Tag: parenting

My Ten Guidelines for Time

Musings on Life and Beauty, Simple. Quality.


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As I’ve been working on my 2013 goals ( read about my Simple. Quality. goals here) for almost a month now, I’ve done what most of us do in January:  evaluate my use of time.  People always ask me how I “do it all” or where I “find the time” and really, I don’t.  I’m not exactly sure what “it” is, and I know that at the end of the day there’s still plenty of unfinished work at my house.  As for “finding” time, I haven’t yet discovered the secret hiding place of extra time, but I have learned a few things about using the time I’ve been given, which is the same amount that everyone else has been given:  24 hours in a day.  Truly, in that thing, the Lord made life absolutely fair.

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As I’ve evaluated my use of time this month, I want to record a few guiding principles that help me use my time wisely.  When I follow them, I end up feeling happier, more satisfied with my day, and I have a sense of being on target – all feelings I crave.  So here are my 10 guiding principles for using the precious time I have:

1.  Vision .  I am a mother of eight children, ages 3 to 15.  Life is incredibly intense at our house and it’s easy to be swept away by the noise, the clutter, the drama, whatever.  All of a sudden the day is gone, the week is over, the month is a memory and we wonder if we did anything meaningful.

I need an enthusiastic vision of victory for my family.

My number one tool for preserving and developing this vision is to spend time reading every day from holy text.
I actually have several different things I read every morning, all of which draw me closer to God and remind me what really matters, giving me power to choose wisely throughout the day.  I also find that this activity lessens my inclination to focus on “things” and increases my concern for people.  Really, all my decisions hinge on this habit.

2.  Stay home .   I have learned that the fewer errands I run, the more time I have.  I’ve also learned that little ones love being at home.  They love having time to play, time to help, time to read stories – all things that are difficult to accomplish when we’re dashing here and there.  It’s also easier to get the laundry done and the house clean and the books read when I’m home.   Really, there’s an awful lot to do if I’m going to be ready to greet my six students when they come home from school, so those hours during the school day are important.  I keep a list of errands to take care of and plan time to take care of them all at once, no more than once a week.  If something must be taken care of sooner, I do it right before I pick up children from school, or during a violin lesson when I have 15 minutes to spare.  Staying home gives me my best shot at tackling my to-do list.  There’s an extra bonus that comes with staying home: it’s awfully easy not to spend money if you don’t go to the store!

3.  The beauty of Enough.
Even when I stay home and work like crazy, I’ve learned it will never “all” get done, especially in a family like ours.  I remind myself that if I’m not able to do everything I want to, I can do “enough.”  I may not be caught up on the laundry, but I can do enough laundry that we’re all wearing clean clothes.  I may not get the house completely clean, but I can clean it enough for my family to feel comfortable and relaxed when they’re here.  As a perfectionist, learning the beauty of enough hasn’t been an easy lesson.  Particularly when I’m running behind on life, I look at our family and ask myself “what would be enough here?” and then take care of the things that will be “enough” for us to function and move forward.  There will be time enough for a spotless house when they’re all grown up.  I want to savor this time, and so enough is often perfect.  When I’ve done enough, that’s my signal to relax with them and enjoy being together.

4.  Recognize and prepare for shifts .  We all have shifts in our day.  My two most intense shifts are the before school rush, and the after school hours.  I’ve learned to save my best energy for the most intense times of day so I can offer my family my best self when they need it most.  The before school shift requires me to get to bed on time.  The after school hours require me to be completely present, organized, and focused.  This means that I take care of my own needs earlier in the day.  I tackle habit #1, Vision, right after they leave for school.  That’s also when I exercise, take care of phone calls, emails, bills, etc.  Then I move into the cooking, cleaning and tasks of keeping home.  I spend some time with my youngest girls playing games, reading stories, working on the alphabet after lunch, and then tackle any projects I’m working on.  But when the clock strikes 2 p.m. I have to stop everything, gather my thoughts, and shift focus to the busiest hours of the day.

5.  The short list.
When my six students come home from school, they all have different homework assignments to tackle, instruments to practice, chores to do, and after school activities to attend.  Just before they’re out of school, I make a “short list.”  Next to each name I write the #1 priority for that child today and perhaps one or two additional things I don’t want to forget.  Having this short list in hand helps me navigate all the things that come up, all the request that are made, and all the obligations we have without forgetting the most important things.  My husband and I also schedule alarms on our phones to remind us of important conversations we need to have with various children.  Without my short list I end up going to bed wishing I’d remembered this or that.  It keeps me on track with the most important (but often not urgent) things.  The short list also helps me mentally transition before I pick them up and gets me excited to have them all home.

6.  Boundary leadership.
Years ago I read a powerful speech given by a man who has studied organizational behavior and leadership for many years.  He spoke about studying leadership not from the perspective of one leading many, but of leadership moments that occur in transitional moments. The quote I saved says, “Like the green that grows in the cracks of a sidewalk, leadership usually springs to life between activities and at the edges of events”  (Curtis LeBaron).  I loved the terms he used to describe effective leaders as they build individuals in “boundary moments” and “face-to-face leadership.”  Intrigued by these ideas, I began studying my own life to discover where I might uncover more opportunities to be a better leader as a mother.  I quickly realized that most of the time my children spend with me will be “boundary moments” for them, and that these seemingly mundane moments were opportunities for “face-to-face leadership” in our home.  Every time I have them in the car, or as we’re getting dinner on the table, or getting ready for school, or helping them with homework is a time when I have face-to-face opportunities with my children.

I am their boundary, the one that’s there on the edge at the beginning and ending of almost everything they’re doing.  When I understood this, these times became more precious to me and I became more purposeful about how I spend them.  For instance, I don’t make phone calls during these hours.  I don’t spend time on any projects in the after school hours.  I don’t sit down at the computer and if I do any housework I try to have at least one of my children helping me so I can talk with them.  With this focus, I find I gain a lot of teaching/building time with my children.

7. Memorize something.
We all know the saying, “the days are long but the years are short.”  There will always be more for me to do than I will get done.  There will always be the tendency to think there will be more time in the future than there is now, and to assume that the life we live today will always be ours.  I want to treasure this time.  Every day I remind myself to memorize something, something that may be ordinary but which will one day change.  It may be the curve of my three year old’s cheek, or the handwriting of my first grader, or the humor of my fifteen year old, or just the sight of all of us together at the dinner table.  Whatever it is, I make myself hold still long enough to study it, notice it, appreciate it.  As I’m doing it, I think, “Memorize this.”  This habit helps me live in the present, appreciate what I have right now, and fills my heart with gratitude.  Later that night I record what I memorized in my gratitude journal.

8.  Create and protect “margin.”
Last year I read Richard Swenson’s fantastic book, Margin .  My whole heart responded to the message of the book.  In this ultra busy world, it’s easy to run faster than we have strength.  We feel like we have to be productive every minute of the day.   Eventually we all burn out if we don’t build time into our lives to recharge ourselves spiritually, mentally, physically, emotionally.  Margin is having energy to spare at the end of the day, money in the bank at the end of the month.  It’s the space between our obligations and our resources.  We all need margin.  We do a few things to preserve margin for our family:  We eat dinner together every night.  We read scripture together at the close of every day.  Sunday is a sacred day at our house, a rest from the week’s schedule.  We have a Family Home Evening every Monday night, an evening set aside for being together, learning, playing, building relationships.  When we schedule activities, I try to protect one afternoon each week for my children to come home from school and just be kids.  Margin is where we find time to serve others, time to work together as a family, time to really enjoy the simple goodness of life.

9.  Limit media.
I find that most media falls into three categories:  media that doesn’t support my values, media that is informational but makes me anxious (most of the news programs fall into this category), media that is beautiful and uplifting.  I don’t need any of the media that doesn’t support my values, and a minimum dose of the media that gives me a stomach ache.   I’ve also found that too much of the visual/social media (pinterest, blogs, etc.) can squash my own creativity, or even make me or my family feel like what we have isn’t good enough.  So we don’t watch tv.  I limit my time online, allowing myself 5 blogs at a time to browse, and limit my additional clicks.  I don’t really “keep up” on things, and some would argue that I miss a lot, but I’m happier with less in this area.  Small doses keep me energized by what’s out there, but helps me avoid getting sucked into anything that isn’t a priority.  Limiting media also wins back time to devote to more meaningful things.

10.  One drop at a time.
Not every day works out the way we’d like.  Life erupts and schedules fall apart.  There are too many days when I go to bed feeling like a failure.  I hope you’ll read this post and spend your days putting drops of awesome in your bowl.  None of us is the woman we dream of being, but we have moments – many of them – when we are.  So let’s give ourselves credit for those moments by recognizing them for what they are, thus fueling ourselves with motivation to keep working at it.   Life is too precious to waste our time on negative thoughts or feelings about ourselves or our performance – even in our slow middles .  The more I train myself to treasure the positive and move on, the more time I have to actually become the woman and mother I dream of being.

These ten principles, when lived, bless my life.  They bring beauty, meaning and purpose to the things I do and help me feel like I have been a good steward of the time God has given me.  They help me focus on creating a beautiful family culture which will help every member of our family reach their potential and grow in goodness.

Lest I appear to have it all figured out, let me share how today went.  I came home from taking everyone to school, and spent an unexpected hour shovelling snow off my driveway.  Then my five year old started throwing up and my three year old decided to be grouchy (to make sure she got her share of attention, I guess?).  Both of them wanted me nearby, so the laundry didn’t get done, the fridge didn’t get cleaned out, dinner didn’t get prepped.  I didn’t make a short list today.  My carpet is cluttered with all the things I try to have cleaned up before the clock strikes two.  The school drop off and pick up trips both took twice as long as usual due to the snow, making us late to piano lessons.   My toddler stole her sister’s chapstick and smeared it all over her eyebrows.  Interesting day to write about how I use my time!    And yet,  it wasn’t so bad.  I memorized the sound of my daughter’s breathing as she slept on my lap, noticed the beauty of the falling snow, put a pot of cranberry cider on the stove for us to enjoy.  Drops of awesome!  In the end it’s not about whether we meet our expectations every day or not.  It’s about the direction we’re headed and our determination to try it all again tomorrow. And doing it with love.  Oh, how the blessings flow if we never stop trying!

Jennifer Linking here

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Slow Middles

Musings on Life and Beauty

Winter is getting to me.   So many weeks of below freezing temperatures, weeks of  smog and fog and gray, gray, gray.  Everything gray.  It’s as if the world has been drained of color by this winter.  Last night we had a freezing rain, something I’ve never before experienced.  Nothing wet, everything ice.  If it had a surface, it was covered in the clearest, thinnest, most slippery ice I’ve ever seen.  As in, I couldn’t get up my driveway today and yet nothing looks slick.  Underground, city water lines are freezing all over the place.  City water lines to many homes have frozen, and now the pipes to one of the buildings at the Junior High are frozen as well.  Everywhere I drive, it seems I see city workers trying to thaw underground water meters.  It is COLD.

Yesterday when I was looking around at most of our furniture piled into two rooms for carpet cleaning I wanted to cry.  My children were loving it, climbing, jumping, chasing, playing on all the upturned everything as if we’d just discovered a new playground.  I, on the other hand, felt frustrated.  It was supposed to be done at 9 a.m, but a machine broke so it was done at 7 pm instead, causing me to cancel plans and generally cringe at everything on the verge of breaking.

And then it hit me.

“This is the middle.”

I’m in the middle of a lot of things, things much bigger than a delayed carpet cleaning.  I’m in the middle of raising my family.  All our 8 beautiful beginnings are now treasured memories and we’re in this crazy, cluttered, loud MIDDLE with all of them.   I’m in the middle of cleaning my pantry, something that was paused for this carpet cleaning and which now stares at me when I walk past it.  I’m forever in the middle of laundry, in the middle of cleaning, in the middle of driving and dropping off and picking up.  My projects all feel like “middles” right now, coming together more slowly than I hoped.  Yesterday I texted my sister, “Do you ever feel like if you go another day without really finishing something you’ll go crazy?  That’s how I’ve felt all week.”   I’m also feeling like I’m in the middle of my own life experience, a feeling I’m not at peace with.   At that moment I wanted desperately to snap my fingers and have all the middles disappear.

My experience with middles is that they aren’t very pretty.  There was certainly nothing pretty about my house yesterday, and there’s nothing pretty about this mid-winter blah that makes me want to scream.  Middles are ugly, often broken, pieces everywhere, slow, like cleaning out a closet.   Beginnings are so clear, so full of obvious potential; endings are absolute.  Middles are a different story.  There’s no guarantee, often no road map, and they usually obscure the view of all that was so obvious at the beginning.

I’m not fond of middles, and yet I’m also learning that there’s no way around them.  Some of them are shorter than others, but the things that matter most in life, those things that have the greatest potential, seem to have the longest middles.

In the middle of my carpet cleaning frustrations yesterday another thought came.  “Jennifer, this day is as much a gift as any other.  What you do with your middle is up to you.”

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So I started studying middles.

I watched my children jumping on upturned furniture and realized that you make memories in the middle.
Oh, the beginnings and endings have memories of their own, but so much of joy and substance comes in the middle.

I looked at my unfinished lone star quilt block, at the quilt tops hanging until I learn free motion quilting, at the squares waiting to be pieced together and I realized you learn skills in the middle.
I looked at all my responsibilities as a mother, which at the moment felt so much larger than I am.  And I thought, you walk by faith in the middle.  You pray for grace in the middle.
I looked in the mirror and saw a woman who wishes lots of things were different, but who gets up every day and does her best.  And I realized, you become someone real in the middle.
I looked at my pantry, 2/3 organized, with a shelf section still a mess because I have to decide how to use it to better meet our needs right now.  I thought, you make decisions in the middle.
This afternoon I played a few games of Memory with my daughters.  They enjoyed setting it up at the beginning and counting their pieces at the end.  But when we kept turning over the same piece 20 times in a row without finding a match for it, we laughed.  My five year old laughed so hard she gave herself the hiccups and her eyes were watery.  And I thought, you laugh in the middle.  Not the “oh that was great” kind of laughter but the laughter that releases tension and gives you a toehold on joy.
And because of all these things, because of the laughter and the prayers, the decisions you weigh and sometimes agonize over, the skills you have to learn to move forward, the memories you make and the laughter you share, the middle usually slows down.  It’s part of life.  But just like we didn’t quit in the middle of our carpet cleaning, you don’t quit in the middle, either.
I wanted the clean carpet, I just didn’t like the prolonged middle.  I didn’t like having it become complicated.  Yet it worked out.

Last night my sister sent me a picture of a beautiful quilt and asked if I might know the source of the pattern.  I typed out the words.  “No, I don’t.  But it’s beautiful.”  Just before I hit send, I looked at it again and realized that the photography looked very Denyse Schmidt in style.  And then I wondered, “Wait, is it in her new book? (The one you bought but never really read)”  Sure enough, there it was.  I sent the information on, but kept the book out.  After putting the children to bed I decided to slow down and read it, which turned out to be a wonderful experience.   In this new book, Modern Quilts Traditional Inspiration , Denyse  talks about the reality that quilts take time, especially many of the more traditional patterns.  After indicting myself earlier over my lack of finished projects, I appreciated this statement:

“While some projects in this book can be made relatively quickly, this is not a book of ‘fast and easy’ projects you can create in an evening or two.  Quilts are big!  They are labors of love, and require a fairly serious investment of time.  A book of traditional quilt patterns – some of which require cutting out thousands of tiny pieces – seems to go against the grain of most crafting books these days, and is antithetical to our culture which demands instant gratification and ever-faster results.  I hope you can embrace the idea of quilting as a ‘slow craft,’ and enjoy the opportunity to engage in a satisfying, contemplative pastime that offers rewards relative to your efforts.” (p. 13) She’s talking about middles!  About those thousands of tiny pieces that eventually make a quilt just as thousands of tiny pieces make a life.   It’s ok when projects, like mothering – particularly when you’re trying to instill traditional values in your children,  become a “slow craft.”   And I love the end of Denyse’s invitation to “enjoy the opportunity to engage in a satisfying, contemplative pastime that offers rewards relative to your efforts .”  (emphasis added)  A satisfying, contemplative life will surely offer the same return on investment regardless of how slow the middles were.

I know a man who passed away this week.  He was a good, decent, optimistic man who lived longer than doctors thought he would.  For his family, that long, slow middle of life just became acutely precious because their mortal time with him is gone.  The middle seems slow to me because I’m looking forward, expecting it to last, but when you look at it from the finish line, it’s fleeting.  Middles, therefore, are largely a matter of perspective.

I was right, today is as much a gift as any other.  It’s up to me to do something with it.  It’s up to me to fill my middle with stories, with lessons learned, hugs given, joy felt.

The carpets look better and the couches are back in their places.  The day ended and I felt more humble and also more awake to the fabric of life.  Although quilting and other projects are a diversion from my mothering middle, I’m going to relax when they’re on a “slow craft” setting and remind myself to enjoy the process.  And as for the thousand broken pieces of life that I bump into all too often, well, they’re the material for piecing together a happy middle. Like the scrap quilts I always love looking at, I can trust my slow middles to come together at last in a pattern far more beautiful than anything I pictured in the beginning.

Jennifer

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Blooming Late and Life Skills

Gardening, Musings on Life and Beauty

My flowerbeds are in desperate need of attention.  In fact, they have been for a while.  I guess I’m putting them off so I can do one big push before winter, get everything cleaned up, bulbs in, and move on.  Really, I love gardening, but this just hasn’t been my year for digging in the dirt.  I should have removed the spent gladiolus a few weeks ago, but if I had, we’d have missed this:


A single, tall, perfect gladiolus graced our home last week.  It was incredibly late, the last week of September, and yet it bloomed.  Partly because it was late and because it was the only one, it was perhaps the most beautiful of them all.

The arrival of this lovely flower brought company to thoughts I’ve had a lot lately.   If you really think about it, growing up is all about learning skills.  Some of us grow up and are taught healthy skills which we use to deal with our problems.  Others of us grow up learning ineffective skills which take many years to replace with effective ones.  I call these lagging skills.   Most of us are a combination of those two categories, partly due to our upbringing, partly because of life’s journey, largely due to our own personal set of strengths and weaknesses.   We’re never really done with the process but a very important stage of that process happens in our childhood.

And so, effective parenting can be boiled down to this one thing:  teaching skills.  Over the weekend we had a number of situations, all part of daily life, but which revealed different lagging skills in various children in our home.  I started the day with a long list in my mind of the coaching that needs to be done to help each of them learn an effective skill for dealing with the next occurrence of the specific situation/feelings.  In some areas I see my children, all of them vastly different from one another, with skills that awe me.  In their own way, they’re all light years ahead in some things.  In others (their personal weaknesses) they struggle, as do I.   When they’re little, the skills are so simple.  They learn to walk, feed themselves, get dressed, and then to read and write.  When they get older, the skills can be more complex, like learning how to deal with people you don’t like but can’t avoid.  There’s also a large dose of self-discovery and awareness required for us to recognize the problem and identify the skill we need to work on.  When self-awareness is one of the weak areas, teaching skills can be very difficult.   I’m also learning that I have great skills for teaching certain children in certain ways, but there are other children in our family whose needs really challenge MY skills, making it more difficult for me to effectively teach them healthy skills.  It’s such a fascinating thing.

If I think too far ahead, these lagging skills can really get me down.  I begin to worry and stress.  Yet there has also been something very liberating about learning to identify the challenge in terms of skills.  My own emotions, my fears, can fly right out the window when I think in these terms:  I can learn skills.  My child can learn skills.  I can learn how to effectively teach each child the skills they need.  This goes right along with the whole idea that “You don’t feel your way to better behavior.  You behave your way to better feelings.”  For example, instead of letting a certain student’s academic performance eat me up, we can identify the skills that need to improve in order to fix the problem.  Is the lagging skill simply the habit of doing homework daily?  Is it the habit of turning homework in?  Is it the habit of writing assignments down?  Is it the habit of managing time wisely?  Once the skill is identified, then we can go to work on it.  It really doesn’t matter if a child hates doing homework right up until the day she graduates from college.  What matters is that she DOES the homework.   In like manner, it doesn’t matter how I feel about the situation either, what matters is that I teach them the skill they need to learn.  That’s my responsibility.

I’m learning that if I make a timeline of my life and mark certain events on it, I can make another timeline right under it to track the feelings of my heart.  Sometimes my heart keeps time with the actual events.  Sometimes my heart is racing ahead of the event timeline, perhaps even influencing it.  Other times something will happen, and my heart is delayed.  Perhaps the reaction is delayed, or my heart gets stuck somewhere while life keeps marching on.  We do need to take good care of our hearts; I’m not preaching that they should be disregarded entirely.  But sometimes we have to just live with the life timeline and not worry too much about where our hearts are, at least where habits go.  Does it matter that I love or hate exercise?  No.  It matters that I do it, regardless of how I feel about it that day.  The same goes for laundry, cooking, cleaning, paying bills.  For my children, it applies to doing homework, speaking respectfully to others, and so forth.  I expect my children to do the right thing, even if their hearts don’t “feel like it” in the moment.  I believe God expects the same of me.  And the thing about doing our duty, choosing the right thing, using effective skills to deal with our problems, is that eventually we feel GREAT about what we’ve done.  Our feelings catch up.

As a mother, it’s so easy to compare our lives to others, to compare our children to the children of our friends.  Of course, we’re always comparing the inside of our lives to the outside of theirs, but we rarely remind ourselves of that detail.  It’s easy to worry if it appears our child isn’t “blooming” like the others.  Sometimes we wonder if we will ever “bloom” as parents, too.  But sooner or later, if we keep working, we all bloom.


In recent weeks I’ve seen evidence of emerging skills that I’ve been focusing on in some of my children.  It really doesn’t matter to me how long I’ve waited for it, what matters is that it happens.  And perhaps the wait makes it all the sweeter.  I’m grateful to my flower for giving me the analogy I needed to pull some thoughts together, remind me of my plan of action, and train my heart.  What an amazing education motherhood provides, and what a kind Heavenly Father we have who provides beautiful lessons for us daily in things as simple as a late September gladiolus!

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