15 Pounds of Awesome

Mac is four months old today, and he is just nothing but fifteen pounds of love and awesomeness. He’s all smiles—that’s like his thing, smiling with a side of laughing. When that baby smiles, everything stops for me. I am totally, completely, one-thousand-percent in love with him.

He’s a laid-back, happy baby, and he basically gets passed from grandma to grandma to aunt to papa to dad to mom, with the occasional sort-of strangle/sort-of hug from his big brother. And he rolls with it all. He’s been to Dallas, Atlanta, Palm Beach, South Haven, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, and Appleton, Wisconsin. Not bad for four months.

Everyone says that when your baby is born, your other children suddenly become giants, and that’s absolutely true. Henry became practically an adult the day we came home from the hospital, and he’s proven to be a fantastic big brother. He loves to dress just like his little brother, so every day he comes into the nursery when I’m changing Mac to see what he’s wearing, and then finds something similar. Darling.

Even after four months, I confess that I’m still having trouble finding the right words for how I feel about this baby, about this gift, about the depth of gratitude I feel for his healthy birth and for each passing day of growth and thriving life.

Five years ago, Henry's birth was the beginning of our parenting journey, and he has brought us joy and laughter and love every day. Right alongside our joy and gratitude for Henry, though, there were years of longing, praying, losing, hoping, trying not to hope. Mac is the answer to every one of those prayers and every one of those tears.

Every parent believes their baby is a miracle. And they’re right. And so do we.

Every parent believes their baby is absolute magic. And they’re right. And so do we.

Here’s to four months of our magic, our miracle, our baby Mac.

Giveaway: Custom Canvas from Livingston & Porter

It’s a new year, and it’s time for a giveaway!

I love this one: my sweet friend Holly from Livingston and Porter will paint one of her amazing custom canvases for the winner.

You know, of course, that I’m a words person by profession. And that carries through all of my life—I love to be surrounded by words: quotes, fragments of poetry, lines from songs, passages from scripture. Naturally, then, Holly’s canvases are totally my jam.

(Yeah, I absolutely just used the phrase "totally my jam." What?)

I have Holly’s work all over my house, literally, and last Christmas, she painted custom canvases for my husband, my mom, my dad, my brother, and my best friend. Seriously, I’m a fan.

I love giving these canvases as gifts—I chose my dad’s life verse (1 Corintians 15:58), a quote about peacemaking for my mom, and a much-loved Nietzsche quote for Aaron: “One must still have enough chaos within oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” 

For a friend with a darling new baby girl, Holly did a canvas in the softest, sweetest pink, and in white it said, “The day you were born, the world had to make room for a little more fancy.” Come on.

For the winner, Holly will do any color, any shape, and any quote for you—so cool, right?  You can peek at her Etsy site for examples, or totally dream up your own. Also on her site are all sorts of treasures—vintage books, things she finds at estate sales. The girl’s got style.

All you have to do is leave a comment with your name and your favorite quote—and it doesn’t have to be the one you’ll choose for the canvas if you win. Just share with us some words that move you.

One entry per person, and the winner will be chosen at random at noon CST on Monday, January 30^th.  Simple enough, yes?

My favorite quote, of course, is in the photo, and that canvas is hanging right in my kitchen, where I see it every day. Splendid torch, indeed.

XO

***Late breaking news: Holly is the best, and not only is she giving away a custom canvas, but because there are so many comments, she's also giving away three Valentine's Day canvases!  That means that on Monday, we'll annouce FOUR winners!  XO***

On Writing & Creativity

I am, as you know, working on Bread & Wine, my third book, a collection of essays about faith, family, food, friendship & life around the table. It’s due this summer, and I’m taking a little bit of a different tack than I have before.

I began again in earnest on January 3^rd, and I write between two and three days a week, depending on the week. I write sometimes at a coffee shop—there are four coffee shops in my rotation, and the one I choose for a particular day has everything to do with who’s watching my sweet baby that day. If I leave him with my mom, I go to the place nearest her house, and so on. That's all just about the same as last time.

I realized, though, that somewhere along the way I developed a bad habit, or at least what I think is an unhelpful habit for my current purpose. I slipped into writing a first draft, cleaning it up, reading through again, crafting first paragraph and last, and then pronouncing it nearly done, all in a day. That’s good, I think. It’s productive, and it lets me cross one essay off the list—one down!

But what it doesn’t do is force me to play in the messy, unfolding, rich, mulch-y creative wreckage. It’s tidy, it’s straightforward, it’s perfect for a blog post—and the bonus there is immediate feedback. But have I become so accustomed to immediate feedback and the tidiness of finishing a quick essay that I’m missing some of the deep, gutsy, creative work that’s yielded only when you let it sit and settle and marinate for a while? That's the question I'm asking these days.

Five years ago this month I was working on Cold Tangerines. I didn’t have a blog. No Facebook or Twitter. I wrote and wrote, and for ages, no one saw it. Occasionally my editor. Very rarely, a friend. It was a wide, sloppy, creative, beautiful mess. Bits and pieces, knit together and unraveled, over and over till they settled together like old friends. There were a few of those essays that I wrote straight through, in a flame of creativity and pure happiness, but I think that happened because I gave myself the protected time and space to write both good stuff and terrible stuff.

So I’m going back to that place. We’re going away with friends mid-February, and between now and then, my only goal is volume—words and words and words. Every story and idea and rabbit trail. Every question, dream, memory. Quantity, freedom, playing around with words.

It’s harder than I thought, mostly because I miss feeling like I’m producing—look at this finished thing I made today! But I can tell, at the same time, that it is yielding as sense of freedom and gutsiness, a depth that I hadn’t been hitting when I wanted a quick, clean 1500 words and a check off my list.

So here's to the mess, the sprawling, ugly-beautiful, chicken-scratched, rabbit-trailed, creative wandering. To the discipline it takes to stay there. And to the goodness we find when we linger there.

As always, for me, writing is more about learning than teaching, more about discovering than reporting, more about showing up than showing off.

Here's to showing up.

Four Words for 2012

Hello again—and Happy New Year! We had a great, sunny, family-filled few days at the beach after Christmas, and then our first day back, I began writing again.

It’s great and hard and exciting and nerve-wracking, and I’m finding that adding three days a week of writing into life with two kids, etc., etc. to be a bit of a trick—the days are flying, and the house is a wreck, and I haven’t yet gotten into the groove.

I’m also attempting to reply to lots of very kind emails from the fall—thank you, first, for all your messages, and second, for your grace as I reply to them after such a delay.

Three month old, five year old, looming manuscript deadline, laundry pile-up, bursting inbox…this poor blog is always the last to get some love and attention, but as with all things this season, better late than never, yes?

These are the four words that I’ve chosen to guide me through the coming year:
SMARTER, STRANGER, HEALTHIER, MORE HOLY

SMARTER 

Once upon a time, like when I graduated from college, I was kind of smart. Or at least smart-ish. I read complicated novels. I read literary criticism. I read the New Yorker. I read in French. Fast forward a decade or so, and while I still read a lot, my standards have slipped. Now, instead of the New Yorker, I read US Weekly. Instead of reading in French, I read cookbooks with French recipes. And that’s not all bad, but this year I want to rediscover my inner smartypants—more Time than tabloids, more Joan Didion than Jenny McCarthy.  I want to turn off the tv and pick up something meaningful, complex, challenging. I want to end the year smarter than when it started.

STRANGER 

Along those lines, when I graduated from college, I was a little less consumed by consumer culture. I was a little stranger. I listened to more indie music, spent less time at Target, danced a little more to the beat of my own drummer. And this year, I want to reclaim that funny little indie artist girl.  I want to buy less, consume less, feel less in line with a mainstream culture that has very little to offer in terms of depth and meaning.

I don’t want to watch the Kardashians. I don’t want to keep filling my house with stuff to make life more convenient—cheap toys, frozen meals, disposable everything.  I want to be, consciously, a little weirder--creative, risky, gutsy.  Generous, alternative, courageous. A little strange.

HEALTHIER 

Let it be said—yes, let it be shouted across the internets—I’m not ready to go all upper-thirties Chico’s-wearing mom just yet. Four pregnancies (2 healthy, 2 not) in five years, along with a move, two books, and two book tours, have not been kind to my body. It’s time to make some serious changes.

For me, that’s about a lot more than a diet. It’s about my appetites, my beliefs about myself and about my body. It’s about exercise and time and self-esteem. I know I won’t do it perfectly, but I’m on it. Ready to learn a new way, ready to teach this old dog some new tricks in 2012.

MORE HOLY 

It would sound better, I know, to say holier, but holier immediately makes me think ‘holier than thou,’ and that’s not what I mean at all. What I mean is holier than I was last year, and the year before. I want to be more like Christ—more forgiving, less angry. More able to sacrifice, less attached to my own safety and comfort. More prayerful and less fearful. More disciplined and less attached to my own preferences.

So there we are...2012: smarter, stranger, healthier, more holy.

What words are guiding you through the year?

Present over Perfect

Here we are, Christmastime. T-6 days until the big day, and if your week is anything like mine, it's full of family parties and gatherings with friends, preschool Christmas programs and coffee dates with out of town friends just here for the holidays. And if your week is anything like mine, your gifts are mostly purchased but mostly not wrapped, and your laundry situation, after a busy weekend, is dire.

When I officiate a wedding, I usually meet with the bride & groom about a week out, and there are a few pieces of advice I always give. The first is that from this point on, nothing can get added to the wedding to-do list. Things can only be taken off the list, either completed or abandoned. But nothing gets added--no last minute project, no stroke of genius DIY thing you see on Pinterest. If it's not already on the list, no matter how charming, adding it will only make you crazy.

And then I tell them that while they can add nothing to the list, I can, in fact, add two very important things to their list. First: a no-wedding-talk date. Second: rest, whatever that means--sleep, an unscheduled hour, a walk, a bath.

They always look at me like I'm nuts. I can see them thinking, we're up to our ears in seating charts and programs to assemble and family drama to mitigate, and you want us to go on a date and then take a nap?

Actually, yes.

Because what will make their wedding day perfect is not the flowers or the favors, but a bride & groom who are happy, connected, present, patient.

And the same is true at Christmas. You can show up with your perfectly wrapped grab bag gift & your perfectly baked cookies...and your perfectly resentful and frazzled self, ready to snap at the first family member you see.

Or you can choose to rest your body & nourish your spirit, knowing that bringing a grounded, present self to each holiday gathering is more important than the gifts you bring.

So this is my advice to you this week: add nothing to the to-do list. Abandon well-intentioned but time-consuming projects. And make rest & space priorities, so that what you offer to your loved ones is more than a brittle mask over a wound-up and depleted soul.

You know that my intention for the season has been PRESENT OVER PERFECT.

I feel like every day this past week I was given an opportunity to live this out: a new friend invited me to a cookie exchange...on the only night Aaron would be home until Christmas, because of the Christmas Eve services at our church. We didn't have plans, per se, but I had a sense that we needed to be home together. And so I said no, which was hard for me, and our little family did approximately nothing--which was just what we needed.

I co-hosted a party the next night, and one of the things I brought was....frozen meatballs. You know I love to cook, and I was planning, of course, to make them from scratch. But it was too much--time and energy I don't have in this season.

And, of course, no one cared. That's the lesson in this for people like me who sometimes get wound up about doing things perfectly...90% of the people in your life won't know the difference between, say, fresh and frozen, or handmade and storebought, and the 10% who do notice are just as stressed out as you are, and your willingness to choose simplicity just might set them free to do the same.

My friends from high school always get together this time of year, and in the last several years we've started a tradition of building gingerbread houses with all our kids. This year, two of us have sick kids. I have a newborn. One is working full time in a new position. One is about 8 & 3/4 months pregnant. As the emails swirled around about a date for this year, finally one person said, "I love you all so much--enough to let tradition slide this year in order to keep things simpler this season."  Ah, yes. Yes. Yes.

Present over perfect.

Quality over quantity.

Relationship over rushing.

People over pressure.

Meaning over mania.

Those are my guiding thoughts for this season, and the ones that I keep at the forefront of my mind as I look over my plans for this week. Nothing else to be added, except blessed little stretches of rest and space.

What does this mean for your week? What might need to be crossed off your list, or simplified, or postponed until after the holidays?

What might you need to say no to, in order to bring a whole, healthy self to the things you've said yes to?

The irony, of course, must not be lost on us: a season that is, at its heart, a love story, a story about faith and fragility, angels, a baby, a star--that sweet, simply beautiful story gets lost so easily in a jarring, toxic tangle of sugar and shopping bags and rushing and parking lots and expectations.

In our lowest, most fragmented moments, we feel out of control, controlled, in fact, by expectations and to-do lists and commitments and traditions. This is that season, we shrug, when things get a little crazy. No avoiding it.

But that's not true. And that's shifting the blame. You've been entrusted with one life, made up of days and hours and minutes. You are spending them according to your values, whether you admit it or not.

Let's be courageous in these days.

Let's choose love and rest and grace.

Let's use our minutes and hours to create memories with the people we love, instead of dragging them on one more errand or shushing them while we accomplish one more seemingly necessary thing.

Let's honor the story--the silent night, the angels, the miracle child, the simple birth, with each choice that we make.

Merry, merry, merry Christmas.