What's Working in April 2022

Best Accidental Library find:

Math Games with Bad Drawings by Ben Orlin 

I found this on the list of new books at my local library and requested it on a whim. I am already thrilled because I finally know the name of a game I love, but didn't know what it was called. My college metaphysics class met at my professor's house because there were only 6 of us, it saved him the trouble of walking to campus some afternoons, and it was fun for us to be outside boring classrooms. During our five minute break in the middle of our class, he would pull out quick games for us to play. And somehow I never caught the name of "Set." But I am about to tell my husband it's what I want for Mother's Day. This book mentioned "Set" in the introduction as one of Stephen Hawking's favorite games. The rest of the Math Games book looks fun too; I'm still in the introduction, but Ben has made me laugh for real twice so far and I flipping through the book, I think I will have some fun games to play with my kids.

Book I like so much I finally have to buy it:

Ralph Tells a Story by Abby Hanlon

I usually try not to buy books because our book shelves are too full for any more books and our walls are too full for any more book cases, and the books I have are so wonderful I can't stand to get rid of any. But This one is such a good story, that I finally decided I need to own it. I feel happy just knowing this book exists and so much more happy reading it.

Laundry Schedule:

I have a laundry schedule. I know what I am washing every day and I don't have to ask the question, "Which laundry needs to be done the most?" or "Do I really need to do laundry?" I just start that day's load. 

Monday: 2 loads (1: Mine + husband's clothes 2: load of two youngest kids' clothes)

Tuesday: Towels

Every other Wednesday: Whites (it takes two weeks to have a whole load)

Thursday: Sheets and blankets as needed

Friday: Oldest child's clothes

Saturday: Towels (I like clean towels)

Sunday: No laundry!

Dinner Schedule:

I want a better schedule, but I have one week night we always get take out. That keeps me from getting take out any other night and I always look forward to that one night of no cooking. 

Also, I do a crockpot meal on the day when my mother-in-law comes over for dinner so that I don't have to spend time the kitchen right before we eat.

Fridays or Saturdays we usually eat up all the leftovers.

First Day of Circle Time

I have been following Pam Barnhill's podcast called Your Morning Basket for a while now, and I have even signed up for her free month of Morning Time Plans. Today we finally started our own version of Morning Time!

We are calling it "Circle Time" because might happen in the afternoon some days. I think I was able to gain the confidence to try this partly because I was able to see Pam's plans, but I decided to customize our time for now; maybe I'll be able to use her plans in the future.  Here's what we did today:

1. We read Psalm 23.  We had a couple of interruptions, but all three kids listened pretty well.  I am hoping we will eventually be able to memorize this psalm.
2. We sang Christ the Solid Rock.  I'm happy we have some hymnals so my 2nd grader can follow along with me.  I think we will try to memorize the first verse before we start adding in additional verses.  My toddler thought the hymnal was a Bible and kept saying "Bible! Jesus!" and he wanted to hold one while we sang.
3. We read a Bible story. At this point, my toddler got really mad that I wouldn't let him hold the book and flip through it, so I asked him to bring out his tool box and he played quietly with his toys for the rest of the time we were sitting on the floor.
4. I wanted to get some physical activity in, so we practiced some very slow jumping jacks.  This is also because my PreK-daughter doesn't quite have her jumping jack arm motions lined up with her legs yet.
5. We did a language lesson from First Language Lessons for the Well Trained Mind. We have done some of these lessons before, so this was not new to my kids.
6. We moved from the living room floor to the kitchen table so we could free write. I was going to set the timer for 5 minutes, but I forgot how much my toddler loves timers; I had to just let him play with my kitchen timer and watch the clock myself.  My 2nd grader wrote sentences about why she likes winter and she wanted to keep going when the time was up.  My PreK-daughter drew a picture and tried to write a sentence below it.  She got a little frustrated when she wrote an extra "and" that she didn't mean to include, but she still seemed to enjoy our time writing.  In fact, through all the first five activities, she kept asking, "Is it writing time yet?"  I think next time we might try 10 minutes.
7. We finished things off with a field trip to a local garden.  I warned the kids that Circle Time will look different on different days. Most days, we probably won't have a field trip, but it was fun to start off with one today.

Even though this concept of "Circle Time" or "Morning Time" is designed for home school families, we are not an official homeschooling family; my 2nd grader and PreK-daughter attend public school. We are trying this out because it sounds fun and can give some structure to our days when we don't have school.

We'll see how this goes tomorrow!

Some Thoughts on Prayer

I was talking to someone about how hard it is to pray when I feel like God is not listening or maybe even like he is not even there.  No matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that, yes, he is there and, yes, he hears me, it just feels fake.  It feels like I am talking to myself.  That feeling can be so discouraging.

I am not an expert on prayer; I am just someone who loves Jesus and claims entrance into God's family through Jesus's death on a cross and resurrection from the dead.  Sometimes God's presence seems overwhelming and undeniable and prayer comes naturally.  Sometimes I feel doubt edging in that perhaps I am completely mistaken and maybe he is not really there after all. Here is what I do to keep praying anyway.

• I write out my prayers.  Instead trying to have a verbal conversation in which I genuinely cannot hear God with my physical ears or thinking prayers in my head, which can seem like just thinking to myself, I use the analogy of a letter.  The person I am writing to does not give me any response that very minute.  In fact, with other humans, it may take days or weeks, or they may read me letter and never have time to write back to me. Communication still happened.
• I write out scripture, especially the Psalms.  I find it helpful to write my way straight through, a few verses a day.  Obviously not all psalms will feel applicable the day I write them and try to make them my own prayer, but on those days, I can add my own feelings after copying out the psalm.  Sometimes praying psalms of lament or celebration on days when I feel just the opposite helps me find my own words.
• Sometimes I "pray" by just thinking through scripture.  I really like the daily meditations produced by the Jesuits called Pray As You Go.  These include music, a scripture reading, and a guided meditation about that passage, all in only about ten to fifteen minutes.
• I remind myself that relationships take time.  When I spend too little time with my husband, I start to feel distant and disconnected.  Sometimes we have to be intentional and spend time together even we might rather do separate things in order to build up our relationship and be able to enjoy being together.  And it is the same with God.  If I ignore him and fill up all the time in my life so there is none left to be pay attention to God, I feel distant and estranged.

Unfortunately, just spending time with God is no guarantee that the feelings of closeness will return, but it at least helps me put myself in a position to recognize God reaching out to me.

My Family's Favorite Library Books June 2017

• Poppy's Best Paper by Susan Eaddy
• Bubble Gum, Bubble Gum by Lisa Wheeler
• Wool Gathering: A Sheep Family Reunion by Lisa Wheeler
• Uncles and Antlers by Lisa Wheeler
• The Cow Loves Cookies by Karma Wilson
• Boo! Haiku by Deanna Caswell
• How Deep is the Ocean? by Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld
• The Name Quilt by Phyllis Root
• Ralph Tells a Story by Abby Hanlon 
• Billions of Bricks: A Counting Book About Building by Kurt Cyrus
• The Obstinate Pen by Frank W. Dormer

Snap Shot of My Life May 2017: What's working, and some other things

What's working:

• Yams in the slow cooker overnight.  My husband and I are doing the Whole30 food "cleanse diet" for the month of May and it is sometimes challenging to get enough veggies cooked, especially for breakfast.  I finally discovered I don't have to cook my yams in the oven.  Just before bed, I peel and dice red or jewel yams, drop them in the slow cooker with a tiny bit of salt, and cook on low for 10 hours.  I don't even have to add any water.  They are ready when we get up in the morning. Perfect next to some eggs.
• Khan Academy before other screen time.  While I try to limit my kids' screen time, we have been going through a lot of illnesses lately.  Sometimes I just need a nap or time to get the dishes done.  In those cases, I let my kids watch something, either a DVD or something on the PBS Kids website.  Before they watch, however, they have to do as many problems on Khan Academy as they are years old.  Because it's just something we always do, they never argue about it any more and they enjoy earning badges.
• Fresh fruit or other  healthy snacks right after school.  Not when we get home, immediately after school. I take apples or Lara bars or Gogo squeeze packets with us and we eat them on the walk to the car.  That makes the walk to the car go better and sets up the rest of the afternoon to at least have chance of going well.
• Cookies! I have had a really hard time getting my toddler to eat.  He has low iron levels and he has not been excited about eating very many things. I offer him all the food we eat and lots of baby food options as well.  I found Gerber Graduates Arrowroot Cookies; each cookies has 10% of his daily value for iron and he actually eats them. So now he gets a cookie for dessert at the end of every meal.  We just started this yesterday; I really hope it keeps working. 
• Reading Rockets book lists. I like to request books from the library so when we are in a hurry, I don't have to spend time trying to find something good. The Reading Rockets website has lists of books by topic and summer book lists going back several years. Almost all the books we have requested from these lists have been big hits in our family.

What I wish were working:

• Audio books.  I have been listening to and loving the Read Aloud Revival podcast. Sarah Mackenzie and her guests keep talking about how important it is for children to hear good books and how audio books really might be better than the child reading silently to themselves. Children might be tempted to skip over things or might not know how to say certain words. Our library has a number of audio books available digitally from our computer.  However, my kids aren't really interested in listening to them right now.  My preschooler does not even want to try to listen.  My 1st grader says she wants to hear them, but then wanders off and starts talking about something else. Maybe in another season we will find a place for audio books in our life.
• Classics for Kids.  I found a great website that has weekly radio shows introducing kids to classical music.  I enjoy listening.  But my preschooler wants me to turn it off and my 1st grader just wants to take the quiz, guessing the answers until she gets them right.
• Taking and managing photos of my kids. Always something to work on.  I want to remind myself not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Books I'm thinking about:

• Grit by Angela Duckworth
• Presence by Amy Cuddy
• Better than Before, Happier at Home, and The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
• The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

What I have been listening to while I do the dishes:

• On Being
• Read Aloud Revival
• Pray As You Go

Reflections on Brene Brown

Brené Brown is a social science researcher who writes about shame, vulnerability, and courage. Thanks to a book club I attend, I have had the opportunity to read two of Brené Brown's books: Daring Greatly and Rising Strong.  As I was reading those books, the personal connections I made were mostly about parenting, gratitude, and writing. Parenting issues resonated with me because I am a mother and Brené connected her research directly to the best ways to help our kids become courageous.  I happened to read Brené's work soon after reading One Thousand Gifts, which had prompted me to be intentional about being grateful, so everything  Brené said about gratitude caught my attention.  But here in this blog post, I want to explore how her insights connect to writing so that maybe, in re-reading this post myself, I will be encouraged to write more, or at least understand my own hang-ups about writing.

I keep saying I want to write.  I keep meaning to write.  I keep toying with blog posts that I don't publish.  I sit down to try and within a few minutes decide I don't have time or the topic I was considering doesn't seem worth the effort.  After Brené's books, I finally understood why writing is so hard and so scary.  Putting my words out there for someone else to read is an inherently vulnerable activity.  My respect for other people writing blog posts has increased dramatically since I read Brené's books and since I have tried to write my own blog posts.

Brené's books are wonderful and very readable, full of stories and clear explanations, and yet I did not find them very quotable.  I wanted to copy our a few sentences that encapsulated her argument, but I kept finding that I would need to copy out several pages for quotes from her books to make sense.  Her interview in an On Being episode gives a good overview of her main ideas from her books. These are the the quotes or ideas stood out to me again in the podcast and what they mean to me for writing.

• "Comparison kills creativity."  I think I have always known better than to compare myself with writers I consider truly great (Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, Jane Austen, etc.) but I do still struggle with comparing my writing with other "ordinary" people's writing.  Comparison never helps anything.  Feeling inadequacy does not help my creativity.  Feeling smug and superior doesn't help either.  I want to learn to appreciate writing without turning it into a measuring stick for my own.
• Writing requires courage.  It will always take courage to put something I wrote "out there" for other people to read, judge, and criticize.  It will never get easy (maybe easier, but never easy).  Anything worth writing creates a certain level of vulnerability.  Now that I know why it is so difficult, maybe I can learn to embrace the challenge and risk inherent in writing instead of trying to find a way to keep it from feeling scary. 
• What I produce does not change my value as a person. If what I wrote is terrible, I am still a valuable person.  If what I write is wonderful, it will not make me any more valuable. Brené pointed out we can't have it both ways.  It would be nice if good writing reflected me while poor writing didn't, but either both change my value or neither do.  I know my value as a person comes from the fact that the creator of the universe decided to make me.  Nothing I do can change that.  So while writing is scary, it is not so very scary as I sometimes try to make it.
• "Success is not a victory march."   Brené said that having her TED talk receive tremendous attention also meant feeling very vulnerable and having to deal with criticism and her fear of criticism.  There is never a point when success is entirely positive.  Sometimes we who dream of success imagine that it will be perfect and wonderful and painless.  In reality, however, success involves a mix of positives and negatives.  This idea makes me think of the Emily Dickinson poem Success Is Counted Sweetest.

13 of 31 Days of Blogging :: Work

Day 13 :: Work (and the end of this series)

This series is starting to feel too much like work.  So this is the end of this series.

The prompts were helpful.  I liked using them.  I just didn't pick a topic that could really keep me interested in writing.  The next few posts that I started to work on seemed too much like complaining. And in retrospect, I never figured out who my audience was.

I am going to try to remember that blogging is fun and stick to fun topics.