It’s Alive!!!

May 28, 2011 by ·

 

When talents were handed out in Heaven, there were several lines that I skipped.

Gardening was one of those.
As far as green thumbs are considered,
Mine is a varying shade of black.
I’m not kidding.
Take, Hostas, for example…
a few years ago, I had a friend dividing her hostas, and offered to share.
Hostas.
Easy.
I mean, seriously, they are the one plant that you can’t kill, right??
Well… I killed it.
Which, now that I look at it, is a type of talent.  When it’s touted as the one plant that is un-killable… then being able to actually kill it is some sort of (sordid) talent, right??
Fast forward 2 years, one slightly productive, and one miserably failed garden attempt,
and we move into a new house…
which is surrounded by…
Hostas.
Yep.
The unkillable plant that I can’t seem to save.
The owner had said she wanted landscaping that was hardy and low-maintanance.
She didn’t count on ‘ole black thumb buying her beautifully surrounded by hostas-house.
We went through season one, and they actually came up… and lived!
(Thanks only to the fact that we also inherited an automatic sprinkler system from them)
Open season two…
And while the rest of the world’s hostas are starting to come alive and bring forth their green pointy starts,
Mine were still, well…
Dead.
To add insult to injury, at a meeting, one of the women was talking about how she was going to need to divide her hostas the next day.
Good grief!  You mean some are so robust that they need to divide this soon?!  She kindly offered to share some of her off-shoots with me to re-start my crop.
Sure, that’s just what I need, more of a plant to which my black thumb is toxic!
The next day, I went out to admit defeat, and pull my dead hostas from the ground.
As I wrapped around and pulled,
To my complete surprise… underneath all of the dull deadness…
I found:
My very own, fresh crop of Hostas!
I’m not a murderer after all!
(and have since learned that ‘everyone knows’ that you are supposed to clear away the dead stuff every fall…like I said… skipped that talent line in heaven!)
I was going to wait for my kids to have them help and learn a little gardening, but I was just so excited pulling off dead to reveal a fresh green start, that I did them all (except for one) right then.
As I did it, I kept thinking about how much like life that is…
Maybe what we think is a worthless and dead part of us
Is just a piece that is patiently waiting for us to clear away the gunk
and reveal a fresh new start.
I love spring!
… so what inside of you is waiting to sprout??
Filed Under: Random Tagged With:

How do you do it all??

May 28, 2011 by ·

 … is a question I have been asked lately when conversation turns to the book coming out.And the real, honest, gut wrenching answer is:  I don’t.This post is simply just to keep it real.  As things have been coming to a head with the books and seminars, I have felt more and more like a chicken with my head cut off… running around in a zillion different directions, trying desperately to catch the (too) many things that I find slipping through my fingers (like missing 2 out of the 4 soccer sessions that we signed my 6 year old up for months ago, and I told myself after missing the first week that we HAD to get him to the 2nd week for sure… and then didn’t think about it again until the morning after the 2nd session…).

Or yesterday getting a call from 3 year olds preschool teacher… informing me that Joshy had bitten another child… and this was the third such phone call I had received from her within the past 2 weeks.  And then in trying to do a pow wow session on the phone of what we could do to stop this, she said she would send home some articles for me to read about ways to get over the biting… like giving more attention to the child…

… She said some other things too, but I didn’t get past that first part.
It hit me
and hit me hard.
In my rush to get these “outside” projects done,
I have been neglecting my “inside” projects.
My most important projects:
my own children.

 

I have been trying so hard to get these books done that, more often than I care to admit, I have been more of a ‘body’ in the home, making sure the children stayed alive throughout the day.  But (as humiliating as this is to admit), not really doing a whole lot more.  Except feeling guilty for it.

Oh yes, that’s one thing that I have excelled at through everything.
The guilt.
Guilt for not meeting a deadline on the book,
Or for not preparing enough for the seminars.
And then guilt for not sitting on the floor for 3 hours playing candyland with my kids.
Or for not taking them on nature walks to pick variations of wild flowers and then come back, press and preserve the flowers for their own personal scrapbooks.
Yep, Guilt is one thing I can do.

So, no, I don’t do it all.

… And I don’t think anyone can.
In our quest to be the perfect mom, wife, friend, sister, daughter, homemaker, book writer, stick figure drawer, etc etc etc (the list could be endless!)…

We can’t do it all.

And shouldn’t do it all.

I think the trick is finding what we can do

And letting go of the rest.

So, perhaps the question we should be asking each other is:
How do you not do it all?
In other words… how do you prioritize and pick what you will do?
Or more importantly, how do you pick and choose what you will let go…
without holding on to the guilt of letting it go??

Just keeping it real 🙂

Filed Under: Deep Thoughts, Featured Posts, Motherhood Tagged With: ,

so many hats… so little time…

May 28, 2011 by ·

I have found myself so caught up in all of the royalty hoopla this weekend… no I didn’t get up at 4:00 to watch the live ceremony… (I knew they would rebroadcast about 1000 times so I wasn’t too worried),

But we did wait anxiously for the “royal kiss” and watched the recap on the morning news show… complete with all of the clips featuring the regal dresses and matching hats (who knew there were so many different hat designs in the world??!  and truly, some of those hats just weren’t meant to be worn – let’s just be honest!).Now, I’m normally not a hat person, but I do my fare share of hat switching throughout any given day.  Take today, for example:

— Wake up in wee hours of morning with horrible stomach issues.
Put on Dr. Hat (since Dr. Hubby is out of town, I couldn’t just turn and ask him what was up) to diagnose the issue:
pregnancy?  Nope.
flu?  Not likely
anyway related to the junky substitute for food that I have been shoveling into my mouth for the past waaaay too many days?  Highly probable.

Which meant I probably just had to wait it out.
On goes patient hat.

Kids come into room in the (still too early) morning, asking if they can watch tv (knowing full well the chore schedule that is awaiting them)
Put on task master hat and mumble something about chores, violin, reading… don’t really finish sentence as I drift back to sleep.
Wake up a bit later to sound of not one, but 2 TV’s playing
Put on warden had and hand out “go directly to jail” cards.

Quickly change into chef hat and direct my little Sioux chefs to get out cereal and milk, and hurry because we needed to be walking out the door in 10 minutes.
Realize we are out of milk.
Change into Kentucky derby hat – race to corner gas station, load up on milk.  (and donuts).

Put on exercise clothes and change into zumba hat.

Load all 5 kiddos in car (shoes optional…) speed to gym just in time to get kids into kids care and run up stairs to help with 3 hour zumbathon to raise money for YMCA in Japan (adjusting philanthropist hat on the way)

Do my little section… quickly changing my whole outline right in the middle due to mic malfunctions
(enter chameleon hat)

Finish my tidbit, change from sexy latin dance hat to mommy hat once again, race to kids care to gather up kids and zoom son to soccer game.

Stopping along the way to break out Mechanic hat as overheating car started dinging warning bells louder and louder warning me to pull off road before engine exploded.

Get to Soccer game, shove shivering son out the door and put on momma bear hat as I launch a tirade of text messages about why wasn’t the game canceled in light of the the freezing rain/high wind/mud pit of a field.

Kept all other kids inside car to watch from our warm perch
and don umpire hat to referee all of the fights that broke out between the kids who were cooped up in way to close of quarters for way too long.

Finally see the game end, and quickly get things loaded to zoom back to zumbathon… only to discover that the car is completely dead.  Not just a little dead.  Won’t even make a sound.

Put on mechanics hat once again and quickly diagnose as child error (i.e. yelled at the kids, who were climbing up on the dash board that they surely hit something that drained the battery in all of their craziness during the game).

Call AAA (LOVE that company!).  Wait for road side assistance (ignoring the glares from other cars, as I wasn’t parked ‘exactly legally’ to begin with, and now had no way of moving the car anyway).

Put on choir director’s hat to cue heavenly angels chorus as road side assistance drove up…
… and quickly pointed out that the lights had been left on the whole game… by (ahem) me.

Jumped battery, told me to keep car running for a while… which was a little problem (see previous overheating issue).

Slapped on deductive reasoning hat to contemplate options:
1.  let car run with no coolant to charge battery… leading to overheating and possibly blowing up engine.
2.  go to store, shut off car to get coolant, have battery die again while in store and become stranded once more with kids.

… finally made it home, found coolant, poured in car, turned back on, let it run.

Put on night hat and literally crashed on the couch for a good hour.  Hopefully the kiddos found something to eat, but not sure.

Woke up even more drained then before, walked like a zombie trying to get my bearings as the neighborhood seemed to have converged on our backyard.

Now contemplating putting on hypocrite hat to load up the kids and declare tonight a Micky-D night (not even 24 hours after updating a ‘how to feed your kids healthy’ type of handout for the website).  Nice.

What hats have you been wearing??

Filed Under: Motherhood, Random Tagged With: ,