Spotify Playlist When You Have Children

Here's a list of my recent music on Spotify:

• Drew Holcolm and the Neighbors
• Paw Patrol
• TROLLS Band Together soundtrack
• Tyler Childers
• Wicked: The Soundtrack
• Doc McStuffins
• Daniel Tiger Songs

My recommended stations:

• Little Angel including songs from Cocomelon, Pinkfong and Little Baby Bum Nursery Songs
• The Highwomen
• Parry Gripp, which includes songs from Parry Grip, Mr Farts (YES, I DID SAY MR. FARTS), and Baby Yoda
• SuperKitties
• Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors. They made a nice compilation of things. :-)
• Bluey
• Julie Andrews? (I do love her, but not sure how she made the list?)
• Noah Kahan

So, you will see that I have about 1/5 of an influence on the music I listen to in the car. A church kid I love told me that they guard their Spotify playlist and won't let anyone ruin the algorithm, including if they ever have children.

I don't know if spotify will exist then or how it all will work, but if it's the same as now, I don't think they have considered how powerful a sobbing and yelling, "PWAYYY PAW PATROL MOOSIC NOOWWWW" toddler in the backseat really is. 

Here's a pic for proof. Also, you might notice an 8 year old added his pic to my account when I wasn't looking one time and changed my name to: (skull emoji) (skull emoji):-$AaronWeiss

 

Good Boy

This is a pic of our pup, Autumn. She's not actually a puppy, she's a grown almost 12 year old. She's a lab, probably 90 pounds. One time she wrapped the leash around my legs and jumped up and then I fell in the street. She's a big girl. 

And she IS a girl.

Today on our walk we walked by someone who very confidently said, "Good boy!!!"

This happens all the time. 

I think it's because she's a dog and all dogs are boys, especially big dogs. They're definitely boys. That all makes sense scientifically. 

Why do you think our brains do that?

 

Teaching kids important stuff like sunsets

I accidentally have been training my kids to love and appreciate sunsets (and sunrises if we ever make that happen). Everytime I see a good sunset, I yell to the kids, "Look at this sunset! Look at how beautiful it is! Look at all the colors" and then we look and everyone says, "wow, that's a nice sunset" or something like that and then we list all the colors we see. For a while we'd watch the sunset every day when driving home from daycare and after a while I noticed that sometimes before I'd even look up at the sky Clara would yell, "look! look at that sunset!" When it started getting darker later and the sun would still be pretty high in the sky on the way home, she'd say with much concern, "mom, but where is the sunset?'

That's probably one of the best things I've accidentally taught them. Hope you find some beauty somewhere and accidentally help other people do the same. 

Here are a few decent ones recently:

2025 feelin' alive

Hi! Welcome to my blog this year! 

This is the time of year when new friends that I’ve made since last year learn that I’m a little funny or kinda weird, or like a 20/80 split between the two, with this annual thing I do. (ALSO, this is my TENTH YEAR doing this?)

I do this blog during Lent (Christian liturgical season we’re in rn, that comes before Easter) to add a practice that isn’t scrolling on my phone and one that helps me be vulnerable in a good way and hopefully brings a little smidgeon of joy. It’s called 10% serious, because that’s how serious I want to be about this. I want this to be like seeing a puppy when you’re sad (or happy, I actually hope you're happy tho).

Here are some possible topics this year that I thought of just now (my rule for continuing this blog every year is that I’ll stop when I stop thinking of random stuff and that never happens): 

• Apples, peanuts, and crafts at Grandma’s house
• I forgot to read, but here’s a list of tv shows I watched
• Spotify playlist when you have children
• Things that make a day good
• Musical chairs, and other games that didn’t age well
• Quote Notebook, as in a notebook with quotes not quoting The Notebook
• People are worth knowing
• Insomnia hacks
• Cute things Clara says that I’ll be sad when she says correctly
• Quick, you’re leading this thing in 3 minutes
• Lesser known/ somewhat made up adhd traits
• Cheese.
• Bucket list
• Lutheran amen
• Mean things you don't have to do
• Perfect job
• New projects I might want to start
• answer with a song

A Really Tiring Day of Rest

My adhd brain does opposite things than you'd usually expect sometimes. Like:

• Sometimes the most challenging tasks for me are in theory super simple and actually take like 5 minutes *if* I get the motivation to do them. 
• Things that are restful for people make my legs wiggly and my brain think about 87 things at once.
• How I exercise at bedtime so my brain will just chill out.
• A really busy day helps me function and a not busy one makes me sit and stare at a wall too long. 

Here's like a perfect day of rest for me: hiking 6 miles, kayaking for a couple of hours, a quick bike ride, then meeting with 3 different groups of friends. It's a really tiring day of rest fortunately/unfortunately.

Wash Your Hands: A Story About When Clara Licked a Public Toilet

Trying to protect kids from gross stuff and gross viruses is kinda futile. They lick things, touch everything, have fingers in noses and pants and ears and mouths, find old mystery food, eat old mystery food, you know... gross stuff.

One time I took the kids to the park. Clara was about a year old. I had to go to the bathroom and so I took her with me. While I was buttoning my pants, Clara shot over to the toilet and put her mouth on the toilet seat. Not the seat exactly, but the part where there's that little opening that the seat doesn't cover. It basically just catches pee? She put her mouth on that. 

I yelled and grabbed her and then because I didn't know what else to do, I washed her hands?

Like I said, it's all futile.  

President's Day

Here's something I thought about on President's Day: 

I don't remember all the presidents we've had. Do you? How many do you remember? Do you know more than one fact about them? I probably should, but I don't. Being the president is a big deal. It's a big job (despite some of our elections). BUT, even people who have held one of the most important and prestigious roles in this country get forgotten. Just some perspective for when you're feeling a little puffed up or pretty small. 

What would you pick?

Everyone knows if you have an iphone or android, and about your name brand shoes/ clothes, but I bet they don't know what kind of laundry detergent you use or what kind of toothpaste you like. There are brands of things that I like and faithfully buy that I mostly don't care enough to tell other people about- I bet you do too. Here are some questions:

• What kind of creamer do you buy?
• What brand of jeans is your favorite?
• What kind of hand lotion do you use?
• What is your go-to snack?
• Soda you always buy?
• Brand of socks?

Here are my current answers:

• creamer- Coffeemate original and peppermint mocha and then I mix them together
•  jeans- Target (universal thread)
• lotion- gold bond
• snack- sabra classic hummus and sun dried tomato wheat thins
• soda- grapefruit spindrift
• socks- these really squishy fruit of the loom ones.

Also we use some laundry detergent sheets that are apparently nice to the world and I like sensodyne toothpaste like a sophisticated lady.

One Song at a Time

I tend to like one song at a time. I listen to it 87,000 times until I don't want to hear it for like 6 months. Here's some of the songs I've listened to 87,000 times lately:

• Light of a Clear Blue Morning- the Wailin' Jennys one 
• Wintergreen- The East Pointers
• Find Your People- Drew Holcolm and The Neighbors
• Rolling Stone- Wild Rivers
• Redesigning Women- The Highwomen
• Esther, Ruth, and Rahab- Flamy Grant
• Don't Stop Me Now- Queen
• 26- Caamp
• Turning Page- Sleeping At Last
• Surface Pressure- Encanto Soundtrack

A Low Bar

 I have some hopes and wishes and the bar is really pretty low. Here they are:

1. That me and these sweet little people in my house would sleep a whole night, more than one night in a row. Like a whole week (or a month even- could you imagine?!) of sleeping every night? 
2. I'd like our house to stop trying to break some kind of perpetual illness record. We've had 0 whole weeks off since July 2023. That's 8 months now. There might have actually been ONE week, but I got sick on day 8 or 9, so I'm still counting this... for pride's sake. 
3. Related, I'd like no one near me to say (or give any visible signs of): "my tummy hurts," "I'm queasy," "I feel like I'm going to throw up," or "tummy yucky" (that one was Clara) for like 3 months straight. I'd also like to not have to or want to say those things.
4. I'd like to hang out with my husband one day, without our kids. I've tried, but then we get sick.  

That's it. That's the vacation I want to have. I'm not dreaming tropical resort-y vacation, just regular life with sleep and without barf.

(Can you tell I'm home today with a barfy toddler?)

*Unlike the blog title, I'm 100% serious about all these things... but also like, I definitely know we are super lucky and don't have chronic illness and life could always be 10,000 times harder. So, whining with perspective and stuff.