Toots Turns One!

My baby girl turned one yesterday.

Toots' BFF "Baby Carrot"

We had a pirate party for her on Sunday.  It was a pirate party because she is my little pirate.  She is wild and happy, a little punch drunk and funny.  She is not stealth or sneaky like her ninja brother.  She is not pulled together, neat and tidy like her dad.  She is pure joy and happiness bursting in all directions.  I marvel at her tiny body wondering how it possibly contains all that personality.

For her actual birthday yesterday we started the day with cupcakes for breakfast (a family tradition).

She and I had a ladies day in the city.  I've been waiting a long time for a mama/daughter city date.  I couldn't have picked a better partner to pal around the Windy City with.

We visited Daddy at work.

And Aunt Ry for lunch.

As I drove us home, racing to make it back for nap time, I couldn't help but think back to April 2012.  She was due April 15th.  Her brother had arrived 10 days early and caught me totally off guard, scrambling to cover the plans and appointments I'd made when I foolishly assumed I'd be pregnant for another 2 weeks.  Armed with the knowledge that most second babies arrive even earlier than the firsts I locked my calendar down for the month of April.  There was literally nothing planned that I absolutely needed to attend.  I figured I'd have a baby in my arms by Easter, the first weekend in April that year.  Each week came and went, more excruciatingly slow than the last.  Each night I would go to bed thinking this is the night I go into labor.  Each morning I would wake up still pregnant.  It was the longest of months.

Finally, finally at the absolute end of the month my baby girl decided to grace us with her presence.  A presence that has been blessing us every day since.

Contrast April 2012 with this past month and you might think we were trying to make up for lost time.  This past month had us in California and Kentucky.  We moved out of our house and in with my parents, caught "The Book of Mormon", played laser tag with middle schoolers, threw a church fundraiser dinner and a first birthday party.  I don't know if we've ever had a fuller month which is saying a lot.

But it's a month filled with good stuff.  The best stuff.  As I think about our lives in April 2012 compared to the same month a year later I marvel at how simply and perfectly Toots fits into our family.  April last year was the aching missing of one we hadn't yet met.  This year it's a month rich with all of life's best stuff and Toot's presence is seamless.  She fits in with our family as only one who is meant to be with us could.  She's rolled with all the punches of this past year bringing us joy and laughter and love.  Our family is better with her.  She belongs with us.

Can good beget good?

Like many I've watched the news on the Boston Marathon bombings with a heavy heart and an anxious stomach.  As a marathoner this feels closer to home than some other tragedies.  I know what a finish line feels like after 26.2, the emotions, the exhaustion.  The Boston marathon is any ordinary marathon times a thousand- the height of a finish line experience.  And this- this act of evil set off in the middle of it all.  I just can't.

The news people are speculating that this was a domestic act of terrorism.  One of our own.  They cited lots of reasons why they believe this, but one stuck out.  Throughout our American history this week this time between April 15th-ish to 20th-ish has been a week of horrors.  Columbine, Virginia Tech, Oklahoma City all saw tragedies during this period.  The reason for this common occurrence?  Hitler's birthday on April 20th.

Evil begets evil.  One man's reign of terror spawns multiple other acts of terror in his honor.  One act of evil opens the door for another and each time the stakes are raised and the evil compounds.  If I think too hard about it I lose all faith in humanity and only long for heaven.

I sat on my parents living room floor watching the news coverage while my children climbed over my legs simultaneously playing independently and demanding my attention.  Attention that shifted between tragic horror and joyful coos.  It's hard to lose all faith in humanity when your eleven month old is working hard for your affection, showing off and preening perfectly.

And so as I realized that evil begets evil I wondered if that also meant good begets good.  Does one act of good open the door for another, raising the stakes each time?  Can goodness compound?

On a night like this I have a hard time believing.  With images of blood soaked streets and news of an eight year old victim dead believing that good begets good isn't a simple act.  I must choose to believe.  I must choose it with every ounce of will and faith.  Because I can't live in a world where evil begets evil if good doesn't also beget good.  And while evil will always scream louder than good I am also reminded that Satan's voice always seems louder than God's still, quiet whispers.  But God's voice, His soft, freeing voice of love and goodness is always there, just beneath the surface, waiting for me to tune in.  And the good that is begetting good is there too.  Small acts of kindness compounding upon more acts of kindness.  One large act of evil will scream, but the thousands of acts of good will rise together.  And if we tune into them, focusing on that good will beget more good.  I believe it.

If you need proof, read this.

And the winner is...

Abby!!  Congrats Abby I know you will love this book!  Thanks to everyone who entered!  I totally encourage everyone to get this book!

Best wishes from sunny CA!  We are headed to LEGO land which I'm sure will make Monster pee his diaper with excitement!


And happy Easter to all (a day late). Easter reminds me that love wins. Always.

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.