Cozy Living

What I've Learned About Breathing

Two years ago, I read my favorite book, Breathe, by Keri Wyatt Kent, for the first time. That summer I was serving on high school staff at church twice a week (plus activities), running a mom's program at church once a month, hosting our church fellowship group at my house, holding monthly stamping classes, teaching card making at JoAnn's, leading a table at MOPS, walking three times a week with a friend, and trying to keep my life together with a two year old and a newborn. I was busy. Way. Too. Busy. I was so busy helping and volunteering and doing that I had lost the ability to just be. To breathe.

After reading this book for the first time, I realized I needed a major shift in my life and my thinking. I had been defining my success in life with what I was accomplishing rather than who I was becoming. There had to be a major shift in thinking in order for me to live the life of peace to which God was calling me. There was no room for peace in my busy schedule.

Two years later, my life is quite different. I've spent two years ruthlessly eliminating hurry, as Keri puts it. I'm still very involved at church, but that means a once a week Bible study (which I'm attending, not leading), hosting my fellowship group (which I truly love doing), meeting once a week with a friend to discuss books we're reading together, and holding a stamping class whenever I feel up to it, which is once every several months. What a change! Of course, the boys being two and four instead of newborn and two does help, but there are so many other areas which God has carefully shown me that needed to be pruned out of my life. Some things were a huge relief to let go of. Others I still wonder why he chose someone else for the job. But the point is, I have space to breathe.

The purposeful slowing down of my life has only been encouraged as I read others' blogs and see how their lives have benefitted from staying close to family, close to the earth, close to home. I read about others who are choosing to avoid the busyness of the world in their own ways, and I am encouraged. Life in the OC moves pretty fast, and we get some strange looks from those who wonder why our lives are moving at such a slow pace. And I'm okay with that. I know that this path is the right one for me and for my family. I can feel God's peace in our lives these days. Every now and then I find myself rushing the boys to get their shoes on or to clean something up, and I realize that while it used to be the norm, it's become somewhat out of character for me to do that. I notice it and I chastise myself for pushing the boys to live life at the pace of the world. What a change. 

Now that I've pruned my life down to the bare minimum, I am so much more able to enjoy the works God has given me to do. I find myself much less resentful about doing the housework, much less worried about what others think of me at church or in the neighborhood, much less stressed. I have space for unexpected things, whether that means making phone calls and cooking meals when someone at church has a sudden death in the family, or if it just means stopping to play in the sprinklers for a while on the way home from the park. Why not? We have no place to rush off to these days. Isn't this life, after all, these little moments? Creating space to breathe...it has made such a difference for me.

And He's Off...

My little Jake is growing up so fast.  I mean, really, when did he stop being a baby?  Today was his first day of preschool, and there were no tears (phew.) He has such a complicated personality...shy but loud, so serious and so funny, cuddly and independent, smart and silly.  So full of contrasts, he is.  I think what I most appreciate about him right now is his thoughtfulness.  All the time and everywhere, he's thinking, examining, figuring out how things work.  The other night he was putting some stickers onto a grid JUST SO, as his brother stuck his own stickers all over the place, not caring if anything lined up or matched.  Aren't kids just so unique? 

We just got a book called People by David Spier which is just full of drawings of millions of different kinds of people, everyone unique.  I don't like preachy books...you know the ones where the author feels the need to slap you in the face with restating over and over the obvious moral of the story?  But this one has really nice artwork and was a great conversation starter for us..."isn't everyone so unique?" I ask them, and "wouldn't the world be so boring if everyone looked the same and liked the same things and acted all the same?"  I love sharing that perspective with them. 

So off my Jakey goes to preschool for a few hours a week, where he'll meet all kinds of unique new little people, and where he'll learn to make new friends, just a little bit on his own and a little bit supported by the wonderful community that is our church's amazing preschool.  It makes me hold on a little tighter to both of my boys when I have them home with me. I'm trying to squeeze every bit out of life together that we can, which reminds me of this quote:

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life...to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. 
~Henry David Thoreau 

Have a wonderful weekend.

On Books and T.V.

 

Two things have morphed a bit in recent days, in a way that's making our lives quite a bit more serene, more wholesome lately.  There's a new way of seeing books and television around here.

First of all, you do remember my severe love of books, don't you?  It has always been my deepest desire that my boys would love reading. That they would crave it, like I always did and do. I have counted down the days and years until they are old enough to sit with me and read out of novels, real novels, along with the picture books they have learned to adore from almost their first days.  This year Jake and I have (finally!) begun reading the Little House on the Prairie series, my absolute favorite books of childhood (and as it turns out, adulthood!)  He sits and listens, amazed at the life back then, and I think I'm loving it even more than he is. Those books offer the perfect antidote for modern life...easy, unhurried, full of family moments.  Tyler, on the other hand, is still not interested in sitting with us for the many pages without pictures, but he seems to have an innate love of thumbing through book after book after book after book, as life moves on around him. I already dream of the day that he'll be old enough for us to reread the Little House books and see them again through his eyes.

On the other hand, television. It's a bit like drinking, to me. In small doses, quite nice. In excess, a very bad thing...for your mind, your soul, your family relationships, your faith, your self image...   I will say that I have always used t.v. like medicine around here. A little bit of PBS goes a long way towards sanity for a mother of two preschoolers.  Do you remember that fog that is life during the early mothering years? At times, television was my savior. When I needed escape and a moment to myself, or just to cook dinner or empty the dishwasher without someone climbing into it and pulling out the knives, t.v. came to my rescue. The DVR is our friend, making our short list of acceptable kids' shows available at any time I needed it.  My favorites: Mister Rogers, Zoboomafoo, Curious George, Between the Lions, generally anything uplifting, educational, and slow paced, and with the DVR we always fast-forward through any commercials. Still, every time I turned on the t.v. for a moment, I felt guilty, as if I couldn't quite handle things on my own. But there it is, it did help me through.  And hubby and I do enjoy catching our favorite dramas together and theorizing endlessly about them...it's like having a standing date on the couch without having to pay for a babysitter.

So today, I'm finding a balance.  It's my "new-old-fashioned life" theory.  Take the best of the modern world (DVR) and leave the rest of it (non-stop screen time).  I'm in the beginning of week four of my t.v. experiment with the boys.  Four weeks ago I felt that I was finally ready for this trial that I've been thinking about for months, even years, I guess. No t.v. during the day. Really, it's not a huge change for them, as they watched at the very most 40 minutes, but it's a change for me.  T.V. has been a great boredom breaker, a great fight ender, a great distraction when everyone's cranky, a generally great fall back plan. When I didn't know quite what else to say or what to suggest, "Let's watch a show," was always met with great enthusiasm from us all.  Now I'm mothering without a net, so to speak.

So far, so good. In the past three weeks I've turned on the t.v. twice for them: once in order to pack our stuff up for the beach, and that was on day one.  Looking back, I probably could have avoided it, but didn't know better.  The second time was just on Friday, when I was having one of those blah days where nothing quite felt right, and Greg had been gone several nights and I just needed a break.  But generally, I have decided that whenever the boys ask to watch a show, I will stop what I'm doing and say, "No, but let's sit together and read a book," and it works! And at times when I feel the need to make the suggestion of t.v. myself, I'm training myself to wait it out for a few moments and see if the storm fades back into peace on its own.  Best of all, we are, as I like to tell Jake, going on an adventure in our imaginations together.  And I'm loving it. I'm so thankful for the way life moves a family, taking us from surviving just a year ago, to thriving today.

I've found a long lost love...

I've recently found an old friend. One who kept me company on long car trips during childhood summers. A friend who helped me escape when Junior High was horrible, as it is for everyone. I even kept up with this great friend through High School and College, as busy and happy and preoccupied as I was at the time. It's only been the last four years that my old friend, reading, has been sorely neglected.

In the summer when I was twelve-ish, I would bring home a stack of twenty library books at a time, and would finish them in the span of a few days, then go back for more. One year, convinced that I'd already returned them, I found a stack of books behind a chair in my terribly messy room at the end of the summer, and vowed that I'd just never go to the library again, rather than paying that unheard of fine. In the end, I couldn't bear the idea of being blacklisted from the library for life, and opted to pay what I remember to be $80.00, although my mother says the amount grows every time I tell the story.

I've gone through Little House on the Prairie at least 7 times on my own (I'm now on #8 with my own boys!), read the entire Babysitter's Club, Nancy Drew, and Sweet Valley High series, and then graduated to anything and everything else before having Jake. Since then, I've read parenting books that really did teach me a lot. Then I've read magazines. Short little articles that briefly satisfy, but don't last.

And now I've rediscovered a long lost love...real books. Oh, how I've missed you. I'm so happy to have you back.

Today I'm reading my absolute favorite author's newest book, Maeve Binchy's Whitethorn Woods. I have honestly adored every single one of her books. Truly, every time I read her, I am convinced that it is my life's dream to move to a small village in Ireland, even if it means having all the daily troubles that her characters do. This book is two years old, but really, did I have time to read it two years ago? So I'm making up for lost time.

Memoirs seem to be my genre of choice these days, (Whitethorn Woods excluded.) It began with Eat, Pray, Love, an amazing book that I read on Christmas Day and the day after. I immediately scoured the bookstores for more memoirs, finding Girl Meets God, an interesting Jewish conversion story, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which I'm not sure qualifies as a memoir, but definitely changed the way my family and I eat and think. The best, by far, was Corrie Ten Boom's The Hiding Place, which is perhaps the most amazing true story I've ever read, about a Dutch woman's unwavering faith during her fight against the Nazis in Holland and later in a concentration camp. I was in tears daily as I read that one. Wow.

Today I'm involved casually in about 5 or 6 books. I think I'll be monogamous to Maeve until I've finished her up, after which I'll return to a memoir about a woman who's obsessed with Jane Austen (another favorite author of mine,) and a novel about five sisters in Australia, along with a few others.

I know this is entirely too long of a post, but those of you who've read this far understand how I feel about books, I know you do. I hope you have one to cozy up with sometime today, preferably with a cup of coffee and some dark chocolate, in an incredibly comfortable chair. Happy reading.

Cozy little spots

Today I'm just being thankful for the cozy little spots I carve out around my home.

The spot where I stack my current books (Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies...the most irreverant and hilarious and touching book about faith ever; The Produce Bible...my go-to book when I get my CSA basket, with gorgeous pictures and information about produce, along with recipes and what seasons to buy them in; daily inspirational readings by Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Devotional Classics...a compilation of excerpts from classic writings; the Patchwork gift book I mentioned a few days back; Cottage Living magazine...my favorite; Home Companion magazine...etc.etc.etc.)

these beautiful flowers greg gave me in a vintagey box, "just because," the card said. so sweet!

this little nook in our family room...with the plaster birds I bought when I was with my grandma at a boutique near her house, backed by old books I recovered from her house after she passed away last fall.

this other family room nook, with papa's old microscope and wooden case that he had when he was a boy, and another bird...this one from cousin debby who is so much fun to be with.

Have a wonderful Monday everyone.

The Cutest Book for Someone Else...

My sister saved me from buying this book the other day. I just wanted so badly to be the kind of person who could make these adorable felted animals. She ever so gently reminded me that I do not have the time to be felting my own animals, much less giving them an adorable tea party like this one.

If you, however, somehow have hours to spare making adorable creatures like these, please do give this sweet little book a try and let me know about it so I can live vicariously through you.