Archive | January, 2014

from a weary mom after the holidays

January 6, 2014 at 1:51 pm

I don’t know what exactly snapped on Saturday night, but it was at that point that I decided I’d had it with the kids.

Too many mornings staggering around the kitchen half-asleep listening to Lena recite what she would like for breakfast (“I want Grape Nuts with some of your milk in a bowl and then some of Daddy’s milk in a cup! OK, Mama? OK? I want Grape Nuts with some of your milk…”) and putting food on Gil’s tray as fast as he can eat it while just longing to sit quietly, read my book, and sip my cup of coffee. Too many hours on the floor with my children, building the same towers or scooping the same markers and crayons back into the same Tupperware container after we all “color” together. Too many hours in the kitchen throwing together meal after snack after meal after snack for my family. Too much time in the house, not enough time outside, not enough time with other people.

Marriage is like dancing, and at that moment on Saturday night, I just couldn’t dance anymore. One thing I’m learning, though, is that even when your partner stumbles, the music — that is, life — keeps right on going. The kids still need your help, the stomachs still need to be filled, the routine still must go on. Sometimes both partners stop dancing at the same time, and it’s messy and sad. But in that moment, Elliott kept dancing even though I couldn’t. He played with the kids, put them in the bath, and then, after they were in bed, he found me and encouraged me.

In those moments, I felt like a failure. I said I wanted to do this stay-at-home mom thing while the kids were tiny, and Elliott has not only been fine with this but has also praised me, supported me, and been grateful for me. But on Saturday night I just wanted a break from my life. Unfortunately, there was really no feasible way to do that. Like most situations, the easiest answer was just to get a good night’s sleep, pray for strength and perspective, and start again the next day.

Honestly, I think part of the issue was that I just didn’t get out of the house enough over the holidays. Christmas through New Year’s keep people at home with their families, which is wonderful in some ways, but my home includes two kids two and under… ack! They need more to wear them out than just block towers, and I need more to give me a break than just their two-hour nap every afternoon.

It’s Monday morning now, and it’s a new day. There is coffee in my cup, laundry in the machine, and sunshine streaming through the windows. It’s highlighting all the dirt on the floor, but… I’ll tackle that eventually. Gil is napping, Lena is at a friend’s house, and Siena is rubbing affectionately against my legs, then dashing ahead of me with a little Maine Coon-chortle wherever I go. I pray at the end of Gil’s nap I can pick him up with genuine joy and go to meet Lena with anticipation and thankfulness.

What do you do to help you recharge your batteries when you’re tired of your work, whatever it might be? No matter what our profession, we all have to show up the next day (or right after nap time) with a smile on our faces and a can-do attitude. How do you get there? What recharges you?

27 :: in Becoming a Stay-at-Home Mom Series, motherhood, naptime diaries, thoughts

my goals for 2014

January 3, 2014 at 4:06 pm

a few things that describe my goals for 2014

Thank you for your encouragement about setting goals and working them out in everyday life. I’d love to hear what your goals are for the year!

When Elliott and I went on a recent (glorious!) 24-hour getaway, we spent an evening talking about our goals for 2014. I wrote them all down in an email draft, and then my phone didn’t save it and the email evaporated. So frustrating! I went home and tried to think through every one that we’d discussed. Now I’ve written these goals down not once but twice, thought them through and through, and I think I’m going to stick with them!

1. Love Elliott, Lena, and Gil.

To expand on this goal from last year, I have a few specifics for each person:

Elliott: Encourage him to write. He asked me for this one! He’s writing a book and wants to have it completely finished by the time we leave Sicily this July. I’m going be invested in his writing and progress by checking in with him, helping him carve out blocks of time, and motivating him to get started each day.

Lena: Establish a morning “school” period with Lena for 1 hour at least 2xs/wk when at home. I’ve been thinking about this one, and I’m excited as well as a little overwhelmed by it because it will be more structured — and require more planning — than any mother-child teaching I’ve done so far. There is an obvious chunk of time for this every day: Gil’s 2-hour morning nap. Generally this time is spent doing household chores together, but I want to devote at least one hour of it to: reading books together, working on a craft project (play doh, artwork, sewing), doing a Montessori activity (learning to set the table, planting and caring for seeds, helping with the laundry), or practicing numbers, letter sounds, and [eventually] reading.

Gil: Read one book with Gil every day. By the time Lena was 4 months, we read faithfully to her before bed as well as during the day. We haven’t nearly made the same effort with Gil. But we’re committed to reading with our children! So here we go… now where’s that copy of Peek-a-Who?

2. Read, Read, Read

Read 5 classics
Finish War and Peace!
Read 5 parenting books (such as Shepherding a Child’s Heart, Grace-Based Parenting, Boundaries with Kids, and Montessori from the Start)
Read 3 books about Italy (such as La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind, The Leopard, Mattanza)

3. Make contact with my siblings (Eric and Emily) once per week via email, phone call, letter, package, or a visit. We’re growing up (or have grown up?) and our hearts and lives are so full. Days turn into years so quickly. I want to share more with them and reach out regularly to love them.

4. Write daily in my One Line a Day Journal. It takes 2 minutes. I love flipping through my [sporadic…] entries for the past three years.

5. Learn more about and practice the manual settings on my camera. The photographer whose work I admire most is Paige; her use of natural light and the simple beauty of her images always leaves me breathless. My goal is to photograph more like her by the end of the year. Aim for the moon and I might land among the stars!

6. Publish a piece of writing (fiction or non-fiction) in a non-blog setting.

7. Write 12 guest posts for other blogs (average of one per month). This is a huge, enormous goal that will require a great deal of time and putting myself out there. However, I love this blogging community and I do aspire to contribute to it and share with it. I get in a rut of just focusing on my own blog and not interacting with and contributing to the community. Here’s to changing that in 2014!

8. Study Italian: finish Italian Made Simple before we leave Italy in July 2014. Which means… start working on the workbook every night, right?!

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Several bloggers I admire (such as Mary Beth) have chosen one word to encapsulate their goals for this year. I thought about these goals and the driving motivation behind them, and I honestly think the best way to describe them all is love.

I want to love my family by making their goals and success and progress a part of my mission for this year. I want to love other bloggers and blog readers and the military community by not just being encouraged by them but also by contributing my own thoughts, experience, and encouragement to them. I want to love my siblings by pursuing them with time, words, prayers, and individual contact. I want to love the place where I live — Italy — by reading about it and studying its language. I want to love and treasure the good things of this life by reading great books, recording our days, and sharing God’s blessings and involvement in my life with others through the written word.

So love it is!

What is one word that would describe your goals, hopes, and dreams for 2014?

7 :: in goals

my 2013 goals in review

January 2, 2014 at 2:43 pm

Biggest and proudest accomplishment of 2013: my contribution to creating and caring for this family of mine!

OK, after a year of work… 2013 is over, and it’s time to review my goals for this past year! Sharing them publicly with all of you is definitely a way to keep me accountable, and I think it helped me stay on track a little better this year than I did in 2012.

If you’d like to, I would love to hear about how well you accomplished your goals (or resolutions), or you could link to your blog posts about them in the comments, too!

Here’s how I did with my 2013 goals:

Love Elliott and Lena and our Baby Boy.

Nothing like keeping my priorities straight! How can I measure this one? I definitely found myself frequently stretched to love my family with patience, compassion, creativity, and humility, particularly when Gil was tiny and we were adjusting to being a family of four. Through it all, though, my love for my family has become deeper than ever, and I am more in love with Elliott and more invested in my whole family than I was a year before. It is wonderful to see my heart full to bursting with love… and then realize a year later that my love has miraculously grown.

Finish War and Peace!

Fail. Total. Complete. Fail. I literally did not even open the book all year. I did move it from my bedside table (where it was mocking me) to the floor (where it continued to mock me) to the guest room (where I was grateful to finally forget about it). I’m hoping for better luck next year with me and Prince Andrei, Natasha, Pierre, Hélène, Nikolai, etc. etc. etc….

Read at least 10 classics that I haven’t read but have always wanted to read.

In the minutiae of motherhood, reading is a respite and a relief to me. (How alliterative! Now I’m on a roll.) Reading books continues my education in an academic sense even when the rest of my life is mostly preparing and cleaning up food, facilitating sleep, and providing wholesome and creativity activities for little minds. When my body is exhausted, I can rest with a book. Other than conversations with Elliott before we fall asleep — or sleep itself — I can’t think of a more restful activity for me.

I also have a deeply satisfying sense of accomplishment when I read the last page and close another book. I can’t quite describe it. It is an accomplishment that cannot be taken away from me, that cannot be undone by little fingers, that is recognized by everyone as a great achievement, and that contributes profoundly to who I am as a person.

I’ve set book reading goals for myself for two years in a row now. In 2012 I resolved to read a book a week for 52 books total, and this past year I resolved to read 40 books. At 11:33pm on December 31st, I finished my 45th book of 2013, including 10 classics. And oh, that feeling of achievement! I’m so glad I did it, and I think I’ll set the same goal again next year. These are the classics that I read in 2013:

A Passage to India by E.M. Forester
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Confessions by St. Augustine
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Persuasion by Jane Austen
The Road by Cormac McCarthy

(I use this Book List Challenge to help me keep track of classics I’ve read and want to read. It’s not definitive, of course, but it is fun! I’ve read 50 of these books… 50 more to go.)

If you’d like to challenge yourself to read more in 2014, I highly recommend Goodreads. It’s like Facebook for bookworms! It’s a fantastic way to learn about new books, see what your friends are reading, keep track of your own reading (because otherwise I never remember), and set reading goals. You can become my friend on Goodreads right here.

Sell 50 handmade items either through craft fairs or through my Etsy shop.

I sold 56. Thank you to all of you who bought something from me!

Study Italian

I planned to complete this Italian workbook as well as the two volumes of Pimsleur Italian audio series. I finished the audio series but not the workbook. I did made good headway into it, though, so I think I’ll finish the book as one of my 2013 goals… before we leave Italy, of course!

Learn more about and practice the manual settings on my camera.

I did do this, but I am still scratching the surface of the manual settings. I know this is the next big step for me in improving my photography (umm… duh), but I have such a comfort zone with the automatic settings on my DSLR and find it hard to imagine that my fumbling with the manual settings will really change my photographs very much. I know that’s not true. Right?

Launch my blog on a new website.

Done as of January 28th, 2013 (< also the day I announced Gil’s birth). I still don’t feel as comfortable with WordPress as I did with Blogspot, but I am grateful to own all my content and to have complete power over the look of my website.

Maybe I’ll beautify a few things around here in 2014. If you have any blog-improvement suggestions (like formatting or helpful features or whatnot), I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Publish a piece of writing (fiction or non-fiction) in a non-blog setting.

Nope. Sigh. I did read a piece of my writing at our church’s women’s Christmas event, so maybe this goal was partially accomplished. But speaking vs. writing wasn’t exactly what I was intending when I made this goal, so I think I’ll try again in 2014.

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So that was 2013! Tomorrow I’ll publish my list of goals for 2014. I’m still working on writing some of them, but other goals are underway already. Again, if you’d like to share your 2013 or 2014 goals, I’d love to hear about them!