We are all having that summer. The one that marked the summer between the before and the afters. We’re just all having it in different ways. For one pool / PTO friend, it’s her Hot Dog Summer — the one where all her children can swim safely without her constant hands-on supervision. She can be poolside watching them, but not in the pool *with* them. We call it the "hot dog summer" after the year my brother was almost 4 in the summer of '82, and my mom could hand him a hot do

Summer survival, I’m learning, is all about lowering expectations. Here’s a quick guide on how to do that: Step One: Adopt these three simple mantras. 1. I can’t care about everything. 2. Done is better than perfect. 3. That’s not MP (my problem), that’s YP (your problem). Step Two: Apply one mantra to every.single.situation that presents itself. That’s it. Nutella for lunch again? $22 in video downloads? 6 kids for lunch and only 4 hot dog buns? I can’t care about everything

Whoa. As parents, we make hard choices every.single.day. It’s the job, it’s what we signed up for. We name them at birth, we choose a pediatrician and a childcare setting and decide on religious influence and we choose their clothing and whether they ever get fast food and before long the choices we make for them seem so routine that we don’t even realize we are making them. These days, the choices seem harder. Masks, and where and when and how (OMG over the nose too is how,

… at how lucky we are to be alive right now. Truly, we are lucky. Because half a million people around the world have died from COVID, and the end is nowhere in sight. Because most of us reading this and definitely the person writing this lives in a house with air conditioning and Disney+, more devices than people, and a second fridge in the garage (it sometimes freezes things if you put them in the wrong spot) with plenty of food and, more importantly, wine. Because Delaware