Terrible/Perfect

I did it all for the cookie

I was certain that I had been doing a good job these last almost 14 years of adulthood presenting myself as moderately incapable, but I somehow ended up with a handful of volunteer jobs with words like "manager" and "leader" and "adviser" in the title. It's either my undeniable aura of sharp intelligence and inborn leadership presence, or I'm the only one without a paying day job and I can't come up with a good excuse to say no.

 

Troop Cookie Manager. I want a badge. And to un-do all the cookie eating that's been done this last week. Bleh.

Borrowed Lent

This is what homeschooling has been looking like. Molting teenage eagle, very cold, very rainy bird watching, reading, wonderfully nerdy educational websites. We've been busy, too, but at home, when we're alone, it's simple and quiet. Winter stuff.

A friend of mine is observing Lent right now, so I decided to give up using the internet as entertainment. Ash Wednesday served as a fine start date, but I'm not giving it up for 40 days. I'm hoping it will be the new normal by then. I don't mean that I will NOT EVER EVER AGAIN look at a silly website or read the news or whatever, but I have a strict policy all written up. Web journaling is one of the small concessions to non-utilitarian interneting, something creative (between the writing and the photographing) that I can do for a bit, of an evening, after the kids are in bed. End of day two, and I feel very much checked into my life. My kitchen is tidy. There's actually far more time in a day than I realized. I think I might start reading poetry, or something indulgent like that.

I'm doing this Seinfeld thing to try and deal with my procrastination problem, too, which I find humorous and exciting. It needs to work because I'm suddenly rather seriously committed to a few volunteering gigs and I can't let people down.

This is good. Time is mine. My world is mine. The children grow and grow and grow, I don't wish to miss it.

Poetry suggestions welcome.

Charrrrrd, matey*.

It's been such a long time. I'm never sure how to start again when it's been this long. Randomly? A list? A random list? Sure.

-My older daughter decided to eat a vegan diet, all on her own, which spurred a huge revolution in the way our whole household eats. All changes for the very best. No meat or dairy, lots and lots and lots of fruits and vegetables, very little processed grain, basically no refined sugar or junk food, lots of nuts and beans. We've pretty much cut out refined oils, too, which is still kind of at the outer edge of nutrition science at the moment but I think it's where the advice is headed. I still need to be better about getting a lot of leafy greens.

-We took vegan pizza out for a spin for the first time today, at a pizzeria, and my girl chose the fixins': basil pesto, a vegan white sauce (mostly soy products and garlic, I think), spiced tofu, and roasted garlic. The crust made me sick (not the crust's fault, but it has been weeks since I've had that much starch) but her toppings made me smile and smile. She was totally satisfied...I guess veganism agrees with her, for now. And the rest of us. Whew. 

-I'm dedicated to perfecting homemade vegan pho. I still haven't dragged my lazy arse to the asian market to procure the proper spices, so my attempts have been pretty far off base, but ultimately, I believe in the soup. The soup wants to come out right.

-I'm stupid excited about a bunch of things right now. I started to feel sorry for myself last night, but I snapped out of it post haste. I don't have time for that! Things are happening! I just get dumb, dumb, dumb happy anymore, all the time, over the silliest little nothing/everything, everything things. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes audiobook I got from the library. The campsite I booked for three nights this summer, in an old growth forest right next to an aquamarine glacial river. The perfect, brilliant hikes we'll take there, and the Junior Ranger programs she'll do. Web Rangers. Family Zen. Girl Scouts. Volkssport. Strawberries.

-Strawberries are obscenely delicious and it seems like they should be terrible for you, but they're not. Win. Win! Forever a win.

-The girls and I are headed to Arizona to visit family in a couple of months, to the Phoenix area, and I am kicking myself that I didn't think to make the trip just a touch longer and try to see some of the national and state park action down there. I'm not sure if I'm up for the Grand Canyon with my littlest buddy, but soon. Soon!

-This is funny to me. One of the big kid's friends has a chart-sticker-reward scheme going on at home with her mum and dad to work on some behaviors, and the proverbial carrot on the stick is a pizza at the end of a good week. My kid decided this was unfair, never mind that she can basically have pizza whenever she wants, so long as we have the ingredients and time or the money to go out. Still, she told me she wanted me to do some kind of chart and sticker scheme. I told her I wouldn't do it**, but we compromised and she has decided to read 56 books (I think this was just the number of boxes that happened to be in the chart she made) and keep track with a chart and stickers, then at the end I will give her a hand-knit bunny as her self-selected reward for achieving the self-selected goal that she will be self-monitoring. But, you know, it's a chart. With stickers. I guess I need to get knitting.

-That says "Bun Bun Day" not "Bon Bon Day". Geez. I wish.

*Ha! That picture above isn't even chard. It's beet greens. Derp.

**We've purposely eschewed the punishments/rewards paradigm as a family, which is why I refuse to indulge my daughter's desire to play that out, but I want to make it clear to my dear friends and readers that I realize I have no right to any notion of what families walking their walks in different pairs of shoes "ought" to do. My friend's situation sounds very, very frustrating, and I sincerely hope this route is fruitful for them.

This way

Things are going pretty awesomely right now. The trajectory is awesome, anyway. I'd been feeling iffy and a little fail-ish about homeschooling and now I'm not. It rules. We're busy but in precisely the way I envisioned us being as a homeschooling family: taking on a bunch of what would be extracurriculars if the kid was in school, but are the core of her "out there, in the world" life since she's here at home during the day. Girl Scouts, 4-H, classes, clubs, church. The ratio of adults to kids in her life is always between 1:2 and 1:5. That pleases me.

One aspect of homeschooling that I hadn't thought of or predicted, and that I am coming to hold near and dear to my heart, is that a pretty significant portion of our lives, which flows so completely as an education, with very few boundaries or demarcations, is spent in the development of personal character. We have chosen a number of activities that quite explicitly deal with being a good and kind-spirited human, and she takes them quite seriously.

We are so busy now. Every day there is something. She gets enough connection to other kids. She's happy. Energetic. She never asks about public school. She pesters me to get out her life science labs.

She was working on her math the other day and the little one, who's just turned three, demanded that I get out her math book. She doesn't have one. I told her I'd get her one and she got really excited. So I guess we need to do that now. Some kind of "math" for her to do.

The little one and I will read our way through this list, too. I had finished them all with her big sister by the time she was 2 1/2. Just as a fun thing to do. The little one is barely able to sit through one picture book before she snatches it from you and "reads" it to herself. Funny. Okay, I hope. I assume she's just walking her own path. I try hard to take them on their own terms.

I sometimes think about the long term, and what I want to give them. We've made this unconventional choice, taken on some different freedoms and responsibilities. Why? I feel clear on how I want our here and now to look and feel (slow, for starters) but what do I want them to walk out into the world with? And it seems that, really, if they're solid in their values-values that have been interrogated, put on, worn, and lived in,if they are able to think critically, and if they can express their ideas clearly? Yes. Yes. Yes.

Those are the stars we'll steer by.

Burn notice

Last week was very, very strange. It was one of those periods in life that have a shape that you can see quite clearly in retrospect but seemed totally dark and nebulous going through...if I'm digging for a metaphor I think maybe we'll call it being hit with a surprise tornado. Oh, yeah. Tornado. That's why my couch is up a tree 30 miles over.

I suppose I have the snow to thank. I'm not sure things would have come to a head in quite the way that they did without it.

Things haven't been right for months. I guess I knew that. I mean...now I know that I knew that. I didn't know that I knew back then. But it was one thing after another...moving, Halloween, a quicker than quick shift into the holiday blitzkrieg, pulling life back together after the holiday blitzkrieg...the normal stuff. I figured it was just stress. Normal stress. Mr. Terrible made plans to attend a two-day meditation retreat. I'd have the kids by myself for the weekend, he'd be home for the Martin Luther King holiday. That was fine.

But things really hadn't been fine for a while, and we got snow. Lots of it. That Sunday was a Snow Day, the super fun kind when everything is really fresh and lovely, and the kids were in and out of the house all day. Wonderful and exhausting. The house was crazy. Mr. T came home from his two days away after we'd all gone to bed. I was asleep in the big bed with both of the kids and remember vaguely telling him there wasn't any room and to go sleep somewhere else.

I suppose I was expecting him to come back to us all fresh and Zen-ful, seeing as how he'd been hanging out in a zendo for two days, but his transition home was really rough. Then he went back to work, and then we got some serious snow and work was cancelled and he was home with us. Except...he wasn't.

Not to put too fine a point on it, because he deserves his privacy even if his wife doesn't seem to need much of her own, but things just weren't working. I found myself in a string of tasks with both kids hanging off of me, literally hanging off of me in a couple of instances. I was helping the toddler soap and rinse her hands while I was sitting on the toilet. I was finding the Play-Doh for the screaming toddler while I was on the phone with my sister. I was opening the oven door to check on the dinner with the fussy toddler on my hip.

And he was reading a book.

I will admit, I lost. my. shit. with him that night. Totally f-ing lost it.

Which turned out to be good, because he managed to mentally check himself back in to the Happiness Hotel that is the life of our family the next day, and because it made me understand what had been going on the past few months:

Burnout.

My job is taking care of my kids and my home. And for months, I have been a working person getting absolutely no reprieve from work. Literally the only time I haven't been responsible for watching at least one of my children is after they go to bed. That's a minimum 14 hour work day, 7 days a week, for months on end.

For a while now I have had very little interest or desire to do...well, my job. All of it. I love my kids, but it had become painful to be around them so unceasingly. I had no motivation to take care of my home. I deeply resented my husband. I was just done. 

Things were laid bare, though, and now it's on the table unequivocally that I need time off every week, measured in continuous daytime hours, not five minute stints at the sewing machine constantly interrupted with demands to wipe a butt or pour a cup of milk.

He needs time off, too. He should get his cup of coffee and NPR by himself, in peace, on Saturday morning, and his weekend meditation retreat every now and again. But I need it too. Even if it's really super hard for him to adjust to being the on-call guy, to flying solo with a high-strung six year-old and a three year-old that wants nothing but, in equal parts: her mother, opportunities to communicate to her father that he's one of God's Unchosen, and the complete destruction of all order in the universe, it has to happen.

The alternative is that I kind of hate everyone.

And I don't. I don't hate them. I love them to bits. I even love homeschooling, even though tossing the big kid on a bus would halve my workload for much of the day. 

Mercifully, just having that little breakdown, that moment when the machine that hasn't been oiled in far too long up and bricks, eased everything for me really quickly. It gave me much needed perspective, an ability to name the problem, which is so very much of almost any battle.

Poof, like magic, I'm enthused about learning science with my science-loving again. About helping her earn Girl Scouts badges. About reading stories to the goofy, frustrating Mama junky about dogs who really, really love chasing balls.

I wasn't depressed. I wasn't lazy. I didn't need a divorce. I don't care if my job isn't taken seriously or if everyone who has ever raised small children has also been spread really, really thin and just sucked it up, I got burned out. It's a thing. I'm dealing with it. It's going to be fine.

The snow came, it stayed, and then it thawed.

Snowpocalypse Now

We've had some Weather around here. I'm not sure whether to capitalize it or italicize it. We've had some weather. Unlike many of our friends we've been extremely lucky and haven't lost power, so almost a week (has it been almost a week already?) of being snowed on and snowed in has mostly passed in a lovely sort of home-cozy way, filled with four-legged friends with velvet ears, hot drinks, soft, soft yarns, beautiful books, beautiful babes, and a birthday tart for one who turned three (no, I did not make it myself). 

I am prepared to be extremely pleased in almost any situation. It's an excellent policy to have, if it can possibly be managed.

The land of ice and snow

Himmel im Winter

Breathtaking winter skies these days, morning and night. Beautiful, beautiful.

Back again

I'm back here again.

My debit card expired and I hadn't updated anything connected to it, so a few things expired with it. If it wasn't essential I just let it go, intentionally, for a bit. I'm a terribly disorganized person so I let things go without meaning to pretty often, but sometimes allowing things to drift away feels lovely.

Things are getting busy. I made commitments a while back that are now coming to call. I'm still staying up late, like I did over the holidays. My body couldn't afford it then and definitely can't afford it now. I need to stop doing that.

I dropped the concept of resolutions a long time ago. I just don't function in that way. I have to approach everything sideways. But for a whole host of reasons I'm focusing on finishing longstanding projects in the craft room as well as starting a few new ones to use up materials. I'm making a huge sampler quilt. Struggling with perfectionism. Planning to paint walls and buy new shelves.

Beginning again, again.

The Handmades: Bags

I managed to make a couple of things for both of my kids this Christmas, so: huzzah! But I procrastinated, and ended up being rushed in the day or two prior to Christmas Day finishing things up. Which meant it was the perfect time to decide to make some lined drawstring bags to wrap the gifts in.

Last year my sister had passed along some remnants of Christmas fabrics she'd used to make pajamas for the whole family, including a couple of Hello Kitty prints, and I knew the girls would really enjoy them. We've done fabric wrapping for a couple of years now, and love it. It's actually very beautiful, simple to make and use and eliminates all the trash that's made opening gifts.

For the new bags, I used this lined drawstring bag tutorial and they turned out beautifully. They're lined, and have a double drawstring and a gusseted bottom, so they're very sturdy and they stand up well when they're filled.

There were paper tags with my kids' names on them, which I did a super duper job covering over in MS Paint.

The books we bought them fit perfectly in the simple fabric pouches I made last year (sitting underneath the new bags in the picture), and the handmade things fit in the Kitty bags. Just right.

Unexpected bonus: my girls stored their stocking loot in them after they'd finished opening the stockings and gifts. My older girl automatically popped all her stuff in her bag, which was a pleasant surprise. The bags kept everything together and they could carry them around or put them in their room or whatever and not lose anything or get things mixed up. Most excellent.

One of my goals for the coming year is to burn through my fabric stash, and I will be making more of these bags as birthday wrapping (if I was going to buy fabric for that express purpose, the Sarah Jane balloon print would be incredibly sweet), as well as some to use as project bags, maybe some to sort and store toys for the girls.

Simple and useful.