Creating a comfortable life one moment at a time
This quote by Gretchen Rubin (author of The Happiness Project) popped up on several blogs after the recent ALT Summit. My understanding is that Ms. Rubin was giving an address and told the audience that she had given up on trying to find work-life balance. Instead she was going to—well, the Mug of Wisdom will tell you what she said. I think it’s great advice.
{ Lily in our hotel room in Nanchang }
The other day I clicked on Design Mom for my daily fix and there I was! Gabrielle has a new feature called “Design Mom Asks.” She selects four or five bloggers and asks them to answer a question like “What’s the most wonderful gift you’ve ever received?” The question I got to answer was “What was the biggest chance you ever took?” You can read my response (and the others) here. Feel free to laugh at me, but I told Tim (rather breathlessly, probably) that this must be the way a comedian feels when she gets a gig on Leno.
It’s no secret that I have a total Mom Crush on Gabrielle. Yes, she has great ideas and is very generous and willing to share the blogging love through things like “Design Mom Asks.” But for me it’s something more than that. Sometimes I think that people don’t always do well with others’ success. So the fact that Gabrielle is so successful despite having a great marriage and pleasant children and staying slim after having six of them gives me hope that I don’t have to be a big, reality-TV-worthy mess for people to read my blog or be able to relate. It’s okay to be your best self. Or at least to try to be. And I love that she’s carved out an amazing creative space for herself, despite having such a large family. I have a feeling Gabrielle is good at not giving too much of her butter away.*
(* You have to read this post for that to make any sense.)
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I’m heading out for the last of our Chinese New Year parties, but first I wanted to share some fun links with you:
Do you have big plans for the weekend? The girls and I are going to a party tonight where we’ll be making all kinds of Valentine-related projects. I’m in charge of one of the “crafting stations.” I haven’t put anything together yet (yikes), but I’m picturing something with jelly jars and Dove chocolates and red-and-white bakers’ twine. You know, just cram all the obsessions into one activity. If I could somehow work in red-and-white-striped paper straws, it’d be perfect.
Tim and Andrew get to go see The Lion King for a band field trip. Have you seen it? I remember needing a lot of tissues. And then of course there’s the Super Bowl on Sunday. What do you think of these Indiana-inspired snacks?
Have a great weekend, and I hope you’ll come back next week!
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Here in the midwest we have a tradition at our State Fair that involves young dairy princesses getting their images carved out of big slabs of butter. Maybe you have this tradition, too? No? One of Lexie’s godmothers was a dairy princess and when the fair was over she cut up her Butter Head and gave the chunks away as Christmas gifts.
I bring this up because I was trying to explain the feeling I have of constantly being chipped away at to my Georgia hermana the other day. And the image of the State Fair Butter Heads kept popping up. As a wife and daughter and friend and neighbor and mother of four, of course I’m going to give away a lot of, well, butter throughout the day. But the truth is that much of the time I feel like people are coming at me with a chisel and just scraping butter off at will.
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Whew! This was another one of those busy-literally-every-minute days. They’re not my favorite, but at least I get to check Annual Physical off my list. (Am I the only one who would rather visit the dentist than have a routine check-up?)
Next on the agenda are the Chinese New Year parties we’re hosting for Will’s and Lily’s classrooms over the next couple of days. We’ve done quite a few of these celebrations in the past, so we have the format down pretty well. I just had to come up with a good dragon activity for the Year of the Dragon. I like the Dragons on Parade over at Kaboose. We’ll have to skip painting the streamers, but otherwise I think the dragons will work great for a parade through the hallways.
(If your kids aren’t in school yet, the dragons would be a fun way to introduce them to the Chinese New Year. Just get some Chinese take-out, have a little parade around the house, and you have a party!)
[Read more…] about Chinese New Year Parties / Planning Phase