Woodpeckers From My Life List

Today, on the playground I was distracted from a truly delightful mommy conversation by the lisping call of an acorn woodpecker! Right there in the middle of a suburban play area, across from the plastic twisty slide...there was a colony of acorn woodpeckers, Melanerpes formicivorus!!!  I took a minute away from my totally normal friends who are not magnetically drawn to woodpeckers and got to see them working away at peppering their telephone pole cum larder with holes, each one a storage hole for a meticulously shelled acorn meat. Totally exciting! I had wanted to see these guys ever since reading about them as a little girl. Most woodpeckers are pretty solitary, feeding from suet at windows around other individuals but mostly operating solo unless its mating season. This woodpecker builds a larder of acorns together with other frien


ds, male and female and shares nesting and incubating duties with other couples....its like a commune woodpecker! So California! I love it.

 When I was maybe 10 or so my sisters and I found an old woodpecker nest by mistake. We were knocking over deadwood in the area of the woods where we liked to play and we snapped open a deceased maple tree about six inches in diameter and there, in the snapped open trunk with a carved open cavity with the old nest, a shockingly minimal pile of woodshavings leftover from the excavation in the bottom. We were pretty fascinated by it and I remember feeling so lucky to find such a hidden thing. Google "downy woodpecker nest" and see how many people are getting glimpses inside of one. Its a pretty rare pleasure.

Anyhow, this was a whole new woodpecker that I had never seen before....we have no woodpeckers here in our yard at Orange Blossom Cottage, just jays, towhees, mockingbirds, crows and lot of assertive little hummingbirds. I miss them. They are a fixture of northern feeders and were an iconic part of my childhood bird watching. I used to leaf through field guides and make mental lists of birds and flowers that I wanted to see someday that seemed exotic and faraway...things that had range maps that were nowhere near Michigan. And there I was, a responsible 36 year old mother, transfixed by the sight of a one of those birds on my  imaginary lists, while suburban mothers around me offered their children goldfish crackers and placidly reapplied sunscreen. Its truly fantastic how life doesn't always wait for a "natural moment" to hand you a wonderful pleasure. I had to take a minute to swallow down my mania before I was ready to go back and join the group again. Some of the best victories have to stay private because only truly odd people can sometimes understand our own little fixations.

We spent a long time more lingering there while the kids shrieked and ran through the splash pad and we moms had many enlightening, comforting and hilarious conversations, someone got stung by a yellow jacket and we pack and unpacked our lunches over and over as kids ran in and out of our circle taking and returning bits of food and stray flip flops. I love a good playground lingering anyhow, especially if its with ladies that fill my cup and make me smile but my favorite kind of open ended recharge session plus a childhood bucket list item....that's a secret victory if ever I heard of one! And its only Monday, folks!

A Mama Legacy

Thinking about parenting a lot lately. I mean, obviously, its job one in my life most of the time so maybe that sounds a little contrived....but its not. Its one thing to do parenting with most of your time and another thing to consciously "think" about parenting a lot. Honestly, a lot of the time I really feel like I can't think about parenting very much. Its so personal, so weighty, so unknown and has waaaaay too many variables. I struggle, a lot, with feeling like I am accomplishing the job and with letting go of the responsibility for "making" my kids turn out. I also can be an over-processor who thinks too much about everything and forgets to actually do it so, sometimes I need to sing loudly and march in!

 Thinking today about what truly matters and trying to help myself cut through the fog of things that clamor for attention when I think about parenting my sons and focus down to what matters not just right this minute or this week or even this year....but what really matters.

There are so many things to consider in shaping up your children and teaching and training and equipping them that it can be a total head spinner. I often feel like I can't see the forest for the trees and so sometimes a little focus can be a good thing. This is kind of a parenting manifesto. If I dropped off tomorrow (God forbid), what would I want my kids to remember about their childhood with me? This seems clarifying. Might these answers be "the point" when all the rest is a little bit of extra muddle? Yes, just so.

I'd hope they'd say:

1. They were certain I loved them dearly.
2. They felt capable and important, they knew they were people who mattered and could make their own path. 
3. They knew I wanted them to give love and they were trained in it often: mercy, generosity and thinking of others around them. 
4. They saw me live in fresh wonder and learned to always be excited about the world and to avoid a useless, bitter jaded-ness. 
5. They learned to organize, mobilize, strategize, tackle things fearlessly and be movers and shakers from their mama who was a fearless learner and maker. 

That's my list. 

Tomorrow, I may need to read this when I find another plum smashed into the drain of the bathroom sink and shredded all over the tile, or when Pom has a total meltdown on the kitchen floor while I am trying to cook dinner and A is texting me on his way home. I might need to remind myself while going over piano lessons and checking math problems and prompting along beginning readers who simply cannot remember what the letter "i" says no matter how many times I have gone over it. I will have to go and read the list of five things again when I find beds unmade, break up fist fights and hear the kids tell me that they think I'm the meanest mom in the world again. The point isn't any of these little annoying things....those are trees. The point is that stuff....up there. 

They are loved. They matter. They can love. The world is amazing. They can do things. 

And so can I. 

New Year's Resolutions, 2015

"Dear, Darling New Year.....I love you! Thank you so much for coming!" <3 p="">

A new year is the perfect boost to have planted in the middle of winter. I am making lists of resolutions, thinking about what I want to accomplish, what areas of my life need addressing and planning what I want to let go of from 2014. So much hopeful material for the 365 tomorrows ahead!

I believe fervently in making resolutions at New Year's. I think its a good exercise to evaluate where you stand, what progress you're making and how your life choices are lining up with your hoped for goals. Its hard to end up where you mean to when you don't keep re-focusing!

I also find that sometimes there are surprises, things I didn't plan for that are wonderful gifts....even in catastrophic form. Its really healthy to be able to notice and call out the good things in your life. We all need to grow and improve but we also need encouragement and that's part of why we need to review and digest our lives sometimes.

I want to be the kind of person who is never stagnant but always growing and improving, trying to learn and change. In order to make sure that my resolutions aren't just ignored or weakly tried for a week and then dropped, I always make certain to make measurable, concrete goals that are specific and achievable. Instead of  "Get Healthy" I might resolve to: "do yoga three times a week,"   "drink a glass of water first thing each morning," and "eat a salad four times a week."  The things I am working on this year are big and small....all kinds of stuff but they are all specific:

My much loved year workbook. You can get one too at Leonie Dawson's website. 

 Resolutions 2015

1. Make an ancestor wall with framed pictures of our parents, grand parents and great-grandparents.

2. Get two professional massages over the course of the year. (I've never had one before!)

3. Start a monthly family movie night.

4. Paint my bedroom.

5. Fly a kite.

6. Finish the brickwork on our front walk.

7. Go visit the Alcott House.

8. Take the two older boys out for a fine dining outing alone with Mommy.

9. Make tissue paper flowers.

10. Sort and cull the sports box.

11. Prune my clematis.

12. Buy a new juicer.

13. Go visit three far away friends.

14. Take our family Christmas photo in October.

15. Have my grandpa's paintings re-glassed.

16. Get one of my orchids to bloom.

17. Attend my book club 8 times.

18. Make two meals out of my Thai cookbook.

19. Have five hot baths.

20. Make shell art!

Not all your resolutions have to be life-changing, they can be funny or trivial or indulgent. There are so many aspects to life and so many things that we need to remind ourselves to include. I feel like the new year is a chance to tweak and focus in on intended direction. What do you want more of in your life this year? What did you never get around to last year? What needs changing? What parts of you need letting go and what parts need watering?

Happy Clean Start, everyone!

Summer Aspirations

Making a list today. Summer is finally here for sure...there's barbeque on every neighborhood breeze and I'm checking my tan in the mirror. So its time to start earlier than I did last year and begin to scribble a list of all the summer stuff I want to do before we smell the first crisp wafts of fall. This is how we actualize folks! Its also how I get all the stuff out of my head that is in it. :)

Things To Do Before Summer Is Over

Pick peaches and can them.

Make apricot jam

Eat a BLT.

Swim more.

Go to a county fair. 

Eat a s'more.

Sit around a campfire.

Go fishing.

Lay on the grass and watch the stars.

Ride in a pick-up.

Eat a popsicle on the porch.

Make a key lime pie.

Feel cute in shorts.

Sit and read in the sun.

Go on a picnic.

Go skinny dipping.

Walk to a store with a friend.

Shoot someone with a squirt gun.

Have astounding sweet corn.

Climb a tree.

Go for a long, wandery beach walk.

Make a daisy chain.

Draw with sidewalk chalk.

Stroll along a pier or dock.

 

 But there are a few things I can already check off. Its worth mentioning to myself again what I have already done!

Things I've Already Done

Eat a lobster.

Pick strawberries.

Go to an outdoor Shakespeare performance.

Grill some good BBQ.

 Sing loudly to the radio with the windows open.

Make a killer salad.

Buy flip-flops.

Run through the sprinkler.

Eat fresh watermelon.

Watch the kids do sparklers.

Find a good book.

Go beach combing with the boys.

 

 

 

A Crisp New January

We are back home. We survived the stomach flu, a manic whirl of trip prep and holiday madness, and the long drive to Michigan and visits with both sides of the family. And here we are, stepping crisply into the new year. Ah! Feels so very, very good.

There's something very cathartic to me about traveling far away for Christmas and then driving back across the country together, bundled up in winter gear, munching leftover cookies, jotting down resolutions and humming on towards a whole new, fresh year together as a family. I love that drive. We talk and think over what our families are like and how we admire them and how we want to out-do them and we talk about our previous year and what went well and what we're primed to tackle next. And I always love it when we get to the part where we plan our travel schedule and make mouth-watering schedules for where and when we'll be adventuring in the coming year. This year we're hoping to see Hawaii, D.C. and New Hampshire as well as maple sugaring in the far north and a family reunion in the ancestral vineyard where we were married. Very apropos for the celebration of our 10th year of marriage together. We have genuine history!

Am feeling full of inspiration, and energy and hope today. My list is long and my spirits are high. I feel like there are good days ahead...I think 2012 is a good one.

Here are the things I'm dreaming of accomplishing in the coming year:

Resolutions 2012

1. Call my parents weekly
2. Help my boys write letters monthly
3. Dream journal
4. Work on the boy's baby books monthly
5. Go on a private "couple's retreat" together
6. Take an interior designs class
7. Take a trip to visit a friend
8. Read three books on genetics
9. Join an art society and hang a piece in an art show
10. Call grandma monthly
11. Plant shrubs on our property
12. Hang pictures in our house (extended family, kids and wedding especially)
13. Find three interior design books that I love and learn from
14. Switch to a local pediatrician and find a family doctor for A and I
15. Put together and follow a car maintenance schedule
16. Organize our basement storage
17. Paint more rooms!
18. Register to vote
19. Join our Neighborhood Association
20. Start an easy food night (pizza, take out, frozen dinner, leftovers etc.)
21. Hire a cleaning service for the first month after Baby Four arrives.
22. Read two great books on blogging
23. Teach the boys to: brush their teeth in the morning, comb their hair consistently and wash their hands before meals
24. Teach Ru to read and Dee to write his own name
25. Potty train Nib
26. Read three new plays
27. Carve out two consistent work times in the day for me-time (one for work and one for personal)
28. Sell three or more paintings
29. Make a new friend
30. Start taking the boys out for special Mommy and Me outings
31. Start an interior design notebook with a section for each room of our house

I might have time later to read through the resolutions from last year and compare and contrast a bit but for now, I'm forging ahead...sometimes blissfully unaware is okay. I'm

Before Kids: A List

I sometimes think idly about how I might have prepared myself more fully for motherhood. I don't mean learning how Tylenol dosage works or practicing diaper changing but more holistic, easily missed or even simple, practical ideas. The kinds of things nobody tells you but you sort of wish you'd known.You know?

I've been compiling my own mental list for a while, here's what I've got.  Maybe you're still in the waiting stage, expecting to be a parent eventually but with a little time buffer between now and then...here's my advice.

Before You Have Kids, You Should.....

• Learn to live by routine. Before I had kids I was the sort of person who had trouble remember to brush her teeth consistently enough, I could never take my multivitamin consistently, I went to bed at random hours...etc. I think one of the main keys to motherhood sanity is simple routines. Always make your bed. Get up early. Shower consistently. Nap-time happens, come hell or high water. That sort of thing. I now live on a menu, have a shopping day, work from a standard home chore list and I'm doing much better but it was an up hill battle....still is. :) Do yourself a favor and get this stuff under your belt now. If you're struggling with home routines...check out Motivated Moms...they have an app for the iPhone and also a Yahoo group that can email you daily chore lists. I love their system.

Quiet day at home, all three brothers.

• Make friends in the same stage of life. I married young which made it easy for me find myself without peers when I was having my first child. BUT, I was also a snob and turned up my conceited little nose at the company of a bunch of "mommy friends." Oh, I was a ridiculous little goose! Learn from me. I now have lots of parenting pals. I think it's really important to have friends who understand what it feels like to be up all night with a screaming toddler, or who are also brainstorming solutions to teething woes, and trying to find pediatricians. People in the same stage of life have sympathy for your issues and also have answers for your puzzles. Seek out your life-stage partners. And if you're worried that the mommy types won't be interesting or engaging enough, seek out people who are your type who also happen to be in the same stage of life. I know this sounds tediously basic but when I was a new mom I thought all new mothers would want to talk about nothing but their kids and wore sweatpants all day. I just had to find a few moms who like to grow their own food, think Monty Python is hilarious and happen to be artists. It's worth looking...you can find all kinds of people in every stage of life.
• Develop personal hobbies and activities that are kid-free and fullfilling. So much of parenthood involves giving to the small people, learning to eclipse yourself and let go...and that's all helpful and good. The other side of that coin is that it is also good to have something that can be a respite for you to retreat into to recover from your kids. It's great for kids to see that their mom has a life beyond them, that she has talents and interests and still grows and learns. It's also good to have something in life that you've held onto that excites you beyond your children for the next stage of life when you stop having babies and decide what else you want to contribute to the world. So, right now while you're kid-free...live in the current stage and dive into whatever you're good at, whatever you're curious about, whatever you've always wanted to try...then keep after it, even in tiny doses once there are little people in your life.

• Get a puppy. I'm just saying. If you've always thought you wanted to have a puppy and you imagine your little ones growing up with a Rover of their own to love....get the puppy now. House-breaking a puppy while potty training your toddler is not to be done. Get the puppy now.
• Learn cooperation (and not just with your spouse). This one is connected to making friends in the same stage of life. Ask for help with parenting. Don't ever suffer under the delusion that "real" moms doing it all by the sweat of their own brows. That's wackazoid! Real moms, healthy moms...are part of vibrant communities where all the flawed and brilliant parents lean on and help each other. Crying your eyes out over discipline? Call a pal. Need childcare for a trip to the dentist? Call a pal. Have a hilarious story about what your 3 year old said on the potty? Get on that phone. Smart parents never parent alone.
• Build a habit of getting up early. I think there are very few parent mood-killers with quite the same potency as the feeling you get when you finally straggle, foggy-headed out of bed and find the mess the kids have been creating all over the house, and look at the clock and realize lunch is in two hours. Getting up early, even if you aren't naturally a morning person...is a huge win. You set the mood for the day, you give yourself more time to get things accomplished, you get your feet on the ground before the kids show their mischievous little faces and you might even get a few stolen moments as a couple before the world is spinning 5,000 miles an hour again. I love this post from the wonderful blog, Like Mother, Like Daughter, about teaching yourself to get up early.

Baby kisses. :)

• Learn to eat well and be active. Take your vitamins every day, make your own food instead of buying processed substitutes, eat multiple colors of produce at each meal, be active every day, don't stock things you don't want to eat all the time. Some of these things are habits, some are education, some are skills....work on them now, while you have the time. Another good thing about working on health before you have kids is that you have the chance to pre-stock your body with the supplies to handle pregnancy, birth, lactation and the stress and pressure of motherhood. 
• Purchase a good bed. (Or at least a killer mattress.) We have a hand-me-down mattress that is in somewhat lamentable condition. I'm truly not sure how old it really is. I wish we'd saved up and purchased a great one before we had kids. When you're really pregnant and sleeping on a mattress with dips and lumps, it's a pretty big insomnia machine, even if you're a great sleeper like me. Now that we're in full-on parenting mode we keep thinking we'll get around to a new one but honestly, I expect us to keep on with the mountain-range model until a spring stabs one of us in the back. Oh to start off on the right foot! And make sure it's at least a queen...we almost started married life on a double and now, I think God every time the baby snuggles down between us or all the kids pile in on a Saturday morning that we actually have the room to allow us and kids sanely.

Sometimes romance has to come, on the fly.

• Spend a lot of time and energy working on understanding sex and getting to know yourself and your partner sexually. Experimentation is good but raw knowledge will give you a turbo boost. Don't just have sex;  read books, listen to lectures, look at diagrams, get out your hand mirror, talk to each other and compare notes, read studies and talk to your friends about their experiences. This is the time to learn and establish sexual skills. Once little people are shrieking in the other room, your man is in the mood and your libido is nursing mother low...knowledge and sexual compatibility will be really difficult (although not impossible, never despair!) to attain. Do it now, this is sexual prime time.

Jam session with my parents and my brother, at Christmas-time.

• Make peace with your family. Nothing like having kids to further stress a strained relationship. If things are distant or rocky or just odd between you and your nuclear relatives, do all you can to let bygones be bygones, protect yourself and appreciate their strengths as well as recognizing and accepting their weaknesses. Remember that you're a grown-up now and mistress of your own ship so there's nothing to fear from the previous stage of life when your parents were in change and made other choices. Time for love, in whatever form and within whatever constraints you can deem necessary.
• Learn to love self-improvement and self-forgiveness. Life is always about balance. Learning how to be a good mother is all about setting impossible high goals, those kinds of "When I'm a mom, I'll never...." sort of statements and then when you fall short forgive yourself. If you can forgive yourself you can move on instead of letting yourself get stuck on whatever your failures are as a parent. You will fail. All parents fail. And there is no failure that can't be forgiven and learned from. None. You are what you are...seek to improve and forgive.
• Concentrate some good energy on getting to know and connection to your nieces and nephews, your godchildren and any other important small children in your life. Interacting with kids is the best practice for interacting with kids...not to mention the fact that it is really fabulous to spend the time and energy on children other than your own while you still can. It is much harder to be an involved auntie to my far away nieces and nephews now that I have three of my own here under the same roof with me.

Jane her Megaman, demonstrating A+ aunt and uncle skills.

That's what I've got for now. Maybe sometime I'll share a list of things I did right that I'd do again if I had the chance. Anyone have anything they'd like to add to the list?

In Which She Is Resolute

Happy New Year to everyone! I'm leisurely about my well-wishing, taking my sweet time getting around to acknowledging the calendar flip ...why panic...we have 365 days to toot our noise-makers. The holiday madness largely behind us, we find ourselves here, blinking at the crisp, white, slate of a newborn January. I kind of love January. I love fresh starts, I love stillness after madness (no holidays all month anyone??? WOOHOO!) and even the sharp winter chill feels a little invigorating. After all, we've hardly had time to enjoy the gentle sifting of a slow snow shower, try out our snuggly Christmas mittens and scarves or go stumping around frostily blowing dragon breath with our giggling two-year-olds. The year is young! Hooray!

If you know me, you know that one of my favorite things about the new year is a fresh and teetering stack full of resolutions. People always tell me that they *cough cough* "Don't really do that resolution thing themselves. It's so depressing and who really keeps their resolutions anyhow!" I don't buy it people. Really? Your plan for making sure you can't fail is that you have decided never to have goals? A pulled out his list of last year's resolutions recently and sighed exclaiming that he hadn't "done very well." It turned out on closer examination that he had made stabs at and some progress on most all of them and had roundly succeeded  on a few to boot! I told him to stop being his own worst critic and appreciate all the success he'd had instead.

An attitude adjustment that allows you be pleased with any amount of progress instead of only perfect completion is helpful, so is a goal making tutorial...practical, yea modest goals are best. Instead of resolving to "eat healthy food" try changing it to "eating something raw every day + joining a CSA." Concrete is good.

Anyhow...all that to say: Here are My 2011 Resolutions!

• Shop for Christmas presents in July
• Get back to my pre-Nib weight
• Get up early 5 days a week (so as to have a quiet space before the hordes are up and buzzing)
• Keep a dream journal next to my bed
• Record all my books on GoodReads again
• Start a Housekeeper's Binder
• Buy a jasmine plant and get it to bloom
• Switch our kids to a local pediatrician (I am sick of driving any more than I have to)
• Call both sets of grandparents on set days, every week
• Host my first real kid birthday party  (Ru, my socialite turns five in April which will be the perfect time)
• Do yoga 5 days a week in the early mornings (maybe 7...we'll see...and also consider taking up running in warm weather)
• Follow a sport (am considering soccer at the moment, although American football has an allure too)
•  Buy my bees

What's on your list?