Drops of Awesome

Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson

About Me

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.

Bucket of Awesome – Write Your Story – Free e-Course

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Bucket of Awesome: The Your-Life’s More Amazing Than You Realize Guidebook launches today! It’s my Book Birthday!

And what’s a birthday without gifts? That’s why I’m also launching Bucket of Awesome – Write Your Story, a free e-course.

Whether you want to create a document outlining your life for future generations, or simply frame your history from a place of power and optimism, creating a Bucket of Awesome is your solution.

Bucket of Awesome is a writing journey to help you put your life into joyful and hopeful focus. Completing this project will help you learn and remember all the things that have made your life so remarkable.

You will get the benefit of a renewed sense of gratitude and purpose and those who come after will be inspired by a document that tells the story of your unique life and perspective.

Sign up for my free e-course and get started today!

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Happy Valentims

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After child one and child two comes child three. In some ways child three is spoiled because she has two parents AND two older siblings. In other ways, she is not spoiled because people forget that Valentine’s Day is still a thing in first grade.

Last night I had an “Oh CRAP!” moment when I remembered that, “Oh, she probably wants to hand out Valentines at her class party tomorrow.” It’s not like I’d thought of nothing. Laylee and Magoo had been making chocolate lollipops to sell to earn money for a school trip. And whenever one looked slightly weird, we’d save it for Wanda to hand out to her friends.

The plan was to give them each one of the bargain basement lollipops… attached to a Valentine’s card. I hadn’t planned to be super creative, or even Pinteresty. I had planned to buy some NKOTB or Smurf cards at the grocery store, as I was raised to do, and call it good. But I forgot.

So, I came to Wanda. “Oh man. I totally forgot about Valentine’s cards for your class.”

“Oh. It’s fine. I made these!”

She proceeded to pull out 25 lined 3×5 notecards on which she had written the names of every student in her class. She was in the process of writing a note to each one, most of which said, “You are an awsome freind. Happy valentims day. Love, Wanda.”

And she was  fiercely proud of her Valentines.

“Do you want to look at the list your teacher sent home with the names of kids in your class?” I asked.

“Mom!” she looked affronted, “I’ve been in the same class with these kids for MONTHS! I know their names.”

“Just in case you forget someone?”

“MOM!”

“Well maybe look at it to make sure you spelled all their names correctly.”

“MOM! I’ve been looking at their names for MONTHS!”

“Okay.”

Now, to be honest, some of the name spellings on her cards look pretty funky. I didn’t check them against the list but it is totally possible that some of the parents just chose to spell their kids names funny. If you do this, I want to know why. Seriously, answers are in order. For her entire life, your kid will have to say, “No. I spell Lucy L-O-O-X-I-E.” What is the net positive there?

I asked Wanda, “Do you want me to print some Valentiney things off the internet so you can glue them onto the backs of the cards?”

She did. But they couldn’t say anything about kissing. RE: Gross.

And she worked on them all night, with the help of her siblings during the assembly phase, in what Dan referred to as a “Valentims Sweatshop.”

And they’re kind of perfect.

If those kids ever need to cram for a test about how awsome of a freind they are, they are totally set with flash cards.

Digging out of a Hole

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I don’t often need to listen to Weezer but when I do it really pumps me up. Because if they can rhyme “front” with “violent…lunt,” then I’m pretty sure I can do anything I put my mind to.

What’s with these homies dissin’ my girl?
Why do they gotta front?
What did we ever do to these guys
That made them so violent?

Wednesday was a crappy day. And I’d like to make the disclaimer that I know I have an easy, charmed life, but some days are just hard. I didn’t accomplish what I wanted to accomplish and I did do a bunch of stuff that I’d promised myself I wouldn’t do. And that makes me feel bad about myself. When I feel bad about myself, I consider that a crappy day. And I had been sliding toward it for about a week.

It was one of those days where you don’t want to do anything you should do for the very reason that you know you should do it. You don’t know what I’m talking about? Feel free to move along.

One of the big problems stemmed from the fact that I decided to try Weight Watchers a few weeks ago. Mother Oprah says she’s finally found peace with food by using Weight Watchers so I thought, Why not? Bring it, O-Money! The problem is that a few weeks into just about any diet, I get angry.

What the chicken? I’m sick of chicken. No one can make me eat this delicious chicken breast. Even me. Even though I’m the one setting the limits, I get mad that the limits exist. “Accountability is the worst,” I say! So, I ate the whole house on Wednesday. And it didn’t even taste good.

I do much better emotionally when I simply make small changes to my eating habits, rather than going all-in on a new “lifestyle.” But I don’t always do so well with my weight when I simply make small changes and I’ve definitely packed on some hibernation pounds this last winter…er…two years.

I’m also having a harder time than I thought I would managing my time with my kids all in school. I have an overwhelming list of things to do and several hours each day to do them. I have great organizing systems in place. But I have such little motivation to do the hard things on my list.

I wouldn’t call it a midlife crisis but it’s definitely a housewife crisis. I’ve always been a stay-at-home mom and now, for 6 hours a day, I’m a housewife… and a writer. No little kids to raise. Just a bunch of their crap strewn all over the house I feel the need to pick up, volunteer commitments, a ton of personal writing and blogging goals with no deadlines or accountability, and this feeling that I need to be contributing more financially but that I have no idea where to start. I wish I could just write and make money but it’s not that simple. There’s a little thing called marketing and I haven’t figured out how to do it yet.

And my next Drops of Awesome book is coming out and I love it, but when I have days like this I think… who am I to help people feel happy? I do not have everything figured out. I need Drops of Awesome thinking just as much as anyone who reads my stuff.

I ruminated on this for a couple of days. I’m writing books about this stuff and yet I still need Drops of Awesome thinking as much as anyone who reads my stuff. And I kept plugging away. Periodically weeping in the shower over my own inadequacy. Reaching out to friends. Driving to that stupid Weight Watchers meeting to weigh in, even though I knew my weight would be up… re: Snow Day Cinnamon Roll Gate 2017.

And then last night it hit me with full force. I NEED DROPS OF AWESOME THINKING JUST AS MUCH AS ANYONE WHO READS MY STUFF! Like I actually need it. Literally. I have to focus on it. I have to reboot my thinking patterns. That’s the way out of this hole.

It’s actually quite silly how often I come to this earth-shattering realization and recommit to being nice to myself and focusing on my wins. I am much more consistently good at reminding other people to turn off their negative voices than I am at turning off my own.

But last night I took a few minutes to think about what I’d done well that day and the day before, the awful waste of life day. And I found that I’d done quite a lot that I hadn’t given myself credit for. And I woke up this morning motivated and ready to face the day. A bit.

I was tired, but I decided to make a nice breakfast and then maybe lie down. But while I was making breakfast, I thought I might as well pack the kids’ lunches for them. And while I was at it, I loaded the breakfast dishes and washed the griddle. I have a tradition of leaving it out dirty for a day or two but I decided, what the heck?! And since I was awake and alert and, you know, cleaning griddles, I might as well sit down in my pajamas and type up this blog post. It was like that children’s book, If You Give A Dog a Drop of Awesome. It might come full circle to the point where I cook again tonight around dinner time. Crazy.

I’d like to say a word about friends. I need them. I talked and cried with a few different friends over the past few days and they listened to me. And helped me clean my kitchen. And offered to drive my kids to things so I could stay home and feel crappy about myself. And gave me hugs. And shared their stories of sadness and personal struggle. And they’re probably the reason I was able to figure this out and pull myself out of this self-created hole.

They didn’t tell me my sadness was irrational, although it probably was. They didn’t tell me to suck it up because I have a cushy life and have no right to feel sad. They were simply kind to me. And that sparked in me the desire to be kind to myself. And that’s what I needed.

Often when I’m feeling down or shameful or self-critical, I want to hide and be alone. But that’s never the answer. We need each other. And we need to see each other at our worst because it gives each of us a chance to be at our best and show love.

Which brings me back to Weezer. Why do any of us homies gotta front? Be real. Be Awesome. Be kind to yourself. It’s simple but it’s really hard sometimes. We can do this.

Bucket of Awesome – Ambassador Invitation

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***Update – The Bucket of Awesome Ambassador Program is drawing to a close, but please sign up below if you’d like to be on the mailing list for future updates and activities.***

It’s happening.

The third, and possibly most epic, Drops of Awesome book is almost here. It arrived at my publisher from the printer and hits shelves and interwebs March 7th! Sign up at the bottom for an early look at the book.

Bucket of Awesome: The Your-Life’s-More-Amazing-Than-You-Realize Guidebook has been in the works for over a year and I am really proud to share it with you. It’s a book with two purposes:

1. To improve your life by changing the way you tell your story.
2. To give you a framework and thought-provoking questions to help you record your personal history in an engaging and positive way.

Change your story by how you tell your story – Drops of Awesome style.

If this idea speaks to you like it yammers to me, I’d love to have you join our promotional team as an Ambassador of Awesome.

Ambassadors of Awesome for this project will receive an advance digital copy of the book and an invitation to join a closed Facebook group where we can share our Bucket of Awesome journeys and talk about our progress.

In return, you agree to receive email from me and the Familius team and help us get the word out about the book through participating in as many of the weekly missions as you can. I would love your help telling the world how Awesome they are. We’ve had so much fun as a team with the past two books. (As a side note, we are building the list from scratch so please sign up below if you’re interested in joining us, even if you helped us with a past project.)

Let’s fill these Buckets UP.

Select “Ambassador of Awesome” to join the team!

Subscribe to our mailing list

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Please Dub Me


Halloween and Bible Videos

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This post was originally written a couple of days after Halloween 2016 but I guess I was too tired to post it because I never did. I just found it on my hard drive so I thought I might as well “throw it up” on the blog. No pun intended…

Wanda slept on Dan’s face Tuesday night.

He did not like it.

She had stayed home from school with a cough on Monday, one of those annoying coughs that probably sounds worse than it is. And it sounds plenty worse. So you keep your kid home so people won’t hate you and your stupid offspring.

Generally, and specifically actually, we have a rule that you can’t go out and do activities in the evening if you stayed home sick during the day. Too sick to go to school? Too sick to go to moonlight pony camp. But, being Halloween, I broke down and told her she could trick-or-treat as long as she didn’t cough on anyone.

The good thing about letting her trick-or-treat when she was sick was that she tired out before too long and we got to call it a night, not because I hate fun and love bedtime, but because she was done. I had to respect her wishes.

The bad thing about letting her trick-or-treat when she was sick was that she stocked up on candy. Candy suppresses your immune system. Candy, in overabundance, makes you sick to your stomach. And let’s be honest. We might as well rename it, “Overabundanceween,” because it’s a day dedicated to too much. Also, excessive sugar can spike anxiety.

We didn’t let her eat any on Halloween night and the next day she seemed well enough to go to school. That afternoon, she made up for lost time, consuming every sugary chocolate morsel she could shove into her candy hatch. Her capacity is high.

By dinner time, she was all filled up. By bedtime, she was vibrating. Aaaand… she didn’t “feel so well.”

I laid with her in her bed. I laid with her in my bed. I sat next to the toilet with her while she said repeatedly for an hour, “I’m gonna do it. I know I’m gonna do it! It’s HAPPENING!!”

It didn’t happen.

And eventually I sedated her with bible videos.

We laid in my bed with the iPad and some little kids explaining baptism. Good times. As each video ended, she’d say, “I think I’m gonna barf!” and I’d hit play on the next one.

Dan joined us in bed, and Wanda, lulled into submission by the flickering screen of doctrine and the midnight hour eventually fell asleep. On his face.

Maybe next year we’ll just skip the trick-or-treating and go straight to the bible videos. I bet that would go over well.

A Great Rapper

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I like to fancy myself a great rapper. Not because I am one, by any stretch, but because… Actually, I don’t know why.

I just do.

So, kiss my shoe.

See how I spit a rhyme there?

I’ve blogged before about hosting family rap battles. These involve sessions of awkward rhyme around the dinner table. None of us even beat box, although I frequently threaten to. And over the past year we’ve added Hamilton to the mix, so we don’t have to make up all the words anymore, which helps.

You haven’t lived until your seven-year-old has broken into a spontaneous rap solo about the constitution.

All of this is a lead-in to me receiving the greatest compliment of my life a couple of weeks ago. Several friends purchased gifts to donate to the International Rescue Committee in Seattle to celebrate “Winter,” which is suspiciously like Christmas, but for refugees from various countries and religious backgrounds.

I was nominated to drop the gifts downtown because all my kids are in school and I am now a lady of leisure. It took me a fair amount of time to find a non-parallel parking spot near the drop-off point, only about 4 blocks away.

Luckily, I’d brought my wagon, still full of sand from the softball field. So, I loaded it up with food and gifts and started to slowly, slowly, ever so awkwardly, make my way over the sidewalk cracks and crosswalks to the building.

As I inched across one crosswalk, holding the presents onto the wagon with one hand, pulling it with the other, a woman pulled up in front of me, gave me a huge grin and a thumbs up. It was as though she “liked” me on Facebook, but IRL.

She unrolled her window and yelled out, “YOU ARE A GREAT WRAPPER!”

There I was on the streets of downtown Seattle and people were calling out to me about my great rapping skills. I prefer to spell it without the “W”. As does Lin Manuel Miranda.

It made my day.

What’s Your Longshot? 

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It’s not cool to admit this, but there are things in my life I don’t attempt or I attempt half-heartedly because I’m pretty sure I won’t succeed.

Weight loss is one. Growing my business online is another. Consistently making healthy breakfast for my kids is a big one. We are a cereal family most of the time. Cereal with a side of fruit for a sense of moral/nutritional superiority.

Sometimes I make lists about breakfast, but when 6:15 rolls around each morning, the chances of me following through grow slim.

There are so many things I avoid. Because success in these areas is difficult for me. Because nailing them would be a longshot.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about this for the past several days. Because I’ve found myself ALL-IN promoting a political candidate for public office for the first time. And this is very unlike me.

In the past, I’ve been quick to hide people from my Facebook and Twitter feed for posting too many political posts. I always vote. But privately and with dignity and respect for all the other parties and candidates.

But, if you looked at my social media feeds before October 5th and then after, you’d probably think I’d been hacked by an unemployed 30-year-old man podcasting from his mother’s basement. It is all Evan McMullin all the time around here. I’ve taken my previously-underused Twitter account to new places, hashtagging the crap out of Evan McMullin and retweeting and liking anything that promotes his candidacy. I talk about algorithms and “retweet limits” and twitter strategy with my new online friends. Political nerdery and fanaticism is in full swing over here.

And Evan’s candidacy is a massive Hail-Mary play.

But I. Do. Not. Care. This process is reminding me that it feels good to do hard things, even if success doesn’t seem likely. Because, if we only fight the battles where victory is certain we’ll miss out on the victories that really matter.

And I want to apply this thinking to other areas of my life. I want to dig in and think about what I’m avoiding doing because I think it will be too hard or because I don’t think I can succeed.

Thomas Edison is quoted as saying, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”    

So, we won’t be successful unless we’re willing to push through the times where we’ve lost all hope of succeeding. We won’t be successful if we give up. And we have to be willing to do the right thing, even when, especially when, the odds are against us.

I believe that some of the most important undertakings begin not because they are bound to succeed but because someone feels bound to do the right thing.

What “right thing” in your life are you avoiding doing because you don’t think you can succeed? Can you try one more time? Can you stand up and make a change?

Breakfast. Tomorrow morning. Overnight oatmeal in the thermal cooker. Never surrender.

bound-to-do-the-right-thing

My Responsibility – Teachers over Moms

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birthday-interview4

Wanda was doing her homework on Monday which was, and I kid you not, telling her stuffed animals about her classroom job. The school is experimenting with moving toward a “no homework” model by giving them little tasks. These are tasks that in the past would have been undertaken without assignment by any normal human child back in the days before they all became tablet-slurping cyborgs.

So now we get lists of things she can do to act like a kid and communicate with “her stuffed animals” (Translation: parents) about what’s happening in the classroom.

With the tasks, comes a worksheet and on that worksheet is a line to write the student’s name.

Wanda looked at the sheet.

“Oh,” she said, “We’re supposed to put our name at the top.”

I smiled and nodded and kept working on digging through my email.

She held her hand out to me, palm-forward.

“No,” she said in a lofty tone, “I need to do it. It’s my responsibility.”

Ummm…okay. No one’s stopping you. I looked after her as she lifted her shoulders into her best possible posture, tossed her hair, and marched off to get a pencil.

I kept on with my email.

“You see, mom? I have a new trait. It’s called responsibility. We’re studying it at school.”

“That is awesome. Good for you.”

All day, she was focused on her responsibility.

I helped her find her missing shoes.

“Thanks for helping mom. But next time I should probably do it myself because it’s my responsibility.”

wanda-responsibility

Laylee reached for one of Wanda’s dishes after dinner.

“NO!! That’s my responsibility.”

You’d think I had never once or ten THOUSAND times told Wanda to clear her own place at the table. No. This was new news. Her teacher had given her a new trait. For October. And that trait, my fellow Americans, is a little thing we like to call RE-SPON-SI-BILITY!

Maybe if I had a teaching degree I would be qualified to give her traits. Maybe.

The older kids, of course, found this hilarious and sweet. When Laylee taught our Family Night lesson about keeping journals, she made sure to look at Wanda with a grave expression and say, “We need to write in our journals. It’s our… responsibility.”

Wanda perked right up and nodded solemnly. She is now on the journal train.

So I started praising every good thing Wanda did as evidence of how responsible she was. I even noticed Laylee do something good and I called her out.

“Look how responsible Laylee is being! Nice job!”

Wanda looked perplexed.

“Wait,” she said, “Laylee has traits too?!”

Yes. Yes she does. But she’s not in Mrs. Boogaloo’s first grade class! I wonder where she got them!?