Happily Releasing Unnecessary Expectations! {Plain & Simple}

This post wasn't a planned part of this series - it just came to me randomly while I was showering a few evenings ago!

Here goes...

One great source of stress in my life (and, I expect, in the lives of many others) is the great morass of self-imposed expectations that I carry in my heart but cannot fulfill in my life. I'm not talking about the essentials (morals, health, real responsibilities), but simply those non-essential social expectations which I have voluntarily taken upon myself to fulfill (but cannot).

All of us choose, in many ways or few, to conform to various societal expectations. And many of these are very good things (like choosing to wear clothes or adopt a moral code). But sometimes conforming to non-essential societal norms can put unnecessary stress on us when we are trying to live up to something that we cannot do - to something that is not true to who we are.

I should again make it clear that I am not suggesting that people throw away morality, ethics, or culture as a whole - just that we should examine non-essential cultural expectations to see if they are benefiting or harming us.

I have found that as I get to know my true self, I can choose to jettison various self-imposed expectations, and it is very freeing - and a very important part of the pathway toward simplicity!

Here are just a few non-essential cultural expectations for which I have chosen the "opt-out" option:

Crafting - I am in awe of those ladies out there who scrapbook, decorate, and are otherwise brilliantly crafty. I love to admire their handiwork. But at the same time, I am simply not (for the most part!) a crafty woman. I do not have the creativity necessary, nor do I have that inward urge to create. But for many years, I have carried the guilt of that expectation. I should scrapbook. I should sew for fun. I should make homemade Christmas cards. And etc.

But the truth is that I have neither the desire nor the need to be crafty. And furthermore, if I do have any spare time, I would much rather spend it, say, scrubbing the floors with bleach than I would making hand-woven hazelnut-dyed wool rugs from fibers that I collected and spun myself. Bleach is just more my kind of thing.

Releasing that expectation was wonderful. So was throwing away all of my "should-do" clippings from Martha Stewart Living that I'd had tucked away in a folder and which had been on my conscience ever since. 

Martha Stewart, meet the round file. 

Pursuing the 'Do - When I was younger, I wore my hair in a braid or a bun... and loved it. But I always felt the social pressure to have a complicated, sculptured, modern hairstyle. And when I graduated from high school, I immediately cut all of my hair off and spent the next ten-plus years very unsuccessfully trying to learn to do a styled hair-do (the type that involves a hair dryer, a curling iron, and gobs of expensive hairstyling products). I never enjoyed it and I was never any good at it.

Recently, though, reality has slapped me in the face. I like plain hairstyles! (Or perhaps I should say Plain hairstyles!) I love the practicality, the quickness and lack of expense, and the look. Why am I trying to live up to an expensive cultural expectation that I don't even want?

In other words... bring on the bun! For good. And this week, I finally tossed the last expensive gooey hairstyling product in the trash bin with a firm "Good Riddance!"

(Okay, I did hold onto one bottle of hairspray. I don't know why. But I'm guessing it'll hit the trash bin too in the next week or so after I release my last emotional tie to the stuff.)

There is great freedom in releasing unwanted self-caused expectations that are tying us to unwanted standards.

(My current plan is to become the sweet little old lady with a cotton print dress, apron, glasses, and wispy grey hair tied up in a knot. It's so adorable I can hardly wait!)

On the way!

Home Education Perfection - Round about August, something starts to turn up in the blogosphere... homeschool mothers posting pictures of their drop-dead-gorgeous homeschool rooms! AAAAAHHHHHH!!!

Now seriously, these homeschool rooms really do make me drool. I love them. I really, really, really love them.

But again... this is not an area in which I am skilled. (Having lived in our house for over four years, I hung our first picture... three days ago. Seriously.) It's also not an area on which I want to spend my time. (Again, the bleach is calling my name.) Furthermore, not being artistically gifted, I could never life up to the high standards set by some of the homeschooling mama-geniuses out there, so I would live in a constant state of envy, guilt, and disappointment should I even try.

Even more importantly, a beautifully-decorated homeschool room is not essential to a good home education. There are things that are essential to good home education - routines, real books, accountability, etc. - but a gorgeous homeschool room is not one of them. I can produce successful kids sitting at the kitchen table with no decorations whatsoever (my current plan). I could also have a beautiful school room... and still fail horribly as a home educator. But a beautiful room will not make or break our home education. If it's something that a homeschool mom wants to do, then that is wonderful! Post pictures and let me drool over them. But it's not something that I need to do as a requirement to be a good home educator.

So, instead of beating myself up over this ("You should have a beautiful school room too, you miserable failure!"), I will stop the guilt, accept that it is not my bent, and enjoy the beautiful school rooms that all you genius-mamas produce... vicariously.

***

Hopefully I'm making myself clear in this post! I'm not proposing that we become lazy, that we drop our morals and ethics, that we make excuses, or that we lay around all day saying, "It's just not in me to do such-and-such!" What I am suggesting is simply that we find out which non-essential self-imposed expectations are dragging us down, and that we choose to replace them with more down-to-earth guidelines for our personal situations.

Here are a few more self-imposed expectations that I have decided (or hope) to drop:

- We must always eat off of real plates! If I use paper plates, I'm cheating! 

- I must update my blog every day or two, or I'm a failure as a blogger! 

- I need to decorate for every season and holiday! Perfectly! 

- I need to do complicated unit studies that cover every subject under the sun and which are so successful that the kids are begging for more! (May I say.... HA!)

- I must bake my own bread, preserve all my own food, raise farm animals, and keep up with all of my other duties simultaneously and perfectly!

As they say in Hypnobabies.... "Release." Works for childbirth, works for unnecessary self-imposed expectations.

RELEASE.

Which expectations have you imposed upon your heart and your life that would be better released and forgotten? I'd love to hear about it!

Our latest family picture, just for fun. Don't you love how helpful the 3yo was being? 

Health & Safety Curriculum!

One of my many-many-many projects for this summer was to write a health & safety curriculum to use for our home education plans next year.

I know that there is a lot missing out of this curriculum (feel free to add, folks!), but this is a basic outline of safety skills that I want to impart to our children. 

Feel free to borrow!

(You will notice that outdoor skills are geared toward the Southwest... every area will have its own animal and/or hazard list.) 

***

Safety & Life-Skills Curriculum



1. Personal Information

- Full name

- Phone number

- Daddy’s cell phone number

- Address

- Parents’ names

- Birthdate


2. Personal Safety

- If lost… look for a woman.

- If lost in a wilderness area… sit down and wait for us to find you.

- If someone says “Don’t tell this to your mommy or daddy,” immediately go tell your mommy or daddy.

- If someone ever tries to touch your underwear area, or to touch you in any way that makes you feel uncomfortable… immediately go tell mommy or daddy or a trusted adult.

- If someone you don’t know comes up to you and asks for directions… leave right away and find mommy or daddy or a trusted adult.

- Never get in a car with someone you do not know. Run away and scream if they try to make you get in a car or go with them, and go right to mommy or daddy or a trusted adult.

- If you are walking and a car pulls up next to you, turn around and go the other direction – and go right to mommy or daddy or a trusted adult.

- If an adult asks you for help (to find a lost pet, etc.), leave right away and go to mommy or daddy or a trusted adult.

- If you ever feel uncomfortable, leave and find mommy or daddy or a trusted adult.

- How to call 911 – mechanics of dialing, what information to have ready.

- Always tell mommy or daddy where you are going.

- Answer the front door only if it is someone you know, or if mommy or daddy says that it’s okay.


3. Practical & Household Safety

- House fire – How to get out of the house; don’t hide in the house.

- Fire – Stop, drop, roll

- Earthquake – Duck and cover

- How to use a fire extinguisher

- How to turn off the gas main

- How to turn off the water main

- How to turn off electricity to the house

- How to turn off the water to a toilet

- How to change a tire


4. Outdoor Safety

How to deal with…

- Snakes

- Scorpions

- Cactus

- Spider

- Streams and stream beds

- Lightning


***

What would you add, readers?

* Later note: See reader additions below!

Dealing With the Crazy in My Head {Plain & Simple}

Before starting, I want to make another book recommendation... a new find that I absolutely adore, "The Simple Living Handbook: Discover the Joy of a Decluttered Life" by Lorilee Lippincott (see her blog here). It is an awesome book with so many good ideas and new ways of looking at things! Thoroughly recommended - go check it out! (But not from the library... at least until I've finished it.)

***

And now to the subject at hand.

There are many ways to simplify. Decluttering the house, turning down the noise, unplugging from the electronics. Those are all important, and I'm planning to touch on some of those in coming weeks. But the most important place to simplify is a place that is not so easy to deal with.

It's inside my head. That crazy place that screams, "You're not moving fast enough! Go! Go! Go!" That place that keeps me going at a frantic pace, even when I'm outwardly calm. That is the place that needs clearing and decluttering.

Apparently I don't project a particularly frantic image, because I am constantly receiving the most surprising compliments on my calm demeanor.

"You handle parenting with such grace."

"You deal with things so calmly!"

"Wow, I wish I could keep as calm as you do with such a busy life going on."

While I'm always pleased to receive such comments, I'm afraid that the reality is too often quite different. Most of the time, my mind is frantically busy making to-do lists and stressing out over details, plans, and the much-too-busyness of being a mother, homemaker, and home educator to three boys.

Should I chance to have a few minutes of time to finally get something done, my mind looks something like this:

"Okay, I've got a few minutes - if the baby will just keep sleeping, maybe I can get something done. God, please let the baby keep sleeping! Hurry, hurry, hurry. Faster, faster, faster. Oh no, I need to do [A], [B], [C], [D], and [E], and there isn't possibly enough time. Go, go, go! Oh no, I forgot about [F], [G], [H], and [I]! Dear God, I'll never get it all done!"

I'm stressing out just thinking about it!

So here's the thing. My life is busy - true. My life is very busy - true. But a lot of the stress that I feel is stress that I am putting upon myself purely because of the craziness going on in my own brain. It's self-imposed. I am doing it to myself.

And that's where the comparison to the Amish comes in. The Amish people (and our ancestors from the Old World, to whom the Amish may be compared) do not have easier lives or lesser workloads than we modern Americans. If anything, they have harder lives and heavier workloads. (Just try plowing a field with a horse some time!) Yet with all of that, their lives are much calmer, their communities are much healthier, and their life-pace is much slower and more measured, as opposed to the crazy-busy pace that I maintain in my head regardless of how busy or non-busy I am.

Like most of us, I am used to frenetic levels of activities - constant to-do lists and deadlines, an over-stuffed schedule both within and without the home, and the constant dangling carrot of more-more-more productivity that we've been taught is the Holy Grail of modern life. Go, go, go. Faster, faster, faster. Move, move, move!  

We do it to ourselves. I do it to myself. But I don't want to do it any more, and I'm working on stopping.

But how do we stop the ingrained mental habits of a lifetime? It sounds simple ("Just calm down!"), but it isn't - because it's our status quo, our automatic habit, our addiction to mental stress. And switching to a slower pace of life is going to take a lot of practice.

When I realize (approximately fifty times per day) that I am operating in my usual frantic-rushing-crazy mode, here are the three steps I am working on:

(1) STOP - When I realize what I'm doing - making myself crazy by screaming at myself to go faster-faster-faster! - I stop! I force myself to stop where I am, mentally and physically, and I pause to re-set my mindset and my activity level.

(2) BREATHE - I physically slow down my breathing, and as I do so, I try to slow down my thoughts and set my mind on something positive (instead of worrying frantically about political or spiritual issues), and breathe slowly so that I can calm down the crazy that's otherwise going on in my head.

(3) SLOW DOWN - Yes, that's right - I physically slow down my movements. Instead of frantically scrubbing dishes and tossing them in the drainer, I'll slow down and force myself to enjoy the process and to feel it and do it calmly. Instead of racing through the house trying to get chores done faster-faster-faster, I'll slow my steps and make myself take a saner pace.

The habits of a lifetime aren't easy to break - but it's worth the effort. Why? Because all of the external work that I'm doing to declutter my house (and I'm on a roll right now with that!) won't matter if I can't tame the raging beast within my own mind.

Stop. Breathe. Slow down.

I think many of us need to escape from the bondage of "faster is better." We may technically get more done (though that's doubtful), but we enter into a dreadful mental bondage that enslaves us to a schedule that we can never keep up with and which makes us miserable and constantly stressed-out. It's worth the work to escape from that slavery.

Who wants to join me? 

Have a wonderful Friday, everyone!

Our Life: The Mother's Day Edition

Because every mother deserves a flower on Mother's Day... Here ya go.

Isn't it heart-warming?

Actually, I told my husband several years ago to PLEASE stop getting me flowers. Of any kind. Ever. I can't stand to watch the poor things die, and I'd much rather have something else - like a book. Or plastic storage boxes. Mmmm... plastic storage boxes.

My dream world would be to wake up surrounded by these wonderful creations. 

But this year I did end up with a flower! However, after four hours out of water plus the tender ministrations of a curious toddler, it looked pretty sorry (see above). When we got home, we put it in water - and then laughed till we cried.

Happy Mother's Day!

(Or Mothers Day. Or Mothers' Day. That question has driven me to near-insanity more than once. Whatever it was, enjoy it!)

Introducing Our Wee Slimy Friend (WSF)

Recently a sweet friend blessed me with a kombucha starter, also known as a SCOBY (a Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast), and thus I have joined the community of kombucha-brewers! Hurray for lactofermentation!!

Kombucha, like yogurt, kefir, pickles, kimchi, etc., is a lacto-fermented product that produces a wonderfully-powerful dose of all-natural probiotics (beneficial bacteria), and can be an awesome addition to one's diet, especially in a day and age when most products that were formerly probiotic have now been nuked (i.e. heat-treated for shelf-life), thus eliminating the beneficial bacteria that we all need.

Can kombucha help nausea and vomiting of pregnancy? Maybe. Read about some possibilities here. However, the truth is that any steps to improve one's health can't hurt, and it's always good to do anything to bump up one's health before facing the monster of hyperemesis.

Because I am doing a low-carb diet, I am letting my kombucha do a longer brew, to allow the colony to consume more of the sugars. This makes the resulting product much less sweet and much less pleasant to drink (my weird-stuff-loving husband won't touch it), but I'm actually getting used to it! Now I'm thinking of brewing even longer to kick the carb count down lower, so we'll see how that goes. (If you brew it for a shorter time, this stuff is awesome - and I don't even care for tea, as a rule!)

Every time you brew a batch of kombucha, your mother SCOBY will produce a baby SCOBY, so there are always plenty of SCOBYs to go around. Grab one from a sympathetic friend and brew away!

(If you end up with baby SCOBYs that you can't give away, add them to your garden or compost pile for extra bacterial goodness!)

My first brew with the WSF - I have made two more batches since then. 

Directions for Making Kombucha Tea

Use a 2-4 quart glass container. All utensils should be clean, but don’t use antibacterial soap (can mess up the SCOBY). If you want to disinfect, rinse with apple cider vinegar.

Pour boiling water halfway up your container. Add 1 teabag per quart and let steep 20 minutes. Stir in sugar (1 cup per gallon, or ¼ cup per quart).

Add cold water to fill (leave room for SCOBY and starter tea) and wait till water has reached room temperature.

Add reserved SCOBY and tea (reserve about 6 oz tea per gallon).

Cover with paper towel and rubber band and place in dark location for 6-10 days. Less time = sweeter taste. More time = less sweet taste, more vinegar. Label with desired bottling date so that you don't lose track!

Bottle in clean glass containers. Strain if desired. Will carbonate, so cap loosely if you don’t want carbonation to build up. Will last in fridge for quite a long time!

Enjoy!

Facebook Group for Hyperemesis Moms of Arizona!

Just a quick note for Arizona hyperemesis mums... There is now a Facebook group specifically for us! Please join us and help make this a vibrant and growing community of HG moms who can meet to share support and local resources:

HG Moms of Arizona

See you there!

Plans and Projects for this Coming Summer!

Before I get started, we want to send our prayers and best wishes to our friends the {name censored for privacy} family, who are today embarking on another great adventure! We hope to hear great things, you guys!

And now, back to the subject at hand!

Now that we are officially on summer break, I have about half a million things that I wish to accomplish before the next school year starts up!

Unfortunately, the phrase "summer break" is a bit of a misnomer. Although the academics do take a break, the children and the house do not. So I'm not sure how all of this "free time" is supposed to magically appear for me to work on summer projects!

Regardless, I do have a bunch of things that I'd like to accomplish. And so... here they are!

Over the coming couple of weeks, I would like to...

(1) Make Pen & Paper Record Sheets - For (1) crafts, science experiments, and activities, and (2) field trips. This past year, I found that keeping records on the computer does not work for me, simply because it lures me over to the computer waayyy too often, after which I wake up 30 minutes later and find I've been mindlessly surfing Facebook. Not good. I really enjoyed moving my daily checklists from computer to paper, and so I'm going to do that for the rest of my records as well.

(2) Buy Curriculum - This will be math and possibly Language Arts.

(3) Plan Chores - After discovering what a huge job it is to assign and check up on chores, I now understand why some parents cop out and just do the work themselves! But that would be a grave disservice to our children and our family, and I'm not going to do that - so I need to get on chore planning for next year. Hopefully this will get easier as I get used to it!

(4) Toddler Teaching Time - I want to work on: (1) Blanket training - I've never tried it, but it sounds like a smart idea. (2) Sleep Issues - Okay, I have to admit it. I have a 15-month-old who still nurses to sleep. I have sinned, I have sinned!! And now, of course, the question is how to get him to get to sleep by himself, and in his own bed. Suggestions, anyone? Please? (3) Training to come when called - Right now, if I called our little dude while he was headed out in front of a moving car, he would keep right on going. So teaching him to come when his name is called is something I really need to get on, because this guy is mobile.

(5) Work on Our Daily Schedule - This is mostly done - now to implement it better! Especially needed is work getting to bed at an earlier time and getting everyone up at an earlier time. An hour both ways would be good.

(6) Write Life-Skills Curriculum - This is done; it just needs revision. I'll post when it's finished!

(7) Clean Out Homeschool Notebook & Set Up For Next Year - In process.

(8) Chore Charts - See above - after I get the chores assigned, I want to make cute displays to post. Or at least moderately cute... without a laminator, there's a limit to the amount of cuteness that I can wield around here (*sob*).

(9) Make New Weekly Checklists for First Grade - Taking off handwriting, adding a couple of things...

(10) Get a New Poetry Book - Now that we've worn "The Llama Who Had No Pajama" into the ground, it's time to find something equally awesome! Any suggestions?

(11) Sketch Out Year's Schedule - Breaks, start and finish dates, etc.

(12) Print Various Forms We'll Need - Checklists, schedules, catechism, records

(13) Spend Time Working on Master Book List - My book list is currently about eighty pages long, and growing every day! I'm having so much fun with this.

(14) Finish Last Year's Record-Keeping - Pretty much done!

(15) Set Up Book Cases in Second Bedroom - Lord, have mercy. We'd better start praying now.

(16) Declutter - Yum. Love this. I could do this all day, every day.

(17) Work on Various Decluttering Projects With DH - Going well! DH is making great strides in shedding his pack-rat tendencies. I still can't get him to let me ditch my wedding dress, but we're making progress.

(18) Various Yard & House Projects - A compost pile (done!), clearing out the garage, working on the garden - you get the picture.

And the biggest one....

(19) Pray About Curriculum Choices - Primarily for Language Arts, but also for history, science, and everything in between.

I think that the curriculum struggle is a big one for most parents who home educate. There are so many choices out there, and most of them look good. Then there's also the issue of when to start each subject, what general approach to take, and a million different details that are all knotty and complicated to understand. Hopefully this will get easier as we continue on in the journey, but it is one that has consumed my mind for at least the past three years.

I'd love to hear what your plans are for summer break!

Church with two babies, one of whom is completely OUT!