go outside and play.

We have only barely passed the half-way point of summer break here in New York City, which means that I have asked my children to go outside and play an approximate five hundred times over the last six weeks. Call it 90s parenting, if you want to latch on to the befuddling internet trend of the moment, but really it’s just getting though the season of not-enough childcare with a modicum of grace and sanity. Really it’s just allowing ourselves the joy of discovery and digging into world with curiosity while embracing the freedom to experiment and make things and get inspired!

Really, it’s a reminder to myself.

As a naturally nesty kind of person with a job that requires at least some time with my bum in chair, fingers on keyboard, it can be easy to spend more time than is really advisable sitting at my desk. It’s partially an ingrained belief that real work happens while tethered to a computer, free of distractions, and without children underfoot. I am NOT romanticizing the v real struggle of attempting to write and work while parenting, but this summer I am trying to embrace a more flexible approach to my work while I don’t have much of an option. What I’m finding, of course, is lots of joy and lots of inspiration (and also some frustration, because, duh).

On a recent journey outside, James and I stopped into the Windsor Chairmakers showroom in Maine to ogle wooden wall boxes and slat-back chairs. As we padded along the creaky wide-plank floorboards of the 18th century home, I couldn’t help but notice the painted wall stencils that wended their way from one room to the next. They reminded me of the stencils my mom had painstakingly worked into the bowed walls of the 18th century house I grew up in. I can’t say if what I was looking at were historic themselves or merely a similar nod to a historic practice, but either way, the idea of zhuzhing up a space with a little low-stakes, easily changed decoration has been taking up space in my brain ever since. This is exactly the kind of thing that happens when I remember to go outside.

What happens when I remember to play is that I end up spending an hour or two with my six-year-old noodling with watercolors and then deciding to freehand historic stencil designs WILLY-NILLY, TOPSY-TURVY, LOOSEY-GOOSEY directly onto my unsuspecting furniture.