The Fabulous Life of Stefanie

Happy middle of the week, in the middle of the summer! I was just looking at a calendar to book some playdates and perhaps a rare just us date with the hubs, and I accidentally scrolled into September because *gasp* it isn't that far away! Oh, the horror! Good thing summer has been really good to us and we are headed to Germany at the end of September or I might cry a little. Thought it would be fun to do a little "currently" update and please, please share all recs for your currently goings-ons, too! Reading My new job means an 8 minute drive instead of a 45-450,000 minute red line commute, which sadly has cut into my reading time (the only sadly of that story). But I am making an effort to grab my book when I am eating lunch at work and pick it up as much as possible when no one is asking me for a snack or where their shoes are at home. Right now I am reading Courtroom 302 and am really enjoying the stories that come out of the busiest courthouse in Chicago (and ...

Ok, so it is overcast for the millionth day so far this year, but Monday was gorgeous and it was also the first day of NO SCHOOL for Maddie! Come August I will be begging for school to start, but right now it feels like a little slice of heaven. No dragging a kid out of bed at 6am. No packing lunches based on an increasingly complex algorithm of what my kid will eat that week. No running out of the house for 7:30 drop off then running back to get ready for work. It is the time for lax bedtimes, late dinners after soaking in all the extra daylight outside, reading together on the porch, beach bound weekend mornings. We have plans for a week down the Cape, a long weekend in New Hampshire and are looking into a long weekend in Acadia. We will be outside as much as possible and taking advantage of movies in the park, a beach we can bike to, the ice cream man and his incessant stalking of children at dinnertime. This is the time of year I LIVE for! In New England, we survive the t...

Watercolor by Maddie Jane, 7. It's springtime in New England, which is really more like a holding pattern that I relate to my days working in the prison; when an inmate had a release day, but it could be held up by paperwork, or could actually happen and they could run out of the prison and dance in the parking lot. Well, that never happened (that I saw), but I would run outside and dance on the street if it happened to hit somewhere in the 50 to 60 degree range upon my waking up in the morning. All I could think about on the walk to drop Maddie off at school today is I just want my toes and/or my fingers to stop being cold. I love living here and would not trade a summer evening or fall day for the world...but I would definitely trade 32 degrees the week before April. While the new year is all about new year-new me and resolutions, I think it takes until spring for people to really start feeling like a new year is here, especially since spring tends to be synonymous with c...

Happy New Year, y'all! People (me) are still saying this in greeting, and will until at least February, so I don't feel too behind in my first post of the year (even if my last post was in October). 2018 wrapped up pretty great - we celebrated Maddie turning 7 with a very epic Harry Potter party (that will get its own belated post because it was just too awesome not to share), a simple and sweet Thanksgiving and ALL THE CHRISTMAS fun that we could fit in throughout the month of December. Christmas Day goes so fast (about 35 minutes by my watch) so we did a bunch of extra special stuff to soak in the magic of the season: The Boston Ballet Nutcracker, lots of walks around the neighborhood to look at lights, near-daily Christmas music dance parties, The Pop's Home Alone show, a trip to Maine and Great Wolf Lodge and spending time hunkered under blankets watching Christmas movies together. All those fun times make it not so sad when I declare Christmas to be over about 12 ...

Sunday marked my sixth take on 26.2 miles in six years, which is pretty crazy for me to even write because in six years I have been postpartum and breastfeeding (twice), had three jobs, bought a house, celebrated 8 years of marriage, been surrounded by dozens of wonderful friends and yet still have had zero years of prior history with running or being any sort of athlete. But here I am, a marathoner 6 times over, with my most recent being my fastest one yet at 4:15:37, which is at least an hour faster than my first and just over 4 minutes faster than my last. I am happy, for sure. Happy that I have a body that can carry me those miles, happy to have a running club to spend hundreds of training miles with and happy to have a partner and family willing to cover dance class and Target runs and not get mad when I fall asleep before everyone else during movie night after a Saturday long run. Also, so happy to have my "off season" from training. Here is the thing that they don...

Yesterday marked 8 years since we stood in front of everyone that matters to us, during a full mass that I insisted upon, and vowed to do this thing forever. Forever is hard; it isn't what it used to be, they say. But with you, it's easy, seamless even. Forever is not long enough because of the way that you make me laugh, the way you make me think and the way that you love and support me in an unconditional way I had never known could exist between two people. I didn't think it would end up like this for me. A girl from Nevada with a wild streak that tangled around a domestic streak with no real idea of how two people go about making a marriage not just last but flourish . But it did happen. We made it happen. We are doing it everyday of our lives together. Is it all fireworks and passion? Nope . Sometimes the only alone time we get is a quick two minute conversation running down everything that needs to be done and juggled and figured out that day to make all of our li...

Self care has become a sort of battle cry of this generation, a reminder that we have to take care of ourselves in the midst of it all lest we collapse in a ball of exhaustion. We are a busy  people living in a busy world. We work, we parent, we volunteer, we engage our community, we social media and on and on and on.  We also very oftentimes forget to take care of ourselves, and thus this idea of self care as a way to keep ourselves able to fulfill all those other roles. As an on-paper sociologist (read: my degrees in psych and criminal justice and also my total nosy-nelly status) I am interested to know ways that we take keep ourselves from burning out, so I thought I could share some of my own methods because maybe they will spark ideas in your brain as others have in mine. I have to add that my dear husband is in Ireland this week on business, the first time he has ever gone out of state (or country) without us and the first time I have been home alone with the pack (two...