Drops of Awesome

An Awesome Book Tour

November 20, 2014 by Kathryn

This week I get to be an author on tour. The sentence I first came up with to begin this post was, “This week I get to pretend to be an author on tour,” but if we’re sticking with the Drops of Awesome belief that in the small moments of doing great things, we actually become the people we dream of being, then today? Tomorrow? I am a rock star author. I am leaving my home to go somewhere different and promote my book. I’m on tour.

Drops of Awesome!

I’ll tell you what there will be on this tour. Books. And good food. And great friends. And LOTS of vitamin C.

I’ve been fighting a cold since Saturday. Oh what a fierce battle it has been, but so far, so good. Thanks to some great advice from people who live on Facebook – *HI PEOPLE WHO LIVE ON FACEBOOK* – I have boosted the heck out of my immune system so the germs keep doing their worst but my body keeps shoving them back down.

This trip is something I’ve wanted to do since I wrote the original Drops of Awesome blog post in 2012. I have family and friends in Utah and a whole bunch of readers there, readers who should be friends and who hopefully will be after this weekend. I went to school there and I’ve been wanting to go back and connect with a bunch of people who have supported Drops of Awesome from the first day I put it online.

When you publish a small book, and honestly nearly any-sized book these days, you mostly promote it yourself. There aren’t big, extravagant book tours and I get it. They don’t really sell that many books. But this trip isn’t about selling books. Okay. It’s a little bit about selling books, as evidenced by the orders placed by Barnes and Noble for my events and the fifty-ton suitcase full of Awesome reading material I checked at the baggage counter. Mostly though, it’s about meeting people. And spreading Awesome. And seeing my new niece in person for the first time. And playing games with my sisters. And buying new clothes so I can be on TV because it is a fact that you can never be on TV wearing clothes that have been worn previously.

A word about the outfit. I love the outfit. The outfit took me three hours of concentrated shopping to find. The email from KSL recommended that I not wear black, white, red, patterns, sparkles… the list went on. Now, all of these recommendations were specifically to help me look better on TV and I’m grateful for them, but, MAN it was hard to find an outfit to meet those specifications. I did. It is accidentally purple. I know. Weird.

Now I talked about how I’m doing a lot of the promotion myself, but I’ve been lucky to work with a publisher that has a small staff of talented publicists who work way too many hours and they’ve helped me out a ton putting this Utah trip together and with other marketing stuff. When I said, “Utah,” they said, “How high?” and then they helped me schedule radio and TV interviews and book signings all in one weekend to maximize the trip.

And they’re not the only ones to hook me up. My brother-in-law offered to buy me a plane ticket down there with his bounteous air miles, and my family and friends have offered up so many spare beds, sofas, and air mattresses, I could stay for three weeks and sleep in a different bed each night.

It’s Wednesday night and I’m on a plane from Seattle to Salt Lake City. Sitting alone. Well, not alone exactly. But no one is asking me for snacks or where the potty is, or telling me their ears feel funny. It’s a strange way to travel.

Dan and several of my lady friends are taking care of the kids this week, getting them to their band practices and performances, Cub Scout meetings, music and dance classes, birthday parties and a whole lot of school. I’m super grateful because the truth is? I’m really excited for this time to get away to talk to people about ideas I’m passionate about. What could be more fun than this?

Event details can be found here.

My BYU Radio interview with Kim Power Stilson from earlier today can be found here.

I’ll be on Studio 5 with Brooke Walker on KSL in Utah on Friday at 1:00pm MST. (Link to come)

The pictures in this post are from a recent book talk and signing at King County Library in Duvall. Below are pictures of me making crazy-sauce faces while I speak. You know you want to see that in person! If you’re in Utah, come see me.

Put it In the Past

November 3, 2014 by Kathryn

One More Drop – Square Breathing

October 21, 2014 by Kathryn

Take a minute to slow down and practice purposeful breath. It calms you and oxygenates your brain. Who doesn’t need more brain oxygen? I certainly don’t not need it.

Breathe in through your nose for four slow counts.
Hold the breath for four.
Breathe out for four.
Hold the breath for four.

Repeat these breaths until your children give up hope of getting your attention ever again.

One More Drop is a series of tiny missions to help you add more Drops of Awesome to your day.

This is Happening

October 21, 2014 by Kathryn

Dan, who loves me and works hard to stay on my good side, says I will be a Daring “Young” Mom forever and maybe he’s right. It’s all in the attitude… and the maturity. However at the age of 35, my wrinkles and I are starting to feel just a bit squirmish about giving people my blog URL.

“Um… it’s because I was young once and… mumble mumble… young at heart… trailing off.”

So I’m migrating my digital life over here to DropsofAwesome.com. The stories are the same. It’s just DaringYoungMom.com for old people. I hope you’ll join me.

One More Drop – Phone Time Out

October 16, 2014 by Kathryn

Put a box or basket on your kitchen counter to use as a phone time-out spot. When you know you need to engage with your family, like at dinner or when you or your spouse or kids get home from work or school, have everyone put their device in the box. Then speak to each other as though you were people, like in the old days ten years ago.

One More Drop is a series of tiny missions to help you add more Drops of Awesome to your day.

One More Drop – Microwave Your Sponge

October 15, 2014 by Kathryn

Dirty microwave? Germy sponge? Kill two of the birds with one of the stones in about five minutes. Sponges are pretty much disgusting little germ factories. Microwaves are places to warm foods until they explode and then leave the mess all over the walls of the magical heat chamber.

Put your wet sponge in the microwave on high for 2 minutes. The water will boil inside the sponge, killing 99% of the microscopic ickies. The steam from the sponge will loosen all the junk on the walls of the microwave. Let the sponge cool to a safe temperature and then use it to wipe out the gunk from the walls of the microwave.

One More Drop is a series of tiny missions to help you add more Drops of Awesome to your day.

One More Drop – Hide a Key

October 14, 2014 by Kathryn

I get locked out. Pretty much all the time. I’ve hidden keys around, under, and through my house but no matter how well I hide it, I’m always nervous someone will find my key and use it to steal all of my marshmallows or for some equally dastardly purpose. SO, I decided to hide the key where it wouldn’t matter if someone found it… at a friend’s house. Pick a friend within walking distance and hide a key there.

One More Drop is a series of tiny missions to help you add more Drops of Awesome to your day.

The Bad Hotel

October 7, 2014 by Kathryn

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.

Hear Us Roar

September 20, 2014 by Kathryn

First day of preschool and they’re reading a dinosaur book. For the first week the teacher has the kids come in small groups so she can get to know them and help them feel comfortable with the routines. Wanda is on the mat with two little boys listening to a story about a dinosaur who goes to school.

“What if a dinosaur came to our preschool?” the teacher asks.

“They can’t. All the dinosaurs are dead,” one four-year-old boy pipes up.

FACT.

The story continues until they get to a part where the dinosaur roars. The teacher asks the kids to roar like a dinosaur. The boys both give nice, cute little roars.

Wanda, on the other hand, has spent the last two years working out with me and my online fitness coach Erik, who believes in the release that comes from letting go with a soul-felt, visceral roar after each workout. These are roars that make your neighbors call 9-1-1, roars that release every pent up feeling in your body, roars that make a poor, unsuspecting preschool teacher startle-jump, eyes wide, her hair flying out behind her like Beyonce in a music video with one of those giant fans blowing while you wonder, “Where is all that wind coming from?”

Yeah. That happened. We’re the Thompsons. That’s how we do.

We really do. Especially me. I often feel like I have that giant fan effect on people I talk to and work with. When I was recently asked to take a turn being the Primary President at church (this involves doing some administrative tasks and teaching the kids), I spent the first two weeks on turbo speed, scaring the stuffing out of the other leaders I work with. I calmed down. A bit. But I go zero to super-annoying very quickly and I have to work hard to keep myself in check.

With this book project, it’s something I struggle with. While my publisher is working on releasing around forty books this year, I’ve just got the one and I have so many ideas spinning around my head, speaking engagements, updating the website, Drops of Awesome umbrellas, charitable giving, book signings, giveaways, interviews, CREATING A MOVEMENT OF AWESOME, squirrel!

I don’t have the money, time or energy to execute half the things I think would be awesome for this book, but I can sure rapid-fire email or talk the CEO’s ear off about them.

Right now, thanks to my amazing readers and friends, the journal is doing so well that we sold out the first print run within two days of release day. This is amazing and exciting and also, WHERE ARE THE BOOKS?!

Answer = The books are at the workshop even now, but the next run won’t be in your hands until mid-October. It’s sort of an exciting problem to have since when Familius asked me a couple of months ago how many I thought we’d sell, I said, “Ummm… At least fifty?”

But it is still a problem and I’m sorry we couldn’t see into the future well enough to keep up with demand. In the meantime, they’re keeping the price at 40% off retail on Familius.com for the next 30 days while the books are printed. So ordering now, especially if you’re looking for Christmas gifts, or other bulk orders, will ensure that you get them at the beginning of the next rush and with the discounted price.

Also, in the meantime, I’m working on a little Drops of Awesome shop. Stay tuned for updates. Fun things are coming.

Please Sir, Will You Buy My Book?

September 9, 2014 by Kathryn

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.

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.

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.

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.

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