Drops of Awesome

Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson

Hallmark Movie Scavenger Hunt

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For the past few years I’ve celebrated my December birthday with an all-day open house binge watch of Hallmark Christmas Movies. When I say “Hallmark Christmas Movies,” I’m talking about an idea, not an actual brand.

You know how people ask for a “Kleenex” but they’re just talking about any old tissue? Or a “Band-Aid” but they really just mean a sticky bandage?

That’s how I use “Hallmark Movie.”

To get an idea of what counts as a Hallmark Movie in my world, check out this year’s scavenger hunt. The boxes next to each item are rectangular, allowing for tally marks because you’ll probably get several of them more than once. [PDF Download Available Below]

hallmark-scavenger-huntDownload

90s Country Music

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I love 90s country songs, specifically those with three verses, plays on words, and a twist at the end. These are the Hallmark Christmas movies of popular music, predictable, cheesy, romantic, and sometimes they make me cry, even though (a little bit) I think they’re dumb.

I’m talking about “Please Don’t Take the Girl” by Tim McGraw. I’m talking about “Love, Me” by Colin Ray. And I’m for sure talking about “One Boy, One Girl” by Colin Ray. “Congratulations… TWINS!!!”

When we moved to Texas in 1994, I was thrust into the world of country music and I pretty much embraced it. I tried on boots. I said, “Y’all.” I attended rodeos with boys who wore large hats. I bought giant earrings to compensate for my egregious lack of appropriate belt buckle.

Fun fact. When my grandpa passed away in 1994, my sister and I BEGGED our parents to let us sing a super cringe-worthy duet version of “Love, Me” at his funeral. They declined and we felt the injustice keenly. Good times. For the record – we sounded terrible and we could NOT get through a single verse without ugly-crying. It was also a cheesy country song, I don’t think my grandpa liked country music, and we wanted to cry/sing it in a somber religious service where “How Great Thou Art” would have been considered an up-tempo number.

26 years later, I’ve convinced my 11-year-old that these songs are awesome. The circle of life is real and one day I’ll write a song about it. The first verse will be about a kid drawing a life cycle in a 2nd grade science class with his female best friend. The second verse will be about him as a young man getting stuck in a busy traffic circle in the big city for the first time while on a date with his girlfriend (THE SAME GIRL FROM SCIENCE CLASS!). In the final verse, everyone will die.

HECTOR!

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I haven’t had the best of luck procuring a gift for Laylee’s sixteenth birthday. To be perfectly clear, she’s not getting anything lavish because our insurance rates are about to go through the roof with a teenage driver in the house.

The store from which I ordered her present several days ago just emailed to let me know the gift was backordered and won’t arrive until several weeks past her birthday.

I had one other small item in mind for something to unwrap on the big day, but it was difficult to find. I called around to a few shops and ended up finding it at a shop about 20 minutes from here.

So, I drove to this small town with just enough time to get the gift and buy groceries before I needed to be home for an appointment. The pleasant shop girl explained that… oops… they didn’t actually have the item but she knew of a place in a town 10 minutes further away that might have it.

I growled under my breath, thanked her and headed to my car. I had a choice. I could buy the groceries and head home or I could forget about trifling concerns like feeding my family and continue in pursuit of the birthday gift. I chose the gift.

This time, I called ahead (like I had with the first shop) but I told them about my experience driving out to Town A and being disappointed and asked them to check their stock to make sure they had it.

They put me on hold.

They checked.

They had it.

I drove to town B.

They did not have it.

BUT the man behind the counter, who randomly told me that college was a waste of money because all they do is brainwash you, told me he knew of a place in Kirkland that might have the item.

He couldn’t remember the name of it, but he drew me the following map.

Let me explain. The big X marks “that one part of I-405 where traffic backs up.” When you get to that part of the freeway, you take the road under the freeway. There will be a shop there of unknown name that may or may not have the item. The small x indicates its location.

You’ll know it’s the right shop if a man named Hector is working there.

Now, we’ve learned that calling ahead doesn’t work anyway and I don’t have a phone number but I DO have a map.

So, here’s my plan.

I will take SR 520 to I-405. I will drive north towards Kirkland. When traffic slows I will exit immediately and drive under the freeway. I will then unroll my window and begin calling for Hector.

What could go wrong?

Presidents Day and Jeff the Canadian

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In honor of Presidents Day on Monday we fled the country. We live a couple of hours from the Canadian border and poutine seemed like a good idea. It turned out that they also had a national holiday on Monday, Family Day, and we think families are worth celebrating.

Heading to Canada also gave us several opportunities to talk about the President on Presidents Day because, and I’m not exaggerating, every single person we spoke to for more than 30 seconds brought up President Trump.

***SPOILER ALERT***

They do not like him.

Everyone we talked to basically expressed condolences, like our uncle had died. Or, I guess, like a crazy uncle had taken over our house. One of those things. We did the best we could. And we luckily live in a place where I’m allowed to type this post on the internet and where we the people get to overthrow the government every four years without shedding any more blood than might be caused by a papercut from a mail-in ballot.

We ended up taking a detour down a side road and stumbled across this gem. It lives up to it’s name.

We stopped by the temple even though it was closed. It was gorgeous and the kids thought the angel statue on top looked extra huge because the temple was so small. #FamiliesAreForeverDay

From there we went in search of poutine. This was rough because we actually favor the poutine at the Costco food court, but they were closed for the holiday. Apparently, Costco employees have families too.

A friend recommended a little French-Canadian poutine place in downtown Vancouver so we headed there. They… seemed surprised to have customers. And not a good surprise, like your grandmother taking you to The Care Bear Movie for your 8th birthday. It was more like, “Why are there dirty socks in the cheese drawer?!”

There was a sign as we entered that said, “Please wait to be seated,” but then they seemed annoyed that we didn’t just find our own seat.

Curling was on TV. Thumbs up.

Line cook with an Oilers hat on. Thumbs way down.

Growing up in Calgary, it was important part of my culture to have an irrational and fervent dislike of Edmondton, Oilers, and anything tainted by Wayne Gretsky.

I can’t totally describe it. It was just a funny place. It looked super sketchy from the outside and then the inside was just sort of crammed with stuff. People, tables, multiple full-sized traffic lights, nude paintings, some with lift-the-flaps to see the most exciting parts, portraits of drag queens, hockey memorabilia.

The employees were hilariously crusty, like we were being punked, and I did not see one table get the food they ordered on the first try. We sat at our table eating poutine and laughing as over and over the servers apologized for the mistake in a tone that said, “I’m sorry you suck,” and then went back to the kitchen window and yelled for something to be changed.

Our order came missing Laylee’s poutine and Magoo and Wanda’s hotdogs. Throughout the meal, the server kept yelling at the line cook for the two hot dogs. (What can you expect? He was an Oilers fan.) They didn’t come and they didn’t come. All our other food was done and still no hot dogs.

“I NEED THOSE TWO HOT DOGS,” he yelled, “WITH MUSTARD AND RELISH!!”

Wanda was crestfallen. She and Magoo had asked for mustard and KETCHUP. We told her to cut her losses. Then when the food showed up, the hot dogs came with ketchup and relish. Nice.

Wanda samples relish for the first time and it is a hit!

But the poutine was decent and if it hadn’t taken 15 years to get our food and two more decades to get our check, I wouldn’t have met the super interesting people at the table next to us, a very chatty older French-Canadian man and his friends who had strong feelings about the president, were very passionate about Dan and I taking our kids to Science World, and were giving Laylee the hard sell about choosing a Canadian university.

We tried our hand at 5-pin bowling. It’s something I grew up doing but when I mentioned it to Dan and the kids, they thought I was kidding.

I wasn’t. It’s real.

And it has inexplicable rules. Each pin is worth a different amount of points. Usually you get to roll the ball 3 times but sometimes you get to roll 4 times and you never know why.

The ball is so small that I think it blows around in the wind because it never went where I expected or desired it to go.

Laylee took advantage of the confusion and emerged victorious. She is apparently a Can-natural and I would like to have her try other Canadian sports, curling, bobsled, badminton pronounced correctly.

We rounded out the trip with some sightseeing in Vancouver. It was a city like most other cities but it felt special because we needed passports to go there and because of donuts.

Wanda purchased a stuffed bear-monkey who she named Jeff The Canadian because he “looked like a Jeff” and he is obviously Canadian.

We raided the grocery store shelves for chocolate and ketchup chips and ichiban noodles. And that’s what we eat for breakfast now because we are middle school boys and our name is Magoo.

The Best Chore Excuse

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Wanda sleeps on the floor now. I blame Marie Kondo.

I started Marie Kondo-ing the kids’ laundry a couple of weeks ago. I told them they could fold their existing clothes that way too if they wanted to be able to see them more easily in the drawer.

Wanda was excited to do this and dumped out all of her clothes immediately, folded two shirts, and got bored with it. Apparently she’s nine.

When I told her to vacuum her room last week, she needed to move all the clothes somewhere.

So, when I found her sleeping on the floor, she told me it was because there was no room for her in the bed. And we don’t have a manger. So…

For three days her only chore has been to fold the rest of the clothes. One day I forgot to check if she’d done her chore. One day she somehow convinced me to trade it for another chore. Then today, she raised procrastination and childhood chore excuses to a new level.

I needed to take Laylee to the driver’s ed school to take her written license exam. Before I left, I told Wanda she absolutely had to finish folding those clothes and putting them away. Thumbs up. She was on it.

After spending an hour reading a book on a couch in the furniture department of Fred Meyer, I brought my little driver home and found Wanda on the couch playing Mario. (not Kondo)

Me: Hey Wanda! Did you do your chores while I was gone?

Her: Yep!

Me: You folded all those clothes in your room?

Her: Yeah! But I didn’t fold ALL of them.

Me: ?

Her: The thing is, it got to be really fun for me. And I started thinking, I want to have fun tomorrow too. So I saved one stack so I could still have some of the fun tomorrow!

She grinned, totally sincere.

See, that’s why I didn’t do the dishes today, Dan. Doing them was just so much fun and it felt wrong to have all that fun at once, like eating an entire Costco cheesecake in one sitting. I wanted to savor the dishes, so I left half of them to get crusty so I could have EXTRA fun tomorrow.

Speaking of fun, Snowpocalypse 2019 has calmed. Our cul-de-sac is still a one-lane road with ice cliffs of insanity on either side and there are no longer lawns or sidewalks in our town, but we can get most anywhere we want. We hear they may even start delivering mail and picking up garbage sometime next week. It’s gonna be so modern and urban up in here.

Also, today I gave approval for the final manuscript of the ice cream book to be printed. I didn’t save any of the fun for tomorrow.

My co-author Barbara signed off too so it looks like I’m gonna be the mom to a new book, coming out in July!

It’s such a long and collaborative process and there’s something really magical about seeing your words turned into something beautiful.

Snow Problem At All

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My kids and I are Canadians real bad and we crave the snow. We’re not Canadians enough to, you know, actually live in Canada or even to have watched a complete hockey game in the past six months. But we are Canadian enough to eat poutine, to wear toques, and to think we know how to drive in the snow.

Except for Wanda.

She is nine and her snow-driving skills are sub-par.

But we live in the Pacific Northwest, where our closeness to salty water and mountains strands us in a sea of grey almost-snow all winter long. Some years we get nary a flake. And we mourn so hard.

This year the Farmer’s Almanac predicted a wet and mild winter and we made peace with our snowlessness. But then the weather channel app started messing with us.

10% chance of frozen joy sprinkles.

30% chance.

JK rain.

And then:

100% CHANCE OF SNOW!!!

But we didn’t believe it. They’ve burned us before. When it finally fell, we were so excited.

We expected an inch or two and that was enough to make us crazy with joy.

 We got snow. We got more snow. We got freezing temperatures.

Over TWO FEET of snow fell in about a week in a place where school will be canceled if a rumor circulates that half an inch of snow sent Seattle a spam email once.

School was canceled.

We didn’t get in any driving practice for Laylee’s impending driver’s test. She didn’t feel up to practicing her parallel parking.

We played a Catan mega game and no one even cried.

We drank hot chocolate by the gallon and made cinnamon rolls and did puzzles and burned half an Ent in our fireplace.

The kids made snow men and snow poffs.

Our power went out Monday night and Dan and I got up at 4am to start the generator. And restore heat and refrigerator power. When he went to pull the cord, this happened.

We spent over an hour repairing the pull cord multiple times (it kept breaking) and trying again and again to start the generator. Then we said a prayer. And tried again. And it worked on the first pull!

So we had heat and refrigeration and Minecraft. We were hooked up! And the snow kept falling, even as the temperatures warmed up.

At one point our two-story vaulted metal roof got melty enough that it roof-alanched all of its snow in one massive 5-foot-tall hard-packed mound at the side of the house.

So, of course, they sculpted a sled ramp that ran from the side of the house all the way down and through the forest owned by our neighbor.

There are benefits that come from allowing your fence to be reclaimed by the moss and slugs of the pacific northwest. Those benefits include turning your yard into a deer highway and having easy access to sled-trespass on your neighbor’s property during Snowmageddon.

A couple other Snowpocalypse highlights were:

Dan working from home

hauling wood for the fire using the kids’ sleds in the middle of the night

watching Dan zoom out of our driveway to go help a friend and leave an 11-inch-deep tire tread in the snow

eating “snow” cones at our awesome neighbor’s house next to a driveway campfire

using my thermal cooker when the power was out

reading by the fire as a family

There will be consequences for this week. The kids have already missed five days of school and had one late start and they’re still home until more of the snow melts. Those days will have to be made up at the end of the year. This is going to wreak havoc with summer plans and youth conference schedules.

The trampoline looks unnaturally stretched and the back deck is suffering under the weight of several inches of unmelted snow.

These are just the consequences for our family and they’re pretty minor. I know other people have suffered much more being stuck and cold and injured on the roads and hungry. I feel terrible for them and we’ve prayed every night that people would be safe and we’ve offered to help where we could.

But, there is nothing our being stressed or anxious or mad will do to change the snow or keep people safe or make the school year any shorter. It will just make us miserable.

So, we choose to celebrate it. It’s been a fat party for a week and a half and we have made amazing memories. Thank you, Mother Elsa. We have LOVED the freeze!

Writing Someone Else’s Story

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I’m Kathryn. I write things.

I write all kinds of things. My most recent project with Familius, due out early this summer, is an adorable and hopefully hilarious ice cream cookbook, co-written with Barbara Beery to cure all of your terrible days with frozen dessert. That was a fun one to work on! I can’t wait to share the cover with you. Because it is rad. But I think it may still be secret.

I’ve published three short non-fiction books. I’ve written fiction, never published. I’ve written hundreds, possibly thousands of blog posts for several different sites.

But I still get writer’s block. Pretty much every time I sit down to write. I read something fun I’ve written in the past and think, “Who wrote that? I will never write anything fun again.” And the longer I wait in between writing sessions, the worse it gets, the less I believe I can string two coherent sentences together.

So, since my first attempt at fiction got side-tracked by several really fun (I’m so glad I did them) non-fiction projects, it’s been several years since I’ve attempted to make up stories. I keep coming up with ideas but when it comes to actually getting them typed out, I sit and stare at the screen, type a few sentences, delete them, and feel utterly and completely inadequate.

And so I keep reading. I read about great writing and how to execute it. I read great writing and drool all over it. And then I sit down to write and nothing measures up.

Well I’ve been focusing on streamlining my life lately, minimizing and essentializing, and I’ve decided to pour some real focus into fiction. 500 words per day. At least 4 days per week. That really isn’t a huge commitment. Unless you are crippled by overwhelming self-doubt and writer’s despair!!!

But this week I’m three for three. Three writing days, 1500 words. Woot. The first couple of days were super rough. But today I had an epiphany.

“Stop trying to write someone else’s book.”

I’ve read so many great authors in the past year. Shannon Hale, Jeanne Birdsall, Brandon Sanderson, Megan Whalen Turner, Grace Lin, Jennifer A. Nielsen. So, when I sit down to write, there’s some subconscious part of me that compares myself to them and tries to do what they do. And then my writing is crap.

The first two days I was writing like a poor man’s Shannon Hale. But I don’t write like Shannon Hale. I LERVE her! But our voices are way not the same. So, of course, if I’m trying to be her, to write one of her books, it will be sad. And not in a good way.

So for today’s 500 words, I wrote in my voice. And it was so much fun. Everything just flowed. Instead of saying, I need to sound more literary or sophisticated or artistic, I just wrote my story. My. Story. And I really like it.

So, you may not be a writer. But in some area of your life are you trying to write someone else’s story?

Stop it.

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. This means, I may receive a small commission if you choose to purchase something from a link I post. Don’t worry, it costs you nothing. Thank you for supporting my website!

Hey Girl Guy Goes to the Moon

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Dan and I watched First Man recently, or as I like to call it Hey Girl Guy Goes to the Moon.

It made me cry. But not for the reasons you might think. It wasn’t because of all the fatalities in the movie, although they were heart-wrenching. It wasn’t because of all the handheld camera, although that made my head hurt. It wasn’t even because Neil Armstrong was married to the flipping QUEEN OF ENGLAND and I read online that they ended up getting divorced after 38 years of marriage.

I cried because I’m too old to pull it together, learn to move my body, and audition for So You Think You Can Dance. I cried because I will never be the youngest swimmer ever to win back-to-back gold medals in the Summer Olympics.

I cried because, sitting in that theatre, I began to plan out exactly what I’d need to do to achieve my lifelong dream of becoming an astronaut. PhD in something sciency and fabulous? Probably. Get ripped and eat nothing but Kale? Definitely. I planned and plotted excitedly and then, as Apollo 11 was taking off, it hit me.

You are not going to space. Probably ever.

And I cried. Just a few tears. The tears of the bitterly disappointed.

Because the problem is, I believe I can do anything… if I really really try. I have an inexplicable and firmly held belief that any failure I have is due to a lack of effort. This can be great. It makes me want to try harder and it means I think my potential is limitless. And it can also be rough because when things don’t go according to plan, I can always find a way to blame the outcome on myself.

Long story short. I am not going to space. I just didn’t put forth the effort soon enough.

I could probably still get a flamethrower though…

 

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. This means, I may receive a small commission if you choose to purchase something from a link I post. Don’t worry, it costs you nothing. Thank you for supporting my website!

Fire Hoses and Bon Jovi

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Yesterday was one of those days. From the moment you wake up, it feels like there’s a firehose pointed directly at your face.

Someone might ask, “But did the water taste good?”

And you scream back over the stream, “I don’t know! I can’t process it! THERE’S JUST TOO MANY WATER!!!”

The sheer volume of needs, my own, my kids, my friends, work, and church work just blasted me all day and I could never quite catch a breath and I could never quite finish any task before a new one popped to the top of the priority list.

Were there good things in my day? Totally! But I couldn’t process them because THERE WAS TOO MANY WATER!!!

Then as I was driving home from Cub Scouts at 8:30 at night, I turned on the radio and Brother Jon Bon was preaching to me. “Livin’ on a Prayer.” And I thought, besides when I first work up, did I pray at all today?

The answer is nope. It didn’t even occur to me. If it had occurred to me, it’s totally possible I would have decided I didn’t have time. Because the fire hose. And because the exhaustion. But it totally would have helped. Because the fire hose. And because the exhaustion.

This comes back to water for me. I am a huge believer in staying hydrated, but the more dehydrated I get, the less desire I have to drink water. It seems crazy but it’s true.

The hungrier I am, the less I feel like making food.
The lonelier I feel, the harder it is to reach out to a friend.
The dirtier my house is, the less I want to clean it.
The busier my day is tomorrow, the more I dread going to bed, even though I know I’ll need the extra sleep.

When life is overwhelming, when we’ve let things get out of hand, it’s really hard to pull it back together. Sometimes we need to pause and refocus.

Tell ourselves:

You will feel better if you take the time to eat something.
I know it’s hard but the loneliness will dissipate if you have some company.
You can’t clean it ALL at this point but if you empty the dishwasher, you’ll slow the decline into chaos and make tomorrow easier.
Staying up late doesn’t actually make tomorrow come more slowly. It just makes it come with a punch to the face.

Even if prayer isn’t your thing, you know that taking a few minutes to breathe and mediate in the middle of a firehose day will help you refocus and be more effective. If you can’t drink all of the water, take a few minutes to turn off the hose and decide which drops you can actually consume. Then go get it.

This is what I was thinking about as Bon Jovi sang my way home. But I was too tired to write about it.

Today my hose is back down to a manageable stream. I still plan to turn it off for a few minutes and regroup throughout the day.

Guest Post – Balancing Your Bipolar – by Blythe Edwards

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**Today I have a guest post by writer and Drops of Awesome reader Blythe Edwards. Her new book Balancing Your Bipolar: A Holistic Approach to Living a Life You Love is aimed at helping people with Bipolar Disorder find meaning and healing in their struggles.**

Why I am Passionate About Balancing Bipolar

I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder type 2 when I was 17 and since that time I have often had the feeling that if I could just help people who have similar experiences with the struggle, it would be worth the pain I have gone through.

Over the years, I have had a few opportunities here and there to do just that. Nothing big, but as I have become more open about sharing my experiences, I have found more people who have family members or friends who have bipolar and they are better able to understand them through our conversations.

This past year I decided I wanted to write a book about my life. It has morphed into something more and it is less about me, and more about sharing my experience so that I can help people who have bipolar and their loved ones to understand it better and work to find balance. Mental illness is a struggle for many people but it doesn’t have to be the end all.

I am so pleased with the initial responses from my family and friends who have gained a deeper understanding of their family members and friends through reading Balancing Your Bipolar.

I am so grateful for those who are brave enough to be real about their experiences with mental illness of all kinds that have helped me to be open as well.

I have written Balancing Your Bipolar: A Holistic Approach to Living a Life You Love  to reach a larger number of people and be a positive voice to help them find balance and greater happiness.

Who I Am

I am a 27 year old mom of three young girls and I get to stay home with them every day. I am trying to do my best and manage what life throws at us. I work to be open and real about my experiences to help decrease the stigma associated with mental illnesses and be a positive influence.

How Drops of Awesome Helped Me

I found the post about Drops of Awesome a few weeks after it was published in early 2013. It was so powerful for me as a young mom with one 18-month-old little girl. I was still struggling to accept my diagnosis and using Drops of Awesome daily made a huge difference for me.

It became my journal for about two years. Sometimes daily, overall very consistently. I would tell myself Drops of Awesome for the little things throughout the day and then journal about them in a gratitude journal as well.

It helped change my perspective of my depression periods. I went from beating myself up for doing what felt like nothing each day, to looking for and praising the little things. In this I was able to do more many days, but even when I wasn’t able to, I was so much happier with myself.

Now, I still use Drops of Awesome during my depressions, which I am actually experiencing now. It has been great to revisit this strategy in detail and realize how much of an effect it has had on my life. When I look at dishes or another chore that needs to be done I can tell myself “drops of awesome” for putting away that one dish, or folding that shirt. In that moment I am awesome!

That attitude shift makes all the difference in allowing me to find joy in my life.