Parting and Pool Partying | How Much Did I Spend Last Week? June 23-29, 2025

Monday

Atlas has speech therapy at 9am, so we’re up and out the door by 8.15am, stopping for coffee and croissants ($15 including tip) en route.

He goes in to speech therapy on his own, which is a gift, because it means I can read my book, which I plan to do… but instead stare at my phone for the 45 minutes, with intermissions to pay a bill that pops up from Parkview ($115.50), and to change Roman’s nappy and all of his clothes, as he has a spectacular blowout while lying in his carseat playing with his crinkly bunny toy. Ah, the life of a baby!

I drop the boys to their babysitter’s on the way home and then sit at my desk and try to write… but nothing happens. I’m feeling all out of sorts with Bea moving away this week, and while I have plenty I could be doing, when I sit down to do it I feel panicky and kind of sick.

Rather than surrender the day to moping (tempting), I decide to list some things on Poshmark – something I’ve been meaning to do for a while – which at least makes me feel vaguely productive, and kind of distracts me from the emotional meltdown I can feel a-brewing.

That takes the guts of two hours, after which I sit down and watch some Yellowstone with toast and a cooling can of Diet Coke (don’t knock this combo until you’ve tried it), then go and get the boys a little bit early and head over to Bea’s for a swim (while we still can).

Brandin comes to meet us there with our older boys after work, and Bea orders Five Guys for the kids while Dad cooks spaghetti bolognese (trying to use up what’s in the freezer) for the adults. Of course, because this is my Irish family, everything ends up being ready about an hour after it was meant to be, at which point Atlas is in full meltdown mode (it’s almost bedtime and he doesn’t like burgers so was having spaghetti with us) and I’m feeling really stressed about the need to get him and Roman home and into bed.

I wish I could be this super laidback mum whose kids go to bed whenever, and just deal with it… but that’s not me, and I feel embarrassed at how stressed it makes me when things run late and the babies start losing their minds, which isn’t great.

Anyway, it’s fine – we eat, we go home, we get everyone into bed. Everyone survives. We do miss the apple tart that was promised for dessert, but I try not to dwell.

My subscription to

The Weekly Digress

($5) comes out, along with our Chewy autoshop, for dog food and cat litter ($107.21), and my Kindle Unlimited subscription ($11.99).

Daily total: $254.70