December 6 – Make. What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it? (Author: Gretchen Rubin)

This is a weird one for me.

In a way I make a lot of things,  I bake and I cook, but those things aren’t lasting.  I don’t even make fancy cookies or cakes that someone would want to take a picture of.  They taste good, and they look good to eat, but they aren’t something you’d want to record for posterity.

Last week I made Christmas cards with my kids, but that’s kind of misleading because I didn’t actually do any myself, I let them make a glorious mess while I organized the materials.

I write. All sorts of different things.  But while that is creative it is not something I would consider myself to have made.

I made a movie with my kids’ friends in October (I still have to edit it), but that was like making a play or writing a story. Still not a THING I made.

The truth is, I don’t make very much.  The details required for crafts and craft hobby confound and frustrate me and I lose any pleasure of creation to the notion that this thing has to go there.  For Christmas, my friends have decided that we will exchange 10 dollar gifts in an elaborate sort of game.  So we don’t know who will end up with the gift we bring.  Everyone else is making things,  I may end up baking.  I can’t really think of what I can make that would end up as something I would want to give as a gift.

I still have a while to figure that out though.

And since I haven’t really made anything lately, I’ll have to go with what I would like to do.

I’d love to be able to draw.  I’d love to be able to create with charcoal and pastels and put feelings into sketches instead of words.*

And on the one hand, I don’t need very much in order to be able to ‘make’ that.  I just need some paper and a pencil I guess.  But what I want?  Delicious cream coloured thick art paper, and the kind of pencils REAL artists use – the kind that you have to use a knife instead of a sharpener to make a point on.

I don’t know if I’ll do it though.

*My usual joke is that I don’t draw and I don’t take good photos, so I have to be really good with my thousand words.

Christine | Crossposted from Mombie | 12 7th, 2010 | 6 Comments »

Christine | Crossposted from Mombie | 12 6th, 2010 | No Comments »

# Reverb10  Prompt 4 – Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year? by Jeff Davis

In 1994, I took a course called Myth and Art lead by an amazing professor named Richard Ilgner who could make connections between things I had never thought to connect before.  He introduced me to Kerouac, whose work I loved (love) despite the fact that the fantastic freedom he and his characters enjoyed depended on women giving up their lives and dreams to support that freedon.

In one class, we were talking about how Kerouac was accused of false naivete because he found everything so damned amazing and got caught up in the wonder of the world around him.  I was totally intrigued, because while I was a fairly practical person, I did see cool things everywhere.  I watched for butterflies, I noticed rainbows in puddles (when I’m not jumping in them), and I thought these things are pretty neat. It hadn’t occurred to me that these were things that ‘grown-ups’ shouldn’t do.

Sixteen years later,  I’m not quite as good at doing these things naturally.  I feel like I have so many things to do, and so many responsibilities that I can’t tap into that wonder as easily.  And it’s true that ‘grown-ups’ can’t spend all their time floating about from one marvellous thing to another or their children won’t have all the skills they need to make their way in the world.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t do it though.  I have to flip the switch more consciously most of the time now, but I still try to smell the air, and see the rainbows and touch the tree bark.  I marvel at people and how their brains work.  How do I do that?  By letting myself be curious, by asking ‘why’ and by thinking of how my children are processing the things around them.

Especially that last one.  When I imagine how they are taking in the information the world is presenting, it seems natural to point out new information for them to absorb. I care about them finding their own way, so pointing out what the world has to offer has to help with that.

I want the structures I’ll develop in 2011 to give me much more time for wonder, much more time to let my kids wander in wonder and take me with them.

Christine | Crossposted from Mombie | 12 4th, 2010 | No Comments »

#Reverb10 Day 3: Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors). (Author: Ali Edwards)

I had a lot of trouble with this one.  I had lots of moments in which I felt very alive but the ones that are most vivid are very private, and sharing them would violate what made them so sharp and intense.

And I don’t think  in terms of favourites, or single-most and I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to pick the very best or just one of the many.  Since I don’t categorize things in a way that would let me distill a single shining moment, I’m just going to pick one that really makes me feel good to think of and run with that.

A Moment

I’m not good with winter, let me say that. I live in Newfoundland where it never gets very, very warm and it never gets very,very cold, but winter is damned chilly and damp and I feel much more inclined to stay inside with a book than to venture outside.

Actually, the only way I can make myself go outdoors is to find a specific thing to do out there and since but I have two boys (6 & 9) who do like to be outdoors I work hard to find reasons to get the whole family outside.  A few years ago Santa brought us all snowshoes to encourage me to have a reason to get out there.  And that brings us to my moment.

One Sunday last February, I huffed and puffed and pushed us all outside with our snowshoes and we trudged to the field by the school near our house.  If this was a fantasy or a movie, the sun would be shining and it would be unseasonably warm and my whole attitude would change at that very moment, but this was real life.

It was really cold, the wind was on my face, and everything smelled sort of sharp, but in a good way, and my boys were thrilled to be tromping around in the snow with me and The Man.  Their faces were red, except for their grins, their mismatched collection of baby and grown-up teeth gleamed at me and they challenged us to a race.

They turned and took off, legs swinging along, their feet giant in yellow and red snow shoes.  My husband and I dashed off after them, doing that parent thing where you put in a real effort while trying not to actually win a race.

My heart was racing, my breaths in were hitting the back of my nose hard and my teeth were getting dry from smiling in the cold air.  My husband was ahead of me and the boys were ahead of me, and being outside in the cold felt good for a change, and I felt like I was doing good things for my kids and myself while I was pushing my muscles just a little.

It all felt REAL and clear, and right and I was inhabiting every part of myself at once, no separate mental track, just the here and now.  And that is so unusual for this overthinker that it stuck with me.

Christine | Three Deep Breaths | 12 4th, 2010 | No Comments »

Today I wrote the title after the piece,  I think that works better.

Today’s Reverb10 prompt is from Leo Babauta of Zen Habits and mnmlst : What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?

This question makes sense coming from him because he is all about cutting down to the juice, to the essentials, to keeping the important parts and shedding the rest.

I’ve been thinking about this prompt for hours now, while I did some work, tidied up, helped my kids make Christmas cards,  got ready for Taekwon-do and tooled around on the internet.  What is it that gets in the way of my writing?

I don’t have a lot of the usual writer’s procrastination things.  Blank pages hardly ever frighten me.  I don’t worry about it being perfect. I’m not hung up on publishing – although it would be nice.  I rarely worry about what other people are going to think of what I’ve written.

But, and this is a big one.  I let EVERYTHING and ANYTHING get in the way of my writing.  For example, at least two of the five things I listed above didn’t need to be done, but instead of sitting down and writing this entry, I tidied up and jumped from site to site on the ole internets.  I enjoyed Taekwon-do and making Christmas cards, and the work was necessary but I tidied and internetted it up to tune out and still feel productive (I was reading business-related blogs).

This clearly ties into my boundary thing from yesterday.

I can’t or I won’t draw a clear boundary around my writing time.  I can make anything seem more important than getting words on paper (or on screen in this case),  and that irritates the hell out of me.

How can I eliminate that?

I think some planning will help. Picking a specific time of day to write.  Picking certain things to write at given times.

But really, the thing I will have to eliminate is my internal reasoning that somehow these creative things I do for myself aren’t all that important.

I had no idea that was in there until I just typed it.

Well now, Christine, where do you go from here?

Christine | Crossposted from Mombie | 12 3rd, 2010 | 1 Comment »

I assume I’ll get better with my titles as the month goes on, but in the spirit of ‘Done beats perfect every time’ I’m going to run with this one.

My word for 2010

REACTIVE

I’m reaching the end of 2010 kind of baffled and frazzled, I’m not sure how a whole year has passed and I can’t really point to any major new accomplishments** or say THERE, that’s what I’ve improved.  The reason for all of this befuddlement and lack of progress is that I’ve been reactive all year.  I’ve been on edge, waiting to be interrupted***, and just responding to everyone’s demands without a clear set of plans for myself.  It has really left me at a loss and somewhat irritated with how I operate in my own life.

I know I need to learn to make myself a bigger factor in how I decide things, I need  to learn to say no, to have clearer boundaries, but I haven’t figured out the mechanisms for that yet.  I’ve just spent 9 years as a stay-at-home writer and freelance mombie so responding to requests from children,clients, family has become my stock in trade and I’m not sure where I want the lines to be yet.

Obviously, I want to have good boundaries around my work time, working at home tends to mean that work melts out into everything else.

I want my children to become more independent but I don’t want to cut them adrift either, the transition from responder-mom to independence-fostering mom might be a littler rough for them.

I want a little more planning, a little more scheduling, a little more…

My word for 2011

STRUCTURE

Now, I don’t mean intense, strict, no flexibility structure.  I mean, something-to-hang-my-tasks-on structure.

I don’t want a bunch of hardsided containers in specially sized slots structure,  I want a wall of funky hooks and shelves structure.

I need to have a place to put all my activities so I can get at them when I want to, and when they make sense.   I want to see where they connect so I can save myself time and energy and use that time and energy to pour into fun things for myself and for my family.

Structure will let me choose how to spend my time, and let me be clear about my progress. And it will let me put things where they belong instead of having them decide when to drop and me to picking them up over and over  like I did ‘reactively’ in 2010 .

To be clear, I don’t expect an orderly life.  I don’t expect control.  I just want to move more with the flow instead of standing still while debris in the river of my life smacks into me. I want to feel peaceful, not frazzled.

I want to be more fun – for myself, for my kids, and for my husband.

* Reverb 10, for those of you playing along at home is a month of posts reflecting on the past year and thinking about the next.  Each day the organizers provide the participants with a prompt for a post and we think and write about that topic – and comment on other people’s posts on the same topic.  You can do it too!

**Aside from my novel but that was a very concentrated effort in November – not at all what I could have accomplished with steady consistent effort over the year.

***My six year is home recovering from a fever and ironically he has interrupted me 5 times already by this point. Glerg.

Christine | Crossposted from Mombie | 12 1st, 2010 | No Comments »

Remember those books from the 80s?  The first chapter would set out the basic storyline and then someone would have to make a decision,  and you, the reader, would get to choose from a couple of options and turn to different pages depending on which one you chose.

The books were fun, and I could get a lot out of them because I always doubled back to see what would have happened if I had chosen differently.  I liked the feeling of being in control of the characters’ decisions (I was one of those kids who would talk to TV characters about their bad decisions), and I liked seeing the options in front of me.

Today, I was at the supermarket checkout, idly considering where I would put the groceries, and being glad that I had cleaned out the fridge and cupboards this morning.  I let my thoughts stray* to how tidy my house is at the moment, a fairly unusual circumstance.  My next thought struck me hard  – it went like this…

‘I’ve been doing a good job keeping ahead of the mess for the last few days but I guess it is just a matter of time before it catches up to me again.’

Crappy, hey?  Seriously, why on earth would I say that to myself?  It’s totally self-defeating and it makes everything sucky.

How about if, instead, I decide to choose my own adventure**?

So, here I go:

I’m choosing not to just accept that my family is so messy that untidiness is inevitable, instead I am going to work toward my new adventure***, an orderly house.

Now, before you think I’ve lost it entirely and that I think I can change my mind and things will automatically put themselves away – I’m not crazy (or at least this is not evidence of it – ha!).  I know there is work to be done, but changing my approach to the problem gives me a little list of questions at the end of my page, and now I can choose which adventure to follow to a solution (and double back if I don’t like the outcome).

I think my solutions lie in the following questions

1) If Christine uses her recent schedule to figure out what is helping her keep things tidy, go to page…

2) If Christine tries to figure out where things got off track in the past (that resulted in a big cummulative mess) and figures out some work-arounds, go to page…

3) If Christine figures out the things that have worked for a short time in the past and refines them before trying them again,  go to page…

4) If Christine figures out how some ways to engage her kids in the process, go to page…

5) If Christine takes a good look at her storage and organizational systems and finds ways to make it easier to put things away, go to page…

See? Changing my thought patterns generates solutions, instead of generating the brick wall of ‘I guess it is just a matter of time…’

So, how about your adventures?

How are you choosing a different chapter at the moment?

******************************************************************************************************************************************************

*Clearly not a mindfulness moment – oh well!  Can’t be on duty all the time.

**And there’s the connection with the first section, you were wondering when that was coming, weren’t you?

***Admittedly, this is a dull use of the word adventure.  Let’s consider a tidy house an adventure foundation.  The less stuff I have to do to manage the house, the more time I have to have fun.

Christine | Choose your own adventure | 04 14th, 2010 | No Comments »

When it’s an afternoon!

Okay, so it’s a lousy riddle but it’s been a real dilemma for me.

At the moment, I’m trapped in what parents around here refer to as kindergarten hell.  Kids in kindergarten here go to school in the morning (8:45-12) for two weeks and then switch to afternoons (1-3) for two weeks.  So my schedule is a little frustrating.*

I can add almost anything to my day, as long as I can do it at almost the same time each day.  I also work best when I have a couple of hours at time – choppy schedules cause me great stress.

Are you starting to see the shape of my problem here?

My favourite work days are the ones when I can bring both kids to school for 8:45, come home, have breakfast, tidy up a little, catch up with some friends online using my laptop at the kitchen table, drink some tea and then head to my home office to work at 9:30.  I work until 11:30, get lunch started and then pick up The Little Guy from school.

That works really well when he’s in mornings.

But when he’s in afternoons, I bring The Boy to school for 8:45, come home have breakfast, hang out with The Little Guy, do some housework, try to squeeze in a little work between requests from TLG, talk to him endlessly about the fact that this is not actually a day off and that he is going to school this afternoon and no, they won’t have playtime or snacktime because school in short.  Then The Man comes home to lunch,  the three of us eat together and then I bring TLG to school, rush back home, try to work from 1:10 to 2:40, and then head back to school to pick them both up and start the snack/homework/play/make supper part of the day.

So yeah, when he’s in afternoons I don’t get a lot of work done because everything’s so choppy.

I tried to solve that by having my friend K babysit a couple of afternoons each week.  When TLG is in mornings, she babysits from  1-5 (and picks TB up from school). When TLG is in afternoons she picks them both up from school and babysits from 3-5.

That backfired on me because I found it hard to settle and focus in the afternoons.  If I had been working all morning, my brain seemed to think we were done for the day, and if I had been hanging out with TLG all morning my brain was scrambled from five-year-old conversation.

This has been plaguing me for a while (in fact the afternoon problem even predates the kindergarten problem) and I haven’t been able to find a workable solution.

But then last week, I had a great chat with Liz from Dream Garden Coaching and she got me thinking about what made mornings work for me.  Then I enlisted The Man and my friend J to help me brainstorm how to make my afternoons more like my mornings.

And, as usual, a friend could solve my problem when I couldn’t.  J quickly identified the fact that my morning work sessions started with putting my house and my brain in order, and spending a little time by myself NOT working before I started trying to work.

Then we brainstormed ways for me to get that downtime in the afternoons, especially when K is babysitting and she and the kid (or kids) are downstairs and I can’t be alone there.

So, my new afternoon work plan looks like this:

If someone is home:

Have lunch

Take laptop and tea to my bedroom for 15-20m and hang out with online friends

Head to my office to work

If no one is home:

Come back from school run

Have tea and hang out time at kitchen table

Head to my office to work

And THAT’S how I’m going to make my afternoon more like a morning.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

How about you? Does your best work time match your schedule? If not, can you make your scheduled work time feel more like your best work time?

*And that’s before you add in professional development days, one day off per month so the teachers can host the Kinderstart program, parent-teacher meeting days, AND the fact that my older kid goes to school from 8:45-3 each day so I have to go back and forth to the school at least 3 times per day.

Christine | Three Deep Breaths, Time Is On Your Side | 03 29th, 2010 | No Comments »

I was at a conference recently and, as often happens at these things, a former Olympic gymnast came in to give a talk about excellence.

Oh, that doesn’t happen that often?  Well, it happened at this one.

This guy, Peter Vidmar, won a gold medal with the US gymnastic team in the 80s and he’s parlayed that into a speaking career.  He seemed like an odd choice to me at first but once he started talking the connections made sense.  Aiming for the Gold, aspiring to excellence,  go business people go!  That sort of thing.

He was funny, charming, and he could swing himself around on the pommel horse like he was born to it.

You know where I’m going with this, right?

He wasn’t born to it.  He PRACTICED. A lot. Way more than it would be practical for a non-Olympian hopeful to practice anything.

But it was awesome to see the results of that sort of practice and since  I will never have to perform on a pommel horse *,  I can just take the practice thing and run with it.

And knowing the years of practice that went into his demonstration really drove one of his comments home.  He was talking in a general way about practice and how it helps, when he did that call and response set up that every speaker tries to do.

Peter: “And as you know (sing song voice) ‘Practice makes…’”

Audience: “PERFECT!”

Peter: (smiling) “Permanent!”

It took a few seconds for us to laugh at ourselves.  The cliche ‘Practice makes perfect’ is so ingrained that it is practically meaningless, no amount of practice will make you perfect at anything.  It’s a level of control we can’t begin to aspire to.

But permanency?  That is something we can work toward because even semi-permanent puts us ahead (semi-perfect doesn’t sound good at all).

It gave me a whole new framework for my Taekwondo practice, for encouraging my 8 year old to keep at his handwriting homework, for getting my five year old to put his own shoes on.   If we practice those things, they’ll become part of us**.  Something unshakeable.

I like that.

So, I’ve committed to daily practice of my Taekwondo.  How about you?  What are you making permanent?

*I may be going out on a limb here, but I think at 37 I could take gymnastics off my to do list ( had they ever been on there).

**Okay, skeptic, I know where you are going already.  Yes, we *can* make bad habits more or less permanent too.  But if we recognize those habits we can replace them with something else to practice into permanency.  I guess it depends on awareness and the desire to change.

Christine | Three Deep Breaths | 02 24th, 2010 | No Comments »

I got commended today for having the tools to help my kid through a bit of anxiety about going to school (he’s almost 5, and some days kindergarten is too much for him),  but I felt like saying that he (and his brother) deserved praise for making me find those tools.

I grew up thinking that my level of worry was completely normal, and that I was somehow keeping danger at bay by worrying.   These ideas weren’t reinforced by my parents or anything, they just existed and somehow got woven into my concept of ‘the way things are.’

My anxiousness wasn’t debilitating, and it didn’t center around any one thing. It was just there and I dealt with it.

Then I started seeing my kids exhibiting some of my coping behaviours (e.g. avoiding competition, overcompensating, withdrawing from heated discussions, stressing about learning new things) and I realized it was time to find some tools for myself, and, to find some tools for them so we could all have easier lives.

I’ll be discussing a lot of those tools on this blog, so I won’t get into them now.  I just thought it was worth noting that one of the things that causes me the most anxiety – trying to parent effectively – is the very thing that is helping me to learn to reduce my anxiousness.

Reason eight million and twelve I am glad to be a parent.

Christine | Three Deep Breaths | 10 22nd, 2009 | No Comments »