Anxiety. I can’t get out of my head. Thoughts spiral. And when I’m lying in bed with everything quiet it’s hard to shut it all up. Sometimes I can’t fall asleep. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night. I’ll try to thirty minutes to an hour before giving up. Then I’ll sit on my phone or go downstairs and watch tv. Eventually if I get tired enough I’ll go back to sleep. Otherwise I’ll wait until it’s time to get ready for the day.

Getting places on time

We live in Virginia but the museum passport is everywhere (there’s also a separate zoo/aquarium one too). The passport does not work for museums within an hour or so drive of the home museum but it works when we go out of town.

While not free, I find a membership or two to be advantageous. There’s usually member swaps where you can get in another local location for free for a month. When we go on vacations our first stop is always a grocery store, and I usually try to get an extended stay hotel with a kitchen. Saves on eating out because we’ll pack for lunch and make dinner. We have an amusement park pass that works with other locations so parking and admission is included. Our museum membership works for hundreds of other out of state museums so we visit science and children’s museums included. Vacations are still expensive of course but this reduces costs significantly.

Other than that things like parks, beaches, library events. Meet up with friends at someone’s house.

I’m thankful that a lot of early childhood places are really beginning to focus on emotional awareness. There are so many resources for social-emotional learning for kids now. My child’s preschool is SEED certified (https://www.nmececd.org/seed/) and she’s been working on a feelings journal. At our elementary school we have social skills groups where we explicitly teach kids about emotions and also teach them life skills (we have small groups of kids playing board games to handle taking turns, losing, etc). At home and school we have these little “spot” of emotion stuffies and an accompanying book that explain what an emotion is, what it feels like, and what we can do about it. Our school also uses the zones of regulation (pic) to not only help kids understand but to also help the staff understand how our students are feeling.

When my now-husband and I first moved in together we ate out more than we do now and when we did make food we “cheated” a lot. We had some frozen meals and premade stuff. Over the years we have refined a lot of our cooking skills. We go out maybe once or twice a month, delivery in rare circumstances (we’re much more likely to do carry out) and eat at home most nights. Our grocery bill is around $400 a month for 2 adults and 1 preschooler. That gets us breakfast, lunches, and dinners. My husband will probably go out to eat for lunch once a week. Going out to eat is at least $30 if not $60+ for us and that’s not sustainable for every meal.

I grew up with a gameboy advance sp that was a gift from my grandmother and we got a family Wii when I was about 12. I don’t think my mom knew much about the ratings but we weren’t allowed to play much besides mario kart and Wii sports. I started playing more when I moved out at 18.

Black Dahlia - old Chevy s10 truck and I was a moody teen

Frank - old gold ford explorer that was a grumpy old man

Madame Red - Oldsmobile Ciera that was red

Ares - black ford explorer that was an old undercover police vehicle and a tank

Nessie - silver ford explorer. Full name Vanessa, V for short (5th car, Roman numeral 5)

Mysia - blue rav4. Absolutely loved this car. Got rear ended and totaled within 4 months.

Athena - Nissan rogue

Bonus: my husband’s cars

Barney - purple car but named for the how I met your mother character

Mozzie - named for the white collar character

Sylvie - named for the Loki character

We had hot tea as a unity thing for the two of us, but he said it was a Chinese tea ceremony which is where the bride and groom serve tea to their families.

Best: can I say my own? Everything was tailored to my tastes so I had a pretty good time. It was summer but we had the ceremony and reception in the same place (indoors with AC), the catering was provided by the owner who was a professional chef, DJ did both live and recorded music, sparkler send-off at the end, had a nice little bridal room downstairs to get ready and keep stuff safe. The only thing I would change was the officiant. He was an old family friend but made everything too Jesus-y, mixed up light year as a unit of time in front of a several meteorologists and nasa scientists, and claimed that something we did was a Chinese tradition despite us explicitly telling him it was not and neither of us having a bit of Chinese heritage.

Worst: overall it has to be my brother’s last year. So first, my grandma had a stroke like two days before and was taken off life support during the rehearsal dinner. The officiant forgot his notes and spend most of his speech talking about how marriage is hard and you might want to get a divorce but you shouldn’t. And the speeches from the best man and maid of honor were cringy and naive (to be fair they were all like 19-21 years old).
Runner-up to my best friend who got married in a non-air-conditioned barn on a humid July day.