I was telling Aron about my after-school routine at my elementary school—Lowell Elementary in Long Beach, in case there are any alumni out there for whom this will ring a bell: every day at dismissal, we’d race to the blacktop and line up outside the ball shed, waiting for “coach” (her name was really Mary), a kind, but no-nonsense 70-something woman who wore blue Keds and a whistle on a lanyard every afternoon. She’d walk up, keys jangling, and the checkout process would begin. There were double-dutch ropes, red bounce balls for four square (Hudson now calls it ‘old-fashioned four square’), checkers and sticks for playing some variation of a pool table game, lanyard material, and mancala boards.
“What’s mancala?” Aron asked. I was shocked. I was obsessed with it back then! Two players strategically move small stones (we used beans) down rows of holes the board, with the object to collect the most. It’s simple—in truth, you could play it without even knowing how to count—but to do well you need to think ahead and try to anticipate your opponent’s moves. I’d forgotten about it—but thinking about Coach and the ballshed brought it all back!
I taught Hudson the rules and he loved it, too, so we’ve taken an inexpensive travel version with us to Italy—though you can also simply dig holes in the earth to play! I’m hopeful that we’ll get Skyler playing against him before too long.
Here are some other games that we’ve been playing lately, and one that comes highly recommended…
It’s officially summer! The kids celebrated their last day of school yesterday and, as usual, I felt a little emotional about that bittersweet march of time. I was happy that their last-day photos (posted on Instagram) seemed to really captured their personalities at this particular moment. Seeing the sixth graders at their graduations, looking so big, put a giant lump in my throat!
So we’re off today, and the goal will be to be as lazy as is possible with these two. Or at least spontaneous. How do you spend the first day of summer vacation?
If you’re doing some browsing, here are some links of note…
I’ve written here about trying a few of the different diet approaches that have gained traction in recent years—from week-long juice cleanses to a month-long Whole 30 regimen. In general, I’ve found that I enjoy trying out a new approach now and then to help me pay better attention to what I’m eating (and why, and when… at least for a while), and to learn a few new recipes. And while I know we’re supposed to only talk in terms of goals like gut-health, and (pretend to?) not care about weight these days,* I must confess that I’m always happy if a new routine leads to the shedding of a few pounds.
In fact, you might recall that one of my big disappointments with the Whole 30 was the way the scale didn’t budge! I really felt good about cutting sugar (both Aron and I had just listened to an interview with Gary Taubes, who wrote The Case Against Sugar, and “Is Sugar Toxic?” and found his case very compelling) and really appreciated the wake-up call as to just how much is added to everything. Cutting sugar, it turned out, wasn’t just about cutting dessert; it’s added everywhere.
But puzzling over why I didn’t see any figure-changing results with such a restrictive diet led me to think about possible reasons, and made me want to try a similarly sugar-reduced approach that so many people love: the Ketogenic diet.
