Every year Maggie and I are humbled by the outpouring of volunteers willing to spend some time as hosts in The Serenity Suite. This year is no exception. So with no further ado, I give you the 2012 Serenity Suite hosts! (Oh wait, here’s more ado–imagine a line of beauties entering stage right while waving above their heads and grinning.) (Anissa’s wheelchair,which is the new black, is being pushed by Smacksy, who is wearing Bob on her shoulder (that’s the new trend in bigboywearing). He is waving for both of them. Anissa is not waving. It appears she is flipping off the crowd for singing You’re The Inspiration.) Can’t you just picture it all… Kim Tracy Prince (@kimtracyprince) Suniverse (@thesuniverse) Alexandra (@GDRPempress) Maggie Dammit (@maggiedammit) Emily Elling (@designhermomma) Anissa Mayhew (@AnissaMayhew) Kristin Kaufmann Wilkinson (@kristinnw) Jennifer Williams (@mommadeitlookez) Jennifer Denning (@redheadedjen) Annette Kiesow (@annettek) Andrea Bates (@goodgirlgonered) Alexandra Rosas (@gdrpempress) Varda Steinhardt (@squashedmom) Greis […]
One of my best friends and her husband had kids a few years before we did. I’ve had the honor of witnessing her bring up her children in a way that…well, it floors me. She’s a really really good mom. She’s that person I call when I just don’t know how to handle something. I ask her what she did, or what she would do if this or that was her child. I often joke that I’ve decided I’m just always going to do whatever she does, because that’s how much I respect her wisdom and grace in motherhood. Her name is Katie and whenever she talks about raising her kids, I pay very close attention. When Miles and Asher were babies, I was over at this Katie’s house and noticed six little tin buckets sitting along a shelf. Each one had a different word painted on it: Save, Spend, Give. And then […]
I’ll admit it, I don’t normally reach for self-help/motivational/psychology/self-improvement books. That’s basically because if I’m going to have time to read, I’m going to read something purely for entertainment or inspiration. (I mean, I realize self-help, etc. books can be inspiring, too, but in all honesty, the kinds of books I’m describing leave me a bit ambivalent and maybe totally skeptical. I think, Yah yeah yeeeaaah, follow these steps and do this this and this and then wham-o! you’re happy and free and even rich! UNTIL YOU’RE NOT.) So. When my friends at The Blog Frog asked if wanted to read The Charge, I hesitated. But, because I’m so self-improved and open-minded, I took a look at the description of the book anyway and became surprisingly curious. I saw the potential for The Charge to elaborate on something I’ve already been doing a lot of thinking about; what makes us feel more fully […]
I’ve been a mother (if you count pregnancy, which you do, of course) for about eight years. I’ve been a blogger for over half that time, and I’ve been active on Twitter and Facebook since about a year after I started blogging. That said, this question was posed: How has the technological age changed parenting for you? I love this question. It fascinates me. I mean, pretty much every parent I know is involved online in one way or another. We’re tweeting or updating facebook or writing and/or reading blogs. We’re talking about this bumpy road of bringing up humans and we’re gaining avenues to different perspectives every day. We have answers at our fingertips every second of every day. We have smart phones and smart notebooks and smart computers and smart laptops…(For real, they’re all smarter than I am.) We are taking in a lot of information about parenting, especially if we’re […]
I was looking at pictures on facebook. Beautiful ocean Instagrams to be exact. The kind that make you feel the salt water on your skin and the wind blowing your hair all the way over here in Minnesota, where we are ocean-less but full of lakes. The truth is, the ocean terrifies me. It’s beautiful and epic and I love it and it terrifies me. There are so many parts of me like this. Like that Sara Groves song says, “I’ve got layers of lies that I don’t even know about yet.” I haven’t been lying about how I feel about the ocean, that’s not what I mean. It just takes me awhile to admit some things to myself and then out loud to be heard and either tossed or taken in. There are layers with truths because my fear of the ocean goes beyond a fear of drowning or being eaten by […]
You were written into my motherhood story and I knew it before I realized you were a little acorn growing inside. I didn’t know how to picture you here but I knew you were coming. I looked at your daddy and I asked, Do you feel like our family is complete? and he said No and I said, Me either. Even though we were riding along with two very loud and whiny boys on a road trip, those two who would become your doting brothers. We were crazy in love with them and couldn’t see past them but we knew. We could feel you. Like you were there in an empty seat beckoning. A little Elsie Jane half-wave from the place you are from; from Everywhere like Heaven and Nowhere like the sky and totally from Love and Grace. I felt your little call to our family–I’m yours!–and it made me nervous. Nervous […]
Maybe most days are so good like today and I miss it because my head just doesn’t feel like noticing what my heart does. When your head and your heart shake hands it’s calming and you can shake the sand out of little boy shoes and onto the floor for more sweeping and not mind. You know it means the day was more full than those shoes. My heart and mind shook hands with each other and with a friend and we stood by rushing water and walked in the sun and got interrupted eleventy-billion times by these kids of ours that must.know.this.something.right.now. And those kids, they ran circles around our new friends’ workshop space, the one I mentioned here before that will be opening to bring in mothers and children to create and commune. We stood in the workshop and thought out loud about story. We talked about motherhood and the pressure […]
There was a force in the social media world named Susan Niebur. (Many of you may have known her as @WhyMommy) Susan used her influential voice on and offline to educate, empower and inspire. On February 6, 2012 Susan passed away, but I’m not going to say she lost her battle with cancer. That phrase doesn’t sit right in my heart-gut, not when speaking of anyone who has died after living with cancer. The word lost and Susan just don’t go together because her legacy, the way she fought to bring awareness to the world, will be kicking cancer’s ass until a cure is found. So I think I’ll change my first sentence to, “There is a force in the social media world named Susan Niebur”. That’s not just hyperbole, my friends. That’s the truth. This spitfire of a woman with a blog called Toddler Planet changed the planet and that’s why Maggie and I […]
So often I ask them how much I love them and they say to the moon and then I say and back down again and we go back and forth like that until one of us speeds up really fast and back up and back down and back up and back down… INFINITY. When I imagined having kids I thought I’d tell them I love them to the moon, but then I had kids and I found out the moon isn’t far enough. Infinity is the only thing forever and endless enough. This weekend I saw these kids move from winter tones to summer kissed ones and somehow it makes them look older. And we moved the boys’ beds from apart to stacked and so they’re bunked boys now. Like the big boys that they are, apart and together. The duo and pals that run past laughing and asking what to play next. […]
“Have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” – William Morris All last week I was slowly and sporadically preparing for a garage sale. (In other words, for five minutes here and there while juggling children (literally, in the air) I went through closets and put price tags on things that we haven’t used. That always adds up to a lot.) Then a friend of mine came over the day before the sale and couldn’t believe how giddy I was. She said she could see how happy I was to be having a garage sale in my face. Yes. I’m a giddy garage sale-having big nerd. It’s a combination of things, my friends. Purging. Cash. Purging. And the psychology of garage sales. You know, the fascinating people and conversations you have that can only come about because of strangers entering your yard, […]
ROOM 4246 That’s right, friends. Maggie and I are back to BlogHer this year in New York City to provide a low-key and relaxing space to take a break from all the beautiful conference madness–scheduling, sessions, socializing, parties and the busy New York City streets. This peaceful place? The Serenity Suite! We’ll be located in a lovely BlogHer sponsored suite in the very hotel where the conference is taking place, and we’re working hard to provide a warm and inviting comfortable space to relax, rejuvenate, regroup and talk with friends, old and new. (This is a great place to set up that “let’s get together at BlogHer!” meeting with the blog friend you feel so connected to but haven’t yet had the chance to meet in person.) Come and visit us at the Serenity Suite, have a cup of coffee or tea, a yummy dessert or three and say hello to the hosts […]
I answered some questions about blogging and life for the inspirational Shannon of my new favorite day. My answers are over at her place today and of course you don’t want to miss them because I say all kinds of riveting things. Like how I’m less serious a lot of the time in real life than I am on my blog and I may be considered… quirky. SHOCKING. But before you go, you should stare at this for a moment… I showed Ryan this picture and he said, look at that old man in the background, hunched over. Then he started talking in a rough and slow voice out the side of his mouth like he’d lost all his teeth all slow-like, saying things like, Let me just put this board right here…for the chickens. We laughed really hard and I told him he was wearing old man shorts, too. I’m so encouraging. […]
The weekends have been rolling through with paintbrush strokes lately. There have been many more bright yellows and reds where there had been a lot of darker things, like depression and colic. We are moving now, wheels turning down the road to places with familiar faces and isn’t it silly that I started to wonder if that would ever happen again? If we would always stand still? You do, you know? You start to believe that “it will always be this way” whatever that way is, but it never stays. We have that one constant, in counting on change. You would think I’d be sure of it by now but I still get scared sometimes when things are hard. I get scared they will only stay hard or get harder. But this weekend Miles had a play date and there was a pizza fundraiser and a huge indoor garage sale where I got […]
because your Thursday needs a little dance off… p.s. who needs pants?! or shirts?! P.S. I did an interview for an online show called Moms Like Us. You can watch it now if you’d like. (It begins at 4 minutes 30 seconds. There’s an interview with Minnesotan children’s book author Catherine Urdahl before my interview. Catherine was kind enough to give her two books to me while we were there and we love them. They’re beautifully illustrated and touch on childhood themes that are hard to address without her style of seeing these hard feelings through a child’s eyes. You can check them out at catherineurdahl.com)
{Welcome to Just Write. This week, after you link up below, click on over to Momalom and link up there, too! We’re sharing words with 5 for 5 this week! The prompt is “Words” but if you didn’t get that memo, no worries. Your post surely has words in it, so it’ll work just fine. The link to 5 for 5 is at the end of this post.} {WORDS} On Sunday I got back into bed, overwhelmed and exhausted, my down comforter like a life raft. No TV, no book, no iPhone. No words. I was just thinking but not about much. Then I drifted off to sleep. I have no idea how long it’s been since I did something like that. Just calmly ignoring the loud sounds coming from the other rooms, coming in and out of consciousness. Peaceful. It’s been a really long time. It was the next thing on […]
“Stories and truth are splints for the soul, and that makes today a sacred gathering.” ~Anne Lamott She has a caramel roll and she’s wearing a white sweatshirt with a lighthouse stitched on it. She sits alone with her newspaper and a sign on the wall above her head that says Dream. She’s absent-minded when the gooey bite falls off her fork on its way to her mouth. I look away to save her from feeling silly. She goes to get a napkin and comes back, sitting down carefully and catching my eye. Good morning! she says and I don’t hear her at first and she says it again loud and clear and then apologizes for how it came out funny the first time. I reassure her and smile wide. Books are open around me, my favorites like C.S. Lewis, Lamott and Donald Miller. It’s been a long time since we sat together […]
We walked to the park with the merry-go-round, all five of us. Our family. It was so warm and not so windy and the clouds were looming in the best way. Floating puffs looking as if they were being slowly pulled apart like taffy. Maybe I thought of them as taffy or cotton candy or fluffy marshmallows because I’ve been refraining from sugar for nearly forty days but I still crave it. I sat on the merry-go-round next to Ryan and we talked about how we can’t even push along with our feet on the ground to spin because we both get sick to our stomachs when we go in circles. We laughed. I thought of an analogy, of course. About going in circles and how it feels and pushing along or just sitting still and being. Elsie sat nearby in the grass and contemplated whether she should try to eat a leaf […]
I handed the teething and fussy and clinging baby to her Daddy right at the moment he came through the door. I said, I need to hide for a little while and here I am. It’s been not even five minutes and Miles has come to the door three times and Asher once. Elsie has been doing that thing with her walker, where she bangs it against the door while making grunt sounds mixed with whining for me. Ryan is trying to make dinner and Miles keeps asking to play a game. It feels a bit like the house is spinning, there’s so much activity. The witching hour(s). Everyone is done, over-tired, needing, hungry and did I mention over-tired? I think of all the houses breathing this same life right now and I know it’s so good that we all get to breathe this way together at all. In a few hours all […]
{this post was inspired by my own story and also Maggie May’s post Anxiety: A Plague, Years of Wonder. Her words help me more fully understand myself and for that I am always grateful.} It feels ridiculous sometimes. I am a grown woman and my husband is holding my hand and taking me to the doctor, carefully. I sit there, child’s pose and Dr. M. says my face looks brighter, better than the first time. Yes, I’m feeling a little more like I can see myself. She increases the dosage of medication that will hopefully round off the corners of some of this anxiety and depression. She says the medicine will at first make the symptoms worse and then better. I hate that I need a medication that is so confused about itself. She was right. I can’t sleep because of the all the drunk monkeys in my head, pounding around, my eyes flying […]
We went out for an early Valentine dinner so we could get back for putting Elsie to bed. She needs me at bedtime. We didn’t say, Now no talking about the kids! Because usually I think of the things They say to do and not do and then I fail and think about it too much. So we just did our thing the best we could on that day. We ended up not talking about the kids. I got curious about things I didn’t know, from life Before Us and so I asked a lot of questions and Ryan told me about road trips and moving to Arizona and the last time he saw his Grandma. I told him some stories too and we never run out of them, you know, if we just keep digging. I remember my Grandpa saying that he learned something new about my Grandma every day. I couldn’t really believe […]
{photo credit} Everything was too hard yesterday. Like how the dish rag was in the bottom of the sink under all the dishes that were filled with water. Uncovering it and rinsing it out and ringing it out would just be too hard so I walked away and left it all there. By three o’clock I was so tired of my own tired with pressure behind the eyes, so I decided to be good and cheerful by making cookies. Except by making cookies I mean the pull apart kind but even then, they kept pulling apart not along the lines so there were big and small ones after baking even though they were supposed to be all one square-gone-round size. Miles thought they were taking too long. Ten minutes from start to finish. Cookies. Done. Not too long. But I understand, I want start to finish now now now, too. We can’t […]
It’s a coffee shop made from an old house with hidden nooks and rooms. It’s cold up here in the middle room. I can hear a boy and his mother in the next space. The walls are thin and I am always tuned into a child’s voice. It’s becoming more and more obvious that they don’t just struggle here but everywhere. The mother’s voice is well-versed in soothing responses, trying to calm the boy who cannot leave the rigid confines of his concrete mind. She is kind and she sighs when he repeats over and over and over that she sucks because she won’t take him home right this second for video games. He’s loud. Louder and louder as he repeats and repeats and does not get the answer that is the only one he wants. Someone comes to close the door from another room and awkwardly explains why she’s closing the door. It’s […]
It’s been 2 years. 2 years 365 days plus 365 days or 24 hours strung together 730 times. I suppose I could go on with all kinds of numbers, but I’m terrible at math and the day must go on. That’s what they do, you know. The days go on, sometimes walking and sometimes running and sometimes marching. Oh the ones that march, they are the stompy and defiant ones, annoying and hard but entirely necessary. This morning I woke up to Elsie Talk, crackling at me over the monitor. I went to get her and nursed her in bed and when she was done she looked up at me and made the silliest face you’ve ever seen. Then Miles came in and sniffed her head and sniffed her head some more. It’s his favorite thing to do. We got up, we three early risers and I made coffee and thought my thinks […]
I don’t very often resolve to do things for the new year. I try to find the resolve every day and fail and triumph and triumph and fail. The time does fly but sometimes I wonder if that’s just because we forget so quickly so it just seems like it when really a lot of the time it’s kind of slow. Either way, there is the illusion of fast and so fast it is. I was writing the numbers on the wipe off calendar in the little squares inside the bigger squares and it felt like I just did this, writing July and then October and now it’s a new year. I am writing those little numbers so often. Almost every time I have to try hard to remember how many days are in the month. The months fly by forgotten and it still says “Get Asher left-handed kid scissors” at the top […]
This picture is from like two weeks ago. You know, when I should have been focusing on Christmas to-do lists, but was instead just walking around Target aimlessly, not buying anything. Now I’m all stressed and I wish Christmas didn’t have to be that way and sure I do a lot of it to myself by procrastination but it also seems like even if I do some things ahead of time, the lists just keep adding stuff to themselves. (yes, I realize that’s a hugely confusing run-on sentence but I’m too tired to change it.) I wish this season was more like it was on the prairie. You know, with the Ingalls, in the little house. Just candy and a violin and some food to make the whole family overjoyed. No hustle and bustle, just a cozy fire and some singing and tradition. Anyway. I love Christmas. I really do. I especially […]
It was just Mommy and Asher, making a trip to the grocery store. I was playing Sara Groves and she sang, it’s a sweet sweet thing, standing here with you and nothing to hide. Light shining down to the very inside… sharin’ our secrets, barin’ our souls, helping each other come clean. He asked, Why does she say…sharing secrets? (this is when I had some rapid-fire mommy thoughts of how to explain the point of the song so a four year old could understand.) I told him that it always feels best to tell the truth, even if you have a secret about something you’ve done that you think you could never tell. I asked him if, when he sneaks something he’s not supposed to and then he tells me about it, he feels better. He said, without hesitation, YES. Yeah, it’s about that. It just feels better to not keep things inside, even […]
I am all chills and aches and so are they, the whole family. There is much whining, mostly from me. I have Mastitis on top of the bug or whatever we have and isn’t it funny that the first time Elsie slept through the night was my second night of Mastitis? So I didn’t even get to enjoy it because I was too uncomfortable and couldn’t sleep. See? Whining. Ryan had to take me to the doctor for antibiotics because everything just hurts and I didn’t want to drive and we were driving along and then went to Target to get Needed Things and there was a mom standing in front of the gas drops for infants and I walked right up to her and asked about her baby and then we talked about things that help those very fussy gassy babies. (That was all one huge run-on sentence and I’m not even […]
I didn’t think anything was wrong. I thought maybe I was just experiencing something normal that I hadn’t experienced before. But while we set up shop in triage and the doctor started running tests, we saw the anxiety in her eyes when she came to talk with us. She had run a test to check for amniotic fluid and sure enough, it was positive. So as fast as we had come in the door and I had gotten myself in the pretty little gown and on the bed, we were being whisked away by ambulance to another hospital with promises that it was the best place for a baby to arrive this early… {Please won’t you continue reading our story over at the Million Moms Challenge hosted by ABC News and The UN Foundation.}
Miles – 2005 I say every mother needs to trust her heart-gut. She knows, I say. It’s hidden inside her, the answer. Answers to all the many many questions that rise up, all day every day. We’ve made our decisions about Miles and school after years of wrestling with homeschooling versus public or private out-of-home schooling. We made the decision to have him not start school at all last year, after doing more heart-gut wrestling. So now here we are. We’ve made our decisions and I even feel good about them, as good as I can feel when every decision we make always has its right and wrong parts. This boy is going to full-time-is-the-only-option kindergarten at a public school next week. {Rain photo circa 2007} Mothers dream of a person and then grow them in their very soul and bring them here and then release them with a great push. Unleashed […]
You eat some sugar snap peas and a bowl of cereal and call it dinner. You worry that the crunching of your cereal may wake the baby. The baby that is in another room, behind a closed door. You consider yourself more accomplished than ever before in your life if you water your two plants in the same day. Wait. Scratch that. You consider yourself more accomplished than ever before if you master the magical babywearing contraption called the Moby wrap on the first try. If it takes twenty tries, you are normal. No matter how many times it takes you to master the wrap, every time you wear your baby in it, you feel a bit smug and also totally in love with carrying your baby close, hands-free! You throw a pillow across the room at 3 a.m. because you just can’t.be.awake for one more second and then you cry when the […]
