Do you have an image of your perfect Christmas morning? From all my Hallmark Channel viewing and Internet scrolling I imagine this:
A family in matching PJs unwrapping a mountain of beautifully wrapped presents. Cinnamon rolls, bacon, orange juice, and Reindeer Blend coffee being poured into Christmas mugs. A kiss under the mistletoe near a crackling fire with Harry Connick Jr singing in the background. It’s the picture perfect white, middle class, American life!
Oh wait! My life isn’t a movie. It plays out more like this: “I’m tired, why is everyone already awake? We don’t open presents until after breakfast. Oh, you don’t like the breakfast? We got the wrong syrup? Why is the wi-fi not working? Why is she crying? When can we open the presents? Why doesn’t my present work? Can you put it together? Where are the batteries?
Our real life house. No mountain of presents or crackling fireplace. Just my beautiful girls.
This week I made a list of all the things I do to prepare for Christmas. It was a long list. I didn’t really feel strongly about anything on the list. I didn’t look forward to doing anything on the list. I do love Christmas, but mostly I love the idea of Christmas, not really the actual work that the month of December brings.
I’ve been thinking a lot about some wise words that Santa shared with me.
Let Go
Say no
Go slow
What if I put this into practice in the month of December.
What can I let go of? Fear, self doubt, and the opinions of others,
What can I say no to? The things I do out of guilt or obligation
How can I go slow? By building margin into each day, taking walks, turning off my phone, and lighting candles.
Take a moment to savor your real life in the real world. It’s all you’ve got. Find the little things…or big things… you have to celebrate, and give a hoot and a holler (or a small grin).
2016…The year of the mice. The first mouse siting was during a sleepover in a room full of teenage girls. My daughter and her group of friends were settling in to watch a movie when a mouse emerged from beneath the couch and raced across the hard wood floor, through the maze of pillows, blankets and couch cushions. That was the end of sleeping on the floor.
After that night, my kids were constantly on the look out for mice. Their eyes and ears were on alert day and night. We began finding mouse droppings around the kitchen and behind the couch. The mice multiplied quickly and we started seeing them in every room of the house. One night we had an unexpected guest who needed a place to spend the night. As I brought them to their bed, a mouse ran across the floor. After that, I stopped inviting people over.
We tried every kind of trap imaginable, deep cleaning the house, and two different pest control companies. The mice completely ignored the traps. I began to feel a bit crazy. I had trouble sleeping and jumped at the chance to leave the house on weekends.
We went on vacation in the summer of 2016 for a week and gladly left the mice behind. When we returned, there were mouse droppings in our beds. That was the last straw!
I started dreading the night. The sun setting meant the mice would come out to play. I turned on loud music and entered empty rooms with my eyes closed yelling, “get out of here, mice!”
We started to recognize the paths that the mice traveled. The majority of activity was in and around the living room couch. As a last resort, we decided to get rid of the couch. Mark brought it out into the country and my brother in-law and father in-law joined in a couch burning party.
After the couch was gone, the mice slowly disappeared. They were gone for about a year, but then came back in 2018.
One night, I opened the bedroom door to come downstairs during the early morning hours and saw two baby mice about an inch long toppling down the stairs. Seeing babies made me think, “Oh no, they’re multiplying!” Pest control came right away and told us that when you see babies, usually it means the adult mice are dead. The babies only leave the nest as a last resort. Those babies were the last mice I have seen.
The only evidence of the mice that remains is a piece of black tape covering the door to the upstairs attic. I convinced myself that the baby mice had come from the attic and taping the door was my desperate attempt of keeping the mice in.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how this image parallels many areas of life. How often do I close the door to certain areas of my heart and emotions that I don’t want to deal with? “I’ll take care of it later,” I think to myself.
Unfortunately, a conflict or painful memory can only be avoided for so long. Last week, I finally took the tape off the door. There was no sign of mice. Just old papers, musty blankets, suitcases, and trash.
The mice are gone now, but the life lessons they taught me still remain. Our thoughts are trained to run in the same patterns, just like mice do. We can look the other way and hope that our hidden thoughts will somehow go away, but usually they need some gentle, yet firm attention. The pest control company we called didn’t seem to be helping for many months. Sometimes, the friend or therapist that we choose doesn’t end up being helpful or it takes longer than we expected. We had mice for over a year and there were days when I just wanted to move out and quit trying.
I am working hard to move toward the hard conversations with others instead of avoiding them. Facing fears and recognizing unhelpful beliefs that I have allowed to rule my life is hard, but important work. I hope you will have courage to face your fears as well. You are stronger than you know.
And now, one last thing, dear reader: If you currently have mice running wild throughout your house, tell me your mice stories and my empathy will abound!
There’s nothing quite like a snow day. Especially when the storm falls on a weekday. I remember as a child of the 80’s, sitting in front of the radio listening to the list of school cancellations being read in alphabetical order. When Marshall was called, we would jump up and down and run around the house screaming “School’s cancelled! School’s cancelled!”
Tonight we got word that St Paul schools would be cancelled tomorrow due to a pre-Thanksgiving snow storm. There was no waiting by the radio, but I did receive a text message, email, and voicemail.
A snow day for the kids means staying up a little later, sitting by the window and watching the snow fall by candle light. During the day off, there will be movies, board games, blanket forts in the living room, freshly baked cookies, family time, playing in the snow, and shoveling. Lots and lots of shoveling.
During a rare April snow day in 2018, the kids made an epic snow fort. The fort was modeled after a similar fort that my brothers and sisters and I made growing up. I am still in search of a photograph of the original. The fort was made from bricks of snow stacked in rows about 6-8 high with the word “HONK” written on the front with food coloring.
The kids had a blast jumping out from behind the wall and cheering when cars would honk
Whether you are dreading the coming winter or as excited as my kids, I hope you will find something to savor in this first snow day.
With four kids ranging from age 5 to 17, I have thrown my share of birthday parties. If you count one party a year for each of my kids, I have currently thrown 47 birthday parties. Can I say that again? 47 Parties!!
Here are my top 3 most memorable
Around the World Party We packed a dozen 1st graders into our basement laundry room in Minneapolis. Rows of folding chairs transformed the space into an airplane.
I was the stewardess who helped the guests board the plane and gave them a boxed snack to eat mid-flight. Mark was the pilot that guided us through the take off and landing, complete with sound effects.
Who Wants to be a Millionaire Party
when Ellie turned 9, one of our favorite TV shows to watch as a family was Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Mark set up speakers in the basement and played host of the popular game show. All the prepared questions had to do with American Girl dolls. The volume of the theme song pouring out of the speakers seemed to shake the whole house. The kids each soaked up their moment of fame as a contestant in the hot seat.
Paint Fight Party
When Tabby turned 15, she asked for a paint fight party. I bought 12 large bottles of washable tempera paint and the kids all wore white. We walked to a grassy field near our house and the teenagers ran around and threw paint on each other for about 10 wild minutes. That’s as long as the paint lasted.
After the paint attack, back at the house, everyone attempted to wash off using the garden hose. It was SUCH a mess. An insane mess. The kids went home and told their parents that it was the best birthday party EVER! I still cannot believe that I allowed it.
Most of the other parties have been fairly tame compared to those three. We have went bowling, ate frozen yogurt, had a doll tea party, decorated cookies, solved secret codes, watched a movie, and smashed lots of piñatas.
The thing that makes parties worth giving is the excitement leading up to the big day. There’s nothing like hearing my kids’ squeals of delight as each guest walks from their car up to our front door with present in hand.
The kids talk about it for weeks beforehand and count the days and hours and minutes until the first friend arrives. It brings me great joy to see them grow with each year. I wonder how many more birthday parties there will be? I think I’ll just enjoy a few months off until the next one.
As a nurturing mother, oldest child, and natural born helper, I didn’t give self care much thought until about 5 years ago. I didn’t have a clear understanding of the word.
I thought Self care = Selfish and I had been taught clearly from childhood that being selfish was bad. I still remember clearly the Sunday School song:
“Put Jesus first and Others second and put Yourself at the end of the line, And you will find true Joy in your life through J-O-Y. I loved that song. I lived it with great pride.
Then, I spent 12 years as a full-time stay at home mom with no time to myself. Add a few major life challenges and finding out I was pregnant with baby #4, and I reached major burn-out.
Over time, the realization came that I was not feeling the least bit joyful. I resented never speaking up for myself and always giving up my needs for everyone else. Through some therapy, I realized that I had lived my life treating everyone else kindly, but not being kind to myself – At All.
I have begun thinking of this topic of self care as Self Kindness
Love is Kind. I cannot truly love the people in my life unless I love myself. I began giving myself permission to rest from always caring for the needs of others. I had to figure out what was restful and then make time for it”
As a young mom, I remember coming to the end of a day after the kids had finally fallen asleep and the house was quiet, and thinking “Now, I can FINALLY rest” . I’ve earned it!!” I defined rest as a small compartment reserved for when the work was done.
Life can be hard. Really hard. There were days and weeks and years when the urgent drowned out the important in my life, and the only break I got was 5 minutes in the bathroom with the door closed. Self care for me started with a decision. I would make a daily choice to be kind to myself and at times that would mean saying no to the demands of others.
I have been gradually adding daily practices that have helped me find rest. *Candle light *Journaling *Drinking coffee *Walking *Going outside in nature *Turning off my phone *Time with friends *Reading *Smiling and making funny faces at myself in the mirror.
After intentionally trying to be more kind to myself for the past 5 years, I have noticed something. I call it a Brush with Self Care. Imagine a paint with water picture. The brush dipped in the water symbolizes self care. When you take the time to dip your brush and apply it to the pages of your life, you will begin to see colors emerge. The colors are the hidden talents, the things you never knew you loved, and the gifts that have been hiding in plain sight.
Hospitality: The friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers.
When I was a child, one of my earliest memories was going to my Grandma Shirley’s house where she always had a full cookie jar ready. There was also ice cream in the cold room, served with chocolate syrup and peanuts. If there was no ice cream in the house, Grandpa would say, “Shirley, we need to go to Dairy Queen and get some “gook” That was the code word for a pint of soft serve chocolate ice cream. We didn’t have a formal invite to go to Grandma’s house, we just always knew that if we rode our bikes over to their house, they would be home with treats ready.
My childhood home in Marshall, MN
The number of guests, visitors, and strangers my parents welcomed into my childhood home was many. One memory that stands out in my mind is when Dad brought some hitch-hikers home for supper. They were an older couple traveling through town and down on their luck. They joined us around the table for a meal. Afterwards, my siblings and I retreated upstairs to discuss the possibility that the hitch-hikers might have been kidnappers on the run. When we came back downstairs, my dad had invited the couple to spend the night on our pull out couch. I never saw them again after that night, but the way my parents welcomed the strangers with a meal and a place to sleep made an impression on me.
This photo was taken on move-in day in St Paul.
I have found hospitality as a practice. The more I invite people into my home, the better I get at it and the more natural it becomes. In my early years of marriage, I had a lot of negative self-talk that prevented me from inviting people over. These are some of the things I would say to myself.
What if people don’t like my house?
What if I don’t have the right food?
Where would everyone sit?
What if people don’t know what to talk about?
I still have these thoughts from time to time, but I have learned that most people don’t care what my house looks like or if my furniture matches. They are just happy to be invited.
My Motivation for Hospitality:
I want to create a place of belonging and a place to connect people who don’t yet know each other. I want my home to be full of laughter, learning, and listening to stories.
Neighborhood bonfire in the front yard.Party in the garage. How many teenagers can you fit in one room?
Whether it is planned in advance or spontaneous, the key is saying “YES!” to hospitality. Your way of showing hospitality will be different than mine. Be you! Join me in the friendly and generous reception of guests, visitors, and strangers.
In my last post I shared about the importance of waking up to our five senses. Today, I want to focus on one of these senses that we use every time we put something into our mouth…taste! Sometimes even looking at a picture of a particular food or smelling it cooking can cause our mouth to begin to water. Hot apple pie straight from the oven, soup that has been simmering all afternoon, freshly baked bread, sizzling bacon. Ok, you get the idea.
Are we hungry yet?
When I got engaged, my roommates threw me a bridal shower and gave me a jar of spaghetti sauce and some frozen pizzas as a joke gift. In my early years of marriage, my lack of knowledge in the kitchen was quite embarrassing. My husband, Mark, knew even less than I did, and was used to a steady diet of turkey sandwiches and apple juice. I worked at Burger King and Mark worked at Pizza Hut. Between fast food, cold sandwiches, and microwavable food, we survived.
Fast forward to having kids, I don’t think things improved all that much. I had some mom friends that passed along their recipes and gave me a few tips (thanks Brooke and Christa), but we were still in survival mode, eating to live, not living to eat. Our regular rotation was tacos, pasta, pizza, waffles, and chicken. Somewhere along the line, I started paying attention when I was around people who were cooking and asking them questions.
We graduated from beef tacos to other kinds of tacos!
My lack of confidence in cooking had nothing to do with a lack of interest in food. It had to do with my fear of failure. I didn’t want to work hard to preparing a special meal, and then have it end up in the garbage.
A few years ago, I realized that I really do enjoy cooking. I decided to make something that I wanted to make for myself one day a week. Once I got past my need for approval, I found myself really enjoying the time in the kitchen.
I can tell when my confidence in cooking started to grow because that’s when I started taking pictures of meals I made
I am still a pretty “safe eater” that gets into a rut when it comes to grocery shopping and cooking. I decided to challenge myself this month with a simple idea, and I hope you will join me.
The challenge is this:
Eat at least one thing you have never tasted each week during the month of November.
For the adventurous eaters, you may need to try a new combination of foods or a new spice mix. For me, it will be no problem to find new foods. I could probably fill a whole cart in every aisle with the things I have not tried.
Grab a friend and try a new food together. If you are already having a get together in November, tell everyone its “New Food November”
I would love to see what’s in your grocery cart. Hopefully, we will all find some delicious new flavors this month and our taste buds will thank us!
Mashed potato martini. A beautiful plate prepared by my friend, Lynn Benson
Have you thought about what it would be like to live without vision, hearing, touch, smell, or taste buds? I picture a life without senses as a paint with water picture without the water and brush. There would be no way for the colors and details to appear in our picture without our senses that bring the world to life.
What if we built a little more margin into our days so we could intentionally practice using our senses? In music, the places of stopping are called ‘rests’. Taking moments to pause in the middle of our days help us notice things that we are usually too busy to see.
Here are a few ideas of how to engage with your senses.
Stand next to a tree and notice its leaves, its bark, and the shape of its branches. What can the tree teach you? What has it been through? How old do you think it is?
Lay on your back and look up at the sky. What do you notice about the clouds? Can you feel the wind on your face? What do you hear around you?
Deliberately take another route on your daily drive or walk. Notice things you have not seen before. Take a little more time getting to where you are going (or end up in a new place that you didn’t intend to go). How did taking a new path make you feel?
Deliberately change one of your routines. Order something different at the coffee shop, add a new ingredient to your sandwich, use cloth napkins instead of paper ones, light a candle, listen to a new type of music.
None of this comes naturally to me. I really like familiar and rarely step out and deliberately find new ways of doing, thinking, or feeling. It is a discipline for me to make time and space to activate my senses. It is a discipline to care for myself and enjoy all the things around me that are waiting to be enjoyed.
Think about the word enJOY.
There are a lot of things that I have realized bring me joy. Fireplaces, the ocean, warm socks, a pretty place setting, conversation with friends, and walks in the woods to name a few. I know my list will grow and change as I get older and as I experience new things.
Make a list of things you enJOY and hang it up somewhere where you can see it. Decide which of your 5 senses are used in experiencing your favorite things. Then, make time for one thing on your list each day.
I grew up thinking artists were a little weird, but it was a good weird. While visiting an art gallery as a child, I saw an abstract piece of art for the first time. It was a canvas with dozens of objects glued to it. There were fish hooks, rope, scraps of paper, and my favorite object – an orange rubber worm. It left quite an impression on me. At age 10, I mostly liked drawing. It felt natural and a paper and pencil were easy supplies to come by, but every once in awhile, I remember wishing I had more materials to work with. After reading a book about a boy who made robots out of cardboard boxes and tin cans, I attempted to make my own robots. As an eager 4-H member who enjoyed coming up with projects, I remember looking in the fridge and trying to invent a recipe with the ingredients I had in front of me. I also wrote and photo-copied a monthly magazine and mailed it to my ‘subscribers’ for about a year in elementary school.
Fast forward to now, and I’m wondering where that inventive child went?
Is the creative artist in me hibernating or is she trapped somehow and not able to get out?
There is a part of me that is not fully living out the creative life I’ve been born to live. I feel stuck in a never-ending cycle of laundry, dishes, and an honest attempt to pay the rent. It is really easy to ignore this creative artist that is being starved most of the time and hiding out in the back of the closet. I’ve told myself for too long that nobody really cares.
A big motivator for my desire to start writing is as a way to stir up the sleeping artist. My biggest inspiration in the past year has been seeing the creative overflow in my children and wishing to be more childlike.
Is slime art? Whatever it is, it sure brings on the JOY!
I want to give you a couple snapshots of this. My older daughters go to an arts high school and every year they look forward to the formal dance, Finale. This year was Tabby’s freshman year and I assumed she would want to go shopping for a dress. When I asked her, she said “No, I think I want to MAKE a dress”. I was skeptical. A few days later I asked again if she wanted to go shopping for a dress. She assured me that she had it under control. She ended up finding a rainbow umbrella, cutting it into strips, and hot gluing it into a dress. Can you believe it? I sure couldn’t!
When you look at an umbrella, do you picture it as a dress?
Another day this year, I found Tabby on the living room floor at about 10:30pm painting a pair of jeans. She had found a black hat with white spots and wanted to make some “cow pants” to match the “cow hat”.
Creative people like my Tabby stand out in a crowd of others who are blending in. Creativity is play and learning to allow yourself to play as an adult can be hard work. Fear, shame, and a scarcity mindset are all barriers to creativity. I am determined to break out of my comfortable and safe routines and discover new ways of thinking in my second half of life.
Here’s Tabby in the finished “cow outfit”. She inspires me to expand my imagination.
Richard Rohr says: “We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”
I have quickly realized that artists need other artists. We can be strong supporters of each other as we birth new ideas and new art. I have decided to form a group called “Midlife Creative”. If you feel a tug to explore this idea, I would love to have your company on this journey to a more creative life.
This is for everyone. We were all made to create. It’s not too late to awaken your sleeping artist.
I grew up defining an artist as “a person who draws or paints and makes a living selling their art”, so you can imagine how surprised I was when someone I respected greatly started telling me I was “an artist” I just smiled everytime she would tell me this, but in my head I would argue, “I’m not an artist!”
Have you found yourself meeting artists on a daily basis? After my friend told me I was an artist, I started meeting such incredibly creative people wherever I went. I began to wonder if they were being sent to me or if I was simply drawn to creative people.
In my adult life, my definition of artist expanded to include actors, playwrights, musicians, dancers, screenwriters, photographers, and any other creative person who made a living doing their art. I was still stuck on this idea that to be an artist, you had to make money from your art. The funny thing is that I have always made money teaching piano lessons, but somehow that didn’t count.
When we moved to St Paul, we found ourselves surrounded by creative people. We were less than a mile from the Schmidt Artist Lofts and a block from Art House North, another community for artists. My kids started going to an art focused elementary school and an arts high school. There were plays to attend, art openings on weekends, and my daughter got involved in a short film. I felt strangely in awe of these creative people and wanted to be around them. I started finding out that even my friends who I thought were “normal” had without my knowledge published a book, played Chopin behind closed doors, and previously owned a sewing business.
There were artists everywhere I turned. I started to realize that we are ALL creative. Every single one of us is born creative. Somehow we talk ourselves out of it and very few claim the identity of “artist”
Why? Why do we not have permission to use this term to describe ourselves? Why can only a few people join this artist club? What would happen if we all started calling ourselves artists? I am going to give it a try. If I call myself a writer, maybe I will become one? Maybe I already am?
What do you wish you could be? Set aside the idea of making money, and look purely at what makes you come alive. What do you enjoy creating? Speak it out, and then start doing it. Call yourself an artist. I believe in you!!
