Magical Thinking

I'm having a less than stellar week. I'm on emotional overload and running very empty on single parenting and have felt pretty near getting in bed and not getting out multiple times this week, and its only freaking Wednesday! I'm not normally much of a poor me, or I like to think I'm not anyway. I've got a good life and a million reasons to be grateful, but the ruts in my mind have been running me off into the weeds. Thank god for the help of a warrior confidant and dinner maker tonight! Lisa, you are a life saver.

The other life saver appearing just in the nick of time was a reminder of the power of positive thinking, or maybe I will call it magical thinking. I happened upon this wonderful idea over at Inchmark to keep a glass mason jar on your desk to record all the magical little quotables children say; the things that make raising kids so damn precious and worthwhile but are usually so quickly forgotten in busy adult brains. The thought of getting up in the morning prepared to document something wonderful my kids are bound to say is enough to help me face tomorrow. And I love the thought of getting to revisit something wacky from Flynn's 2 year old mind down the road.

I also got a big boost from reading 1000awesomethings. As ever, its the little stuff in life that is worth considering and so many of the things posted here are examples of all that we look past daily without realizing we just might be experiencing a perfect moment of joy.

Inspired by 1000 things, I officially started my awesome summer things list. Part to- do and part hopeful, it instantly made me feel happier to put it all down on paper and focus on future. Sometimes living in the now ain't all its cracked up to be! I really am a list maker at heart. I have miles of lists sitting on my desk right now and I have gotten satisfaction from writing every single one of them. I should start saving all my lists as proof positive that the road of my life was paved with good intentions.

Here are a few of my good intentions for this sure to be very glorious summer:

play croquet in someone's backyard

throw horseshoes as much as possible. ringer!!

have a fire in that amazing, huge outdoor fireplace at liberty park that i've fantasized about for the last 5 years

watch a roller derby match

make gazpacho

can pickles and jam and salsa, peaches and tomatoes and applesauce

pick berries at the mcbrides berry farm

take the kids to vernal to look at dinosaur stuff

project a movie onto a sheet and watch it outside under the stars

camp in the red rock desert and look forward to the sensation i always get that i'm home

camp in the uintas (maybe moon lake?)

camp at bear lake and let flynn dig in the sand all day

go to the drive-in movies in mt pleasant with my dad and eat popcorn and red vines til we're sick

keep my humming bird feeders full and let cleo attempt to "train" a hummingbird (one of her recent goals)

hike mt olympus

get a fly fishing lesson from nile

take my cruiser bike out for a spin with my mom on her cruiser

skinny dip

do shadow puppets in a tent, jeff reed style

have weekly bbqs with friends

make homemade granola bars

go to bees baseball games

make lots of lipton sun tea just like my nanny marcie used to make with secret ingredient:cinnamon sticks

help cleo run a lemonade stand

go to lagoon

take someone, anyone, out to see spiral jetty on the great salt lake who hasn't ever been there

enter something into the state fair

turn 35 and hope for a good 35 more....

Green is the New Black

Today is Earth Day, people. It's an important day to me because the Earth--Nature--is the closest thing I have to religion. I'm an earth lover. There is nothing that makes me feel happier than to be out-of-doors and in the fresh air. It always cures what ails me. I am in love with the tallest tree and the smallest leaf. I admire dew drops and fern curls and sparkly chips of hard granite. I like dirt under my fingernails. I watch wisps of clouds and limbs swaying in the breeze. My breath has caught in my throat at the sight of an apricot colored butterfly and the iridescent green throat of a humming bird. I've felt actual triumph at seeing a rainbow suddenly appear in the foreground of a dark thundercloud and fear to my toes watching a black bear lumber toward me. The exuberance, the creativity, the PERFECTION of every facet of Nature floors me. It gives me reassurance and makes me believe in something, somewhere, orchestrating this flawlessness.

I saw Avatar tonight. I think my mother in law and I were the last people on the planet NOT to have seen it, so we joined forces and went. I bring this up because I felt so amazed by the world depicted in the movie; unimaginable creatures and unique beauty and awesome scale as far as the eye could see. But seriously, has anyone watched Planet Earth or LIfe on Discovery Channel lately? There is nothing in Avatar that eclipses the beauty and the diversity of what we have right here on our very own planet. It's an amazing world out there and I for one hope that we can help find the balance in our lifestyles that will preserve what we have before it is too late.

It is cliche to say "Make Every Day Earth Day" but I'm going to recommend it anyway. There are so many little things we can all do to help our MAMA out. Small things add up when done by millions. In honor of Earth Day, here's a round up of some great links to ideas on little things we can all do to increase our GREEN. Enjoy!:

Simple Mom's 40 Ways to Go Green

Small Notebook's 20 Tips to Waste Less Food

Maya Made's How to Create a Paperless Kitchen

Crafty Crow's awesome selection of crafts using recyclables

My new line of work....

Wow, I think I was just graced with the perfect spring weekend. The weather cooperated beautifully from Friday to Sunday, allowing me to spend maximum time outside with no discomfort. If there's a heaven, I'm pretty sure it is 72 degrees there.

I took the kids down to the lovely Spring City this weekend to install our new bee hive with my Dad. As novice bee people, we decided to place the hive down on my Dad's property in the very rural and very bee friendly countryside of Spring City rather than make a go of it in our traditional suburban neighborhoods. It was a nervous moment, for sure, loading up the car with 2 kids and thousands of bees.

To start a new hive, bees are delivered to you in "packages" consisting of 1 queen surrounded by her thousands of workers all humming and buzzing at you from the inside of a wooden box with wire mesh sides. Bee behavior is fascinating and the whole reason one can start a colony fresh from a package like we did is because of the highly organized nature of bee society. The queen bee is literally the head and the begetter of the entire hive. Her job is to make sure the hive never runs out of bees and she does this by laying thousands of eggs every day. (In just three weeks, the queen lays enough eggs to completely repopulate the hive with new bees.) Every single other bee in the hive is a worker bee, and, interestingly, other than a small percentage of male drones whose only job is to mate with the queen, the remaining thousands of workers are all female. Egads, a matriarchal society! Worker bees have a lifespan of a couple months and in this short time they hold a series of jobs within the hive that make bee society run. Worker bees clean the hive, feed the bee larvae, make wax cells which store the honey, care for the Queen, guard the hive, and others are the bees we see out and about foraging for the all important nectar that bees use to make the honey which sustains them.

The experience of opening up our bee package and releasing the bees into the hive was nerve wracking, but it was also really cool. It definitely helped that both my Dad and I had suited up in our bee outfits so our skin, faces, and hands were protected from stings. It ensured a false sense of confidence! It also helped that the goal of all those worker bees is to be near their Queen. As soon as we put the queen into the hive in her little cage (she is kept separate from the workers while in the package) the bees want to be near her. They want to free her and they want to get to work. We literally dumped thousands of bees on top of the hive and in front of it and in a few short hours, there wasn't a bee in sight. They were all inside getting down to business. The devotion struck me as beautiful. And that feeling, that humanizing thought, provided me with perhaps the best answer for why in the hell I would want to get into bee keeping. Sure, I like honey, but I certainly don't feel obligated to produce my own. I've been stung by a few bees in my time and can say it is an experience I'm not eager to recreate. But what I really loved, and what I think will make bee keeping addictive, is to see something lowly like the bee and realize that there is a whole world there within my world. Bees have their own jobs, their own family, their own rhythm and knowledge. They are a creature being as much itself as I am. To peer into that hive world, something so new and so hidden, was tantalizing. I feel hooked. I feel like a bee keeper.

Signs of Spring...

Climbing trees, sleeping in the stroller after a nice walk, dirty hands and fingernails, going shirtless and shoeless, seeds and pea shoots and plant starts, new garden beds, pile of freshly washed (and previously very muddy) boots sitting by the door, painting white our soon to be working bee hive, wrestling in matching spring time pj's, making dinner on the grill, watching our baby chicks pecking and playing in the garden for the first time...... O SPRING, I adore you.

And so does my favorite poet of all time, the venerable ee cummings, who says it so much better than i.....

III

Spring is like a perhaps hand

(which comes carefully out of Nowhere)arranging

a window, into which people look(while

people stare

arranging and changing placing

carefully there a strange

thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps

Hand in a window

(carefully to

and fro moving New and

Old things, while

people stare carefully

moving a perhaps

fraction of flower here placing

an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

V

O sweet spontaneous

earth how often have

the

doting

fingers of

purient philosophers pinched

and

poked

thee

,has the naughty thumb

of science prodded

thy

beauty .how

often have religions taken

thee upon their scraggy knees

squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive

gods

(but

true

to the incomparable

couch of death thy

rhythmic

lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

Magic afoot.....

I love being the boss of my kids, but like any job, I sometimes have managerial issues. I often can relate to Michael Scott on The Office, cheer leading to a very unappreciative pair of disgruntled employees. Sometimes my crew doesn't seem motivated to listen or achieve, and quite often both Cleo and Flynn choose not to follow our house rules (which pretty much all restate the GOLDEN RULE in various ways) and instead try to scratch each other's eyes out over who has the blue marker or the chair next to mom or the pink plate or other such silly dramas. And that's frustrating, especially when I'm at the end of my line with a long day, or worse when Jaren's away traveling for blocks of time and I'm plain desperate for receptive ears and cooperative hands and minds. I find that my frustration with my kids and their behvaior can outweigh the fun of parenting and then its like a weird graph chart or something, as my frustration and theirs increases so does the level of our voices--much higher and louder! Things devolve very quickly around here when we have reached that point with each other. I hate going to bed feeling like I spent the day yelling at my kids. About a month ago I decided I needed to try something new to try and alleviate power struggles and to help my kids learn to make better choices on their own.

There are a gazillion techniques that parenting books or online resources suggest for motivating kids toward better behavior. One of the ones I come across most frequently is the marble jar. Basically parents reward kids with a marble for good behavior which they then put in a jar, and when the jar is full, the child receives an agreed upon reward or treat. It is a simple concept but very effective, thanks to the tangibility of seeing actual marbles pile up. I think kids really need to SEE results not just have you ask for them. I also like the fact that a marble can stand in for just about anything in parenting world....doing a chore, using the potty, washing hands, finishing homework, cleaning their plate at dinner, sharing, and especially for those unexpected moments of kindness kids bestow on each other and a parent happens to witness.

Most marble jar users seem to only "give" marbles for positive behavior. Maybe I'm a meaner mom, or just in the throes of the terrible two's, but I felt I had to tweak the marble system a bit for my family and instead have come up with the pebble system. We use glass beads (normally used in flower arrangements) as our pebbles and Cleo and Flynn each have their own color and own clear glass mason jar. Next to each jar both kids have 2 cups-one with a happy face on it and the other with a sad face. We keep the jars and cups right on the ledge above the kitchen sink so its a very prominent spot. Each morning I put 4 marbles on the top of the jar and throughout the day the kids either earn happy or "magic" pebbles for good behavior and random acts of kindness, or sad pebbles for sassing, fighting, hurting each other, etc. They can always earn back pebbles in the sad cup but I can't take away pebbles from the happy cup. At the end of the day the pebbles in the happy cup get poured into the jar and the sad ones go back into the pool to be earned again. They each have a reward card on the fridge where we wrote down what they decided to work toward. Last week we completed the first round of full jars and Cleo got to go swimming at our Rec Center and Flynn got to go out for ice cream--pretty small rewards for 3 weeks of much less yelling and way more cooperation!

I think a key reason the system has been so successful around here is that before we got started, I sat down with the kids and really discussed what we would be doing and asked them what kind of behavior would earn a magic vs. a sad pebble. I tried really hard not to feed them the answers and I was really pleased to see that on her own Cleo already clearly knew the difference between behaviors that are positive and behaviors that make me crazy! We worked together to make a list on our chalkboard and I haven't had the heart to erase it since it is so cute and keeps us all motivated. I had to work a little harder to get independent answers from Flynn, but he was able to articulate on his own "no hitting" "listening to mom and dad" and "staying in my bed." A pretty good start for two.

It really has changed my life to be able to "threaten" with the very idea of getting a sad pebble rather than yell and hiss, and to have a tangible means of rewarding my kids for good deeds. It makes the whole transaction of parenting a little less fraught with emotion. I half believe there really is some magic in those pebbles; lightening the mood, easing frustration, and feeling like we are all having more fun together--those are magic accomplishments to me. Cleo and Flynn have both told me seperatly that they think me or Jaren should get a magic pebble for something nice we have done and I'm thinking about trying that experiment too...making a parent jar and giving the kids a chance to reward or deny us some pebbles. Even as an adult, I can still use a reprimand and a reward every now and again!


P.S.I love the wonderful blog Let's Explore's version of the marble jar because they use one jar to motivate both their kids to work toward a reward for the whole family. It's a team effort and focuses on the positive. Check it out.

Meet Honey and Matilda....

I have a habit/fault of talking about things way before I ever actually do them. My mind, it seems, works much faster than my body and my motivation. This is precisely the case with the idea we had 18 months ago to delve into the backyard chicken movement that is currently sweeping across the country. (If you don't believe me that this is an actual trend see this article and this one. Chickens, as Susan Orlean in the New Yorker article puts it, are the "it bird".)

Jaren and I were excited from the outset about the idea of keeping chickens. Having our own fresh eggs, getting to experience raising an animal that actually produces a useful edible thing, and watching the effect taking care of our chickens would have on our children--especially since our household is cursed with animal allergies and some deep running cleanliness issues that pretty much rule out our ever having a conventional indoor pet-- these all played into the desire. So did the fact that I am so eager these days to reconnect with traditions of domesticity that are useful and have needlessly fallen by the wayside of modernized culture. Chickens have only NOT been a part of most people's home life for about 50 years. Before that, they were a commonplace and utilitarian feature of the domestic landscape, albeit the more pastoral landscape of the past. And unlike bigger livestock, chicken raising was normally relegated to the realm of women and children, something that makes me love it all the more in this current phase of my life as a stay at home mama.

So anyway, there I was broadcasting our plan to have chickens to one and all, collecting scrap wood for the coop, looking at online sites like Backyard Chicken and Urban Chicken and then we just sat on the idea...til now! This spring has found us finally ready to catch up to our talk. Jaren has been working on the coop this past week and it will be completed whenever this infernal fickle Spring decides to really become itself. Yesterday we went to IFA and just bit the bullet and bought ourselves 2 fuzzy little balls of peeping cuteness: one Buff Orpington which will lay gorgeous pale brown eggs and 1 Ameraucana the famed "Easter Egg" chicken which lays lovely aqua colored eggs. We will probably add one more to the mix this weekend. Does 3 make a flock?

I'm very excited about the whole adventure. I worry about my neighbors; I worry about pests and critters and predators; I worry about odor and chicken shit; I worry about the fact that all birds have the capacity to weird me out with their non blinking and darty movements and strange scaly feet. But it is funny the way mother nature puts potentially difficult and tedious things in perfectly manageable and cute packages. Babies and chicks, who can resist them? And just like with parenting, I know that if I devote myself to caring for these little somethings, in the end the shit and the worry and the weirdness end up being such a small piece that can't hold a candle to the overall joy. I'm counting on that. I'm also figuring that if I ever start to doubt the decision, Cleo will come to the rescue and be the chicken cheer leader. In the less than 24 hours we've had the chicks, Cleo has already told me "now our family's bigger!" and made a card "introducing" the chickens to the world, and said "Mom, it's not about the eggs, it's about them!" She's in love. Let's hope I will be too.