A few good gems

Good morning Friday! Glad to see you all here and ready for the weekend. My kids have a full line up of activities today and Saturday, which means I have a full line up of driving and spectating. I'm also planning on planning Spring Break. Only one more week of school!!! I can't wait. And I'm not even in school. Sleep. Need sleep.

Enough about me. Here's this week's link roundup. I especially loved this quote about happiness and love. It's so true. I think we all need to work harder on being happy for each other. That's my PSA for the day. Carry on!

Teaching character to our children may be one of the most difficult tasks set before parents. I mean, how do you practically DO THAT? Check out this New York Times article titled, "What if the Secret to Success is Failure?" It's lengthy but worth the investment. Thanks Andrea!

Because we have missionary daughters, I had to post this NYT article on how the drop in missionary age (and surge of female missionaries) signals a changing of roles for women in the LDS church. Onwards and upwards ladies!

I'm feeling the need to beautify and organize my laundry room. It's a strange urge, I'll admit. I'm liking this one, and this one, and this.

This short article on being content really hit home with me. There's nothing especially earth shattering, but it's a good reminder nonetheless.

Here's a craft I can get behind: a deer head! Out of yardsticks! Does anyone have a collection of vintage yardsticks I could "borrow" ? I swear, collecting the supplies is what makes crafting difficult.

image via FindingHome

I'm bound and determined to make these Chocolate Chip Cookie Energy Bars. They look like a good pre/post workout snack, and then I could throw out Becca's sugar-laden granola bars. I have a date with dates this weekend. (Because, you now, the bars have dates in them. And cashews.)

And, in the spirit of full disclosure:

Reading: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Listening: Ingrid Michaelson's new single Wonderful Unknown . . . waiting for the rest of the album, Lights Out. 

Eating: Smoothies -- almost every day. My favorite right now is strawberries, raspberries, banana, spinach, greek yogurt, almond milk, and a teaspoon each of ground flax seed and honey. 

That's it. I'm out. Happy weekending!

A few good gems

We made it to Friday! What a relief. It's been a blessedly quiet week around here, and I'm hoping for a low-key weekend -- one where I don't eat my body weight in sugar. A girl can hope. I've drummed up a few good gems for your weekend perusal. Isn't that quote (pictured above) just about perfect? Plus, I'm nostalgic (see article below) for 1989. Great year. Happy weekending to all.

"Winter Olympics Inspire Nation's Youth to Try Sports Their Parents Can't Afford" --  So, true.

There's been a lot of hype surrounding Jimmy Fallon's new role on The Tonight Show. I'm rarely up late enough to watch his old show OR his new show (I know, party animal), but my girls made me watch all of his "Ew" episodes. I find these completely hilarious. Jimmy Fallon as a teenage girl? It's fun. Here's the best one.

With all of the retro fads circling these days, I've been thinking a lot about nostalgia. (I've also been nostalgic what with my children leaving me and all.) The Atlantic has a great article on the Internet and nostalgia . . . and just how nostalgia sells us STUFF. There has been a particular influx of 90s memoriabilia, "appropriated to arouse a vague sense that we have lost something as we’ve moved, inexorably, into our future." Yes! Like The Cosby Show, and parachute pants, and life before cell phones. All lost.

Last week Design Mom posted about cobra weave stick bombs. I was so intrigued I went right out and bought a box of tongue depressors. Guys, this is good stuff (particularly if you are a nerd!).

I've been really trying to eat healthy. I've got this and this currently open on my desktop. Are these healthy? Or no? What if I eat 248 cookie dough bites? Because that could happen. (Note: These also look interesting.)

The case of the wilting roses

When we moved into the house we’d rented for our four-year stint here in Australia, I admired the lovely rose bushes in front, sure, but with a good dose of anxiety. I hadn't ever done roses before and these were clearly someone else's pride and joy. Oh, the pressure!

Sure enough, my anxiety was justified. After a month or two the roses were lagging.  I did considerable hand wringing. Were we feeding them right? Did they need a special fertilizer? I watched YouTube videos on the correct way to deadhead and prune roses. I called an irrigation specialist to come check the sprinkler system for the yard, particularly the drip irrigation hoses installed beneath the roses' mulched beds. The sprinkler guy reassured me that all was fine. 

But, clearly the roses weren’t so fine! They were wilting under my care. I took the roses and their failure to thrive personally. After a while it felt like they were doing this to me, not the other way around! Surely they were purposely exposing my fraud as a wanna-be-gardener. Some evenings I’d walk past other gardens in the neighborhood on surreptitious rose surveillance, peeking out of the corner of my eye at their Roses of Thriving Loveliness. What was their magic secret?

Turns out that what my garden needed was more water. More water! So simple and yet its simplicity flummoxed me for fourteen wilted months. In desperation one day I dragged a hose out (despite the fact that there were supposedly plenty of drip hoses watering the roses beneath the ground) and soaked the ground with water. They seemed to perk up a bit so I did the same thing over several more days until, one day with water streaming down my wrist and the scent of roses in the air, I thought: Oh. Sometimes the answer is just more water. Duh.

You can probably see where this is going. Metaphor alert! Insert parenting/gardening analogy of your choice here.

Here's mine: More often than not I feel less pro gardener, more flailing wanna-be trying to keep these borrowed roses growing under my care. It’s daunting. It’s experimental. It’s supremely tempting to compare my sometimes struggling garden with everyone else’s carefully cultivated show-garden families online, down the street, or on neighboring church benches. But those are completely different circumstances and equipment. My garden needs what it needs. 

Also this: Sure, solutions are not always so simple or straightforward as more water.  And I might not even have all roses in my metaphorical garden--there might be a cactus and an orchid in there, too. Different water needs, different blooming calendars. Parenting means figuring out what that looks like, exactly, in your own garden. But sometimes maybe it really is as simple as more water, returning to the basics of compassion, time, connection. Maybe in that way we're each the gardener and the water in our own plots.

This is not a guilt thing. It’s a reassurance: You’re enough. 

In defense of the old lady in the market

Okay, it's the first day of the school year here and Sam just surpassed me in height and Maddy's leaving home at the end of the year and Lauren's half a world away. So I feel like one of those ladies in the market: time passes so quickly! Sunrise! Sunset! and every other true and cheesy platitude about time and passing and children.

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I'm chatting with a friend who will be moving back to the States this year. When you've got a big move like that in your future, it's easy to start feeling wanderlusty and impatient to just do it already--to spend your time scouring real estate listings and researching schools for the kids and thinking about all the nexts.

"Are you getting anxious to go?" 

"No, not really. I'm trying to think more about making the most of every day since we probably won't get the chance to live here ever again, not full time. I don't know, maybe we'll visit. There's so much we wanted to do and haven't yet."

Later, the conversation turns to our kids, motherhood, parenting angst and awe. She asks about my plans in the coming years (so tactfully and delicately dancing around the inquiry “so are you done with your graduate work yet?”) and I land on the awareness once again that I am in the final three years of in-residence motherhood.

I know it's kind of a thing to vent about old ladies in the supermarket who offer their inevitable and insistent advice to “enjoy every moment” and “time goes so fast.” And I get it, I really do. I laughed in recognition with that whole post and others like it! When you’re stuck in the trenches of what amounts to mommy boot camp with sometimes mercurial little sergeants to answer to—well those days, as Glennon hilariously articulated in that post last year, the last thing you want on your exhausting Everest climb of parenthood is “people stationed, say, every thirty feet along Mount Everest yelling to the climbers—“ARE YOU ENJOYING YOURSELF? IF NOT YOU SHOULD BE! ONE DAY YOU’LL BE SORRY YOU DIDN’T! TRUST US!! IT’LL BE OVER TOO SOON! CARPE DIEM!”

The Back Room, Kim English

But what I’m beginning to understand is we might have it all wrong with that analogy. Maybe they’re not perky, oblivious little cheerleaders, these ladies in the market. Maybe instead they're exhausted, exhilarated, battle-scarred climbers that we meet in passing as they descend from the peak while we trudge upwards. Their wisdom isn’t meant to shame us, it’s meant to guide us and avoid some rocky regrets and unnecessary falls. If I met early-mama Annie now, do you know what I’d tell her? Take it easy. Enjoy the 3-year-old tyrants and the talkative 4s. Snuggle those babies every second you can. And future Annie would probably tell me to get up from my desk and go play a game with the lounging teens downstairs. Or tuck them in bed like I used to. The closer I get to the summit (whatever, wherever, whenever that is) the more I can confirm the old lady market advice as wisdom. It does go so fast; it’s just a fraction of our years. As Gretchen Rubin put it, the days are long but the years are short:

There were years, early on, when I might have felt wanderlusty and impatient about getting to the finish line but I find I'm more like my friend, trying to savor the last moments in Motherland. I probably won't get the chance to live here ever again, not full time. There's so much I wanted to do.

I do hear Nanaland is absolutely spectacular, though I'm not booking that trip for quite some time. But I am practicing my old lady market technique, as you can tell.

A few good gems

Happy Friday, y'all! A few of our favorite things from internet world this week:

I find these machine embroidery illustrations so inspiring:

Amanda deftly captures the moment when a child ever-so-subtly moves into the next phase.  A snippet: "I'm trying so hard to support their evolution but some days it feels like holding icicles in my hand. I am so tender, careful not to squeeze too hard...the ice melts beneath my touch, the shape constantly changing."

What's your Starbucks name? This article reminded me of a silly tradition we started at some point in the last ten years. When we visit a restaurant/cafe that asks for a name for our order, we take turns supplying some crazy fake name. There's something satisfyingly insubordinate about it. 

YES to this piece on Diana Nyad and the documentary The Other Shore. This part so resonated with me that it's kicked me back into gear on some of my "other shore" goals: "One day she woke up and felt the weight of an incomplete life. It was that simple. Something was missing. To hell with lost time. Because sometimes the only way to get rid of the haunting is to strap yourself to the ghost." What's your "other shore"?
 

via OWN

My mom sent me this wise, tender, and practical article on the ministry of presence and how those of us outside of the zone of trauma and loss can better communicate with those who are smack in the center of it. 

Oh, I love La Blogotheque's Take Away Shows series. As their website puts it, they "film beautiful, rare, and intimate sessions with your favorite artists, and the ones you are soon to fall in love with." Check out Of Monsters and Men, Emiliana Torrini, the Lumineers and the first one I ever saw, My Brightest Diamond's lullaby to her son, I Have Never Loved Someone (which I have probably already posted here but here goes again):

My Brightest Diamond | I Have Never Loved Someone | A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

This would be fun and easy to make for Valentines Day. I'm thinking you could just as easily use a heart-shaped cookie cutter and embroidery hoop:

Via Pinterest, where the link to the original is broken. Anyone know where this came from?

Happy weekend, all!  Hope it's filled with some rest, some get-'er-done, and many good things. And a little silliness. See you back here on Monday.

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Reading: Anna Quindlen's new novel, Still Life with Breadcrumbs. Also the always inspiring, kick-in-the-pants Steal Like an Artist (Austin Kleon). 

Eating: these coconut chicken tenders were a huge hit here. Also, I'm suddenly a huge edamame fan. It's my favorite snack right now.

Listening to: San Fermin's Sonsick and Oh Darling. 

And what are you reading/eating/listening to these days? Do share!

She's 20

By the time you hit your 40s (and I like to say EARLY 40s to make myself feel better) you've been through a lot of stages. I had a quite unattractive stage right around fifth grade where my two front teeth stuck out like a beaver, and my curly hair REFUSED to do wings or curl under or behave in any decent fashion. That was an awkward stage. I don't really want to talk about the teenage stage, other than to say that I was an exemplary teenager who talked WAY too much. The new mom stage was pretty darn fun. And traumatic. I was one of those germ-o-phobe new moms. I carried wet wipes around with me, scouring every surface my baby might potentially touch. I've done toddlers, and elementary schoolers, and junior high. I've done puberty and high school and teenage crushes. I've done college dorms and a mission. But PEOPLE. My very own baby turned 20 last month. Is 20 even a stage? 20, to me, sounds like real life adulthood. 20 sounds like teenager-no-more. And sadly, 20 sounds like it doesn't need its mama. 

My oldest turned 20 years old at the end of December. In fact, we were traveling on the actual day, which didn't matter one little bit since she was in France -- doing her missionary thing. We sent her a package, of course, and a letter wherein I reminisced on the fabulous adventure of parenting her, of watching her grow from wee, helpless infant to independent, French-speaking adult.

The most difficult part about 20 is that she's not here. I can't write up a long list of things she likes or does or says. I can't pull down a memory from two months ago and polish it up to represent my sparkling girl. I can't listen to her play a piano piece over and over until she's got it just right. I don't know exactly what she'll be doing tomorrow.

And, sure, I'm probably being overly dramatic. She is a fabulous e-mailer and writer, and she shares lots of really cool experiences. But the day-to-day is happening elsewhere, and that breaks my heart just a little each day.

On the up side? Twenty is learning things about herself and the world that blow my socks off. Her perspective, her compassion, her ability to love and serve is increasing exponentially. This kid (even at 19) was tentative to talk to strangers, to work through administrative red tape, to really put herself outside of her comfort zone. But this same girl taught a 60 year-old man from the Ivory Coast about Jesus Christ IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE. She stands in the center of her village and talks to anyone who will listen. She moved herself from Chalon sur Saone to Toulouse. Twenty is a can-do girl.

I think it's a rotten, dirty trick that we should raise these children up to leave us. I also think there is a grievous gap in the literature of parenting. Where is What to Expect When Your Baby is a Grown Up Person? Or a blog post: "Ten Steps to Understanding That Your Baby is Twenty Years Old"?

Maybe next year, on her 21st birthday, I'll write that post. For now, Internet, just know that I mourn that baby something fierce. And I celebrate that adult with everything I've got. Imagine a shiny, silver pedestal. And Miss Twenty is standing on it. And I'm pointing and waving like a mad woman. Happy Birthday Baby!

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Sterling and I talk almost daily about how we will and should handle parenting adult children. Right now our philosophy centers mostly around being a support and help to them emotionally (and yes, financially at the moment) while allowing them the freedom to explore who they are and who they want to become. But we are newbies. Any tried-and-true methods/traditions/examples?

A few good gems

Wishful thinking. Image by Philipp Reiner

Hi all. We are expecting a "wintry mix" (shouldn't that be 'wintery'?) of precipitation tonight, which means my kids are expecting the day off from school tomorrow. I'm thinking they may just get their wish, since even one teeny, tiny flake of ice  in Houston SHUTS DOWN THE ENTIRE CITY. And . . . sleeping in would be a-okay with me as well. 

Regardless of weather, let's get this weekend started right. I really slaved over these links, because you know how I hate surfing the Internet and all. BUT SOMEONE HAS TO DO IT!

This Op-doc video, Sarah's Uncertain Path, is a powerful look at a pregnant teenager in impoverished, rural Missouri.

I've seen lots of heartwarming stories of adoption of the Internet as of late. Read this incredible story of a woman who has adopted five children from Tanzania (and started an orphanage as well). I've also been following global adoptions on this blog and . . . here.

George Eliot is my very favorite Victorian-era writer. I'm sorta like a George Eliot groupie. I just saw this book review, and my Amazon trigger finger is itching.

I loved this essay of all the places Katherine Coplen has lived. I don't know Katherine, but I appreciate her chronicle of college-priced housing. My favorite line described her third residence: "There were three bedrooms of varying sizes and shapes. One had a door both to the hallway and the kitchen (a snack door, obviously)." I read that and thought maybe we were related. Because I really like snacks.

Somewhere, in the vast recesses of Facebook, I came across a recommendation for a little app called Duolingo. Now I'm obsessed and have to set a timer to limit my duolingo time. Duolingo offers courses in Italian, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese. I'm working on French, natch. You can play/learn online or on your smartphone.

Becca likes to take a granola bar to school everyday to eat after track. I always feel a little bad packing them because they seem mostly like junk food. Going to try these for next week. 

Going to whip up this Winter Citrus Salad for lunch this week. 

I know my kids are older, but who wouldn't enjoy a woodland creature bookmark? WHO? 

And on that note (the woodland creature note), I'm out of here. The Saratov Approach finally comes to Houston this weekend, so you'll find me there!