Hi guys.

So, we sort of unceremoniously took a bit of a blogging break. I won't lie to you -- it's a fair amount of work to drum up regular content here at Nest & Launch, but it's also a labor of love, so Annie and I have been loathe to shut her down permanently.

And I think about Nest & Launch everyday. Things I want to tell you. Things I want you (o' world of the interwebs) to tell me. So today I challenged myself to stop watching Netflix, while simultaneously worrying about my dissertation chapter, and to write something. ANYTHING.

Here's the state of affairs: It's summer. My oldest is working a full-time gig at BYU, so she's in Utah. My second is working an internship. So, she's in NYC. Children three and four are technically at home, but seem to be more often at a friend's house, at work, at the gym, playing Smash Bros., out to lunch, to the movies, etc. Sometimes all of their friends are over here. In short, the children are under the impression that summer is a free-for-all. I'm still weighing out if that should indeed be the case.

Three days ago I bought a nice piece of salmon to cook for dinner. However, when dinner time rolled around, I counted up the number of family members who would actually be home for dinner, and that number was one. Me. I generally don't cook for one, so I promptly (and with a sigh of relief) forgot about dinner. But then the next day at dinnertime the house was full of more kids than one fillet could feed. And the next day Sterling and I opted to grab some food while we were out. So today, certain I could not let the good salmon go to waste, I rescued it from certain demise and cooked it for lunch (again, I was the only one home). I even cooked some new potatoes and veggies, waited for them to cool, and then neatly placed them all in plastic containers now obsessively/compulsively stacked in my refrigerator.

I'm not exactly sure what it is I'm trying to point out here. Maybe it's that my life grows increasingly strange to me -- moments of chaos and noise followed by stretches of empty quiet, both states I can appreciate for their own inherent merits. Maybe it's that I'm cooking now like the French, the big meal in the middle of the day. Hey! Look at me! Bonjour! Or maybe it's simply that I'm undone by the non-structure of summer days.

But certainly it's nothing that can't be remedied by an icy cold Diet Coke from the McDonald's drive thru.

• Try this recipe for dinner. I've made it twice now and we all love it.
• Did you read Cathy Zielske's post "From the Middle Aged Momma Files"? Really good.