Everyday Life, Parenting

Thoughts on Leaving the House in the Morning: A Meme Story

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Made my first meme today. It’s brought to you by the moment when I leave the house in the morning. Pretty much every time I leave home, I look around at the utter chaos and disorder, and say to tell myself:

If I arrive somewhere looking like I just barely made it out alive? It’s because I did. It’s like a bank heist gone wrong, a calculated plan poorly executed that doesn’t have as much to do with not tripping sophisticated alarm systems but more with getting the dishes done and beds (get adjustable beds for sale from here) made before exiting the building. (Although, a one-year-old??? Talk about a sophisticated alarm system. Do NOT take that Tupperware lid away from her).  This is especially true when we’re going to be gone for most of the day and we’re packing picnics, leaving dishes strewn across the counter and drawers and cabinets open everywhere, forgetting to put away hairbrushes, toothbrushes, pretty much everything. Why not just stop to clean it up? Why not navigate here and hire a maid to do that? We’d be a good hour late, maybe two, and I’d be hoarse from all the “come back and put away!”-ing.  Better to call it a morning and pick up the pieces of dismissed outfits and twelve water bottle lids when we get home. The silver lining? A wrecked house to clean up is a good excuse for making an afternoon cup pot of coffee.

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So, yes, we need some better leaving the house practices. It’s definitely a delegation issue at this point in my parenting. But for now, may the coffee be strong, the afternoon productive, and the evening full of something similar to if not necessarily Chick-fil-A.

Everyday Life, Nonfiction, Quick Lit, Reading, Reviews

A Quest for Sustainability – Summer Reading 2018

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A snapshot of my current reading pile on this mid-summer day made me realize that I have a pretty clear theme going on in this season:

Apparently I’m not gravitating towards titles with words like “revolutionize” or “begin” or even “new.” No za-za-zing or va-va-vroom hear, please! No, I’m checking books out that are about “ordinary” and “everyday” and “the middle.” Somewhat unconsciously, the theme of this summer has become the pursuit of sustainability. What good things can I do and keep doing? How can I keep doing the things I must and do them well while also keeping the joy and fun in life? This quest for sustainability is really uncool, very boring-sounding, but I’m drawn to it like a tired person is drawn to a plain white duvet and a familiar pillow. I’m weary of the fads, I’m figuring out some things about what doesn’t work, and I want to be faithful in the seemingly monotonous places in life. I don’t want to struggle along anymore in the everyday, ordinary parts of life. When the summer ends, I want to be ready for doing the school year well. I’m not itching for new– not a new house or a new career or even a new baby (and I treasure my babies) – I’m longing to get the house I currently have fit for a productive and full life, I’m settling into this homeschooling/homemaking/writing/so-much-more career, and I’m trying to squeeze every last snuggle and game of Uno out these four babies that are already here. So on that note, here’s what I’ve been reading this summer:

Everyday Holy is a collection of short devotionals, good for gently waking my brain up a bit in the morning. This is the third devotional I’ve read this year, which is…surprising. I used to dislike the idea of devotionals, but there are times when self-directed study gets hard…when you’re super busy or groggy from lack of sleep or simply a bit apathetic and you need a starting point to get you thinking in the right direction. I always appreciate Melanie Shankle’s blend of humor and honesty, and her constant grappling with the mundane, circumstantial elements of life that can numb us to the life believers are called to and graced with in Christ. My current morning reading practice is half a chapter of Proverbs (I spent the first six months of this year in Psalms and now I’m moving on!), a day or two from Everyday Holy, and a chapter of The Liturgy of the Ordinary or Give Them Grace. (Yes, I read a lot of books at once. No, I do not have ADD).

The Liturgy of the Ordinary is mostly about worship during the mundane chores and tasks we do each day. We fight in this culture against constant entertainment and a fear of the ordinary. Tish Harrison Warren explains in her book how she’s reconciling the ordinary with the sacred and coming to view them as not so separate after all. I liked parts of the book, though I don’t agree with all the author’s viewpoints. On finishing it, I’d give it 2.75 stars. I think I’m going to need to dig into The Quotidian Mysteries by Kathleen Norris next, because this book quotes it often! My biggest yet most unimportant beef with  The Liturgy of the Ordinary Day is that the text is constantly interrupted with bold main points. Listen. I know this is a common practice in non-fiction publishing right now, but I hate it. I already read that sentence, and you’re interrupting my train of thought to read it again??? No. Put it off to the side in the margin if you must, but here’s a thought: maybe you should trust your readers to read the page of text and gather the main points on their own, intelligent selves? This may come as a shock, publishing world, but we are capable of drawing conclusions and recognizing the heart of the message. Thank you, rant over. (But don’t get me started on back and forth, present to future viewpoints in historical novels…gah! Hate it. (See, told you I don’t have ADD. What’s the opposite? Complete focus at the expense of all else? Tunnel vision? I have that)).

Now, onto the cookbooks! I may have mentioned three or three hundred times that meal planning and prep is the bane of my daily existence. This summer, I’m out to conquer my struggles by keeping simple meals on repeat. Usually what happens is I swing from an uber-healthy eating phase to an “I’m sick of all this food prep give me pizza” phase. I stay in the second phase for quite a while before swinging back, but I feel nagging guilt about it all the time, so I end up avoiding buying “unhealthy” foods because I know they’re poison but then I don’t have the energy or forethought to provide my family with healthy foods and my grocery shopping is all a muddle…and then the week is suddenly a disaster. No, I’m not being dramatic. That’s why I was drawn to Eating in the Middle: A Mostly Wholesome Cookbook. Sustainability? Balance? Yes, please. I have yet to cook anything from it, but the Breakfast Egg Salad and Greek Yogurt Pancakes are on this week’s menu! I haven’t made it out of the breakfast section yet…the photos are beautiful. I have tried two recipes from Smitten Kitchen Everyday: Triumphant and Unfussy New Favorites and they were winners, especially the Chicken and Rice Street Cart Style. Have I ever gotten chicken and rice from a street cart? No. But I will be making this recipe again and again.  One of the best parts of these two cookbooks is the authors are not just good cooks but excellent writers; I actually want to read all the text and introductions to each recipe. Not sure how I became a person who reads cookbooks (or a Goodreads friend whose shelves are cluttered with cookbooks…) but I’m pretty sure it has to do with the pursuit of sustainability, haha.

The Baker's SecretOn the fiction side of things, I haven’t been hitting the novels very hard. I love being outside in the summer, running around with the kids, doing house projects, swimming, so the cold winter months are really when I do the bulk of my reading. I did read The Baker’s Secret,  and really enjoyed it, though there were definitely depressing parts (war novel). If you like WWII historical fiction like The Plum Tree or The Nightingale, you’ll like this book. I also finally got Ronia, the Robber’s  Daughter off my to-read list, and mostly enjoyed it, though it was much darker than I was expecting. I won’t be reading it to my kids…it’s more of a YA book, in my opinion.

Now homeschool planning for the coming year is heavy on the brain, so my reading habits probably won’t pick up til September or October, but I’d love to hear what your summer reading is looking like! Happy summer! And head on over the Modernmrsdarcy.com to see more of what readers have been reading this summer on the QuickLit feature!

Children's Books, Reviews

The Pink Umbrella – A Love Story Worth Reading with Your Kids

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It’s pouring rain here…the perfect day for me to tell you about this gem of the book: The Pink Umbrella, by Amelie Callot, illustrated by Genevieve Godbout. This is a children’s picture book, but it’s also the perfectly delightful story for all ages of Adele, a cafe owner in a small village by the sea. Adele is like sunshine to the people around her, but gets very blue on rainy days. In short, Adele hates rain, and the people who love her hate to see her sad. The story develops in a simple way, but it will melt your heart.

Yes, The Pink Umbrella is about romantic love, but in the best possible way. The love story is about a slow, abiding, caring, gentle love, not a sweep-you-off-your-feet, love-at-first-sight kind of love our children are so often exposed to in fairy tales and through all kinds of mediums. Beyond a healthy and beautiful love story, the book gives a good picture of how a hard-working, thoughtful, and generous person in seemingly small ways can change the people and places around him or her. Adele is an ordinary woman, not a princess, and this is an ordinary story, but with gorgeous illustrations and a couple of characters you’ll want to know in real life.

Make an outing to a library or bookstore to get The Pink Umbrella part of your plans this weekend!

{Note: this post is completely UNsponsored}

About Mia The Reader ~ Just a lady with a busy life full of a big family, a background in literature, and an obsession with books ~

 

Everyday Life, Parenting

Giant Balls of String – The Untidy Parenting Journey I’m On

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If you’ve been around this blog for a while, you may remember that I write some posts about parenting now and then. You may have noticed that I write those posts far less often now than I used to. Something about having children older than, oh about three years old, can make a parent question why she ever thought she had much parenting wisdom. With my two older kids 9 and  almost 7, and my two younger ones throwing me for loops daily, I hardly ever find myself thinking, “Wow, I should share what I’m learning with the world at large.” For one thing, what I’m learning isn’t neat and Image result for balls of stringeasy to whip up into a tidy blog post. Parenting is beginning to seem like untangling a gigantic ball of string. You start at the beginning with varying emotions and you hit particularly tangled snags and you also go through some smoother parts. There was a clear beginning to this ball of string, but who knows where the end is or what it will look like, or even what kind of material we’re dealing with– I have wool and you have silk? Both? I don’t know. This analogy is getting weird. Either way, giant balls of tangled string don’t make for good blog posts with clear beginnings and neat conclusions. All I really know is as my kids get bigger, my wisdom gets smaller.

Most of us, when we find ourselves lacking wisdom, go looking for it. We skip out into the information age, sure we’ll find some ideas. A few minutes later, we run back and hide our heads under a pillow. So many opinions. So many serious, earnest voices. And so many do’s and don’ts.

“Make your bed everyday and you’ll be successful in life!”

“Don’t make your bed, that’s gross!”

“Throw everything out that doesn’t bring you joy and you’ll be freeeee!”

“Don’t throw that away! Repurpose it into an amazing entryway bench or life-changing crafting opportunity with your child!”

And whoever started the terribly trendy articles titled “5 Things You Should Never Say to Your Spouse” or “The 10 Worst Things You Can Say To Your Teen” should be well, not shot, but maybe sentenced to Antarctica to shovel snow for life. You can find convincing arguments for all sides of both important and trivial issues in books, online, in conversations with friends, in forums (ugh…we should all agree to just skip the forums…). And then, to smooth it all over like peanut butter on very, very lumpy bread, we have the phrase, “You do you.” Thanks. That fixes everything. I mean, at this point I don’t have time to think about who am I, much less how to do me. I’m too busy sorting through mixed reviews on sippy cups. I thought I was just going to jump online and buy a sippy cup, but which one? There’s this one… some people say it will change your life and some people say that it’s so defective it will ruin the interior of your mini-van and you’ll have to buy a whole new van, or maybe it will give your kids cancer. Am I the kind of person who buys a stainless steel sippy cup, anyway? How can there be this many STRONG opinions about a sippy cup?

If we’re reading all these reviews and searching for the right information to help us raise our families, we probably are living life with laser focus on getting things right. That’s a good thing…parenting is important…until we wake up one day and wonder if something might be missing. Something important, like light-heartedness. Something like freedom…you know, the freedom to not feel bad for rewarding your children with popsicles after they clean out the back of the SUV on a hot day, even though you read that viral article on why you shouldn’t use food as a reward. Or something like fun…why do I feel bad when I say “yes” to UNO instead of forcing that phonics card game on my 6-year-old? Games are supposed to be fun! In the grand scheme of things, it’s this all-important Something, the cheerfulness, freedom, and fun, that I know without even having to hear it from someone on the internet is what I want my children to look back and see in their time with me before they become adults themselves. I don’t know about you, but in the past two or three years of my parenting life, I’ve noticed that Something is missing.

This gradual realization that I’m losing cheerfulness, freedom, and fun as a mom in my earnest pursuit of parenting perfection is what has kept me from posting anything about parenting here lately. I don’t want to be one more voice that comes across like I’m telling parents how to do every little thing the right way. I am sick of those voices myself. And, like I said earlier, my parenting wisdom just keeps on shrinking. So I kept quiet until I thought maybe I could be a different kind of voice. In the meantime, I read your messages about this blog. Some of you lovely readers asked me if I would be posting again on parenting or homeschooling again. Those messages and in-person conversations surprised me so much! I’m truly grateful for them. I doubt I’ll ever again think I have tons of good ideas to share about parenting like I must have had when I started this blog with a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old and no clue that I’d have two more children come along and ten thousand moments of doubtful parenting in my future. But if I can do one thing on this crazy internet, I would choose be a voice in a parenting movement of cheerfulness, freedom, and fun, in pursuit of connection and relationship with our children. I’ll get a million things wrong along the way, but I’m starting to understand that being okay with getting a few things wrong is the first step in parenting from a place of strength and lightheartedness, even as we parent with purpose.

And of course, there will be book reviews for you and your kids as a great season of summer reading approaches.

Thanks for reading!

 

Uncategorized

March Quick Lit 2018

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Time for some Quick Lit reviews! I’m linking up with Modern Mrs. Darcy and other book bloggers to talk about what we’ve read lately Hop on over and find more book recommendations than you’ll know what to do with (which in book-speak, is a very good thing)!

Winter has decided to stay forever. It did not ask our permission, because if it had, we would have said “No.” Emphatically, no. I’m attempting to embrace what will actually be the last few weeks of winter, whether that surly season likes it or not, but it’s similar to when you try to embrace those middle of the night feedings with your sweet newborn baby….you really just need to sleep, and we really just want spring. The silver lining is that winter weather keeps me under my favorite electric blanket with a book in hand. Here’s what I’ve been reading over the past month.

Fiction

The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street

I posted on Instagram that I am in love with all the characters from this book, and I really can’t give higher praise to a novel than that. The setting was pretty swell, too, aside from being central to the plot. This book is middle-grade novel perfection, and I would recommend it to anyone, young or old, but especially to people who enjoyed The Penderwicks, The Saturdays, All in a Family, and other family narratives. The theme of an older neighbor who is the grumpiest creature known to mankind is also here, so if you’re a fan of A Man Called Ove or any number of misanthropic character books, you might just love The Vanderbeekers, too.

Island of Sweet Pies and Soldiers – I’d put this at the top of my favorite adult fiction read in the past year list. Debut novelist Sara Ackerman tells a tender yet fascinating and page turning story that was not overly sweet (no pun on the title intended) or shockingly harsh. I have read a lot of books set in WWII Europe, but I know next to nothing about the Pacific battlefront, so this was a nice change. Set in Hawaii as soldiers are being sent there to prepare for the invasion of Japan, the plot centers on one family’s strange struggle to find their missing husband/father and to understand the many different kinds of love between family and friends. Could I have done without some of the romance? Yes, but I’m glad it stuck to a PG level. Highly recommend for fans of historical novels and especially fans of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (though it is not at all written in the same format).

Little Fires Everywhere – This book is well written literature, with all kinds of perfectly fine-tuned details, symbolism, foil characters, universal themes…the list could go on.  It’s got some pretty hard subject matters and adult content, so I wouldn’t turn to this one if you’re looking for a light, beachy read, but it is a great book club pick and will get you thinking from many different perspectives on parenthood, community, and friendship.

The Bookman’s Tale – Though the story has a fun National Treasure type twist to it, I wouldn’t recommend this book very highly. I finished it because it was a book club pick, but it was slow going through unbelievable characters and settings, with way too much detail about some things and far too little about other important components of the story.

Non-fiction

Mom Set Free: Find Relief From the Pressure to Get it All Right – Though simplistic in writing style at times, the message of this book is something I desperately need in my parenting journey. Jeannie Cunnion points our parenting and our treatment of our own selves back to the gospel. I know this is going to be a slow conversion for me, a doer and an authority pleaser at heart, but I truly think it’s worth the trying. I really appreciate all the Bible verses Cunnion quotes throughout the book and the list she gives in the back of verses that she references.

If You Only Knew: My Unlikely, Unavoidable Story of Becoming Free – I wasn’t planning on reading Jamie Ivey’s memoir, but a friend told me she really liked it and let me borrow it, and I’m seriously glad she did (thanks, Erica!). Yes, Ivey tells a story that is messy and vulnerable, but she doesn’t tell it because she feels like spilling her guts – there is an intense purpose to her writing and she constantly points her readers back to the cross and Jesus’ love for us. There’s a chapter at the end called “Sin-shame” about how we treat others who are vulnerable in what they share with us that really convicted me. I was surprised by how great this book was. It was easy to get into, but it was also deep; I was expecting something a lot lighter from the host of a podcast titled The Happy Hour. =)

Comforts from the Cross: Celebrating the Gospel One Day at a Time – Can you tell I’m pretty gospel-focused these days? It’s incredible that I’ve been following Christ since I was an itty-bitty five-year-old yet I can’t seem to accept or give grace and free, unconditional love in my daily thoughts and actions. This devotional has been awesome, even though it has a Chicken Soup for the Soul type title that makes me cringe a little. I’m finding it a great follow up to the devotional Gracelaced, which adored last summer. That’s two more devotionals than I’ve ever enjoyed before, so maybe my feelings on devotionals in general are turning.

Girl, Wash Your Face – I’m listening to this one on audio and still have about 25% left. Having no familiarity with Rachel Hollis before reading this book, I didn’t know what to expect. It has a lot of “own your life” themes. The central idea is we shouldn’t believe lies about ourselves. Sometimes it feels too much like a “girl power” memoir and sometimes I’m left breathless at the insights from this down-to-earth lady who has done a lot and seems pretty different from me but maybe really isn’t. It’s a good treadmill audiobook, if you’re in the market for one of those. I admit, I was mostly grabbed by the title.

That rounds out what Quick Lit for this month. Happy reading, everyone!