Without sand.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

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PERFECTION: Pursuing it? Eschewing it? Or: what’s your idea of perfection? In six words?

Write yours in the comments here, or post on your own blog (and then add your link to our list!). Or tweet it, with tag #sixwordfridays.

Need more details? Want me to email you next week’s topic?
Check out the six word fridays info page.

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You think, hmm, how am I going to make lemonade out of this one? An unexpected nap is going to void the early bedtime plan, but you cleverly—cleverly!—carry said toddler to your room, where you figure you can at least curl up with her for a few minutes. But when you close your eyes, she opens hers and gives you a long explanation about how mommy puppies should not sleep during the day, only baby puppies should, and anyway she’s already done sleeping, let’s go get some grapes.

So basically my question is: is there an emoticon for that?

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Guess what? Tomorrow’s Friday! Okay, that wasn’t the most interesting thing ever to guess. I apologize.

However! Friday means Six Word Fridays! This week’s topic: PERFECTION. Are you pursuing it? Do you eschew it? Where have you found it? Or give us your idea of perfection, in six words.

For the full scoop, or if you’d like me to email you next week’s topic, check out the
Six Word Fridays info page!

Since we home school, our lives aren’t all that different in the summer than the fall—there’s no back to school rush, we’re not counting down the days, there’s neither angst nor excitement about new teachers or new schools or new anything. Well, there’s excitement for new school supplies. But that’s about all.

Sometimes I think that year-round sameness is a benefit of our lifestyle, and sometimes I think it’s a drawback. I wouldn’t mind marking the seasonal changes a little more intentionally, giving a little more attention to the passage of time, acknowledging what’s just passed and look forward to what’s ahead. (And of course things aren’t EXACTLY the same all year long. But similar, at least.)

I say this pretty much at the end of every season, but have yet to figure out how to implement such taking-a-breath-and-reflecting rituals in our lives. The daily maintenance gets in the way, for one thing, and I don’t have a clear idea of what I want to do, for another. Someday I’ll figure it out.

And in the meantime I’ll wonder: where the heck did the summer go? And is the rest going to zip by just as quickly?

Why? Why do you do this to me? Was your existing product really so abominable that you had to make it both “new” and “improved”? New I can agree with. Improved? I am somewhat less inclined to use that word.

And while “more essential oils” sounds like a good selling point, having tried the new product, I have to wonder: was it not essential enough before? Because it was certainly oily enough. Now it is something else altogether unpleasant.

Which means that yesterday, hair conditioner was one thing I gave no thought to. I bought the brand I wanted, I put it in the shower, I used it as necessary. Today, suddenly, it’s back on the list of Things To Think About. I have to pay attention to the hair products shelf at the store. I have to read labels. I have to try something else and hope it’s neither completely useless nor hideously scented nor, apparently, overly oily.

And I hear you, you’re thinking, geez, lady, it’s just conditioner! It’s one thing! So you have to comparison shop again, so what? It’ll take an extra few minutes.

Dude. It’s never just the conditioner.

That is all.

Love,
Me

Succinctly?

Aaaaand it’s Monday again.

We’ll spend the day cleaning together!

(It’s the nesting. Can’t escape it.)

But getting back on topic again:

Eleven years. Four kids. Plus more.

And we still like each other.

This makes me happy, every day.

Over the heads of noisy children…

Making meals they probably won’t eat…

Driving, on the way to anywhere…

In quiet moments after they sleep…

When they wake us too early…

Together: better than I could’ve guessed.

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And now for your take! TOGETHER. Being together? Got it all together? Your very own sort of togetherness, in six words!

Write yours in the comments here, or post on your own blog (and then add your link to our list!). Or tweet it, with tag #sixwordfridays.

Need more details? Want me to email you next week’s topic?

Check out the six word fridays info page.

—

First of all, what keywords in my email triggered an ad selling mind control techniques?

And second, shouldn’t the seller have just used mind control to make me want to buy their product? Because I didn’t even click. That seems like a mind control fail right there, to me. But maybe my mind control standards are too high…

“Although we adore men individually,
As a group, we must admit,
They’re rather stuuuuu-pid.” *

Except of course we don’t use words like stupid, so that part gets dramatically hummed.

* It’s Mrs. Banks, in her suffragette garb, explaining why women need the vote. Apparently that part of the song is really really catchy.

And then I take a maintenance break and go online to read yet another study showing that parents think they ought to spend more time with their kids, and I think, well, of course.

Because my kids? Are with me or my husband twenty-four hours a day, every day, every week. The older ones are home schooled, the younger ones are home, and we’re all together all the time.

And I still think I’d like to spend more time with them.

Because most of the time that we’re together, we’re not Being Together. We’re making lunch, we’re tidying the playroom, we’re working out whose turn it is to ride the tricycle. Or maybe I’m working whether Audrey or Sadie gets to ride the tricycle while Owen waters the vegetable garden and Abigail reads a book in the shade.

We’re together, technically, but we’re not Being Together so much as Being Nearby Each Another. It’s not the same thing. Even if we’re all working on the same project, half the time it’s maintenance. It’s not fun, it’s not exciting, it’s just necessary.

I’m glad we get to do that—even Being Nearby is relationship-building, if not meaningful and fun in the way Being Together might be—and they have to learn to do the maintenance stuff sometime, so they might as well learn by doing it together. But still. It doesn’t feel like we spend all that much time Together.

Today I didn’t do maintenance. Not hardly. A little bit of household stuff, very little in the way of meal prep, and then I laid on my bed and read books to whomever wanted to listen. And then Owen read to us, and then we all went out to the backyard together and admired the sunflowers and ate the cherry tomatoes. We did an art project, we read some more.

The house is a wreck—there’s a reason we do so much maintenance usually—but we were Together quite a lot.

I’d like to devise a routine that involved more Together and less maintenance, but I’m not sure how to make that work. We still need to eat meals, we still need to wear clean clothes, we still need to be able to walk through the house without tripping over lego creations. Still, it’s something to ponder. Because my kids are really cool people, and they grow very very quickly. I’d like to spend more time with them, you know?

With only a few (okay, several) weeks left, we are still pretty much nowhere on baby names. We’ve got lists. Some of the lists we even like. But we haven’t quite put together first + middle combinations that will work just yet. And we don’t know whether we’re expecting a boy or a girl, so we really need two names…

What I’m thinking is, this clearly means we’re not spending enough time trolling baby naming websites. You know any good ones? We’ve tried Nymbler and Name Voyager and Nameberry… there must be more! Aren’t there? Maybe?