Archive | thoughts

Unplugging and Restarting Your Parenting Overseas (or Right Where You Are!)

May 19, 2014 at 7:40 pm

When I told my dad we were moving to a foreign country, he said: “I think this is so good. You guys are young. You can go away and establish yourselves as a family, work out your priorities, without a lot of family nearby and outside influences. This is a great, great opportunity for you, and I am so happy for you.”

I’ve thought about that a thousand times since we moved to Sicily three years ago. My parents raised my siblings and me overseas, so he spoke from a depth of experience. He knew that anyone who lives overseas has a choice. You will be isolated, you will be lonely, you will be overwhelmed, you will be foreign.

But.

You can use the isolation for your benefit. You can take advantage of the distance from the influences that affect your peers. You can reevaluate your priorities, establish new habits, build a foundation for your family. You can train the crew of your little ship so that when the world’s fancies sway this way and that, you can still hold steady to your goals.

For us, Sicily was where our parenting started. Lena was just three months old when our plane landed in Italy. Also, I quit my job when we left the States, and I couldn’t immediately find work here. (You can read about that difficult transition here.)

After I accepted my new status as a full-time mom instead of a full-time nurse, I sat down and thought about the kind of mom I wanted to be, especially as a stay-at-home mom. This move gave us a chance to establish ourselves as parents and as a family and to decide what our priorities would be.

These were the priorities we have established here:

We want to read.

A lot. We love to read, thanks to parents who raised us on a steady diet of great literature. My husband and I read an average of 50 books a year on our own, and we read at least four books a day to each of our kids.

One trick to reading a lot is to surround yourself (and your kids) with good books. There are [piles of] books all over our home, and I recently calculated that we have about 100 board books and 150 picture books. Plenty to keep both the readers and the listeners interested in the stories!

(Note to moms trying to build their home libraries: try library book sales. I’ve filled boxes with children’s books at library sales in the States and then shipped them back to us overseas with the super-cheap, super-slow Media Mail option.)

We want to cook our own clean, healthy food.

We live in a small town in rural Sicily, and we have to drive at least 30 minutes to get good ethnic (ie. not Italian) food. We enjoy going out to a restaurant once a month or so – usually for incredible wood-fired pizza in our town – but it’s stressful with little kids. So… in Sicily, if we want to eat, we kind of have to cook.

And cook we do! Thanks to dearth of restaurants and a cornucopia of produce, I’ve finally gotten the crash course in basic home cooking that I so desperately needed… oh, when I went to college. I do our dry-goods shopping at the U.S. grocery store on base, and then we try to purchase most of the perishable items — fruits, vegetables, cheese, seafood — at the market or in town. Sicily makes this easy.

I’ve watched my friend Rachel beautifully transform the food culture in her home since moving here. Here’s what she said about living and cooking in Sicily:

“Not having the fast food option has helped me to learn to embrace cooking. I’ve always enjoyed it, but having such easy (and cheap) access to incredible fresh ingredients has motivated me to search out ways to cook them. On top of that, I’ve loved having my kids in the kitchen with me! … Mussels and artichokes are their favorites these days. (Isn’t that crazy?! We can’t believe it, either!) We love knowing that we’re laying a foundation of healthy eating for them!”

We don’t want TV to be a big deal in our home.

By that I mean that we want to spend more time doing other things, and we don’t want our kids sitting in front of screens. For now, our family does not own a TV. Our kids don’t expect movies or computer time; we just fill our days with other activities. We don’t think this is a permanent choice (both Elliott and I grew up with — and loved — family movie nights), but it’s right for us during this season.

I’d like to blog more about this soon, but in the meantime, Amanda wrote an amazing blog post about living without a TV during their three years in Japan. I highly recommend it!

We don’t want to spend a lot of time on our computers or phones in front of our kids.

I wrote more about my decisions to limit my iPhone usage here. (Elliott doesn’t own a smartphone right now, so it’s a lot easier for him!)

I loved my friend Sarah’s comment on that blog post because it shows how Sicily has helped her unplug and restart her parenting as well:

“Since moving to Sicily it has been very freeing to be in a different time zone where social media is not buzzing in the phone…. I have found that also I get frustrated with my kids if I’m distracted by my phone because they’re not allowing me to “focus.” I have noticed that and have now made a point to only check FB and email in the mornings, nap time, and the evenings…. It allows me to be a mother and wife who is present.”

Amen to that! I only wish it were more true of me.

We want to explore alternative employment.

I sell handmade crafts, do copy editing work for my dad’s organization, and blog… and earn a few dollars a month. ;) It’s ok; earning money is not my primary focus right now. I’m enjoying this chance to explore other fields besides nursing during these years so that I have a better idea of my skills and interests (and so I keep developing both of those!) whenever I re-enter the workforce.

Elliott has also enjoyed “building a platform” that might lead to another career down the road. He established a website and podcast while he was here called “The Uncommon Veterinarian.” He also is almost finished with his first novel, a monumental feat of dedication.

We want to stay connected to family back home.

We Skype with family on weekend afternoons, and my blog is a big way to stay connected to our family and invite them into our lives. We also love it when they visit us here!

We want to open our home to visitors.

We love having family and friends come to stay, and we’ve tried to make that a priority in our lives by always having an available guest room, a pretty open schedule, and a welcome invitation to anyone who would like to come.

This year we’ve had week-long visitors every month since October, and we try to open our home regularly for dinners, play dates, and game nights, too. It’s all a part of our life-goal of making room… hence the name of this blog!

We want to spend time outdoors.

That’s why we chose a house that had a whole green valley for a backyard. Except in the summertime, we take the kids on a hike about every week. Often Elliott will take the kids for a walk as soon as he gets home from work and while I’m cooking dinner. They meander down to the piazza and come back with fresh bread and wine to accompany our meal, or sometimes they walk farther to a farm near our house.

——–

For those of us in Sicily – or living anywhere overseas – this is a rare opportunity. Living overseas is an adventure, and there are definitely extra challenges with the distance from family and smaller community and resources. But don’t forget that the community is (usually) ready-made and eager to welcome you; resources are often plentiful and free; and you live in a beautiful-in-its-own-way, once-in-a-lifetime location.

Of course, unplugging and restarting your parenting — or your life! — is important to do wherever you are whenever you need to do it, whether you’re in Bahrain or Boston, Iceland or Indianapolis, Venezuela or Vancouver. Certainly there are more resources and more diversity when you’re in a major Western metropolis. I want our family’s priorities and goals to be something we constantly remember, re-evaluate, and re-prioritize no matter where we live.

Now it’s your turn! Before you had a family of your own, how did you picture your family? How did you envision yourselves spending weekends, evenings, and holidays? What did you think your priorities would be?

If you’re single, how did you picture yourself at this age? Are your priorities in the right place?

And now: what baby steps could you take to help yourself get there? Here are some suggestions (most of which I could really apply to my life!):

Waking up 15 minutes earlier to pack a healthy lunch for yourself, or to get a shower in before the kids are up. (I didn’t do that this morning and wish I had….)
Going home next weekend to spend time with your parents.
Finally making a budget and sticking to it.
Reading one book this month that you’ve always wanted to read. Maybe a short classic like My Antonia, or a beautiful memoir like The Dirty Life, or a great piece of new fiction like What Alice Forgot.
Making a meal plan this week (just four meals, and use the leftovers for other meals) and shopping for the ingredients.
Setting a goal of something to do with your kids today, like reading one book to each of them, or building a blanket fort instead of letting them watch TV, or making homemade play dough in fun colors.

OK, enough talking. What do you think of all this? How can you unplug and restart your parenting right where you are? You guys inspire me! I can’t wait to hear what you have to say!

25 :: in Becoming a Stay-at-Home Mom Series, family, Italy, military life, motherhood, Sicily, thoughts

bread + wine + kids + travel

May 12, 2014 at 3:36 pm

I took this photo in our Paris apartment on a quiet afternoon that Elliott and I spent reading and sipping hot, milked-down espresso as the kids slept. (In other words… that afternoon was heaven on earth!)

The other day Lena and I were sitting on the couch together, as we often do during Gil’s morning nap. We finished reading picture books together, and she started coloring. I turned back to Bread and Wine, a book I find myself reading slowly, savoring, and then caught up in irresistibly, reading faster than I intend, but unable to put down for the sheer joy and beauty of each honest story, each delicious food, each life lesson, that the author shares.

I had come to the chapter innocuously titled “Delicious Everywhere,” and I was totally roped in because she was writing about traveling and eating around the world, two things near and dear to my heart.

And then boom. I hit these last two paragraphs of the chapter, and my heart started to sing in my chest. Every line felt like it was written just for me, a perfect description of everything I feel and act upon in my life, said in a way I’ve always been struggling to find.

And right there, on the couch, in the middle of the morning, I began to cry.

“Sometimes people ask me why I travel so much, and specifically why we travel with [our little kids] so often. I think they think it’s easier to keep the kids at home, in their routines, surrounded by their stuff. It is. But we travel because it’s there. Because Capri exists and Kenya exists and Tel Aviv exists, and I want to taste every bite of it. We travel because I want my kids to learn, as I learned, that there are a million ways to live, a million ways to eat, a million ways to dress and speak and view the world. I want them to know that “our way” isn’t the right way, but just one way, that children all over the world, no matter how different they seem, are just like the children in our neighborhood — they love to play, to discover, to learn.

“I want my kids to learn firsthand and up close that different isn’t bad, but instead that different is exciting and wonderful and worth taking the time to understand. I want them to see themselves as bit players in a huge, sweeping, beautiful play, not as the main characters in the drama of our living room. I want my kids to taste and smell and experience the biggest possible world, because every bite of it, every taste and texture and flavor, is delicious.” (emphasis mine)

I don’t yet understand why I love living and traveling overseas so much. Yes, I did grow up mostly overseas, but I didn’t always love it, and when we moved back to the States and I went to college, I was so ready. I was so done with living overseas. I loved living in Virginia and Boston and D.C. for a few years.

But then — as soon as the opportunity presented itself — I couldn’t wait to live overseas again. As Elliott will tell you, we’re living in Italy now because he let me choose where we could live next, and I chose Italy.

And, to be honest, I have really mixed emotions about moving back to the States for our new life in CA. Earlier this spring, Elliott interviewed for a job that would have sent us to Tbilisi, in the Republic of Georgia, and a big part of me longed for him to get that job, for us to plunge headfirst into yet another culture, another language, another city map, another international church, another home away from home.

I am sure there are many sinful emotions tied up in my love of living and traveling and being overseas. There’s pride and a desire for adventure and a longing to be different.

But there’s also a love for it. Learning the road rules, the food cultures, the hand gestures, the clothing staples, the housing quirks, and the right way to check out in a grocery store… I love all that. No matter where I am in the world, I get a thrill from learning these everyday communication techniques, learning how to fit in like a local, learning how to blend my family’s culture and the country’s culture.

And so, because of all these tied-to-my-heartstrings reasons, I’ve loved this chance to birth one of my children and raise two of them — at least for a little while — in another country. Together, Elliott and I encouraged and taught and watched them experience and savor this overseas life too. We watched them play with children for hours who didn’t speak their language, watched their eyes light up with delight over foods we can’t find in the States, watched them hike mountains and swim in oceans and walk on streets where no one else shares their nationality.

Our children’s acceptance and fascination with all we teach them — “this is good” or “this is different” or “this is home” — is a privilege given to parents. For this season of life, I’m so glad that we could teach them that home includes buying olives and eggplants at the market each week, and a handyman who speaks only Italian, and the unbending rule that you must say “grazie” after someone does something kind.

I hope we can continue to welcome the world into our home, in California and beyond, through food, visitors, books, and discussions around the dinner table. I worry that I will become complacent, or that I’ll forget. I fear — because I know my weaknesses — that I’ll become comfortable with familiar and forget the beauty and challenge of living so close to the ground in another culture. I hope I won’t forget.

And I hope it won’t be too long before we pack our bags and move overseas again for awhile. Oh please, God, don’t let it be too long.

Have you ever left a life overseas, and do you long to go back? Any encouragement for someone about to make the transition to the States?

21 :: in good reads, military life, thoughts, travel

It takes a village to raise a child, so make sure you’re a part of one.

April 24, 2014 at 3:05 pm

Last week, a friend asked me to come speak at an event she was hosting on our Navy base (Sigonella). Elizabeth called it a “Parenting Toolkit Workshop,” and there were speakers addressing nutrition, relaxation/downtime, and children’s emotions. She had been reading my blog and we’d been emailing since before she arrived, so she thought I might be able to add a “real life” aspect to the parenting talk.

As I thought about what to say, it really boiled down to two things:

It takes a village to raise a child, so make sure you’re a part of one, and
Sicily is a place to unplug and restart your parenting.

I thought I’d share a little bit from each of these points as an encouragement to other parents out there. If you’re here in Sicily or about to move here, hopefully this discussion will also be a resource and a guide for you. However, I hope you’ll feel a fire lit under you no matter where you are or what your stage of life you’re in.

So here we go with my first point: it takes a village!

One thing that many people comment on in Sicily/Sigonella is that they feel isolated. I don’t know if this is true of all military base housing, but here in Sigonella, it’s a common refrain. There are so many reasons for this, I’m sure:

Base housing is a fishbowl. People appreciate privacy. It’s hard to balance privacy with vulnerability.
They miss the community they left.
They don’t want to be there. (Perhaps they didn’t want to move to Sicily. Perhaps they wanted to live out in town.)
Closeness is uncomfortable sometimes!

But base housing isn’t really that different from living “out in town,” ie. in an Italian house or apartment in an Italian town near the base. Out in town, people feel isolated too.

There are a language and cultural barriers, which means… no friends to go outside and see/talk to.
There are very few outdoor, public community spaces to go hang out in (at least in my town).
It’s easier to interact with a computer, or with food in your kitchen, or with your own kids in a safe space, than to go outside.

However, becoming comfortable with an isolated, insulated life is not how we were meant to live. You may disagree with me on that, and so perhaps that’s the fodder for another blog post. But I believe strongly that we should live in community, that we should go outside frequently, that we should know our neighbors, that we should welcome them into our homes (a lot! all the time! standing invitation!), that we should cook for them, that we should accept their food, that we should be open and nonjudgmental and communicative and truthful even if we don’t like them.

Even if we can’t speak their language.

The person I’m aspiring to emulate in all of this is, of course, Jesus, who hung out with everyone (saints and sinners) everywhere (temples and wells, open fields and street corners). He came to love and live with people, and I think we are hardwired as humans to need and love and crave human interaction, support, and community.

If you feel isolated, if you want to live in community, the only person who is going to change that is YOU.

Ok, that was the tough stuff. Here are some personal examples of things I am glad we did here in Sicily to build community.

And then there are some things I wish I’d done.

Things I am glad we did
Things I wish we’d done

Think about the place where you live right now. What will you regret not doing after you leave? What were your expectations when you arrived? How can you make them happen?

Maybe can answer that question with… what did you love in your last home? Was there a mom’s group that organized activities for you and your kids that you relied on each week? Were you a part of a book club? Did you gather your friends to relax over beers on your back porch every Friday night? Were you involved in a sport or social activity?

Parenting and marriage are hard work, especially so far from home. You need people.

You need them so that someone can watch your child or pets overnight when you go to the hospital to have another baby.

You need them so that someone can pack up your house for you and sell your cars when you get terrible news (illness, death) and have to move back to the States immediately.

You need them so that you can walk up to someone’s house and say, “I drove all the way here and forgot to bring lunch for my kids… can I borrow some food?!”

You need them because exploring a new place, taking your kids to the playground, or having a picnic are always more fun with friends!

If you don’t like something where you live, don’t isolate yourself. Don’t gossip about it. And don’t just grin and bear it either. DO something about it.

If you don’t like something where you live, change it. If you don’t have something, get it. If you don’t want to be there, make it a place where you want to be!

This is a little corny, but it says it best: be the change you wish to see in your community.

18 :: in Becoming a Stay-at-Home Mom Series, hospitality, military life, motherhood, Sicily, thoughts

using my iPhone well :: 5 changes for my kids & home

April 11, 2014 at 2:27 pm

It arrived last week.

I opened the white box to reveal a sleek new iPhone, lying there before its new owner with a history yet unwritten. Within a few moments, the phone was programmed, and I set up my email and chose my favorite ringtone. I snapped a sturdy case onto it for safekeeping. I slipped it in my purse.

Welcome to my life, iPhone.

But I was a slightly different person than the distracted young woman who lost her iPhone three weeks before. Getting my iPhone stolen from under my nose both dismayed and provoked me. In the ensuing three weeks, I thought a lot about my phone use and tried to change a few habits.

I’ve slowly written this post over the past week, wanting to be honest as well as not too optimistic. I’ve tried to be vulnerable and thoughtful about all of it, and I’d love to know your thoughts. Here are a few things I realized while I had no iPhone, and therefore a few things I’d like to change:

1. I don’t need to carry my phone around the house.

Before I lost it, I would generally carry my iPhone from room to room with me, usually in my back pocket. In theory, this was so I could grab it if someone called or texted me. But my life in Sicily is not full of calls or texts. My friends and I just use email unless it’s urgent. Pretty much the only person who calls me is Elliott, and he rarely texts because he doesn’t have a smartphone. Because we live overseas, I can’t call or text my parents or siblings, so that cuts out a lot of fun everyday communication that I am really looking forward to when we move back to the States!

In summary, I didn’t carry my phone around in case someone called. I carried it around to a) take pictures and b) check various social media outlets.

After I lost my phone, I borrowed my friend’s very simple flip phone. Because there was nothing to do on it, I started to leave it in my purse all afternoon, or on my bedside table all morning. When someone (Elliott) called me, I could usually hear it and go retrieve it. (Usually. There were some missed calls.)

In the meantime, I felt surprisingly free. “Where’s my phone? In my room. I haven’t heard it, so no one’s called. Maybe I’ll check it in awhile.” I lost the itch to have it in the same room with me at all times.

When my new phone arrived, I had already diagnosed this change and wanted to keep it this way. So far, I’ve been successful. Case in point: while writing this, I realized that my phone was still in the backpack from our picnic hike today, meaning I haven’t looked at it in eight hours. That would never have happened before.

However, Elliott read over my shoulder when I was writing this and said, “But when I call you, I want you to answer. It’s good that you aren’t as attached! But we’re paying for a phone so that when people call you, you hear it and pick it up.” And he’s right.

So maybe the phone still does need to travel with me, or maybe I just need to live with a louder ringtone instead of the vibrate setting. I’m still figuring this one out.

2. Putting my baby to bed is not a time to look at my phone.

Gil currently nurses four times a day, always before he goes to sleep. Before I lost my phone, I would often bring it with me to read in the dark when no one could “see” me. But Gil often did turn around to see where the light was coming from, which then turned into a game of me hiding the phone every time he turned his head. In the end, I often felt more frustrated than relaxed. “Just let me finish writing this comment, Gil!”

After I lost my phone, I didn’t have anything to do while nursing Gil except… sit there. So I closed my eyes. I rocked quietly in the rocking chair. I let my mind wander. I rested.

By the time my new phone arrived, I had really learned to value those few minutes with Gil. So I decided not to even bring my phone into the room with me while putting Gil to bed. Now those minutes are quiet, peaceful times for both of us. Our breathing slows, our heart rates decrease, our minds rest. These minutes are also preparatory for both of us: Gil prepares to sleep and I prepare for everythingIneedtododuringnaptime. It’s a time to snuggle together. It’s a sweet time, a fleeting moment in the grand scheme of our lives.

So this change may not last long (because Gil is 14 months and I’ll be weaning him soon), but this is at least one change I’m making: no phone while putting my baby to sleep.

3. Instagram takes a lot more than it gives (at least for me).

I love the glimpses into people’s lives, the ordinary moments and life-defining shots all shared in a simple forum. I’ve reconnected with friends and even made some new ones thanks to Instagram.

But wow. I spent a lot of time on there. Over time, I watched myself begin to spend 10 minutes editing each picture, and then fret over how many likes it might garner. I started to follow people I didn’t know, including a lot of popular bloggers with pretty photos. The more people I followed, the more updates I had, so the more often I checked Instagram. Multiple times a day. Or every hour. Or sometimes – especially right after I’d uploaded a photo – multiple times an hour.

After I lost my iPhone, I missed the updates from my friends, and I would Google various feeds to check in on their photos. But that started to happen less and less. At the same time, I stopped worrying about taking the perfect photo, or thinking about other Insta celebs perfect photos (and food and houses and lives), or getting that nagging itch to check my feed again. These changes gave me more peace and more time.

So I don’t know. Clearly Instagram had a strong hold on me, and perhaps my story is unique. One blogger I know said that Facebook was always getting her down (so she got off Facebook), but Instagram always built her up. Maybe that’s true for a lot of people, but for me Instagram offers more comparisons and time drains instead of encouragement.

After I got my new phone, I tried to establish new habits. Now I only check Instagram about three times a day instead of 10 or 30 times. I stopped following the blogger celebrities that were filling up my feed. (This also means fewer updates in my feed, and fewer updates means I don’t feel the need to check for updates as often.) I’m also trying to never check Instagram around my kids. We’ll see if these changes last, hah! Wish me luck!

4. Taking care of your email in blocks of time saves you time.

With no smartphone, I used my laptop to check my email. And my laptop — unlike my phone — couldn’t travel all around the house with me. Thus, instead of checking my phone every hour (or multiple times an hour), I could only check my laptop when I had a few free minutes in my room by myself: before the kids were up in the morning, during nap time, and in the evening after they’re in bed.

As my time on my email became more limited, I found that I could be more productive when I focused on one thing – “now I have a quiet hour, and I am going to respond to as many emails as I can.” This is so much more productive than trying to email a friend in the corner of the kitchen in the few seconds before Lena came back to find me!

Responding to email only at certain times of day is a time-management tip I’ve heard about, but I’m still figuring it out. Is it realistic to say I am only going to respond to my email at 7am, 2pm, and 8pm? Probably not. But I have found that focusing on my email responses in blocks of time instead of scattered minutes has made me calmer throughout the day. I’m still thinking about this one. I’d love to hear if you have made this work for you.

5. I don’t need to photograph or video every hour of my children’s lives.

Like I mentioned before, I wept when my phone was stolen because there were several months of photos and videos inside that phone. I felt like I lost part of my children’s childhoods. There were iconic moments and memories that will fade away now.

For the first week after I lost my phone, I would mentally reach for it all. the. time. Surprisingly, that was not because I wanted to check my email or look things up on Google. I wanted it so I could take a picture. I saw Gil’s conundrum, Lena’s silly dance, or a beautiful corner of our Italian neighborhood, and my knee-jerk reaction was to reach for my phone and capture the moment.

But after a week or so, the urge faded. I picked up my DSLR a little more and played around with some manual settings. Mostly I just got used to enjoying the moments instead of freeze-framing them.

After I got my new phone, I started using the camera again slowly. I’ve been trying to be more judicious about the photos I take. To delete extra photos as I go. To think more about what I’m trying to capture. To not take a photo and instead just to enjoy the moment. To look at my children and laugh with them and enjoy that moment with my own two eyes and not necessarily from behind an iPhone.

The result, I think, will be fewer photos and probably just as good photos. Maybe better photos, if I’m being more thoughtful. The result might also be children who don’t feel like every moment of their lives is being filmed and recorded.

And these are all good things, I think.

——–

What are your thoughts about all this? If you have a smartphone, do you try to regulate your usage? If you have kids, how do you use your phone around them?

I feel like I’m beginning to set battle lines for a personal war I’ll be fighting all my life. What are your strategies so you use your phone efficiently… and not the other way around?

18 :: in Becoming a Stay-at-Home Mom Series, motherhood, thoughts

A Book Review :: Steady Days: A Journey Toward Intentional, Professional Motherhood

March 18, 2014 at 4:39 pm

It was the subtitle that caught my attention: “A Journal Toward Intentional, Professional Motherhood.” Professional? What does it mean to be a professional mother?

Since I have set my career as a nurse aside during our time in Sicily, I guess I would call motherhood my profession. I mean… it’s what I do 24|7! I spend my days teaching, loving, feeding, dressing, and training up these two little people in my life. I want to do my job well. I want to be intentional and professional about it. Don’t you?

I ordered a used copy of Jamie’s book after I’d only been reading her blogs — Steady Mom and Simple Homeschool — for a little while. She is a wonderfully inspiring person; I love how her family of five is made up of four nations! Steady Days a super-easy read with chapters that are about two pages long. I read the book this weekend and felt refreshed and inspired afterwards, so I wanted to share it with you!

The gist of Jamie’s message is this: “We create Steady Days for our children by getting organized, retaining our enthusiasm, learning together, and making memories. When we balance these qualities together, we discover the gentle rhythm we long for.”

Part One: Getting Organized is my favorite. Jamie explains how she used to just drift from one activity to another, letting the day kind of unroll based on how she and her kids felt each day. (That feels familiar!) So Jamie encourages moms to evaluate their schedules — meal times, nap times, errands, activities outside the home — and create a rough routine for the mom and each child. She has heaps of suggestions for structured activities you can plan for during the otherwise “drifting time,” like room time, baking, art, video time, structured play, and free time.

She also encourages them to put this routine into a binder in order to keep your whole home organized. She keeps her shopping lists, meal plans, special dates organizer, important documents, weekly to do list, emergency phone numbers, and even take out menus in her binder. (Basically, she puts everything in her binder that I stick all over my fridge!) I’ve thought about making a “home management binder,” but I’ve never actually made it work. Have you?

I loved this quote: “Some people think that if they become organized, they will lose their spontaneity and passion for living…. This doesn’t have to be the case. Having a flexible structure helps you enjoy spontaneity. If you have taken time to be organized in things that matter most, then you will not feel behind. So when an opportunity comes your way, like the first warm day of spring or a special concert for the children, you can ditch the rest of your plans and go for it. You can enjoy without guilt, because your other responsibilities are up to date.”

What if I actually send birthday cards and gifts on time? What if I actually planned ahead for a craft with my kids? What if I actually remembered my dental appointment… instead of missing it twice in a row?! What if I became more reliable, more steady, more organized? That would be a gift to so many, not just my immediate family!

In Part Two: Retaining Enthusiasm, Jamie talks about how to stay inspired as an intentional, professional mother. She encourages moms to embrace their roll as a mom… instead of whining about or regretting this demanding stage of life. She also uses a “Steady Blessings” list in her binder to remind her daily of things to be thankful for, and she keeps inspirational quotes and Scripture verses on cards and rotates one to meditate on each day.

(Just this last idea takes so much more organization than I have right now. Geez Louise! But as I read through her quotes and verses, I was inspired. We need to draw encouragement from true, deep sources, not just from mommy blogs.)

In Part Three: Learning Together, Jamie talks the importance of establishing good habits as well as demonstrating these habits to our children. She also shared ways that she and her children learn together through their “Steady Learning Board” and “Steady Learning Scrapbook,” which you can find more about through her Learning Together archives. I loved these suggestions for incorporating learning into everyday home life… and also for keeping artwork and craft projects organized.

Finally, in Part Four: Making Memories, Jamie talks about the importance of family traditions and about her “Look At Me” and “Mom’s Favorite Moments,” two ways she uses to keep track of her kids’ growth and development. Both of these look better than the current scattered artwork and scribbled lists of “funny things they say” that I keep tacked on my fridge… and then shove in some folder, never to be seen or enjoyed again.

——-

I took great pride in my work as a nurse. I loved doing my job well, from the smallest tasks (arriving on time, wearing neat scrubs, always having a pen handy) to the most significant, like really listening to my patients or addressing an emergency with quick wits, hard-earned skills, and trained expertise. I loved being a nurse that others relied on and enjoyed working with. I loved being a nurse that my patients recommended or requested. I took great pride in my intentionality and my professionalism.

I want to be the same way as a mother. There are fewer boundaries here. The job description includes everything and the kitchen sink. There’s no place to clock out at the end of a long shift.

But whether I incorporate all of Jamie’s ideas or just a few into my life, I do want to incorporate this: a sense of pride in my work done well. I want to aspire to be organized, be enthusiastic, learn together, and make memories together. Unlike some jobs, this job will end — my kids won’t be young forever! And I only get once chance to do this well.

So here’s to be a steady mom! Are you with me?