Drops of Awesome

Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson

About Me

Certifiable

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I didn’t know Laylee was certifiable but she has a card that says otherwise. I took her to Seattle Children’s Hospital for a CPR course for babysitters yesterday, handed her over to some strangers for five hours and she came out of it with this card and the ability to save your life, especially if you are pediatric in nature.

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She is prepared to crack your ribs if necessary. She told me this. And, although it would be awkward, she is willing to remove any clothing that gets in the way. Because. And she was very clear on this. Your life is at stake and that’s more important than worrying about awkward nudity. I wipe away a silent tear of parental pride.

I spent the five hours sitting in a lobby at the hospital working on my manuscript for the next Drops of Awesome project due out from Familius in 2016. It’s a gift book about ways to be Awesome and it’s taking an awful lot of time and thought for so short and cute of a book. I hope you love it. You probably will. Re: you are awesome.

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Later in 2016, we’re planning to release a third Drops of Awesome book, tentatively titled Autobiography of Awesome, a much more in-depth guided journal that gives you prompts to help you write the history of your beautiful life. I’m working on that right now too and it may be my favorite book yet. I’m so excited to use it!

To celebrate, we drove a mile to the U District and stopped at Full Tilt Ice Cream, where I proceeded to buy bigger-than-your-head waffle cones for everyone I could find who was a) my daughter and b) had just finished a CPR course. They were all super grateful.

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I sampled the wares as well, just to be sure they weren’t poison and because my budding life saver refused to order chocolate-covered bacon as a topping on her cone. Something needed to be done with regards to that travesty.

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One of us ended up with melted ice cream between our toes. Not naming names. Follow my eyes.

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And we came home to a sweet and tired family who had spent the day at our small town’s yearly festival, a magical place where tractors,

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unmarked wooden carts full of townspeople,

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tanks,

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time machines,

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fruit people

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and dancing Mexican horses

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delight the crowds and show off our rich cultural sub-rural Washington heritage.

I was pretty sad to miss the fun, but, hey. If Laylee is willing to crack your ribs and rip your clothes off to save your life, I guess I’m willing to miss a parade with a tin man bee keeper riding in a flatbed truck. You’re welcome.

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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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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.

Wherein I Ramble About Pie and Loss and Being Apprehended by the Police

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I am blogging while I wait up for Laylee to get home from her evening activities and then I’ll sleep. I was going to wait up for the pies to cool but I don’t know that it’s worth it. Because there are no pies. Only pie soup with floating meringue. Two hours of my life in a dish with floating blobs of meringue.

And I’m good at pie. I SLAUGHTER AT PIE. But not this time. Because this time it matters. This time I’m making pie for two pie competitions, one at Magoo’s school that he desperately wants to win and one at Dan’s work that I desperately want to win because he’s in his new job with his new co-workers and I don’t know anybody and I have this irrational desire to win Stay-at-Home-Mom/Wife, Microsoft edition. It’s not a thing, but in my special brain-world it is and if I’m going to place in the top 3, I at least need to be able make a freaking pie. Right? Right?

I want to punch myself in the face for typing that because truly? Truly? Who cares? No one. And tomorrow not even me, I guarantee. But in this moment I’m epically sad about losing at pie.

I did good things today. Drops of Awesome were everywhere, but I ended the day exhausted, with liquid pie guts in a dish and I say, “Serve me up a different day, please. Because I’m sending this one back to the kitchen.”

The weather was gorgeous.

One of my kids left the house this morning seething with hormonal rage, aimed at no one in particular but flowing in my general direction. My throat hurt. I had a writing deadline and the post was taking me forever.

By 9:45am, I had heard that someone I care about had passed away, I had gone out in public unshowered and with Wanda looking like a pajama-clad orphan and I’d been pulled over by the police for speeding on a street where Dan has told me no fewer than 30 times to slow down because I would likely get pulled over for speeding.

Preschool, road construction, baseball practice, errands, more road construction, lateness, tween rage, nothing for dinner, trashed house that was clean YES-TER-DAY, instrument practice, play rehearsal, homework, shoes and backpacks everywhere, WAY more shoes and backpacks than there are humans living in my house. Way more. Like I could start a shoe and backpack emporium for people who like shoes with shredded laces because no one under the age of 30 in this family will ever EVER tie their shoes. They just let the laces drag behind them until they wear down to the length they want. Like beaver teeth.

And then Magoo and I spent two hours that I didn’t really have making lemon meringue pies from zest-and-squeeze-your-own-lemons scratch and the lemon fillings wouldn’t set at all. It was like yellow water in soggy hand-rolled crusts. And I blopped the meringue on top and baked them anyway because I was so mad at those pies, I thought a good fifteen minutes in a hot oven would serve them right.

And while I was typing this rant, Laylee came home from her rehearsal and I told her about my day and I cried a little and I told her sometimes it’s hard being the mom. And she said, “Your friend died and you got picked up by the police. That’s a hard day for anyone.” And she hugged me and told me she loved me.

And I loved her more.

I feel better now and I considered letting this post die on my computer without seeing the internet light of day. Because I am Drops of Awesome lady. I’m an author and a public speaker. I think positively. I love myself fully and never ever want to put my kids to bed at 5pm and hoover all the chocolate in Washington State. But that’s not always the case.

Sometimes I’m Drops of Awesome lady. And I’m tired.

And I’m fed up.

And I’m not rational at all.

And I murder pies.

And I thought you should know.

My little tween mom-substitute told me I should go to sleep. I think she’s right. Everything will look better in the morning.

 

It’s Alive!

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Wanda has developed a taste for fruit leather. She loves it and she will have it and there is no limit to her insatiable dried fruit-squish thirst. The other day she ate four.

“Don’t eat four,” I said, my words like feathers in the wind. “Eating four is bad. Eating four will make you sick.”

She gave me a look.

I didn’t enforce the Don’t Eat Four policy.

Four were eaten.

Later that night I was using my magical lay-her-to-sleep powers by laying with her until she fell asleep and she lurched to a sitting position.

“AHHH!!! I just felt my heart beat!!!”

“Yes. That is normal. Because you are a human child,” I said.

“Woah.”

She laid back down.

“MOM!! It just did it again! HA!”

“Ha?”

“Yeah. Ha. You said I would totally get sick if I ate four fruit leathers. And I ate four fruit leathers. And my heart still totally did two beats. So. HA!”

Well, my heart is still beating today but so are my mucus producular glands. And my dizzy glands. And my lay around on the couch all day while building a mountain of balled up tissue glands.

I am a horrible sick person. I always tell myself that if I were terminally ill, I would be extremely positive and long suffering. But, give me a cold, hooooo mama. Call the wambulance. It’s not that I whine out loud, but my inner whino is super duper annoying. It’s like I can’t remember ever having energy or functioning sinuses or a head that wasn’t full of liquefied slugs.

My kids were sick today too.

And they weren’t annoying. At least not about being sick.

Maybe tomorrow will be better. HA! My heart just beat THREE times! I guess I’m fine.

Veganish – Review and Giveaway

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Veganish_hiresI am Vegan sometimes. Sometimes I’m Paleo. Every once in a while I’m a Dorito-tarian. (Don’t tell Jamie Oliver!) I love food. I dream about food. I consume it in ample quantities and I spend a lot of time thinking about what I do eat, what I should eat, and what I will eat.

One of my biggest goals is adding more vegetable into my life in a delicious and sustainable way. By sustainable, I’m not talking about composting and buying local. I’m talking about eating vegetables in a way that I’m willing to do over and over again till death do we part, which hopefully won’t be for a long time because, LOOK, I’m eating so many vegetables!

So I’m always checking out new cookbooks and I love vegan and vegetarian cookbooks especially because they focus so heavily on veg. I’ll take an awesome vegan casserole recipe and substitute chicken for beans or cheese for fake cheese. Because I like me some tasty animal products.

Mielle Chenier-Cowan Rose’s new-ish cookbook Veganish: The Omnivore’s Guide to Plant-Based Cooking speaks to the world of vegetable lovers who add in an occasional animal product for the health benefits. It’s pretty fabulous. The book has no pictures and a horrible index but the recipes and information are so good that I’ve gone back to it again and again. This is surprising if you know me and how heavily I rely on good indexing.

I worked through several of her recipes, cooking from it almost exclusively for a week and we enjoyed nearly everything. I think during that week I tripled my family’s veggie intake and not just for the meals I was preparing from her recipes. Veganish gave so many great veggie prep instructions and just plain motivation to live and eat healthier, that I found myself snacking better, sleeping better and drinking more water between meals.

In the introduction to the book, Mielle says she wants it to be more of a cookbook than a recipe book, to inhabit the nightstand as much as the kitchen. It did just that. I read it from cover to cover and got really fired up about eating better.

I’m sure you will too. If your New Year’s resolutions for healthy living are starting to fade, this book is a good refresher. I’m giving away a copy. Just leave a comment below, listing your favorite veggie and I’ll choose a winner the evening of February 6th. You need to live in the continental US to win, unless you want to pay the shipping. The winner is comment #5 – Valeri!

For those of you who don’t win the book, you get something too. By request, Mielle is sharing her Massaged Kale Salad with my readers. As a person who wants to love kale so I can feel superior to my spinach-eating friends, I was excited to find a salad that finally made this monster green palatable to me. I LOVE this salad. Maybe it’s because the kale is so happy and relaxed after its massage and happy food is tasty food. Whatever the reason, this one is a winner. I’ve made it for extended family dinners and neighborhood potlucks and it’s a crowd pleaser, among people willing to put kale in their mouths and chew. Enjoy!

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Football Agnosticism

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I don’t have anything against football. I just don’t necessarily believe in it. In fact, I ignore it most of the year/decade until something big happens and then I jump on the bandwagon of our winning home team. Die-hard fans are annoyed by this, but I don’t see why. I’m sort of like an agnostic who loves to decorate for Christmas because it’s tradition and it’s fun, it gives me a sense of community, and… OOOOOO Shiny!

As a fellow Christmas lover, I’m happy to see anyone celebrating Christmas, no matter how deeply their religious fervor goes.

And I thusly support the Seahawks at this time of year.

Last year when they went to that really great bowl, you know, the super one, we watched the game. It was the first football game my kids had ever seen and it was a doozy.

“What’s a safety?”

“What’s an interception, mom?”

“Does one team always get that many more points than the other team?”

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Two Sundays ago we wore our outfits from my sister’s wedding last summer (conveniently Seahawks colors) to church in support of the NFC Championship game. What does NFC stand for? “Um… National Football Something Niner…”

And we got out of church at 2pm only to see we’d lost the game. There were 5 minutes left and the Seahawks were behind 19-7. Three minutes left and suddenly they came back and won the game in overtime. Crazy. The entire city of Seattle and every surrounding town had a collective heart attack. It’s sad really because no one will be around to watch the Super Bowl in a couple of days. Even now, my ghost is typing this. Because I died listening to the game. On the radio. We don’t have cable this year because the Olympics aren’t currently happening.

So this weekend will see us in our Seahawks gear, cheering for the home team because we can and it’s fun and we love Seattle and we tolerate football, especially when we’re winning. Go Hawks!

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?