Bread & Wine Giveaway!!

You've made it to the last day of Bread & Wine week!   In honor of Shauna Niequist's new book Bread & Wine: a Love Letter to Life Around the Table, with Recipes, I'm talking all things Bread & Wine related. I started with some thoughts on grace and cooking, then I gushed over Shauna's book, and shared all about the dinner party I threw for some of my favorite ladies with the help of Shauna's new book.  Today it's giveaway time!

It's the end of Bread & Wine week.  I've had so much fun thinking about community and friendship, cooking and grace, and what happens when we commit to serving those we love food at our table.

The first dinner party I ever threw was truly awful.  I was a horrible cook, mostly because at that point in my life all I could do was bake chicken breasts and boil edamame.  And most of the time I undercooked the chicken.  I came across a cookbook that boasted an entire array of recipes that used only five ingredients.  I figured I could at least handle that so I invited the only friends I'd made in New York thus far over for dinner.  The five of us sat down to a meal made entirely of five ingredients and it was awful.  Probably because it only used five ingredients, but mostly because I was an awful cook.  It was so bad my friends couldn't even really pretend it was edible.  Even my sweet friend Amy, the most encouraging person I know, said something along the lines of, "maybe you just need more practice cooking??"

Anyway, I've come a long way since that first dinner party in terms of the preparing and serving of food I cooked myself.  But I've always maintained the importance of opening up your home and inviting others in.  When you do that you are really just opening up yourself and allowing others to know you better.  The joy and reward in this act is immeasurable.  I've never felt closer to God than through the friendships and community He has provided.

So no matter where you are on the cooking spectrum, whether you're ordering pizza because you screwed up a five ingredient meal or cooking a duck, stuffed in a chicken, stuffed in a turkey (because that to me seems like the greatest of culinary feats), there should always be room around your table.  As my friends and I discovered when discussing our best meals ever, the food itself carries very little weight in the memory.  Usually our best meals ever have much more to do with the company we kept at the table.

Ok pals, so I'm a book pusher.  It is one of my go to gifts and I use the max out of my Amazon Prime membership.  I've given plenty of copies of Shauna's other two books away, so it seems only fitting that I end my Bread & Wine week with a giveaway!  And since only like three and a half people read my blog your chances of winning are super good.  I'm using Rafflecopter for the first time so if it totally fails me, just leave a comment letting me know it's not working.  The giveaway is open until Sunday at midnight!


a Rafflecopter giveaway



I'll be back Monday to announce the winner.  I hope I will anyway.  We leave for vacation tomorrow so my posting will be limited.  But I'm pretty sure I can hop onto the world wide web at some point to at least announce the winner!   And if you are a robber who is reading this- go ahead and try to steal all my stuff while we're gone.  Good luck finding the valuables amidst the one million boxes of crap we've packed up for our move.  I don't own nice things 'cause I'm a forgetful klutz.

At the Table we Eat and Talk

Are you enjoying Bread & Wine week as much as I am??  This week, in honor of Shauna Niequist's new book Bread & Wine: a Love Letter to Life Around the Table, with Recipes, I'm talking all things Bread & Wine related.  Tuesday I shared some thoughts on grace and cooking, yesterday I gushed over Shauna's book, and today is all about the dinner party I threw for some of my favorite ladies with the help of Shauna's new book.  Don't miss tomorrow's post 'cause it's a giveaway!

“At the table we eat and talk.”  Sarah taught this phrase to the little boy she used to take care of.  He was used to eating in front of the television but Sarah wasn’t playing that game.  So she set a table for lunch, turned off the TV and told her little buddy, “at the table we eat and talk.”  She said it every day until eventually he would finish the phrase for her. 

At the table we eat and talk.  It’s so simple and sweet. 

Sarah told this story around my table last Saturday night.  I gathered my most favorite women to my home for a “Bread and Wine/Ladies I Love” dinner party.  I was itching to try some of Shauna’s recipes from Bread and Wine and, as we are about to move in with my parents in a matter of weeks, this felt like my last chance to entertain for a while.

At some point in the evening Whit got a hold of my camera and the photo quality improved exponentially.

I invited my favorite women.  In a stroke of good luck, almost all could come.  Ten women gathered around my table, eleven counting me.  Whit, Sarah, Mal and the other Sarah participated in all sorts of embarrassing antics with me in college and are all founding members of book club.  Charity and Ashley have stuck with me since my high school days, but our friendship now is even more significant than when we were sixteen.  Devon is one of the grace dispensers I met through my internship.  Kate used to live next door to me and was a key player in my survival of early motherhood.  Kelly manages to span all eras of my life, high school, college and motherhood.  And my sister Ryann, well, I play favorites and she’s mine.

In an unprecedented move I actually tried these recipes out before the big Ladies I Love party. I’m usually famous for trying a recipe out for the first time for a dinner party of ten, not reading the recipe correctly and then sending my husband and another party guest out to pick up a missing ingredient.  (I can feel the cringes through my computer screen.) This time however, one of my favorite ladies was going to be out of town for the actual dinner party so I invited her and another pal over for a trial run.  I’m so glad that I did.  It made Saturday so much smoother and I felt more present than at any other dinner I’ve hosted.

I served the Green Well’s Michigan Harvest salad and the Real Simple cassoulet.  We devoured the goat cheese biscuits.  (Can we talk about the goat cheese biscuits for a second?  They are to die for.  Seriously the easiest and best thing I’ve ever made.  I may or may not have misread the recipe and put twice as much goat cheese in them, but you know how I feel- you can never have too much cheese.  For real pals, buy the book, make the goat cheese biscuits, love your life.)  After the plates had been cleared I brought out dark chocolate sea salted butter toffee, which we munched on as the conversation continued.

And oh, the conversation.  After we were seated and served I asked everyone about the best meal they ever had.  Dinners and lunches in foreign countries while studying abroad or travelling were popular favorites.  Charity shared her morning routine of breakfast with her husband before he goes to work.  Ashley’s favorite meal was a breakfast of fish and grits that she caught herself with her grandfather.  The thing about all of our favorite meals is that they had very little to do with the actual food itself.  For all of us what we ate wasn’t as nearly as important as who we ate with and the conversations that happened during the meal. 

We sat around my table for hours last Saturday night discussing social justice and parenting, being women and the blessings female friendships.  We shared funny memories and difficult ones.  We decided that women could be each other’s worst enemies and also their biggest cheerleaders but that nothing takes the place of good chats with your girlfriends.  The table and what happens around it wove its way through our conversation, an idea we couldn’t seem to escape no matter the topic of discussion.   At the table we ate and talked.

When I think about this night I could cry big fat tears of gratitude for these women, these smart, funny, fantastic women who are moving me, inspiring me, pushing me towards my best self.  I am fortunate, I know, to have such amazing women in my life.  These women come from different backgrounds and are in different life places.  Some are mothers, some wives, some single.  They have varied careers, interests, opinions and perspectives.  But all share that most important quality of depth of character.  These women are compassionate thinkers, strong, intelligent quality people.  If I’ve done one thing right in my life it’s to pick the best kind of women to call friends.  

You know how I feel about wine corks don't you?

     

Bread & Wine: a Review

It's Bread & Wine week!  I'm talking all things Bread & Wine in honor of Shauna Niequist's new book Bread & Wine: a Love Letter to Life Around the Table, with Recipes.  Yesterday's post was inspired by this beautiful book.  Today I'm reviewing and tomorrow I'll share all about my Bread & Wine dinner party!

Confession: I have loved Shauna Niequist’s writing since I first cracked open Cold Tangerines years ago.  I devoured Bittersweet in about two days, eight weeks post partum with a baby boy who didn’t sleep for more than twenty minutes at a time.  I have given her books to countless friends, even photocopied chapters and mailed them to people who I think may find comfort in her words.  My book club read Bittersweet.  I pre-ordered Bread & Wine for a few of my girlfriends as Christmas gifts.  I may not be the most unbiased reviewer ever.

Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table, with Recipes is Shauna’s third book.  Like her previous two she writes in an essay/short story style.  This time many of her essays include recipes at the end.  Framed around nourishing our friendships and ourselves, it’s a book about food but also much more than food.  It’s about inviting people into our homes and into our lives.  And, like all of Shauna’s books, it’s about grace and community and friendship and how God’s presence permeates it all.

I’m not a food person like Shauna.  I don’t read cookbooks for fun, and Bread & Wine was an education on descriptive culinary words.  But that didn’t take away from my enjoyment of her book purely on a food and recipe level.  Buy this book for the Goat Cheese Biscuit recipe alone (more on that tomorrow!).  I found myself itching to get into the kitchen, to experiment, to play.  Her recipes are freeing, generous, graceful.  She writes about how she cooks a particular recipe and then punts to you, granting permission to experiment and play, all while maintaining the notion that everyone can cook.  I mean the girl can make baking bread seem totally approachable.  These are normal every day kind of recipes, no fancy kitchen gadgets or extensive food knowledge required.  Her style and approach to cooking make me think Shauna is full of grace.     

Bread & Wine is so much more than a book about cooking and dinner parties though.  It’s about friendship and shame and community.  It’s about fasting and feasting and nourishment.  It’s about the big, beautiful thing that happens when we open ourselves up to friendship and community.  I am a community girl.  People are my thing and there have been a seasons in my life where real, raw, authentic, vulnerable community happened.  It is sacred.  Shauna gets that and this book is ultimately a tribute to that.  To letting people in, warts and all.  To showing up even if you aren’t sure you should.  To taking time to build friendships because they are worth it.   Cooking and dinner parties are the vehicles to get you to this sacred place of community.  There is nothing more precious or honoring than nourishing our loved ones with food yes, but also with love and attention and support.  Shauna gets that and this book will help you to see it too.

Shauna is one of those writers who seems to be “in my head” so to speak.  She articulates beautifully the thoughts and feelings that I am wrestling with.  She gives a voice to ideas and struggles I assume I am alone in.  I feel like she gets me.  Or maybe I get her.  Our childhoods have the similar backdrop of suburban Chicago.  I once worked at her church and share mutual friends.  (Fun fact- our dinner party paths crossed in one of her stories from Bread & Wine.  I had a dinner party on the same night as her “New Year’s Eve in the middle of January” party and we both invited the same person.  Our friend chose her dinner J).  We have a lot of little things in common.  She feels like someone I grew up with, live next door to, work alongside. 

But even if we didn’t have these shared experiences in common I think I would still love Shauna’s writing.  She is one of those authors who is beautifully, captivatingly honest.  She paints a picture of community and life I want to be a part of.  Shauna tells stories in a way that invites you to tell your own stories.   She illuminates the crazy beautiful every day moments of her own life in a way that sheds light onto your own crazy beautiful everyday moments.  I found myself remembering stories I hadn’t thought about in years, suddenly seeing a new gems of wisdom nestled in between the who, what, where, when details.

I can’t recommend it enough.  Go out and get yourself a copy.  Let it become covered in food spills and watermarks and dog-ear all the recipes you want to try.  Love this book well.   And then heed it and gather your community around your table.  See what God does when you open yourself up to others.

Check back here on Friday ‘cause I’m giving away a copy of Bread & Wine

Grace and Cooking

It’s Bread & Wine week!!  This week I’m devoting myself to all things relating to ShaunaNiequist’s new book Bread &Wine: My Love Letter to Life Around the Table, with Recipes.  Tomorrow I’ll share my thoughts on the book itself (spoiler alert: I loved it.)  As I read Bread & Wine I kept coming back to this idea, this truth from my life about grace and cooking.  So today I’m going to share what I’ve discovered.  Later in the week I’ll tell you all about the dinner party I threw in honor of Bread & Wine (aka the best dinner party I ever threw).  And check back here on Friday for a GIVE-AWAY!!!

I never used to be all that interested in cooking.  In college I mostly ate tuna fish and crackers and cheerios.  While registering for wedding gifts at Crate & Barrel I may or may not have burst into tears in front of the wall of kitchen gadgets because I didn’t know what any of them were used for.  At my wedding shower my sister gave me a list of restaurants in the area that delivered.  My reputation for cooking was widely known.

Cooking just made me nervous.  The recipes weren’t always precise.  Following the directions didn’t always guarantee success.  It seemed to me that cooking required you to depend on instincts about food that I didn’t yet have.  You relied on feelings about food and trust in their “doneness.”  And the stakes felt so high with cooking.  If it didn’t turn out all that food (and money) was wasted!  Or what if it tasted really bad?  What would we eat instead?  And the choices!  There seemed to me to be all sorts of choices I had to make with cooking, all kinds of options for substitutions.  What if I made the wrong choice?  It was too intimidating, too risky.  Cooking wasn’t like baking.  Baking had clear rules.  Follow the recipe exactly, mix the specified amounts of the specific ingredients, bake for the instructed time and voila!  Cupcakes.  It didn’t really require me to guess or trust my gut.  I could follow the rules and was rewarded for my obedience.

The deeper truth about my relationship to cooking vs. baking boiled down to this:  becoming proficient at cooking required trial and error, failing and learning from my mistakes, screwing up and giving myself grace and moving on, something that made me extremely uncomfortable.  Baking meanwhile was black and white- just follow the rules to a “T” and you succeed.  In my early twenties I was paralyzed by the idea of failing.  I wanted clear-cut rules to follow so I wouldn’t disappoint anyone.  The way that I baked was boring and required little creativity, but at least I knew what was expected of me. 

When I was 25 I was finally confronted by my worth earning, perfectionist, grace denying junk through an internship at a large church in the area.  I was making the career shift from teaching to youth ministry and had decided to do this internship to give me some hands on experience in ministry so that someone would actually hire me.  I was just looking for a resume boost.  It ended up changing the way I thought about God and grace and myself.

Part of the internship required some intensive counseling type mentoring.  I met one-on-one with Deirdre and Bryan and Devon each week.  Each person acted as a therapist and grace dispenser and listener and exact right question asker.  Deirdre helped me walk through failure.  She took me down the path of facing my fears, naming the worst possible outcomes and then helped me to see that it wasn’t really the end of the world after all.  If I did in fact fail, disappoint, come up short, my life would go on.  I’d survive.  Devon helped me to recognize the constant, graceless internal dialogue I had with myself and introduced me to a voice much more loving and reasonable.  Bryan in particular met me in my brokenness with supernatural grace.  Each week I would confess all the ugly thoughts and feelings I tried to hide from the world lest they figure out the real me and each week he accepted it all without batting an eye.  I would unload all my shame and he would respond with grace.  I expected every confession to elicit disappointment, to taint his opinion of me.  And every time he would remind me why it was perfectly normal for me to feel/think/respond in a particular way and show me that I wasn’t a monster unworthy of love after all.  Bryan made me start to believe that perhaps God wasn’t completely disappointed with all the ways I couldn’t seem to get it together either.  Through these mentors, these giants of grace, I met, for the first time, the God of grace.

And it was there smack in the middle of my twenties that my relationship with God shifted from baking to cooking.  I had been living a life with God that looked a lot like a complicated baking recipe.  There were a lot of legalistic steps and rules but if I could just follow them perfectly I would be rewarded with God’s approval.  As long as I didn’t take any risks, didn’t make any mistakes the cupcakes of God’s love were mine for the taking.  Once I began to understand the God of grace we started cooking together.  I was free to make some mistakes and learn from them.  Free to try some new things and fail, knowing that failure wasn’t the worst thing in the world.  Free to have grace for myself in the process of this life I was cooking up.

This way of living found its way into my kitchen as well.  Cooking became much more fun.   Burning dinner or cooking something that didn’t taste great wasn’t the end of the world and didn’t mean I was unworthy.  It just meant we got to have take-out later.  I learned that substituting an ingredient here and there sometimes made the meal even better than if I’d stuck to the recipe.  I learned from my mistakes and then I didn’t make the same mistake again.  Perhaps the best lesson I learned in the kitchen was that it was harder than I thought to completely ruin a meal and, more often than not, adding more cheese covered any mistake I made. 

I’ve found the same is true for life.  It’s harder than I expect to ruin relationships by revealing the real me.  In fact being honest about my shortcomings, hard parts and vulnerabilities usually brought me closer to others.  And, more often than not, adding more grace covers all things.  

On Grace for Monsters

I wasn’t going to write about this.  I have a list of other topics I planned to write about during my naptime writing session.  Updating you on my failed Lenten practice or a light, breezy post regarding our upcoming move and how I am the worst at packing topped the list.  But since Tuesday morning this topic has consumed my thoughts, refusing to leave, hanging around the corners of my mind, never far, always finding its way in to the forefront.  I think maybe it’s something I need to work out.  I’m still undecided on whether I will click the publish button on this or keep it filed away in my drafts pile.

My hometown has been rocked with a scandal this week.  A high school teacher has been arrested and accused of having an almost year long affair with a student.   He, reportedly, admits to it all.  This isn’t the first time such a scandal has hit my town.  It is the first time a teacher so beloved has breeched this trust and committed this kind of sin.  Shocked, stunned, angry and sad don’t even begin to cover the reactions to this story.

For me, as a former student of the high school where this all took place, this is much more personal than just some teacher from my alma mater that I vaguely remember turning out to be a creepy predator.  I knew this man as both a student and an adult.  He was one of my favorite coaches of an activity very near and dear to my heart that I participated in as a student.  He was still coaching when I returned years later to coach the team myself.  Ironically, the night before the scandal broke, perhaps at the very same time he was being arrested, I came across an old photo of this coach and set it aside to send to him with a sweet “remember when/thanks for being great” note.  On that night, before I knew what I know, I would have called him a friend, said he was someone I knew well, someone I adored, respected, enjoyed and thought highly of.  As a freshman he pulled me into the heart of the team, which allowed me to find my place in an activity that forever changed me.  As a fellow coach I saw him change the course of students’ lives.  He was one of those coaches who kids wanted to be around.  His classroom was a safe haven for the dorks, nerds, jocks and achievers alike.  I can name a number of students who would count his influence upon them as life changing. 

And now, I don’t really know what to do with all this.  As a parent and youth worker I hold a special, significant amount of rage for perpetrators of this crime: preying on the innocence of children and teens.  I have spent most of my life writing off those guilty of this particular sin.  It is reprehensible.  My stomach turns in disgust upon seeing the mug shots of men, these monsters, who have slept with students in their classrooms or youth groups.  I am swift and final with my judgment: they deserve all the years behind bars and more, they should never work again, I hope they lose everything.  For those guilty of this crime I want to take away any and all happiness now and forever.  But now the face in the mug shot is familiar.  The monster has a name and a distinct laugh that, should you say or do something to elicit it, makes you feel like a million bucks.  For me, the man in that picture carries with him dozens of happy memories.

Because he is (was?) so beloved I think people are having a hard time knowing how to react to this news.  Some have turned to blaming the victim- she should have known better, she is partially to blame.  This is wrong.  She is a sixteen-year-old victim.  He is an adult who knows better.

I’m finding my own reaction hard to process.  What do I do with what I thought of him before?  Does this negate any good he has ever done?  Does it wipe clean the record of countless kids whose lives were positively impacted by him?  Should it?  And yet what he did is so, so wrong.  Inexcusable.  Horrifying.  Just plain awful.

What do you do when you know not to excuse the crime and not to blame the victim, but find yourself feeling less disgusted than you think you should and more grieved?  My usual reaction of rage seems dormant.  Instead all I feel is grief.  Grief for his wife and daughter.  Grief for all the students who called him a mentor and must now navigate the confusing emotions of seeing a hero fall from grace.  Grief for his victim, a sixteen-year-old girl who will carry this with her for the rest of her life.  These emotions are not surprising though.  I expect to feel this grief. 

What I do not expect is to feel tremendous amount of grief for him.

I feel sadness for him, for the past that is now tarnished and the future he threw away.  I am finding myself worried about him and his bleak, empty future.  I keep thinking about my friend alone in jail having the darkest night of the soul.  Does he despair his choice, these actions?  He must.  I can imagine him there, wrestling his demons, defeated and alone.  And I feel sad for him.  And then I feel guilty for feeling sad.   Shouldn’t this be the least of his punishments?  Shouldn’t he get everything coming and more?  Doesn’t he deserve to see the end of any happiness now and forever?  Isn’t he now a monster after all?

What does grace look like in this?  How does the God of grace respond?

I’m finding my grief for him to be a surprising key to grace in all of this.  I usually imagine God as angry, annoyed and short- tempered with regards to my sin.  I often assume my wrong doings cause him to write me off, knock me down a few ladder rungs that I will have to earn my way back up.  I assume his judgment is swift and final (much like mine for the nameless monsters in mug shots).

But grief for me, the sinner?  It’s not an emotion I would connect to God’s response to sin.  Does God grieve my sin?  Does he grieve the consequences of my actions, the future I may throw away with a bad choice?  Does he feel sorrow over the ways I have hurt myself with my sin?  I expect God to feel sad for my victims, for the people my sin hurts.  I don’t expect him to feel sorrow for me, for how my sin hurts me.

What if God responds to my sin with grace that sometimes looks like grief?  What if grace is sometimes sorrow and sadness for the sinner too and not just his victims?  I think I am encountering another facet of grace in my emotions following this scandal.  Part of my graceful response towards my friend who did a very foolish, painful, awful thing is to allow myself to feel sadness for him.  He is not undeserving of my grief.  I must let this emotion wash away the judgment and anger and disgust.  And I must remember it when I am presented with a mug shot that is unfamiliar so that I can grieve for that sinner too.  And grieve for the fallen world and the consequences of our actions. 

I must let grace look like grief today and remember that just as I am never outside the grips of grace, neither is anyone else.

On Doing Hard Things

We can do hard things.  That phrase turns and bumps around in my head on constant replay.  I’m pretty sure it’s from Momastery.  It sounds like something she would say.  (If you’ve never read Momastery, go right now and do so.  She says everything I would ever want to say one billion times more beautifully than I could ever hope to say it.) 

We can do hard things was all I could think as I sat in the audiologists office while she explained the inner workings of cochlear implants and what the surgery and year’s worth of follow up appointments would look like.  We can do hard things, like spend months fine tuning an artificial hearing device so that my son can do what most people don’t have to think twice about.  We can do hard things, like put my son through months of relearning how to hear.  We can do hard things, like stay engaged through this meeting, tears streaming down my face, when all I want to do is leave, sit on my couch and watch hour after hour of old Office reruns.

When faced with hard emotional things I find myself completely paralyzed to do normal non-hard things.  In the face of uncertainty and fear for Monster’s future reading the packets and pages of literature on the different brands of cochlear implants feels like an insurmountable hard thing.  As does making dinner, figuring out the logistics of our upcoming move, and cleaning my bathrooms.  All of these relatively simple tasks feel like impossibly hard things.

I know that in the face of hard, emotional, big, scary things some people find comfort in the mindless tasks.  Keeping their bodies busy relaxes their mind and they lose their anxiety in the mundane chores and busywork.  I am not one of those people.

The truth is I tend to avoid things that feel hard.  Convenience is so readily available in this day and age and if I’ve learned nothing from my procrastinating ways it’s the reality that if you avoid something long enough it really might just go away.  I want to skip over the hard things and dive into the fun, beautiful, easy things.  I want the dinner party without all the cooking, cleaning, planning.  I want to take beautiful pictures without having to pour through the 500-page manual that accompanied my new fancy camera.  I want to raise kids who are polite, respectful and obedient without the one million and one time outs.

But some hard things I’m realizing are unavoidable.  Monster has lost more hearing.  So now we are heading down the road of cochlear implants.  Doing the research that accompanies this road is annoying and overwhelming, but I have to do it.  Making appointments and faxing immunization records and keeping track of all the paperwork is not “in my wheelhouse” as one might say.  But loving my little boy is.  And giving him what he needs, regardless of how hard it feels is what I need to do. 

I don’t want to be someone who can’t do hard things.  I don’t want to teach my kids to avoid hard things.  I want them to be able to because life is all about hard things and if I curl up in a ball and avoid this hard thing my son will suffer.    So I’m trying to do it.

And I’m also giving myself grace.  Because if I can just do one of the 15 hard things on my list today then that will be better than none.  And if I give myself a weekend to only do easy things I may just find that I’m much more equipped to do the hard stuff come Monday.  So that’s what I’m doing.  In a timing only God could orchestrate, Tommy and I are flying to San Francisco this weekend to celebrate a dear friends’ birthday.  I’m declaring it a weekend of easy things.  I’m going to read all the books and magazines I’ve been meaning to read.  I’m going to watch the 5 episodes of Project Runway I loaded on my iPad.  Tommy and I are going to enjoy each other and laugh and play and try to forget about Monster’s hearing and the packing and moving waiting for us at home. 

I can do hard things.  And sometimes the hardest thing is giving myself grace when I need a break from doing hard things.

Parent Fails

I make, on a regular basis, more than my fair share of mom fails.  There are just some parenting things that I am not good at.  And today, I’m naming them.  (Lucky you!)  I name these not because I plan to work on them.  I really don’t.  I name them more as a path towards acceptance.  Much like my list of things I don’t do, these are the parenting things I admit defeat on.  I can stress about keeping on top of these mom fails, or I can keep my kids alive.  For right now, I’m choosing option B. 

 And now, in no particular order, my top 7 parent fails (it was 5 but then I thought of 2 more):

1.)  Making my kids brush their teeth.  I’m awful at remembering this.  Seriously, Monster brushes his teeth approximately once every 3-4 days.  Other things in this category I’m the worst at: taking my kids to the dentist regularly ever, kindly telling them that they have bad breath.

2.)  Weather appropriate accessories.  For some reason I cannot seem to get my kids out of the house in weather appropriate accessories.  The other night, in the middle of a snowstorm, in an attempt to just get out of the house that we’d been trapped in all day, Tommy and I took the kids to the restaurant two blocks away for dinner.  Because the car was in the garage we decided to walk there.  We got half a block away when I looked down and realized Toots was not wearing any shoes.  Just socks.  In the middle of a blizzard.  Monster’s three winter hats have all been in my car for at least a week.  He plays outside for recess at school and all of his hats are in my car.  In the summer we’ve been playing outside for about a half an hour before I realize that I didn’t put sunscreen on.

3.)  Child proofing the house.  I know that there are a plethora of child proofing products available at Target.  Unfortunately I can never remember to pick them up during one of my twice (thrice?) weekly trips there.  And so poor Toots continues to fall down the bottom two steps.  Yes I realize a gate would probably help.  But that’s a lot of work.  So is installing those drawer protectors.  Instead I’ll just continue to pick up the sandwich bags Toots strews all about the house.  Additionally I’ve come to realize it might be wise to invest in some closable boxes for Monster’s markers and crayons so that my daughter doesn’t go around looking like she ate a smurf on a regular basis.  But again, that probably won’t make its way to my Target list.

4.)  Doing creative crafts and projects.  I know I was once a teacher, but I was NOT an elementary school teacher.  I don’t craft.  I have never looked on Pinterest for interesting projects to do with the kids.  I kind of think Pinterest is the devil.  My sister-in-law once gave me an awesome “toddler activity box” (that she saw on Pinterest) and every “crafty activity” has totally gone unused.  I open it.  I think about it.  I decide to save the crafts for another day.  It is never another day.

5.)  Teaching my kids stuff they are supposed to know.  Monster’s therapists will ask me from time to time how he’s doing on his colors.  I usually lie and say great.  The truth is he’s doing as well on his colors as he was the last time she worked with him.  Because I certainly have not practiced with him since then.  Monster didn’t know his body parts until he was like two and a half.  Partly because of his speech delay, but mostly because I never really thought to work with him on it.  I’m fairly certain that his hearing loss, and subsequent early enrollment in school, may be the best thing that ever happened to him.  Otherwise Monster would likely go to kindergarten not knowing letters, colors, numbers or how to spell his name.  Poor Toots.  She can hear so no early intervention pre-school for her.  She’s in real trouble.

6.)  Speaking to my kids in age appropriate ways.  I can’t help it.  I work with teenagers and that tends to extend into my parenting.  I’m sarcastic with my two year old.  Instead of telling him to “calm his body down” I say, “if you kick me in the boob one more time while I’m changing your diaper I will force you to change your own diapers even the really soup-y diarrhea ones that you need to take a shower after.”  I tell my crying 10 month old she’s being a total diva on par with a Bachelor contestant.  On particularly hard days I may or may not accuse them of driving me towards alcoholism.

7.)  Not laughing when they fall down.  I know.  I know.  This one is particularly bad, but I truly cannot help it.  When my toddler takes a huge spill I can’t not laugh.  Have you seen a two year old try to take a corner at 50 mph, turn too soon, hit the wall and then ricochet off of it, tumbling to the ground?  It’s hilarious.  Luckily when I hold him close as he cries he can’t see the tears of laughter falling down my face.  I’m hoping he assumes the violent laughter shakes are sobs of solidarity.

And there you have it.  My top 7 (of about 500+) parent fails.  I’m cool with it.  My kids are still alive.  They sleep and eat pretty well.  They are mostly fun to be around.  They haven’t tried to murder anyone yet.  My work here is probably done.

Bad Girls Book Club

I went to book club last night.  It was at Mal’s apartment, in the city.  We ate tilapia with sweet potato mash and the most delicious salad with homemade dressing.  We sat around Mal’s coffee table and drank wine and after the dinner plates were cleared we devoured chocolate pudding made from scratch and strawberries. 

For the last five and a half years I’ve met every month with my book club.  I started the club the fall after I’d moved back to Chicago from New York.  Newly married and living in the suburbs after being smack dab in the busiest city there is, I found myself lonely in that weird way only newlyweds are.  I had come off a season in New York that was rich with female friendships.  The see each other three to four times a week kind of friendships.  My marriage was so fresh that I felt guilty making plans in the evenings if Tommy wasn’t travelling.  And after a few months of this I realized the importance of girlfriends.  So I set out to get something regular on the calendar.

I had plenty of high school and college friends in the area but I’d been absent from their lives for two years.  It had become painfully clear that summer that their lives had gone on without me during this time.  In many ways reaching out to these friends to start the book club was my attempt to create a lifeline back to these women.  It was a way to try and figure out how I fit back in their lives and they in mine.

The initial email I sent out called it the “Better than Oprah’s Book Club Book Club.”  Our first gathering was at our tiny little coach house.  We had no kitchen table so we sat on the floor around our coffee table.  Our menu consisted entirely of appetizers from the frozen foods section of Trader Joe’s and I used every single serving platter and dish that I had received as wedding gifts.  We read Jodi Picoult’s “Nineteen Minutes” that first month.  It got mixed reviews.

We’ve been through a lot since that first meeting.  Members have come and gone.  We’ve had babies and weddings and new jobs and career changes.  Our meals have improved greatly since our first feast (thankfully!) and I’m always amazed at the creativity these girls have employed with regards to different dietary concerns.  (For a brief period we were meat, fish, gluten and dairy free!)  Some months we have riveting, challenging, passionate discussions about the books, and in others we didn’t even mention the book at all.  There was about a year where all we did was meet monthly to drink wine.  That has been the one consistency all these years: wine and lots of it.

I learned the art of hosting with these girls.  I learned how to plan a menu and coordinate cooking times.  I learned how to accommodate different dietary concerns and how to set a pretty table.  I learned all of it by making spectacularly huge mistakes and learning from them.  And isn’t that the joy of good friends: the grace to fail miserably and the faith of a better next time.

Beyond these gifts of grace and faith the book club girls have given me an even greater one: the company of smart, talented, beautiful women.  Some of us are moms, some single, some married and some dating.  We live in the ‘burbs and the city.  We work full time and part time and everything in between.  We are doctors, lawyers, teachers, students, youth pastors, marketing execs and non-profit champions.  There is such a wide array of thoughts and opinions and ideas and each of us brings a different perspective to the table.  Which is what I love.  Conversation can flow from we got our kid to stop using a pacifier to how the author’s character development allowed us to root for them even though we hated their actions.  From our desire to improve our marriage to politics and upcoming elections.  From women’s rights to trips to Mexico.  I learn so much from these women each month.  Being in their company fills me up.

I look forward to the regularity of these monthly meetings perhaps an inappropriate amount.  I love, love, love the women that comprise this club.  They are all smart, articulate, beautiful, kind and thoughtful.  I love intelligent conversation with these passionate women and silly gossip with them too.  Particularly now, as I juggle part time work and lots of time home with two small children, I find myself incredibly grateful for a monthly meeting with grown ups.  Not just any grown ups.  A group of some of the best grown ups I know.  The book club girls.