Hello, It Is the Future

At dinner before Kathy and Sue’s wedding, July 2022

Hello! Hi. My name is Kim and I am the publisher of this blog. You might be wondering what happened to me and my family. More likely, though, probably not, because the only people who ever read this thing anymore are the people I am connected to in other places (Facebook, instagram, real life) and I share just as much as I feel comfortable sharing and that is fine.

I’m here today because my first born child (who now goes by Skye) is turning 18 in two days. It is a reality that I am so lucky to be witnessing, and still so moved and surprised and nostalgic about it, even though I’ve known for all these years that it would happen eventually. In other news, my second born child will turn 16 in ten days, so I was looking around for pictures of him to send to Aunt Kathy, who, in a tradition that she is creating for all of her grand nieces and nephews and niblings, is making a photo book of his life.

Finding these photos was more difficult than I anticipated because my old photo libraries are on an external hard drive that is so full that the Mac app Photos will not even try to open them unless I move them to a disk with more space. So now I am copying a HUGE photo library and that is going to take four hours. In the meantime, I decided to look through the blog archives to see which eras of Brady’s life I want to review pictures from.

And you know how that goes. Two hours later, I’m deep into blog archives, wishing I had continued blogging as frequently as I did when the kids were younger, because they were so funny and sweet, and if I hadn’t written their stories down I would have forgotten them completely. I shared some of them with Stewart, my husband, and he said “Yeah, we don’t remember because we never slept.”

The teen years have been rough, my friends. Each kid went through long stretches of barely smiling at me much less smiling for a photo. The pandemic sent them into their bedrooms to play video games and connect with other kids on Discord and they have just barely emerged. They are basically young adults now. They have, for the most part, preserved their core personalities: Skye is endlessly inquisitive and learns all day long and spouts facts. Brady is the class clown and loves to be social and play sports. Neither of them knows what they want for their birthdays or even what they want to do. I guess I am the only one who is derailed by their milestones.

Here are some things that happened recently that I will preserve here because likely in 10 more years I will have forgotten them.

1. Last night I took them to see John Wick 4. Good God what a terrible movie. The outing cost over $70 for three adult tickets, two large popcorns, two regular fountain drinks, and an Icee. That is far too much money to have paid to see 2 hours of gunplay and martial arts plus an hour of meaningless exposition. But for time spent together, I’ll consider it money well spent. (To be honest, though, I would rather have watched it at home so I could have folded laundry or something while it played.)
2. Skye downloaded an app that helps you identify plants. They went for a walk around the neighborhood pointing their phone at various plants (and animals, and humans) and marveling at the names of flowers, lemons, felines. (The app identified George as a “domestic house cat.”) During this adventure, Skye met a neighbor who has a beautiful drought-resistant garden in her front yard and they appreciated the plants together.
3. In a very long story made short, Brady, who has played baseball since he was five years old and fought like hell to get on the high school team and once wanted to play professionally, quit baseball in January and joined the volleyball team and is obsessed with it. He practices every day with the team and then a few times a week at the gym and yesterday he got up early to go to the beach with a friend and play volleyball there.Celebrating a rare win
4. Skye passed the driver’s license test and is now driving to school and sometimes takes Brady to the gym. We have sent Skye on grocery errands at least once and this is a game changer, just like parents of older kids have told us. Passed on the first try!
5. Stewart will be retiring soon. This is too big to comprehend and if I write another blog post anytime soon I will cover that subject there.
6. I am the same: getting older, but still willing to be ridiculous. The photo below was a thing I did for a laugh in my team meeting. It occurred to me recently that I am, let’s say…more youthful than other 50+ professionals at the organization where I work. Sometimes I wonder if I should be more professional than I am. Probably. But that feeling doesn’t last long. I like myself the way I am. Besides, I clean up just fine (see above) and can pretend to be mature and professional when necessary.

The worst part about this photo is the amount of flyaway hairs I can’t unsee.