The Curriculum of Love

No More To Do Lists

2012-02-18T21:08:00.002-08:00

I am living without To Do Lists.

Why? How? Say, What?

Those are some of the reactions I've had when I've told folks that I've tossed the To Do List.

Well, Why:

To Do Lists were adding to my general anxiety level. I couldn't turn off the mental To Do List, and I was obsessively keeping lists that were getting ridiculously long. So - if you have a simple and under-control To Do List, you probably don't need to chuck it. But mine was not a simple tool, but rather coming close to an obsession.

How:

1. Routines. If you always empty out your inbox on Tuesdays, you don't have to put it on a list to remember to do it.

2. Do It Now. If you have something come up, just do it now so you don't have to put it on a list to do later. Answer that email now, make that phone call right away, etc.

3. Stage. Want to return that book to the library? Set it by the front door. Same with drycleaning, etc.

4. Send yourself a memo. So sometimes you can't do it right away. Rather than making a list (that I keep thinking about), I'm sending myself memos. An email, a post-it note where I will see it, or even a voice mail to myself. Once the memo is sent off, I stop thinking about it until I get to the routine time of going through my email/voicemail, or I encounter that post-it note to myself.

Say, What?

I'm not a radical anti-list activist. I still have lists: grocery lists, invitation lists, birthday lists. But I'm finding that the To Do List is not an essential tool. In fact, I was worried that I would start forgetting to do things, become sloppy, and unreliable. It hasn't really happened yet. I think I'm just as organized and efficient as before, or maybe even a bit better. And I'm doing it without a list. So when I'm done, I'm done. I'm not thinking about that list all the time.

Checking in on my New Year's Goals

2012-02-17T08:35:00.000-08:00

Signs of Spring are popping up here. I've just spent 30 Days focusing on Love on my blog, but there are, of course, lots of other things happening too. And it's been about a month and a half since my New Year's Goals - how am I doing?

The ultimate goal I have for myself is to Be Here Now. How present am I in my own life?

I also had five subgoals, to help me be more present:

Morning Yoga
Real Food
Read More Real Books
Enjoy Each Moment - Turn off the To Do Lists
Less Multi-Tasking

1. I am not doing the morning yoga. If I could make myself wake up and get up even 30 minutes earlier, I could do it. So that's something to think about. If it's important, why won't I roll out of bed and do it? Maybe I should try to go to sleep earlier - except that late at night is the only quiet work time I get. Hmmmm.

2. I'm doing pretty well with the Real Food. Hopefully it will get even better as we move into the Fresh Food Seasons.

3. And I am reading more real books, and spending less time just reading the Digest version online. Of course, the books that I'm reading are all required reading for the RE Credentialing program, but they're still Real Books.

4. Turn Off the To Do Lists has actually been the most revolutionary notion. I am not keeping a To Do List! More about that tomorrow.

5. Less Multitasking is also doing OK. It turns out that it's more efficient to just focus on one task at a time and get it done quickly, rather than spin about like a distracted dervish. It's almost like meditation - if a thought arises that is not applicable to the task at hand, gently set it aside. If I'm working on the computer, I gently set it aside by shooting myself an email. If I'm elsewhere, I either put a voice memo to myself on my phone or write it on a post-it note. But I don't try to deal with it before I've finished the task at hand. And if Life (aka My Children) is just not letting me focus right now, it's better to stop, switch gears, and then come back later than it is to keep trying to multi-task.

So, overall I'm working on my goals still. Don't get me wrong - I'm overwhelmed and overworked right now, and I've taken too much on and it's not good for my mental health. But even while drowning, I am pretty present in the process of my day to day life. I wish I was present for a bit more peacefulness, and not so much stress and overwork, but nonetheless I'm staying pretty present to it.

I Know This Rose Will Open

2012-02-16T08:03:00.000-08:00

I got this single rose for Valentine's Day, and I put it in the vase and just absent-mindedly set it above my kitchen sink. The next day, this image struck me - the rose, something special, right there amidst my everyday mundane. The kitchen sink, a place I stand at least three times a day, is not a glamorous or lovely place. But it's a good place, a part of my life's simple being.

I'm also reminded of that hymn:

I know this rose will open

I know my fears will burn away.

I know my soul will unfurl its wings.

I know this rose will open.

Happy Valentine's Day (belated)

2012-02-15T07:51:00.000-08:00

Happy Valentine's Day, in whatever way you celebrated it. Valentine's Day marks the end of the 30 Days of Love project that I've been blogging along to, and it's time to reflect on what the last 30 Days have meant to me.

It's been wonderful to keep the big picture in front of myself, by focusing on Love with a capitol "L". It's a lot easier to not sweat the small stuff when you are looking out with this perspective.
Love is a verb. It's a call to action. It's not something you just have, or get - it's an obligation that flows through us from the source of life, through our hearts, and then back out to the interdependent web of life.
We are all connected. We are all, ultimately, on human family. What increases the good for others, increases the good for me as well. And the reverse is true.
But Love as a feeling isn't enough. Yesterday I put on the Beetles song, "All You Need is Love", and my daughter was listening to that said "It's not true! You need food and stuff too!". True - Love is not enough if our other basic needs are not met. Love calls us to meet those other needs, for ourselves and others.

30 Days of Love, Day 29

2012-02-13T08:32:00.001-08:00

29! I can't believe this is almost over. It's been a lovely focus for me this last month, to blog about LOVE more than anything else. And I am Standing on the Side of Love.

the ministry of administration

2012-02-12T19:30:00.000-08:00

I just spent this weekend at a Renaissance Module (the continuing education trainings for UU Religious Educators) dedicated to Administration. I got some good ideas, some affirmations of things I'm already doing, some pushing to work on my growth edges - but most of all I got to be with colleagues. These are good people who do this work, and this is work that I love. I am blessed.

30 Days of Love, Day 24

2012-02-09T21:04:00.000-08:00

"One word frees us of all the weight and pain in life. That word is love."

Sophocles

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage licence. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples.
― Retired Judge Vaughn Walker, ruling Prop. 8 unconstitutional

Speak Out for LGBT Equality

Post your favorite social justice/love quote in your Facebook status or Twitter update.

We dedicate this 30 Days of Love action to the struggle for justice and equality for LGBT people, and have pulled some quotes related to LGBT justice you can share via Facebook or Twitter.

Please add your own as well!

Ending marriage discrimination is just one element of our LGBT justice movement, but it is one that inspires great passion, since it focuses on love, commitment, and equality under the law.

So let’s amplify this decision by imparting why it speaks to our highest of ideals.

“No gov’t has the right to tell its citizens when or whom to love. The only queer people are those who don’t love anybody.” ~Rita Mae Brownocles

It's a great Day for Love. Washington State has passed a marriage equality law, which our governor will sign. Opponents may be planning a voter referendum, but it's still a great and exciting thing now.

The Prop 8 ruling that upholds its unconstitutional nature is also a great thing.

Love, people. How can we stand in the way of Love? No - we are Standing on the Side of Love.

It's Sweater Day!

2012-02-09T08:15:00.000-08:00

To save a bit of energy and help our Mother Earth, today we are asked to all Turn Down the Heat - and instead Put On a Sweater!

There's a really cute website from the World Wildlife Fund for National Sweater Day.

Are you wearing a sweater?

A Book and a Craft

2012-02-09T00:02:00.000-08:00

The PaperBag Princess has been a great launching point for lots of fun in my Storytellers class at church. Paper Bag costumes, paper bag puppets - so much fun!

30 Days of Love, Day 23

2012-02-07T19:28:00.000-08:00

(my daughter, just because it's a cute picture)

In anticipation of Valentine's Day, why not send a card with a purpose? Send a Valentine to a Hero/Heroine of Love. I'd suggest that we might all want to send Valentine's to our legislators, and thank them/encourage them for standing up for marriage equality.

You can download and print a Standing on the Side of Love card template here.

My homemade Valentines from a past year.

Last year's "All Part of the Human Heart" from our Valentine's Day service at church.

30 Days of Love, Day 22

2012-02-06T08:33:00.000-08:00

Here is today's prompt from 30 Days of Love:

Dear Sara,

Prayers can take different forms. They can be addressed to a deity, an idea, for guidance, or simply to express your thoughts or emotions.

Today, I hope that you will consider writing a prayer, meditation, or mantra of your own, to start off this week’s National Standing on the Side of Love Month theme: Spread the Love.

Here is my prayer:

Spirit which connects all of existence, which I call Love,

may you be felt and heard and carried in hearts everywhere.

May every child feel cherished, safe, seen, and heard,

May every person know they are enough, just as they are,

May every elder feel respected and appreciated, and still wanted.

May the world itself, our Mother Earth, be cherished and sustained in love.

May compassion and peace unite us as one human family,

And may every heart sing a song of love.

A Tea Party

2012-02-04T22:22:00.000-08:00

The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?"
"Come, we shall have some fun now!" thought Alice. "I'm glad they've begun asking riddles. — I believe I can guess that," she added aloud.
"Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?" said the March Hare.
"Exactly so," said Alice.
"Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on.
"I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know."
"Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!"
"You might just as well say," added the March Hare, "that 'I like what I get' is the same thing as 'I get what I like'!"
"You might just as well say," added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, "that 'I breathe when I sleep' is the same thing as 'I sleep when I breathe'!"
(Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 7)

Early Art

2012-02-03T22:58:00.000-08:00

The earliest human art has been inspiring some art from my kids:

Besides gorgeous art books full of big pictures, we also have enjoyed:

The Secret Cave

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

and a Virtual Tour of Lascaux I found.

We did a lesson about cave paintings at church, for the exploration of earth-based faiths one class is doing, and for that lesson I had the kids paint inside cardboard boxes by flashlight - that was a huge hit. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me that day.

2012-02-02T23:12:00.001-08:00

So if I wanted to keep following the 30 Days of Love schedule, I'd need to post about the Secure Communities act and immigration justice today - and that would be a good thing to post about. The youth group at my church has been exploring this issue, and they have been blown away by hearing from activists, immigrants, and through watching some powerful documentary films (they liked Mojados).

But, I'm a bit more excited about some other things today, which are also all about Love for me. One is that we're preparing for my daughter's 6th birthday, and she wanted an Alice in Wonderland party. So I've made her a "Princess of Hearts" (because she doesn't want to be the Queen, but rather the "younger girl who will someday be the Queen") dress with fabric and pattern that she picked out, and for my son I created a Mad Hatter hat (hot glued fabric and flowers and ribbon onto a St. Patrick's Day cardboard hat). They are soooo excited for this party.

And .... last night the state senate voted to approve the legalization of same-sex marriage in our state! Some of my friends went down to attend the Senate session (with their kids) and said the mood there was just jubilant. One of our Community Ministers popped into my office today at church to show me the hand-made Valentine's that another area UU church's children had made for the legislators, and she was about to go hand deliver to each office. The kids had cut hearts in half, glued them on the paper, and written "don't keep people apart" in between the two halves of the hearts. It was quite touching, and I hope those legislators appreciated getting them!

So I'm feeling like today is a Great Day for Love.

30 Days of Love, Day 17

2012-02-01T22:27:00.000-08:00

Today's prompt from Standing on the Side of Love:

Combating bullying is not simple, and has no easy fix. Bullying-related suicides, especially of LGBT-identified young people, have been prominent in the news cycles over the past couple of years.

I’m sure you know some of the oft-repeated statistics:

Suicide is the third leading cause of death among 15 to 24-year-olds
LGBT youth are up to four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers.
Nine out of 10 LGBT students report experiencing harassment at school
Of course, bullying affects far more than just LGBT-identified young people. There are now increasing reports of Latino/a youth and Muslim youth being targeted. And sadly, many of us may have experienced bullying for a whole host of reasons, both as youngsters and as adults.

Our society's culture of bullying is a plague that has taken hold in our nation’s schools and finds its roots at the very seat of power—just look at some of the political campaign rhetoric.

So what can we do about bullying? Honestly, I think bullying is partly a phenomenon of over-crowded schools with over-burdened teachers and administrators, and a culture of competition rather than cooperation.

And it seems that one of the simplest ways to overcome the bully-mentality is the technique of cooperative learning. Why this is surprising - you assign diverse groups of kids to have to work together and collaborate to solve a common problem and they bond and come together - it really shouldn't be surprising. If we, as a society, cooperated a bit more and competed a bit less it would be a good thing.

Bullying is not a joke. And it's not OK. We, as a culture, need to make that clear.

30 Days of Love, Belated Day 16

2012-02-01T19:43:00.000-08:00

Turn the Tide on Anti-LGBT Constitutional AmendmentsBoth Minnesota and North Carolina face ballot measures this year that attempt to enshrine anti-LGBT bigotry into state constitutions. We must put an end to the era of constitutional queer-bashing! Wherever you are in the country, sign up today to phone bank in the coming days or weeks to help beat back anti-LGBT initiatives in North Carolina and Minnesota. You can join in phone banking here.

But here in my state, we've got really good developments, and are waiting with baited breath as our state senate is debating legislation to legalize same-sex marriage. Fingers crossed!

30 Days of Love, Day 15

2012-01-30T09:19:00.000-08:00

There is Enough.

Getting Real With Food

2012-01-27T12:17:00.000-08:00

I'm still trying to be more engaged in the whole process of feeding my family, and I'm enjoying the results.

Baking

If you bake, you need never miss out on treats, even if you get snowed in for a week. You save money over both packaged baked goods and fresh bakery stuff, and you can make it healthier as well. Since we are gluten-free, baking for ourselves makes even more sense. Loaves of bread, a batch of peanut butter brownies, some blueberry muffins, some snickerdoodle cookies, a loaf of banana bread - all of that has come out of my kitchen in the last two weeks, and it hasn't been that big a deal, time-wise. It is using up our chicken eggs a lot faster than we were before, but if I just wait a couple days the chickens will have replenished our supply.

Rice and Beans

Rice and beans is not actually boring! Turns out there tons of ways to play with it and make it fun, and you can add in almost anything you have on hand. Hardboiled eggs? Sure. Cheese? Yummy. Frozen vegetables? Yes please. Roasted root vegetables? Yep. Sauteed peppers? Delicious. Canned mushrooms? Sure thing. The only thing I haven't tried is adding anything pickled, and I think I will avoid that experiment - but otherwise it's been a great game. And when the power was out and we were snowed in, with my big bags of dried beans and rice I had no worries that my family would go hungry. We've had red beans and rice, chickpeas and yellow rice, and more. And if there's any left the next day, the kids love it fried into little pancake fritters for breakfast.

Soup

There's nothing like a pot of soup, and it's another great way to use whatever you have on hand. If you are feeding a bunch of vegetarians and meat-eaters together, you can make it veggie and serve the meat on the side to just add as desired. If you are serving kids and adults together you can make it mild and serve hot sauce on the side. And it stretches, so you can just add a bit more stock and water to make more soup if you are feeding a crowd. It freezes too, so make a big batch and then save some for later. Serve it with a loaf of fresh bread and you have a warming and satisfying meal. We've had squash soup, potato soup, cauliflower soup, white chili (veggie with shredded chicken on the side), black bean and potato, and lentil pasta soup in the past few weeks.

Snacks

I've been making my own "snack mix" and putting it out in large rubbermaids for my family's consumption. This isn't really "from scratch", but I do like making my own mix so I can pick gluten-free pretzels, cereal, dried fruit, nuts, and other bits we like. If I'm feeling really rice, I'll throw some M & M's into the mix - but we've also enjoyed candy-coated sunflower seeds and honey roasted peanuts as the sweet bits of the mix. With bulk bags in the cupboard, I'm in control of what and how much goes into the snack mix bucket, and then I just let them go ahead and eat that when they want a snack.

Breakfast

Is the most important meal of the day, but also the hardest to do right if you're in a hurry to get out the door. There's more options than just cereal: baked mochi, hardboiled eggs (do the night before), homemade baked goods (the night before) and butter or jam, fried rice, polenta and cheese, oatmeal, protein smoothies, just to name a few.

It feels good to keep it Real, and it sure was nice during the storm to feel like I could deal with food and not panic.

30 Days of Love, Day 11

2012-01-26T20:34:00.000-08:00

Today’s community question: How do you imagine we can make a difference in the world through standing of the side of love?

I don't know how to change the world. All I really know is that I can change, and that when I change my little circle of influence will be changed. And when my little circle changes, all the circles that are touched by anyone in my circle might, just might, also be changed. And so it will go, rippling on.

Yes, there are watershed moments, important landmarks, and pivotal figures in the history of the world. But there were also a whole lot of people who just gradually shifted their perceptions, their opinions, and started to live their lives a bit differently.

I dream of a world in which the inherent dignity of every being who has been blessed with the gift of life is respected, and no life is treated like an object and not a blessed being in its own right. I dream of a world in which the basic task of life - to grow and be happy, to be the unique being each was born as - is allowed to blossom and no one is shamed or abused or oppressed. I dream of a world where we give value to the freedom of the individual to be who they are and to do what they love, while also recognizing our interdependence and our duty to a good greater than ourselves.

Can that dream be achieved simply through Standing on the Side of Love? Can consistently treating others with dignity and showing up to defend the rights of all change the world? Can acting to care for others and accepting them for who they are while also encouraging their growth change the world? Can treating all life with compassion change the world?

I really hope so.

Naked Eggs

2012-01-26T07:35:00.000-08:00

30 Days of Love, Day 10

2012-01-25T11:00:00.000-08:00

Lift up a Story of Courageous Love

When was the last time you recognized those whose words and deeds exemplify the values of inclusion, diversity, community, and equality? Now is an ideal time to honor your hero, whether it’s someone famous, someone in your congregation or family, or a local community partner.

This is a hard prompt. I am inspired by so many folks: my mother, the ministers who serve my congregation, my fellow-DRE's in this area and those I only know through their work, the many passionate volunteers and advocates who attend my congregation, and the community figures I know who work on so many worthy dreams. And that doesn't even take into account the authors, international figures, and historical figures that inspire me through their work and the love they have brought to the world.

To pick one person seems impossible to me, so I am going to share the story of an amalgam I will call The Dreamer (who is not me, but a combination of people I know).

The Dreamer was born into fairly mainstream American family, and comes from a middle-class family of European background. The Dreamer then gradually started to form their own opinions in adolescence, and although they dearly love their family-of-origin, they don't have the same values and beliefs anymore. College then really changed The Dreamer, and they found their Dream and became passionate about changing the world.

That was all fine and good in college, but after graduation the family says "Ok, now what are you really going to do to make a good income? It's time to cut your hair and get a real job, son/daughter."

But The Dreamer had a DREAM, not a career-plan. So The Dreamer took a low-paying job as an advocate/social worker/librarian/government agency-worker/organic farmer and/or went on to get a completely impractical graduate degree. Their family sighed and worried, but hoped they would grow out of it.

The Dreamer met many other dreamers, and went to live in an Intentional Community/married-partnered another dreamer/got a bunch of really awesome Housemates and found a community outside college that supported dreaming. But it was hard, and many of the dreamers struggled with giving up on their dreams or feeling that it was hopeless - no change would ever really happen and in the meantime you can't afford health insurance.

The Dreamer got older/had children/bought a house and now their family and others they knew expected them to finally give up on this dream and go get that real job. They couldn't afford the things their family could afford, and they were offered hand-outs so they could go to Family Reunions that would be held at expensive resorts or so they could go to the same restaurant for dinner with everyone else.

These things bother The Dreamer, but he/she cannot/will not give up on their Dream, and so they keep on staying home with their kids/working at low wages for an organization they believe in/struggling to be self-employed and build their own business/or working a day-job to pay the bills while doing their real love at the same time.

Ask not what the world needs, but rather what you love, for what the world really needs is more people doing what they love.

The Reading Life

2012-01-25T09:19:00.000-08:00

Reading, reading reading! A great activity for a Snow Week Without Electricity.

When the power was on, the kids still enjoyed their audiobooks.

The Children of Green Knowe, which Carbon has listened to dozens of times, finally made it's way into Hypatia's room and she listened to it by herself. We all adore the magical Green Knowe series, with its gentle magic, sense of place and history, and lyrical use of language.

She also enjoyed The London Eye Mystery by herself. I didn't listen to it, so I can't really say much about it, except that Hypatia liked it.

Meanwhile, Carbon repeatedly listened to The Penderwicks on Gardham Street. That is another book series that we adore, full of Family and Love.

He also listened to Darth Paper Strikes Back, so there have been a lot of Darth Paper puppets around here.

For reading aloud, we enjoyed these books a great deal:

The Twins' Blanket is a charming story of siblings that have to share, and how they get big enough to each need one of their own - but how to fairly split the old blanket in two?

Bink and Gollie are friends, in the best tradition of the Odd Couple (think Frog and Toad).

Where's Walrus? is a wordless book about a walrus who wanders out of the zoo, and he hides out in some pretty funny places.

Alice and Greta are a good witch and a not-good witch, in this story that emphasizes that what you cast into the world will end up coming back to you.

Hooray for Amanda and Her Alligator! If you find your best friend in the Bargain Bin, I would hope that they would be as wonderful as Amanda's best friend, her stuffed Alligator. This is a thoroughly charming story of friendship.

Books we read but I don't rate very highly:

Puss in Cowboy Boots. It was fun to adopt the cowboy accent for the whole book, but otherwise it's not very good.

Sophie the Sapphire Fairy is one of the Rainbow Fairy books, and as much as Hypatia loves those I just can't enjoy reading them out loud.

30 Days of Love, Day 9

2012-01-24T19:01:00.000-08:00

TODAY’S REFLECTIONS:

What is your local community struggling with?
How has the economic crisis affected your congregation and community?
How have you and/or your congregation been impacted by what you have witnessed these past months in your community, and what have you done in response?
How is your congregation standing on the side of love?

The past months, and the rise of the Occupy Movement, have been both inspiring and worrying. It was inspiring to see folks bringing attention to economic disparity and inequity. It was worrying to see the out-of-proportion response that so many municipalities and police departments gave to the Occupiers.

My local community is deeply affected by the fact that we are a State Capitol, and much of our local economy is affected by the state budget. The budget shortfalls, that are common to so many governments, hit us really hard as many people in the community have been given furloughs, deductions in pay, frozen pay, or have been laid off. When programs are slashed or cut, not only do the clients suffer, but the whole local economy suffers. Our congregation definitely is suffering as the state workers are suffering economically.

The recent Occupy activity in our town also highlighted, yet again, the homeless folks who are not adequately cared for. In the final surveys of who was left in the Occupy camp before the State Troopers enclosed it and cleared it out, many residents reported that they were homeless and appreciated the community they gained in the camp.

The congregation I serve Stands on the Side of Love in many ways, but part of our Mission is to "work to end poverty" and we have many projects to aid the homeless members of our community. We house a shelter for families with children on our property, and we are active supporters of a homeless tent city for adults that rotates among churches in our community. We also house an emergency overflow shelter in our church building several times a year (another project that rotates to different churches within the larger community). Our minister is active in working to end homelessness, and his vision and passion, along with that of others in our community, carries us forward in this work.

While the Occupy camp was active in town, we were active in supporting it, and our Minister was one of the interfaith Witnesses who first met with the State Troopers and officials and then later stood in witness to the process of clearing out the camp, thereby most-likely helping to reduce possible violence. We had one of the more peaceful shut-downs of an Occupy camp from around the country.

It's always just a step in the right direction, but we are taking steps, and more steps, and then more. We would be a hummingbird, in the words of the inspiring story by Wangari Maathai.

Snow Science

2012-01-24T08:03:00.000-08:00

First Day of the Semester

2012-01-23T17:50:00.000-08:00

For the first time in years, I am back in school. :) This is my first experience with a semester, as well. But of course, it's all online, so I'm not going anywhere.

Want to guess what class I'm taking?

30 Days of Love, Day 8

2012-01-23T17:43:00.000-08:00

This week the 30 Days of Love moves from focusing on individual self-reflection into community reflection. Here is the focus for the week:

Jan 23 – 28, 2012

DescriptionBy telling a “story of us” you can communicate values that can inspire others to act together by identifying with each other, not only with you. Just as with a story of self, the key choice points in the life of a community – its founding, crises it has faced, or other events that everyone remembers - are moments that express the values shared. Consider stories that members of your congregation or group have shared, especially those that held similar meaning for all of you. The key is to focus on telling a specific story about specific people at a specific time that can remind everyone – or call to everyone’s attention – values that you share. Telling a good story of us requires the courage of empathy – to consider the experience of others deeply enough to take a chance on articulating that experience.

Today’s community questions:

What are your unique identities? Do you fall outside your perceptions of who the Standing on the Side of Love community is?
What inspires you about our community? Why are you involved with Standing on the Side of Love and/or UUism? What does the Standing on the Side of Love campaign mean to you?

Speaking about the UU congregation that I serve, and only have as a comparison other Puget Sound area congregations I've attended and my experience of the national UU movement at trainings and conventions, I would say that my congregation is a pretty "normal" UU congregation. There is a high number of hybrid cars in our parking lot, and those who have actually gone to all electric are lauded and envied. We are mostly of European decent, seem to mostly work in government (but that is our town in general), and I don't know the exact median age but I would estimate it's in the 50's-60's.

We are also military families, prior-service military, and veterans, in much higher numbers than one might expect. This fact was highlighted for me because our last ministerial intern was working toward becoming a Navy Chaplain, so naturally much of her work with us was around how to care for military personnel and re-integrate veterans into our society, community, congregations, and families. Of the five person staff, three of us have military experience. That may be surprising and different for a UU congregation, and part of the Standing on the Side of Love community. However, the work that we have done with supporting area Coffee Houses for military personnel, by working with a chaplain candidate (and how much I think we need UU, agnostic, atheist, and humanist chaplains!), and by seeking to welcome home and re-embrace veterans, is work that I perceive as still being Standing on the Side of Love.

I first encountered the Standing on the Side of Love campaign at the General Assembly in Salt Lake City, and I was immediately inspired by the positive stance of the campaign and by how I perceive that it can tie together many separate political and social issues into one essentially theological stance. We value and respect the inherent worth and dignity of all, and seek to offer fair, kind, and compassionate treatment to all. We choose Love, in the broadest and most all-embracing sense. That is inspiring to me, and much more moving than signing on for marriage equality, immigration justice, or civil liberties work. Not that I don't think all of those are incredibly important - because they are! - but because for me, none of those is a life-orientation that can guide every action I take, every day of my life. Standing on the Side of Love is a life-orientation, however. For every moment, for every decision, I can choose Love.

And in the years since I first saw the campaign, I feel like it is still living up to that promise. My congregation has held multiple Standing on the Side of Love services and events, mostly in support of the ongoing struggle for marriage-equality in Washington State (which is exciting and hopeful right now!), and the message has resonated for me at all of these events. The current focus on immigration justice didn't feel as natural to me at first, but as my congregation has studied the issue and really educated ourselves about it, it too has become very resonant for me.

And this activity, the 30 Days of Love, has been a wonderful idea as well!

A mess ....

2012-01-21T21:21:00.000-08:00

It's a really good thing my husband got a chainsaw for Christmas. :)

30 Days of Love, Day Six

2012-01-21T08:30:00.000-08:00

Here is today's prompt from 30 Days of Love:

Today’s active reflection is about the power of our words:

When was the last time you spoke (emailed, etc.) unlovingly to someone?

To yourself?

What about the last time you spoke or wrote cruelly about someone?

What about people in your lives vs. strangers?

In each case, what was the root of your anger?

How can you remind yourself to promote more respectful rhetoric online, in your personal and professional interactions, and with yourself?

When was the last time I used language in a less-than-loving way? Um, yesterday.

I am not a person who is out yelling in the streets, engaging in road rage with other drivers, leaving hateful comments out on the internet, or feuding with neighbors. I am not combative, and I try to live by the maxim of "assume good intentions" when dealing with others. In my less noble moments, I remind myself of another maxim: "Never assume malice for what stupidity could explain". If people hurt you, they didn't do it out of malice, just ignorance.

But none of that means that I don't use language in a less-than-loving way. It just means that my vitriol is reserved for home, for my husband, for myself, and sometimes even for my kids. It's easier to just "assume good intentions" and let it go when the person is someone you deal with and then get a break from. It's harder to give that grace to those we rub up against all the time, those who leave their dirty socks on our floors, those who lose your flashlights over and over again, or who forget to phone home and leave you worrying about them.

And then it is hardest of all to extend grace to myself. Here I cannot "assume good intentions". I know exactly what my intentions were - and I hold myself to a very high standard. My self-talk is not kind or compassionate, which is part of my struggle to take better care of myself and climb back out of this depression.

I am working on this. True love and peace begins in the heart, and in the home.

If there is to be peace in the world,

there must be peace in the nations.

If there is to be peace in the nations,

there must be peace in the cities.

If there is to be peace in the cities,

there must be peace between neighbors.

If there is to be peace between neighbors,

there must be peace in the home.

If there is to be peace in the home,

there must be peace in the heart.

lao tse

30 Days of Love, Day Five

2012-01-20T17:13:00.000-08:00

Description: “Coming Out” about our own struggles and challenges is an act of Courageous Love. Consider the broader definition of “coming out.” By sharing our vulnerabilities and our authentic selves—whether or not what we are disclosing is identity-based—we can help others on their own path. Sharing something personal to help others is so brave, and receiving that story is a special gift.

To do: Today, share something that might help or inspire others.

I didn't think I was going to be able to post today, because our electricity has been out since yesterday morning, and our internet went out midday yesterday. We have been counting our blessings that we have a gas stove and fireplace and a back-up generator that can run part of the house (including the all-important well pump that makes our running water).

It's been part fun break from normal life, part family-bonding experience, part hair-pulling frustration, and part lesson in survival and preparedness.

But now the power and internet are back, and I'm back on this blog. The prompt today leaves me a bit perplexed, though. The story that was shared on the Standing on the Side of Love blog is very inspiring, but I have already shared my struggles with depression, so I don't feel like I have anything new to "come out" about.

I know the power of hearing that others have confronted the same things you have. It can be incredibly helpful to know that you are not alone in this. When I miscarried my first pregnancy at four months, I was amazed at how many women confided to me quietly their own stories of miscarriage and loss. In a world in which 1 in 5 pregnancies end in miscarriage, this is a common tragedy, a common sadness, and yet we don't talk about it. People suffer in silence, not telling anyone. And I was told by many that it wasn't anything to be sad about. "It's not like it was really a baby yet". But my sorrow was real. It was real to me. And it helped to hear how other women had felt this loss.

So I applaud the sharing. Today all I have to share is this, a day spent entertaining my children with odds and ends and (little) electricity:

30 Days of Love, Day Four

2012-01-19T10:39:00.000-08:00

Description: We are living in turbulent times; each of us is struggling in our own ways; many of us are worried about our own livelihood, our black holes of debt, our ability to care for our families, or the prospects for our children’s future. What are your heartfelt concerns … what keeps you awake at night? What societal systems in place have helped or hindered you in your journey?

Today’s Question: What Do You Struggle With?

This question reminds me of a quote, which I've seen attributed to Plato but also to other folks: "Be Kind, For Everyone You Meet is Fighting a Hard Battle".

In other words, yes, we all struggle with something. While those of us who are blessed with relatively large privilege should remember the great struggles of others and recognize our privilege, but it is also helpful to look at ALL people - even those of privilege - and recognize that we do not, cannot, know their internal struggles.

What do I struggle with?

With never feeling good enough. With guilt and anxiety and depression and burn out. With accepting my limitations and loving myself anyway. I was a child prone to anxiety attacks, a teen with anorexia/bulemia, a young woman with internalized misogyny, and now I am a woman who struggles with depression.

Not so unusual, apparently. The psychiatrist I recently saw was able to describe my personality struggles based on just knowing my birth order, what my parents do for a living, and my early history of anorexia. Apparently I am exactly what you expect from an eldest daughter of an ambitious doctor. Not unusual, but there it is.

My other struggles pale in comparison to the intensity that I feel this one, but I also struggle with not having enough time to do everything, with not managing our money well enough, with eating right and taking care of my body, and with maintaining a happy and healthy marriage.

In the big picture, my struggles are pretty minor. I have enough to eat, a warm roof over my head, a secure job, access to quality healthcare, happy and healthy children, a marriage to a good man who is good to me, and I am of a group of people that is privileged to a low amount of discrimination and oppression. In fact, as I age as a woman, I experience less and less sexually-based harassment and more deference and courtesy. While I don't think that is a good thing at all, and I hear that there is a downward curve when women get to and past middle age where they start to experience less courtesy and more invisibility, but at least for right now I am experiencing more positive, or pleasant, sexism.

So I don't hold up my struggles as something for others to do anything about. No - they are MY struggles. I am actually my own worst enemy, and the solution to my struggles will come from internal work and learning to love myself as I am. When I finally stop chasing the approval of others or some standard of achievement, that will be a great day. When I am able to truly love myself, as I am, and take care of myself, I will be on the road away from depression.

Be Kind. Everyone You Meet is Fighting a Hard Battle. Assume We Do The Best We Can, At This Moment.

Blazing the trail

2012-01-18T21:08:00.000-08:00

Older siblings frequently blaze the trail for their younger siblings (sometimes folks say that the first child "breaks the parents in" on each new thing) but today my oldest literally blazed a trail for his less-tall sister to follow. :)

30 Days of Love, Day Three

2012-01-18T10:34:00.000-08:00

Small dogs were not made for more than a foot of snow. :)

The whole family is staying home today, for a Snow Day. Husband is working from home on his computer, with noise canceling headphones and his own music to drown the rest of us out, children are enjoying playing in the snow and then dragging all that wet stuff back in with them, or busy doing their home school lessons (no snow days for homeschoolers), the dogs are having trouble getting in and out, and I am wondering why I didn't think ahead and bring home my curriculum binders from church.

And here is today's prompt from the 30 Days of Love:

Description: Making room for our own thoughts, and space for others’ thoughts, is crucial to standing on the side of love. Today, from morning to night, speak in a gentle voice, sparingly, allowing for silence as much as possible. Note how this feels.

Today’s question: Does speaking gently change the nature of your conversations, or how people interact with you?

Hmmm. A snow day at home with the kids is a funny time to work on this, I think! We're sort of all trapped in here together - a great time for the noise level to climb and patience levels to decline. So maybe this is the perfect day to work on this.

Absolutely the way I speak changes the nature of the conversation, and how people interact with me. In fact, it's usually more effective for me to lower my voice and speak slowly, calmly, quietly, and draw the kids in closer so they can hear me, than it is to escalate and get louder and louder to deal with a situation. Working with children, you still need to get their attention first, but then speak gently.

Will I be able to allow for as much silence as possible today? Sure, but it may require ear plugs. :)

I recommend these books for better communication skills with children:

Screamfree Parenting: The Revolutionary Approach to Raising Your Kids by Keeping Your Cool

How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk

Playful Parenting

Respectful Parents, Respectful Kids: 7 Keys to Turn Family Conflict into Co-operation

Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids

Becoming the Parent You Want to Be: a Sourcebook of Strategies for the First Five Years

we weren't the only ones birdwatching ....

2012-01-17T21:07:00.000-08:00

30 Days of Love, Day Two

2012-01-17T07:16:00.000-08:00

My daughter, as she was almost six years ago.

Description: To know the story of us and the story of now, we must know the story of self. Powerful actions emanate from profound self-reflection. Join us in introspective love by answering crucial questions this week.

Today’s question: How is love part of your personal identity?

For children: Draw a picture of what love looks like to you.

I put the picture of my baby on this post, because when it comes to personal identity, I really did find that "a baby changes everything". The picture that I carried of myself, who I thought I was, and what I thought defined me as a person - all of that was swept aside by the identity of Loving Mother.

It came home to me most powerfully in a early workshop for the Masters in Teaching program I was in. To start us off we had a week-long retreat with the rest of our cohort and the professors, and we did a whole week of processing identity questions and group building. One exercise we did was with a box, and we wrote inside the box how we saw ourselves. Then we passed the box around to these still-mostly-strangers and they wrote on the outside of the box how they saw us.

I still thought of myself as being tough and striving, an achiever who stressed out too much, and a whole bunch of other identity stuff from my pre-children days. What the others saw was a young mother who had to leave class all the time to go pump breast milk for her baby who had been left for the first time ever with a new nanny. They saw me as the Loving Mother. What I had been before was no longer visible, and frankly didn't really matter anymore. Having a baby changed everything, and it transformed me as a person in big and small ways.

Since having my children, Love and Service have been at the core of my identity at all times. Sometimes it's a narrow focus Love and Service that only encircles my own family, and sometimes it's a kind of general love for all of existence that feels like it could burst my heart into little bits because it's just too big for one person to feel all at once. Sometimes it is something in between, when I feel powerful love and compassion for others that calls me to care for them in some way. But some sort of outward focused love and the need to care for others is always guiding and motivating me.

What I'm discovering now is that I have to stop and give that same love back to myself. Going back to that box that we wrote on for the identity exercise, I have to love all the bits of myself that no one else ever sees. I have to nourish and care for the inner person, so that I will have the strength to bear this Love that can drain me of myself. Love calls me to service, and Love and Service can hurt sometimes. But Love also heals, forgives, and waits patiently.

30 Days of Love, Day One

2012-01-16T16:08:00.001-08:00

At the UU blog, Blue Boat, they are running 30 Days of Love, from today, MLK Day, to Valentine's Day. I like this idea a lot, and want to focus on 30 Days of Love myself. I don't know if I'll always follow their suggestions or if I'll diverge into some reflections of my own, but I want to focus on Love and the power of Love for this month.

"I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."
Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Reading Life

2012-01-15T15:19:00.000-08:00

We're still loving picture books, and have found some more good ones.

Poindexter Makes a Friend is a sweet story about a shy pig who loves to play with stuffed animals and read books (my kids love to play with stuffed animals and read books, so they could relate), and how he finally makes a friend.

Beauty and the Squat Bears is a graphic novel, so it's automatically not my cup of tea, but Hypatia got her dad to read it to her and she enjoyed this mixed up fairy tale. I just can't learn to enjoy reading comic book style writing, and the speech bubbles really distract me.

A House in the Woods starts off with two little pigs who have made little houses for themselves in the woods, but then their houses are accidentally destroyed by Bear and Moose - so the four of them decide to build a home they can all share.

We've read The Giraffe that Walked to Paris again, this time paying attention to the vocabulary words in it that Hypatia didn't already know.

And How Rocket Learned to Read is a sweet story of a puppy learning to read from a bird. I was slightly bothered by the issue of how a little bird was able to carry all those books around (the books were as big as the bird, and there were a whole pile of them), but those nit-picky adult concerns didn't bother the kids.

We also love audiobooks here, and this week it's been:

A Wrinkle in Time, which I'm enjoying just as much as the kids.

Clementine, a story of a spunky girl, so of course Hypatia liked it.

Judy Moody Around the World in 8 1/2 Days, the second Judy Moody book Hypatia has listened to. Another spunky girl character!

The Penderwicks on Gardham Street (again). Hypatia likes to chew through audiobooks and then move on to a new one, but Carbon will get into a groove and want to listen to the same story over and over again. Recently his obsession has been with the Penderwick books.

The Cricket in Times Square didn't appeal to either kid, but I just put it on anyway, and they ended up adoring it. The story of a cricket who learns to play opera was the big hit of the week, actually.

Geography time in our homeschool

2012-01-14T13:19:00.000-08:00

There is the geography portion of Hypatia's Five in a Row curriculum, and there are also some nice basic geography workbooks we got as Christmas gifts. The FIAR work is nice for just getting a big picture idea of where countries are in the world. The workbooks are nice for working on directions, maps, and so forth.

And then the kids take off on their own fun, and create treasure maps and treasure hunts. I think we need to do some geocaching. :)

Doing his own thing

2012-01-13T12:30:00.000-08:00

My ideal balance for our homeschool (my ideal, and our homeschool, so other folks can certainly have different ingredients in their schooling) is to have some stuff the kids just Have To Do, some stuff that I sort of Strew about and let them do if they want, and some time to do whatever they want along with the supplies and help they need to get it done.

Assigned tasks you must do
Materials strewn about their lives that might spark something
Time and Support to follow their on interests

That's the mix that makes our particular eclectic homeschool.

This week Carbon took the time to do things and ran with it. He had two main interests this week: sewing and origami.

After listening to The Strange Case of Origami Yoda (an example of something that was strewn for the kids), he was really interested in doing some origami. There weren't any books at the library when he looked, so he asked me to put some on hold for him, and this week they came in. With a pad of scrapbooking paper, he went to town.

He was also very interested in sewing, and this week he asked to look through my patterns. I helped him cut out a pattern, but that seemed a bit too intimidating to him, so he switched to making pillow cases and quilts. He made a pillow case for himself out of corduroy (Super Nice feeling to lie on), with help from me and his dad (who doesn't know how to sew either, so he was also a beginner learning) and now he's confident enough with the sewing machine that he's just making a crazy quilt top all by himself.

I love the spontaneous learning and how he uses his time!

Storytellers

2012-01-10T19:54:00.000-08:00

(This is what I ran in this month's church newsletter, with pictures from the first class)

Years and years ago, before I became the DRE here, I remember the minister telling a story about a man-eating tiger and a Buddhist monk. That story has stuck with me for years – and that is the power of stories, for when they touch us they stay in our minds and hearts and inform our lives forever more.

Faith and religion are ultimately about meaning-making – how we understand the essential and core realities of the cosmos and our place in it. In my opinion, stories are one of the best forms of meaning-making, and they have served that purpose for our ancestors since the hazy days of prehistory.

This year our program at the 9:15 service was compressed into one all-ages class, and we have been using the Spirit Play format for that class. But starting in January, we will start a new program, based on the power of stories to help us make meaning.

We’ll call this program “Storytellers” and in this class the children will explore a good story for several Sundays in a row, learning the story, retelling and dramatizing the story, creating their own interpretations and illustrations and retellings of the story – in short they will take the time to make the story truly their own. We’ll also have story connections that the kids can take home with them, to share the story with their families.

It’s still fine to just drop in on this program – each Sunday will stand alone enough to be welcoming to newcomers, visitors, or those who normally come at 11:00 but this week just need to come earlier. But it will be a meaningful and complete program all by itself, and I encourage you to consider coming to the 9:15 service with your elementary aged children.

The January story will be “The Mitten”, a fabulous and funny story of animals finding what seems like a cozy way to stay warm in the winter – until too much sharing literally bursts the seems. It will be a chance to talk about sharing, making space, and what warms our hearts. There will be fiber arts, sewing, drama, and more.

Stories can connect us to that which is true, of worth, and meaning. They can ask questions, not always answer them, but point us toward an answer. They have a powerful appeal that has held true for human beings for millennia, and we can all be storytellers. With stories at its center, the Storytellers program at the 9:15 service will be something meaningful and fun!

The Reading Life

2012-01-09T21:24:00.000-08:00

Our local library had a winter reading contest, so if the kids read five books and then brought in their list they would be entered to maybe win a $20 gift card to a local bookstore. That motivated Carbon to cruise through some picture books. It motivated Hypatia to start making a book list, but for some reason the idea of being in a contest is very upsetting to her, so she doesn't want to turn in her list at the library. As there is really no reason to stress, we'll just take Carbon's in and let her keep hers.

Samantha on a Roll reminds me of the illustration styles I knew when I was a kid, and there is a sort of vintage-feel to the book even though it is a 2011 book. A little girl takes her skates out by herself, while Mommy is busy, and ends up rolling out of control through some crazy situations before winding up back at home again. It's like Curious George, without getting in trouble at the end.

Poor Scrawny Cat used to be loved and have a home, but now all anyone calls him is "Get outta here!". Taking refuge on a little boat, the scrawny cat is blown out to sea in a storm, and washes up on a little island. But never fear, all is well in the end.

Press Here is the low-tech response to all those "interactive" books where you push buttons. The book instructs the reader to push, tilt, shake, and clap, and in response the dots "move about". My kids loved it, and "highly recommend it".

The Teeny Tiny Woman is just weird. A teeny tiny woman finds a bone on a grave (?!!!) and decides to take it home to make soup (!!!!!????), but after putting it in a cupboard it speaks to her (!!!!!!!) and keeps waking her up saying "Give Me My Bone Back" (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). Weird and creepy.

Nina, in That Makes Me Mad taps into the basic childhood frustrations and how they make children mad. It's pretty cute.

For our Five in a Row studies, we read The Giraffe that Walked to Paris. It's based on a true story, of the first giraffe to ever be seen in France, and both kids enjoyed it. I was only moderately impressed by it.

Everybody Cooks Rice

2012-01-08T16:25:00.000-08:00

One of my basic tasks as a religious educator is to teach tolerance, acceptance, and open-mind/heartedness. Today I had created a plan for our Way Cool Sunday School and Children's Chapel that combined observing MLK day, discussing immigration justice (our special social justice issue this year, heading into the "Justice GA" in June), and some more general Welcoming Congregation work.

Planning the Sunday, I knew that it needed to be fun and keep the kids' attention, and be something that we could accomplish within the limited time. And I came up with what I think was a great plan, involving a guest speaker (who did a great job and taught the kids a song in Spanish), the book Everybody Cooks Rice and then five different rice recipes I cooked and brought in for tasting, and a project to write Welcome signs in many different languages that we could hang around the RE wing of the church.

It reminded me, though, that we were taught in grad school to avoid "holidays and food" as the main way to teach multiculturalism. Because there isn't much depth to that, of course, and because you can end up perpetuating more stereotypes. Those are all good reasons, and we should keep best practices in mind.

On the other hand - the kids love food! Any time I bring food into the class, it's a hit. Today was fun, and the kids really did enjoy themselves. One little boy said to me, "I'm glad I came to church today", another told me "this is the best rice I've ever had", a little girl was very proud of her Welcome sign and wanted me hang it up right then and there, the parents who were there told me it was a great lesson, and the guest speaker left happy and thanked me for the opportunity. I rate it a success. :)

Art kick start

2012-01-07T14:17:00.000-08:00

We've had some major stress from Hypatia about comparing her work to her brother's, and feeling like she's not good enough. There is a three year age gap, and those are three years of major developmental growth, but she isn't willing to just give herself time.

So I wanted to get her over some of this stress, with a bit of a "jumpstart". I tried to set up a time to just do art with her, but Carbon couldn't stay away once he saw the paints come out.

The "jumpstart" was that I sat and sketched in a pencil drawing, and asked Hypatia to color it in with watercolors. This was our second picture together.

She moved on to doing her own pencil drawing, and then asking me to watercolor it, to then just doing projects all by herself.

The results excited her, so I think it was a successful boost - like I said a KickStart. :)

Right Relationship and Riding a Bike

2012-01-06T10:00:00.000-08:00

I've been working on the "Right Relationships and Ethics" section of my credentialing portfolio, and it was good timing for me with the self-care, self-awareness, and self-management work that I'm doing right now. I was especially drawn to the leadership theory of Rabbi Dr. Edwin H. Friedman, with its emphasis on self-knowledge and self-control. He teaches that leadership is about self-regulation within the relationship. Management of self, and still Being Somebody and Being Present, rather than losing yourself in the pursuit of consensus or an effort to please others. Leadership requires being aware of and modulating how you function in the relationships that mean something to you. It's about differentiation.

Another idea that jumped out at me was that leadership is a relationship between the leader and the led. It's the space between you and others. (The Safe Congregation Handbook)

and .... anxiety is normal, but as much as possible the goal is to keep calm and values-focused. (The Safe Congregation Handbook)

And finally, this thought from Practicing Right Relationship from the Alban Institute: "when we do not self-manage, others are placed in a position of having to manage us, taking time and energy from the tasks at hand."

So what does all that have to do with riding a bike? Well, right now I'm teaching my children how to ride their bikes. We're all at different ability levels, but in this situation, I'm the leader.

I need:

to be aware of where I am and how I'm feeling, whether it is that I'm on my bike or standing there holding up their bike, or standing back and letting go all together. I need to remember that I'm me and where I am in this process.
to self-manage my own anxiety or whatever else is going on with me. I need to keep my balance, let the anxiety go, and stay focused on the goal and my values (in this case that we all ride bikes and that we enjoy the process and stay in loving relationship throughout).

For the kids:

I need to be paying attention to them, with an open mind and heart, not assuming I know what they are thinking and feeling.
I need to envision how I want this relationship to go, and to adopt a positive stance that will help that happen (compassion, playfulness, caring, audacity, respect, honesty, or a combination there of).
And I should acknowledge them for more than just what they do, and show them that I am seeing and appreciating the person they are and the qualities they are bringing to what they are doing (for instance their persistence, their courage, their joy).

For the outcome:

It is normal to feel anxiety about the outcome. After all, people fall as they learn to ride a bike.
It is normal to feel anxiety about letting them go. After all, eventually children will no longer need you, and will ride off without you, and each step along that path is a little letting go of this precious child.
It is normal to be unsure when is the right time to let go. And there is trial and error, and mistakes, and falls, and upset feelings.
You can't control the outcome, but most of the time it all works out in the end.

And so you:

Give a little push when it seems like that's what's needed.
Stand back and watch, controlling your anxiety.
Run up to give comfort or aid when there is a spill along the way.
Clap and praise when there is success.
Encourage when there is fear or doubt.
And then let them go.

After all, its their bike ride, not yours.

Real Food This Week

2012-01-05T11:18:00.000-08:00

One of my New Year's resolutions is to focus more on "Real Food". By that I mean food that is local, organic, in season, nutritious, frugal, within budget, sustainable, gluten-free, and delicious. Easy, right?

This week it's been:

Monday I noticed I had half a tub of organic cottage cheese still in the fridge, so I made gluten-free Cottage Cheese Dill bread in my bread machine. It was ready by lunch time, so we had fresh warm bread and butter and a sliced apple and cheese slices for lunch. Then for dinner I used two of the squash I still have on my window sill from our CSA last year, and made a pureed squash soup, which was served with more of the bread and yogurt and toasted sunflower seeds to stir in.

Tuesday we had cereal for breakfast, and warmed up last week's leftovers (enchiladas and potato salad) at church for our lunch. For dinner I used the last of the bread as topping on a gluten-free macaroni and cheese.

Wednesday I made gluten-free pancakes for breakfast, and the kids had peanut butter and jelly (homemade blackberry jam, but store-bought bread) sandwiches for lunch. I was out running around, so I treated myself to a bowl of pho at a restaurant for lunch. For dinner I made a very interesting soup, "Native American Three Sisters Stew" for dinner.

Thursday has so far been scrambled eggs (from our own chickens) for breakfast and leftover macaroni and cheese for lunch. It will be leftover soup for dinner.

A really great tool for organizing recipes and planning meals is plantoeat.com I was impressed enough to pay the money for a membership, and I'm not sorry I did. You can try it out with a free trial membership - and if anyone joins and wants to be my friend on the site we can share recipes and menu plans!

I got the two soup recipes this week from this wonderful magazine:

Native American Three Sisters Stew (as I made it, not as the recipe called for):

10 dried pitted prunes

1 small red onion

6 cloves of garlic

a large dash of oregano

1 green bell pepper

1 can of diced tomatoes

2 small yellow finn potatoes

1 sweet potato

3/4 cup frozen corn kernels

1 can kidney beans, rinsed and drained

1. Soak the prunes in water for at least two hours. Reserve the liquid and chop the fruit.

2. Heat oil in a soup pot, and saute the diced onion and garlic. Add diced bell pepper, oregano, and tomatoes with their juice. Cook two minutes.

3. Add the potatoes and sweet potato, and the reserved fruit liquid. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer, covered, for 15 minutes or so.

4. Add corn and diced fruit, and beans. Season with salt and pepper. Simmer for 5 minutes more.

The prune broth makes for a sweet soup, but not cloyingly so.

How to do Nature Study from the indoors

2012-01-04T09:13:00.000-08:00

My girl doesn't like going outside in the wet and the cold, so we've set up a Nature Study observation post in the kitchen window seats. :)

The Reading Life

2012-01-03T08:14:00.000-08:00

Older Than the Stars is one of those Wonder-Filled, Science-Based books about the universe that I love for young children. It is a repetitive format, like "The Green Grass Grows", with simple-but-interesting illustrations. A great book for children a bit too young for Born With a Bang.

Blue Chicken is an art joke, because when a painter leaves without finishing her painting of a farm, a (drawing of a) chicken decides to "help" but ends up spilling the blue paint over everything.

I Want My Hat Back is one of the best books of 2011, and one of the best we read all year. It's deceptively simple, but clever and mischievous with a great ending.

We're also enjoying:

Judy Moody, Girl Detective (Book #9 in the series but the first we've read)

The Penderwicks at Point Mouette (the charming family returns for their third book)

The Strange Case of Origami Yoda (both of my kids loved this on audiobook and have listened to the whole thing through multiple times, and walk around with paper yodas on their fingers now)

And I've joined Goodreads.com, and I'm loving the way you can organize bookshelves and the recommendations are wonderful! A great way to organize your reading life.

My New Year's Resolutions

2012-01-02T14:43:00.000-08:00

I want to BE HERE NOW, and I think these things will help me do that:

1. More yoga. It brings me into peace within my body in a way nothing else does.

2. Real Food. Food that I grow and cook - I want to pay more attention to food and feeding us all well.

3. Reading more Real Books, and spending less time surfing the internet or obsessively checking Facebook.

4. Enjoy Each Moment that presents itself, and turn off the Mental To Do List. Avoid To Do Lists entirely if I can.

5. Avoid multi-tasking, or try to do one thing at a time, and do it well.

What have you resolved to do this year?

Staycation

2011-12-30T15:06:00.000-08:00

I'm coming to the end of a two week "Staycation" that I took from work. Working for a church, it was a bit crazy for me to take the Christmas weeks off, but there were volunteers and the minister to do the holiday services, and I hadn't used any of my vacation time this year. Use it or lose it, and there is no cashing it out option.

So I've been cozied into home for two weeks, which has proved fantastic. I tackled some reorganization tasks that were fun to do and will feel really nice to have done. Since I enjoy that sort of task, it was a "fun" way for me to spend my down time. The pantry, filing cabinets, and book shelves are all fabulous now.

There's lots of different ways to get some R&R. This time at home didn't cost anything extra, gave me time to tackle projects that had been bothering me, and it's been restful too. Now I'm chomping at the bit to get back to work. :)

StoryBook Art

2011-12-30T07:51:00.000-08:00

We are using the book StoryBook Art by MaryAnn F. Kohl as our art study, and I LOVE how much more accessible for my kids the art of picture book illustrators is than say, the work of Da Vinci. Each lesson is based around a picture book, and then there is an art activity that uses a similar technique or imitates the style of the illustrations.

We started with Molly Bang's When Sophie Gets Angry, which StoryBook Art tells us the author painted using "gouache". We were just using tempera paint, but the kids were delighted to notice that actually some of our Crayola-brand paints said "gouache" on the labels. So we had "the real stuff!".

A bit of planned activity is very helpful in getting past the post-Christmas cranky days, I'm finding.

2011, in retrospect

2011-12-29T09:06:00.000-08:00

This has been quite the year, and it was not at all what I set out to make it. At the beginning of the year I picked a guiding word: Less. It's interesting to look through my blog entries from this year, because the word lasted as a focus for about three months, and then I just couldn't keep it anymore.

This wasn't the year of Less. It was the year of "push Sara to the burn out point".

I got heavily involved in fundraising for Carbon's school (and ended up feeling burned out as a volunteer).

We fell in love with the idea of some land again, and went through a home search and then found our dream home - and got it! This was all wonderful stuff, but also stressful. We had to put in our savings, and a lot of our time getting the garage fixed up, and all the uncertainty and stress around a major home purchase pushed both me and my husband to our burn-out points. Moving in the Fall, during the busy start-up season at church, was another time for burn-out and stress.

And my husband got laid-off work this year, right as we were buying the house. He landed on his feet with another job, but it still added to our stress load.

I spent the year fundraising for a youth mission trip to Transylvania, and went on the trip as one of the chaperones. It was a huge project to take on, and it definitely burned me out as well.

I hit the new church year running with an ambitious plan for lots of activities and a big program, and also really jumped in to the credentialing program at the same time.

And we returned to homeschooling again this year.

It wasn't the year of Less.

In some ways it was the year of More, More, More. Do More. Buy More. Stress More.

It was a year of anxiety. Of pushing myself just for the sake of pushing myself. I wanted to prove that I could do it. I felt a huge anxiety to perform at 110% at all times, to be SuperMom, SuperDRE, SuperWoman.

And I'm realizing that in all that rush, bustle, stress, and anxiety, somewhere along the line I lost track of WHY to do anything. I became anxiety driven rather than values-focused. It was really just about doing a lot of stuff, being busy, and constantly in motion.

It may not have been a year of Less, but it was a year of Big Learning for me. And now I want to take that insight into 2012 not with a Guiding Word or a list of resolutions, but with just this one simple thing I've learned: keep what is most important to you, your deepest values, the ideal vision statement for your life and the world - keep all of that close to your heart always and don't forget it in the scramble of daily life and the buffeting of our society and its pressure to consume and be busy. If you are living a life that is in harmony with your values, there are no further goals you have to achieve. It's not a rush to finish, after all. It's a life to live, moment by moment. And I don't want my obituary to read "she was a very busy woman".

Christmas, unwrapped

2011-12-27T07:04:00.000-08:00

It's been two days of Christmas here, as we had my in-law's over for Christmas dinner and my family over for the day after Christmas. Hosting two festive dinners and gift exchanges in a row was a bit ambitious of me, and meant that I had to completely clean my house, cook a meal, have folks make a mess, then completely clean my house again, cook a big meal, and have folks make a mess. But it actually was accomplished without too much fatigue or stress, and very little marital fighting, so it's our very own Christmas Miracle!

We've had some Santa drama this year, but in the end all was well and the kids found their stockings well stocked on Christmas morning with some simple toys, etc, and he even signed the autograph slip that Carbon left out for him the night before.

The big gift from us to the kids this year was a pair of swings, which we managed to set up without them figuring out what we were doing. Christmas eve in the dark, we went out with the ladder and actually put the swings up, and then Mother Nature added a gift, and it stopped raining on Christmas morning just long enough for the kids to run outside and test out the new set up.

It's been delightful this year how much the kids have enjoyed all their gifts, no matter if it was a toy or a book or art supplies. Grandma adopted wolves who live in a nearby sanctuary for them, and they were both very happy about that and sat and had us read them the whole information packet about the wolf.

My husband and I received some really thoughtful and useful gifts as well.

And just when we had that all cleaned up and put away, another whole family's worth of food and people and gifts arrived!

This action shot is blurry, but there were 17 people in my living room exchanging gifts and enjoying the visit! My grandmother came up from California, and all my siblings (plus one sister-in-law) were here, and my father and step-mother, my mother, and my cousin and her husband.

After all that, today we clean (again), catch back up on laundry, rest, and maybe I'll get the kids out of the house for a while since we haven't set foot off our property in 4 days.

And so, Christmas 2011 is all unwrapped.

Bear Noel

2011-12-24T14:05:00.000-08:00

This charming book casts a polar bear as the Santa of the animals of the north woods, and he brings edible treats and decorates a tree for all the animals to enjoy.

We did our own version for the wildlife that lives in our back acres: deer, rabbits, raccoons, foxes, squirrels, birds, and field mice.

A new tradition for our new home. We're thinking of planting a baby Christmas tree for next year though, as all the evergreens back there are already pretty tall and it was hard to reach!

When Christmas Gets Crazy

2011-12-24T08:07:00.000-08:00

Zoolights, which we drove up to see along with what seemed like 1000 other people. Lovely, right?

But a bit much: too much traffic, a crowded parking lot, long lines to stand in in the cold, crowds of people everywhere.

I made the mistake of leaving my shopping for Christmas dinner until Dec. 23rd. Wow - that's when Christmas gets crazy. And the domino effect of people getting frustrated and then cranky and then not being nice to someone else, who then gets cranky ....

This isn't the Christmas spirit at all. How did it get so intense?

something a bit sillier ....

2011-12-23T07:28:00.000-08:00

Our poor, super-tolerant cat, Choo Choo Train Socks and Shoes (Choo Choo for short). Guess how old Carbon was when he named her.

I don't know what it is about animal videos that is so endlessly funny, but my kids really do love this one:

each night a child is born

2011-12-22T12:10:00.000-08:00

What I respond to the most in the Christian story of Christmas is the birth story itself. That everyone would drop what they were doing (tending their flocks and all that) and rush to acknowledge this baby and recognize the hope that he brought to the world.

Each and every child is a miracle in their own way, and a birth is so incredibly powerful to witness. The possibilities for their life are open, but they also show us that the possibilities for our lives are still open too. Children can bring out the best in us all, calling us to be the kind of adults that they deserve. When we truly open our hearts to the power of their presence in this world, we open ourselves to the calling to build a better world for them and to grow ourselves into the kind of person we would have wanted to love us when we were children.

Reading #616 from Singing the Living Tradition

For so the children come, and so they have been coming.

Always in the same way they come, born of the seed of man and woman.

No angels herald their beginnings. No prophets predict their future courses.

No wisemen see a star to show where to find the babe that will save humankind.

Yet each night a child is born is a holy night,

Fathers and mothers - sitting beside their children's cribs, feel the glory in the sight of a new life beginning.

They ask, "Where and how will this new life end?" "Or will it ever end?"

Each night a child is born is a holy night -

A time for singing.

A time for wondering.

A time for worshipping.

Sophia Lyon Fahs

"I sure do like those Christmas Cookies, Sugar"

2011-12-21T21:12:00.000-08:00

Light a Candle in the darkness

2011-12-21T14:23:00.000-08:00

A simple family ritual. Cover and turn off all the lights, sit in the darkness holding hands, and then light candles and sit in that light. Happy turning of the year.

the shortest day of the year

2011-12-20T13:01:00.000-08:00

Reading #551 from Singing the Living Tradition

Earth Teach Me

Earth teach me stillness as the grasses are stilled with light.

Earth teach me suffering as old stones suffer with memory.

Earth teach me caring as parents who secure their young.

Earth teach me courage as the tree which stands all alone.

Earth teach me limitation as the ant which crawls on the ground.

Earth teach me freedom as the eagle which soars in the sky.

Earth teach me resignation as the leaves which die in the fall.

Earth teach me regeneration as the leaves which die in the fall.

Earth teach me regeneration as the seed which rises in the spring.

Earth teach me to forget myself as melted snow forgets its life.

Earth teach me to remember kindness as dry fields weep with rain.

From the Ute Indians of North America

A week until Christmas

2011-12-19T09:30:00.000-08:00

The Legend of the Christmas Spider

One Christmas eve, a long time ago, there was an old woman busily preparing her home for the holidays. She had a lot to do – cooking, baking, cleaning. This year things were also a bit tighter than usual, and she didn’t have much money for the holiday extras. Her Christmas tree stood in the corner and she often looked at it and thought, “the tree! The tree! I need to decorate the tree!” But she had so much to do!

Late that evening, all the work was done – the cookies were baked, the house was clean, the windows sparkled in the candlelight. The old woman thought, “the tree! The tree!, I need to decorate the tree!”. She poured a cup of tea from the kettle, carried her cup to her favorite rocking chair, and sat down to rest – just for a minute. Looking up, she saw a spider web that she had missed in her cleaning. “I’ll get that web with my broom as soon as I drink my tea”, she thought. But as she sipped her tea, she watched the spider busy at its work.

“That spider is working as hard as I am”, she thought. And then, looking outside at the cold, she thought “it would be cruel to cast the little creature out in the cold on Christmas eve.”

She stared into the fire thinking about how wonderful it would be on Christmas Day with all her grandchildren coming to visit. As she sat and sipped and rocked, she grew sleepier and sleepier. She looked at the tree and thought, “the tree! The tree! I need to decorate the tree!”. But her eyes drooped, closed … and soon she was fast asleep.

Up in the web, the spiders were curious. Every year the old woman had run them out with their cleaning, but this year was different. “Why did she bring a tree into her house?” asked a little spider. “I’m not sure,” answered an older, wider spider. “Let’s go down and see.”

The spiders crept out of their hiding place. They swung on their webs down to the tree, and when they landed on the branches, they all crawled all over it, leaving bright silver strings of webbing behind them. When they had examined every part of the tree, they still were not sure why the old woman had brought it in, and they returned to their web on the ceiling.

In the morning, when the old woman woke up, she was so surprised! Her tree was covered with spider webs. But as she looked, the sun came through the window and caught the webs in its rays. The spider webs started to sparkle and shine! They had all turned into sparkling, shimmering silver and gold.

At that moment, the door burst open and in came her grandchildren. “Grandmother! Your tree is so beautiful! Look how it shines! This is even better than the decorations you usually use!” The old woman smiled, and looked up at the spider web. “I had help from many friends,” she said. “I hope they come back every year to decorate my tree.”

Every year after that, when the old woman cleaned her house for Christmas, she always made sure to leave one web for the spiders, and they always came to help decorate her tree on Christmas eve.

According to legend, this is why people hang tinsel on their Christmas trees today. In many places, it is also the custom to include a spider among the decorations on the tree. The tinsel and the spiders are reminders of that long-ago Christmas and those busy, busy spiders.

Back to the fun bits

2011-12-15T20:33:00.000-08:00

Things were getting pretty grim here in our home school. We didn't have much time, it seemed, so the time we did have went to math workbooks and phonics work, and blah blah blah.

It happens, when we get stressed out. We get anxiety-driven, and worried about results, and we lose sight of values and the picture that is bigger than results. The qualitative data gets lost in the quantitative data, in other words.

I realized we needed to be re-inspired, and what better place to go for inspiration than to the classics that have served us well in the past. We are going back to Stories, to Art, to Experiential Learning, and to Exploring the World. I created a weekly schedule: nothing too tight and strict, but just an easy block schedule with a couple subjects a day.

Picture books are the new core of Hypatia's work. Picture books and art. It's Kindergarten, for goodness sake. It should be about story and song and art and learning to love learning. I ordered volume two of Five in a Row, and StoryBook Art, and I let her pick out a Jumbo Kindergarten Workbook with stickers and colorful pages that appealed to her. She is so happy to have fun picture books and it just feels perfect to make this the center of her schooling.

The things both kids will still do together are nature study, science, and geography. I've bought Drawn to Nature, and the Nature Connection, and I bought a nice tin with drawing pencils and little journals for the kids at the local art store. That has all been a huge hit.

Science is easy, and is just a matter of doing experiments. The kids LOVE doing experiments. I just have to make time for it.

Geography is also pretty easy, mostly involving library books, a globe, and imaginary travels around the world.

For Carbon I'm returning to The Story of the World. He's also still doing Math U See, and Explode the Code, and we're adding in some creative writing. As an early Christmas gift, his grandpa sent us a set of Rory's Story Cubes. Those are fun!

This has been a good turn of events for me and the kids. The kids are responding really well to this, and it's more fun for me too.

What is important to me? What is important to them? Focusing on our values and the life we really hope to have, and not letting anxiety drive our lives, is what I'm trying to do.

Happy Birthday to him

2011-12-14T17:33:00.000-08:00

It's my husband's birthday today, and I want to take a minute to reflect on my appreciation for him.

He's a good, reliable provider, a silly funny guy, and plenty smart. He makes a mean martini, gives a good back massage, and always beats me at card games. He always eats what I cook without complaint, and he builds a good fire and grills meat we all love to eat. Our strengths compliment each other, and we mostly put up with each others' weaknesses with compassion and understanding.

And, most of all, he is a wonderful father. Really, truly, he is a great father.

So, I'm glad you were born on this day all those years ago (you're not anywhere near as old as your children think you are). Happy Birthday, my dear.

the little Santa's elves

2011-12-13T20:32:00.000-08:00

Fabric paint, painted pottery, dried flowers, sewing, handwritten cards, pictures, homemade jam, and the packages are off in the mail.

Children's Chapel

2011-12-12T12:30:00.000-08:00

The first Children's Chapel I ever did, four years ago, was in a circle. ONE circle, in one classroom, and it was all the kids in attendance that Sunday. Then we go a bit bigger, and we "graduated" from a circle to a more formal set up with rows all facing forward, to the "stage" where I put on the "show".

That was working fairly well, and the kids vied for the opportunity to be helpers and come up to light the chalice, read the opening words, and so forth. I walked around and read picture books, showing the illustrations to everyone, letting them make comments and participate as they felt moved to do so. But then we grew yet again, and our first Chapel this year we had 45 kids show up and squeeze in to the room, and it was TOO MUCH. They can't share and participate without it taking two hours, and children are pretty squirmy when they are asked to be a passive audience.

Luckily, inspiration is always close at hand in the form of my fabulous colleagues in this work, and a trip as a chaperone to a Middle School CON showed me yet another way to do Worship, with many small circles all doing the same thing at the same time. Due to the foresight of the planning committee that built the RE wing of our church two years ago, I can open up the walls and turn my three large classrooms into one really big classroom, and that is perfect for circle worship.

Each circle includes children of preschool-6th grade ages, and adults. Each circle has its own Chalice to light, but we all say the words together. We all sing together, then each circle can do Joys and Sorrows and there is actually enough time for every single person to share something. We did a meditation yesterday where we passed an (electric) candle around the circle and each child made a wish for someone else while they held the candle. We did it in silence, but everyone could watch it go around the circle and stay active during the process.

For now, this is working! It does mean no more stories during chapel, but I tell plenty of stories at other times.

Shop till you Drop

2011-12-10T21:21:00.000-08:00

We are shopped out! Other than some internet shopping, we have saved all our Christmas shopping for one marathon day, and that day was today.

There was some method to this madness. We figured, rather than tucking it in everywhere and struggling through traffic multiple times, we would just set aside a day, make it an Event, and drive downtown and park ONCE.

It was a whole family affair, which is how I ended up walking up to the counter in our local toy store with two toys stuffed up my sweater. No, I'm not a shoplifter, folks - I'm just trying to keep both of my kids from seeing what the other one wants to buy them for Christmas!

There were a couple other hiccups to the day, like when my husband took the kids off to the herbal/beauty/massage/yoga-type shop to buy my gifts, and then when they met up with me again a few shops later, Hypatia was crying and upset because daddy "Wouldn't Let me Buy You Two Presents! It's not FAIR."

But the plus side was that we supported the local businesses like crazy, and it was good to see them really packed and busy with other folks also shopping there. We shopped at small toy stores, novelty stores, boutiques, jewelry stores, and more. We stopped for a break at the local coffee shop before continuing on.

Without giving too much away, I can tell you that our family is going to be opening a lot of games, art supplies, jewelry, art, and hand-knit goods for Christmas.

I only really have two, maybe three things left to do for Christmas shopping. One is a trip to the big box toy store, because I just have to get some Legos for Christmas. Carbon's letter to Santa this year only asked for ONE thing, and that was Legos. And although our local independent toy store has started carrying Legos, the selection is still really limited. If I don't get the Legos, the current Stocking Selection (for each child: an Audiobook CD, a DS game (used), an art supply, and a couple pieces of candy) will be tragically lacking.

Say, Cheese!

2011-12-09T13:39:00.000-08:00

Yet another fabulous event organized by someone in the homeschool meet-up group we've joined - this time with a local cheesemaker teaching the kids how to make mozzarella. I'm so glad I joined this group, even if everyone in it is so spread out geographically that we are unlikely to make friends to hang out with outside these events. The events themselves are plenty fun.

And as for making cheese, it's a great activity with this age group. The hands-on mushing up of the cheese balls was super fun, and then they got to eat the results.

Shoes he loved

2011-12-08T21:15:00.000-08:00

First, the front door mat looks awful in this picture. Of course, it's purpose in life is to catch dirt. And it does that pretty well - that's why all the dirt is on the mat. :)

Yes, my son likes to wear pink socks. He's happy, and it's all good.

And, yes, he tried to fix his own shoes with duct tape. He loved these shoes (purchased used in a lot box of boys' shoes from ebay), and he especially loved that they are pull-ons with no need to tie them. He CAN tie his shoes, but he really doesn't like to bother. So when the toes wore through and his sock was sticking out of the top of the shoe, he didn't want to just throw them away. He was sure the duct tape would work (hey, they apparently mended a leaky boat with the stuff on Mythbusters, his favorite show).

But the weather has been pretty wet, and from the picture above you probably get an idea of how much fun it is to wear these shoes now. He FINALLY let me throw them away, and he picked out a new pair of sneakers at the store. Goodness, keeping the whole family just decently clad is such a chore. (Not Little House on the Prairie size chore, but still.)

museum day

2011-12-07T19:20:00.000-08:00

Our homeschool meet-up group had a field trip to the art museum today, with the museum staff doing their school field-trip package for us. That meant a guided discussion and walk through the folk-art of Mexico gallery and then another discussion around a picture book they read to the group, and then a hands-on art project in the style of the folk art the kids had seen - over all it was a pretty good plan, and the kids had fun.

I'd never done an art museum with a guide and a large group of kids though, and it was pretty funny seeing the anxiety level around them touching things. The museum staff were very cautious and concerned about any sort of touching. I can understand that, of course, but it's pretty hard to enjoy the art and be that anxious and stressed out at the same time. I wonder if they get that anxious over bigger school groups (we were only 14 kids) or if it was the youngness of our group (all under 8 years old down to toddlers)? Or maybe they are just always worried.

Carbon was disappointed that we only saw the one gallery, but thrilled with the hands-on project. Hypatia was just tired (she woke up at 4 am this morning and never went back to sleep, so she and I had plenty of excuse to be less than our best today).

After the museum, I treated them to a lunch at the Old Spaghetti Factory. The gluten-free menu there is a nice treat for us, and the kids love the atmosphere and the fact that we can sit in an antique streetcar while we eat.

Christmas Caroling

2011-12-06T19:57:00.000-08:00

On Saturday we had a Christmas party with my family, and in addition to sampling the baking that everyone brought, we also sang some carols. There was the old, old-fashioned way of doing carols, with my mother pumping away at the old organ that was her great-grandmother's. You have to pump the foot pedals to push the air through it, so her stamina didn't last that long.

Then we switched over to what seems the exact opposite: karaoke carols on youtube. Carbon's favorite carol is "three ships", and Hypatia likes "deck the halls" this year, which she calls the "holly and jolly song".

Trim the Tree, and Why We Won't be Starting Chalica Tomorrow

2011-12-04T22:24:00.000-08:00

We had to hack the top off the tree and then just twist-tie the angel to the top - so much for my husband thinking the tree would fit with our new tall ceilings! Next year, we measure BEFORE we set it up in the stand!

It's a UU tree: there's a solstice sun on it, some angels, lots of homemade stuff, peace doves, a felt chalice, lots of fair-trade multicultural stuff. It's also our family tree, so there are lego ornaments and family heirloom ornaments.

But as much as I enjoy hanging my homemade chalice ornament on my Christmas tree, I won't be starting Chalica tomorrow with my family. I'm not anti-Chalica (we did try it last year), it's just that I'm a bit busy with other holidays. Really - based on family history, tradition, and custom we already celebrate both Solstice and Christmas. And then at church we throw in Hanukkah and Rohatsu as well. There are multiple parties to go to, plays and ballets to see, special baking to do, packages and cards to mail, shopping and gift-making to do, 24 days of Advent, 12 Days of Yule candles, greening of our home and church, charity-giving and doing, special music to listen to and sing, cookies to be carried to neighbors, bird-seed hanging, and more that I'm probably forgetting right now. With all that leading up to the darkest day of the year, why do I need yet another candle-lighting tradition, this time involving 7 days of lighting our chalice?

Chalica is a fine idea - a great way to emphasize the 7 Principles and our family's UU identity with my kids. I have no visceral or philosophical dislike of the idea - just no room to fit it in where the holiday-creators are trying to make it go. How much better it seems to me to put in January. It's still just as dark and dreary in January, so some family ritual around a candle lighting will be most welcome. But in January, there's no real competition for the holiday spotlight and it will fit into our lives. We will actually be able to focus on Chalica in January, no longer distracted by Christmas and Solstice.

That's why we aren't going to start it tomorrow, with the rest of the crowd. I'm saving it for January, and you'll probably hear all about it then.

What about you? Any UU's out there going to try Chalica this year?

We got our tree

2011-12-03T21:23:00.000-08:00

This farm is in our neighborhood, and we've been going there for years to pick out our tree. This year, with the tall ceilings in the new house, my husband was picturing a tall tree. But then he had to drag that heavy thing all the way back to the truck!

Tomorrow, if we have time with church and all, we'll decorate the tree.

Advent begins

2011-12-02T19:41:00.000-08:00

We've started Advent here, with the "stocking garland" that I put together a few years ago. The kids and I put four fair-trade chocolates in each stocking or mitten, so each family member gets one chocolate per day. There are only 12 stockings, so half-way through Advent I need to restock this. I haven't decided what to put in them yet for the end of the month. Toys? Candy canes? I'll figure it out.

We also have the Lego Star Wars advent calendar, and the kids have added to the whole display with some of their existing legos. It's an ongoing process combining Lego, Christmas, and Star Wars, and it's all fun. But Carbon's comment so far on the calendar (after only two days, mind you) is "It's always a huge disappointment".

Today Carbon made a wreath. I let him pick out some "bedazzly bits" at the craft store, and then when we got home I sent him out on the property with some clippers to gather greens.

The result:

And while he did that I made a gluten-free chocolate bundt cake. :)

Who needs a desk?

2011-12-01T12:31:00.000-08:00

With the way the kids love to work at the hearth, the coffee table, or on the floor, they don't really use their desks at all. And why not, if that's how they want to work?

Getting ready for the holidays

2011-11-30T12:51:00.000-08:00

The official launch of the Christmas season starts after Thanksgiving, and this year the kids are the main holiday elves. They are in love with the season, but not just for gifts. Carbon put the Christmas lights outside, with a tiny bit of help from me, and they've decorated inside and made a gingerbread house. We're listening to Christmas music and planning baking and other fun. It's lovely to see them be old enough to take a hand in creating their own holiday.

And here's the scene that went into the creation of the gingerbread house:

I'm aiming for a lovely holiday moment, so I've got Christmas music playing, milk on the stove for hot chocolate, and I'm making a gingerbread house with the kids. Then the doorbell rings as I'm trying to stick all the parts of the house together and hold them up until the icing sets. It's the Fedex man, with a holiday related package. But I'm covered in icing, the house falls down, the dogs and kids go crazy and we have to get the big dog out the back door so I can open the front door. I have to excuse myself to go wash icing off my hands, and while I do that our little dog takes a poop right in front of the door! Meanwhile, the milk overboiled. At least I gave the Fedex guy a good laugh today.

The Happiness Prescription

2011-11-28T15:24:00.000-08:00

As I relayed in my last post, I've just struggled with several months of pretty bad depression. I like to think that most people didn't know anything about this - I played it pretty close to my vest and really didn't want to or feel safe letting it all hang out. Now that I'm feeling better, I can talk about it.

I went to a counselor, the same one that four years ago helped save my marriage and help my husband through his depression and stress upon returning from Iraq, and two years ago helped me through a bout of crazy anger- and tension-related insomnia. I trust her and we already have this history on file, so it was faster getting to the meat of the current matter.

It's not like she revealed some amazing truth about my life that I'd missed seeing - it's more like "hey, I'm paying for this so now it's Doctor's Orders". We talked, I did an assessment test to see if my depression had reached "clinical" (just barely not), and she told me two obvious truths:

1. I need to avoid self-medicating through behaviors that are actually harmful. That means don't overeat, don't under-eat, don't over drink, don't smoke, etc. I was told to watch myself closely.

2. My life balance is out of whack. She asked "what would you do if you just had an extra four hours in every week, to do with as you please". Then she said "do that anyway you don't have an extra four hours".

The only way I can accomplish my "doctor's orders" and do more stuff that is purely recreational for me (re-create-ional. I need to recreate myself), was to let something go a bit. The options were:

1. Work. Either lower my standards, get more help, or most-radically reduce my hours.

2. Kids. Cancel some of their activities, lower my standards for homeschooling, get more help, or most radically - stop homeschooling.

3. Home. Lower my standards, get more help, or most radically - burn it down (I'm kidding).

4. Food. Lower my standards, get more help, eat out more, or tell everyone to just scrounge and ignore their pleas for food.

5. Clothing. Just let it pile up dirty. Let my husband go without ironed shirts.

6. Credentialing. I could extend the time I plan to work on my credential, or more radically I could drop out of the program.

7. Normal self-care. I could stop exercising and going to the doctor and all that.

Now - realistically anything that leads me down a path of living in a stink-hole while wearing dirty clothing and eating packaged cookies for breakfast and not going to the gym anymore is a BAD IDEA. That road will just lead to me being more depressed. Yuck - not going there.

My husband STRONGLY felt that I should not ask to reduce my hours at work. He said, and he's probably right, that I'd just end up doing the same amount of work but get paid less.

As much as everyone looked to the homeschooling as the obvious thing to drop, I resisted that with a stubborn grimace.

So it's the Credentialing. I'm not dropping out of the program, but I am going to give myself one more year to complete it. And, honestly, I've lost a lot of my passion for doing it at all - but I'm signed up and so, by golly, I'll do it. I also realized I just couldn't keep loading extra events onto my work responsibilities. I need to keep it realistic and sustainable, and remember to keep the core program strong and do the extras as - well as extras!

By becoming a Semi-Slacker, I've bought myself just enough time for:

1. Sudoku puzzles. Lovely, pointless little things.

2. Fiction reading. It's so therapeutic, no matter what you read! I mean, I could even just read romance novels - the point is it feels fun and is renewing.

3. Watching Star Trek with my family. I like it - something nostalgic that reminds me of my younger self.

That has all been just the fun stuff. I also need to re-form the habit of doing a daily spiritual practice, and I have two that I've done for years: morning yoga and evening journal writing. They just slipped away from me when I started squeezing in study wherever I could, and I justified that studying and writing reflection papers were a form of spiritual practice in their own right - but they don't actually feel very spiritual when you're rushed and anxious!

This is not magic. Doing a sudoku puzzle isn't going to "fix" me, and there are still a few core issues. Like how my standards for myself are really high. Like how I don't get much help. Like the fact that I am a full-time working, full-time homeschooling mom, running a (new, just moved!) household with four acres to care for and planning on hobby farming, and also pursuing a continuing education program that is like part-time grad school.

But the sudoku puzzle does help.

Depression and burn-out

2011-11-27T19:01:00.000-08:00

I could not write this post, or open my heart when I really needed help.

I have been in the shadow-lands, my friends. Perhaps I still am, although I'm able to take some enjoyment in life again and most tellingly, I'm dancing again, a bit.

But those were some dark months. I often live by a saying: "fake it till you make it". The idea is that if I act happy, I'll be happy. If I act like I love my husband, I'll start to actually love him again. I also tend to live for my responsibilities. I'm needed, therefore I keep going.

But all that faking and focusing on responsibilities and duties started to have a very brittle feeling to it. My smile was getting strained, my resiliency was gone, and the "bend or break" aspect of my job and of parenting (of caregiving in general) was leaning toward me breaking. The more I pile on my plate, the more I focus on the needs of others, and set a highly ambitious agenda for EVERYTHING, the more I worry about achievement, the more I worry that I'm not good enough just as I am - the closer to burn-out I get.

The job of a religious educator is a giving and care-taking profession, and I'm also a care-giver to my family. People will take what you give. They will bring their problems to you. They will expect you to be present to them, in 100% authentic openness, no matter how many other people are standing there waiting in line for the same attention. You'll sometimes mess up, be less than perfect, and you'll beg forgiveness with a heartfelt and honestly self-reflective gesture. You'll sometimes be helped, and you'll give thoughtful thank-you's. You'll sometimes feel helpless, faced with the fact that people are people, the world is imperfect, and the best-laid plans fall prey to the unforeseen. People will be cranky with you, or fabulous, or hurt, but no matter what, you will find yourself saying these things over and over again: "I'm sorry", "It's OK", "you're fine", "thank you". You will pour love into others' cups, and hold their hands, and clap extravagantly. And, always, always, you will embody happiness, smile serenely, and never looked stressed out. Fake. It. Till. You. Make. It.

If that is what you expect from yourself all the time, you risk running dry.

It came to a head for me in a staff meeting at church. I brought up our bust-the-seams high attendance in religious education classes at our second service, and our minister responded by focusing on how low the first service attendance had gotten, and what was I going to do about that?

I had no resilience left. I had no bend left in me. I fought back tears, and just was quiet for the rest of the meeting. Then I walked into my office, shut the door, turned my back on my kids who were in there watching a DVD, and burst into tears.

And I called a counselor and made an appointment.

Really, when you feel like you just. cannot. deal. anymore - it's time to reach out for help.

More on what I'm doing to "press the sustain pedal on the piano of my soul" in my next post.

Weekend Books, etc.

2011-11-26T09:17:00.000-08:00

A week in our life, in media use:

I'm reading:

My husband gave me an early Christmas present, because of all my whining about how heavy A Dance with Dragons is in hardcover, and my general iPad envy. No - not an iPad. That's still too pricey, when I have a perfectly good iPhone and MacBook. No, he's been a citizen of AmazonLand for awhile now, and he likes it there. So he got me a Kindle Fire, the latest from Amazon and their version of a tablet. It's pretty darn awesome - I immediately bought Dance with Dragons and I can also get magazine subscriptions on there, and they would be in full color. But I can also go on the internet with a wifi connection, and download movies, music, and apps on to it. So I'm enjoying it a great deal!

reading aloud:

One of Hypatia's friends was reading the Rainbow Magic Fairies series, so when Hypatia saw them at the library she was excited to try them herself. We've been reading Harriet the Hamster Fairy this week, and although I find it incredibly silly she is enjoying it. I doubt I'll want to read anymore out loud, however - these can wait until she breaks into independent reading.

We're still reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to Carbon. It's slow going with such a hefty book.

listening to:

We got another Book of Umber: Happenstance Found from the library this week, on audio CD, and Carbon basically disappeared from family life for a day until he'd listened to the whole thing. He carried around his walkman and headphones, and was only barely restrained from even listening at the dinner table.

And Hypatia's theater class is all learning the song My Favorite Things, so I'm playing (by a loose definition of the word "playing") that on the piano and singing it with her, and I got it on my iPod so she can listen to it over, and over, and over, and over .... but we still like the song!

We watched:

Connected to the theater tickets I've bought this year, we got both Young Frankenstein and Monty Python and the Holy Grail from netflix. My husband and I watched Young Frankenstein - I'd never seen it and he thought I should see it before we go see the Broadway version. I have to say, I didn't love it that much. We'll see how I like the live performance.

We all watched the Monty Python together. Carbon loved it, although we had to explain quite a bit of it. Hypatia liked some parts - the Knights who Say Ni has been a favorite game of theirs for the last few days - but she was disturbed by some of the fake blood spraying bits (and the rabbit attacking Knights was totally uncool with her).

A non-consumer Thanksgiving

2011-11-25T17:55:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving is still the least commercial holiday, although the way that the rest of the weekend goes with its increasingly crazy Christmas shopping frenzy is so overpowering that possibly Thanksgiving is just being swallowed by Christmas.

But we still try to celebrate Thanksgiving first, and keep the shopping monster at bay.

We drove up to my mother's couple acres near the mountains, and talked to the turkeys that were deemed too small to harvest before the holiday.

Ever since my mother was a little girl it's been a family tradition to do a jigsaw puzzle on Thanksgiving. We pulled out an old jigsaw puzzle I remembered from when I was a little kid, a cool one with small pieces and big pieces so it presents the right challenge level for the whole family. Only now it's my kids doing the easy part, and me doing the hard part.

My brother and sister-in-law hosted the dinner, with the turkey being one they had raised and killed and cleaned and cooked themselves.

One of the fun things at my brother's house is their pet pig, Blanche.

We stayed over at my mother's, and today (instead of the crazy Black Friday sales) we headed just a short way up the road to a hiking trail. Getting the family out into the forest seemed like just the right compliment to a day of celebrating our gratitude, and the antidote to the culture of consumer excess that we don't want to join.

harvest home, and we give thanks ...

2011-11-23T07:50:00.000-08:00

Remember the apples I picked?

And I didn't grow all of these, but I'm abundantly provided with squash!

Tomorrow we'll head up the road to my mother's and my brother's homes for Thanksgiving with family. They will be preparing one of the turkeys they raised this year; we'll be bringing a pumpkin pie made with the pumpkin we grew. Sure, there will also probably be jello in a molded shape (my mother is from Kansas and the midwest traditions are strong in her) and what my children lovingly refer to as "that weird red stuff that comes in a can" (cranberry "sauce"), but it will also be a meal celebrating the harvest that we actually brought in, and the local harvest of those real farmers around us.

And after singing this in church last Sunday (it's by a Unitarian author and it's a Thanksgiving song - not a Christmas song as is often thought), the kids and I will most likely sing it as we drive:

to boldly go ...

2011-11-21T15:46:00.000-08:00

After watching Star Trek, I thought it would be a good connection to read about some real explorers. So far we've read about Matthew Henson's journey to the North Pole (crazy! why risk your life for that?), and William Beebe's journey into the deep ocean. It's a great geography tie-in as well, and we got onto Google Earth and looked at maps and satellite pictures.

I do so love how homeschooling can follow a twisty-turny path. We really are explorers ourselves, boldly going where no one has gone before. In fact, everyone is an explorer, pushing out into the unknown. And the journey along the way is the whole point.

Weekend Links

2011-11-19T11:16:00.000-08:00

Our life this week in quick links:

I'm reading:

I have been given an official prescription that I need to spend more time doing things just because they are fun (this is the benefit of going to see a therapist for my slide into depression - more on that later), so with that in mind I went to the bookstore this week. I wanted A Dance With Dragons, but the sheer size of the hardcover book gave me pause. That thing would throw my back out carrying it around! Definitely going to get that on the Kindle. Instead I bought David Sedaris's holidays on ice, a collection of six holiday stories by the caustic comedic writer. So far I'm enjoying it, but not busting out loud with laughter.

We're reading to the kids:

We finished the Ivy and Bean book this week, and instead of starting another chapter book I thought it would be nice to read a few picture books. Even as they get older, I don't want to stop reading all the wonderful picture books out there!

Me ... Jane introduces us to a little girl named Jane and her fun stuffed monkey, and all the fun outdoors they have. And of course it turns out that the little girl Jane is Jane Goodall and she grows up to have wonderful adventures outdoors with real apes. Hypatia loved it and was inspired to jump right up and go join Roots to Shoots and save the world. This book has made it onto a lot of "Best of 2011" lists.

Grandpa Green is a romp through a crazy topiary garden, so the illustrations are very interesting. It also reads like a love-letter to a beloved grandpa. This is also on a lot of "Best of 2011" lists.

In the Rainfield: Who's the Greatest? is a story from Africa about an argument between Wind, Fire, and Rain about who is the greatest. In the end, Rain, the gentlest, is also the greatest, but the story was a bit odd to our ears. However, the illustrations are very interesting with a blend of photo collage and paintings, and we enjoyed examining them very much.

We read some other books about explorers, but I'll post about them later.

We're listening to:

Pimsleur's Learn to Speak Spanish, as we drive around town.

More NPR than we had time for before. A pleasant side-effect of my longer drive to work after our move, and a reminder that I really ought to send in a pledge! The kids are also getting old enough that they actually listen to it with me, and it sparks lots of good conversations about what's going on in the world.

The Children of Green Knowe, which Carbon has heard already too many times to count. This book series is easily his favorite of all time. Hypatia has only heard this one once before, so we're listening to it again in the car. They are truly, deeply, lovely books.

We're watching:

Project Runway, Season 5. The kids LOVE this show, and the whole family enjoys watching it together. And they are working with some of my old scrap fabric and making sketches, trying to become designers themselves.

Star Trek, the Original Series. I loved Star Trek when I was a kid, and it's fun to share that now with my own kids. Sure, it's silly, but it still has a lot of good messages and we've had some great family discussions based on it.

Care Packages for the homeless

2011-11-18T11:17:00.000-08:00

Carbon is reading every sign and everything we pass, especially when I'm driving. Now that he's finally got the letter-reversals mostly under control, the Code is Cracked and he's loving being able to read things for himself.

So it's a rainy day, and I'm taking them to PE at the YMCA. We are stopped at a red light, and there's a homeless man standing at the corner with a hand-lettered sign on a piece of cardboard. Carbon sounds it out: "Homeless. Please Help", and he reads it out loud just as the light changes and I start to drive away.

Hypatia yells "he was asking for HELP! Why didn't you stop?"

Indeed. Why didn't I stop? Because I don't know how best to help him? Because I'm afraid that giving him cash won't really help? Because I don't usually carry much cash? Because I'm embarrassed to hold traffic up? Because, honestly, it gets tiring to keep seeing other people's pain and a numbness takes over where you just stop looking?

None of that is good enough for my kids. None of that is good enough for my own best self, either (and my kids are like the external manifestation of my own best self - and worst self too, of course. All about the extremes, young people). The kids want to help, and they need something tangible they can do.

So we talked about what would help, if you lived on the streets. We don't want to give them money to spend on alcohol or drugs, if that is part of why they are on the streets. But we want to give them something. In the end, we went to the big warehouse store and got batteries, those instant handwarmers, and some good thermal socks. We also bought gift cards to the movie theater, hoping that maybe they can go get in out of the cold for a bit that way. Gift cards for coffee shops and McDonalds (hey, it may not be the best nutrition but it's right downtown, it's warm inside, and the money goes a long way there) will go in future bags I think.

The kids wrote cards, that say "Stay Well" on them, and they packed the care packages up. Now, the next time we see someone who is asking for Help, the kids can give them this.

Time management

2011-11-17T19:12:00.000-08:00

This is something I recently got at a conference: this idea of how you can divide up your time and To Do List into these four quadrants. And if you looked at your time, most people probably spend the majority of their time in that top left quadrant, doing things that need to be done immediately for other people. And most people probably spend very little time in that bottom right quadrant, doing things they hope to do eventually for themselves.

This state of affairs keeps us from ever getting to the things that are possibly the most important - the long term goals and dreams we have for ourselves. And always doing just what needs to be done immediately is a limiting way of living, as well.

A fellow DRE in my "cluster" (the regional group that meets once a month for mutual support and study) was telling us all that she was reserving one work day a week to "work ahead", and that inspired me to try something new with my own work week.

Monday - the day of Rest

Tuesday - the day to tie up all loose ends. Get to the bottom of the Inbox and do any lingering To Do list tasks

Wednesday - Prep tasks for Sunday and all immediate tasks

Thursday - Work ahead and look farther ahead than just this week

Friday - really long-term work like study and developing new curricula

Saturday - if there are any last minute prep tasks or special events, do those

Sunday - the big day at church

This week so far it has been very nice, and I'm very hopeful for this way of organizing my time!

current best practices: felt boards for classes

2011-11-16T21:26:00.000-08:00

One of my latest projects has been to add a felt board to the 1st-2nd grade class so that the illustrations from the books they're reading in there can be better enjoyed by all the children. As the class has gotten larger, and as we are trying hard to better welcome children with special needs, seeing the illustrations in a book the teacher is reading from just weren't enough anymore. So I ordered this felt board (should have just made one, really - it's just a folded bit of cardboard with felt glued to it) and I've been photocopying the illustrations and laminating then sticking velcro to the back of them. The kids can either manipulate the illustrations or the teacher can, depending on the way the day is going. Overall, I'm quite happy with how this helps them focus during reading time, and I think it helps them all to have more to look at.

haircut time

2011-11-15T20:28:00.000-08:00

Among all my other motherly duties is the job of keeping my kids from looking like little ragamuffins. They would, indeed, go out into the world with uncombed hair, dirty faces, ripped dirty clothes, etc - generally you get the idea - if I wasn't here making sure they walk out into the world looking like the child of someone who actually cares.

I read somewhere, a few years back, and I really wish I could remember where, an essay by a white woman who had adopted African-American children, and she wrote about the obligation to take care of their hair as it was explained to her by a black mother, as being a cultural obligation to make sure that your children are obviously valued and loved. I really wish I could find that essay again - so if you know what I'm talking about please send me the link!

There is a sort of hippy-kid look that lets them dress however they want that is very popular in my social circle, and there is a norm for the kids to be allowed to choose their own "look". I have to walk a line with that and with my own feelings on the matter. Really, I kind of like the look of kids in school uniforms with matching crew cuts. Honestly - I really like that! I think it's because I was one of those hippy kids and all that freedom of self-expression just never seemed that great to me or all it was cracked up to be.

OK, long story short - I've got both the kids' hair cut and I'm very happy that they're looking less scruffy!

Comic Crazy

2011-11-14T11:34:00.000-08:00

Letting your kids watch cartoons is NOT supposed to be educational. In fact, screen time and being "plugged in" has a really bad rap and parents are encouraged to "unplug" their kids and get them reading or building or playing outside.

And kids should read and build and go play outside.

But I also let my kids have more screen time than others recommend, and I'm not too worried about it. They are not lacking in time to do all the other good things, and they are not passive consumers - they are engaged with what they are watching.

In fact, last week I got them a disc of Super Hero Squad from netflix, which they watched happily about three times through. This led to a conversation about "The Marvel Universe", which led to me having to do some online research (thank you Wikipedia!) because I knew nothing about comic book heroes or the whole "DC versus Marvel" conversation.

And that led to a trip to our local comic book shop, and the purchase of a Super Hero Squad comic book. Carbon has been struggling his way through reading it independently - and that's the first time he's tried this hard to read something all by himself.

Reading a comic book has led to wanting to create a comic book, and lots of drawing time for both kids. And that also led to some great conversations about what the law is for copying a character - we had to once again consult the internet for some copyright law information (thank you, Wikipedia!).

Carbon decided he wanted to buy a toy related to this whole thing, so we went to the store and found out how much that would cost. Then he's been saving up for that toy, and doing a bunch of extra work to earn money. I had flower bulbs that needed to be planted, so I offered that as a paid task. He had to be shown how to properly plant them, and then he spent hours outside planting flowers so he could earn the money to (he planted 100 flower bulbs). So he ended up spending time outside too!

(Hypatia's comic heroes)

Overall, not a bad cascade of results from letting my kids watch a cartoon! I don't think it's the time spent being "plugged in" or "unplugged" - I think it's how plugged in the adult is to the child - how much you are noticing their interests and then giving them the resources they need (including their time and your interest and your time) so they can engage with their interests.

Way Cool Sunday School

2011-11-13T14:58:00.000-08:00

Once a month, I'm experimenting with a different method of Religious Education called "Way Cool Sunday School". We aren't doing the pure method, as we are only doing it once a month, but it's primarily a more hands-on and multi-age method of RE. We are trying it so there is something for the kids that feels less like "school". Last month was our first try at it, and it was crazy, hectic, and not ideal.

This month we tried again, with all we learned last month under our belts. It was much better! In fact, it was pretty cool. A 15 minute Children's Chapel worship was followed by a rotation with three stations that kids spent 15 minutes each at.

A guest speaker talked about Sustainable Agriculture and how to take care of your garden in organic ways.

Kids made posters for our Food Drive we'll do this month.

They cooked.

And they ate.

Weekend Links

2011-11-12T14:03:00.000-08:00

Boy, my life is busy, and I don't much like it this way. Go, go, go, go, go! But here I have a couple precious hours at home on a Saturday, between work hours, and here are my weekend links.

I'm reading: When Youth Lead: A Guide to Intergenerational Social Justice Ministry by Jill M. Schwendeman.

I WISH I was reading (if I had time, precious time!): A Dance with Dragons. I enjoyed the first four books over the summer, and I really wish I had time to read the 5th in the series.

Carbon and Hypatia's read alouds are still the same as last week (No News is Good News and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)

The kids enjoyed watching The Super Hero Squad Show from netflix this week, and it spawned some new interests. So we headed down to our local comic book shop and Hypatia bought some Strawberry Shortcake comics and Carbon bought a Super Hero Squad comic. He has trouble reading the fonts they use in the comics, but he's motivated and trying - the first time he's really done much independent reading. You can also create your own Super Hero Squad comic online - it's pretty fun. More about comics in a later post.

We've also started watching Star Trek: The Original Series as a family. It's streaming on netflix, and I love how it's bringing us together as a family to sit and do one episode a day. It's cutting into our bedtime reading time, but it's worth it. We are having so many good conversations around these old episodes, and I jokingly said we should do a "Star Trek Unit Study". Well, that sounded awesome to the kids! So I'm thinking about how to do that.

And then we had a tragedy this week: I had two tickets to the touring production of Spamalot, and I gave them to Carbon. He got to choose which parent he wanted to take with him, and he chose his dad "because I don't get to spend as much time with Daddy". We were all set, and he had watched YouTube clips to get ready, read the synopsis, and then I looked at the tickets and realized I had goofed up the date and the production had been LAST NIGHT. We totally missed it because I had it on the wrong date on the calendar - major tragedy. We were all terribly upset. That sucked, to say the least.

A Gratitude Workshop

2011-11-11T20:33:00.000-08:00

Here is a workshop that I did last Sunday at church, and the Gratitude Tree that Carbon made at the workshop!

Family Gratitude Workshop

Gathering (10 Minutes)

Hymn: “We Gather Together”

A Simple Gratitude Ritual

A basket is passed around the circle, and each person chooses one object from within. Then, while holding that object, think of something that you are grateful for. Once the basket is empty, it will be passed around again. Each person places their object back into the basket, saying what they are grateful for. The final person takes the full basket and says “Our basket is full, “our cup runeth over”, thank you for these gifts we share.”

(This could easily be done at home, around a dinner table. A small bowl could be used in place of the basket, for a smaller gathering. Objects can be stones, fruits or nuts, seashells, or anything else that feels meaningful to you. Something that actually feels good in the hands, giving this a tactile experience for the children, is better.)

Reflecting/Creating (30 Minutes)

Children will Now create Gratitude Trees

Adults will Reflect and Discuss

Questions for Reflection. Take a few minutes and think or write about these questions, then get into pairs or groups of three and discuss (for these, it doesn’t really matter if you talk with your own life partner or another, but later it would be good to switch it up).

Think back to your own childhood. Watch the time. Reflect for 5 minutes.

1. What made you happy?

2. What energized you?

3. What barrier did you overcome?

4. What changed you?

5. What triggered your creativity?

6. What deepened your spirituality?

7. What kindness did you experience?

8. What did others do for you?

9. What inspired you?

10. What made you feel good?

11. What difficulty taught you an important lesson?

Discuss your childhood memories with a partner or in a group of three. Watch the time – share for 10 minutes.

Now, read the following sermon excerpt: (5 Minutes)

Parenting As Spiritual Discipline

A Sermon by the Rev. Wayne B. Arnason and Ahmie Yeung, Worship Associate
for the West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, Rocky River Ohio
April 10, 2005

Sermon Part 1: Wayne

In her book, The Heart of a Family, Meg Cox tells a story about the Siegel family of Alexandria, VA. They “had started to eat dinner one night when two year old Rebecca, sitting in her high chair, suddenly got very quiet. Tears rolled down her cheeks, while her confused parents and older sister frantically tried to figure out what was wrong. She didn’t seem sick or in pain. The food on her plate was something she liked. What could be missing? What had they done differently? Suddenly, it came to them. They had forgotten to sing grace.”

So they held hands and sang the grace their family used. As they began to sing it, Rebecca’s crying had escalated into loud sobs, but then subsided quickly as she heard the familiar tune that began their meals. She calmed down and ate her dinner. The family never forgot grace again.

When Ahmie Yeung and I began talking about this sermon idea, we found that the theme raised enough questions for us to fill three sermons: “How do we pass on our beliefs to our children? Do UU parents really want our children to choose what they believe for themselves? What about those of us in our church whose family heritage includes more than one religious path and finally; “How does parenting change us, the parents, as spiritual beings?” We won’t cover all these questions today but you will get at least two themes for the price of one. First, “How does parenting invite and instruct us in the virtues and practices of a formal religious life, especially a Unitarian Universalist religious life, regardless of our personal theology?” and second “What are the personal spiritual lessons of parenting?” It’s been great to talk with Ahmie about these questions from two ends of the parenting spectrum – she as the mother of brand new child and me as the father of a child about to graduate from college.

The story from Meg Cox illustrates well how both of these dimensions of parenting as a spiritual discipline can manifest themselves. Parents who implement a regular grace at meals with their families may do so for many reasons, some of them very personal to the spirituality of the parents. But one of the reasons will often be to create a ritual of moral and spiritual instruction for children. The message grace conveys is that we should be grateful for our food, and the many hands and the larger context of living that has made it possible for us to be able to eat it. Well and good! Little Rebecca wasn’t old enough to understand the moral lesson of grace, however. At age two, she just enjoyed how it felt. It was part of the family ritual whenever they sat down to eat, and so when they didn’t sing the grace, she noticed! And she cried! What did her parents learn from this?

That love of ritual is something that is deeply ingrained in us, and a natural way for our youngest human beings to make sense of a confusing world in which there is so much to learn.
That there are some events and moments in family life where everyone needs to be included, and if they aren’t they will likely let you know.
That the pain and distance created when an important ritual is missed can be assuaged by reconciliation and renewal of the ritual.

With a different partner than you discussed before, discuss these questions: (10 minutes)

1. How is parenting a “Spiritual Discipline” for you?

2. What lessons do you learn from parenting? What challenges you the most?

3. What gifts do you receive from your children?

4. What practices or “rituals” do you have in your family? What values are reflected in your rituals?

Family Gratitude Trees (10 minutes)

The kids have been making trees (which they’ll take home with them), now we reform into family groups and cut out leaf shapes from paper, write what we are grateful for on each leaf, and tie them on the trees. One leaf for each thing that someone in your family is grateful for.

(This ritual could be done regularly, or just around the Thanksgiving season. If you don’t have a wire tree like we just made here, you could use a real tree and tie ribbons to it, make one out of twigs, or make a large paper tree and post it on a wall of your home, and tape/glue paper leaves on to that poster for each of the things you are grateful for. If you google “Gratitude Trees” and choose “Images” you will find many inspiring pictures.)

Closing Ritual

Hymn: “We Give Thanks”

Responsive Reading “We Give Thanks”

Homeschooling Field Notes

2011-11-07T16:13:00.000-08:00

Field Trip Day. I'm really glad I joined this homeschool "meetup" group, and that we are able to join them for field trips. I'm seeing a theme in my life right now, and that theme is that stuff needs to be scheduled or I won't find time to do it. If I sign up for a field trip there is some accountability and it gets onto my calendar. If I just think, "oh, sometime in November when the salmon are running I should take the kids out to see that", it will just keep getting put off until it's over and I'm thinking "boy, I wish I'd taken them out to see the salmon last month".

The weather was great, the group was just the right size (4 families, about 12 kids), Carbon had kids about his age that he enjoyed spending time with, the docent was nice and knowledgable and the kids asked good questions, and the salmon were active and easily seen. And I learned that from now on, if Hypatia is leaving the house in rubber boots I need to make sure she put socks on under them. Her toes were purple by the time we got home!

Weekend Links

2011-11-06T22:15:00.000-08:00

OK, so my "Saturday Morning Book Posts" have been interrupted by a schedule of Saturday morning gymnastics classes and so forth. So here's a new stab at keeping a record of what we're reading and so forth - "Weekend Links".

Storytelling: The Quiltmaker's Gift by Jeff Brumbeau made a great story in church this morning.

Reading out loud to Hypatia: Ivy and Bean: No News is Good News (Love it!)

Reading out loud to Carbon: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Listening to in the car: Dragon Games (Books of Umber) (Pretty fun)

The kids are listening to on their own: the Hank the Cowdog series (They both enjoy it - I find it irritating)

We're listening to: The Green Album (Muppet Fans unite!)

Hypatia has this irritating pop song stuck in her head and keeps singing it: Half Of My Heart

Something we actually saw live and enjoyed:

We've got PE covered

2011-11-03T18:07:00.000-07:00

I enjoy exercise, but I find it hard to make it a priority to go to the gym on my own. I might squeeze in a walk or some home yoga with a DVD, but to get my butt down to the gym I really need to have another reason.

Thank goodness the kids have a full gym schedule! Because we use the YMCA, there are classes for the whole family, and the PlayCare room for Hypatia when there isn't anything for her. Carbon has joined a Jiu Jitsu class that meets two evenings a week, and they are both doing a Homeschool PE program there that meets for two hours, twice a week. It's an hour in the swimming pool and then an hour in the gym.

They're getting plenty of exercise. (And having fun!). And the schedule means that I'm getting my exercise too. I go off and do my own stuff while they are swimming, then come back in time to help Hypatia wash her hair in the showers, then join them for the gym part. And I can sneak some reading in there too.

Sometimes we just need an external structure to keep us going.

Apples!

2011-11-02T16:44:00.000-07:00

I had time to pick them on Monday, on my day off when the sun came out and was just so inviting and glorious. Now, when do I have time to actually do something with this many apples?

Happy Halloween!

2011-10-31T08:47:00.000-07:00

Our Halloween traditions: how to make them easier on Mama?

2011-10-30T16:34:00.000-07:00

I was inspired to try and take the "Easy Way Out" this Halloween. It's one of my family's favorite holidays (not my favorite, but the kids and my husband love it) and we have traditionally celebrated the heck out of it. But, let's face it - it's a LOT of work for the Mama. Being the holiday wizard in charge of making sure the family gets their special times and memories is yet another chore that falls on my shoulders.

I didn't have it in me this year (I really am barely keeping my head above water with all the work and different hats I'm wearing), so I couldn't imagine sitting down and sewing costumes. I proposed that we just go to the Halloween store and buy costumes this year, and the kids LOVED that idea. Although it meant shilling out hard-earned money for cheap crap, the trade-off was that I didn't need to sit up all night long trying to find the time to sew costumes. I don't know that it's the right choice for every year, but for this year it felt right.

But then I proposed that we just buy our pumpkins at the grocery store, instead of picking them out at the pumpkin patch farm. They already got to go to the patch earlier this month, for a homeschool group field trip, and pick out small pumpkins to bring home. So why not just buys our big carving pumpkins at the grocery store?

TOTAL MUTINY. It's not Halloween if we don't get our pumpkins at the farm! So we squeezed a trip in, and they were happy with that. And now I know which traditions matter to them and which don't.

Egg Drop

2011-10-25T20:53:00.000-07:00

It was my second year as a DRE, and I had been inspired to write my own curriculum for our 1st-3rd grade class called "The Seven Principles and Dr. Seuss". I was still pretty fresh from graduate school, with more theory than practice under my belt. I wanted this to be a multiple intelligences curriculum, with each lesson working a different form of intelligence: musical, artistic, interpersonal, etc. Being even more rigid, I laid down the order of rotation (so it would be consistent and predictable) for how the lessons would cycle through those intelligences.

So the 2nd Principle was Horton Hatches an Egg, but it also "had" to be musical. I struggled with that, then thought of those egg shakers you can buy for rhythm band instruments. We could have made them from easter eggs, but I didn't happen to have a supply of plastic easter eggs on hand, so I morphed it into just any sort of shakers. It wasn't ideal, but whatever - the kids should enjoy it and then they could shake them to "From You I Receive, to You I Give" and it would all make sense with the 2nd Principle.

It was the day of that lesson, and we had a big class (in retrospect, it was a small class, but it was big for what we were used to back then), crammed into a tiny 1/2 of a classroom with cubicle dividers between them and the preschoolers. The teacher did a good job reading the story, but then we sat down to make the shakers. It was a tight space, and beans were falling everywhere. The teacher was frazzled. But the kids were laughing and having fun.

My son was in that class. He was six years old, and was my little shadow, always going to work with me. I asked him how the class had been.

"Well, Mom, I had fun - but I didn't see any connection between the story and the activity."

I was both proud of him for seeing the problem and naming it, and frustrated with myself for failing to make a better lesson plan.

This year we pulled that curriculum off the shelf to do it again. And this gave me a chance to re-do this lesson plan, a second chance to get this right. I now know that when I am planning I need to picture the kids themselves, and imagine what will make sense to them and be fun - not what will follow some strict theory or plan. What makes sense and will be fun with "Horton"? An egg-drop, baby. :)

And they loved it.

(If you don't know what an egg drop is, it's a some-what classic activity where you give kids an egg and challenge them to design a way for it to fall without cracking. In our case, I hardboiled the eggs (less messy) and gave the kids packing materials.)

chicken keeping

2011-10-24T21:25:00.000-07:00

Carbon is the primary chicken keeper around here. It's his chore to go out first thing in the morning and collect the eggs and feed the chickens, and to go out after dark to lock them in for the night, safe from predators. He needs a bit of monitoring, but mostly he does a good job at this chore.

While I was away the kids got to stay with my mother on her little hobby farm, and she has a much bigger flock of birds. It happened that she and my brothers were going to be slaughtering some of the flock and putting them up in the freezer for the winter. After getting my permission (and really - I think kids should know where their food comes from if they're going to eat meat), they all included Carbon in the process. He watched the killing, and he plucked birds, and he was proud of himself for being helpful. Now he says he's ready to be a "real farmer".

Meat-eating is not a given, and I absolutely respect those who choose not to eat it. I agree with the argument that meat takes more resources (so vegetarianism is a bit lighter on the environment) and that most animal-farming is horribly unethical in how it treats these poor living creatures. But when I was a vegetarian I got pretty sick, and I've come to the conclusion that I'm not up to the task of managing my genetic anemia (it's a rare type) without eating meat. So ... I'm really happy to find ways to be a responsible meat-consumer and be connected to the animals.

And I'm proud of my little boy who wants to be a "real farmer".

Musings on the Sabbath

2011-10-23T10:58:00.000-07:00

(This week at the Liberal Religious Educators Association Fall Conference, keynote speaker Kim Stafford gave us through some writing exercises and reflections. After he read a selection to us from Rabbi Herschel's Sabbath, I wrote this reflection in my journal.)

Sabbath, not as worship but as rest. Spring does not come without winter. The field must be allowed to lie fallow. What if I did not meditate on a cushion, with legs folded under me and new age music (or silence - even harder to get in real life) in a world apart from my life? What if I meditated in my adirondack chair, with a cup of coffee on one arm? Gazing out over the field, bundled up against the cold, just sitting there? What if I allowed myself to just enjoy all that I have, not worrying if I am worthy of it or not, not worrying if I have done enough to earn this rest time, not worrying if others see it all as good or not. How amazing and free would that be? What if I just sat, not in a hermit's cave or on a mountain top, but here, now, amidst my life and all it's crazy messiness?

What I'm Doing in Portland

2011-10-21T14:11:00.000-07:00

This week I had to find a volunteer substitute to fill my role at church on Sunday morning. I had to go into church on my day off to set out materials in all the classrooms, with little notes "set up for Sunday classes - PLEASE DO NOT MOVE", and just hope for the best. Then the next day I had to drive 2 hours each way to go drop off my children and dogs with my wonderful sweet mother who is watching them all for me this week. There were other loose ends to tie up; other people I needed to ask favors of so I could leave town for a few days. Why, oh why, I think, do I ever try to get away? It's so darn much work.

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Then I got a taxi to the train station, and a train down to Portland. I'm attending the Liberal Religious Educators Association (LREDA) Fall Conference. A gathering of 200 wonderful folks (not all women), who do this same work I do. I also signed up for an additional two days of training in Youth Ministry, and that training had a 120 page reader that was emailed to me last Thursday and I had to have it all read before I arrived.

It's work, but it's good work; the kind of work that educates, renews, refreshes, and re-inspires. I have so many ideas jotted down, and more energy to get home and get back to it.

And ... a plug for the train. That was my first time riding it, and it is the Most Relaxing travel I have ever done. No crazy-making security and sardine can claustrophobia. No road-rage or blindness. Just me and a comfy seat, a cup of coffee I bought in the dining car, passing lovely scenery - and that reader I needed to finish before I arrived.

I hope to find time to take the train somewhere again! I think the kids would love it.

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Rocks and Minerals

2011-10-17T21:55:00.000-07:00

The University has a lovely little natural history museum, and they have a lovely educational department that loans out "museum in a box" kits to teachers. The kits come full of specimens and books and so forth, and a 3-ring binder of lesson plans. With the budget cuts that are hitting almost everyone, they've raised the rental fees on these boxes, but it still seems worth it to me.

We've had a box of Rocks and Minerals for two weeks, and we've been working through the lesson plans. It has been a fun unit study, all packed and ready to go for me!

I don't know how many people even know about this resource. If you have a museum or a University near you, you should check what sort of teacher resources they have. These resources are available for homeschoolers too!

UU stereotypes: coffee

2011-10-16T16:03:00.000-07:00

Have you heard the joke about the church arsonist? I know - a weird place to start a joke. But anyway, there is this arsonist burning down churches. And at each of the churches in town the priest/minister/pastor pushes past the fire department and rushes in to save the most important thing in the church. The Catholic priest carries out the communion accoutrements, the Protestant minister carries out the Bible, and then the UU minister rushes in to his church and comes back out carrying the .... coffee pot.

Well, today one of our RE classes made little clay representations of their favorite place in the church, and here you have it ... the coffee service window. :) There's a little plate of cookies there, too.