Cathy Zielske's Blog

Free School's Out Card Download for Project Life

It's official: school is out and summer is at hand.

Granted, we've had freakishly cool, gray, Seattle-like weather here in the Upper Midwest so it doesn't really feel like summer. You will get zero complaints from this Pacific Northwestern bred, perimenopausal girl. I say temps in the sixties are sexy. 

This marks the first summer that Coleman has off in full. Both kids attended year-round school programs from Pre-K to 6th Grade, and this is a summer I've been anticipating for a few years now. 

I don't have to wake anyone up today.

Okay, that's not completely true. Aidan starts her summer nanny job today (her second year with the same family), and she will have to arrive there at 8:30 a.m. sharp. No worries. Her job site? Right next door. How's that for ease of commute?

Cole, on any given day, will likely sleep until Noon, which means my work mornings will not seem all that different from those during the school year. I am worried, however, that the wake up time will creep and that soon enough, my son will be living like a Lost Boy, rising only at dusk. As long as he doesn't start to feast on human blood, I figure it's all part of being a male teen, right? Right.

That said, I designed a simple 3 x 4 card to celebrate the end of school. In the package, you'll find a layered PSD (so you can change out all of the colors), a PNG (to print as is, and these colors match the Seafoam Edition of Project Life), or a printable PDF.

Download CZ_SchoolsOut

Here's to summer! 

Speaking of summer… 

The Phone Photography Project kicks off in about three weeks at Big Picture Classes. Register for the introductory price of $39 until June 12th, when the price goes up to $49. This class offers 32 days of photo challenges, inspiration and app reviews. I contributed a fun digital template designed to take six of your favorite phone photos and feature them in a framed project. Click on the image below for more information and to register.

The yearbook: it's kind of totally in my wheelhouse

My daughter decided to volunteer for yearbook editor this year.

My daughter likes to take on as many things as possible. It's kind of her deal. She's what they call a real go-getter.

Last year, I served a very minor advisory role for her high school's year book.

This year, not so minor.

That said, Aidan and her staff have worked really hard this year to collate all the material for the book. The only thing they didn't know how to do? Design it or produce it using a magical program called Adobe InDesign.

Enter Mom.

I worked with Aidan to create a series of templates (there was no way in Hell we were using the Yearbook Company's schlocky templates) and now she's up to her eyeballs with pages to fill, copy to flow (or still write) and deadlines to be met.

After all is said and done, I get to step in and bat clean up.

And I have to admit: I kind of love it.

Even though the yearbook company's list of approved fonts was enough to make me utter a few unsavory comments in the early days of the design—Cooper? Really Yearbook Company? Really?—I've really had fun working on this project with my daughter.

True, I've needed to step back and not just take the dang thing over. I mean, let's face it: I could design and produce this with one hand tied behind my back. That ain't braggin' people. Making publications is kind of my sweet spot. It is nothing, if not fully in my wheelhouse.

Still, I'm not as green as I once was.

That's where my Yearbook Editor comes in.

She's doing a bang up job, y'all.

 

This project, plus other projects, also partially explain the lighter posting this week. Hoping to actually do my Project Life for last week. Stay tuned…

An interview about parenting, featuring—wait for it, because it might shock you—me

I was recently invited to do an interview with Nest&Launch, a new site devoted to exploring the world of mid-stage parenting. 

It was a really great opportunity for me to put into writing my philosophy for parenting. I only wish I had that I had taken this approach much sooner in my life with children. 

I've written about the work I've done on my marriage in this space, but I didn't expect to learn so much about how to be a better parent during the process of marriage counseling. And not just a better parent, but a parent who works to give my children what they truly need—acknowledgement, competency, limits and love. I only have them under this roof for such a short time. Every day is an opportunity to do what is needed. I don't always hit that mark every day, but more and more often I find that I do. 

You can read the interview here. Nest&Launch is a site I plan to continue to check in with. I think they've got something special starting up over there.

Here's to parenting in the mid-stage years.

All aboard the bullet train

This girl turned 17 last Friday.

My girlie is 17. 

Something about 17 sounds older. More serious. More real, as in, "She's really not going to live here with us forever" real.

17 means college is around the next corner, and that college will very likely not actually be around the next corner, but around the next corner in another state.

I'm so grateful for the relationship I have with this young woman. Believe me. I do count my lucky stars for it. I cultivate it every single day.

(I also thank my therapist for helping me to be a better parent to this young woman, but that's a story for another day.)

Look at you, Aidan. Look at you.

 

48 years ago

Little Daniel Ezekiel Jr. makes his debut.

Happy birthday, babe. Tell everyone you know.

xo.

You think it's hard to take nice pictures of your kids? Try husbands.

Dan has recently decided to add some facial hair to his look. Granted, he can do this in about three to four hours, such is the growth rate of said facial hair, but I always think he looks so handsome with a little scruff. (Until he goes overboard and does something like this.)

I asked him if I could take a nice photo of him in his handsome beardedness. He said yes.

And it pretty much went downhill from there.

"Sit facing the window."

"No, sit back a little please."

"Okay, sit back up."

"Now turn and face me, and look up a little."

"Bring your chin down a little."

"Okay, that's not what I meant at all. Look here."

(Then He Who Will Not Be Photographed joined in.)

Then I started to get a bit testy. "LOOK HERE and HOLD STILL!"

"Can you just relax your face and try to look handsome?"

In the end, I had to settle for the Double Fisted Chin Rest. 

You can't say I didn't try.

It really is a nice beard.

Heirlooms: a love story?

Dan has been on a cleaning and organizing binge for the past six months. (Side note: is there a sexier way to describe any man? I mean, really? Is there anything hotter than of a bottle of Windex and the phrase, "Do you care if I throw this out?")

One of his targets has been our attic, but he's also focusing on other areas of the house. A few days ago, he was sorting through a drawer and came across a stack of old photos. As he was sharing them with me, I paused on this one:

That's my tiny little hubby in red, sitting on his great grandmother's lap, circa 1967, his older siblings, Debbie and David, nestled in on either side. 

That's also my old couch.

When I moved in with Dan back in 1990, he owned a little duplex in Frogtown, a working class neighborhood just outside of St. Paul's downtown district. As I quickly discovered, he was the sibling who always said 'yes' to the cast offs and family hand-me-downs. 

Want your uncle's trunk of clothes from the 50s? Yes! Want your grandparents' old furniture? Absolutely! How about this collection of antique tincture bottles from the 1930s? I have JUST the place for that!

He has always been a man with a soft spot for the old and gently used. Not only that, he's always been a man with a sincere respect and love for the quality, craftsmanship and style from the days of yore. He's a fan of the vintage.

The couch you see in the photo above was his—and in turn became ours—for the first eight years of our married life. I brought practically nothing of substance to our union, in terms of earthly possessions. I added a bed, and a black futon and a black futon-like coffee table. (And of course, my sparkling personality!) But my cheap, college furniture didn't really stand the test of time like that old, inherited couch did.

The couch was relegated to the porch in the early 2000s, and then with our remodel in 2010, we said goodbye to it for good. It was, afterall, falling into disrepair and though it was hard for Dan to say that last goodbye, we did, in fact, bid it a final adieu.

Seeing this photo, I had a great idea: I'll find some photos that show our more recent past on the couch—us, the kids, friends, family—and I'll combine it with this photo for a layout, or a blog post, or something to show how things weave themselves effortlessly into the backgrounds of our lives.

So I sat down yesterday and pored over my photo albums. The active years this couch had in our family was during the pre-digital camera years, so I knew I would find photos in the pages of my traditional photo albums.

It was so fun to page through the albums, reconnecting with so many photos and so many memories. Page after page of our lives. I couldn't help but feel like in this digital era, where so many of my photos end up as bits and bytes in an iPhoto library, that not having a complete, printed photographic record at my disposal was somehow a loss.

And as I went through every possible album that could hold a photo of this couch's golden years, the only shot I ended up finding was this, from 2001:

Can you see it? In the upper right side of this shot, taken on Coleman's 2nd birthday? The beautiful curve of that inlaid wood? The classic fabric from a time long since passed?

That's the couch. And that is the only photo I could find that even showed a trace of it being in our home.

And that's when it hit me:

I hated that freaking couch.

It was small and scratchy and dark and you sunk into it every time you sat down, on account of the completely wasted and ancient infrastructure. It smelled funny, too.

Okay, maybe hated is too strong a word, but the day it went out to the porch was a happy day for me. And the day it left the premises completely? I think overjoyed comes to mind.

I guess the point to my story is this: not every heirloom is automatically cherished and loved.

I've never really been a vintage kind of girl.

I never loved that piece of furniture.

I loved the man that came with the couch like crazy though. Still do, in fact.

And that, blog readers, is probably the real point to this story.

Maybe that will make a great scrapbook page afterall.

 

They're quite aware of what they're going through

I haven't been writing a whole lot about my second born force of nature, also known as Cole.

He's asked me to ease up on the public display—the Tweets, the Instagrams—the photos and snippets in general that will go out into the world for public consumption. 

I want to honor his requests and even though I'd love to write more about this kid who is really not a kid anymore, I'm going to keep his stories where he wants them: at home, in our albums perhaps, but far less on my blog for now.

I think it would be hard to be a 13-year-old boy. I have zero personal experience with it. But I feel like it requires a whole different set of navigational instruments. Part of my job right now is to learn and see and understand and guide while and where I can.

Make no mistake, he's still the coolest, funniest, most creative dude I know. I'd like to show him my support in every way that I can as he works his way through this time and place in his life.

Know what I'm sayin'?

 

 

 

 

Missing my tree and other New Year's Stories

And so the holiday season is officially wrapped up, boxed up and put away for another year.

I miss it already.

This year, more than any year before, I was filled with true happiness over the holidays. I set my intention to get into the season, and that's exactly what I did. Yes, there was some of the most heartbreaking news I think any of us have heard with what happened in Newton last month, but I emerged from December so thankful for this life of mine.

I know this is a direct result of therapy, this idea that I can really connect to life and be present and well, just simple be.

Yesterday I got back into the work groove. Always lots of deadlines on tap and it was good to be busy. It meant I missed my late sleeping teens a bit less. I love having them home. I love knowing the house is full of bodies, even if those bodies are in fact sleeping for many hours of the day, as teens are wont to do.

We hosted a rockin' New Year's Eve party, a tradition going on about five years now, complete with karaoke and plenty of fine champagne (okay, plenty of cheap champagne.) And when I say rockin', that translates to "I went to bed at 4 a.m." Holy mother of pearl. Good times, indeed.

Alas, the holidays are over. I said to Dan on Sunday: I miss our tree.

He looked at me, shrugged, and said, "You can go visit it in the backyard."

Good point.

Happy new year, indeed!

 

Not a creature was stirring…

Christmas Eve, 1970. Four-year-old Cathy MacDonald, and Frosty.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.