john's mom works

a little backyard chaos and shenanigans i will forever remember this summer as a time of shifting sibling dynamics. john and charlie have always alternated between playing beautifully together and beating the snot out of each other -- pretty standard fare for brothers, from what i understand. they are each others' best friend and arch nemesis, rolled up into one jack-and-jill-bathroom-sharing package. it's made for amazing times when they create and build and explore and entertain each other. it's made for challenging times when they get under each others' skin, antagonize and bully one another, and scream. man, can those kids scream. when bean first arrived, of course, not much changed. if anything, the bigs got closer. they got good at occupying each other when the baby needed "too much" attention. the flare ups didn't stop, of course, but i wouldn't have expected them to. but now at two, bean is a real person with real ideas and real ima...

this blog is not about my kids (gasp!). or, not exactly, though they are such a force that it seems everything in my universe is colored by my experiences with them. it's about how we're all so tired. more precisely, it's about how we keep talking about how we're all so tired. in the past several days i've seen a number of articles cross my feed on the topic of "why millennials are so tired," (almost ignored that one as i don't identify as a millennial) or "the fetishization of tiredness" or "the cult of exhaustion" ... i'm not linking any of them, as i haven't found the articles themselves to be particularly interesting or insightful.  but it did make me stop and think about how true this is about my life, and probably yours. someone asks how you are, and you say, "i'm good, but i'm exhausted." you hear someone with "less" on their plate than you say they're tired, and you think (and ma...