In progress #005

Are we ready for summer yet?

(THIS part of summer I am very much looking forward to. Summer is my favourite season! But there’s also one thing about it which I am terrible at. Help, please!)

Listen. I like to be organised. I have a colour-coded summer childcare spreadsheet. I book our summer holidays in January. That’s me. I love a plan.

And yet. Last summer the childcare juggle pretty much did me in.

I had just started my in-the-office job, after years of being self-employed. I started about a month before the holidays began, and felt pretty prepared for them. I thought I was set. Holiday club, our babysitter, a backup babysitter for when the babysitter went on holiday, my grandparents, the babysitter or backup babysitter when my parents went away, play dates at our house on WFH days, play dates at other people’s houses etc.

There were so many moving parts, the spreadsheet was spreadsheeting itself all over the place.

Only, apparently I put some of the dates in wrong. And then the backup babysitter transpired to cost literally double our usual babysitter. Then I forgot to add a couple of things into the diary. I never seemed to have enough bread to make the packed lunches (I blame my son who literally doesn’t stop eating it) and meal planning in general kind of fell apart.

I have NEVER in my life felt like the ‘hot mess single parent’ stereotype until last summer. By the end of it I felt like I needed a 6 week holiday to recover!

This year, I still have that job, which I love and want to keep showing up for. But I’m no longer new, and can hopefully give myself a bit more flexibility (lord knows this rigidity doesn’t come from my boss!). I’ve made another colour coordinated spreadsheet, but it’s got a lot fewer moving parts on it. I think it’ll be fine. Right? RIGHT?

I’m still not feeling ready.

What I’d love, if you have a moment, is for you to tell me how you do it.

• How do you handle the summer holidays when you work? Particularly if the burden of childcare falls to one parent.

• Is there a piece of kit, a routine, a website, a survival snack — anything — that makes it more manageable?

• Are there meals you make that make life easier at the end of the day?

Tell me your secrets — whatever they are!

May in progress

A few of the things I’ve enjoyed over the past month:

• 📺 TV:

  • I’ve been loving Margo’s Got Money Problems, The Other Bennett Sister and started Rivals this week. The TV lull from last month is over!

• 📚 Books: I finished:

  • The King’s Witches — The Scottish witch trials (which I knew nothing about!) from the perspective of the women involved.

  • Atmosphere — Female astronaut trainees in the 1980s who fall in love. Not my favourite TJR book, but I was in bits by the end.

  • Heart, The Lover — I enjoyed all sorts of things about this book but the final third made me absolutely furious.

  • Broken Country — An affair that leads to a murder. Part love story, part thriller.

  • Both this and Heart, The Lover are about university relationships that come back to life later on. If it wasn’t for the fact that a friend of mine is going through this exact thing happening in her own life, I’d say this is an unbelievable plotline, but apparently is does happen in real life, too!

• 🛍️ Loving:

  • Our strawberries growing in the garden (slug free!)

  • My friend’s amazing 40th birthday — there is something so brilliant about getting a group of women together for good wine and good food and chatting and dancing. It felt like the very best of the hen dos (until suddenly the daytime wine drinking kicked in). To be repeated!

• Wishlist:

  • I am still looking for the perfect bar cart for our kitchen. I think I’ve found it here, but I am still considering.

• Articles:

  • I thought this post about influencers selling an unbelievable version of post-partum was so interesting. I unfollowed alllll of the parenting influencer types during Covid when our version of parenting because so transparently different, but I wish I’d done it sooner.

  • What if exhaustion is the correct response? IT IS. There is so much beauty in this world and that beauty makes it clear to me that this (worker bees, working 40 hours a week, disconnected from nature, consuming other people’s lives through a tiny screen) is not how we are meant to live. It’s hard to not be exhausted when every piece of news you read or see has you screaming with frustration!

How are you? How has your month been? What have you been watching and reading and listening to?

PS! The Joy of Beginning is always free but…

Thank you for reading! The Joy of Beginning will always be free to access, but I’ve decided to turn on payments just on the off-chance someone thinks ‘hey, I’d love to buy Katie a coffee every month and keep her art supplies topped up’.

There will be no additional content for paid subscribers, but you can upgrade to paid to support me and this hobby I enjoy so much. If you would like to support without a monthly / annual payment, you can also buy me a coffee :)