Drops of Awesome

Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson

Aspirations

Wish Me Peace and Comfort at This Most Difficult Time

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Every once in a while, it does a body good to do something scary, something good and productive that scares the Chacos off of you. Two years ago it was a sprint triathlon. This year it’s a 10k.

And I don’t run.

Ever.

Once many years ago my physical therapist told me I had wobbly joints and I should never become a runner. I listened to her because she was singing my song. I can never run? Oh, the tragic humanity of it all. Do I want to get up at 4:00AM and slam my body repeatedly against the cement until I vomit? Of COURSE I do! Who wouldn’t!? Sadly, I can’t. I’ve been medically advised not to.

No. Under the council of my almost physician, I’m afraid I will have to eat cheese and watch Pride and Prejudice instead and think about how hardcore I’d be IF (as Cinderella’s stepmother would say) I were physically able to wear tiny shorts and exert myself to the point of almost-death. But I can’t… so… nom nom nom… Netflix.

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I’ve done a few 5ks in my life, always walking them, re: my off-the-cuff diagnosis of wobbilitis. When I competed in a sprint triathlon a couple of years ago I walked the 5k portion. I wanted a big goal, a scary goal, but one with no running involved. I finished. I cried. It was glorious.

Then my body fell into disrepair. I’d met my big fat goal and I didn’t have another one and I just stopped pushing myself.

So, when a friend asked on facebook who wanted to run a 10K with him this September, I said, “Yes,” before I really thought about it. I needed something to push me. This would be the thing. This race has everything – cartoonists, Nutella and cupcakes at the aid stations, couches along the route, and creepy guys in fat suits chasing you to make you run faster. How could I refuse?

I consulted my new PT and she said, “Sure. You can run it if you train properly.”

Well, crap.

So I’ve been training for several months. At first I did this in secret, not wanting to tell my running friends for fear they would brand me as one of them, invite me to sleep in their stinky Ragnar van, or “do a quick 14-miler” on a Saturday morning, only to find out I was simply pretending to run.

I’m still running slower than many people walk. What I’m doing is pretty much what they’d call jogging in the eighties but since it is not the eighties we are all runners. Always. And athletes. Never say “jogging” to me.

But eventually the secret came out and everyone’s been nothing but supportive. Runners are people too, it seems.

And I’m tri-ing again this week as a step on the road to the 10k. ¼ mile swim, 14 mile bike, 5K run.

It’s been a rocky process. I haven’t lost an ounce of weight. I’ve had some training days that have made me happy cry and more days where I’ve sad cried. Mostly I’m just proud I’ve stuck with it this long. I feel stronger and more certain I can do hard things, even if I do them really REALLY slowly.

Last week was one of the Dark Times. We’d been on vacation, a veritable tour of food, and when I got back I’d lost a lot of ground physically. Five-year-old Wanda overheard me asking a friend to pray for me because I was worried about the tri and the 10K of doom.

So she went up to the card drawer and picked out this lovely specimen for me, which I’m 98% sure she had no idea how to read.

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Then she wrote this inside.

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“Mom. I know that you can do the triathlon next year. Love, Wanda.” The picture is me and my three friends running. I am not tall.

Notice what the original card says.

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It truly is a most difficult time. Wish me peace. And comfort. And several months of post-race carb loading.

 

 

It’s Only Routine, Ma’am

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Brandon Mull obviously has kids because he’s using some quality subliminal messaging in the third book in his Five Kingdoms series. All the cool kids in the ultra-modern realm of Zeropolis use the slang term “tidy” to mean good, awesome, sick, buck, or super fly. What are those darn kids saying these days in the magic-deficient earthen-type world? Cause in Zeropolis they say “tidy.”

“Wow. Your new spikey blue hair cut is super tidy.”

“You are good at the techno-baseball. That was a tidy catch you made with your glove of catching.”

“Your room looks so good since your mom made you throw away everything that you hold dear. Tidy!”

I like Mr. Mull.

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We made it through spring break with very few injuries although Wanda described her adventures as “discovering new kinds of scabs.” She says she doesn’t fall down on purpose and she doesn’t like getting hurt, but one good thing is she can always discover new kinds and shapes of scabs… “and that’s good!” Love the attitude.

Another thing that’s good is throwing out half your belongings and that’s just what we did in the kids’ rooms and with their stuff throughout the house. Their rooms look awesome and they actually want to be in them so everyone is happy but the mice who are looking for the crumbs and plates of food I found under their beds. The mice and bugs hate everything about our spring break adventures. P.S. We have never had mice in the kids rooms, but oh how they would love it there.

Now, the whole week wasn’t as epic as the 12-hour clean-a-thon day one. We slept in some and played a ton of games but we made it through every category of stuff and now I’m on to the rest of the house. Today I emptied every darn thing out of the freezer and deep freeze for the first time in the nine years we’ve lived here.

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I found a can of frozen juice with an expiration date of 2007. We have purchased two new refrigerators since 2007 and the can of juice has moved from one to the other to the other. Yes. That happened. But now it is on its way to the happy landfill in the sky and I am left with only food I would actually consider preparing for my family.

It’s strange that I would keep horribly freezer-burned food for years because, “I don’t want to waste it.” But the truth is, if it’s got a greenish tint, is covered in frost, and I would never, even in a zombie apocalypse, consider serving it to my family, then it’s already wasted. Now, keeping it in there just wastes my energy and space.

It’s the same with any item I purchased and am just hanging onto because I feel guilty about wasting money. I wasted the money the minute I bought it. Now I get to choose if I let that poor choice determine the way I live indefinitely.

I have the same issue with food on my plate or in the fridge. I frequently overeat in the name of not wasting food. Truthfully, the food waste is even greater if I eat something my body doesn’t need or want. Would I rather waste the food in the trash can or waste it in my body as if I’m some sort of living breathing food disposal unit? Because it hangs a-ROUND once I place it in my body. And not in a good way.

So now that the kids’ rooms are done and the kitchen is done and my clothes are done, I start on all the rest of the house and as I start on all the rest of the house I feel the need to put some solid habits in place to care for the things I’ve been blessed with and the people I love.

I’m starting simple.

Three non-negotiables, as recently brought to my remembrance by StressFreeHomemaking.com.

1. One load of laundry from start to finish every day, folded, put away. It may sound strange, but I think my problem was I was cleaning too much laundry on any given day. Cleaning it’s the easy part. I couldn’t keep up with the folding and putting away.

2. Dishwasher run each night and unloaded first thing in the morning. I’m pretty good at this already but I’m going to try running it every night regardless of how full it is so I can start the next day with a clean slate.

3. Dinner planned and ingredients thawed every night for the following day. There’s something embarrassing about how shocked I am every single night that we need to eat something around 6pm. Again?! We just ate dinner yesterday!!

I’m also doing my best to follow a basic weekly cleaning routine. I’ve looked at several and this is the one I’m using for now because it’s simple and the printable is cute.

I’ll let you know my progress and how long the routines last. Consistency is hard, unless it’s consistently eating chocolate. I can do that.

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*This post may contain affiliate links.

Hooked on a Feeling – A Peace Resolution

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I love pressing reset at the beginning of the new year. I’ve heard a lot of people going off about New Year’s resolutions the past couple of weeks.

“They never work.”

“They’re too much pressure and then you just feel like a failure when you don’t accomplish them.”

“Pass the chocolate.”

And you know how I like to get all Drops-of-Awesomey up in here. And chocolate. BUT. I still really like the feeling of making a fresh start on January One, or rather on the first day the kids go back to school after January One.

So, this year as I thought about why so many people are skipping out on resolutions, it occurred to me that the reason resolutions stress us out is because we’re perfectionists and we’re not resolving to be better, we’re resolving to be perfect immediately and our lack of flexibility and self-mercy put us in a mental place to feel like failures because we’re improving our lives but not COMPLETELY. NOW. And therefore we suck.

This is dumb. And stressful. And counter-productive. And un-Awesome.

For 2015, I have one resolution. And it’s not about what I’m going to do perfectly or stop doing completely. It’s about how I’m going to feel. And that feeling is peaceful.

For 2015 I am resolving to increase the level of peace in my heart and therefore in my home and thusly in the world. I am resolving to make peace on earth in 2015.

This may sound abstract and it could be, but I spent some time thinking about what peace looks like for me, what choices I make that lead to peace. Basically the practical side of this resolution is to ask myself as often as I can remember to be mindful, which of course won’t be all the time, “Is this choice adding to or subtracting from my personal peace?”

There are a few things I know will help me feel peaceful:

1. More spiritual devotional time
2. Less desire to control situations or people other than myself
3. More love
4. Fewer comments I regret
5. Less time spent in the bad hotel, or as Queen El-to-the-Sa would say, more “Let it Go!”
6. More gratitude.
7. More love – I know I have this one on the list twice, but I need to not only love others more, but also love myself.

In practical use, those might look like:

1. Pour my heart out to God in prayer, rather than watch one more episode of Gilmore Girls tonight.
2. When one of my kids does poorly on a report card, try to guide her gently without feeling personally injured by the setback.
3. If Dan is grumpy, give him a hug, rather than being annoyed. After all, that’s what I expect him to do for me.
4. Say one less TMI comment at the next book club.
5. When I share TMI at the next book club, I won’t obsess about it for days.
6. Be grateful that my 80s cabinets are sturdy enough to have lasted since the 80s.
7. Spend time tonight thinking about all the good I’ve contributed to the world today.

Any time I make one of those peaceful choices, I am adding to that feeling, I am succeeding in my resolution. Any time I make a choice that slurps the peace from my life, I can always make a different choice and add some peace back in.

How do you want to feel this year?

The Bad Hotel

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We’d been driving for hours and we were tired. I pulled out my phone to find an inexpensive place to stay for the night and I saw a few options. Everything in our price range had Meh reviews so I went with the cheapest one, even though I sort of knew it wouldn’t be good. We drove into the parking lot and it was confirmed. This wasn’t going to be pretty. But I was tired and I decided to stay there anyway.

As we took the rattling elevator up to the second floor with a rough looking man and his dog, I began to seriously question my decision. We walked down the long, dim hallway, noise greeting us from nearly every room and the choking smell of cigarette smoke radiating from the walls.

We locked ourselves into our filthy room, helped the kids brush their teeth, checked for bed bugs and turned out the lights. The room was cold, dark, and noisy from the heater and the neighbors to the right, left, and above us. It smelled horrible. But we’d paid for the room and we needed the sleep before we started out on the road again the next morning. Wanda, a year old at the time, stood up in her pack ‘n play and screamed, reaching out to me and Dan in our cramped double bed. I picked her up. I sang to her. I comforted her. I laid on the stained carpet next to her and shushed her to sleep.

We didn’t get much rest. We had a horrible night. And we paid a hundred dollars for the experience. To put it mildly, we regretted the decision to stay there.

But the rough night was over. What could I do to fix the problem? I could apologize to Dan and the kids for my poor hotel choice, for not planning ahead and for not getting us out of there once I knew how gross the hotel was. I could decide never to stay there again.

What could I do to make the problem worse and ensure we stayed miserable for years into the future? I could decide that it was a tragedy that I’d chosen such a skeezy road trip hotel because since I’d chosen that hotel once, we were doomed to stay there every road trip for the rest of our lives. I could talk about how awful it was non-stop and decorate our home to match the hotel just so that every day I would remember what a bad choice I’d made. I could turn that hotel into the focus of my life.

Now that seems ridiculous, but how many times do we let our mistakes determine our entire future? Or even enough of our future to make us waste one day or one week in crippling regret? I recently said some things I regret. Stupid things. Thoughtless things. Things I thought were funny during a moment of heightened stress. I apologized to the people involved. I prayed and asked God to forgive me.

But the next day I still felt awful. How could I say those things? What did those things say about me as a person? How could my friends ever look at me the same way again? Should they ever look at me the same way again? These thoughts of shame and regret cycled through my head over and over again.

So because I was so upset about my mistake, I decided to live in that mistake for as long as possible. If it was a bad thing and I didn’t want it to be part of my life, then why did I let it take up so much time in my thoughts and in my heart? I had done everything I could to fix it… Except let it go.

By focusing all my energy on my poor choices, I was magnifying their negative effects in my life. I was decorating my house with pictures of the bad Hotel.. And I was succumbing to the inevitability of booking a room there again.

“That’s where I always stay. It sucks but I stay there.”

When you are bogged down by the things you’ve done wrong, you start to believe that you have no choice but to do them again, that it’s just the way you are, that you’re somehow defective or incapable of changing. If, after all, you spend your time dwelling on them, you aren’t changing.

Now, do I want to completely wipe the bad hotel from my memory? No. Not exactly. I want to remember it just enough at the back of my mind so I avoid going there again. I don’t want to think about it, but if the experience is buried way down deep in my brain, it can pop to the surface if I ever drive through that town again and find myself looking for a place to stay.

Next time I’m hanging out with my friends and I come to a place where I can go for a cheap laugh or speak words of love, I hope I remember just an echo of what the cheap laugh felt like and I hope I make a different choice. But for today, I need to let it go.

Today is so much bigger than yesterday’s mistakes. Today is a thousand choices waiting to be made and the first one will be to live where I am, because with the next choice I make, where I am can be a pretty beautiful place.

Please Sir, Will You Buy My Book?

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We’re so close, I can taste it. I guess I could actually taste it, if I wanted to. Although Drops of Awesome: The You’re-More-Awesome-Than-You-Think Journal doesn’t release for another week, I already have my copies in all their deliciousness.

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That was an exciting day. Laylee said that me opening my box of books reminded her of George McFly getting his first box of books at the end of Back to the Future. I take that as the highest compliment.

I would also take it as quite a morale boost if you would pre-order Drops of Awesome on Amazon today. You can buy it any day but we’re trying to see how high we can get the Amazon rank to climb, so today would be especially helpful.

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I love the book. The ideas within its pages have changed my life multiple times. Let’s call those times “course corrections.” And I really want to see the book and the movement spread throughout the world.

We need to start defining ourselves by who we are and what we do, not who we aren’t and what we don’t. We need to celebrate our victories, no matter how small to help us build momentum to do even greater things. And we need to know that a new story starts this instant. If you are taking positive action now, then you are the person you want to be.

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Below is a preview copy of the journal. I hope it inspires you as you read and you want to share it with your family and friends. I can’t think of a more perfect gift for the sister, mother, friend, teacher, or dude who isn’t afraid of pink in your life. Who doesn’t want a gift that says, “I think you are amazing. I want to help you see just how awesome you are?”

I want you to see just how awesome you are! Please take this journey with me.

This Big Yellow Car Came and Took My Children

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Well, it starts. School. More specifically middle school. Queue the silent scream. This person is far too old and far too tween-ular for my liking. I still like her, but like I said, the silent scream.

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Things take longer in the morning when your destination is middle school. You have to panic because your curls “look weird” and then you have to de-weird them. You have to wear lipstick for the first time. That’s right people, LIPSTICK, because you are old and mature and… SILENT SCREAM.

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In middle school you wear runners bigger than your entire body was when it exited your mother’s womb and a backpack that is heavier than your current body weight. You have to check and recheck your backpack and ask your mom to walk you to the bus stop on the first day, only to get to the bus stop and realize, “Hey. Why is my MOM here?!”

So this is her back-to-school bus picture. From behind the trees. With Laylee super tiny because I didn’t have a razzi lens on my Windows Phone camera.

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She will do great. Me too. At least the screams are currently silent.

Then there is Magoo. He has never cared about fashion. Or, I should make a correction, he has always cared about fashion just enough to know that he wanted no part of it. The look of horror he gave me last year when I suggested he wear a button-up shirt to school picture day curled my toes.

“Why can’t I just wear an Angry Birds shirt like a normal person?”

He doesn’t want to stand out, doesn’t want to be uncomfortable, doesn’t want to be seen as someone who cares about what he’s wearing.

But then this year we took him to H&M for back to school shopping and somehow this happened:

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It was love at first sight and I found myself spending three times more on a pair of jeans for him than I ever had before. Because when a person who wears track pants and a logo t-shirt every day of his life begs you to let him look like a Newsie the first day of school, you say, “How high?” and jump up to that cash register. (This only works when you are employed, which we are. Yay! I’ll be blogging about that soon.)

Even Dan agreed. We needed to buy the outfit for our sudden fashionist-o. But then he asked, “Do you think he’ll really have the guts to wear it the first day of school?”

I had no idea but I was willing to take the gamble. And it paid off. He is even now on the bus to learning land, dressed like someone who’s misplaced his street urchin boy band. Out of two kids at his bus stop this morning, only two of them gave him a hard time for wearing suspenders. So that’s something.

I don’t care. The cuteness cannot be stood for.

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I had a moment this morning where I was praying over my breakfast and it ended up being a way long prayer about the kids and school and all of my wants and desires for them. It’s swallow-you-up raw, that surge of emotion you get when you think about your kids and their happiness and future. I can’t express in words how badly I want them to be happy.

And off they go into the breach and I start the countdown to summer all over again. I will miss my friends.

What Happens Next?

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If you’re reading a good book, chances are, terrible things are happening to the main character. She’s making bad choices. People are mean jerks, doing things to make her life harder… or end it. Bad things are not good. You can’t change what’s happened in the book. So, why even keep reading?

I keep reading because I want to know what happens next. I keep reading because I know that no matter what has happened in the past, the future can always be brighter.

In life, you keep going because you decide what happens next. Minute by minute, choice by choice, you could be creating the world’s greatest comeback.

As we left for our vacation this summer, I was in a foul mood. Everyone was moving too slowly. My kids, my husband, the car in front of me on the one-lane road out of town. I wasn’t nice. To anyone. The car descended into gloomy silence and I sat at the steering wheel fuming. At first I was mad at everyone else. Then I was simply mad at myself.

We had just begun an all day road trip and I had been an impatient jerk, hurting people’s feelings and setting a horrible tone for the journey. Then I asked myself, “What happens next?” Because really that’s all that matters. It took me about an hour to cool down, but the next words out of my mouth were an apology and after that the next words were positive. Eventually, I was ready to create fun and the road trip turned out to be lovely. I’m so glad I didn’t throw in the towel just because I’d been a jerk for ten minutes but I came REALLY REALLY close to deciding the whole day was a wash.

Every hero has her low points. But what makes an inspiring, enduring hero? She keeps going. She knows that everything she’s been through can be raw material to make her stronger, better and more heroic. She tries not to make the same mistake twice, but if she does, she tries not to make it a third, fourth, fifth, or thousandth time.

This is a journey and the end has not been written. Keep reading!

This is My Jam

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This is my jam.

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It was a hot jam but now it’s a cool jam.

It is definitely a slow jam. It took several hours yesterday to make.

Since Magoo eats jam like some people breathe air, I decided to make about 40 pints this summer, strawberry, raspberry, and blueberry. This kid spreads jam thicker than the bread. Lately, he’s decided that it’s easier to simply hold the jam jar upside down over the bread and pour it out.

I ordered the blueberries for this jam PLO* and they came in yesterday right at the height of my Drops of Awesome-induced email writing frenzy. So, I would take breaks from writing email to make jam and then take breaks from making jam to write email, with Laylee helping me in every capacity.

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What child labor laws? Clicking the “invite” button on Facebook repeatedly is her favorite.

While the jam cooled, I ran out to my other jam session, a bucket-list hip hop class with my laydeez. When I say “bucket list,” I mean list of things to do before I turn 40, because I only have five years before I can never say, “I’m not forty yet,” again. I don’t think I’ve ever said it before, but five years from now, I will be never be able to say it truthfully again. So, before that happens, I need to do ALL the fun things.

And this summer one of those fun things is breaking it down with my crew.

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These are the ladies who go to the Step Up movies with me… in costume. These are the ladies who just last night took turns performing our hip hop routine in pairs. Between the 6 of us, we have 23 children. None of us have ever taken a hip hop class before. These are the ladies who were available for this particular session and who happened to be around when I started begging people to take the class with me so I wouldn’t have to take it alone.

If I ever take one again and you’re reading this, you’re invited. We are not an exclusive crew. If you have an abandoned warehouse we can borrow to practice our moves, you are invited times ten.

White mom hip hop class. Because it’s never too late to close your eyes and pretend you dance exactly like your young, super fly hip hop instructor.

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*We’ve started referring to things we purchased before the end of our time at Microsoft as Pre-Layoff or PLO. I don’t know why we think this is funny. We are pretty much laughing our way through this entire layoff. For example, when Dan was updating his LinkedIn profile one night, we were a little overtired and silly and he started filling in his resume with Facebook-Ad-Style-ClickBait headlines.

“This Software Engineer just finished an 11-year stint at Microsoft. What happens next will AMAZE you,” as his summary.

“How this Software Engineer got amazing results using just these 6 weird old tricks,” as a lead-in to his bullet list of skills. There are 10 listed.

“What Obama Doesn’t Want You to Know About Dan’s Career at Microsoft,” a link to a PDF of detailed information about what Dan did at Microsoft for the last eleven years.

Then he changed his current position to July 2014-Present Senior Software Design Engineer at Not Microsoft. The best thing about this was how two days later all of his contacts got an email suggesting they congratulate Dan Thompson on his new position at Not Microsoft.

If you can’t laugh your way through a layoff, what’s the fun of having HR misplace your job? Am I right?