much better prices anyway) at the Rack. Trust precedence!
• Write down the restaurants you want to visit if you're going to south-east Idaho, rather than thinking you can use the bookmarks on your phone while you're driving. Phone service is spotty there. Spotty at best.
• Mesa Falls in Idaho? Pretty amazing. (Pics to follow when I can cope with all 700 I took on our trip.)
• Small restaurants in tiny towns have a hard time dealing with 18 people showing up all at once. Plan to wait for a long, long time, and order ice cream at the same time as your meal or you'll wait even longer. (Or just skip the ice cream...it was mediocre.)
• Floating down the Snake River is transcendent, while sitting on the very tip of the raft's nose during class-3 rapids is terrifying but exhilarating.
• I still miss my mother-in-law and I have a pocket of anger at the Universe or God or Whatever Took Her Away Too Soon.
• I don't have that same angry pocket over my father-in-law's death. Having the time to say goodbye makes a huge difference.
• The Tetons are just as awe-inspiring as I remember.
• Traveling with family is fun but complicated. Pack a lot of patience.
• You notice things about your kids when you travel with them that you don't see any other way.
• Traveling with one missing kid (in this case, Haley, who couldn't get off from work) makes things feel both more spacious and more lonely. I kept trying to keep track of four kids instead of three and then feeling sad when I remembered I only had three with me—and that that is going to be our new normal.
• My kids are pretty amazing. My husband found some great stuff for us to do on our trip. And even three times in one week is not too much eating at Taco Bell—although, BK does make a pretty delicious ice-cream Sunday. (We did eat at other places besides fast food...)

How was your week?