Steam up those windows...

For me the stretch of winter between January through Feburary is always about hunkering down. I tend to get rooted to home and projects and day dream about the warmer days to come when I can be outside doing the things I really love. I find myself dreading January and February, but in actuality, I think the record would show these are good months for me. I get a lot done when I'm staying focused on home, and though my expanding waistline might disagree, I get so much enjoyment out of cooking in the cold, winter days. It is interactive entertainment (especially if you involve your kids) and it is thoughtful attention to a task that I find really relaxing. And then there's the eating. It's hard to beat summer produce but a comfort laden winter meal comes close. Love you hot cinnamon-y oatmeal, Mmmm pasta with alfredo sauce and peas and ham, yum bread pudding, ahhhh french onion soup smothered in gruyere, yes roasted chicken with mashed potatoes, more please chipotle spiked roasted squash and salty oven roasted brocooli..... so many good tastes and sensations. And I get inexplicably warm inside when I see the stock pot steaming up the windows in my kitchen and then look out to the snow covered trees and roofs beyond. It's a gorgeous feeling, and such a good reminder of the safety and comfort and blessings I have within the walls of my home.

Cooking is a powerful thing. It is one of those uniquely human acts....can't think of a time I've ever heard about a monkey or a dog boiling up some pasta...and since cooking ultimately leads to eating, it is a cornerstone of our species' survival. But let's not forget that it can also be very fun. I might be somewhat biased with that statement since I've always liked to cook, but I really think it is true. The process of making food, especially for loved ones or to celebrate a special occasion is galvanizing. I love the tradition of taking food to a family with a brand new baby. Funeral food and baby shower food are distinct and recognizable breeds. Funeral cheesy potatoes anyone? Chciken salad with grapes on crossiant? I love the way food and certain dishes or tastes can link to memories and to people. My dad? He's swedish pancakes and cucumber and swiss sandwiches on rykrisp or limpa. My mom? She's hot fudge sauce and pork roasts with perfect gravy. My sister? Sugar cookies and banana cake. My grandma Mere? Swedish spritz and apricot nectar. Jaren? A perfectly cooked fried or poached egg with feta and spinach. Food creates legacies and merriment. I really believe that. It's a belief I hope I'm instilling in my kids each and every day they watch (and help) me in the kitchen.

Yesterday was Cleo's 6th birthday. (Unimaginable!) We spent literally a few hours of the morning making her birthday cake, a delectable and insane 6 layer rainbow deal inspired by this picture of baked loveliness I randomly found online. Though our final product bore no resemblance to that one (and lost 2 layers to a tragic pan sticking incident), it was really fun to spend the birthday morning in our robes, spilling sugar, splattering egg whites, and swirling vibrant colors into batter. It felt celebratory, and like so much in life, I think the effort made the taste all the sweeter.

Shake it like a polaroid picture...

As a stay at home parent, my job description is constantly morphing. Somedays I feel I'm the entertainer. Others more of the referee or disciplinarian. Somedays I'm a coach running defense and sometimes clearly in charge with offensive plays up my sleeve. Sometimes I'm slave and short order cook and others I'm master and chef. And let me tell you as a temporary single parent ,and one that hasn't left the house or my two children in 48 hours thanks to little sickies, I could currently be described as potential sadist!

I don't know if you've seen this or not, but I've noticed that some stay at home parents fill out assorted forms at school, or on social media, or wherever, with a job description that says CEO of Smith Household or employed by Emma (7) and Kate (5) or some kind of cute spin. I'm not a big fan of this in general, but I did, however, happen to recently see a description, still tongue in check, that I actually thought brilliantly applied: Director of Development. As parents, we really are the central source for encouraging our childrens' development into self sufficient and hopefully productive, happy adults. We directly expose (and sometimes indirectly, oops) expose them to information. We are their first touchstones for making sense of the world around them. It's a huge position to field and one that has oh so many strings and expectations attached.

I've had this in mind the last couple days even as I fight the urge to impatiently wring necks....here I am developing my child each and every waking minute we interact. Am I actively or passively doing this? I've been picturing myself shaking the polaroid, with just a little bit more of their images "developing", becoming clear each day.

Interestingly, I have been reading a bunch about Maria Montessori, the founder and theorist behind the education system commonly referred to as Montessori, lately and her philosophies dovetail so nicely with this idea. (Let me say in advance that I have no direct experience with Montessori education and neither do my children. We've done straight up preschools and public school thus far. ) But learning somewhere that Montessori was the first woman to practice medicine in Italy in 1896 initially piqued my interest about her. As did lots of little tidbits I'd see around on other blogs about Montessori methods with kids which all seemed to point to creative exploration and inner development.

It turns out that Montessori's main theory is that we are incomplete at birth. We require adult nurturing for a period of time before becoming fully functioning adults. Montessori thought this period of formation lasted until the age of 24. (And random or not, neural scientists have recently concluded through studies that the foundational neural structures in the frontal lobes of the human brain are not complete until around age 24!) Montessori believed education was an aid to life, it was a way to help children build their inner selves, their minds, from infancy to maturity. She once said "a child's work is to create the person he/she will become." I love her rationale that no two individuals learn the same thing the same way, so in essence no two individuals will ever build the same brain. Montessori originated the descriptor "Kids are like sponges" though it sounded all old-timey and professional when she said it since she used the words "absorbent minds" instead. Anyone who has spent anytime with children knows how much information they are capable of swallowing and with such gusto and enthusiasm. They are a rapt audience just waiting for the show.

And though I'm focusing in on children because of, ahem, my very important job description as Director of Development, I don't see any reason that this line of thinking can't be applied to one's own life, regardless of age or station. Aren't we all really directors of our own development each and every day? Wouldn't you hope that your most important job in life is to become exactly who you want to be?

Build Routines

Happy TWENTY TEN to all of you! I hope this new year is exactly what you want it to be. I want to start this off by telling all of you lovely readers out there how much it means to me that you read this blog. December 29 was the one year anniversary of this project! I am pretty proud of that fact. It makes me so happy to put my thoughts, passions, fears, and personality out there and I appreciate your support and readership so much. I plan to continue developing this site and hope to unveil some improvements shortly. So, please stay tuned. And I don't think I say this enough...please feel free to make comments, queries, and pointers on any and everything I write about. I love to hear from you and would love this place to feel more like a meeting of the minds. So comment away if you are so inclined! And thanks again for making this so worth it for me.

With the new year fresh as the morning dew, like most, I have fresh starts and goals on the mind. I really do love a good resolution and this year one of mine is to create better routines for me personally and for my family. I came across this phrase "building routines" somewhere awhile back and have had it scrawled on our chalkboard for months. I realize that I am drawn to the phrase because of the inherent implication that a routine has to start from zilch and grow into something more, establish itself as it were. You can't make new habits materialize and work out of thin air. And yet this is the approach I normally go for...I try to force very specific changes and want them to happen overnight. My family has braved all kinds of iterations of my good intentions relating to our tv watching habits, creative aspirations, chores, exercise plans, and reading. The best laid plans...but somehow everything disintegrates fairly quickly and I'm back to my free form sense of each day where pretty much what happens just does. I tend to be pretty laissez faire about life, and since Jaren's schedule being self employed is super flexible, our weeks look really different from one to the next. Sometimes we're all home on Wednesday and stay in our PJs until 12:00 and sometimes Jaren is out of town and I get the urge to be up and at 'em by 9:00. It just depends, and there isn't much rhyme or reason to it. I think Cleo's school schedule is the most rigid thing in our life. Isn't that funny?

Lately this lack of repetitive routine has been bugging me. Maybe I crave more structure because of the semblance of control it brings to life. But I also think my family would benefit from something they could recognize as a standard course of events. (To hear kid pros tell it, children thrive on routine, right?) I like to think about milking everything I can out of each day in terms of enjoyment but also in terms of learning and productivity. I always have a lot of to do's floating around in my head and some fall into the honest to goodness chore or must do category, but a lot fall into that nebulous personal fulfillment area. I want to make time in my life for things like reading a good book and creating something with my own two hands. I want to be sure that my kids get to hear us read stories aloud to them each and every day. I want to spend time outdoors, regardless of the season. I would love to listen to a podcast of This American LIfe every Sunday with Jaren over our morning coffee. I could call each of these items goals, but what I actually would like them to be is just part of my life.

And this, I realize is the key clincher when thinking about building a routine. I think I may have been looking at it all wrong all these years, highlighting what I should do instead of what I want to do. What do I want each week I live to include? What balance do I want to strike? What do I want my kids' days to be filled with? Asking myself these questions rather than mumbling dishearteningly "I should be reading more", "I should be exercising daily" etc. etc. has really helped me isolate the routine I want to build. And true to my, and my family's laissez faire nature, I think I've hit on a format that can still resemble a routine without being too stringent and inflexible for our oh so flexible lifestyle. I don't have to assign a day or a set time to each thing, just a goal to hit each one at least once during the week with a very basic category check off list.

Here's how I envision it working: basically I've broken the routine down into the different elements I want to include within each week. They are: create, educate, clean, exercise, organize, entertain. Each category functions on two levels, one personal and the other family. For example each week, I want to create something and I want my kids to do this as well. We can craft, write a story, take photos, draw, that kind of thing. For clean, I have to do the normal household cleaning but I want to make sure my kids get in the habit of doing cleaning chores that effect their immediate surroundings as well. Educate will hopefully ensure that I spend adequate time reading this year and exposing myself to new info via print, podcast or computer. And the same thing for my family. Organize is the umbrella term for tackling household and personal things like sorting my iphoto, going through my massive magazine clipping stash, restacking the linen closet, going through all the tiny baby clothes that have no business being in Flynn's closet anymore--pretty much all the things I put off because I never assign myself a moment to do them. Exercise is self explanatory, though including the kids on this one is important to me because, especially in the winter, we don't always move, move, move as much as we should. Entertain is the purely fun one. This includes time with friends, tv and movie watching, and random social and family activities out and about.

If we manage to actually do something in all those areas at least once a week I think I'm looking at a pretty balanced, good life. I think its the life I want to lead, and if being a little type A about it helps me get there then I'm willing to try it. So don't make fun of me. And fingers crossed, if it works (and I will report back in a few weeks on our progress) you may just want to give it your own little mini type A whirl.