Dive in

"I have measured my life..."

I totally didn't post anything last week and well, uh, I guess it is what it is.

Part of me totally wants the permission to quit, although as I say that it sounds so very stupid, and then there's a small voice that says, just dive in again.

This weekend I went swimming in the lake near our house with my friend and her daughters. One of them was hesitant to go all the way in for fear of the cold. I think I told her something to the effect of, "It's not too bad, so if you're planning on coming in eventually, you may as well just get it over with so you can enjoy the rest of the time."

I'm not sure of very many things in my life, but I am sure that I love water, and that I want to be in it always.

I had one of those weeks last week where a few of the mornings I woke up to that mental tape (do you have one?) that just plays the refrain, "I suck I suck I totally suck" over and over again.

I'm still not very sure about this writing thing, or about this sharing thing, or about this life thing (sometimes). This world seems so very big, and I'm afraid it's cold, but I guess if I'm planning on being part of this eventually, maybe I may as well just get it over with and surrender, with faith, knowing that yes, it will be shocking, but that yes, it will also be wonderful.

David asked me the other day what I want to teach my kids, and I think that ultimately, I want them to know that life is very hard, but that life is also very beautiful.

The tension of living between grief and gratitude is part and parcel of being human, and the more I can embrace that, I think the better off I'll be.

--

I picked up some poetry the other day, because I think I need it to slow me down, and to deepen me. I'm married to a poet, but before I knew David I think I felt the way many people do about poetry, that it is written by anguished people and it makes those who read it anguished, too.

I love Billy Collins because of the delight he takes in poetry and his belief that poetry can be accessible. In his well-known poem, "Introduction to Poetry", he teases students for trying to "torture a confession" out of poems, and I love that.

Anyway, this one poem in his anthology, 180, made me laugh out loud this morning and I wanted to share it with you.

Did I Miss Anything?
by Tom Wayman

Nothing. When we realized you weren't here
we sat with our hands on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 percent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I'm about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 percent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring the good news to all people on earth

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human experience
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been gathered

but it was one place

And you weren't here

New-fangled

A couple of weeks ago I was really feeling the overwhelm of technology.

In the last decade since graduating from college, I'd tried to preemptively circumvent the FOMO I knew I would inevitably feel from the engagement of technology by avoiding it as much as I could. But now I feel like I'm some old fogey who, at only 31, just doesn't understand those young people.

How do I stay connected without getting swept away?

Many of you have probably pondered and ruminated over this while I've just had my head buried in the sand. So, please enlighten me. How do you:

(a) utilize technology? (Where does it help and where does it hurt?)
(b) let go of where you aren't totally plugged in?
(c) understand the role of technology in your life?

(Insert smoooooth transition.)

Here are three new-to-me "technological" things I've been enjoying:

1. Using audio messages through iMessage to leave messages that aren't urgent. It's just so much faster for me to convey what I'm trying to say without the worry of typos or an ambiguous tone. It's also much easier to send a message when I have only one hand available, which is often.

2. Facebook groups. So nifty! Yes, I just said nifty, so you can understand just how old-fashioned I am.

3. Okay, I know everyone is going to roll their eyes at me, but I've just discovered the beauty of the drive-thru at the bank. I'm one of those weirdos/extroverts who actually likes to go into the bank and talk to someone and see how they are handling my transaction. But anyway, two kids later, I've come to see the light, and this way I can still enjoy the personal interaction without having to get myself (or the kids, lbh) out of the car.

What technology are you enjoying lately? And, on the flip side, what ways are you finding to ground yourself to the "real"/natural world?

Speaking of

[Alternate title: 15 things on the 15th, (More than) a few randoms]

1. What we're eating this week:

bún / sunday night stew

2. A favorite meal from last week: Chinese-inspired beef and pork bone soup with lotus root, shiitake mushroom, goji berries, and red dates. I didn't expect at this point in my life to be cooking Asian food 80-90% of the time (and of that, mostly Chinese/Vietnamese, sorry David!), but it's one of those things where I've learned that there's way less drama at the table when we eat these foods. It's weird because I don't feel like I technically even know how to cook Asian food. (I learned it by eating, and when I learned to cook I didn't learn Asian food.) When I do feel in flow, it's cool to know that it's somehow just in my blood and also in my brain, the repetition of it hitting my taste buds on an almost-daily basis for 18 years (my mom is an amazing cook, of all different cuisines, too). I still have a LOT to learn.

3. Speaking of mothers, and in light of Mother's Day last weekend, I found something I made twenty years ago.

When I called her to show her, she laughed and said, "Why do you have this and not me?"

4. Re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird... 'nuff said.

5. My pattern of thin slices of joy is: time with people, sunshine, good food/drink, thifting, good conversation.

5b. We had a picnic on the deck this Saturday and we realized our meals are especially happy when they are a hybrid between take-out and home-made. This was pizza and steak, and the day before we brought over take-out roast duck and chicken wings with home-made cabbage, salad, and rice to a family's move.

Not pictured: me taking the photo, Theo searching for worms 

6. Speaking of slimy things, I've successfully brewed my first really good batch of kombucha. Let a sista know if you'd like a SCOBY!

7. This simple matchstick solution has been bringing me disproportionate amounts of joy. I've made three or four of them already out of old votive holders or baby food jars and I can't get over how amazing it is.

We have been loving candles here... I don't know why it took me so long to realize that candles can take a day from gloomy to cozy! Tip: TJMaxx seems to have a great selection and for cheap.

8. Speaking of making the storage of things look pretty, I've been trying to do a lot of that in the house lately. Last-year-me dismissed the Nate Berkuss method of taking the labels off of things, but this-year-me is all about this. A friend was telling me about a family member who will only accept wooden toys in her house, which led her to call them, jokingly, "high-end granola." I laughed, but then later I was, like, that's what I want to be! (Insert thinking emoji.) When I told David that story, he said, "granola is expensive!" Indeed, it is.

9. Speaking of granola, I need to make a batch. Molly's No. 5 is the best, but I need to leave out nuts for the baby, so I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do yet. Even if I hadn't mention #8 above, I've been thinking about granola and other breakfast items because I need more breakfast ideas. I've been avoiding eggs and also nuts, so my protein choices feel limited. We've been eating more sausage for breakfast but I need a little more variety so I've been thinking about prepping grain bowls (like this) or other savory meals (like this) that I can have in the AM - essentially, eating lunch or dinner for breakfast. If anyone has ideas for non-sweet breakfasts that don't involve eggs, I'm all ears!

10. Speaking of oats, have you ever had baked oatmeal? It was better than expected. One person called it the bread pudding of oatmeal, and I know not everyone likes bread pudding, but thinking about it that way made me like this even more.

11. An inspiring typography video of Ira Glass that could be applied to any creative endeavor / learning curve.

12. Princess Kate + vulnerability + social media + mental health awareness

13. A sweet home tour of a blogger I've been following for a while.

14. Speaking of homes, I'm taking The Nester's decorating class right now and my head is buzzing with ideas. It's hard to slow down and know that this just takes time.

15. David and I had a great conversation about rest, quality over quantity, spiritual wealth, and contentedness. What rhythms help you (and your families, if applicable) balance achievement and rest?

A life well-lived

I'm re-reading Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak, which I haven't read in more than a decade. (Remember when I talked about vocation/vacation?) I have to say, it's really speaking to me this time.

Have you ever read a book at just the right time, where you find yourself nodding along to every single sentence in every single paragraph?

I had to stop to breathe and then wipe away tears after reading this paragraph:

"Vocation at its deepest level is not, 'Oh boy, do I want to go to this strange place where I have to learn a new way to live and where no one, including me, understands what I'm doing.' Vocation at its deepest level is, 'This is something I can't not do, for reasons I'm unable to explain to anyone else and don't fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling'" (Palmer, 25).

I'm really resonating with the tension between the ego and the true-self. Am I living the life I am meant to live? Of course, there are very valid reasons we run away from our calling, and there are so many (SO many) conflicting messages from all directions (within and without) as to what is a life well-lived.

I'm comforted by the fact that even Palmer went through darkness and shadows, which he believes are integral in the journey towards selfhood, and that he wanted to share with us what he felt few elders were willing to talk to him about when he was in his twenties and thirties.

I could go on and on, and really, the whole thing is just so evocative I am tempted to cut and paste the entire book to my blog, but alas.

Oh, to be a Quaker!

Finally, this whole divine/human interface is making me feel very confused and like it's time for a cheeseburger.

One hundred

Here are my "thin slices of joy" from the last week:

1 | visiting with an old friend from out of town (Hi Molly!)
2 | eating homemade whole wheat chocolate chip muffins with the kids on the front deck for a breakfast picnic; having dinner with neighbors
3 | aforementioned neighbors giving us two perfect kid-sized chairs {and the day before a different neighbor walked over and offered to give us her old electric trimmer because she saw David cutting some hedges manually and she didn't need hers anymore}
4 | fun playdate with an old friend from work; sunshine and two boys playing really well together in the dirt for hours
5 | painting Theo's room; also, watching Theo pluck basil for his pizza

Pro tip: get a cup of chopped onions from the hot dog condiments area the next time you order a Costco pizza.

6 | the tulip festival! and ice cream cones the size of our heads!

mud puddles > tulips

7 | sunbathing during naptime; dinner on the deck with a friend whose husband also had to work on Sunday; watching one 11-month-old take a nice mud bath

And here's our menu for the week:

This is my 100th published post! I'm still not sure what this blog is, but I'm glad I'm doing it. I suppose, then, that this is a good reminder that it takes a lot of doing to get somewhere. And that the more you do, the less pressure there is on each instance of doing.

I read somewhere that instead of thinking "One day..." you can say instead "Day One." I like that fresh and hope-filled vision. Instead of thinking "One day, I'm going to live a creative life," I have the choice to say, "This is Day One (or Day Two, Three, or Ten Thousand) of living a creative life." Thanks for following along!

Fearless

I love how these boots make her look like a fishmonger.

It’s such a wild exercise to pay attention to everything my kids are doing as they grow and develop. I worry sometimes that “blog summaries” of them oversimplify their personhood into bulleted lists, but for now, this is still better than not writing anything.

Before I picked up blogging again with regularity, I was only remembering to capture things here and there, and it really felt like a chore. Now I’m a bit quicker to jot something down in my Notes app.

Knowing that my collections are headed somewhere (and that you all really seem to like these! Especially you, Molly, it’s your lucky week!) makes it feel even more worthwhile.

And I know that in 20 years (or even just next year) I’ll be really grateful I did that. (Ha, I just used the word grateful and it didn’t make me gag. Maybe it’s because I’m being grateful to myself, not to some vague Other.)

Oh, you didn't know that monkeys are marsupials?

So, without further ado, a little update on Emilyn.

She started walking just shortly before our trip to Virginia, so I’d say that was right around the beginning of April, after she turned 15 months. (Is this so classic second child, that I don’t have the exact day written down?)

Theo was walking just after his first birthday, but nobody was worried about anything with Emilyn. Nonetheless, I am so happy that the days are here now that I can take her more easily to the playground and know that she’s not just going to shred up her pants from crawling.

I didn’t entirely wait for her to be fully walking before letting her play outside with Brother, though. For the last probably two months, I threw her out and let her get dirty in the mud and grass in the yard. (Though we’re still having to constantly tell her “don’t put nature in your mouth.”)

Speaking of playgrounds, she is FEARLESS. She discovered the slides, and she will climb up and go down, multiple times. Even if it knocks the wind out of her, she is almost always grinning from ear to ear and ready to do it again. She loves to try to climb up the slides backwards as well.

She still loves to tickle people’s feet, all while jibber-jabbering the phrase “ticke ticke ticke” which means “tickle tickle tickle” if you didn’t catch that.

In general, she talks like R2D2. It’s hilarious when she opens a book and “reads.”

Speaking of Star Wars, doesn't she looks like some SW princess wearing my puffy vest? (And May the Fourth be with you!)

The funniest thing she started doing this last month is squinting her eyes at us. Technically, she thinks she is blinking. She did this after seeing David’s dad putting in eye drops, and blinking to get the excess out. As soon as she saw him do it, she closed her eyes like a squint and got laughs out of all of us.

It almost looked as though she was trying to close her eyes while simultaneously watching to see if we were watching her. That’s what made it look like a squint.

And so obviously now that she knows it bowls us over with laughter, she keeps it in her back pocket to lighten the mood.

It looks a little like this.

She continues to have the utmost patience for Theo, but she can be more stubborn with me, David, or even Kathy.

One day I told her, “You’re so easy, until you’re not.”

Other names I call her besides Emily: Emi,  Emi-baby, Dolly / Dolly Pie (mostly when I wake her up), Sister, Sissy Missy, Miss E, Princess Emilyn.

We look at her and wonder, How can you be so smart for someone who has lived on this earth for little more than 1 year?

It’s this crazy mixture of her being a second-born and a girl that makes her incredibly quick and it constantly surprises me how much she knows and understands. I’m always like, “who taught you that?” Ohhhhh.

She often stays near people / conversation / food, whereas Theo may run off to bigger and better things. (Read: monster trucks.)

Both of them love to dance, but she dances like an old man: both feet flat on the ground, hand on tummy, and swaying to the music with her shoulders. If the song is faster, she may bend her knees to bounce. She gets a glimmer in her eyes when she is excited.

Says: mama, dada, hi, bye, ball, doggie (duck-ga), nuh-nuh (for nuna/Kathy); I think she calls Theo “da”; I’m really trying to get her to not just go “ehh ehh” while waving her hands towards anything she wants. Sigh.

Signs: please (by rubbing her protruding tummy, lol), milk, all done, sister, brother, banana, avocado (we googled and learned “sausage” this week which was funny; she did her best to repeat it)

Loves: singing, dancing, blowing kisses

Firsts: being put to bed by David while I went out to dinner with a friend (she kept saying “my mama, mama, me mama” and signing for nursing/milk, but she did eventually go down without a fuss)

Thin slices of joy

If you may recall from my can-it-just-be-spring-already? goals list, one of the things I committed to do was to keep track of moments of joy in every day. My friend Stephanie commented on that post and left a link to an article about a Google engineer who has taught people to use the tools of mindfulness to find "thin slices of joy" in their days. I thought that was helpful language, and even the image of that (i.e., those "thin slices") gives me joy.

After publishing that post, I had the idea to use the monthly view on my (paper) calendar to keep track of the moment (or moments) of joy in each square. There was something satisfying about using a calendar as a to-done list more than a to-do, and incidentally it makes it easy to report here on my blog what my thin slices of joy were for the remainder of April since writing that post.

19 | the sweetest puppies ever befriended me, Theo, and Emilyn at the park
20 | good and open conversation; going antiquing downtown (we had randomly decided to go that day, and discovered when we got there that they were suppose to close by the time we arrived, but there happened to be a special event that day that meant they were open later than usual!)

The universe sent me a message at the antique store.

21 | a crazy sunny day which led to a picnic and basketball game with extended family
22 | a neighbor walking across the street to introduce herself when I was out on a walk because she's seen me walking for years

Also from April 22: the color of Thai banana contrasted against chia seed pudding. (Should I just title this post thin slices of yellow/sunshine/happiness?)

23 | working on a blog post that made me excited; cooking ginger chicken and a new Viet soup that I knew Kathy would really enjoy
24 | sunshine (again!); getting to bring dinner over to a neighbor's and eat together
25 | the coconut popsicles from my postscript were really delicious
26 | thrifting and finding awesome books I actually wanted; great dinner/conversation with a friend; listening to a very good podcast
27 | sunshine (yet again!)
28 | playing outside with the kids with my new Bluetooth speakers (why didn't I get these earlier?!) projecting Renee & Jeremy (but alas, also the day I felt dumb trying to figure out Stories on Instagram, thank you slai for trying to make me feel better); providing a recipe and all the ingredients for my sis-in-law to make dinner at her home, which her family ended up loving*

(*If you haven't made sheet pan chicken yet, you are really missing out. Seriously, unless you're a vegetarian or you're allergic to delicious food, you should not be living one more day without this in your life. Sorry to be so bossy. I really need to stop over-selling it and risk you being disappointed. Like, maybe I should change the title of the post to "It's just rice and chicken, nbd.")

29 | conversation with a friend
30 | surprising a friend with a chai at church without even knowing she had forgotten to make her tea that morning (!); going to the Indian buffet by myself (Butter Chicken for President!)

The weird (but perhaps not really that weird) thing is that after I decided to do this whole thin slices of joy thing, my days actually did get better. Even the weather got (incrementally) better. Yes, three sunny days out of 12 is not that great, but I noticed - and savored - those brighter days.

The real trick will be whether this will work in the dead of winter... so friends, if I feel crummy in the winter of 2017/2018, please ask me if I'm doing this still, and remind me to go visit my in-laws to get a break. (I can just go back to the mountain top, right, Marla?)

Anyway, I'm definitely keeping up in May and I invite you to join along!

And now here's this week's menu:

Chicken curry. Do it. 

YOU GUYS. Posting this menu was my TENTH TIME doing a weekly menu plan and sharing it. Can I just pat myself on the back here? I am so darn proud of myself.

P.S. Let it be known that when I left my computer and came back, David had changed my notes to: thin slices of joy pork belly

P.P.S. My friend Kayla texted me this article about self-care vs. "resourcing" and of course I loved it because the author talks about the function and efficacy of word choice, and while neither Kayla nor I personally resonated with her specific choice of "resourcing," I did enjoy the resourcefulness of her choosing a word that helped her focus on self-care more easily. (This is all in reference to my preferring to think about what I'm "thankful" for vs. what I'm "grateful" for.)