Five Things That Have Happened

1. The event I've been working on since November, TEDxGrandRapids, took place last Thursday. I'm feeling incredibly lucky to have been part of such a dedicated and creative team and incredibly proud of the writing I did to give our event a voice. (Virtually all the website copy, blog posts, and audience newsletters - and many of the news releases - were written by me, and it's simultaneously a huge relief to be mostly done with the project and a strange sense of emptiness to not be thinking about it every day.) A few thoughts, post-event:

• As the event got close, another team member and I took over the Twitter feed. My job the day of the event was largely to post, re-tweet, monitor, reply, and keep track of an exploding hashtag - and I've really only been on Twitter in a minimal capacity for less than a year. All credit goes to the super-smart college student on my team who very nicely sat down with me, helped me set up TweetDeck, and taught me about RT, MT, hashtags, and all manner of Twitter usage. At one point I actually said, "I'm sorry! I'm thirty-five! I learned to type on a word processor!" but he was patient, and I was reminded that I'm not nearly old enough to stop learning new tricks.
• Our speakers were very, very smart people whose talks were challenging, interesting, and inspiring. This is exactly as we had hoped and planned, so - good! And yet, I don't think I'm the only one who found the cumulative effect of all those PhDs doing amazing research/people overcoming obstacles and dreaming big/innovative designers with bold ideas for the future to be the nagging thought, What am I even doing with my life? (And: I remember having that feeling before, after reading Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, and I remember that it eventually went away, so I'm not too alarmed. I think I'll re-watch the talks when they come online, maybe one at a time so as not to be overwhelmed.)
• The night before, at the speaker-sponsor reception, I got to chat one-on-one for about half an hour with one of our speakers, a genomics medicine expert whose talk centered around the efficacy of genetic testing and what individuals might want to do with that information. I got to quiz him about my family history of Alzheimer's, ask about my insurance company suspicions, and get advice about whether and how to be tested. That interaction alone was priceless and gave me a ton to think about regarding my health care.
• Over the course of the day, I also saw a high-school classmate that I haven't had contact with since graduation, drank one perfect MadCap cappuccino, discussed vasectomies with the wife of a favorite local business owner I'd just met, used my latent calligraphy skills to prettify the name badges of late-registering attendees, and cried my eyes out at a TED video that was interspersed between the talks. It was a day unlike any other, that's for sure.

2. On Friday, I helped take the event down in the morning (this involved glamorous things like pulling up yards of sidewalk tape in the drizzling rain and washing out multiple water containers), then picked up my Riverbank Run 25K packet in the afternoon. Because WHY NOT RUN 15 MILES TWO DAYS AFTER A 16-HOUR EVENT? Our school principal, for whom a team of us was raising money with the run, generously hosted a pasta dinner for the runners and their families on Friday evening. It was nice to spend a little time with the other runners and their families, and in retrospect, it was nice to have that extra reminder that each of us, sponsored by others, was running for a dear cause. Because, while the first 12 miles of the run on Saturday went beautifully (Sarah and I talking and laughing and downing Gatorade as we always do), the last 3.5 miles did not feel good. At all. And I may or may not have been doing an embarrassing amount of self-talk and sing-song chants to the beat of my feet on the ground about being strong, running for a cause, and making our team proud. In the end, we finished - and within about 20 seconds of the time we've gotten every other time we've done this distance, too. Apparently if you wind me up, I do a nine-minute mile until I can't do any more. I came home, got in the hot tub, and spent much of the rest of the day in bed, thank goodness.

3. Sunday was Mother's Day. After the girls awakened me early (7:01) to bring me breakfast in bed (yogurt and granola, mango, coffee) and my favorite flowers (lilacs), I had a few moments to reflect on how my Mother's Days have changed so drastically over the years. I so clearly remember those first, blurry ones - crying babies, tantruming toddlers, so much sweating involved either packing us all up to go somewhere or hosting family at our house. I remember ending the day with a defeated sense that, to truly enjoy a day of thanks and relaxation, I'd have to do it WITHOUT my children, and that didn't feel right at all, Plus, my role then was so totally as A MOM that not getting that acknowledgement bothered me more than it probably should have. These days, I truly love (most of) the time I spend with the girls. They're not sleeping sweetly on my shoulder or using adorable three-year-old voices to babble brightly, and I do miss that, but they're legitimately fun to be with. Highlights of the day this year included the way the girls had hung little signs and pictures all around the house for me to find, our family brunch at Trillium Haven (where Annie took down a plate of bacon faster than I've ever seen), seeing both grandmas for a bit in the afternoon, and, of course, the cards the girls made me at school. Jemma's, I want the record to show, proclaimed that I "smell like honey," which is not exactly the message I get from her after I've returned from a run. Next time she backs away from my post-workout kiss, I'm going to yell, "I thought I smelled like honey!" and see what she says. Annie's entire list of "10 Things About My Mom" thrilled me - not just because it's a project I used to do with my second-graders after we'd read Because of Winn-Dixie, too, but mostly because of list item #5, which said, "Whining does not work with her." I'm not sure I'm going to stop celebrating that little tidbit, since it proves that if you say something almost every day for nearly nine years, your child will eventually internalize it. (I'm also not able to stop hearing that phrase in what I call the Wesley Willis voice. Jason agrees.) Anyway, it was a super-special day, and I felt loved and lucky, and I wish I could tell my past self that Mother's Day will eventually a) mean a little less to me in a good way, since I'll have other sources of affirmation in my life and b) get better, as far as the having fun WITH the kids thing goes.

4. On Monday, the sleeplessness and excitement of last week caught up to me. I got my hair cut, watched DVR'd Mad Men, and took a nap. I was like a college student after finals: only interested in sleeping, and wishing my mom would do my laundry.

5. Yesterday, I made Smitten Kitchen's salted brown butter rice krispie treats, then promptly ate almost half the pan. I mean, that's not the ONLY thing I did yesterday, it's just all I'm telling you about.

On Finding Your Passion

I read somewhere (and I really, really wish I could remember where) that if you get stuck trying to figure out what to "be" when you're a grown-up, you should look back and see what you did for fun when you were nine or ten years old. Not what your hobbies were, or which sports you played, or which subjects you were best at in school (though those might play a part), but the thing you did on a winter afternoon when all your friends were doing other things and your mom was taking a nap. (Ahem.) The thing you did when you were supposed to be doing your homework. The thing you woke up early to do during summer vacation. The thing you loved, when nobody was watching and there was no reward for doing it.

When I was nine or ten, I read a lot and I wrote elaborate stories. I invented whole families of sisters (five or more usually - the better to use all my favorite names), and then I invented their lives. I sat with my best friend on my living room floor, and we went through the gigantic J.C. Penny catalog that came twice a year, choosing page by page what my characters would wear and which bedspreads would decorate their fictional bedrooms. Then I wrote about it in small, neat cursive. I still have a few of these stories. They're terrible, full of gratuitous detail and lacking any sort of a plot. But they represent my childhood passion, and so I keep them.

I did other things, too: played t-ball and soccer, went to catechism and piano lessons, went camping and rode my bike, had sleepovers, swam in my pool, played by the creek across the street. But writing was the thing I turned to when there was "nothing to do," and these days I still get a small thrill when I see the word "writer" attached to my name. On a good week, I have a few moments where I catch myself submitting an article I wrote or meeting an interesting person for an interview and I can't believe my good fortune, and I haven't stopped feeling grateful for it yet.

That best friend, the one who spent parts of her childhood cutting things out of the J.C. Penny catalog? She took those ideas - furniture, fabrics, colors - and drew and designed elaborate houses with them - the settings for my childish novels, if you will. These days? She's a de-facto interior designer, that friend that everyone calls to choose paint colors or put together their mudroom or re-do the baby's nursery. Another friend admits she logged hours in her childhood basement making up silly songs, putting on "shows" for her family, and getting voted class clown; she's getting paid for her work as a stand-up comedian and has an agent booking her events.

Annie's been spending hours and hours lately setting up elaborate tableaus of tiny toys and figures. These last few days, she's been on break from school, and she can occupy herself indefinitely putting together outfits out of fabric scraps for her dolls and animals, creating entire wardrobes out of ribbons, ponytail holders, string, clips, and sequins. Sometimes this involves her entire bedroom floor being covered in can't-be-moved arrangements of "furniture" and "people" or "wedding processions," and it does drive me a little crazy. But she's completely immersed in it, to the point that she has to be dragged to the museum to see the Titanic exhibit or forced to play outside in the snow for an hour.

I don't even begin to know what to call what she's doing - design? fashion? pointless mess-making? But the thing I love is that she's doing it for herself. It's something creative she can indulge in outside of the daily homework, piano practice, soccer conditioning, school-going, family activity routine. And the thing I worry about is that, as a society, we're not giving our nine-year-olds much of this kind of time at all. I worry that kids who get whisked straight from school to tennis lessons to ballet to swimming to ski school won't know what they love to do when nobody's watching; that if, when they're a grown-up trying to figure out how to create a career out of doing the thing they love, they are asked what they did for fun when they were eight or ten, they legitimately won't remember. I worry that we're programming our kids to perform constantly, to ignore that small, creative voice deep inside.

These days, I feel awfully lucky to be building a bona fide career doing something I've always loved. I hope it will be possible for my girls to do that, too, and I'm doing my best to give them some time here and there to be "bored," and to figure out what their passion is. As spring and summer approach, I'm committing to pushing them outside with a bucket and some paint, to letting them dump out an entire container of Playmobil and mix it with Play-Doh, to letting them "cook" something with limited guidance, to forcing them to figure out what they enjoy. I'm so glad that my parents did.

My Very Favorite Writing

I think that if I could freeze my children at any ages they've been so far, I'd pick either 18-24 months (so cute! such chubby cheeks and squeaky voices! and they haven't started saying 'no' too much yet!) and kindergarten. The writing and drawing skills from the kindergarten stage are particularly my favorite, so it is no surprise that I adore every single thing Jemma brings home these days. I love the inventive spelling, the backwards letters, and the scrappy little drawings so much that it's hard to part with any of them, though I do guiltily sneak a fair amount of them into the recycling bin during the day when she's at school. I try to photograph some of my favorites, though. To wit:

I like strawberries. I like cherries. (Other things she "licked" during that stage included friends, donuts, and her family.)

"Me and my family." Awwwww.

A recent self-directed art project with stickers and the most adorable spellings of Halloween words ever.

Speaking of hilarious and adorable writing, Jason and I volunteered in Annie's classroom to help with an oil spill simulation, and this is the thank-you note she wrote us a couple of days later:

That's a keeper, for sure.

On Vulnerability

I'm back from my 11th annual Girls' Weekend, a reunion for six of us college friends that's been a high point of my year for a long time now. Though we're spread across three states and in various stages of work and family-raising, it's so special and fun to get together.

Since having kids, I've sort of thought that the "special" factor around the weekend came mostly from the fact that our group had total freedom to do whatever we wanted, and that's mostly included a few adventures mixed in with a lot of eating, spa treatments, and being waited upon for two days without having to cut anyone's waffle into seventy small bites and wipe the syrup off their face later. And we did those things this year - pedicures, lunch and dinner out, a fabulous spread of wine and cheese and magazines in Adirondack chairs overlooking Lake Michigan, a fun painting class - and of course I loved them, but last night, home again and sleep-deprived from the up-till-3:00 a.m.-talking, I realized that it's not really the "away from work and children" thing that feels so luxurious. It's the sense that basically any topic is fair game, and that you can introduce those topics in an environment that's safe and supportive. It's the shared history, the thousands of memories, and - mostly - the sense that these people are On Your Team. It's the vulnerable, honest, hilarious conversations that sustain you. It's the quiet knowledge, not necessarily spoken aloud, that these people knew me before I was Mrs. anybody, before I was somebody's mom, and will know me when we're all going through "The Change" (a term we all vowed to never actually use), when we're launching grown children into the world, when the inevitable hard and scary life events come calling, too.

*****

Before I left for my weekend, I had a Real Grown-up Meeting with someone I've been in contact with for a few months, and I'm so happy that it's led to me joining the team for TEDxGR. I'll be writing all the content for the event, and I'm both hopeful that the hours I'll be gone will be a "just right" amount of time for my work/life balance, and I'm thrilled to be a teeny-tiny part of TED, even if on a local level.

I can't believe how many people I've talked to about this don't know what TED is, so let's tie up this ode to vulnerability by linking to some of my favorite TED talks: Brene Brown talking on vulnerability in 2011 and the related topic of shame in 2012. Other favorites include Elizabeth Gilbert's talk on creativity and genius and LZ Granderson's The Myth of the Gay Agenda (from TEDxGR last year).

So, cheers: to old friends, to new adventures, and to vulnerability.

Read Elsewhere: Fiction

From Keith Ridgway in The New Yorker:

And I mean that—everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/08/everything-is-fiction.html#ixzz23ZbASKsr

Read Elsewhere: Story

"The artistic sensibility in the nation became wholly self-referential - the story of my life is what matters, not the well-crafted and distilled art of memoir, nor the carefully compiled story (and analysis) of the lives (and problems ) of others - but the story of what I am feeling, right now, right this minute.  And so, I became part of the problem, I suppose . . . We have always loved stories, I think, it's just that we, as a nation and perhaps as a human race, recently stopped loving stories about the other; we began to love stories only about ourselves.  We love stories in which we are the protagonists in search of truth.  I do not want to judge this.  But my feeling is that we can cope with the increasing smallness, rapidness, and indifference of our changing, violent world only by seeing ourselves as noble characters caught in the struggle.  We are all, as Turgenev so presciently said over a century ago, either Hamlet or Quixotes, and we must be these kinds of people if we are to endure.

We see ourselves in a struggle of epic, or at least interesting, magnitude, and so we go about documenting it ourselves, not waiting for some future historian, anthropologist, or novelist to find our tale and tell it for us. YouTube, MySpace, blogs - all of these things are ways for us to make ourselves protagonists on a very crowded, violent, and unjust stage." - Dean Bakopoulos, My American Unhappiness


*****

"The story my kids will tell someday depends on me.  I am writing their book, and I want their childhood chapters full of traditions and stories and memories of the comforts of home." - Kelle Hampton

*****

"When our story is told, and it will be told in song and fable and interpretive dance and puppet show, people will weep with joy and, through sobs, say, "Today we have witnessed love.  How can our lives not be bettered by this?" - quote in a friend's back entry.

I Wish

The following is inspired by Just Write at The Extraordinary Ordinary and a passage from the book The Gift of an Ordinary Day by Katrina Kenison, which I had to go through today before returning it to the library so that I could un-fold all the corners I'd folded down.  


I don't wish for the old house back, not really, yet in a way, I wish for everything back that ever was, everything that once seemed like forever and yet has vanished.  I wish for my own childhood bedroom with its mauve-and-mint-green heart-patterned wallpaper, the white-painted furniture, the west-facing window out of which I watched the sunset through the open screen in the summer.  I wish for Sunday after-church coffees at my grandparents' house and summer sleepovers in their downstairs bedrooms, in a house with gold-flecked Formica and a tub with sticky rubber bath mats inside.  I wish for a chance to relive an afternoon with my brother, when we shot hoops in the driveway and rode our bikes right down the middle of the street until my mom yelled out the front door that dinner was ready.  I wish for a sleepover with my best friends, sneaking out to toilet-paper a neighbor's house and coming back to eat microwave popcorn and watch The Princess Bride in the basement, for the day we went to see Wayne's World in the theatre, for our Christmas gift exchanges and summer meetings in fields and before-school pancake breakfasts and track meets.  I wish for my college dorm room with its view of the cafeteria, the futon on which I fell asleep reading uncountable pages of literature and philosophy, the white board hanging on our door next to a Nike ad I ripped out of a magazine, the buzz in the hallway at 10:00 p.m. on a Friday night, all hairspray and music and getting ready to go out.  I wish for my husband as he was the first time I saw him, the first time he asked me to dinner at my dorm room door, the feeling of falling in love outside of The Alpen Rose restaurant on a cool fall night.  I wish for the first apartment we ever shared, in a generic complex across from north campus, the kitchen where I taught myself how to cook, the tiny TV/VCR combination that sat on our bedroom dresser.  I wish for my two daughters at every age they've ever been, but especially on the days they were born, for the sleepy moments in the middle of the night, for their happy, squeaky little voices and their chubby little cheeks filling the house.  I wish for Christmas mornings and blowing out birthday candles and first soccer games and all the hundreds of ordinary mornings with breakfast dishes to clear and coats to zip up and half-finished mugs of coffee growing cold on the counter.

Food, Glorious Food

About that new food-writing gig:

Who:  My friend Di, who always has a million good ideas along with the savvy to turn them into a reality.  She was the first person to pay me to write things, and even though writing website copy for investment firms, bakeries, and dental offices has been great experience, I'm so happy to be writing about one of my true passions for her newest venture.

What:  Just Vittles, a site that aims to be a resource for busy people of all walks of life who want "clean food for modern families" with a special emphasis on elimination diets, gluten- and allergy-free food, and healthy, organic, local eating.

When:  I'll be posting every Tuesday and Friday for now, and maybe more starting this fall when my schedule is more consistent.

Where:  Just Vittles just launched in Seattle and is going to launch in West Michigan this fall, but you can participate and engage with it wherever you live.

Why:  Good question.  That's what my most recent blog post is about, and I'd love for you to join in the conversation.

How:  Register for Just Vittles (it's free!) or fan it on Facebook and see the updates in your feed daily.

Life List: Publish a Poem

Today I got an email that began like so:

Dear Stephanie,

We thoroughly enjoyed your poems “Her Hands” and “Cinderella,” which eloquently identify meaning in small flashes of quotidian life. I’m pleased to inform you that they will be published in the forthcoming Bear River Review.

They're pleased to inform me; I'm pleased to be informed:  everyone is pleased!

Neither has been previously published, though I did post "Cinderella" here shortly after I wrote it last June (scroll down; it's at the end of that post).  "Her Hands" is about my maternal grandmother.  She's no longer able to remember much, so I am glad that a little piece of her is going to be published for posterity.  I think I'll wait and link to it when the publication comes out.  

Also:  TWO poems!  Take that, Life List!

I Have a Lot Of Opinions

Mounting stage, tapping podium, clearing throat:


Here in Michigan, the economy sort of . . . sucks.  And the governor and legislature have the difficult and unenviable job of trying to make some sort of a budget work, which I understand is challenging and complicated.  But the more I have learned in the past few days and weeks about the kinds of budget cuts that are being proposed for the next two years, the more upset I am.  So I'm getting involved with our school's legislative committee and I'm writing letters.  If you, too, live in Michigan, feel free to copy and paste my strong feelings on the subject:  add to them, plagarize them shamelessly, spread them around and get other people to write letters, too.

Dear Governor Synder,

My husband and I are writing to express our dismay at the continued cuts to K-12 education that are proposed for 2011-2012 and beyond.  As a former teacher and a mother of two young children, I wholeheartedly believe that excellent education for every one of Michigan's children is the key to our state's ability to thrive, innovate, and succeed years into the future.  Furthermore, we believe that continued budget cuts (and the diversion of money to community colleges) are short-sighted.  Community college is a wonderful educational tool which can be funded by motivated students with student loans, or by paying tuition with a part-time job.  Public school students, however, do not have the ability to borrow money or work toward the payment of their education; rather, public-school students depend on the state to provide a quality, comprehensive education until they graduate from high school.

We live in a district, XXX, which we chose specifically because of the quality of its schools.  Our daughter, a first-grader, has the opportunity to experience art, music, physical education, computer lab, and Spanish on a daily and/or weekly basis.  Her elementary school employs a social worker who is instrumental in teaching the children how to be kind and caring citizens of the world as well as para-professionals in the classrooms and reading enrichment teachers for struggling readers.  It is my understanding that all of these services - and many more at the district level - are in jeopardy if the funding cuts are passed.  We would be dismayed if the schools were to lose per-pupil funding for yet another year in a row, not only for our own children in our own district, but also for children in much less fortunate districts who will see their student-teacher ratios climb to untenable levels and who will fall through the cracks in our system, losing their chance to receive the kind of education that will allow them to become educated, productive members of society.

These cuts are unacceptable and we urge you to reconsider.

Sincerely,
XXX and XXX

At Book Club

Amid discussion of Precious and Tosh.0 and Charlie Sheen, talk turned to motherhood, as it always does, and specifically to the wonderful, horrible first few weeks of new motherhood - to that moment when each of us realized things were somehow never going to be the same again.

General consensus of the group can be summed up as follows:

1.  Nobody tells you how HARD it's going to be.  Nobody.

2.  Nobody gets right in your face during those first, hard weeks and promises you that it's going to get better.

After I told the group about one memory I have of a night when Jason had gone out with co-workers while I was up every two hours, rocking Annie in the chair and nursing her, crying because my life had disappeared, another woman asked me, "What are you going to tell your girls someday, when they're thinking about having kids?"

"The truth," I said. The whole, wonderful, horrible truth.  Isn't that what this blog is all about?

Read Elsewhere: It's a Small World, After All

Remember how I mentioned in passing that we met another (mommy-blogging) family in Jamaica?  Well, we did, and the other blogger wrote about it here, so if you want to see how The Internet makes the world a smaller, better place, go read about it.  If she lived closer, I'd totally invite her to join my book club.

Three Things, Unrelated

Since the last time I wrote substantively here, a few things have happened.

1.  I had a new article published in Rapid Growth about a lovely yoga program for kids that Annie and Jemma both experienced (and loved).

2.  I had the opportunity to have this conversation in the car with Annie on the way to dance:

Me:  "What happened to the braid I put in your hair this morning?  Remember, your hair needs to be up for dance."

A:  "Charlie said he didn't like it and he took it right out of my hair."

Me:  "What???"

A:  "Yeah, Charlie said how he didn't like my braid, and it looked stupid, and he took it out."

Me, mock-confused, joking, suspicious:  "So, there you were, minding your own business, and Charlie was so furious with your hair that he told you it looked stupid and then came over to you, undid your ponytail holder, and took the braid out himself?"

Annie:  "Moooom!  Yes!"

Me:  "That seems . . . unlikely.   Are you sure that's what happened?"

Annie:  "NO ONE EVER BELIEVES ME!!!!!"

3.  Jason took the girls up north for the weekend for some Extreme Winter Sports and I stayed here.  Alone.  And mostly, I stayed in the house, because it's hard to get motivated to go out when the temperature is minus-7.  I organized both girls' closets and dressers (and did the annoying Rubbermaid-bin-sorting that goes along with that), went through five years' worth of Bon Appetit and Everyday Food magazines and forced myself to (cringe) rip out the pages of the recipes I truly wanted to keep and throw out the rest, created art bins for the girls' large school art projects, created file boxes for their yearly school pictures and report cards, went to the gym, got a pedicure, got groceries, bought myself some new jeans, got caught up on copywriting, and watched a lot of Food Network.   It wasn't glamorous, but between this weekend's progress and my renewed dedication to using Goodreads, I am well on my way to accomplishing a big chunk of this year's New Year's Resolutions.  (Still dragging my feet on dealing with the photo-uploading, though . . .)

Scribbles

Here are some of the things we did this weekend:

It was one fun activity after another, many involving outdoor gear (skates!  skis!) and some indoor fun, too.  Cirque with my family was just as amazing as we had expected it would be, and I love the fact that we've chosen to treat ourselves to an experience rather than buying lots of gift cards for each other at Christmas.

The downside to cramming seven thousand fun activities into a weekend like this is that it just seems to raise the girls' expectations of The Fun Level.  Like yesterday, when I helped in Jemma's Sunday School class, then Jason took the girls ice-skating at the rink our neighbor makes across the street every winter, then we ate a big roast chicken Sunday dinner, then we made marshmallow sculptures with stale mini-marshmallows and toothpicks, then Jason took Annie skiing for the rest of the day while I took Jemma swimming.  Jemma and I walked in the door a little after 5:00 p.m. and before I had even taken off my boots, she turned to me and said, "NOW what can we do?"  Independent Play Ability = Broken.

In other corners of the house, other scribbles were created this weekend, too.  Like this:

Because even though it's the weekend, Jemma's still following us around, adorably asking for "homework" and copying the alphabet Jason's made for her.

Also, this:

Because sometimes I have to get very stern with myself when I sit down to make my to-do lists for the week.

These scribbles - from last week's well-child pediatrician appointments - are photo-worthy simply because they mark the first time that the girls have boosted their weight percentiles above the 10th!  Goes to show that you can live on air, Goldfish, yogurt, and fruit, especially if you're Jemma.

Lastly, the set of writing around here that makes the least sense so far.  It's this old, white legal pad that I'm slowly filling up with sentences, half-thesis statements, questions, and non-linear ideas that might - MIGHT - be the germ of an idea for a book.  The endosperm of the seed of the idea, if you will.  I don't have the first idea how to begin going about such a thing, but the first step, I think, is writing down the ideas when they come to me.  So I have been.

Your turn:  In the comments, scribble down what you think I should write a book about.  Title it, even, and give a brief synopsis (took me three tries to spell synopsis; maybe I shouldn't think about writing a book).  (Narrows eyes, looks at Google Analytics, knows exactly how many people are reading this blog vs. how many are commenting upon it . . .)

Keeping it Real

You know what I love?  I love it when you meet somebody new, or maybe just get to know them a bit better than you did before, and you discover that you really like them.  They're fun, they're honest, and - bonus! - they have a kid or three the same ages as a couple of yours.  Subsequently, I love it when you and that person decide to force your children to be friends so you can hang out and drink coffee and talk cookbooks.

Anywho, this happened (happily) to me recently, and this person began reading what I write here, and made some sort of comment about me being "a machine."  And when I stopped laughing, I went back and read a few of my recent posts.

When I started blogging about two-year-old Annie and baby Jemma, it was partly because I wanted to keep a record of our life - their lives, before they would remember them - and partly to stay in touch and tell my stories to some friends who live far away.  But there was another reason, too.  I realized that I was often caught up in the drudgery and sometimes-thankless tasks of parenting; I realized that I often talked about my days as if they were just hours to be gotten through; I realized that I wasn't focusing enough on the good.

I'm a realist by nature, but one who wants (and tries consciously, with varying degrees of success) to be an optimistically-inclined realist.  I think this explains my long-documented and long-mocked love of the inspirational quote, my affinity for reading memoir and essays, my curiosity about people who have done big things with their lives:  how can I do this better?  How can I make this work?  How can I keep myself aware that each moment of even the most thankless task is a gift?  How can I laugh about the ridiculousness that is a toddler?

So I started writing here, and when I scroll back through the weeks and months, I see that I do tend to paint a fairly happy picture.  I tend to focus on the good, the perfect days, the adorable photos, the memorable one-liners and not the negative, though that seeps out every now and then when I need to vent it out.

But I want to keep it real here, too, so that my grown-up girls will be able to read here and see that every mother struggles with certain things, to see that each day was not rosy-cheeked babes in arms and a piping-hot meal on the table and a clean, happy house.  I want to keep writing my slice-of-life posts and celebrate the everyday things, but I want to remember things as they really were, too.

So:

Sometimes our dining room looks like this:

and our front entry looks like this:

Sometimes I get in bed with a book when Jemma has her quiet time and I don't get out until she's up.  Sometimes Jemma wakes up from her nap and looks (and acts) like this:

Sometimes I plan to make Barefoot Contessa's Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic for dinner, but when I go to start it at 4:15 on a Monday afternoon, I realize that the first step is "Hack your whole, raw chicken apart into eight separate pieces like so" and when my knife hits the bone that holds the leg to the body, I immediately decide to make Whole Roast Lemon Chicken with Croutons Plus a Lot of Garlic That I Already Peeled.

Sometimes we go to Annie's parent-teacher conference and hear the word "spitfire" more than we would like.

Sometimes I don't make the bed.

Sometimes I cook lots of great things during the week for dinner, but sometimes I go to the grocery store on a Monday morning and my meal plan, written on the back of my grocery list, goes "Monday, grilled cheese and tomato soup; Tuesday, eggs and toast; Wednesday ???? . . ."

Sometimes I wait to do laundry until I'm about to run out of underwear.

Sometimes I eat a lot of the kids' Halloween candy while they're not home.

Sometimes I feel like this about my life:

but I think I'm going to want to remember the times when I feel like this:

The Apple Tree, by Annie

Annie took some time over the weekend to write and illustrate a new book.  I am too lazy right now to photograph it page by page and upload the photos, but I want to share the story because it's pretty great.

The Apple Tree

For Mom and Dad

Capter One:  The Frend

There lived a tree.  It had a frend.  Her name was flowr.  Flowr was tree's Best Frend.  The tree and the flowr grow and grow tile the tree startid to grow appl's on it.  The appl's were so chiney that wene evre pepple waelkt by they wohd think they were the most chineyist  appl's evre.

Capter Two

Flowrs days past by cickly and flowr's brit petls beygan to die and tree was sad but then tree fouwd anothre frend.  He was happy agene becuas he had a new frend.  But he still mist flowr but he was glad he had a new frend to play with.  The End.

Read Elsewhere: The Power of Detail

From Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg:

"Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical.  We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles.  We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it.  At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth.  We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded.  This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand.  We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived.  Let it be known, the earth passed before us.  Our details are important."

Stuck

I'm having a little trouble finding a new routine in our new normal. This happens to me every fall. I love fall and think of it - even more than January first - as a perfect time to introduce new routines and order and intention into my life. But there's something about the sudden Blam! of everything kid-related starting at once (school, dance, catechism, Sunday School) combined with the sudden lack of a triathlon-related workout schedule that's left me pretty aimless this week.

I want to sit down and write a birthday letter to Annie. I want to write more about how doing the triathlon made me feel instead of just describing the experience. I want to write about introducing chores and an allowance to a six-year-old. I want to write about my first foray into formal religious education with my daughter in a church I didn't grow up in. I want to make time to write more of the things I want to write - queries, articles, poems - instead of messing around with things I don't.

This morning, though, I unloaded the dishwasher and re-organized the accessory bin. I tried (and failed) to track down a pair of ballet shoes that will fit Annie for her class this afternoon. I copied a recipe from a cookbook that's due back at the library. I will shower, bring Jemma to dance, buy Annie new ballet shoes, put the laundry away, maybe go to yoga. And maybe later tonight, after the sun has set far too early for my taste, I will actually write something.

From Devotion by Dani Shapiro:

"Writers often say that the hardest part of writing isn't the writing itself: it's the sitting down to write. The same is true of yoga, meditation, and prayer. The sitting down, the making space. The doing. It sounds so simple, doesn't it? Unroll the mat. Sit cross-legged on the floor. Just do it. Close your eyes and express a silent need, a wish, a moment of gratitude. What's so hard about that? Except - it is hard. The usual distractions - the clutter and piles of life - are suddenly, unusually enticing. The worst of it, I've come to realize, is that the thing that stops me - the shadow that casts a cold darkness across the best of my intentions - isn't the puppy, the e-mail, the UPS truck, the school conference, the phone, the laundry, the to-do lists. It's me that stops me. Things get stuck, the osteopath once said with a shrug. He gestured to the area where the neck meets the head. The place where the body ends and the mind begins. Things get stuck. It sounded so simple when he said it. It's me, and the things that are stuck. Standing in my way."

How to Cultivate Wonder

Hold hands and wander the aisles of Rite-Aid, letting her smell all the deodorants until she chooses the Secret Powder Fresh that smells “just like you, Mommy!”

Take her to the grocery store for the sole purpose of buying ice cream. Let her choose the flavor. Bring it home and eat it immediately, out of the container, at 2:00 on a Monday afternoon.

Plant a garden on the side of your house. Teach her how to pull weeds out gently, how to get the roots, how to march around in the dirt without trampling the peas.

Let her drag a chair over by the stove. Let her stir the risotto. Let her stir the caramel. Let her stir the lemonade.

Watch her choose her own clothes. Praise her choice of rainbow heart-printed shorts with a polka-dotted shirt with bright orange socks. Let her wear her Tinkerbell dress to Costco.

Go into her room in the morning, when it smells vaguely like hamster bedding, and nestle down into her covers with her. Tickle her. Kiss her round cheeks. Ask her what she wants for breakfast.

Get her a balloon for no reason.

Give her the camera and let her wander the house, shooting her world from her perspective.

Put a blanket out on the lawn and dump out the art bin. Tell her to draw anything she sees. Read her books about Picasso and Monet. Hang her creations on the wall, the refrigerator, the nightstand in your bedroom.

Watch things together: parades, fireworks, fireflies, fountains, outdoor concerts, Olympics, soccer tournaments, waves, races, musicals, airplanes leaving their white trail in the sky. Let your eyes get big and wide.

Eleven

Eleven years ago right this minute, Jason and I were dancing at our wedding reception. We took a cruise to Bermuda for our honeymoon, spent the 4th of July up north, and then moved in to this apartment in Ann Arbor, which we photostalked this weekend in a one-night anniversary getaway. We went to almost all of our favorite old haunts:

Pinball Pete's for video games;

Cafe Zola for breakfast;

the Arb for a meandering mid-morning hike;

the alley where - to our delight and astonishment - the same guy who's been doing his Michael Jackson impersonation complete with boom box blasting Thriller and Beat It was STILL breaking it down when we walked by on our way to lunch;

Ashley's for some serious beer-drinking;

Zingerman's for world-famous sandwiches and lots of bread and brownies to bring home;

Kerrytown and the farmer's market, which is still my absolute favorite place to be on a Saturday morning;

and the townhouse on Spring Street we called home for the last three years we lived there. We also peeked into some of our favorite galleries and stores, bought Michigan shirts for the girls for fall football games, went to the art museum and really enjoyed the new modern wing, had dinner at The Prickly Pear and ice cream at Stucchi's, and watched a huge thunderstorm roll into town just as we were getting back to our hotel last night.

Walking around the city, absorbing the sights and sounds and noticing what's changed and what's stayed the same, sparked so many conversations and memories about all the things we did during those first years of our marriage. We talked about whether we were happier then or now, whether not having money or having money makes a difference, whether the time we spend together keeping our marriage strong has changed. We laughed a lot and even managed to learn a few new things about each other that have somehow never come up in conversation before. We missed our girls but not their noise and needs. We weren't in a hurry or on a schedule. We got away for just a night and came back totally refreshed and awfully amazed that so many years have gone by so quickly.

We didn't give each other anniversary gifts (usually don't, and instead spend the money doing something celebratory together, like eating and drinking our way through some fun city), but I did give Jason something I began writing a few weeks at at Bear River. It's anniversary-ish, I think.

Cinderella

After I kissed you that night –

Midnight, New Year’s Eve, 1995 –

I went ahead and kissed someone else

Just moments later. You saw this

And did not appreciate it

And I am sorry,

Though I blame the Solo cups of Miller Lite and the darkness

Of the basement party.

It was not a memorable kiss. It did not fill me

With hope

Or magic

Or the strong conviction that we would live happily ever after.

I was eighteen, and I mostly wanted to dance,

To laugh, to stumble home with my friends.

But when you came and knocked on my door,

Months later, I remembered

Dusty Springfield had been playing and you had been wearing

A green plaid shirt

That hangs in the back of our bedroom closet,

Two kids, three houses, fourteen years later.

Tonight we are sprawled on the couch,

Our legs tangled together

A bottle of wine open on the coffee table,

Puzzle pieces and a stray pink shoe littering the living room.

We watch the sun go down out the window,

Have long, wasteful conversations,

Eat warm brownies straight from the pan,

Kiss healthy children asleep in safe beds.

I think it is enough. I think

It would be wrong to ask for anything more.