Inspiration Collection   

April 16, 2008 | 1 Comment

You know the people who inspire me? The ones who can tell you, in 5 words or less, what inspires them! My good friend Shauntelle asked the question over on her blog, “what inspires you?” Well, I can’t exactly answer that in a simple comment, so I’m answering here.

I’m so all over the place that I can’t really say that any one thing is my inspiration. But I’ll share what comes to mind this morning.

1. The pure joy that is a preschooler up to his elbows in finger paint. I want that uninhibited sense of pure creativity back! It’s there, hiding in the back of my soul, buried under years of responsibility. I can’t wait to be a grandma so I can join the little ones in finger painting without that annoying little voice in the back of my head reminding me that I have to clean it up when we’re done.

2. Women who do it all, raise large families, homeschool their children, run a home business, and still manage to keep a peace about them that makes me want to just sit in their presence for half an hour to recharge my own spirit.

3. Edward Abbey - author of several “coarse, rude, bad-tempered, violently prejudiced, unconstructive - even frankly antisocial” books, including my favorite, Desert Solitaire. It would take me weeks to decide on just one quote that inspires me from this book, so I’ll share one of my favorites from the introduction:

When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe. Probably not. . . . This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don’t drop it on your foot — throw it at something big and glassy. What do you have to lose?

4. Pioneer women who raised 10 children in a one-room cabin, with no heat, no running water, and none of the modern conveniences that I can’t imagine living without. Those women remind me of how strong we women are when we have to be.

5. Victorian mansions. The lives lived in those old homes was so much more graceful than my own. I miss that gentility and elegance in modern life. Yes, I know - all that gentility was enjoyed on the backs of generations of the poor, but somehow when I tour a home like this one (the David Davis Mansion in Bloomington, IL), all that cold hard reality fades away and I relax into the fantasy of polite society.

That’s enough for now, I think! I’m sure, the moment I publish this post, five more things will come to mind.

Tackle it Tuesday: The Laundry Room   

April 15, 2008 | 8 Comments

Ok, this is one of those tackles that makes me look around and wonder WHY on Earth it took so long to figure this out. Ah well, that’s life, right?

My laundry room has always been a messy area with piles of dirty laundry arranged on the floor - one pile for whites, one for colors, one for reds, one for jeans, one for towels and linens. As you can imagine, with a family of 5, those piles get big and topple over on a pretty regular basis!

When you have little boys doing their part to carry dirty laundry downstairs to the laundry room, that doesn’t exactly contribute to the neatness factor. I’ve never caught them at it, but I suspect sometimes those piles of laundry are a bit too tempting and get jumped in too!

Sure, this isn’t exactly a life-altering burst of inspiration, but it’s amazing how a half-dozen plastic bins can make a huge difference! Last weekend, I found 32 gallon plastic bins on clearance for about $7 each (ok, so they’re pastel blue and purple, Easter colors, but who cares? They’re in the laundry room!). I bought one for each of my laundry piles and voila! No more laundry on the floor, and the whole laundry area takes up a lot less space.

This was such a spur-of-the moment Tackle, I don’t even have before pictures (although if you saw my Basement Storage Room Tackle, you’ll get a pretty good feel for what the laundry room looked like….). Here’s the After picture though - I’m sure you can see the vast improvement! That reminds me, I need to switch laundry while I’m down there taking pictures!

As an added bonus, the clothes are easier to sort now too, because the piles are clearly separated. So now I have boys who can carry dirty laundry to the basement and put their own clean clothes away, I feel a lesson on separating laundry coming on! (Hey, at least I can rest easy knowing that they won’t go to college without a clue how to achieve clean clothes.)

Recipe for Spring Break Sanity   

April 8, 2008 | Comments

Another writer I know recently asked how to survive Spring Break with the kids home from school.  First I have a guilty confession to make.  I kind of look forward to the days when my older son is home from school.  But that’s a whole ‘nother post!  Here’s my recipe for Spring Break Sanity:

1. Take a deep breath.  You can do this!
2. If it’s not physically dangerous to be outside (i.e. severe
   thunderstorms, blizzard, wind chill below zero, or a heat advisory)
   kick the kids outside for a minimum of 1 hour.  If it’s raining,
   fine.  A little water and mud never hurt anyone (although it will do
   a number to that freshly mopped floor….sorry!).  You stay inside
   (where you can see them, of course!) and pour yourself a cup of
   coffee/tea/soda/water or whatever spells comfort in your world.
3. Brainstorm 5 article ideas and research markets for them
   while you’re waiting for editors to get out of
   meetings and call you back.
4. When the kids get back inside, escort them to the shower -
   odds are they’re going to need it, even if the weather’s fine!
5. When they’re clean, feed them.  That always buys me at
   least a 1/2 hour of sanity.  Use this 30 minutes or so to come up
   with an obscure task or project for them to do.  I like scavenger
   hunts for things that don’t actually exist
6. After lunch, send them on their quest or sit them down for a
   project.  Free art time is good too - dump a bunch of random stuff on
   the table, provide scissors, glue, and construction paper and see
   what happens.
7. Chore time!
8. After they’ve worked so diligently, reward them with an hour
   of TV or computer games or whatever activity Dr. Sears would probably
   frown upon.

Congratulations, by now it should be mid- to late- afternoon and you’re practically done with the day!

Crisis Management - How Not to Fall Off the Face of the Earth   

April 7, 2008 | Comments

I haven’t posted here in - what, over a week now? - and I’ve missed it! Unfortunately, just as everything seemed to be chugging along fairly normally, 3 separate crisis situations landed in my lap. And that’s not counting the fact that my husband and one of the boys were sick all weekend, and today I have all 3 boys home with fever and coughing.

That reminds me - gotta call the school and let them know the boys won’t be there today!

Ok, that’s done.

So I have two reasons for posting today. (Ok, 3. I feel horribly guilty about not posting in so long!) First, crises happen to the best of us. No matter how organized and on top of things we try to be, stuff happens. Second, life turning upside down is not an indictment on your ability to manage your life.

I spent a good chunk of last week flirting with a relapse into major depression because I blamed myself for the mess life had become. If I had only been more organized, more disciplined, more psychically in tune with circumstances beyond my knowledge or control, none of this would have happened!

Perhaps.

However, until I develop psychic powers and the ability to function on less than 8 solid hours of sleep (better yet, 9), crises are going to keep happening. That’s just reality. What matters is how I deal with them. I’ll be honest, by gut instinct is to curl up under a blanket and hide. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make them go away. Most of the time it just makes the crisis bigger.

So, I’m being brave this week. I’m facing each crisis individually, as rationally as I can, and dealing with the uncertainty. What else can I do? If I try and hide, the boys come find me

Guess what? Facing these situations head-on makes them less scary. I might not have made a lot of friends today as I dealt with things, but that’s not the point. Ok, so I’ve been downright blunt today. (I like to call it “honest”!) I haven’t sugar-coated anything. I’ve explained, in some detail, exactly what the problem is as I see it and exactly what actions I expect from each individual person involved.

So far, so good. I can’t say that anything is 100% solved yet, but at least I’m not hiding from the problems any more.

As for the second reason I’m posting today - that life turning upside down is not an indictment on our ability to manage - sometimes circumstances are simply outside of our control. And sometimes there’s just so much going on that something falls through the cracks. It happens! And life goes on.

And you know what? Anybody who gives you a hard time or makes you feel like a failure because you missed something either has entirely too much time on their hands, or is covering up their own failures.  Ignore them.  They aren’t particularly helpful, and therefore you don’t have time for those people.  People who encourage you and reaffirm your inner strength, on the other hand, are the emotional equivalent of dark chocolate and a really good massage.  You always have time for them!

Tackle it Tuesday: The Basement Storage Room   

March 25, 2008 | 11 Comments

As I noted in the Nursery project kick-off post, before I can clear out the art/computer room to make room for the nursery, we have to clear all the boxes out of the basement storage room so we can turn that room in to the new art room. So that mammoth project is today’s Tackle!

Here’s what the basement storage room looked like before we started:Actually, what you’re not seeing in this photo is the load of boxes and stuff that my husband had already cleared out. I staggered out of bed at 7:30 am only to realize he had been up and working for a couple of hours already!Here’s what the basement storage room looks like now.

It’s not quite finished, but we’ve made a huge dent in the project. We’ll keep working on it this week so that by next weekend we can clear out the nursery, just in time to get started on some of the great projects Shauntelle has dreamed up!

North of Normal   

March 19, 2008 | 4 Comments

We all have certain expectations of ourselves, and there’s nothing wrong with that. After all, if we expect nothing of ourselves, that’s usually what we’ll get. But sometimes it’s a good idea to step back and take a long hard look at our expectations and where they came from. I did just that late last week, and was a bit shocked both by what I discovered about myself, and by how free I felt once I let go of one major expectation that had no business skulking around my life any more.

About 3 years ago, we lived in a pretty generic house in a neighborhood that could have been located anywhere. The house and the neighborhood together were the poster child for generic upper-middle-class suburbia. My husband had an hour and a half commute to work, and while there were dozens of young kids in the neighborhood, their parents were all at least 10 years older than us. (We had our first child at (gasp) 23!)

The women in the neighborhood were either intensely career-minded, so they brushed me off as soon as they noted my usual apparel (jeans and flannel or t-shirt) and the small crowd of kids following me, or else they were stay-at-home Moms whose eyes glazed over the minute I opened my mouth and told them I was a writer, or mentioned that we were having an hour at the park to wear out the boys so they would nap and I could meet my deadlines.

When my husband was offered a position 3 hours south of Suburbia, USA it seemed like the solution to a lot of problems. Sure, we ended up renting a house sight-unseen based on the fact that it was available, had enough bedrooms, and the landlord didn’t mind that we had a large dog. We’ve spent the past few years bouncing around town, trying to figure out where we fit in here. Up until recently, my goal had been to buy a house very similar to the one we had before, in a similar neighborhood.

It just seemed to be the thing to do. Honestly, I never really examined the reasons behind that particular expectation, until we took the boys to a park near the University and my husband casually mentioned that we ought to look at houses in Normal. Normal IL, home of Illinois State University, is a college town. It’s full of eclectic little shops and equally eclectic people. It’s definitely not Suburbia, USA!

Something just clicked in my head when he suggested looking at houses in Normal. Suddenly I realized, we’re just not a mainstream family. Aside from the fact that we’ve had 4 kids in less than 7 years (usually a pretty obvious tip-off that we’re not quite average!), we homeschool our preschoolers (and our older son during the summer), use cloth diapers and slings, bake our own bread (when I have time!), and on and on.

So why have I spent most of my adult life trying to achieve something that looks like a mainstream lifestyle, complete with the suburban house, 2 cars, perfect (and perfectly useless) landscaping, and the tendency to solve life’s problems through retail therapy - all while indulging my instincts to do things a little differently than they do on the sitcoms?

We all pick up these random assumptions about what constitutes a successful life. I’ve re-evaluated one of those assumptions, and as soon as I let go of the pressure to appear to be something I’m not, life suddenly made a whole lot more sense!

Take clothes for example. I wear jeans, t-shirts and flannels just about every day.

This is closer to what I would wear on most days if I didn’t think people would look at me oddly:

(dress available from Pyramid Collection)

I love the pretty ribbons at the shoulders, the whimsical floral pattern at the hem.  It reminds me of wandering through a field of wildflowers.

So - what’s the point?  I do have a point, I promise!

If you’re feeling trapped, like something’s not quite right but you can’t put your finger on what it is, sit down and examine your core expectations of life.  What you learn - and learn to let go of - might just surprise you!

I’ve been tagged!   

March 18, 2008 | 6 Comments

Ok, so according to Shauntelle, the blogosphere wants to know 10 weird things about me. (What, only 10?!) Ok here goes:

1. I’m completely obsessive about planning and organization, but I need a good amount of spontaneity in my life as well. Except that I have a really hard time adjusting when things don’t go as planned. Hey, I just report the weirdness, I don’t try to understand it!
2. We partially homeschool our kids - our oldest is in full-day Kindergarten, but he joins us for homeschool on days off. Our middle son is in preschool 3 days a week, and he joins homeschool on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Our third is fully homeschooled for preschool and will homeschool until Kindergarten in 2 years. I expect to homeschool Miss Elizabeth for preschool as well. We do science, art, and music a couple of afternoons a week with our two oldest boys, to supplement what they are (or aren’t, in the case of science) learning at school.The boys are rapidly piling ideas on me for Summer Homeschool - so far we’re planning a unit on the Pioneers, complete with field trips to a living history museum and a “No power weekend” where we will avoid using electricity and other modern conveniences so as to experience what it might have been like to leave the conveniences of the East Coast and strike out into the wilderness. We’ll also be learning about hydroponics by building a hydroponic tub and growing several varieties of herbs, and since Elizabeth will be born sometime in May, I’m trying to figure out whether I can convince my 6 year old that learning to change diapers qualifies as a homeschool topic!
3. I recently revived a book project from several years ago. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had several conversations with various people about the benefits of living a sustainable and less cash-dependent lifestyle, without moving to a subsistence farm in Iowa or otherwise living on the equivalent of bread and water. It’s an idea I played with several years ago, but let it go when other projects became more pressing. Now I’m starting to think in that direction again, so I guess it’s time to let my poor agent in on my dirty little secret: I can write hard-core technical books, but I’m a hippie chick at heart!
4. I’m the youngest of 7 kids, but I was raised as an only child. My parents had 6 kids in 10 years, then almost 12 years later, I came along. Now that I’m an adult, I have close relationships with most of my siblings, and I’m grateful to have such a large support system available.
5. I grew up in California, and went to school in Peoria, Illinois for no better reason than “because it felt right.” Seriously.
6. I met my husband in October of our freshman year in college. (Score one for intuition!) We’ve been attached at the hip for the past 12 years or so, although in college half our friends had no idea we were dating. Yet we still hear the phrase “get a room” on a fairly regular basis, so go figure.
7. I started a cloth diaper company that imported and sold prefolds to many of the cloth diaper retailers in the US. For about a year, then I sold the company to focus on writing.
8. I owned a web hosting, content development, and search engine optimization company for about a year - which I then sold to focus on writing.
9. I collect culinary textbooks and love to pour through them dreaming of days when I’ll have time to cook and bake like I used to before I had kids. Baking artisan breads and French pastries are two of my favorite stress relievers. Luckily I live in a house full of appreciative boys who never let any of my creative endeavors go to waste.
10. I majored in Computer Science in college because my mother strongly advised that I might want to get a degree in something that would allow me to support myself while I wrote stories. I was bored and didn’t actually bother going to class as often as was academically advisable, so was kicked out after my freshman year. In order to be readmitted, I had to write a letter to the dean describing how I would change my ways. My solution - I double majored in Computer Science and English/Creative Writing. Eventually I dropped the CS major when I realized that I had all the credits to graduate in English. I had done enough CS to get my first job as a web developer, which led to a fairly successful career in the IT field. Until I got bored with it and left IT to focus on writing.

Ok - there ya go. 10 things that make me just slightly outside the realm of normal. Gotta go feed the natives, then I’ll tag someone else!

The natives have been fed, they’re tidying up the Living Room in preparation for quiet time, so I’m off tagging 3 other bloggers:  Homemaking Mama, Angela from And Then There Were Four, and Michelle of #!/usr/bin/mom.

Cut back on driving until the gas companies get a clue   

March 12, 2008 | 4 Comments

Like most of the country, I’ve complained about the rising price of gasoline. Who wouldn’t complain when all of our budgets are getting tighter, everything we buy is more expensive because shipping costs are higher, the economy is tanking, and the oil companies are posting record profits?

But this is just too much. Last week, gas in my area was $2.99 a gallon. It jumped to $3.19 a few days ago. Today, the price is $3.46 a gallon! (Yes, I’m well aware that $3.46 is “cheap gas” in some parts of the country - I feel for you, and I hope you’ll hop on and share some tips - but I’m getting ahead of myself)

I am sick and tired of the obscenely wealthy oil barons playing chess with my budget. And they can quit whining about the Saudi’s raising the price of oil. I personally don’t have a lot of sympathy for them when, first off, they pass those higher prices right down the line to us at the gas pumps, and secondly (have I mentioned this yet) they’re making record profits! I’m pretty much convinced that all this business about the Saudis is blown way out of proportion just to give them an excuse to jack up gas prices again.

So, enough ranting. Let’s talk solutions here.

Hybrid cars and biodiesel fuels are great solutions to the big problem, but they’re also a pretty major thing to implement for most families. While I’d love to drive a smaller vehicle, reality is that we have to drive a car that seats 6 (4 carseats/booster seats, 2 adults), so that pretty much locks us into a minivan, and besides our family isn’t in a position right now to run out and buy a new car!

So I’m thinking of ways that our family can conserve gasoline as much as possible. Simple, practical things that we can implement right now, while we save up for that hybrid!

Here are the things I’ve come up with right away and will be implementing over the next week - please, add your own ideas and tips! I’m working on the details, but I’m thinking this will turn into a blog contest, where everyone who adds their own ideas and tips will be entered into a drawing for a prize.

• Consolidate errands into a single trip. This one’s tough, because to work well it means that one parent stays home with the kids while the other does the running around. Why? Because when you take young kids along on errands, they get bored. Then they get crabby. And eventually you go home just to get them out of the car - and then you have to go back out later to finish. BUT there’s a side benefit to this one too: it’s more budget-friendly to do errands in one big kid-free trip, because you do less impulse spending. You’re less likely to bow to the “Mama, we want Happy Meals!” campaign from the back seat.
• Buy in bulk. The idea here is that if you can purchase 2 weeks worth of groceries at a time, you can make one less trip to the grocery store. If you do Freezer Meals, you’re already ahead of the game!
• Relax when you drive. You’ll get better gas mileage if you slow down, accelerate calmly, and just generally chill out. Road rage is just too expensive these days!

I know there are more ideas out there - how will you cut back on driving until the gas companies get a clue?

Nursery for a Princess - goals for this week   

March 11, 2008 | 5 Comments

Since we officially launched the nursery blogging project, Shauntelle and I have been hard at work planning this project. Well, I’ve been hard at work. I’m pretty sure Shauntelle has been having way too much fun to call it work!

Anyhow - here’s how this thing is gonna happen. I’m breaking it into two phases. Phase I is happening in March and involves all the projects that have to happen before I can even get into the room to start decorating. Don’t believe me? Check out these Before photos - warning, not for the faint of heart!

This is what happens when you encourage the kids to work independently . . .

Art is messy sometimes . . .

No kidding - this crazy room full of chaos and artwork is going to turn into a peaceful oasis for our little Princess. But not without a whole lot of work…All that stuff has to go somewhere. Currently, we’re using the room as an art room and computer room for the boys.

The plan is to clear out the unfinished side of the basement and convert that into the new art room. That will give them a lot more space, plus the concrete floor is easier to clean than carpet!

To move the art room downstairs, we have to move all the boxes we’re currently storing in that room into the larger storage unit we rented this weekend.

So to recap, this month’s projects are to clear out the room. This week, we’ll move the boxes out of the basement into the storage unit. Next week, we’ll move the art supplies into the totally reorganized art area in the basement. We’ll be setting up shelves and a drying area for their supplies and finished projects. Then we’ll move the computer desk out and clean the room from top to bottom.

Check back to see how we’re doing!

Tackle it Tuesday: Three Year Olds Can Put Away Laundry!   

March 11, 2008 | 5 Comments

First off, I apologize - I meant to have photos to post of this project, but my camera up and died yesterday! Hopefully it’s just the battery and I’ll be able to post photos later this week.

Ok, now on to today’s Tackle. I have a family of 5 - soon to be 6 (if you haven’t already, check out the nursery blogging project!), and with our 3-year old potty training, let’s just say we generate a LOT of laundry! One of the biggest challenges to all this laundry hasn’t been getting it put through the washer and dryer, but getting it all put away. I can get through about 4-5 loads of laundry in a day if I stay on top of it, and it’s easier for me to put it all away at the end of the day, rather than put each load away individually. I usually sort and fold laundry while the kids are in their bath.

Here’s the problem with my existing system: by the time I have the clothes sorted and folded, the boys are ready for bed. I can’t really get the clothes into their dressers and closet while they’re trying to go to sleep, so their clothes end up being stored in laundry baskets.

That’s gotta end - it’s driving me nuts!

There are two reasons that the boys couldn’t put their own clothes away: First, they would have to accurately figure out which clothes belonged to which person, and second, they would have to remember which drawer each item of clothing belonged in.

On the first point - figuring out which person each item belonged to - I bought 3 smallish laundry baskets. They’re just big enough to hold one boy’s clothes, and small enough for them to carry or push them down the hall to their room. I labeled them with each boy’s name in their favorite color. As I’m folding, I sort the clothes into each boy’s basket.

On the second point - helping them remember which drawers are theirs and which holds shirts, pants, etc. - I’m turning that problem into a homeschooling opportunity! Our oldest is starting to read independently, our middle son is starting to sound out words, and our youngest is learning to recognize his name and his brothers’ names.

I found index cards with manuscript lines printed on them, and some clip art showing shirts, pants, and pajamas. I made three cards for each boy, and wrote a label for each drawer in the boy’s favorite color, then taped a picture of the clothing item to the card.

Now, each boy has a color-coded laundry basket with his name on it, and three drawers with color-coordinated labels with his name, the word for the appropriate clothing item, and a picture of the clothing that belongs in that drawer.

To test the theory, I lined up the full baskets in the hallway outside their room, and sent them each in to put their laundry away. It worked - even my 3 year old got all of his clothes put away in the correct drawers!

I’ll try to get pictures posted later this week, once my camera is working again.