genuine thanks

Though we say it, make calls, and email, I haven't taught the boys to write true, genuine thank you cards - and after listening to this interview, I realized that it is such an important piece of our family culture that I want to foster. It was even part of our wedding vows - to not take each other for granted and be grateful for each other every day of our lives.

To be sincere.

I wonder if this is a quality that is being choked out with our busy world...and in our desire to get closer to a simple life that is enriched with the beauty of the natural world and enhanced with the wonders of our modern world, I know sincerity is a quality we want instilled in our family values.

So this week we will sit down together at dinner and fill out our thank you cards together and I just might take Kralik's lead and try to write one each day - what a way to create the kind of world we want to live in instead of accepting the one that has been given.

I like creating.

I like sincerity.

I like where this is pointing us.

Is a Stress-Free Christmas Even Possible?

One of the clear indications that I am getting older is the sheer velocity of the passing of time. I'm pretty sure it was just July yesterday and now I'm told it's almost Thanksgiving which means that Christmas is pretty much tomorrow. Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhrrrrrrgggg!

Is there anyone who doesn't experience stress over the December holidays? (I'm generalizing...I don't know enough about religions other than Christianity to know if people who believe in other religions experience stress at the end of the year holidays.) I suppose you have to be older than 20 and probably have to have kids for it to be truly stressful but I remember being stressed even as a teen worrying about what I would buy my family (and the boyfriend...is THAT not the cruelest form of torture to try to figure out what to buy a boy you've been dating for a few months?).

My kids get those toy catalogs out of the mailbox and mark 98 percent of the catalog as "want." I know that's part of being a kid, though I don't remember the volume of toy catalogs as a kid. The toys are more expensive now too, right? Or am I just old and cheap? My son circles $100+ Lego play sets and thinks it's fine to ask for all of them.

We've always told our kids they can ask Santa to bring them 3 things. It helps them narrow down all those wants and really think about what they want the most. Sometimes Santa gets off inexpensively. Sometimes not. So far, Santa has always brought all three things for the kids. The number 3 comes from the 3 gifts the wise men brought for Baby Jesus. I've tried to explain that to the kids but I don't think they really care. Did I mention they're kids?

Other kids send Santa a huge list. My kids know that too. I think. But I've asked them (told them) to think of the other kids and remember Santa has only a limited amount of room in his sleigh. They know that they wouldn't want to take toys from other kids.

I think they get it. At least a little bit. They are so lucky. Santa should send more gifts to the kids who don't have as much. Santa is magic but still has limitations.

Thank you Santa, for the gifts you've given my family.

Resolutions? Here's My Plan.

It's time to start thinking about those New Year's Resolutions, friends.

Lose weight!  Get organized!  Pursue purpose!

Do we make the same promises to ourselves year after year?  I know sometimes I do.

This year, some of my intentions will be the same, but I am focusing on living a true life.  We've all heard that there are so many good things to do that it's easy to say "yes" and lose ourselves along the way.  In general, this hasn't been the case for me, although I have certainly walked through overcommitted times where I felt I was doing good stuff that wasn't necessarily the right stuff for me.  All in all, though, I'm fairly good about focusing.  Sometimes, too good.

This year I have a few thoughts, rather than resolutions, that I want to pursue for 2010.

• I have 6 years until my oldest son leaves for college.  It doesn't seem possible, but there it is.  I just had him, I swear, and now he is in full teen-years mode.  This year I will focus on trying to understand the young man he's growing into, to encouraging his gifts, to supporting his faith.  Really, these goals are no different than those I've had the past 13 years, they just seem bigger now, somehow.

• In the coming months,  I plan to jettison the activities that aren't closest to my heart and focus more energy on the ones that are.  

• As I do every year, I'll spend time with good friends.  Some years are harder than others.  I'll try my best to make sure this year isn't one of them.

• Keep running.  And doing Pilates.  And, as long as my knees and hips hold out, playing basketball.  These are activities I enjoy that help my heart beat stronger. I love that.

• My husband and I will celebrate 18 years of marriage this May.  We've been blessed with a strong committment to one another through thick and tthin.  My vow for this year is to make sure he knows how glad I am that we chose one another all those years ago.  I'd choose him again in a heartbeat.

Happy, almost, 2010 everyone.  Let me know your hopes, dreams & goals for 2010--how lucky we are to see another year.

Merry Christmas from Heather and the gang!

Hope you have a fantastic holiday season and are able to spend time with those you love.

Our Little Helper

We have a helper around here. He arrives right after Thanksgiving, and truth be told, this is only his second year visiting us. His arrival was anxiously anticipated this year.

I forgot his name. My kids did not. According to the rules, we should not share his name with others.

He comes to our house and sits in lofty perches. He moves every night as he heads to the North Pole to submit his report and picks a new vantage point. The kids compete every morning to be the first to spot him.

We have an “official” elf. He arrived with a book that explained the rules very clearly. But I imagine there are other elves out there that don’t come with a book. You can find our version here: The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition Elf on the Shelf Gift Set


Our elf watches and reports to Santa every night. He is a welcome addition to our family every December. We miss him when he leaves us on December 23rd.

I’ve been tempted to employ another elf the other 11 months of the year. Perhaps we need a house elf like in Harry Potter books.
If you need an elf in your life here is where we adopted ours: Elf on the Shelf

One of Our Holiday Traditions

My kids are a little like the retail stores. They start thinking about Christmas just before Halloween. They daydream about the presents they will receive and plan the best things to ask Santa to bring.

I've always wanted my kids to see the magic of Christmas and dream those dreams, but I also wanted to try to keep the greed monster at least a little at bay. When M was a toddler I heard another parent explain that Santa brings her children only 3 gifts. She explained that the number three was arrived at because the wise men brought baby Jesus three gifts.

Three seemed like as good a number as any to me. So this is the number of gifts my kids ask Santa for each year. Maybe I'm a Grinch that I limit the number of things they are allowed to ask the big guy to bring, but it also makes them think more carefully about what they really want instead of simply asking for everything that looks even mildly interesting.

Because the kids only ask Santa to bring three things, Santa has (so far) been able to bring them all the items they request each year. They don't write their letters to Santa until they've carefully considered what they want to ask for and know once they've written the letters that they're committed to their decisions.

Santa still brings a few more gifts along with the requested items, and I've told them that Santa only brings one really big item per child because he has so many kids that he needs to bring presents to each year.

This has worked for our family so far. What do you do (if anything) to try to control the greed and consumerism of the holidays?

Pizza and a Movie

A long time ago, more than a decade ago, one of my dearest friends introduced me to Friday Night Pizza and a Movie Night. She had three children at the time, 5 years, 2 years and newborn. Every Friday night their whole family would watch a movie together and enjoy homemade pizza. It was always a kids movie that the children would enjoy. We found out about it because my daughter and I came by one Friday night to visit. My friend welcomed us in, gave my daughter a piece of pizza and a spot on the floor, and pulled me into the kitchen to visit while the children were happily occupied. At the time I thought, I wish our family could have something like this.

Since then, I've divorced my oldest daughter's father, been a single parent, remarried and had a second daughter. It was a few months ago, when I was in my last trimester of pregnancy, that I suggested to my husband we give the idea of Friday Night Pizza and a Movie Night a try in our family. I was on medical leave because my pregnancy had become very stressful to my body. My husband had just returned from South America after losing his father to a sudden death. My teenage daughter had been away for a month with her father and hadn't been home much at all. We were all a bit fatigued, drained, and generally in need of downtime to reconnect. We desperately needed to have some quiet family time.

We started with some movies we had around the house on DVD or recorded on DVR. Freaky Friday (the remake with Lindsey Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis), Men In Black and Beetlejuice. We loved it. It was great to get to laugh together.

The baby was born, the school year started for both my daughter and my husband. Things felt hectic again. So we continued to set aside Friday night for pizza and a movie.

We starting going for some serious films. Lean On Me with Morgan Freeman. I love the opening sequence, seeing the pristine school of the 1960s fade into the inner city graffitied school of 1987. To this day I think the use of the song "Welcome to the Jungle" in that scene is one of the best uses of a musical piece in film. While watching the violence and chaos ensuing at Eastside High in 1987, backed by Axl Rose screaming to cacophonic metal rock, my daughter couldn't take her eyes off the screen. After about half a minute, she said, 'OK, that is SO unrealistic. That would never happen in a high school." It was then that I realized that even though she had spent her entire educational career in Washington, DC and close to Detroit, she had no idea about the reality of inner city schools and neighborhoods.

My husband picked out Rabbit-Proof Fence. It's a 2002 film directed by Phillip Noyce (of Dead Calm and The Saint) depicting the true story of three girls journeying across the Australian Outback back to their home and their mother. The girls are journeying back because they have been forcibly removed by the government, a government who believes that mixed race people, half-aborigine half-white in this case, are members of an unwanted race, nature gone wrong. Such children were removed from their families and trained to be domestic servants -- until 1970. The movie is a bit too subtle for young children and maybe too complex of a topic for them to understand. But for my teenage daughter, it was perfect.

The next movie night was Baby Mama. The following week was my pick, a classic that I adore, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. For both of these flicks, we all laughed out loud through the comedy and antics of the SNL alums.

Aside from the selection of movie itself, our family has benefited so much since starting Friday Night Pizza and a Movie Night. Having a fixed time in the week set aside for family gives us a place to reconnect. Even more important, it's much better than a night out for so many reasons.

• It has a minimal cost, just the price of renting a movie, about $10 tops for a couple frozen pizzas ($15 is we order out, pick it up and use a coupon), and a few more bucks for the sodas bought in bulk and a salad made from scratch. I guess that the top price tag for the whole evening has never been more than $30 and sometimes that includes milkshakes and dessert.
• The night can go on into bedtime without the crankiness of still being out. If someone gets sleepy, they can just snuggle up on the couch with a warm afghan. The worst thing that happens is they doze off and watch the rest of the movie later in the weekend.
• Above all, the best advantage to being at home rather than being out is that we don't have the distraction of being in a crowd, having to interact with strangers, and interacting with the rest of the world. We get enough of all that during the week. By staying at home we get to focus on each other and enjoy each other's company.

For the time being, the planning involved is minimal. We order a pizza for take out or throw a few frozen ones in the microwave. The choice of movie just needs to entertain two adults and a teenager and not have a soundtrack that would upset an infant. As time passes, it may take a little more planning and tolerance. When the infant gets older, we'll have to change the movie selections to ones that are age appropriate for toddlers and preschoolers. Pizza will need to be cut up in small bite-size pieces and accompanied by carrots or some other nutritious side suitable for smaller kids. Eventually, I hope Friday Night Pizza and a Movie Night will become such a fixture in our family life that when friends stop by unexpectedly, we can easily fit them right into our festivities. Fix up a plate of pizza for each child and find a spot on the floor for them while we adults enjoy the end of another week in relaxed conversation.

Pumpkin Carving: Get Your Template Here

Lo those many years ago, before we had children and were still living in the Big City, my husband and I received a gift. It looked like this:

I swear to you that in all of my life up until that moment I'd never heard of any such thing. People didn't just carve faces on their pumpkins? Happy faces? Sad faces? Scary faces? There were designs? This was beyond my frame of reference, friends. I came from simple pumpkin carving folk.

So we tried it, my husband and I. We broke out of our comfort zone, and sharpened our knives, and did us up a fancy jack-o-lantern. And we liked it! Our jack-o-lanterns were so cool! So fun! We reused those templates so many times that it's gross. Totally.

When our kids grow up, they'll probably get married to a lovely woman who wants to carve a simple, smiling jack-o-lantern and they'll be all "What? No scary spider? No bat?" It's a complicated world, isn't it?

As I was looking back through my photos I realized I don't have many photos of our creations. So this year, I will start. But here you can see a couple examples, if you look past those pesky kids in the photos.

(It's hard to see it, but that one on the left is an excellent and scary skull.

The one on the right, well, who knows?)

(Here you can see the cool spider - I like this guy and

I am no fan of spiders, let me tell you.)

If you'd like to create your own fancy jack-o-lanterns this year, you can find these books everywhere now. They probably sell them at your grocery store. Or maybe Target. But if not, or if you prefer to search from the comfort of that chair you're sitting in, here are a few links to try.

• Better Homes & Gardens
• DLTK's Growing Together
• Celebrating Halloween

Happy Carving!

GUEST BLOGGER: FADKOG: Dorothy had it right, and this is where I hang my hat

Our next guest blogger is known as FADKOG, which stands for For a Different Kind of Girl. I discovered FADKOG on Twitter and her tweets, as well as her blog are hilariously funny. Please welcome her!

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When my family moved to the Iowa town I grew up in, my world was a three-block radius. It was the circle around which I'd ride my bike for hours, where neighborhood kids would meet to play kick ball until dark, and where, every Wednesday, I'd endure every feasible weather condition or barking dog to deliver the weekly advertising circular. Those three blocks represented the place I felt safest (despite the vicious dogs) and most welcomed. It was a short journey from my block - the filling in the neighborhood sandwich between the other two blocks - to school or the convenience store we'd visit on late summer afternoons to purchase orange snow cones, but it felt vast.

Aside from time spent in college and several years working as the editor of a community newspaper, I've never truly ventured very far from those three blocks. Today, I'm raising my own family a mere two minutes - though sometimes it can take three depending on the occasional confused motorist who pauses uncomfortably long at the five-way stop sign up the road - from the front door of my present home to that of my childhood home.

Unlike the other places I've lived, I've always felt at home where I now reside. Always. Although my hometown - which often dominates the top of any "Fastest Growing Communities in the Nation" lists - is vastly different from the place I remember growing up, when I say I'm from here, it feels familiar, and to me, familiar means comfortable. Three big-name grocery stores dot the landscape where, years ago, residents had a difficult time supporting even one small, family-owned market. The library, which once operated from a tiny room in the back of an equally tiny city hall building, now host programming in a large facility with a parking lot that is always full.

Today, more houses are cropping up on what was once sustainable farm land than actual crops, and just when I think developers can't possibly come up with any new names for a multi-dwelling subdivision, up pops a Painted Woods or Something That Always Ends With The Word 'Pointe With An E.' Trying to give directions to someone unfamiliar with my hometown is virtually impossible for me because there are so many new streets and so many new names for them that I'm almost as lost as they are. If it's not part of the "old part of town," (which is what the area I grew up in is referred to now), I'm sorry. Good luck on your journey!

Yet it still feels like home.

My youngest son is finishing his first grade year in the same building where I attended elementary school, and though countless revisions have been made to it, walking through it is like zapping through a time warp and there's the kindergarten classroom where we incubated chicken eggs in the spring. Except now it's the computer lab! My oldest son, a middle school student, plays basketball in the same gymnasium where I ran laps as a student, only when I was a student in that particular building, I was attending high school and preparing to graduate with a class of 62 students I'd been going to school with since kindergarten. When my sixth grader graduates in 2015, he'll be crossing the stage with more than 600 classmates who filter into our district from the surrounding suburbs. Very few of them will have known each other from the days when they were learning how to write their names and navigate the vast hallways of a new building.

This is home.

From time to time, I'll drive around my hometown, and in my mind, I can distinctly see the games we played on the streets I'm driving on. There's the house where my best friend and I sat on the front steps and talked about the boys who traveled in packs on mopeds and played basketball in the driveway over there each night after dinner. On this street is the house we'd all meet at when the sun went down and we'd sit outside on the patio, watching movies on a tiny television that had been dragged outside.

When I take my boys to the park, it's the same park where I barreled my orange Huffy 10-speed down the hills. When we get there, the boys will swing on the same set of squeaky swings my best friend and I used to cut through the air on. I'll sometimes mention these memories to my sons, both as a means of connecting my life with their respective childhoods, and perhaps planting the idea that it's important to remember where we came from. I don't know that their goals will keep them near me here, but I hope no matter where they go, no matter what fancy named subdivision they may one day live in, they feel the sense of home I'm struck by when they think of what is now our shared hometown.