Merry Christmas from our family to yours!
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Month: December 2010
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Baking it till you make it
Sometimes it’s hard to love any minute of motherhood. I realized that my problem with this lately basically comes down to being burnt out, despite trying to make time for myself.
Which means it’s time to pull out the “big guns”: those almost fail-safe activities that we all enjoy. Working together usually helps to decrease contention and bickering
A few of ours:
- Getting out of the house
- Television (or turning it off)
- Art projects
- Tickling
- Reading
- Baking
Guess which one we did today.
What are your “big guns”?
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Thanksgiving Point Winner!
Thank you to everyone who entered the Thanksgiving Point Giveaway! I wish I had a pass for each and every one of you. (Fo’ realz, yo.)
Alas, there can be only one winner. And that winner is comment number . . .
Twelve!
Congratulations to Erin! I’ll get your pass to you ASAP!
(I started the counter at 2 to exclude a comment I made, and so I wouldn’t have to renumber all the comments.)
Thanks again to everyone who entered!
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Loving any minute of it
If you’re in Utah, don’t forget to enter the Thanksgiving Point Giveaway! Today is the last day!
It seems like, if we’re happy, we’re supposed to love every minute of our lives. If we enjoy motherhood, we should love every minute of it. And some people really do love every minute of being a mom—so if we don’t, there must be something wrong with us.
I don’t believe that’s true (and I sincerely hope it’s not!).
I say this because sometimes I struggle to love any minute of motherhood, for weeks at a time. Sure, there’s the occasional 30 seconds of bliss as I snuggle a finally-asleep-again-baby, and the flush of pride when Rachel starts crawling at six months or Rebecca successfully counts to 12(!) at <two and a half, and the smiles at Hayden’s first realistic full-body drawing:
But those tiny pleasures are so easily forgotten after hours of diapers, whining, crying, screaming, bickering, punishments, refereeing, and motherhood in general—hours where it feels like these tiny tyrants need everything you have to give and more.
When I dare to admit that feeling, I often get comments telling me I should go back to work. Give up, essentially. Focus on what will make you happiest (“giddy with delight”) immediately.
I do still think that what I’m doing as a stay-at-home mom is important. But sometimes, I’m so unhappy on a daily basis that I struggle to feel that what I’m doing is best for me and for the kids.
I do still think that what I said a year ago is true:
Choosing to be happy does not mean that we will automatically be happy all the time. It doesn’t mean we always choose whatever might make us happy right this second.
Choosing happiness means we choose the things we know are most important for our long term happiness.
But I think I need to put more effort into making better choices on a day-to-day basis. I don’t believe we’ll be “giddy with delight” every minute, no matter what we’re doing, but we can try to focus on the things that do make us feel good about motherhood. And it’s about time I recommit to doing that.
When I was good about working on Feeling Fulfilled Fridays, that’s what I was trying to do: focus on those things that I can do to affect the way I feel and we all function. Maybe it’s about time I work on those things again.
I stopped posting about it for several reasons: struggling with these feelings, being too busy, and the deafening lack of response and enthusiasm from 99% of my readership. However, I think that focusing on fulfillment again—refocusing—can help with the first two, since I think they’re really symptoms of the problem instead of side-effects.
The last one . . . well, that one’s up to you. Is there anything I can do to help encourage you to participate in Feeling Fulfilled Fridays?
As a reminder, for FFF we create a list of things that help us feel accomplished, work on a few of those things during the week, and report on Fridays.
What can you do to enjoy your time as a mother more?
And oh yeah, Rachel really is crawling:
Manic smiley photo by Astrid Phillips
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Blogger Finds the Happy Feed Medium
I’ve long said full feeds are the best option for bloggers and readers. But for some posts, a full feed isn’t the best option—and now Blogger users have even more feed options with the addition of Jump Breaks in the feed.
Jump Breaks have been around since September 2009 (announced on 09/09/09). Up until a few days ago, you could use Jump Breaks on your blog to truncate posts displayed there. Write a long post, but don’t want it making your homepage load so long? Insert a Jump Break a few paragraphs in, and the main page of your blog will only display the post to that point, with a link to see the full version.
To insert a Jump Break, you can click on the Edit HTML tag and enter <!– more –> . Or, in the Compose tab, you can click on the Jump Break button:
Now you can use the same function in your feeds. To enable the Jump Breaks in your feed, go to Settings > Site Feed. By “Allow Blog Feeds,” select “Until Jump Break.”
You can even customize the “Read more” text. Go to Design > Page Elements. Under Blog Posts, click Edit.
Then just change the Post Page Link Text in the popup window:
Why would you want to use Jump Breaks?
There are a lot of reasons to use Jump Breaks in your feed and on your blog. For example:
- To cut off a long or image-heavy post that would take a long time to load.
- To customize when and where you publish a “snippet” or “preview” feed.
- To keep your homepage from getting too long.
- To display a larger variety or number of posts on your homepage.
On other blogging platforms
If you use WordPress, this all might look a little familiar: you can also split posts in WordPress with the <!– more –> tag. You can type that in the HTML version of a post, or just use the more button: in the Visual tab 
or the HTML tab 
. You can even customize the text of the link it inserts, if you’re feeling ambitious.
In TypePad, you can split posts if you’re a premium subscriber.
What do you think? Do you or would you ever use this function? Why or why not?
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Thanksgiving Point GIVEAWAY
Our grand finale of giveaways is a full year family membership to Thanksgiving Point, a $175 value!
Thanksgiving Point is . . . man, I don’t know how to describe it. They have a kids’ dinosaur museum with an IMAX theater. They have a regular movie theater. They have a barnyard. They have shopping. They have restaurants. They have gardens. They have cooking classes. They have places for conferences and conventions and dinners and weddings.
Hayden and Rebecca enjoyed the light and rainbows exhibit at the museum in August (it’s dark in the room, and this was a cell phone camera):
Thanksgiving Point generously invited me along with a bunch of other bloggers in Utah to a holiday preview. We got to taste some amazing shrimp nachos and butternut squash soup with pepitas (and curry and ginger). Both were fantastic!
Then they showed us some inexpensive neighbor gifts: forced bulbs. We put pea gravel in the bottom of a used tin can, then potting soil to about 1″ from the top. We took paperwhite bulbs and put them basically on top of the soil, then tucked sphagnum (peat) moss around them. Then we decorated the cans with a burlap ribbon and floral embellishments. Neighbor gifts for <$2—and flowers in December!
As you can see, mine has grown well over the last two weeks (haven’t killed it yet!):
We also got to learn about how they stock their Emporium store for Christmas (which is a year-long endeavor) and stay on top of trends. We got to see their basement stock room, too.
Then we got to take a trolley ride through Thanksgiving Point’s holiday lights (with hot chocolate!). I really liked the lights, and the nativity paintings at the end. I think my kids would be completely enthralled. (You can take trolley [or wagon or carriage] rides or drive through with your own car.)
Thanksgiving Point members can get into the holiday lights display for half off—and a whole lot of other stuff:
- Free Admission to Thanksgiving Point Gardens, Museum of Ancient Life and Farm Country
- 10% Discount on Retail & Food Property Wide
- Monthly Thanksgiving Point Gazette
- E-Mail Blast
- Personalized Membership Card
- 50% off Admissions for accompanied guests
- Early Admission to Thanksgiving Point Gardens
- Mammoth Screen Movies $5 per person/per movie
And now you can get all that for a year, for free!
How to enter
There are several ways to enter:
- Leave a comment on this post
- Comment on another post from this week
- Subscribe to my blog! In the feed, there’s a secret code with instructions at the bottom of this post
- Tweet about this contest (post the direct link to your tweet in the comments; only one tweet per day will count)
- Post about this contest on Facebook (post the direct link to your tweet in the comments; only one post per day will count)
Do any/all of the above through Friday, December 17.
How to win
One winner will be selected at random on Saturday, December 18 and posted on this blog.
Thanksgiving Point also gave me a free full year membership. Thank you, Thanksgiving Point!