Holidays

Cousins for the Holiday

By / November 29, 2013

My five year old niece looked up at me and babbled out a request in German. Unlike her older two siblings, she didn’t automatically switch to English when she walked in my house. Of course the last time she was hear was a third of her life ago. That’s a long time for a little child. I’m just happy that she still remembers me. I expect she’ll start using English very quickly, she already knows it just like her siblings. It is fun to have all of them here. It is even more fun the way that they just slide right in with my kids because there are good matches for age and interests.

My children are blessed with an abundance of cousins. This is not a surprise since I have six siblings and Howard has three. Howard’s siblings have all settled within twenty miles of each other, so we get the clan together about once per month. I’ve discovered that gathering for three hours once per month is far less stressful than gathering for a weekend once per year. My kids and their Tayler cousins have ongoing games and relationships. We used to see the cousins on my side of the family more often, but people moved around and shifted life phases. Three of my siblings have settled up in Idaho, so we need to trek there so that my oldest kids can visit their same-age cousins. But my sister’s family has just moved into my town for the next three months. They’re setting up a house that they can stay in when they visit from Germany. This means that my kids will get to spend time with their German cousins far more regularly than they ever have before, and I’m glad for it.

Thanksgiving weekend is a great time to hang out with family. It has far less pressure of expectation than the Christmas holidays, which helps keep the weekend relaxing. Tomorrow I need to bring out the holiday decorations and we’ll be pulled right into Christmas. Monday has lots of work waiting for me, but today I can listen to my children and the accent inflected voices of my nieces and nephew. It is a good sort of evening to have.

Feels Like Thanksgiving

By / November 27, 2013

Somehow it got to be 9pm and I find that I am glad that I bought pumpkin pies when I was at the grocery store, else I would feel compelled to be baking them right now. What I want to do right now is watch some TV show and eat. All the hours of my day got used up. They were used well, but they’re gone now, and so is my energy. So instead of a focused and composed set of thoughts on the advent of Thanksgiving, I have a rambling series of thoughts instead.

I drove six hours yesterday to fetch Kiki from college. We talked all the way home about everything and nothing. Kiki has two more weeks in her semester after this weekend. Beyond that she has a new semester and a new roommate that she picked for herself. She’ll have new classes and new challenges. She’s excited for all of it. She’s also excited to be at home, even though she’s sleeping in the concrete room that used to be my shipping room.

Kiki came with me to the warehouse today. She helped me put orders into packages. We sent out all of the unsketched complicated orders to international destinations. The remainder of the unsketched orders will go out the day after Thanksgiving, along with the first accumulation of holiday orders. Working with Kiki made me so glad to have her and to have the warehouse.

The first thing I did this morning was have a cover conversation for the Strength of Wild Horses book. Angela has struggled with it because I wasn’t able to articulate what I want the cover to be. I finally did that this morning and I think the result will be delightful. It is also possible that I paged through all the original art just because it is here and I could. Angela’s pictures make me happy.

Despite all of the work things, today had a holiday feel. Some part of my brain knows that tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I’m glad.

Bits and Pieces

By / November 20, 2013 / 4 Comments

Kiki called home yesterday. Apparently she saw that I’d said we assumed all was well with her since we figured she’d call if something was wrong. So she called just to chat. Mostly she told me about her classes and the fun things going on. I watched her talk and realized, again, that I miss her. I don’t miss her the way that some of my friends miss their recently-moved-out adult children. It isn’t like part of my heart is somewhere else, or that we have a hole here at home. I miss her because she is fun to be around and she makes me laugh. It is going to be fun to have her home for Thanksgiving next week. As I was listening to her, I got a strong sense that she is in the stage of life where all things are possible. She could choose so many different things and is just beginning to see what they all are. This is different than my stage where I’ve got 20 years invested in my current paths. I could choose something very different, but there is lots I’d have to give up. Kiki’s stage is wonderful and I’m so glad she gets to have it.

Patch helped me with the postcards again this year. It has become an annual tradition. He and I sit together putting stamps and labels onto the postcards that thank all the people who have ordered things from our store this year. He talks to me about things as we work. Often they are comments on the places where the postcards are going, or thoughts from school, or from the games he’s been playing lately. Patch is pretty good company and the cards are all ready to go out tomorrow.

Howard had a depressive episode earlier this week. He tweeted about it quite a bit as it was ongoing. Being open about the depression is therapeutic for him, it is also a small part of what we can do to de-stigmatize mental health issues so that more people seek help when they need it. I was thinking about it and realized that I should probably write up a post about the other half of the equation. Howard can talk about depression. I can write about what it is like to be married to a depressed person and the things loved ones can do both to help and to keep themselves healthy. It gets difficult.

This week I was worn down by the never ending tide of small tasks which I do for other people. I have a record keeping job for our scout troop. I’ve had it for awhile and my whole mode of operation has been to just quietly keep the records, because me doing this job allows the part of scouting which I think is actually valuable: which is that boys get to have growth experiences. We just had significant leadership turn over in our scout troop and suddenly I’m the one who knows how everything works. Instead of being invisible, I’m now the expert in a system that is confusing and labrynthine. On top of that was Link’s ever revolving list of homework. I’m helping him track it and get it done. For each assignment I’m torn. Do I help here so that he can focus his learning energy there. Or do I stand back and let him struggle with all aspects of the assignments. Am I helping too much? It just hardly seems fair that he spends so much of his school hours being variously confused because he missed hearing or tracking some small piece of information. Except it is even harder for me to track the info since I’m not in the classes and have to go off of things Link tells me and occasional emails from teachers. I’m probably helping too much.

The shipment of calendars arrived today. This means I need to shift into shipping preparations. I’m going to have to unpack that part of my brain and figure out what the steps need to be. Tomorrow.

The Kickstarter is slowly progressing. I’m grateful for each person who finds their way to it and decides to pledge. I need to make slow but steady efforts for the next 10 days and then a big push for the last day. 67% funded right now.

We had adventures in healthcare coverage this week when one of Gleek’s prescriptions was ten times more expensive than usual. Our fear was that the new healthcare legislation had changed our coverage and the medicine was no longer covered. The good news is that our plan is grandfathered. It can’t be changed by new laws. The price change was simply because Gleek maxed out her prescription plan for this year and we’ll have to pay full price instead of just a copay until January. It is also possible that our plan being grandfathered is a bad thing because it means our plan still doesn’t cover any sort of mental healthcare. We’ve spent quite a lot on mental health this past year and it has all been out of pocket. I don’t see that number going down next year either. So now I have a homework assignment to try to figure out if it is to our advantage to stick with the current coverage or to change to something new.

I used to be a person who started thinking about Christmas right around Halloween and who had most of it purchased before Thanksgiving. Now I’m a person who deliberately avoids thinking about Christmas until after Thanksgiving. Too many other things in my head.

Thanksgiving, now that I am looking forward to. The internet always goes to sleep during that weekend, which means that work won’t accumulate. Instead I’ll get to spend time with my extended family. Kiki will be in town. And my sister and her family will be arriving from Germany to spend a few months in the US. Also, there will be pie.

Halloween Costumes

By / October 30, 2013 / 1 Comment

When I was little, Halloween was magical. Around the time my age hit double digits it started to be…complicated. I believe this is a common experience as children begin to be self conscious. In my case I was frustrated because no one ever knew what my costumes were, and I found them hard to explain. This is because I never chose to be a commonly known character. Instead I would create a character based on half a dozen worlds that I’d read and synthesized. Why could no one see that my long blue dress and cloak obviously meant that I was an empath who rode a winged horse? They would ask “what are you?” in a confused tone of voice and I wouldn’t know how to summarize, but I knew they didn’t want to hear the whole back story. When I was a kid among other kids, they understood that costumes had stories. But by junior high, they stood there in a yellow crayon outfit and stared at me like I was the weirdo. That was a difficult year and it put me off costumes for the rest of junior high.

Halloween became a big deal again after I met Howard and got married. It started small with just some stage make-up. But the seeds of the next year’s costume were planted until the pinnacle years when we had a group of six people and our toddler all dressed up like post-apocalyptic cyborg survivors. And then like medieval warriors with a preschool dragon and a baby dragon. We got professional photographs that year and had a great time. Then our Halloween loving friends moved away and somehow our Halloween efforts dwindled. The creative energy that we used to spend on costumes got spent on other things instead. I’m not going to complain because I like Schlock and I’m not sure it would have begun if we’d had a full-blown costuming hobby in place.

Today I went to our church Halloween carnival and for the I-don’t-know-how-many-th year in a row, I was boring. I didn’t wear a costume at all. I think I started being Halloween boring when Gleek was a toddler. I had three kids and it was challenging enough to keep track of them without adding complicated clothing. I always ended up toting their discarded props and trying to juggle all of their things plus a heavy cloak or a long dress stopped being any kind of fun at all. I used to make jokes about being dressed up as the storage closet because of all the things I ended up carrying around. Not only that, but there was never time to think up something to wear when I was so completely occupied with supplying four outfits to the exacting specifications of my children. I still enjoyed Halloween, but from a spectator role.

A few weeks ago I ready this Hyperbole and Half piece about a dinosaur costume. Not only was it really funny, but it made me think about identity. I have come full circle to a place where I am again friends with people who love costuming. I admire their brilliance at conventions and yet have never planned to don a costume “That’s not me” I thought. “I’m not a costume person. I am a writer person.” Yet I used to be a costume person. I used to be willing to put on a different identity for the span of a day just so that I could play. True, I was always a little awkward with it, unwilling to fully own an outfit, but at least I put the outfit on. The tale of a little girl and her dinosaur costume made me re-consider the power of costume and how being something else for a while might teach me something about who I am when I’m wearing my regular clothes.

Also, I’m tired of feeling boring on Halloween. I can’t guarantee I’ll follow through on anything. My life is full of projects and any costuming project is pretty far down the list, but when Howard dons his steampunk clothes I’d kind of like to have an outfit that matches. Perhaps this next year I’ll learn how to play dress up again. And maybe I’ll learn a better answer to the question “who are you?” or perhaps I’ll be the beneficiary of a world that is more open to adults in creative costumes.

Fourth of July

By / July 4, 2013

There is always a moment at the beginning of the festival of fireworks when I look around at the chaos of kids running and burning objects, sometimes kids running with burning objects, and I feel a strong desire to call a halt to the whole thing. But then it settles down. The kids become more content to watch from the curb as the daylight wanes. Either that, or they’ve vanished into the back yard with glow bracelets to play their own games. This leaves only a few people running out to the middle of the street to light the aerials that shoot into the sky to explode.

I always think of “the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air” when I am surrounded by booming and colorful bursts on all sides.


I was aware that I ought to spend some of the Fourth of July contemplating freedom. The first sight this morning was the view of a flag through my doorway window. Yet my mind slipped away from serious contemplation. I alternated between working and relaxing. We did not participate in any public events, choosing instead to contemplate a canopy of green leaves as seen from a hammock. This is an expression of freedom I suppose, to enjoy the luxuries that others sacrificed so that I could have. I was conscious of my privileges today because they are a gift. Other years we have attended balloon launches, parades, and festivals. This year it felt good to just be at home. In the evening we cooked food on the grill and enjoyed fireworks with neighbors.

Our cat was less pleased with the day.

We kept her indoors for the most explosive hours of the evening, but she was still skittish and obviously trying to make sense of a world gone crazy. This is always a hard day for pets.

Tomorrow we’ll be back to work, which makes me glad. We have good work to do.

Halfway Out of the Dark

By / January 3, 2013 / 2 Comments

“I don’t want to put the Christmas tree away.” Kiki said on January first. She wasn’t the only child to express this sentiment. It was not mere chore avoidance, the kids honestly felt wistful and sad about putting away the trappings of the holiday season. I felt the same myself, but we proceeded, because the New Year was already marching on us and we had to become ready for it.

There have been years where Christmas was scoured from the house on Boxing Day, mere hours after the holiday was complete. Other years it was allowed to linger until New Year’s Day only on principle but my fingers were itching to put it away. This year we all left the holiday reluctantly, wishing for another week of setting our own schedules, another week of brightness in the dark. I pulled out the boxes and began putting things away, hoping that the actions would help us all re-set our brains into a non-holiday mode.

“Hey kids,” I said drawing four sets of eyes to focus on me. We were at the dinner table, which I find is a good place to make announcements since they’re all seated in the same room and relatively quiet. “School starts tomorrow, so after you eat I need to to pull out your backpacks and go through them to make sure that you’re ready.” This is the sort of announcement which often triggers a scrambling panic as one child or another remembers that there was this homework assignment they were supposed to do. Instead, four sets of eyes blinked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. What is this school thing, and how does one prepare for it? They’d packed away their school thoughts so thoroughly that they didn’t even know where to start finding them.

I sympathize. We used to get up how early? 5:30? Really? How did I do that? I rolled out of bed to the blaring alarm and had to carefully remember which steps came next: put on robe, wake Kiki, make breakfast. In October, November, early December these steps were habit. Now the habit feels rusty, as if it belonged to someone else and I’m trying to fill her shoes. I didn’t think the holidays were particularly transformative, but somehow they feel like a watershed, a turning point, instead of a pause. It is as if everything before belonged to a different era. “It’s weird, Mom,” said Kiki “but I kind of feel like I ought to be starting college, not going back to the last semester of high school.” I don’t think it is weird. Or if it is, then I suffer a similar weirdness. I want to move onward because there are things coming which I hope to reach. Yet I don’t want to leave the holiday break because the ground is cold and dark between where I am and those things I want to reach.

“Christmas, halfway out of the dark” proclaims Doctor Who A Christmas Carol. It is a ridiculous show which defies logic and delights me year after year. I think part of the reason it works for me is because of that phrase. It acknowledges that winter is a long dark journey. We celebrate in the middle by stringing up extra lights and singing special songs, but then the lights are put away and I have half of the dark journey left to go. It is the harder part because I am traveling away from the bright holiday season instead of toward it. I’m headed for spring, but it is hard to believe in spring when the world is frozen solid and I have to remember the steps to getting up at 5:30 am.

The decorations are tucked into the closet under the stairs and the tree is stashed away for the year. I am left with a front room which feels bare and in dire need of a new coat of paint. In the next few weeks I intend to supply that paint. It is one of the January projects I will use to give myself focus. Things I can focus on and accomplish in the short term as I step day by day into a time when the sun gets up before I do.

“I think we should have a two-month-long festival of lights.” Howard said while looking out the window at the first grayness of dawn. He did not want to put away the holiday brightness either. But we did. And the kids went to school, landing us on a Thursday which should have first-day-back-to-work enthusiasm. Except Thursday is when I usually begin winding up a work week. It is the day for finishing off and reassigning, not for beginning. So I light a candle despite the daylight which finally showed up outside the windows. Then I begin to feel my way through the day, with many pauses while I try to remember what should come next. Task by task, step by step, slowly traveling out of the dark.

After a Good Christmas

By / December 26, 2012

Morning dawned on the day after Christmas and I dove back into work with a sigh of relief. It is not that I dislike the holiday, but I am in the middle of many projects which were interrupted by festivities. Perhaps this is why I was not able to fully develop a holiday glow in which everything felt lovely. I’d start it, but then Kiki would need to unburden herself of concerns about upcoming art projects, or Link’s youth leader would corner me to talk about scout stuff, or I’d get an email reminding me that both Gleek and Patch have some testing coming up in January. The source varied, and I was reminded that there was much to do, only I wasn’t supposed to be doing any of it. I was supposed to be in the moment, treasuring the time right in front of me. I did in snatches: Gleek hugging her new spiral draw set tight. Kiki pulling (and pulling and pulling) to free her new giant scarf from the stocking. Melting wax on a candle. The shifting patterns from the Christmas pyramid as they played across the kitchen ceiling. Sitting by the Christmas tree. Singing a carol. These moments brought peace and joy in the season.

At this point I can almost hear the worried friends and relations, concerned that the did not do enough to make my Christmas marvelous. They need not fear, or feel bad. I had a good Christmas. It was everything it should be. The requirement to make sure that Christmas is magical puts too much pressure on everyone. It is the source of the stress. Good is enough. A magical timeless glow either arrives or it doesn’t. I caught it sometimes and others I didn’t. This is fine. For now, I’m ready to turn my thoughts toward making good use out of what is left of 2012. The minute I hit January I need to be ready for 2013.

After the Shopping

By / December 22, 2012

One thing that getting older has taught me is that I often become something I never expected to be. I began parenthood as a stay at home mother who devoted 90% of her creative energy to things which benefited the kids. I thought that was the best kind of mother to be. These days I’m a working mother who often lets her kids fend for themselves and I can see significant advantages to this way of doing things. I used to be a person who started making Christmas purchases in October and had them completed by Thanksgiving. It was all carefully planned and balanced. This year we are making most of our Christmas purchases within 4 days of that holiday. I always thought that sort of last minute scramble represented poor planning and resulted in over spending because of last minute stress. Yes going out shopping today put us into crowded stores, but I don’t think the expense was more. It may even have been less because during the planning years we kept picking up “one more thing.” Nor do I think that the conscious focus of picking gifts was lessened. Choosing a gift is the same emotional action whether it occurs two months or two days before the holiday. I didn’t understand that before, I was too busy carefully planning. Also by shortening the time between gift selection and gift presentation, the kids retain an emotional connection to the gift they are giving. This will not be a year when a giver has forgotten what is inside the wrapping paper.

This is not to say that carefully planning is wrong either. It would not surprise me to discover that my future holds carefully-planned-in-advance Christmases. This is the advantage to discovering that there is no one true way to approach Christmas, I’m free to choose whichever form of celebration best fits that particular holiday season.

The forays into the wilds of Christmas bustle were successful. It turns out that the necessary shopping was split across five people instead of just falling to me. Howard went out, Kiki went out, and I took both boys out. The only family member who did not go to a store today was Gleek. She happily conspired with me from the items I already had here at home.

It was interesting to go shopping with my two boys. They have a very direct approach to gift selection. It is kind of refreshing. They flounder, not at all sure what they should get until suddenly they know that the thing right in front of them is exactly right. Even if it is a thing I’m not certain about, even if I express that reservation, they are not dissuaded. They stick with their choices. I like seeing them decisive. And truth be told, I didn’t argue much. I’m trying to let go, let the kids do their own struggling, considering, and selecting. Kiki had a harder time. She reached a blitzed, unable to decide state. It was a full-bore option overload from which Howard had to rescue her. he did and they came home triumphant, if tired.

Yesterday, during the long shopping outing with Howard, I looked over at him and felt happy. We were out in the holiday crowds–something we try to avoid–and we were shopping last minute–also to be avoided–yet I felt happy. I was so happy to be part of a Christmas preparation team instead of trying to save everyone else from stress by doing most of it myself. At 2 am this morning I could not believe that the holiday would be good. Now I can. I’ll take that.

Christmas Looms

By / December 22, 2012

At 2 am this morning I was convinced that I’d ruined Christmas, as if Christmas was my job to get right for my entire family instead of a mutual creation. But 2 am is not a rational hour and the illogical thoughts capered through my brain refusing to calm down or cooperate. I knew that if I could only sleep, things would look better in the morning. I would then be able to sort the tasks which needed to be done and actually do them. Step one was to fall asleep and that was proving tricky.

I did it to myself really. I spent from 10 am to 2 pm out with Howard, visiting the doctor, a restaurant and three different stores. We returned home with our selections for Christmas morning surprises, carefully chosen. As I tweeted during lunch: The fate of Christmas morning rested upon those purchasing decisions. It doesn’t of course. Christmas isn’t in the gifts, packages, boxes, or tags. The Grinch reminds me of this every year and I always manage to forget it at some point during the next year. We arrived home tired. I napped a bit, but then my youngest needed help cleaning his room because he was inclined to just clear the middle by shoving things to the edges. We cleaned, I caught a brief nap, friends stopped by, I realized I had not yet run to the grocery store despite the fact that it had been high on the priority list for two days. The grocery run brought me home just in time to cook a fish stick dinner for the kids and then dash out into the night for a social evening with friends. Hours of talking (and laughing) later I drove home–too tired to even make conversation on the drive. It was a day with no time for stopping or relaxing, no time for my brain to sort the day or settle it. So I found myself in the darkest hour of night with capering thoughts that I knew were irrational, but could not stop.

I’m not sure when sleep managed to arrive, one of my tactics was to refuse to check the clock. Eventually I woke up this morning able to finally do things to feel that Christmas will be fine. Most of what I need to do is take kids shopping. Four kids. Four shopping trips. All on the Saturday before Christmas. I’m going to be tired by the end of today. Hopefully I’ll be able to cultivate a holiday shopping zen rather than having the entire experience be miserable. Or perhaps I should let it be miserable in the hope that next year the kids will think about Christmas options earlier in the month.

For now, I need to change out of pajamas and let the shopping begin.That, and hope that having had my Christmas is ruined panic last night, I can maybe skip that part of Christmas eve.

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.