I have been unplugging quite an awful lot on weekends.

It’s good for the kids, it’s good for our family, it’s good for me.

We are filling our summer with so much. I was going to actually, you know, finish that sentence there, but the so much pretty accurately sums it up. This weekend alone, I had a Menchie’s date with Josh and Isabella. I had sushi with some lovely ladies. We went out to dinner with friends. I wore three necklaces, because I am super bad at making hard decisions. We had an afternoon at friends, complete with several dozen children competing in at-home Olympic games. (Surprise: I didn’t win.) I bought three dresses at anthropologie. I had a wonderful shabbat lunch at my bestie’s house. The kids swam. The kids biked. The kids trampolined. We finished our really creepy 1,500 piece gnome puzzle.

We got the first coat of paint up in Emily’s new grey room (surprise!)—of course when I say ‘WE’ what I really, actually mean is that @gavmartell is painting the room and I am walking back and forth questioning missed spots, questioning why the paint smells so bad, and questioning the musical choices (I mean..Drake? Really?) I’m an excellent assistant. You could probably compare my assistant skills to my shotgun seat during road trips. Probably. It’s impossible to know at which task I excel more at.

I edited hundreds and hundreds of my nephew’s Bar Mitzvah photos.

My children threw a street party.

No really, they did. They planned it all, even down to the bags of chips, the hula hoops, and the chalk stations.

The turnout was only sort of, kind of, mildly successful, but it didn’t matter. They are still smiling today.

So, these things. They are good.

Great.

Because there were a looooot of things that were less than good, less than great on the internet this weekend.

Don’t get me wrong. Some things were fabulous. Like, say, the fact that my 5 Easy Ways to Knot a Belt post has been repinned 1,209 times on Pinterest. I KNOW. 

But then there was a post on circumcision that I made the mistake of leaving a light-hearted comment on. It’s not a secret. I am Jewish. My son had a bris eight days after he was born. I make not a single apology for it. I am not saying it’s right for YOU, but I am saying that it’s right FOR ME AND FOR MY FAMILY. The response was a little, um, unexpected: congratulations on sexually torturing and mutilating a helpless infant, you barbaric ass. Fuck you. Since this isn’t my first rodeo (I have been doing this, putting myself out there online for, um, over eight years.) I know not to even give people who spew hateful words the satisfaction of a response (as hard as it might be) especially since no amount of name-calling is going to a) bring back a foreskin (It won’t!) or b) make me regret my decision (I don’t! Not for a second!) I didn’t suggest that what I do is right and what others do is wrong. I was simply telling the lovely author of the post that my son, too, is circumcised. I wasn’t asking anyone to agree with me. I wasn’t asking for advice, for judgement, for anything. And yet. Here we are. judgement.

Which brings me to that second little thing that went down on the internet.

Early Friday morning, I was so shocked, saddened, HEARTSICK by what had happened in Aurora the night before.

By late Friday morning, I was so shocked, saddened, and heartsick to see the status updates and tweets that were flying by in my feeds. Questions, comments, judgements about the ages of children at the movie. REALLY? Really? THAT’S what people were choosing to focus their energy on? Seems to me those people had their priorities in a wee bit of the wrong place.

So this happened. Because it couldn’t not happen.

And then—thankfully—there were posts written that supported my thoughts exactly.

AND THEN there were some posts and tweets and status updates written that were still questioning, still asking, still wondering, about parenting decisions.

Still judging. 

So I made a little parenting decision of my own—you are free to judge it if you like.

I shut my laptop.

And we had ourselves a hula weekend.