Hyperfocus of the Week: Summer Parenting

Welcome back! I took last week off from Hyperfocusing but here we are again.

Summer isn’t my best time for Hyperfocusing. The kids are home, the yard is a constant project, and I have a mile long to-do list to chip away at, so there aren’t hours at a time for me to drop into my own whims. Still, I occasionally manage.

First some news! My emergency substitute qualification was re-issued so this coming year I will be subbing at the kids’ school. I will also be teaching an 18 ish week class on Storybuilding, offered to middle and high schoolers. I am basing it off of my teen workshop and adding in a lot more content and writing exercises, along with some LARPing. The school requires 30 hours of volunteering for the first kiddo, so this class will fulfill that.

I have an article coming out this month in the Historic Novelists of North America newsletter this month, so expect a link to that soon. I wrote on Historic Ways to Kill of A Character.

My sister is getting married this coming weekend! Congratulations Katy and Aldy.

On to my (sort of) Hyperfocus: Parenting.

Summer parenting is different than school time parenting. As a mom I don’t suddenly have six more hours of emotional energy expenditure to offer just because school is out. Now, to be completely honest here, my kids are fantastic. Our version of behavior issues are the occasional bedtime temper tantrum about brushing teeth, or normal levels of squabbling between certain sibling sets. As a neuro-spicy mom of neuro-spicy kids I am pretty empathetic to their quirks and ways.

The big emotional energy expenditures with our kids are their hobbies and interests. Linden is pretty obsessed with board games at the moment. Her favorite? Memory. Memory is a step up from candy land or chutes and ladders, but it is a killer. Our compromise has been Railroad Inc, or Flip7 which Porter or Moss will join in on. Linden doesn’t understand the strategy for either card game so we usually tell her she got 100 points at the end and everyone is happy.

Moss just wants to “hang out”. He generally wants to do this the moment I settle in to do something else, like writing or napping. Moss is my shadow kiddo which means that my strained “sure.” Makes him run from the room yelling “Nevermind” and leaving me feeling terribly guilty. The best compromise is for me to take him and the kayaks out and do my work on a picnic blanket while he entertains himself in the water, but that only works when the water isn’t 40 degrees.

Violet is a busy kid this summer. She is volunteering at the library for all the reading program events, and is getting ready for fair. Throw in coming to Wednesday girl shop day at my friend’s wood shop and the fact that her Silver Award proposal was just accepted and she has a full plate. This week I played fabric cutting assistant, and chauffeur. Violet is also my most compliant kid, helping around the house as we had to get things looking nice for insurance photographs—I repaid her in ice cream.

Porter is at that self-sufficient age where he pops up occasionally and says “Hi Mom, whatcha doin?” I feel like he slips through the cracks most often because he doesn’t ask for mommy and me time the way the other kids do. I’m working on it, mostly because he is a cool kid and I like hanging out with him.

Along with the immediate attention I have for the kids is the future planning. I’ll be leading two Girl Scout ages in the fall, along with 4H, and teaching my class. We also have CAP, drivers ed, piano lessons, junior strings, and woodturning. That doesn’t include grown-up hobbies and organizations. The only way I can give each of these things the time they need is to plan way ahead and have a lot of stuff at the grab and go stage when the activities roll around.

So this is what rolls around my head at night, and what is occupying my daily to-do lists. July will be a “tame the beast” month, but I’ll make sure to add some kayak trips and mom-hobby time in as well.

I did get my big lathe up and going this week in my home shop and I’m working on a nice big bowl. I also finished my historic sewing combo of pin cushion vase, needle case, and thimble acorn, all done in walnut, with the acorn “nut” done in resin and wood shavings I cast. I had planned on a different shape with the needle case but a flaw in the wood took me a different direction. That’s life.