Kimberly Figures it Out

For the first adventure from my list, I watched several days of stunning sunsets in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The pink light fades to orange and then deepens as the sun sinks out past the edge of the lake. I added watching a sunset to the list because we live a few miles from the ocean and I should be watching these all the time but rarely do. There's something so magical about the transition from day to night so I'll be keeping track of all the sunsets I witness this year. One wasn't enough!  The campgrounds were almost completely empty which gave us several days of the lake all to ourselves. The area has no cell coverage so everyone was off devices and spending time with each other. Being that we are raising kids in the city, getting them out and into the mountains for at least one week a year is one of our traditions and (fingers crossed) will help them be well rounded people. I know a lot of people don't like the dirt and roughing it of camping but I ...

Today is my 40th birthday. Today I'm embarking on a new project. 40 things to do while I'm 40. This list extends on my backpack list I wrote about when we went to see the Sharks. Many of these items are San Francisco related and take me through the city in new ways and to things I've always wanted to do. Some are general and allow for some spontaneity around the event and how it takes place. It's giving scavenger hunt in some places. More importantly, these are almost all items I will do with my friends and family. I intend to share this project with everyone and select things to cross off with my best friends. Adventures await!  This project, while filled with fun things to do, is more than a lark. It's about intentionally connecting and grounding myself in the present. It's about not letting time pass me by. My kids are (or will be soon!) young teenagers this year. Time with them is fleeting and while I'm responsible to prepare them for adulthood. I know t...

M y theme for the year in 2024 was "invest," I chose this theme because I noticed that I was running on empty and doing everything I could for other people while spending very little time thinking about what I needed. I have always believed that parents need to be good models for self-care for our kids but I wasn't doing this very well.  A little background: I decided to put myself through graduate school from 2019-2021 (yes, those were, we'll say, interesting years to have young children and be a full time student). This led to a career change from running child development centers to a different career in the field. This change led to an increase in my base salary which made me realize I didn't have much knowledge about personal finance or finance in general.  Back to 2024:  Invest as an overall theme helped me to think about investing in the broadest sense and truly was investing in myself. While I did have goals on physical health and mental health under the i...

Lately I have been getting into the garden one day a week to trim and work on the plants. The garden used to be one of my favorite places but over the past few years I wasn't getting out to garden very often and some of the plants became overgrown. My new routine is to put on a podcast and start working, before I know it several hours have passed.  I find that I feel close to myself when I am in the dirt or up a tree with clippers. As soon as I take that first smell of bitter dirt and sharp, sweet lemons in our garden I feel grounded.  Lately, I have been pruning our lemon trees that have become woefully overgrown. Trimming the lemons is like solving a puzzle with no answer and takes complete concentration, I trace back each branch to the main branches to see if I want to change the path or if it's growing solidly. I find this process very restorative and a direct analogy to my relationship with myself. I am paring down habits and ideas that aren't useful and making plans f...

For weeks, my house was abuzz with the excitement around the student government election both my middle schoolers are involved in. My son was running for 6th grade president and my daughter, an 8th grader, for student body president.  For my son, the stakes are pretty low. True to personality he told us, “I’m running for 6th grade president.” “How did that come about?”, we asked. “I just turned to the kid next to me and said, Let’s run together, I’ll be president.” Couldn’t be simpler.  For my daughter, there have been countless conversations about political strategy with us, with her friends and with other adults in her life. She had a game plan for asking for campaigning (don’t be thirsty but be brave is the gist of it). She evaluated each candidate by popularity level, perceived popularity levels and their possible elementary school ties. Quite complicated.  Cutting straight to the end of the story. He won. She lost.  And in that moment, one of my kids was celebra...

I promised myself to write a blog that was about me and about who I am today but I have not yet trusted what I might say. I'm worried I'll hurt someone's feelings or embarrass myself and I'm worried I'll be judged for being silly or small or whatever. But…. But …. I need to be real. I decided to get sober in March of 2022. I did it for my kids mostly because I was scared of who I wanted to become when I drank, which is someone who drinks and has fun and is the life of the party. The thing was, I wasn't that person. I was anxious and nervous and cut myself off because though I want to have fun, I am scared of repeating the past.  I've been sober for two full calendar years 2023 and 2024 and this year I will have my 3 year soberversary in March. I have just closed out my second set of sober holidays and this experience feels at once like a revelation and like nothing special.  The day of my last drink we were on vacation in Oceanside and I was in a bad mood. I...

I don’t have a bucket list, I have what I now think of as a “Backpack List.” The things I have to go out of the way to do but aren’t exactly lifelong dreams. Things I can strap my backpack on at the front door and set out to do or see or experience. I also have a hard time committing to possibly un-achievable goals like a bucket list contains so this is a way for me to have little dreams. Here’s the story of how I got to thinking of this concept.  NYE 2024 we spent celebrating at the San Jose Sharks game. The atmosphere was fun and exciting and the teal was on display. It was our first time watching the Sharks and the first time for me and the kids to see a hockey game in person. The stadium lowers down a giant fiberglass shark’s head that the players skate out of at the beginning of the game which was both exciting to watch happen but more fun for me to watch the shark handlers in the rafters getting the whole thing ready. I am really a sucker for logistics.  On the way home ...

My word for 2025 is Peace.  I love New Year’s Resolutions and have set and taken them seriously most of my adult life. One year I committed to getting 10,000 steps a day and another I vowed to go back to school for my Master’s degree. Last year my best friend gave me the idea to sum up the year’s resolutions with a word. Choosing was hard but once I landed on “Invest” the list wrote itself and I have had so much fun investing in the last year both in the literal sense as well as in myself. Credit for this idea goes to Gretchen Rubin. One major investment was disengaging with all of my volunteer commitments which set me up to have time to reflect and make plans for myself.  Peace is all about the quest to quiet the nagging should haves of the past several years. Last year my word was “Invest” and I made great progress investing in myself. Through that journey I started working on this blog and noticed immediately that making my idea come to life left me feeling lighter and more...

On Christmas morning, I opened a small, light bag from my mother. Inside were family recipes I had requested. Immediately, seeing her handwriting, I began to cry. I quickly wiped my eyes and the festivities moved on. I had requested the recipe but forgot that I asked for them as my Christmas present and I didn’t expect to see the recipe for Turkey Artichoke Pie in the stack.  My grandmother, Dorothy Love, died in 2023. My heart still feels broken by her loss and though she told me herself she was ready to go and that I couldn’t really expect her to live forever, I did expect her to live forever and the world just isn’t the same without her in it. Last Christmas I couldn’t really bear doing all the traditions without her. I didn’t send Christmas cards because I didn’t want to see her name on the list and I didn’t put up a tree because I didn’t want to see the ornaments she had made for me and her great grandchildren over the years.  This year, I jumped back in but it felt lonel...

The topic of allowance comes up as kids get older. Among my friends, I know other moms give a weekly or monthly allotment, tie it to chores and those who skip it altogether. In our house, the kids each have spending money but it doesn't come from a set allowance. We celebrate Lunar New Year so they receive most of their spending money around the new year . We also allow them to cash out of any gift cards they receive if they prefer. As the middle school years came along, they each started taking their money with them to purchase small items like boba drinks and snacks from the local hardware store (that guy is really a business genius but that's another story). We buy them what they need and want whenever it comes up and and extras for birthdays and holidays. We do not give them an allowance. The reason for this goes back to when I worked in the office at a early education center. At the center, we had a late pick up policy in the handbook that allowed for charging fees for eac...

Last year I made a commitment to myself: be done with grinding for free for SFUSD. This promise was easier on paper than in reality and it took me 14 months to finish out all my commitments. Don’t get me wrong: I am proud of many things I accomplished as a heavily invested volunteer. However, the more involved I got, the more supportive I became, the more diminished the returns. Take my social life for instance. They say that these boards are a great way to meet people and they are but they are a great way to either intimidate or alienate most people. On one hand, people are really impressed about the commitment and they thank you for your time and energy you’re putting into the school. On the other hand, they roll their eyes when you invite them to a meeting or when they make a complaint while waiting for the morning drop off to finish and you respond with an educated and nuanced answer. Coffee invites don’t come frequently from that crowd.  Take my favorite example of this scenar...

I started this blog in my thoughts several years ago, brainstorming in the shower or walking around about things that I'd like to write that might be interesting to read for other people. I chickened out of publishing last year but now I've drawn the courage up to go for it and here I am. This year is my 39th and as I approach 40 I have been figuring out who I am and who I want to be in my next 39 years. These days my biggest identity is being a mama to my two middle schoolers. Currently 12 and 14, they have been keeping me busy and learning since they were born as they move into stage after stage of development and we navigate the world together as a family. 40 looms large doesn't it? I do not dream of being younger as I am far happier and healthier than I was in my 20s but there is a weight to 40. It's not insignificant. Case in point, I moved to San Francisco when I was 17. So, I have been living in the big city for 22 years. Twenty two! That's the kind of number...