I wonder if I am the only one who finds it depressing to start something new. I love starting new things. Starting something new is exciting, but there is also something discouraging about the first day you begin to do anything.
I have started lots of things that I quit or did not work out. I have started more things that I failed to finish than things that I have finished. I know this when I start something new. After I do something for the first time there is an element of discouragement. This is only the first day. I have so far to go until a reach my goal or form a new habit, and it is so hard to press on toward a goal when you are just starting no matter how badly you want to succeed.
I know that when you begin things that you need to plan and that part of that plan involves planning for success. I love nothing more than a good plan; especially one that is written down and has boxes to check off. I need plans or I know I will never accomplish anything. However, another key to finishing what you start is momentum. I thrive off of momentum and it is hard to build.
I mentioned when I was writing about my goals for the year that I have a problem with the book of Genesis as a starting place for reading the whole Bible. This is why: I just read the first three or four chapters of a huge book I have read many times and I know that I have so far to go. I also know how much discipline it is going to take to make it that far. Having an understanding of just how great a task is sometimes makes it harder at the beginning. The nice thing about the Bible is that you can start in Job or anywhere else and go back to the beginning once you have some momentum. Then it doesn't feel quite so daunting. You can't do that with most things.
So when I start things with my plan complete with checkboxes in hand, I cross off the first box and look at all of the boxes left to go and wonder, knowing how hard it is going to be to take the next few steps to check off the next few boxes. Fortunately, I get a high off of checking boxes and that gives me a little motivation when the knowledge that the goal I am pursuing is worth it isn't quite enough to get me moving. I also know that with each box I check off, I am changing my life and forming new habits and things get a little bit easier.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Friday, February 1, 2013
Seven Quick Takes - Sugar and Wheat Free
I started writing a long post about my family's recent diet changes but it got too complicated so here it is in simple form:
1.
We all got sick several times over the holidays and I decided it was time to make some changes to improve our immune systems. Having read a lot recently about ways to improve your health through diet, we decided to stop eating wheat and cane sugar for a month. It should be said that we already don't eat artificial sweeteners so that means we are working with honey, molasses, and our new discovery - coconut sugar. Coconut sugar can be used in 1:1 substitution with cane sugar though the taste is different. This is important because there was no way Izzy would go without sweets even for a short time.
2.
Wheat and sugar are addictive. It was really hard to stop eating them and not substitute with something else. I was craving baked goods non-stop for almost two weeks. I remember this from going on an elimination diet after Ezra was born. The cravings are coming to an end and I am beginning to be satisfied after eating simple meals. I also remember this stage from before. It feels great!
3.
Izzy will also not go without bread, pancakes, and a number of other things so I have been learning about baking with alternate grains. Spelt is my new best friend. This bread is wonderful. I made a loaf for sandwiches and cinnamon rolls with it. This weekend I am going to try my hand at making gluten free french bread. I plant to use this recipe if I can find the dough attachment for our food processor.
4.
After a couple weeks, we decided that we probably won't go back to eating wheat or cane sugar very often. Now the question is what to do with the ton of fantastic whole wheat flour and all the sugary items left over from the holidays in our pantry. They will probably be baked into things that get taken to church but in the meantime they provide quite the temptation.
5.
Toward the middle of the second week, Bee broke out with rosacea all over her little face and my skin got a little yucky. We think it was a symptom of detox. We both got better toward the end of the week.
Then we took a holiday from our new ways for a weekend due to a family event and a birthday party. (Because I'm not mean enough to take Phoebe to a birthday party and not let her have the food or birthday cake.) Her face broke out again. It seems she has a sensitivity to wheat. She broke out again this week when my mom gave her some pita bread.
6.
Speaking of Bee, she is such a good girl. The ladies at church serve some serious snacks after service and for the last several weeks, my sweet girl has sat and eaten broccoli or fruit while the other kids run around with cake, brownies, bagels, and other things she can't have. I never really let her have the sweets to begin with, but I'm so proud of how well she takes it when I won't let her have the treats that the other kids get.
7.
I don't have to wonder what to do with our 7 pounds of sugar because I started brewing kombucha. So far I've had two good batches and one batch that got moldy. We don't quite heat our house warm enough to brew effectively in the winter. I can't wait until it warms up.
Check out Jen for more quick takes.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Torn
I feel like my life is torn in half. There is half that I spend with my family doing things that matter and there is the half I spend at work where I spend the day sitting at a desk doing things of marginal importance and wondering what is happening out in the world where things matter. The latter half feels like the larger of the two.
I actually like to work. I am very good at what I do, though recently I have been frustrated because I am capable of a lot more than my job currently requires. The problem is that I hesitate to find a better job because I don't want to work. No matter how important my work happens to be, I feel like it is so much more important to be with my children teaching them how to live in the world. It is very necessary for me to work; if I didn't we wouldn't have food to eat or a place to live. I know the work I do provides the essentials of life for my family but I wish it didn't have to be so.
I am glad that I can provide for my family and I am glad that the littles at least have their Daddy with them instead of a stranger. However, I watch Izzy have such a hard time with them and I want to trade places because while I know it wouldn't be easy for me, it would be easier that it is for him.
For now, I am praying for contentment. It is always clear to me in hindsight that God knows better what I need than I do. My children are walking proof of this. I keep looking for ways to find Izzy a job or find job that would allow me to support the family while working less or from home. But this is where I am right now and I don't want to ruin it by spending all my time pining for what I don't have.
I actually like to work. I am very good at what I do, though recently I have been frustrated because I am capable of a lot more than my job currently requires. The problem is that I hesitate to find a better job because I don't want to work. No matter how important my work happens to be, I feel like it is so much more important to be with my children teaching them how to live in the world. It is very necessary for me to work; if I didn't we wouldn't have food to eat or a place to live. I know the work I do provides the essentials of life for my family but I wish it didn't have to be so.
I am glad that I can provide for my family and I am glad that the littles at least have their Daddy with them instead of a stranger. However, I watch Izzy have such a hard time with them and I want to trade places because while I know it wouldn't be easy for me, it would be easier that it is for him.
For now, I am praying for contentment. It is always clear to me in hindsight that God knows better what I need than I do. My children are walking proof of this. I keep looking for ways to find Izzy a job or find job that would allow me to support the family while working less or from home. But this is where I am right now and I don't want to ruin it by spending all my time pining for what I don't have.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Goal Setting for the New Year
I can't remember the last time I made a New Years' resolution. I really don't like the idea of making them because they feel more like wishes that probably won't come true. If I'm calling things what they are, I made several resolutions this year, however I am talking to myself about them in terms of goal setting. Even though setting goals and making resolutions are the same thing, using the term "goal setting" helps me feel like I will achieve them rather hope I might be able to stick to through February. I'm pretty sure February is when most people let go of their New Years' resolutions. I think there is a study or something.
Winter is a good time for me to set goals because I do a lot less. I don't tend to do much or add much to my life when going outside is less of an option. Instead, I make plans for what I will do when it is warm and light out again. I am very lucky to live somewhere with a short winter. Here is my schedule: I wake up and go to work, I go home and spend time with the children until bedtime, and then I go to sleep. Every other Tuesday I go to a Bible study and every Sunday I go to church. There is a lot lacking in this schedule.
As I was thinking about what I want to change, I read this article, which helped me solidify my goals. Here is what I plan and why:
1. Pray in the morning. Right now, I pray at night. I pray with the children when I put them to bed, I pray when I go to bed, and I pray when I can't sleep. The truth is, that I really need help in the morning before my day starts. When I went through the inventory Jennifer described, many of the areas in which I desire change will be affected by seeking help in the morning. Prayer in the morning is the first step in improving my relationships with my family, with God, and putting myself in a place where I have the strenth and discipline to change other areas of my life.
Accomplishing this goal will require me to develop new habits. First, waking up at a fixed and early enough time to do this, and second, remembering to pray without charging off into my day. My first step to achieving this goal is to set an alarm.
2. Read the whole Bible this year. I like reading the Bible, but I haven't read the whole thing in a long time, and my study over the past few years has be sporadic and only occasionally helpful. I plan to mostly follow a chronological schedule with one exception; I am skipping Genesis for now. I started reading Genesis a few days ago to give myself a "head start" for the year and I realize Genesis is the reason I rarely get very far when I pick up a Bible and plan to read from the beginning to the end. Call me strange, because there are several books that are less interesting to me, but I was looking at the schedule and realized that if I can get to Leviticus, I'll be engaged enough to finish and the biggest hurdle to being that engaged was Genesis. So I'll read it in last as part of my sprint to the finish. The funny thing is that if I stick to it, I will probably finish long before December.
3. Take a specific action to improve my relationship with my husband at least once a week. Is that vague enough? Don't worry, I actually have a more specific plan, but I have reasons for not publically sharing exactly what I plan to do just now.
Neither Izzy nor I have reguarly done anything intentional about improving or maintaining our relationship for a long time. Things are by no means bad, but I had hoped for a higher bar for my marriage than "not awful". So I plan to do something.
4. Intentionally pursue friendship twice a month. I am lonely. I have good friends, but none of them live nearby anymore and they are all also working moms. This means I don't see them or talk to them often. As a working mom, I don't get nearly as much time with my children as I would like, and it is hard for me to give up time to pursue other relationships, but the truth is, I need friends who I see somewhat regularly.
In the last year, I haven't had much opportunity to spend time with people outside my family and I realized that I forgot how to make friends. I have met a few women who I would love to be friends with, but I am out of practice when it comes to making friends of the people I meet when I'm not thrown together with them by circumstance. For only the second time in my life, I find if I want friends, I need to make an effort to go out and get some. I'm going to try and do that twice a month starting this month.
5. Build a built-in bookshelf/cabinet in the living room. I have been talking about doing this since we moved into our house. Our house is a three bedroom, two bathroom home that used to be a one bedroom, one bathroom home. The original bedroom is now the living room and there is a large space in the wall where the closet used to be. This spring I plan to make it a bookshelf/cabinet.
Depending on the success of this project, I have been inspired to consider building furniture. After the built-in comes this printers' cabinet:
http://ana-white.com/2012/10/plans/printers-triple-console-cabinet
6. Replace my dishwasher with a cabinet and paint my kitchen walls and cabinets. We only used our dish washer for about a month. For the last four years, it has served as an inefficient storage area. It is past time to replace it. Our cabinets are also faded and need to be treated and I am tired of orange walls in the kitchen. June sounds like a nice time for this project. I even got gift cards for Christmas to make it happen.
Winter is a good time for me to set goals because I do a lot less. I don't tend to do much or add much to my life when going outside is less of an option. Instead, I make plans for what I will do when it is warm and light out again. I am very lucky to live somewhere with a short winter. Here is my schedule: I wake up and go to work, I go home and spend time with the children until bedtime, and then I go to sleep. Every other Tuesday I go to a Bible study and every Sunday I go to church. There is a lot lacking in this schedule.
As I was thinking about what I want to change, I read this article, which helped me solidify my goals. Here is what I plan and why:
1. Pray in the morning. Right now, I pray at night. I pray with the children when I put them to bed, I pray when I go to bed, and I pray when I can't sleep. The truth is, that I really need help in the morning before my day starts. When I went through the inventory Jennifer described, many of the areas in which I desire change will be affected by seeking help in the morning. Prayer in the morning is the first step in improving my relationships with my family, with God, and putting myself in a place where I have the strenth and discipline to change other areas of my life.
Accomplishing this goal will require me to develop new habits. First, waking up at a fixed and early enough time to do this, and second, remembering to pray without charging off into my day. My first step to achieving this goal is to set an alarm.
2. Read the whole Bible this year. I like reading the Bible, but I haven't read the whole thing in a long time, and my study over the past few years has be sporadic and only occasionally helpful. I plan to mostly follow a chronological schedule with one exception; I am skipping Genesis for now. I started reading Genesis a few days ago to give myself a "head start" for the year and I realize Genesis is the reason I rarely get very far when I pick up a Bible and plan to read from the beginning to the end. Call me strange, because there are several books that are less interesting to me, but I was looking at the schedule and realized that if I can get to Leviticus, I'll be engaged enough to finish and the biggest hurdle to being that engaged was Genesis. So I'll read it in last as part of my sprint to the finish. The funny thing is that if I stick to it, I will probably finish long before December.
3. Take a specific action to improve my relationship with my husband at least once a week. Is that vague enough? Don't worry, I actually have a more specific plan, but I have reasons for not publically sharing exactly what I plan to do just now.
Neither Izzy nor I have reguarly done anything intentional about improving or maintaining our relationship for a long time. Things are by no means bad, but I had hoped for a higher bar for my marriage than "not awful". So I plan to do something.
4. Intentionally pursue friendship twice a month. I am lonely. I have good friends, but none of them live nearby anymore and they are all also working moms. This means I don't see them or talk to them often. As a working mom, I don't get nearly as much time with my children as I would like, and it is hard for me to give up time to pursue other relationships, but the truth is, I need friends who I see somewhat regularly.
In the last year, I haven't had much opportunity to spend time with people outside my family and I realized that I forgot how to make friends. I have met a few women who I would love to be friends with, but I am out of practice when it comes to making friends of the people I meet when I'm not thrown together with them by circumstance. For only the second time in my life, I find if I want friends, I need to make an effort to go out and get some. I'm going to try and do that twice a month starting this month.
5. Build a built-in bookshelf/cabinet in the living room. I have been talking about doing this since we moved into our house. Our house is a three bedroom, two bathroom home that used to be a one bedroom, one bathroom home. The original bedroom is now the living room and there is a large space in the wall where the closet used to be. This spring I plan to make it a bookshelf/cabinet.
Depending on the success of this project, I have been inspired to consider building furniture. After the built-in comes this printers' cabinet:
http://ana-white.com/2012/10/plans/printers-triple-console-cabinet
6. Replace my dishwasher with a cabinet and paint my kitchen walls and cabinets. We only used our dish washer for about a month. For the last four years, it has served as an inefficient storage area. It is past time to replace it. Our cabinets are also faded and need to be treated and I am tired of orange walls in the kitchen. June sounds like a nice time for this project. I even got gift cards for Christmas to make it happen.
Monday, December 31, 2012
Things I'm Glad I Did This Year
Its the last day of 2012 and it has been an eventful year. On the first day of the year, we said goodbye to Midtown Friends Community after we decided that we were to small to continue meeting as our own church and the changes kept on coming. Here are some of the best changes:
Became part of a new church. Even though Sacramento Friends was one of the parent churches of Midtown Friends, in many ways it couldn't be more different. While there are so many things we loved and miss about Midtown Friends, we found new things to love in our new community. I appreciate being a part of an intergenerational community again and it has been interesting path to accept the authenticity of the formal, yet remarkably informal style of worship.
Ezra was born! Need I say more?
I started reading again. All it took was an iPad. I read more books this year than I have since I finished school. I didn't want an e-reader, I like real books with real pages, but my life is such that I don't finish reading real books and I incur library fines. I do finish ebooks. Unless they aren't good. Here are some of the books I read in the order I remember them:
Making my own stuff. I know how to make lots of things, I just don't always find time to do it when buying things is faster, but I started this year and hope to expand my DIY endeavors next year. This year I made:
Became part of a new church. Even though Sacramento Friends was one of the parent churches of Midtown Friends, in many ways it couldn't be more different. While there are so many things we loved and miss about Midtown Friends, we found new things to love in our new community. I appreciate being a part of an intergenerational community again and it has been interesting path to accept the authenticity of the formal, yet remarkably informal style of worship.
Ezra was born! Need I say more?
I started reading again. All it took was an iPad. I read more books this year than I have since I finished school. I didn't want an e-reader, I like real books with real pages, but my life is such that I don't finish reading real books and I incur library fines. I do finish ebooks. Unless they aren't good. Here are some of the books I read in the order I remember them:
- The Count of Monte Cristo
- The Discipline Book
- Breakfast at Tiffany's
- Fifth Avenue, 4 A.M.: Audrey Heburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and The Dawn of the Modern Woman
- The Three Musketeers
- How to Raise an Amazing Child the Montessori Way
- Perelandra
- Montessori From the Start: The Child at Home from Birth to Age Three
- Little Women
- Pollyanna
- The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why
- Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice
- Grow Great Grub: Organic Food for Small Spaces
Making my own stuff. I know how to make lots of things, I just don't always find time to do it when buying things is faster, but I started this year and hope to expand my DIY endeavors next year. This year I made:
- bedding for Ezra and curtains for the kids room.
- I knitted and croched tons of things, mostly hats, blankets, and headbands. It was something to do for the two months I spent sitting with a sleeping baby on my chest. Next year I am thinking about making a sweater.
- condiments - jam, fruit butter, sauerkraut, mayonaise, salsa, pesto
- baby food
- herbal tea (grown in the garden), homebrewed ginger ale, and the beginnings of kombucha (it will be finished in another week)
- beauty products - I've done this for a while. This is the first year I made anything for others.
- laundry soap - been doing this for a while also
Friday, December 28, 2012
Seven Quick Takes - Little Bits of Christmas
1.
Merry Christmas! The last week was somewhat chaotic and passed too quickly, but we had a lovely time. Before Christmas, the children and I had the flu. This resulted in one more day off work than I planned. I spent Thursday and Friday in bed with Phoebe listening to music on Pandora and napping. In spite of all the vomiting, it was lovely and I enjoyed spending time with her while she was more relaxed than normal.
2.
Sunday was Christmas service at church. Our community follows the Quaker tradition of not having special services on Christmas Eve so the Christmas celebration was on Sunday with a lunch afterward. I have to say that I really dislike holiday services at non-liturgical churches. I know people love them, but watching a string of performances, even if I enjoy them, does not help me worship or reflect on the Incarnation. Call me Scrooge - my family already does. I did really enjoy the potluck and wish my littles had been feeling better so we could have stayed and enjoyed the company longer.
3.
As part of the aforementioned service, Bee sang "Away in a Manger" with the other littles. She still wasn't feeling well, and even wearing her sparkly tutu didn't help. She frowned through the song, which made me a little sad because she loves singing so much usually and she always loves an audience.
4.
We spent Monday and Tuesday at my parents' house and enjoyed time with my family. I always wish we could have more time. It seems that both of the children grew up a lot over those two days. Probably I just noticed things that I don't usually see because I am at work for most of their waking hours.
5.
Monday afternoon, my parents, Ezra and I visited my grandfather in the nursing home after we heard he was not doing well and he passed away Christmas morning. While my mom was originally hoping that he would not pass until after Christmas, I think she ended up appreciating having people around and a lot to do that day. I hadn't seen him in a while, so I am glad that I got to go say goodbye.
6.
Ezra started communicating a lot more over the last week. He holds his arms out to the people he wants, waves hello, and I think he is also signing for milk. The milk sign looks a lot like a hello wave, but last night I decided they were different.
7.
I came back to work yesterday. It is more difficult than normal to be here after I spent such a nice week with my children.
More Quick Takes found here.
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Our Christmas Card
Snowflakes Ribbon Christmas Card
Don't send boring Christmas cards , personalize them at Shutterfly.
View the entire collection of cards.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)