A midsummer update, clickbait, and the art of boring storytelling 📖

Or, revisiting my summer bucket list and thoughts about writing online

About a month ago, I shared my Summer Bucket List, or my little insurance policy to make sure fun mom shows up every once in a while. (If there’s a list, this type-A girl is going to conquer it. 👏🏻) Here’s what we’ve got so far:

Our 2024 Summer Bucket List

1. Vacation!

2. Try making frozen chocolate orange slices

3. Get out the kiddie pool, already (water balloons?)

4. Front porch drinks

5. One house project

6. Bake at least once (two huge cookies)

7. Lots of watermelon

8. Thrift goals: a desk for Q and decor for kitchen

9. Anniversary date

10. Baseball game

11. Farmers’ market visits

12. At least one photo of our whole family

13. Library summer reading program

Not bad! I give myself until the end of August, so we still have plenty of time. And as I said in my previous post, The Summer Bucket List is breezy—there is no obligation to finish the list, and fun can be added (or removed) anytime. We likely won’t join the summer reading program now, and that’s okay. Will I bake? I don’t know. I made a funfetti mug cake from a boxed mix, which we might call enough.

Cotton candy skies and early fireworks on the 4th of July. Peak summer.

In other news, I’ve recently started a new job, so that transition has been taking up a lot of time. (More on that later, which I keep saying, and I also mean it.) It would be easy to take a break from writing—I could, almost too quickly, rationalize removing it from my plate. What I’m trying to do instead, though, is see this as a way to show up for myself. For the accountability, yes. (I’ve published 27 weeks in a row — I can’t stop now!) But also because taking a little time each week to document who I am that day is meaningful. Charlotte of

Baby Brain

said it best:

And truly, the easiest thing to do as a mom is to disappear—into your children, into the mental load, into the chores, into the impossible “balance” of it all. In the absence of free time, I’ve learned how much I need space to be with my thoughts and to process my experiences. Deciding to write weekly personal essays and actually following through with it (who knew?) has built a cozy little nook of self-reflection in my life again. The bar may be set low, but I can’t tell you how accomplished I feel when I pull something together each week and hit publish.

There’s so much writing online that markets a product or shares a hack. And that’s fine—I definitely tap on those articles! But what’s even more compelling, to me, is storytelling. It’s getting to peek into someone’s brain, someone’s life, and realizing that I’m not alone. It’s seeing someone else put into the exact right words that feeling I’ve been having, but couldn’t articulate.

I’d love to pour hours every week into each post, fine-tuning and editing my writing into a shining, polished oracle. Instead, though, I’m gathering wisps of time in the margins of my days and I’m creating rather than consuming. I’m reflecting rather than scrolling.

I’ve decided that I want a digital snapshot of this chunk of my life, and I’m adding a new view each week. I’ve decided that even the everyday, the “boring,” is worth documenting. 💌