Drops of Awesome

Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson

Domesticality

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!

A Stranger Things Birthday Party for Laylee – BARB IS ALIVE!!

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A couple of weeks ago my friend’s husband came to pick my kids up for church youth night. He is also my friend but this story feels more dramatic if I refer to him as “my friend’s husband.” While he was waiting for them to get ready, he asked me a question.

“Does this Saturday work for Laylee’s birthday party or would you rather do it next week?”

I had no response to this.

A. I’ve never had one of my friends’ husbands approach me about the timing of my teenage daughter’s birthday party.

B. I had momentarily forgotten that she had a birthday.

“I mean,” he continued, “We’ll want to have it fairly close to her actual birthday. We could do it at my house, but I’d rather do it at yours.”

What.

This only made it worse. I mean, he’s a good friend, but. What?

It turns out that, as he was driving the jazz band carpool, he had been talking to Laylee about the “locked room” party craze. He’s super creative  and wanted to plan an elaborate puzzle like that. And so they hatched a plot. Mike would spend hours creating a locked room/puzzle birthday party for Laylee and her friends, one of whom was his daughter.

It was just that no one had told me about it. So. The confused face.

Once I was up to speed, we got to work. Mike did all the mad genius stuff and I set the mood.

The mood?

Retro 1980s Horror Show That Half of Laylee’s Friends Aren’t Allowed to Watch Because it’s Practically too Scary for Me. Perfect. Here’s how it went down.

The girls arrived at our 80s abode and we fed them dinner. Eggos. 80s dance music was playing.

As they were finishing dinner, I knocked at the front door, dressed as Joyce Byers. This was convenient because I just recycled my Halloween costume.

Joyce was crying as usual and told them to come out on the front porch. It was an EMERGENCY! You see, she believed that Barb was ALIIIIIIIIIVE!

While we were out on the porch, Dan and Mike threw grey thrift store sheets over everything to make it Upside-Downy and then dimmed the lights and flipped on some blue ones.

Joyce told the girls they had to go into the Upside Down and save Barb.

Back inside, Chief Hopper awaited to tell them how the puzzle worked. Everything they needed to unlock the secret door under the stairs and save Barb was on one specific book shelf and table. Then he gave them a walkie talkie and told them to contact him if they needed assistance.

The way Mike set up the puzzle, there were three numbers they needed to find that corresponded with three stickers next to a padlock.

The first riddle involved them sorting books by height. Each book had a letter on it. When sorted properly, the letters spelled Tolkien. When they looked in the Lord of the Rings books, they found a clue to another detailed puzzle. Once solved, that puzzle gave them the quote “rings for mortal men.” There are 9 rings for mortal men in LOTR, so the number was nine.

The second riddle involved an unfolded cootie catcher. Remember those little paper folded fortune tellers from when we were kids? When they folded it and held the points together, it contained a musical staff with a line of music. When they played the song on the piano, it was the theme from Star Wars.

In the Star Wars VHS tape on the shelf was an oddly cut out piece of paper. There was another piece of paper with similar markings on the table. They had to hold up the cutout paper a foot above the table paper with a flashlight shining through it.

The combination of the projected light from the first paper and the symbols on the second paper spelled out the word “quinze”, which means 15 in Portuguese. Good thing there was an English/Portuguese dictionary on the table. The second number was 15.

For the third and final clue, there was an 80s Troll puzzle half-assembled on the table. They had to put it together, squish it between two cookie sheets, flip it over, and read the message on the back. The message contained 4 quotes they recognized from Harry Potter books. Now, I know Harry Potter is not 80s appropriate, but we needed to pick books the girls would all be familiar with and time is irrelevant in the Upside Down.

They found the correct books and in their pages were the pieces to a brightly colored Sudoku puzzle. The colors matched the colors of M&Ms in a jar on the shelf. They had to solve the Sudoku puzzle, count the number of M&Ms and then do a math problem with those numbers, giving them the final number for the code.

They unlocked the door.

And found this VHS video from Barb inside.

She was ALIVE!!! And she’d left them some rad treats. Scrunchies, Coke glasses, hot pink nail polish, and makeup bags with Nerds inside.

Here is a picture of the girls watching Barb’s message. I love the older kids’ delight contrasted with Wanda’s horror. Eaten by monsters? Gross.

And I let them eat cake.

And monsters ate no one.

Pi Day – Beef Broccoli Cheddar Pie

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My kids love Pi Day almost as much as I love Labor Day, and that’s saying something.

They have each memorized more digits of Pi than any sane person should know and every year we celebrate.

This year, in honor of Pi day on March 14th, why not make pie for dinner?

This recipe is a healthied-up version of a family favorite my mom used to make when I was growing up. Even with the changes, my kids love this. Enjoy.

cheddar-pie

Beef Broccoli Cheddar Pie

Filling:
1 lb ground beef
1/4 cup of chopped onions
1/2 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1/4 cup dry bread crumbs
8 oz of tomato sauce

Topping:
1 egg
2 egg whites
2 oz cheddar
6 oz low-fat cottage cheese
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp dry mustard
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1/2 tsp dry parsley
1 cup small-cut broccoli florets

Steam broccoli until just tender enough to stick a fork in. Set aside. Brown beef and onions and drain well. Mix beef and onions with remainder of filling ingredients. Mix topping ingredients except broccoli. Fold in broccoli. Spoon filling into pie plate. Cover pie with topping and bake at 350 until the topping is bubbly and cooked through, about 30 minutes.

For the Love

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I have the hardest time every year choosing what picture to put on our Christmas cards. From the time school starts pretty much until Christmas vacation we simply do and do and do some more. We don’t really take time to document the doing. So the years when I get around to printing Christmas cards I often struggle. The summer pictures are too summery. The spring pictures are too outdated already. The fall pictures look like a ninja or witch, or a What Does the Fox Say, which aren’t very Christmasy.

So, this year I decided to kill two birds with one stone. For Halloween our entire family is dressing up as characters from White Christmas. Then we take a picture at the Halloween party and BAM! Christmas card pictures! The girls are the Haines Sisters, Dan and Magoo are Bob and Phil, and I’m the nosy housekeeper.

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We’ve been buying fabric and feather fans for weeks and now, and the church Halloween party is just a couple of days away. I’ve been getting more organized, thanks to the fabulous Power of Moms, and I’m pretty much on schedule with this project. Today is the day to sew.

But I find that since I know I need to sew today, it’s the last thing I want to do. In fact, I’m Grumble-Sewing. Sew a seam. Growl a little. Pull out some pins. Sigh.

I am sitting at the table surrounded by gorgeous blue clouds of fabric and wonderful sewing machines that I’m blessed enough to own. I’m creating something amazing that I really want to create because I somehow convinced my entire family to dress up as characters from my favorite Christmas movie for Halloween, and I’m whining.

Why?

Have you ever done this? Have you ever found yourself whining internally or externally because you have to do something that you technically really love and that you chose to do but that suddenly when it’s time to do it, it feels like a chore?

Ugh. I have to read my book club book.
Ugh. I have to pick out an outfit for my date night.
Ugh. I have to sew Halloween costumes.
Ugh. I have to make dinner.
Ugh. I have to walk upstairs and sing Wanda a song for bedtime.

I love reading, getting dressed up, sewing, cooking, and spending time with my kids. But there’s something about a deadline or a sense of necessity that squash-slams my attitude.

However, noticing how annoying I was being, I was able to turn my day around by changing a few things:

1. Make a mental list of why you love what you’re doing – Today as I was sewing, I tried to remember why I love this hobby. I made a mental list.
-I get to make something beautiful.
-My kids love it.
-It makes me feel creative.
-I love finding cool new ways to put pieces together.
-It’s one of the few things I do that gets recognition from other people . (It’s like grown-up show and tell.)

2. Watch your wording – Whenever I chatted with someone, I was careful about how I talked about what I was doing. Instead of saying, “I have to sew costumes today,” I said, “I get to sew costumes today.” It helps to think of the task as a privilege, rather than a burden. I should never forget that I chose how I spend my time.

3. Take breaks – So instead of pushing through with my usual sewing sweatshop, a marathon process that makes sewing extremely unfun, I broke it up by doing other tasks like cleaning and grocery shopping. That way sewing was the recreational activity I could return to in little chunks and actually enjoy it.

I find that this process works even for tasks I don’t actually love. If I make a mental list of things I love about mopping (the smell of the soap, the way the floor looks and feels when I’m done, the game I play where I break the floor up into shapes and scrub them one at a time), talk about it like I’m lucky to have a floor to mop, and reward myself with a little break when I’m done the kitchen, mopping is less of a suck.

How do you motivate yourself to do the things you hate or remind yourself that you actually love the things on your schedule?

My Autobiography on a Plate

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“What’s that?” Laylee asked with an upturned nose, pointing to Wanda’s uneaten peanut butter sandwich languishing on the table.

sandwich

“It’s the story of my life,” I replied, “My autobiography on a plate.”

Because I spend my life making food for people, sometimes very specific food like this particular sandwich, food that is asked for, and needed for things like sustaining life and strengthening eyeballs, food that is licked and discarded.

That plate says so much.

Laylee gave me the “Mom You’re Weird” look and moved on with her day.

Later that night I asked her if she liked the lunch I’d packed her for school.

“Oh. Sorry, Mom! I forgot to eat it and bought lunch at the cafeteria.”

Garbage can open thy gaping maw. We have another offering.

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.

dejunk

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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When All Else Fails, Discard All of Your Personal Effects

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When I was little my mom would make us clean our rooms. It was a bitter wind that blew on room cleaning days because… how dare she? She taught us life skills and we wept bitterly.

Now I have kids of my own and I’ve taken room cleaning to a whole new level. It’s a level born of necessity. It’s a level born of not doing a thorough cleaning or decluttering in the nine years we’ve lived in this house. It’s a level that combines the Grinch with Dr. Robin Zasio from Hoarders. On their walls I left nothing but hooks and some wire.

I recently read an AWESOME book about decluttering, nay THE awesome book about decluttering, I’ve read a few and this one is true. What I like so much about her approach is that it’s less about getting rid of stuff and more about choosing to keep the things that bring you joy and only the things that bring you joy. You can have something and it can be nice or useful but if it doesn’t spark joy, you don’t need it. She also talks about how to let go of things with gratitude once they’ve fulfilled their purpose in your life. It’s very Zen.

Thank you for being such a fun pair of socks and fulfilling your purpose by being on sale for a dollar. I had so much fun purchasing you and wearing you once. Goodbye.

Thank you for being a fun scarf that I received as a gift. I felt very loved and surprised when I received you. That feeling of love and surprise were your reason for existing. But that doesn’t mean I have to like you or feel guilty for not wearing you every time I walk past you in my closet. Farewell.

So, I’ve been decluttering for weeks, prepping for spring break when the real fun would start. And it started today. All of these steps are to be accomplished with the kids’ assistance.

Step one. Wash all the laundry in the entire world so we’d know what clothes we had.

Step two. Remove everything from my children’s rooms but their furniture and their clothes, which we heaped up on their beds. Books are lined up along the walls in the hall to be sorted later. Everything else is staged in various rooms throughout the house by category.

Step three. Deep clean every crevice and baseboard and vacuum under the furniture.

Step four. While moving furniture to clean, agree that the kids can put their furniture anywhere they want it, even if, especially if, that furniture placement is completely an ordinance of crazy town.

Step five. Sort their clothes one piece at a time, donating anything that doesn’t fit, doesn’t look good, or doesn’t make us feel happy.

This is where we stopped tonight after working pretty much solid from 9am to 9pm.

Steps six through a billion. Repeat the sorting process with one category per day throughout spring break, taking time each afternoon to do something fabulous as a reward. By fabulous I mean getting a free ice cream cone at Ben and Jerry’s on the 14th because it’s free ice cream day or buying new bedroom curtains at IKEA on Friday if we’ve gotten all of our cleaning done.

The trick here is that they love their newly cleaned and stripped rooms so much that I’m hoping they will be loath to add too much junk back into them and I think it’s working. A few choice quotes from today:

Wanda – “Hey mom. It’s weird. I actually like cleaning.”

Laylee – When asked to choose one thing she’s thankful for to add to our family prayer, she said, “I’m thankful for cleaning.”

Yes. That happened. I did not faint or cry. I didn’t even twirl my mustache or cackle with glee. I just added it to the ever-living prayer. We are thankful for cleaning. Yep. Because that’s a thing that average 12-year-olds say all the time.

Magoo – I want to add as few things back to my room as possible because it’s awesome right now.

To my credit, I was DJ-ing some wicked sick tunes while we cleaned and I let the level of silliness climb about 86.3% higher than I’m generally comfortable with. I also helped them move their furniture into (and I cannot emphasize this enough) possibly the weirdest and most-likely-to-make-Feng-Shui-certified-home-decorators-bludgeon-themselves-with-their-own-energy-cures configurations possible. Because I am the nicest and most chill mom ever and because I had the nicest and most chill mom ever who let me do wickedly stupid things with my furniture when I was a kid and because Laylee said moving things around would make it feel like a whole new room and I could not argue with that.

Twelve hours and one category in and we’ve gathered 2 big black garbage bags of trash and 3 big black garbage bags of donations. And Laylee is thankful for cleaning. So basically the apocalypse is nigh. Stock up on wheat and ammunition.