The weather is warm in New Hampshire and the summer schedule has started. The camps and sports programs of my kids’ youth have been replaced with summer jobs which leave them coming and going, all on different schedules. Last night our new dog Dalai started barking at around 12:00. That dog never barks so we got up to investigate. Turns out we had forgotten that one kid was out for the night (in our defense he’s usually at college) and his knocking on his own front door alerted the dog to a possible intruder. See? Coming and going.
By the way, Good Girl, Dalai.
I’m also not spending two days of the week at the college for classes, although I am teaching on online class, I create the schedule for that. I’ve got time.
Our summer is wide open.
This of course, leaves complete days just for writing (and trust me, I’ll be taking advantage of the time), but it also leaves days unstructured and if you’re a teen (or a mom who is sitting in front of a computer), you know that that can mean far too many hours spent on social media (OMG!) Sometimes you just have to create something to do. I have a fitbit and I just ordered one for Emma (our soul summer swim team member.) Our goal is to get 10K steps in every day. Which, I might add, is not that easy, especially if you go at high noon and come home a little dehydrated.
Yesterday we went for a walk at noon and came back to find out we still needed 2,500 steps. With walking around the house we were able to get that down to 1,500 by dinnertime and so after dinner Emma and I decided to go for a small walk in order to complete our goal for the day.
I’m not sure that either of us had fully recovered from our earlier dehydration spell and with this walk, we seemed to be a little punch drunk.
“Mom, let’s take some classic Instagram pictures,” suggested Emma at one point after we had both been giggling uncontrollably about something. (To be truthful, I didn’t know that there was such a thing as classic Instagram photos, but when she started explaining what they were, I realized that, hey, I have seen a lot of those kinds of posts.)
First, she took my hand and had me take a photo of that.
In case you were wondering, I’m the one with the tats.
“Nice,” she said. “Okay and now we have to do an “I’m leading you around the world photo.””
Huh? She told me what to do and we took the photo.
Apparently this is a thing
Clearly you can take the girl away from the social media, but you can’t take the social media away from the girl.
But you know what? Having just lost my mom, this photo almost brings me to tears. Such is the power of social media.
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Wendy Thomas writes about the lessons learned while raising children and chickens in New Hampshire. Contact her at [email protected]
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