Slow Like Sunday Morning

It's 7:20 am on Mother's Day. I had a great sleep, finished my re-read of Dire Bound snuggled in bed this morning when I woke up early (my very favorite way to read) and am very excited to start the sequel that came out last week, and have a Pilates Barre class waiting for me at 9 am. James is at a swim meet, Landon will be joining him there shortly, and the girls are still asleep. We're getting brunch later, everyone will be home this afternoon, and a big storm is expected to hit around 3 pm. I'm not sure it could be a better day.

(Spoiler alert: I did not finish the post, so we're turning to it now, post-brunch, pre-dinner. The boys did great in their meet this morning, including my James who broke the World Record for his age division in the 50 M breaststroke!)

Spring has been even more of a whirlwind than normal. The end of the year with three kids in three schools is always a lot, but adding a senior to the mix (particularly one who didn't know where he was going to college until a few weeks ago) is a whole other level. I've also had an unusual amount of work travel for a busy client matter with SEC testimony all over the country and then a 6 day partner retreat in San Diego. I've also decided to listen to the multiple perimenopause podcasts I had saved and have resolved to do more weight training, so I'm fitting that in too. As always, it's annoying how good it feels to make time to exercise.

(Not an essential part of the narrative, but I am OBSESSED with this dress I bought for the awards night of the partner retreat. When I first found it and fell head over heels in love I wondered if it was too much? It's my first retreat, I'm new to the firm, I'd be meeting about 600 new partners. And then I remembered I'm a tropical bird and I should not pre-pluck my own feathers. And it was a HUGE hit.)

Let's check in on the children. Landon signed with Indiana University a couple of weeks ago!! SwimSwam wrote about it. This is how I found out, in SEC testimony prep in Chicago:

Indiana is a great school and an incredible swim program. They got 3rd at NCAA's this Spring and have their eyes set on #2 next year. (For those curious, the Top 10 for Men's Swimming in 2026 was: (1) Texas; (2) Florida; (3) Indiana; (4) Arizona State; (5) Tennessee; (6) NC State; (7) Cal; (8) Michigan; (9) Virginia; (10) Stanford.)

I'm honestly still a little in shock that this is where he ended up. What an extraordinary senior season he had. It was just six months ago that James and I sat him down and told him he absolutely HAD to reach out to coaches at schools ranked 20-40 because that was far more realistic and while it would be great if he hit his goal times and had new options open up, those were his options now, and he did need to go to college, and there are fantastic schools in that bracket and there's more to his college chapter than just swimming, etc etc etc. Or, as Landon calls it, "Remember that time you didn't believe in my dreams?" He's kidding, I promise.

The official Signing Day was this past Wednesday!

His best friend and one of his club teammates (who is a junior and has also committed to Indiana, so they'll be teammates again in a year!)

I didn't realize Senior Year would involve so much homework and arts and crafts for me, but my deep love for pictures and rganizational items has been waiting my whole life for this moment.

Oh! And between my 6-day work trip, Landon had two proms: his girlfriend's prom, where we discovered through the camera lens that the suit we thought he'd bought didn't actually match:

And then his own, where we bought the suit he's wearing here literally 2 hours before pictures began:

He had a great time at both, or at least, "a time," and he didn't hate it, so that's a win! He's turning into quite the social butterfly with the girlfriend and multiple club teammates to drag him out of the house. We've had to institute a curfew! Our 85-year-old is finally 18.

Meanwhile Claire already has an entire Pinterest board dedicates to looks she's thinking about for her prom next year.

Speaking of Claire, she has three 16th birthday parties to go to this month, and then her own at the very end, so she needed dresses to match the various "themes". (This feels very Dallas? All the girls are given colors to wear so their photos are coordinated with what is probably a very fancy balloon backdrop.) She also needed dresses for Landon's graduation and graduation party, so I told her I'd buy 3 dresses and she could figure out how to allocate them. We went to TJ Maxx and found three really beautiful ones for a bargain, including this one, that she wore last night for a "Dolce Riviera/Capri" vibes party theme and I feel like we nailed it?

She's been planning her own 16th birthday party for months. I was given a PowerPoint presentation weeks ago. After a firm budget and a lot of compromise we've settled on a pool party held at our house the weekend after Landon's graduation (and the weekend before our trip). The theme is pink and white, with yellow lemons for accents. Etsy provided me with some adorable invitations and other decor. There will be a lemonade bar, snacks, mini bundt cakes for dessert, music, and a balloon backdrop on the back fence. TJ Maxx provided a dress for this affair as well. (Because you start out wearing a dress for 10 minutes and then you change into your swimsuit, obviously.)

She's wrapping up her sophomore year. She's hit her stride more this year with school and social, swimming and emotional. I'm in absolute denial that two years from now we'll be doing this all again and preparing to send her out of the nest and off to college as well. MOVING ON.

Cora! Our little 6th grader. After a rough adjustment to her new school (and we're realizing really all adjustments to new things are rough for Cora), she's settled in as well. She just started playing volleyball, which made us very proud because she HATES starting new things, is wrapping up yet another soccer season, and continues to swim. She's very excited to start middle school athletics in 7th grade where she'll get to go compete with her friends from elementary school since her GT magnate school doesn't have sports.

She remains our painstaking little perfectionist. The other night I found her in the gameroom, agonizing over a flower she was making as an "accent" to a poster project. She had come up with the idea of using a chopstick with a ball of clay on top and then hand cut and shadow penciled each individual petal. As the minutes ticked far past my bedtime, I began to feel my job is to teach her the art of the "good enough," but I do love how intensely she works on everything, including completion grades like I later found out this was!

She also recently brought home two science projects and is now deeply invested in a poster about South Africa for her world cultures class.

In frivolous personal news, in addition to the dress I found for my partner retreat above, I've added another new spring item or two to my wardrobe, all courtesy of my beloved consignment store I found in one of the fancier neighborhoods of Dallas. Like this dress. Love!

And this Tahari top that I am almost as obsessed with as my rainbow dress. Color! All of them, as often as possible.

As I wrap up this update, with pictures of Landon going to prom and news of his college plans, it seems crazy that somehow I've been blogging for nearly 20 years and there are some of you who have been following since I first announced I was a 2L pregnant with a tiny baby Landon. I've been thinking a lot about where this blog is going and what I'm going to do with 20 years of archives now that I so rarely have time to post.

I have spent ages 23 to 43 in these draft blogger windows, typing thoughts, deleting many, publishing more than I probably should, and deeply appreciating the positive feedback and friendship I received in return. There were several stages of adulthood that were deeply lonely for me - with multiple moves, having kids far younger than anyone else I knew, job changes, and more, and there were times this blog truly was my community. I'm deeply grateful for it. I also know I lost many hours of sleep to negative comments, false assumptions and criticisms that my anxiety meds have mostly cured, though there are some I could still recite by heart. On the balance though, this little old-school, unfancy, non-monetized blog has been a deeply positive thread in my adult life.

I keep wondering if it still has a place in my current life. I've built a community here in our new home. The kids are older and occasional readers themselves. Maybe now it's just a record of the big things? I use my own archives all the time to remember dates and stories, to look up vacation details I've forgotten, and to relive favorite memories from the past. So I don't know. Apparently one post a month is what I can manage, so that's where I'm at for now! Happy Mother's Day/Sunday to all!

Thoughts from 36,000 feet

I'm on a late night flight back from Philadelphia after a very long day of SEC testimony. I have no idea where this is going to go, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to freeform write for 30 minutes and see what comes out.

I love my new firm. I love it so much. I had dinner with our Global managing partner last week, an amazing woman, and we talked about so many things - mentoring, being an attorney in the growing age of AI, loving our work, loving our families, and so much more. I hosted a dinner for our women's initiative group that I'm now leading in Dallas at my house the next night and what a great bookend to the week that was.

During last week we also had James and Landon away on a recruiting trip to Indiana University (who just placed THIRD at the mens' NCAA swimming champsionships and they want our little Landon!), Cora balancing her GT schedule, volleyball, swimming, and soccer, and Claire babysitting, killing it on a chemistry test after so much work, and getting her swimming letter jacket. Over the weekend, Landon had a meet, Cora had volleyball and soccer games, Claire had swim practice, and I tried valiently to bargain shop for a dress for my upcoming partner retreat in San Diego, but after spending hours at my consignment store, the clearance Dillards, and Marshall's, I ended up at Trina Turk and bought a completely insane dress at full price that I love with all of my heart. This will be my first partner retreat at the new firm and I suppose they might as well see all of me. Like a tropical bird. In radiant rainbow colors.

I've been thinking a lot about the transition to being a parent of older children. For the first time in our nearly 19 years of co-parenting, James and I have found ourselves with pretty different views on it and that's been fascinating to me after we've pretty smoothly parented through 3 different infancies, toddlerhoods, and little/big kid times together.

I have always felt that parenting is mostly navigating yourself between your two rails - towards what you remember as a child from your parents of what you want to do and away from what you don't. It's about charting the path in between - the path that is yours - and it can be hard even when you have good and bad examples to sail between.

When our kids were little, we found that the approach that led to the greatest sense of peace in our home was unconditional love (giving apologies when due, being open and vocal in our love and praise, being present, genuinely enjoying time spent with our children and making sure they felt that joy) paired with firm, clear, consistent boundaries (every SINGLE time we bent a rule, I swear it ruined our childrens' lives for 2 weeks; they wanted consitency, they wanted to know that they could push and we wouldn't bend. We would always explain, we would always include them in decision making when we could, but we were also firm. This seemed to be a source of comfort).

That no longer works. Or at least, it works differently. The unconditional love is still true, but it's informed love. It's love that knows each other, that talks through choices, that shares past experiences... it's love hand in hand with the fact that boundaries are now less about our own rules and more about real life consequences and helping to warn about and navigate them. It's less about our boundaries and more about what our 18-year-old can expect from the world and how his actions affect people in it. All actions have consequences and while we've always let natural consequences follow behavior, his actions are bigger and so is his world and so are potential ramifications. And it's less our job to protect or insulate from them and more our job to become a partner in navigating them. To be a resource. An example. A place of trust and safety.

In the last few years my parenting has shifted from "don't do X,Y,Z" to "look, don't do X,Y,Z, but when you do, I'm you're first phone call. There is nothing you can't make worse by going it alone after a bad decision and nothing we can't make better. Bring us in. We love you always."

Has he made any bad choices yet? Not really. Will he? For sure. Hopefully they're small. Regardless, my biggest fear is not that he'll screw up, it's that he'll think he needs to protect us from it. Or think he needs to protect our love from it. That is one of the few things that really scares me in this phase of life.

Meanwhile we also have a 12-year-old who needs to be reminded 1600 times to put her laundry away and still finds any movie where a character dies to be so terrifying she can't sleep alone.

So it's an interesting, wonderful, exciting, exhausting time to be a parent.

And maybe it's always exactly that?

I have truly deeply loved every phase of parenting. Not necessarily every single phase with every child - Landon's newborn phase was hard. Claire's was a dream. Cora only exists because we accidentally had a Claire. But with each child I have found enormous joy within every era, even the hard ones. I feel so much joy in this phase too, even as I see my influence waning. Because now every bit of sharing, of being read in, of being sought out for counsel is a choice. Three-year-old Claire told me every thought in her adorable little head. 15-year-old Claire shares what she wants to. And every bit that I get to hear is a show of respect and love that I don't ever minimize or take for granted.

In the next 6 weeks Landon will graduate high school and Claire will turn 16. We are hosting his graduation party and her Sweet 16 party at our house 7 days apart. Depending on where he goes to school, Landon has anywhere from 2-4 months left of living in our house. It is the most exquisitely painful thing to know that your time as the sun and moon in his world is setting. And it's supposed to. And you'll always be important, but your time to shape or mold or do whatever we can do with these fully formed little humans we bring into the world is ending. And you're so proud of who he is, but how can we possibly sit down to dinner in 6 months time and it's just four of us? Claire and Cora might be even more upset about it than James and I are. I was an oldest child. James was an only. Neither of us ever lived at home again after we left for college- that's Division I athlete life and Landon will be the same. I never felt a nest that was missing a duckling. It seems impossible that we'll just continue on day-to-day without him here.

And yet, I know we will absolutely be fine. And life will adapt again, and it will be wonderful and fun and fulfilling. But it's hard anyway.

Frankly James has struggled more with the transition from parent (God-like figure) to parent (peer) more than I have, but in our late night musings with each other I think it's because he's been parent + coach while I've always been parent + lawyer. Every day involves me talking to another adult I'm trying to convince to listen to me. To convey that I know what I'm talking about. That I understand where they're coming from and I have something to contribute to their considerations. That I am trustworthy and reasonable and steadfast. Coaching is about being a supreme figure: do what I say and you'll succeed and there's not much negotiation involved.

Lawyering has never been like that. My advice is only good to the extent clients will actually listen to it. It has to be practical, personal, and real. This is parenting teens. They have to be bought in to the idea that you are worth listening to. You have to earn it in small daily ways.

When Claire was really struggling in the hellscape that was middle school for her, I remember thinking, I am so glad I have a job. My day could have so easily risen and fallen based on her own experiences and that would be the worst thing I could do for her. I am steadfast. I am solid, and I exist outside our house and outside of her. I genuinely believe this lightened her mental load. I read once that teens are less stressed about being popular and included than they are about their parents will worry that they aren't popular or included. Having just moved to a new city, it would have been hard to separate my own success-and my own emotions- from hers. I'm so glad I've always had my own yardstick. In truth, I have never been more thankful to be a fulltime working mom than I've been in the teen years.

And that's where I am, at 36,000 feet, at 10:41 pm on Monday night, flying back to Dallas from Philadelphia on a day I billed 2x the number of hours I got to sleep.

Thanks for being here with me.

Costa Rica, Take 2!

Longtime readers (actually, given how long I've been blogging, it's really like midterm readers?) will remember that we went to Costa Rica in 2018.It was one of our first big international trips with the kids where we rented a car and local house and drove around, cooked our food, ate at local places, and just truly explored the country (we'd done Jamaica and Mexico to date, but had stayed on a resort or in an all-inclusive house). It was Thanksgiving week and the kids were 11, 8, and 5 and we had the BEST time.

(All my posts from that trip can be found here: Costa Rica 2018. They're long and detailed and I can't believe I actually used to find time to write like that. I'm so thankful for my archives, reading them brings me so much joy, and I googled my own blog so many times on our trip to remember restaurants and other places we'd loved. But man, now that my anxiety is controlled and I can sleep at night, and my kids have activities that mean we eat at 8 and our nights are so short, and I have this job that follows me I go, I fear the blogging has been hardest hit. Well, not as hard as my exercising regimin and general fitness... Anyway! All the posts are there! And while I am biased as the author, they are a delight- my travel pack was so tiny and their cheeks were so rounded.)

Usually I plan trips a year+ in advance, but I'd kept this Spring Break open in case we needed to travel for Landon's college selection process (still ongoing! He was fielding recruiting calls left and right from Costa Rica, including from some Top 5 swim schools and it's crazy and exciting and so fun but he graduates in less than 2 months and I would really like to know where he's going so I can party prep for his graduation party! #priorities).

Then I thought we'd ski, but the snow has been terrible this year and my parents were off in India and Nepal so we wouldn't be able to do our usual grandparent visit combo ski trip. In January I decided maybe we just needed a beach with some adventure and wildlife. We loved Costa Rica so much and Cora barely remembered it. I brought it up at dinner and everyone enthusiastically supported my motion.

I thought a lot about exploring some new areas, like Arenal and La Fortuna with the volcanoes and lush rainforest (which we still want to do!), but we had loved the Southern Pacific/Dominical area and while we had never before vacationed in the same place, something about it just drew us back. Also the fact that I'd be planning this trip myself and we'd be leaving in 2 months. So I hopped on VRBO, bookmarked a few houses, and had everyone agree on one during dinner the next day and we were set! I connected with the house management company to help book some tours and we were good to go.

I tried to balance our love of adventure (and our particular love of jumping off rocks into water) with our teenagers' increasing delight in sleeping in and having recharge time on vacation.

We've always been huge fans of traveling and vacationing with our kids (obviously), but as they get older it really has become so much more precious. They are so busy - we are all so busy - and they go to three different schools in three very spread out locations with three very different schedules. We still eat dinner together very night, but it's not until 8:15 pm and even then 1 person is sometimes missing. Vacation is the one time we are all on the same time table, without distractions, without activities or girlfriends or errands or chores or any of the things that fill our days at home. And our week in Costa Rica was just as precious and wonderful as I wanted it to be.

Our itinerary:

Day 1/Mon: Fly Dallas - San Jose (10:35 am - 2:30 pm), stop immediately for delicious Costa Rican food that James has missed so much, drive 4 hours to our rental house in Dominical.

Day 2/Tues: Zipline tour in Uvita in the morning with a bonus visit to the Uvita Waterfall, house lounge time in the afternoon, and a night hike through the rain forest after dark!

Day 3/Wed: Day trip to Corcovado National Park and a private chef dinner at the house that night.