Family

The Things on our Walls and What they Tell

By / December 27, 2012

Our decorating scheme for this house has been pretty haphazard in the fifteen years since we moved in. The walls are white because we’ve never spent the time or money to change them. We hung up some portraits and a picture of the temple because that is what one does with the walls of a house, also because I believe that sometimes we need visual reminders of the important things in our lives. There is a large picture in the kitchen of a gargoyle leaping to catch bubbles. I still love that picture. Howard and I bought it together one day after we received an unexpectedly large tax return. However the wall hanging we picked up in Africa thirteen years ago was a purchase made because we were in Africa and felt the need to bring something home with us. Then once it was here we needed to display it. Many of the other ornaments in our home have lingered for similar reasons. Our whole decorating scheme centered around things we acquired or inherited randomly that were sort of cool. Yet this past year I’ve placed more focus on noticing how small shifts in our surroundings can add to the general happiness in our lives. The African wall hanging long ago stopped causing us to feel happy. It was time for something new.

Our walls don’t just speak to us about places we’ve been and what matters, they also speak to those who visit. Mostly what our walls have been saying lately is that we are busy people who don’t take time to clean or to create a cohesive feel to our spaces. Howard had an idea to fix that, at least for the family room. He used some reward points to get Nintendo game posters. They showed large images of games that we’ve loved. Looking at the posters made us happy. We talked of having them framed to hang on the walls. Yet we didn’t. Mostly the delay was due to concerns about the cost of framing, but I confess I also worried a bit about what our walls would say to others.

Our family room is set up for video games and movies. The big TV is mounted on the wall and the cabinet below it is stacked with multiple game systems and shelves of the games that we have accumulated. Sometimes I feel very aware of all of these things when a visitor walks into the room, particularly if that visitor is one who has expressed the opinion that video games are a waste of time. That room makes it very obvious where much of our discretionary money is spent. Do we sometimes spend too much time and money on video games? Yes. But I know that the games bring happiness to our lives. We have as many happy memories and shared experiences over video games as other families do over soccer matches or trips to theme parks.

I have been trying lately to add small happiness to life, to recognize which things add to that happiness and which subtract. For Christmas this year I measured the posters and bought frames at Target. They were relatively cheap, simple to assemble, and did a good job of displaying the posters. This afternoon I took down the other displays and hung the posters. The room no declares clearly that the games do not just belong to the kids, but also to the adults. Not only that, but that we consider the games to be art worthy of display. With this one simple act we truly own the room, the games, and ourselves. Even more important, I when I watch Howard or the kids enter the room, their eyes flicker to the pictures of Zelda or a Skyrim map and their mouths quirk in a smile. A tiny piece of happiness has been added to our lives. We are glad to walk in that room now. It is good.

We’re not done. I expect that we’ll trade out the posters periodically as these ones begin to feel stale and new ones arrive. I also know that a particular pairing is not quite working right. It would also add to the room if we were to put a fresh coat of paint on the walls. These things will come, and they will add to our happiness.

A Mixture of December Thoughts

By / December 19, 2012 / 1 Comment

My December wasn’t busy when I viewed it from the safety of Thanksgiving weekend. I could look at the calendar–mostly empty–and hope that in between the holiday shipping there would be time for some peace. If I look back at the calendar days I’ve just been through, they still look pretty empty, but I know that they were not. December is always like this, or at least it has been for the last several years. It is the unrelenting list of things to do, each one small but important. It is getting the kids up for school and instead of focusing on homework support and house management, running downstairs to process the stack of orders that needs to go out with the mail. Then it is managing the small homework crises which would not have been crises at all had I been following my usual patterns. It is the accumulation of clutter and laundry because I use my spare minutes to plan gifts, manage customer support, or process orders. Then there are the out of ordinary things that rearrange my days. Kiki needing urgent medical attention for what turned out to be an acute abdominal strain. Link having frequent heartburn pain which increased to the point that he was awake in tears at night. So now we’re in the process of diagnosis to figure out why–lab results testing for an ulcer should come in on Friday. Each unexpected thing makes all the other things have to shuffle around.

And then there was the mummified chicken. It was a school project. The kids have been working on it for weeks, but Gleek really owned the whole process. I was fine with that, except one day Gleek called because she’d volunteered a to bring a sarcophagus and she had left it at home. I delivered it. The next day Gleek called because the kid who was supposed to bring the cotton wrapping had not done so. That time Howard delivered the rescue. This afternoon Gleek arrived at the car with the sarcophagus in hand. Someone had to take the mummy home and bury it until spring, rather like an odd version of taking home the class pet for the weekend. So, I have a mummified chicken in my garage waiting for Gleek to dig a hole in some corner of my yard. This definitely falls into the category of Things I Did Not Expect When I Decided to Become a Parent.

I was supposed to take Gleek and Patch to go see the Christmas lights on Temple Square today. It is a trip we all want to take, except when we walked into the house this afternoon, not one of us wanted to leave. I don’t want to leave my house very much lately. I know I should. It is good for me when I do. Yet entire weeks go by when I only leave to carpool kids or to fetch food from the grocery store. And visit the post office. I’ve made many trips to the post office this past week when I could not leave packages by the curb because of the water falling from the sky. This is why it was so good of Howard to send me to see The Hobbit last Friday. This Friday I have a social event with friends. I’m looking forward to it, and simultaneously I do not want to leave my house. I don’t like the word homebody. It has negative connotations for me, but increasingly I think the word applies to me. I’m trying to decide how I feel about that and if it is a problem to be remedied.

Last year I wrote a lovely blog entry about approaching Christmas This year is different than last. I find myself in a strange place where Christmas is only days away and our tree is still mostly bare of gifts. The strangest part is that none of the kids have come to me upset by the lack of presents, though a couple of them have expressed concern about what they should give and how to fund it. I have a stash of things I’ve accumulated, but I get the feeling that none of my kids will be shopping in the mommy store. They are going to go shopping, seeking out what they want to give rather than taking the easy path of giving something I’ve already acquired. I’ll be assisting with this more challenging path, turning over to them this part of creating the holiday. Thus we build new holiday patterns because we outgrew the old ones. More important, I am loosening my hands on the reins, realizing that Christmas is a group project and I have to let everyone else participate instead of just being passengers on my ride. Even if it means that three days from now there is a present buying panic.

All of which makes for a blog entry as mixed together and haphazard as most of my days have been lately.

Playing with Dry Ice

By / December 17, 2012

Kiki was sick the day they did the dry ice lab in her physics class. Dry ice allows the students to simulate a frictionless environment. In order to help Kiki make up her assignment we declared playing with dry ice to be our Monday night family activity. For safety, I made them all put on gloves. The squabbling began about two seconds after I got the ice out of the bag. They all had very clear ideas about what we should do with the ice, but none of them were very good at pausing to listen to each other. Even with the squabbles, much fun was had as we slid the block across our kitchen counter helping Kiki with her experiments.

Then we explored the joy of plunking the remaining ice into a pot of water. The bubbles of fog were truly impressive. Photographing them was tricky. Two kids had to blow the fog away while I aimed the camera.

Naturally we spent some time letting the fog flow over the sides of the pot and across the counter.

Even this part of the experiment was not argument free. Gleek wanted to catch and swirl the fog with her hands. Kiki wanted to watch the patterns it made when undisturbed. Except when they swapped roles wanting the opposite things. Add in two more kids with desires to stir, pull the ice back out and slide it some more, and a host of other creative ideas… Let’s just say the playing with dry ice is not a conflict free experience with a family of four.

Yet it was completely worthwhile and quite a lot of fun. Sometimes we get to do something really cool. Literally. The dry ice formed condensation and ice crystals wherever it went.

Telling Kids About Bad Things

By / December 17, 2012

Howard and I spent most of the weekend avoiding the news. We checked in for updates, but only read them in text. We watched no video and tried to keep to bare facts as much as possible. We certainly did not turn on broadcast news in our family room and let our kids watch with us. For them, the school shooting barely existed all weekend long. Howard and I had several conversations during which we sorted our thoughts and feelings, but we were careful to have those where the kids were not listening.

This morning at breakfast Gleek asked a question which showed that the school shooting was on her mind. This is logical since she would be headed off to school soon. I sat down and reviewed some facts with them. We talked about order of events, details we may never know, and how rare this sort of event was. I kept my demeanor factual and calm while watching to see what they were feeling. Children will adopt the emotional states of their parents and I did not want to send them off to school upset. I also did not want to send them off to school uninformed, because kids talk at school. Some of their friends did spend all weekend watching news and listening to their parents cry. I fully expect my kids to come home more upset and with more questions than they had this morning. This is hard.

There was a moment during this morning’s discussion where I watched my kids realize how terrible this is. When I said that the victims were first graders, a flicker passed across both Gleek’s face and Patch’s. They are older. The first graders are the little kids. So we talked about that for a bit. We talked about how teachers died trying to protect the kids and that their teachers would do the same for them. Then we talked about free agency, which God grants to all of his children, even though he knows that some people will make choices to hurt others.

When the conversation wound down to a pause, I deliberately changed the subject. We moved onward into homework and getting ready for school. Hard things happen. We have feelings about them. We help where we can. We take reasonable steps to increase safety. Then we move onward.

The House of the Skewampus Schedules

By / December 14, 2012 / 3 Comments

On Wednesday Kiki and I stayed up until midnight. She’d been working all day on a picture book project. I stayed up an hour longer to scan all the pictures before she gave away the book on Thursday. Kiki came home from school on Thursday and crashed into sleep. She slept until 10pm and then was more or less awake until time to get up on Friday morning. She is tired and likely to drag through school today. I took a nap mid day Thursday which restored me to being functional, but fatigue returned in force by evening. I should have gone to bed early, but what with one thing and another, I didn’t. I’m tired today and a nap may be called for. Howard got an invitation to a midnight showing of The Hobbit. He went. When I got up at 5:30 this morning, he was still fully dressed and in the kitchen making breakfast. “By the time I got home an blogged my review, I realized everyone would be getting up in forty minutes. It seemed easier to just stay awake.” He crashed into bed at about 7 am. Link is also tired today from various nights of staying up later than he ought. Gleek and Patch got to sleep in a bit this morning because I knew they’d done their homework the night before.

Not one person in this house has had a normal sleep schedule for the past 48 hours. And it was just Monday when I felt a new commitment to getting to bed on time so we could stabilize the family schedule…

Sympathetic Vibration and Depression

By / December 10, 2012 / 1 Comment

If you slowly press down the C key on a piano so that the hammer does not strike the string and then keep it pressed so that the dampers are off of it, that string is now sitting free inside the piano. Then take a different finger and play a different C somewhere on the key board. Just push and let go so that the second string plays and then is dampened. You can hear the free string still vibrating in tune with the other. This is resonance or sympathetic vibration. The two strings vibrate at the same frequency, which means that they can cause each other to sound.

I am in tune with the people in my household. It is like those resonant strings where I start to pick up whatever tune it is that they are playing. I have my own music, naturally, but if two or three members of my family are playing mournful songs I pick up on that. Even when I am trying not to, my heartstrings will vibrate sympathetically. Sympathy is a good trait to have in a relationship, yet often what is needed is not sympathy but harmony or counterpoint. When Howard is depressed he doesn’t need me to sing along in tune. He needs something else so that the tune of the day will not all be bleak. This is one of the hard things about dealing with depression. I must have enough sympathy to feel compassion and still have enough detachment to play a different music.

Learning that was hard. Even harder was learning that I can’t fix someone else’s depression. Not really. I can succeed in alleviating bad moods or cheering up a child. I can get quite good at it, but I have not actually solved a problem in a lasting way. I’ve just acquired a never ending job as the make-it-better person. This job burdens me and prevents anyone from taking the long hard steps to seek out a true solution.

So I sing my own songs. I do my own soul searching to figure out why some of my songs are sad or scared. I find ways to be happy. And I try to sing in harmony with those around me. Because sympathetic vibration works both directions. Sometimes I’m the one who gets lifted by it.

Thoughts that have Accumulated While Shipping Packages

By / December 5, 2012 / 10 Comments

I can tell it is shipping season by looking at my hands. They are dry from handling all the paper. The fingertips are sore from holding the edges of cardboard in place while I fold boxes. I have scratches and scrapes on the backs of my fingers from sliding product into boxes. I often have a cut or two from accidentally scraping some part of my hands against the cutting surface of the tape dispenser. Also my right wrist develops an ache.

I re-watched Brave on Monday night. It is a beautiful film that consistently manages to lance open unexpected emotional sores. Apparently I have unresolved emotional conflicts relating to freedom vs. restraint and Mother Daughter relationship struggles. I love Merida. I want to be Merida. Yet I am the mother. This makes me sad. It also makes me aware of how much depends upon what a reader/viewer brings with them to the story. No one else I know has such strong emotional reactions to this film in the places that I have them. I suspect I need to periodically return to the film to keep digging out what causes me to be upset. Also because it is a beautiful and fun film.

Two kids, two pocket knives, and several bars of soap results in soap carvings and soap dust coating one half of the kitchen. In theory soap dust is easy to clean up, but in truth it has to be carefully managed or one just ends up with soap scum on every available surface. Also, the kids are discovering that inadequately cleaned soap dust does not taste good. If soap carving is still a thing come spring, it will be evicted from the house.

My meal planning needs an overhaul. Frozen pizza should not be a staple.

When googling around to find answers for computer problems, it is best to picture yourself treading through swampy, snake-infested waters. Check multiple sources and think three times before downloading any “solutions.” Knowing this is half of what made me so panicked and exhausted when contemplating fixing my computer. The landscape out there changes fast and I don’t speak the native language.

The shipping of unsketched calendars is all done. Only sketched calendars to go. This is good since I’m starting to get emails from folks worried about Christmas presents. I don’t want to add to their stress.

Tomorrow I need to get my act together, conquer the laundry, and pay more attention to the kids and their homework. They’re pretty good at getting the daily stuff done, but I’m certain some longer-term projects are falling through the cracks.

Building a Family Culture for a Happy Holiday Season

By / December 5, 2012 / 1 Comment

It is December 5th and we only have two wrapped Christmas gifts under our tree. They were deposited there by my sister who visited last weekend. Usually the tree starts to accumulate presents within a day or two of when it goes up. This year the tree has been lovely for more than a week and we can still see both the tree skirt and the stuffed nativity set. I kind of like letting the tree be a center piece without the distraction of packages. I like even more that none of the kids have commented on this. None of them are hovering hopefully to see if there are presents for them as has been the case in years past. In fact our house has a significant lack of the things-I-want vibe. Howard and I have had a couple of discussions about what to get the kids, but there aren’t any items we must get or be faced with disappointment. Some of this is because our kids are older, but I think some of it is the family culture we have gradually built around Christmas. I thought it might be useful to list out the things we consciously do to focus on the non-commercial aspects of the holiday season. I ended up with twelve list items which seams seasonally appropriate.

1. We keep it small. All of our Christmas decorations fit into four medium size boxes and one big Christmas tree bag. It is enough to make our front room lovely, but not for a dazzling show. If we want to spread the holiday through the house we light a scented candle and play music.

2. We don’t do Santa. This was really hard when the kids were little and everywhere we turned people expected them to believe in Santa. I was always afraid that my kids would talk Santa with other kids and then angry parents would confront me. However, without a belief in Santa, my kids never believed that their wildest dreams would just appear on Christmas morning. They understood that even Christmas has practical limitations because the providers of Christmas were a very human Mom and Dad. Christmas morning surprises supplied by parents were still magical.

3. We avoid exposing ourselves to advertising, particularly television commercials, as much as possible. Advertising creates a false reality which aims to make people believe their lives will be better if they buy something. This is rarely true.

4. If at all possible we avoid shopping in a hurry. Going to stores and looking for gifts can be an enjoyable part of the holiday season, but it is when we’re stressed and in a hurry that we blow our budget or buy items we regret later. We usually try to enter stores with a clear idea of what we’re looking for and why we need it.

5. When gift giving commences we sort the presents by who is giving them not by who gets to open them. We take turns and each gift is handed over by the giver. This practice really helped our young kids focus on the giving aspect of the season.

6. We remember that disappointment happens and it is not the end of the world. Christmas does not have to be perfect. The gifts do not have to bring ecstatic joy to be good gifts. In fact, we try to avoid frenzies of excitement because they are always followed by a let down. Half of our Christmas efforts involve slowing things, calming things, and pacing the season.

7. Many of our traditions and decorations are about lights in darkness. We light our tree, light our house, and burn an advent candle each evening. (Except when we forget and light it extra long the next day.) On Christmas eve we light all the candles of a nativity pyramid. Light in darkness makes us all more happy and peaceful.

8. We don’t travel during the holidays. These days staying home is critical because I’m in the midst of holiday shipping, but even before that we stayed at home. Connecting with extended relatives is lovely and important, and we do get together with the ones nearby, but any trip which requires a suitcase can find a different time of year. That way we can focus on the visit instead of holiday logistics.

9. Optional events are optional. This season is full of concerts, special events, displays, and limited time offers. No one person can take advantage of them all. We sample as the mood strikes and try to not feel obligated to do too much.

10. Traditions which add more stress than joy get culled from our holiday practices. The best traditions are the ones that happen of their own accord because someone loves them enough to spend the effort. We have a tree because we all care about it enough to haul the thing up from the basement and assemble it. This year we have outdoor lights after a long outdoor light hiatus, because this year I wanted them enough to put them up.

11. We know that holiday culture grows and changes. When the kids were younger, I had to spend a lot more effort creating the holiday, planning the gift choices, planning family traditions. We’ve reached a stage where we all create the holiday for each other in small ways. Ten years from now things will be different again.

12. We weave our religious beliefs into the holiday celebrations and preparations, but not every single thing has to be about Christ. We try to make themes of Christ the ever present background music of the holiday rather then always requiring it to be front and center. That way when we do bring it to the front, we’re able to focus and attend.

I’m aware of the irony that I try very hard to de-commercialize and simplify our family traditions, while simultaneously running a retail business for which we offer holiday sales and incentives. I can only hope that our books and merchandise are things which add joy to holidays rather than stress. Because I really do wish for everyone to have a December that is tailored to their ideas of what the holidays should be. That is the key really, finding what brings happiness and paring away the rest.

Parent Teacher Conferences and Praise

By / November 29, 2012

In Elementary school, parent teacher conferences are simple: one teacher, one appointment. Junior high is more complicated and the school seeks to solve this issue by a sort of open house conference night. Sometimes they have all the teachers seated at tables in the commons area and the families form lines in front of those tables. The long lines impede on the space for other lines and to get down to the teacher at the end one has to wend through a crowd. Other times the teachers are all in their rooms and the lines form outside the classroom doors. I’m not fond of this free-for-all style of conferences. Often I side step the issue by simply contacting the teacher on a non-conference day. If I do attend the conferences, I want to whittle down the line standing as much as possible. The child and I chose which teachers we most need to see and leave as soon as possible. It seemed like a good strategy, but tonight Link showed me where the strategy fails.

“I want to see all my teachers.” Link said. “I want to hear what they think of me.” So instead of picking the one or two classes where his grades demonstrated that he might need extra attention, we stood in line for every single teacher. They praised him. “I wish all my students were like him.” “He’s attentive, helpful, and raises his hand to make comments.” “Sometimes he’s quiet, but he’s doing great on all the tests.” “He works hard and never tries to slack off.” Link smiled and I swear he walked taller as we left the school. Why did I not realize before the value to be found in letting a kid listen while a teacher and a parent agree about how wonderful he is?

Homework Hour

By / November 28, 2012

“Children!” my voice was pitched loud so that it could be heard over their chatter and pierce their internal imaginations. “I have two children with two projects and we have about two hours before bedtime. There is only one of me and I’m going to need you to follow instructions.” My declaration came at the end of fifteen minutes where I kept trying to get the kids to focus, but they kept pinging off in random directions the moment my back was turned. Patch’s project was an animal report where he made a lift the flap book about leopards and a shadow puppet play about monkeys. Gleek needed to construct a Mesopotamian house out of paper that compared and contrasted it to a modern house. These are the sorts of projects which lead to late hours and many tears, except this is at least the third such set of projects for the school year and thus far we’ve avoided major project meltdown. The kids nodded in response to my words and began adjusting their ratios of work to distraction in a more productive balance.

I was not good at projects when I was in school. I was a fairly classic procrastinator except in the cases when I loved the project and thus expanded it to be much more difficult than it needed to be. I was really good at working in a huge burst of creative energy, but not at all good at continuing to work when the energy ran out. Even in my early mothering years I would work in bursts, organizing the entire house, making a cleaning schedule, and then letting it all fall apart less than a week later. Somewhere in the last seven or eight years I learned how to work a little every day. Perhaps it was learning about the power of practice in creating excellence, but more likely it was just that I’d finally lived long enough to see the the accumulation from small efforts. The most physical manifestation of this was the day when I received an inch-thick book in the mail which was full of one year’s worth of blog entries. I’d written a novel’s worth of words a day or two at a time. I could see that later blog entries were smoother than early ones. I could see that my skills at layout and design progressed from year to year. Expertise requires practice over time.

My children appear to be learning this lesson at a much younger age than I did, probably because I’ve been so focused on it myself. I don’t let the big projects slide, they have to work on parts of them days and weeks ahead of time. In our business I’m always deciding what needs to be done today in order to prevent next week or next month from being crazy. Keeping track of kid projects is part of that. Last year I did all of the tracking and enforcing. It was exhausting. This year Gleek is doing it all for herself and Patch is beginning to. Patch sat down to draw a cover for his Leopard book while Gleek scrounged for scissors and tape. I went to dig out our shadow puppet theater and discover which pieces could be re-used for Patch’s play. I came back upstairs to discover Gleek playing with her stress ball and Patch eating pistachios. I redirected them back to work. I cut out a cardboard alligator (You can’t have a monkey play without an alligator) and then took the pistachios away from Patch until he glued down the informational flaps into his book. Later Patch declared that he would die from having to write down a bibliography, but he did it in his deliberately over dramatic voice, so I just waited and then he wrote it all down. Gleek was in the front room throwing her stress ball onto the floor to watch it flatten, but when asked, she informed me that her house was done.

In the morning Patch will need to practice his shadow play. Gleek will need to figure out how to transport her house safely. There will also be computer homework (10 minutes typing practice) and some spelling sentences to be written. The homework does not end until school does, but the work and projects just seem to fit right in with everything else around here.