Finding My Voice

When I was a kid, I loved to act and sing. I was fearless in front of a crowd, and thoroughly enjoyed any opportunity to perform. I was in my first musical when I was 8, played the Captain in our sixth grade production of H.M.S. Pinafore (one of the benefits of an all-girls school), and fully embraced my lifelong affinity for hobbits as Bilbo Baggins in 7th grade. I loved all of it.

Also, I was decently good. My particular class in school turns out to have been absolutely riddled with talented girls, and quite a few have gone on to follow careers as musicians and actors. So I wasn't the best actress or singer in my year. Sadly, much of my young life was crippled by my own insistence that I only engage in activities in which I could excel, meaning if I couldn't be the best math student or poet or artist or dancer or whathaveyou, I just didn't bother.

Have you ever wanted to go back and take your younger self by the shoulders and shake some sense into her? Yeah.

But my own fear of competition and failure wasn't the only reason I walked away from theatre and singing. If it was, I could reserve all of my anger and disappointment for myself. No, there was something else. At some point, I think it was during high school, a teacher or someone in some sort of authority made a comment to me. It's telling that I can no longer remember who said it. Was it that voice teacher at music camp? I can't remember, and it doesn't matter. Because the point is, I absorbed this comment and accepted it as fact. Once said, it became part of my own Truth. And it went something like this:

"It's too bad about your lisp. At this point, it's probably too late to correct it. Unfortunately, even a small lisp like yours will prevent you from ever having any kind of career with your voice -- acting, singing, etc. Such a shame."

This adult probably had no idea what an impact their words would have. How much I would accept this pronouncement as the gospel truth, how these words would silence me for so many years. Of course it was a load of bull-honky. For one thing, I don't actually have a lisp -- I have a sibilant S, and it's not even that pronounced. For another thing, lots of singers and actors have lisps or "imperfect" voices.

But I believed it, and thus made it true. I have not acted on the stage since 7th grade. And my singing has been limited to children's lullabies and family gatherings.

Amazing how a 30-second off-hand comment can have that kind of long-lasting effect. It's a good reminder for those of us who are parents or work with children. You never know what an impact your words can have.

But the funny thing is, I have never actually stopped doing the things that I loved, I've just had a more limited audience. Every day for the past 18+ years, I have read aloud to my children. I do voices, I do accents, and I take pride in my reading-aloud skills. When I read Harry Potter, I am acting out Harry Potter... and playing all of the characters. Every day, my own voice is used to entertain and educate the small people in my house.

And this summer, I started learning how to play the guitar. Now every night, my husband and I sit in the living room taking turns playing new songs, practicing tricky chords, and singing. Every night, for an audience of one loving set of ears, I sing.

And it doesn't seem to matter whether it's too late to pursue these interests in a more serious way. (Maybe it isn't -- I still fantasize about a second career as a voice actor. Who knows?) In any event, after all these years, I am finding my voice.

Unearthing an Unexpected Bounty

This Spring, I double-dug my raised beds, worked composted manure into the soil, and gently planted my seeds and seedlings after all danger of a frost had passed. As the tiny plants began to establish themselves, I kept the beds weeded and stood sentry against any invasion of would-be pests.

And then I got distracted.

I mean, like, criminally distracted. Like, I should be barred from calling myself a gardener. I basically ignored my garden. For months.

I know, I know. How could I just leave a carefully planned garden to languish? How could I let all my hard work be taken over by weeds? The answer is complicated, but the simplest explanation is that my head just wasn't in it. I had so many other things going on in my life and in my mind this summer, I just simply did not have room for caring for Swiss chard and cucumbers.

And then slowly, as the weather cooled, I came back to my garden. My mind quieted, and I found myself longing for the feel of the soil between my fingers again. I began to pull the weeds from the garden. At first, the sight of all those spent plants, choked by vining brown weeds shamed me. The growing pile of pulled vegetation was a rebuke: Where have you been? But the simple act of kneeling in the dirt was so calming, so nourishing, that I let all the should have's go. It just felt so good to get my hands dirty again.

And then I found them. Beneath a mass of weeds, a few green tops of carrots remained. I pulled them, thinking I could at least get a carrot or two out of all of this mess. To get the full group of carrots out, I had to dig in the dirt with my fingers. And I just... kept digging. All through the patch where I had planted those carrot seeds back in May, carrots were waiting under the soil. Many of them had had their tops chewed off by the local (active) bunny population, but under the surface, big fat beautiful carrots remained. Just... waiting. Waiting for me to come find them. Waiting for me to be ready to appreciate them.

I sat there with my harvest, and laughed. With joy, with relief, and with gratitude for a world that holds its gifts in reserve, waiting for me to be ready to accept them in all their secret, delicious glory.

Stealing Time

I remember my parents saying to me when I was young (and not so young, most likely), "if it is important to you, then you make time for it." And I still absolutely agree with that sentiment, the idea that our actions are what ultimately express our values. How we spend our time is the truest reflection of our priorities. But I want to quibble with one little aspect of my parents' advice: I cannot make time.

Oh, that I could. If only I could create extra time, more hours in the day to devote to those activities I value and never seem to get around to. If only I could make the time I need to get everything done. But sadly, I cannot.

The hard truth is, there is only a very limited amount of time in any given day. And when I choose to devote time to one activity, I am inevitably stealing that time from some other endeavor. This is a zero sum game. Every hour I spend doing housework is an hour I don't spend reading to my children. And if I try to do it all, I just end up stealing from my own allotment of sleep.

What ends up happening, more often than not, is that when I try to carve time out of my day that is just for me, set aside for my own selfish interests, I feel the guilt of a thief. I am all too conscious of what I am not doing. In a family, whenever one person drops the ball, another must pick it up. Thus none of my decisions only affect myself, especially when it comes to how to spend my time. Trying to set aside some "me" time inevitably means imposing on someone else to pick up the slack.

Recently, my husband asked me, concerning some trivial decision about where to have dinner or what to do on a Saturday, "what do you want?" And I answered his question with considerations of nap time and the children's preferences, and he reiterated, "No, what do you want?" And I realized that the answer to that question hardly even occurs to me. I am mentally unable to conceive of my own needs and desires outside of the needs and desires of my family as a whole. This, my friends, is a problem.

Perhaps part of the issue, in my case, is that I was never an independent adult. I was seventeen years old when I found out I was pregnant with my daughter. I went straight from adolescent to mother, with no stopping for a breath in between. And from the day she was born, I was first and foremost a mother. I never had a period of life in which my time was truly my own.

So this is my challenge to myself now: to find the answer, the truly individual selfish answer, to the question, what do you want? And then to find a way to steal the time I need without guilt. To let some things go. To say to myself, you are important. Your needs are important, as an individual person. I am sure I am not the only one who finds this such a revolutionary idea. Most of us squash down our selfishness most of the time, and that's not a bad thing. But it is absurd, when I am trying to teach my children self-respect, to not treat myself with that same level of regard.

Right now, I want... time to write. And this week, I promise myself, I will steal it.

New Adventures

Several updates from my topsy-turvy world:

1. Someone domain-squatted on me, and the minute my domain registration expired, POOF! it was gone. (The renewal reminders ended up in my spam filter. Gmail spam filter FAIL.) So I am no longer at chickencounting dot com. We'll just have to manage with chickencounting.blogspot.com instead for the time being. So I am still here! Hmm, how do you send out change of address cards for a blog...?

2. Since a fair amount of my energies are being directed towards trying to make a go of this whole stringing-words-together thing, which may or may not be of interest to my regular readers here at Chicken Counting, I've created a new space to chronicle my attempts at becoming a writer when I grow up. Read all about it over there.

3. And speaking of that whole stringing-words-together deal, I have an exciting announcement: I have released the first installment of my serialized novel for young readers on Amazon as a Kindle book. You can read all about it here. Very exciting!!



Oh, and meanwhile the six-year-old has been writing books like nobody's business. Something about apples and trees...

Radio Silence

I have to make a confession.

I've been cheating on you. I know, I know, I don't know how it happened, I just... well. I've been writing somewhere else.

The thing is, once upon a time, a long long time ago, I wrote fiction. Poetry too, sometimes a lot, but always fiction. Short stories, plays, a novel I almost finished, etc. And gradually I just... stopped. I can't really explain what happened. I thought for a long time it was because my life had become happy and stable, and that my writing stemmed only from pain and chaos.

It was a theory.

I tried to keep writing after getting happily married and discovering all of the joys that currently fuel my spirit: handwork, gardening, cooking, etc. Every few months I'd get a story idea, but I'd be stuck with the idea, stymied by how to start, feeling like the words just wouldn't flow. I had pretty much accepted that my writing mojo was just... gone.

And then I started writing in this space. Without the pressure of having to somehow "make art" with my words, I was able to start letting the words flow. And in a more tangible way than just writing in a journal -- here I was able to get feedback, to have some accountability for my words. The frozen mechanism of my writing mind began to thaw.

Then this past summer, I got an idea for a children's book. A "middle grade reader," as they say, a chapter book not a picture book. And this time, I was able to take the idea and immediately start stringing words together. That rusty old mechanism was able to get going. My friends, it's going rather well. I think... I think I might actually finish it this time.

Then, round about the last time I posted in this space, I picked up a gig doing some freelance writing for children. Lots of little assignments with due dates within 48 hours. Fiction, nonfiction, 300 words here and 800 words there. It was the sort of writing exercise that in many ways I should have been doing for myself all along, as part of the discipline of keeping that writing mechanism well-oiled and functional. But now I was accountable to someone else, I couldn't sit and fuss with a piece, nitpicking and trying to make it perfect. I just had to send it out the door, and move on to the next one. I had to find the muscle-y hard-working side of my writing brain, the part that comes to work whether or not it's feeling inspired.

And now it's like the Fourth of July up there in my head. I've got more ideas than I have time to write them down. I am simultaneously working on three different pieces that I actually think are going somewhere useful. I even somehow mustered up the hubris to write for grown-ups again.

I haven't forgotten about you. I'm not sure how this space will evolve when I am spending so much writing time holed up in the privacy of my imagination. But meanwhile, you know, I'm still here. Just... blessedly, delightfully distracted.

Things I Learned On the Road

We just got back from a family road trip to Wisconsin and back. It's been a crazy, crazy 10 days, and now I am launching into full end-of-summer panic mode, but first, I just want to pause and reflect on what I learned on this latest adventure.

1. My extremely tall two-and-a-half year old can, in a pinch, still sleep in a Pack n Play. And he will insist that he fits, even when his head and feet are literally pushing out the mesh at each end.

2. When looking at colleges, there really is no substitute for actually looking at colleges. Also, college campuses tend to be great places for little kids to let off steam.

3. Six people can share one bathroom. Comfortably.

4. Driving seven hours in one day is a cake walk compared to driving twelve hours in one day. CAKE WALK.

5. A five-year-old can hike quite a long way if there are chocolate chip pancakes waiting for her at the other end.

6. The best way to get a 17-year-old to do her summer reading is to remove her from her friends and stick her in a rustic cabin for a week.

7. My two-year-old son sings himself to sleep. (He sleeps with the door closed at home, so I had no idea.)

8. Mad Libs are a great way to teach the parts of speech.

9. Twenty Questions? It needed improving. So my five-year-old turned it into 105 Questions. And the starting question isn't "animal, vegetable, or mineral," it's "solid, liquid, gas, or plasma."

10. There are a lot of wind turbines in Indiana. A lot. I know some people think they're eyesores, but I thought they looked so graceful as they slowly turned. Very cool.



11. I am apparently the only person in my family who suffers from feeling like her organs are being squashed after sitting in a car all day. And if you use a term like "organ squashage" to describe said feeling, your 17-year-old might actually go into convulsions.

12. Based on the farms I passed along the way (and it was a LOT, people), we eat only two things in this country: corn and soybeans. We may think we eat other things, but primarily it's going to boil down to corn and soybeans.

13. If a huge fish has been lurking under a pier long enough to have earned the nickname "Sneaky Pete" and a reputation for frustrating fishermen, a two-year-old is not going to be able to catch him with a piece of hot dog on the end of a "Pirates of the Carribean"-themed fishing pole. This will not prevent him from trying, however. Every day.

14. A quiet cottage on a lake is the perfect place to embark upon a new creative endeavor.

15. Cooking for six people in a postage-stamp-sized kitchen with a tiny apartment-sized stove and no dishwasher forces creativity, but can totally be done.

16. After living with a dishwasher for many years, it's actually kind of nice to hand-wash dishes.

17. A garden, left largely to its own devices for 10 days of August Maryland weather, will outgrow its raised beds and attempt to transform your backyard into a jungle.



18. The legendary Garlic Cheeseburger (aka. GCB), as frightening as it sounds, is actually pretty good. Also: it's a cheeseburger on garlic bread.

19. A little boy, who has been up with the sun (or before!) every day of his two-and-a-half years of life, but who has been traveling and sleeping in strange beds for ten days, might be tired when he gets home. He might be so tired that he sleeps past 9 AM for the first time EVER.

20. The ability to identify poison ivy is one of those lifelong skills that really comes in handy.



21. Travel is exciting and full of surprises, but the best part is how much it makes you appreciate being home.

The Crazy Cleanup House Tour Game

I am notoriously distractible. When I was a kid, I was totally one of those kids who goes to clean their room and ends up re-reading their history notes from last year with papers strewn across the floor.

OK, I'm still like that.

But instead of fighting my nature, I've learned to embrace it. I noticed that when I was trying to put things away, I'd end up going into a room to return a book and discovering something that needed to be done there, and following this chain reaction all around the house.

So I made a game out of it. Because putting things back where they belong is: a) excruciatingly boring, b) essential to my sanity, c) something I do every day, and d) an important skill for kids to learn.

The object of the game: To visit every room in the house.

To play: Start in any room, and find an item that does not belong there. Take the item to the room in which it belongs and put it completely away. (It doesn't count to move your dirty socks from the hallway floor to your bedroom floor... they have to make it to the hamper!) Then look around the room you ended up in, and find something that doesn't belong there. See how many rooms you can hit on your tour OR how long it takes you to find a room that doesn't have any misplaced items. I've heard that this sort of thing is theoretically possible, but I've yet to encounter it.

Get everyone involved! Turn on music! Run from room to room if you must (but careful on the stairs)!

Note: this is not an efficient way to put things away. This is, like, the opposite of efficient. This has you running needlessly all over the house, potentially back and forth between the same two rooms carrying only one item at a time. But the funny thing is? It works. If you play this game for ten minutes every day with your kids, over time you will notice far less vagabond items. Also, you will have to establish a home for every item beforehand, as it is impossible to put something away when you don't know where it goes. That's okay. If you come across a truly homeless item, either at least put it in a room that makes sense, or decide then and there where its permanent home ought to be. It is remarkably freeing!

Doesn't it sound like a blast? Let's play a round right now, shall we? Oh, and feel free to get distracted along the way... that's part of the fun!

We start in the front hallway, where I see a nature journal left out from this morning's nature walk. Tsk tsk! You don't belong here!



Off to the bookshelf in the family room, where all such items live:



Alright, so what's going on in the family room, while we're here...



Empty sippy cup on the floor! Off to the kitchen with you...



That's better. Alright, so what's in the kitchen that doesn't belong?



The cookbook I used for last night's soup! To the closet shelf with you...



Right there with the other cookbooks, next to the double boiler. Excellent. Now, what's lurking in this hallway?



Reusable grocery bags! Better put you back in the car...



That's better! Now I'm all set for impromptu shopping adventures. Now, we find ourselves in the garage, which is such a haven for misplaced items, I can't even begin... I just can't even look at it or think about it right now. I am walking right out of here empty-handed, and I'm just going to keep walking until I see...

A stuffed rat on the living room floor?? Uh-uh, I don't think so...



Silly rat. You belong in the stuffed animal basket under the family room coffee table. Obviously.



That's better. Oh man, something's out of place here... Ah, it's the bane of my existence!



Couch pillows on the floor? How many times a day do I put them back? Let's not think about that right now...



Ahhh, I can feel my blood pressure lowering already.

You will ignore the gaping hole in my couch. This couch has been through a lot, man.



What happened here? It looks like a little froggy bath toy lost a game of chess and threw some pieces around. That's no good.

First, we reassemble the board:



Now to return our froggy friend to his rightful home...



Reunited, and it feels so good... While we're here in the kids' bathroom... uh oh!



Who made this big mess? Nevermind, let's just tidy it up...



Phew, I feel better now! What's this on the bathroom counter?



Nope, not where those belong. Into the five-year-old's room, to the basket of hair thingies on her dresser!



This room is surprisingly tidy, but I do notice the crape myrtles out her window are blooming. Ooooh, pretty!



And the game quickly devolves as I wander into my own bathroom, find this morning's coffee cup still on the counter (oops!)...



...take it down to the kitchen, and get permanently distracted by the presence of a beetle on some wheatgrass growing on the kitchen counter. Woah!



And game over. Because of course the beetle belongs outside. And once outside, I am pulled by a gravitational force quite beyond my control into the garden. Ah well. I didn't hit every single room, but there's always next time.

Believe me. There is always next time.

Combating Illness With Food

Many of us eat with healthfulness in mind, choosing foods to nourish our bodies and promote our good health. But have you ever tried to use your diet to actually fight a disease? I have, and despite my extreme skepticism, it worked. So I now feel compelled to share this experience, in case anyone else out there is hitting the same brick wall I was in battling a chronic condition, and wants to try a new strategy.



A little background: I have psoriasis. Psoriasis is a chronic skin condition where inflammation of the skin often results in raised white "plaques". Basically your skin keeps thinking you have an injury and starts making new skin cells like crazy to repair it, but since there is no injury, the skin cells just pile on top of each other. If the plaques cover a large area, they can be extremely uncomfortable, and sometimes painful. They are also frequently itchy. And, let's face it, they're unsightly. Having large patches of white skin, usually on an inflamed red background... yeah, not the look most of us are going for.

Some people with psoriasis also develop a form of arthritis called psoriatic arthritis. (Lucky me!) The symptoms are similar to rheumatoid arthritis -- joint pain, swelling, and stiffness that flares up and subsides in cycles. I have it in my hands, my shoulders, and my feet. Most of the time, it doesn't affect my life that much, except when I get a bad flare and can't use an arm for a week or two. And the fact that I can no longer open jars. Handwork (knitting, embroidery), which I very much enjoy, is now routinely painful -- but I work through it.

About a year ago, I had a really bad flare-up in my shoulder that was agony. I couldn't use that arm at all, and the pain was excruciating. I went in to see my doctor for a stronger anti-inflammatory medication, and during the course of the conversation, she suggested an anti-inflammatory diet.

I did a little research on anti-inflammatory diets, and, while there are many approaches, the basic formula seemed to be a diet of whole foods including whole grains, cutting out chemicals and processed food as much as possible. Hey, it couldn't hurt, I thought. Seriously, this isn't some "eat only watermelon for a week" goofy diet, this is a pretty non-contraversial healthful approach. So I took it one step at a time, and slowly started changing my eating habits.



Step #1: Cut out aspartame. I was drinking a fair amount of this, not just in diet soda, but in a diet iced tea I really liked and bought in bulk. I cut it out cold turkey and have not had any aspartame in almost a year. And those headaches I used to get all time? Gone. Just sayin'. I know a lot of people who have discovered they have a sensitivity to this stuff. Cutting it out was easy and I saw almost immediate benefits.

Step #2: Cut out high fructose corn syrup. OK, this one was harder. Way harder. Do you know how much stuff has HFCS in it? Did you know it was in peanut butter? Jam? Maple syrup? Ketchup? Every single processed food in the grocery store??? But I did it. I'd say I've cut out 99% of the HFCS in my diet, because every once in a while I still do have a little soda, and it's very hard to find soda with neither aspartame or HFCS. But for the most part, when out at a restaurant, I drink unsweetened iced tea. And over time, I've lost some of my taste for sweetness. When I do have a sip of a regular soda, it seems so overpoweringly sweet to me that I can't believe I used to drink that stuff all the time.

Step #3: Cut out processed food, especially refined grains. This is where I am right now; this is my current work-in-progress. I have cut out much of the processed food from my diet, and am eating whole grains more often than not. I see it as a continuum, and I am moving in the right direction, so I'm not going to beat myself up about eating a processed cracker or store-bought granola.

So, since I embarked on this journey almost a year ago, where has it gotten me?

A year ago, my knees were covered with psoriasis, as were my elbows. I had a large noticeable patch on my forearm, and I had recently developed a large patch on my leg. I had tried all manner of prescription creams, and never found much success from any of them. When I started this whole diet thing, I stopped using prescription medication for my skin at all. All I did was moisturize heavily twice a day, every day.



Today, you can see an outline of paler skin where the psoriasis used to be, and a few tiny dots of remaining plaques. In some areas, the pale outline is the only evidence that there used to be psoriasis there. In the past year, 95% of the areas that had been affected by psoriasis cleared up completely. And people, I've been dealing with this condition for 16 years.

The arthritis is still there. Better, but still there. And that's what motivates me to keep going with this. The psoriasis is so easy to see... it is such a dramatic demonstration of the power of diet in controlling a chronic, inflammatory condition. And it has spurred me on to continue with this project and see if I can get the joint pain under the same kind of control. Because now, I actually believe it can happen.

Have you used diet to battle disease? How has it worked for you? I'd love you to share your experience in the comments. In the past year I have gone from skeptic to true believer, and it all just keeps driving home the same point that I keep coming back to everywhere I turn:

What we eat matters.

Letter Writing Week: May 16-22

Are you ready? Have you collected some addresses? Find your stamps? Flexed your out-of-shape writing hand?

This week I have challenged myself to write one letter every day. Would you like to join in the challenge? You could just write a single letter if a letter a day seems too daunting. The point is to revive the seemingly-archaic art of writing a letter. I miss letters. So instead of sulking, I'm going to write some.

Maybe I'll even get some back.

Ready? Go!

Let's Start a Letter-Writing Campaign

When was the last time you received a letter? Not a bill, not a catalog, not even a birthday card or thank you note, but a letter. A personal letter, written just to you.

When was the last time you wrote one?

The thing is, I used to write letters all the time. Long letters. Sometimes to people on the other side of the globe, and sometimes to people I knew I would see in school the next day. I loved writing letters almost as much as I loved receiving them.

Of course, now we have email. And texting. And Twitter, and blogging, and a million ways in which to communicate. So what's so great about a letter? Isn't it just an outdated mode of communication?



I could go on and on about why I think letters are so great, and how they fulfill a purpose that all our modern technology simply doesn't, but off the top of my head:

1. A letter takes effort. Some might say this is the drawback, but the whole reason why a letter carries more meaning than an email is because an email is too easy. It just doesn't mean as much to fire off an email to your grandmother as it does to sit down and write her a letter, even if the content were exactly the same.

2. A letter is tangible. Again, this might be seen as a drawback in our digital age. (I know the last thing I need is more paper clutter in my home!) But a personal letter isn't clutter. It is exactly the sort of thing that you want to hold in your hand, find in a drawer and read again. Recently I found a letter my grandmother had written me when I was getting married. I held it in my hands and knew that she had touched that paper, I saw her gorgeous penmanship, so much a representation of her elegant self. There is no way an email could have communicated that.



3. Most letters are handwritten. When you see someone's handwriting, it is so much more an extension of themselves than their typing. And when we write by hand, somehow we seem to tap into more of our emotional interior than we can with a keyboard. Maybe because it reminds us of journaling, maybe because of the way the brain is wired, but I know that when I am writing by hand I am writing from a more personal place.

4. Letters are part of a long history and tradition. From the time human beings could read and write, they wrote letters to one another. They are their own literary form. Our modern methods of communication tend to truncate and dumb down our language and expression, whereas a letter allows us the time and space to step it up a notch. There are whole oceans of vocabulary that would sound ridiculous in a tweet, but that can make themselves right at home in a nice, long, reflective letter.



5. Writing a letter takes time, and uses your whole brain. This is one of the reasons we don't do it anymore, right? I mean, we're so busy these days, who has time to sit down and write a letter? Especially since you can't do it while multitasking. But this, to me, is a good thing. This is the sort of thing that we should take time to do. Turn off the TV, put aside the cell phone, and focus your thoughts on a single person and what you'd like to communicate with them. It doesn't have to be the deepest secrets of your heart, it could just be a recounting of your day or your week. But I can guarantee you that the quality of what you are communicating will be vastly different than what you would have texted them.

In this spirit, I'm launching a challenge. Letter-Writing Week! Next week, I commit to writing a letter every day. To my mother, to my old friend from grade school, to that English teacher I always meant to thank.

Want to play along? Who would you like to write a letter to? Whose day could you make? While you're at it, get your kids in on the action! There isn't a grandparent on the planet who wouldn't absolutely adore a letter from their grandchild.

So find your stamps, collect your addresses, and get ready! I hereby declare May 16-22 Letter-Writing Week! Are you with me?

And if you're in, please spread the word! Let's bring back letter-writing, before the postal service decides we don't need them anymore.

This Moment: Making a Froggy Friend

No words, just a moment from the past week that I want to stop and savor. Check out the other moments being shared this morning over at SouleMama.



(Can you see the frog?)

Under Quarantine

I think I need a large BIOHAZARD sign for my front door. Between the evil pestilence of a stomach virus that just won't quit, a freak injury that has the eldest child hobbling around in a walking cast, and the crushing pressure of auditions and AP tests, I feel like we are under siege.

At times like this, it's important to keep things in perspective. I put on the following video the other day when I was trying to remind myself that, indeed, this too shall pass, and it's become the two-year-old's Favorite Thing In The Universe. How can marbles rolling down a wooden train track fail to make you smile? I think we've been watching this at least twenty times a day.



Meanwhile, I was over at SortaCrunchy today, whipping up a simple, thoughtful gift. Head on over to see more.

Collaboration

See that man in the hammock there? He is very wise. And not just because he married me.

For example, the other day as we were chatting while making dinner, he articulated something that, as it turns out, is pretty much the secret to what makes our marriage work. And until he said it, I had never thought of it that way, and once he said it, it was like a lightbulb going off.

A healthy relationship strikes a balance between needing one another, and independence.

Think about it. Think about every relationship you've ever had that didn't work. Chances are, one person was too needy and not independent enough. Or one was fiercely independent and didn't need the other at all. As human beings, we need to be needed. But we also want to be with someone who can stand on their own two feet, from whom we can stand back enough to admire and respect them.

There are times when I need to be able to see him from a distance. I need to see him accomplish something on his own, so that I can appreciate and respect him as an individual. And vice versa. We have to have the mental privacy to follow our own trains of thought, to come up with our own ideas. This is what allows us to continually surprise one another, to keep interest and excitement alive.

What results from finding that sweet spot of balance between need and independence is true collaboration. Bringing your individual gifts, thoughts, accomplishments, wisdom together to create something a thousand times richer and deeper.

I love that my husband goes out into the world each day. I love that, away from me and separate from me, he stands on his own two feet and is a man for whom I am flooded with respect and admiration. And at the end of the day he comes home. Because he needs me, with all of his being, just as he knows I could not draw breath without him.

It's like the picture above. I don't quite know what he's dreaming about with that faraway look. I don't know his every thought. Thank goodness. But I do know that whatever dreams he's having, I'm part of them. Because, while we are certainly each individuals, we're most importantly a team.

This post is part of the Moms' 30-Minute Blog Challenge, hosted by Jamie at SteadyMom.

Abundance

It is Easter afternoon, and I'm going through the photos we've taken in the past few days and just feeling so incredibly blessed. Healthy children, beautiful weather, delicious food, and time to enjoy it all.

Here are some glimpses of our Easter preparations and celebrations. I hope everyone is having a joyful day, whatever you are celebrating on this fine Spring day.



















Exciting things afoot with the kitchen garden, so stay tuned tomorrow!