Dear Frugality,

Dear Frugality,
I credit you with making me a late-bloomer consumer.
I credit you for making me sob at the one and only movie I went to in a theater when I was a new mom. I credit you for mistaking ingratitude with sincere surprise when I received a Target gift card many years ago and had only shopped there once before. I credit you for making me the sibling who always brings the smallest gifts to the family Christmas tree. I credit you for developing the bad habit of sometimes letting Facebook be my primary source of news. I credit you for spreading Naked Lady fever among every group of women I know as my primary source of clothing and the only clothes 'shopping' I enjoy. I credit you for spurring creativity and experimenting with new and found things, like the incense-making kit a neighbor passed on to me......I also credit you for the embarrassments I may or may not avoid such as giving said incense to a host who doesn't like it. I credit you with the middle of the night sanity knowing that sprinkling my carpet with crushed lavender buds and baking soda will lift the last odors of night sick without having to buy chemicals. I credit you for embarrassing the heck out of my kids who still see that the size of a gift must be a reflection of the size of one's heart.

I credit you for making me resilient, continually considering how to make something out of nothing, and how to be flexible enough to realize that sometimes I have to let you go. I never regret that eleventh-hour inspiration when I scrape up the courage to purchase a few small downright frivolous things to spread some holiday cheer. We're not through yet, dear frugality, but we may need to make some changes.
Love,
Me

Unsuspectingly Simple Gifts

I started off writing this list for my preschool newsletter for kids to promote inexpensive creativity-inspiring gift ideas that are fun & developmentally desirable. By the last item, I felt pretty jazzed about creating things too!

It's impossible not to think about gifts of some kind or another in the month of December.

When I was a kid, birthdays and Christmas were the only times we got anything new at all, and our greatest wishes were reliably granted. To this day I treasure that experience but struggle with the cycle of stuff lavishness and financial investment it required. As a new parent, I headed into the fray with the best of intentions: fourteen Christmases ago when my daughter was a year old, I used a stencil book of insect designs to make her a memory matching game on found wood tile scraps I had sanded to smooth the rough edges. I was gratified with my innovation, that I was creating her a brain toy to stimulate her (hopeful) inner-naturalist, all for the price of my time and a bottle of mod-podge to seal the inked drawings. For subsequent holidays, I set about making hand puppets from fabric scraps (those years I only allowed myself to buy the gold trimmings to make them 'fancy'), a doorway fabric puppet curtain (had to buy the tension rod), and gifts had to otherwise fit into a stocking.

It more or less worked to gift with a reliance on my own resourcefulness and maker's skills for their early years. But even I knew I would have to outgrow my frugality regardless of the pocket-book's dimensions. I was thinking well outside the box by limiting my own money-spending, though I overlooked the very simple option to take everyday objects and give the gift of permission to use them differently. When I became a preschool teacher, I noted a distinct and liberating factor in the classroom day after day. One of the single-most recurring instigators of joy and personal creativity for young children was the ability to make messes and use much. I know many people think of preschool as the place to make messes so you don't have as many at home; this holiday consider letting go of your grown-up complexities and let these fun, unsuspectingly simple gift ideas bring joy (and fine motor skill development through sensory play and unlimited exploration) into your home.

1. A Tape Dispenser
   Put your child's name on it, train yourself never to use it or need it, and stock several rolls of surplus tape for refilling as needed. Colored tape, 'real' scotch tape, masking tape, electric tape, you name it. I suggest sticking with the name brands because they are the easiest for children to manage, and the point of this gift is a child may use it limit-lessly and freely to connect objects, papers and promote all around design and construction integrity.
   
   
2. A Bottle of Dish Soap
   The Permission part of gift-giving is very important here, as this gift may only last for one play-session. Offer this gift with an empty sink or bathtub, or better yet provide the whole bathroom as a soggy laboratory that might require some serious clean-up attention when the bottle is empty. Not only does this gift provide a sensory experience with water, viscosity and smell, it teems with science play invitations to explore cause and effect, volume and quantity. Here's another place where you might want to buy the fancy brands, the least chemically-derived versions, as your child will most likely enjoy full-body immersion in this gift.
   
   
3. Shaving Cream
   You can do it cheap and color-less right out of the grocery store or find colored art supply versions in catalogs or art stores. Clear a table, or better yet the kitchen floor, provide a bathing suit, and show your child how to depress the button to squirt the cream. You'll give your child the gift of blank canvas and literacy evolution as fingers and toes 'draw' in thick relief.

4. Colored Wire and Pipe Cleaners
   The fabulously forgiving nature of bendable wire makes it a stress-free and three-dimensional art medium. For a child who doesn't like to get wet or messy, wire offers endless fine motor manipulation options, abstract and representational process to product, and each creation tends to inspire another one. We have always had pipe cleaners in the house, yet even my 9- year old daughter was over the moon about a wire sculpture art project at school and morphed her figure three times over on the car ride home.
   
   
5. Loose Parts
   Mix and match household parts and pieces to your heart's content to unleash designer/engineer/ modern-day Rube Goldberg contagion. Funnels, plastic containers, tubes, gears, rulers, sticks and marbles or small balls in a box transform into contraptions and inventions that inspire problem-solving, concentration and perseverance with a whole lot of satisfaction and fun. Be sure to include non-adhesive wall putty (for any surface) or zip ties (great for a peg board ) or velcro-backed hooks (for felt or fabric) and a surface at least two feet tall to build upon.

The list could be limitless. I hope it inspires you to let go of the commercial norms of how to make connections with your kids and make the holiday season joyful, fun and creative.

Step Right Up with What You've Got

Stone soup is what you need, when you have some friends to feed.

Step right up with what you've got, add your stone to the big soup pot.

Pete Seeger swooped right (back) down into my heart when he retold the famous tale of Stone Soup in an illustrated picture book complete with a read-along tune. I read about three versions of this folktale to my preschool class each year prior to our Group Soup/Stone Soup cooking day, including one called Hammer Soup in which a little girl overcomes her frustration with her fun neighbor's lazy work ethic. Perhaps it's the way I swoon over making something out of nothing, the idea of so many parts coming together to make a whole, or even more simply that kids really believe a stone or a hammer is the foundation for a good pot of soup - that makes this activity never grow old for me. I've had many a pot of stone soup over the years between school and my own kitchen. It's one of those recipes you can't mess up. You can always make it better, but by definition you can't mess it up. Even when half the potatoes spill on the floor, the carrot chunks are added as timber-sized chunks hewn by a butter knife, or the dash of salt was a child's dash.

Making stone soup with the kids is a gateway to overcoming Intention Deficit. Intention deficit: those really good ideas that your gut tells you are good but you haven't figured out why, or worse yet that you know how and why they are great but you have a tough time getting the message communicated. The original Stone Soup folktale is about a hungry, tired soldier who comes into a village after a time of war when the villagers are so broken they don't trust or help their neighbors let alone a stranger. The inventive and wise soldier builds a fire in the middle of the village, attracts the attention of a child (it's always the children that know when something important is happening), and proceeds to acquire a pot, some stones, and all manner of small and squandered contributions from the villagers which culminate in a community meal and a rejuvenated town spirit. In my mind the soldier was an intention deficit master. He artfully communicated his idea without asking for help, and he created an experience through which everyone learned by doing and no doubt ever forgot. The point, of course, is that working together creates something in both the short term and the long. 

This year we ran a little short on planning time for our group soup recipe because I was out of the classroom conferencing the class day before we made our soup. I was determined to get everyone's choice ingredients on the list vs. the usual parent sign-up for a planned assortment of ingredients. If we truly succeeded in that, we'd usually have strawberries, cookies and apples in the soup.  This year I was a little smarter and aimed to 'write' a recipe out of vegetables with the kids. I got a little closer to overcoming intention deficit. I know that for three-year olds there is a fair chance we'll be recreating the idea as if it's a first conversation on the day everyone adds their gots to the pot. But when one little girl exuberantly told me we'd need a hammer for our soup list, I knew at least one person was with me all the way.

The Gifts

There was a very dark patch a couple of years ago when the residual effects of grief and anger and exhaustion were keeping me down. It was so complicated to keep up momentum with my own kids that I constantly questioned how on earth I ought to be guiding others, how was it that I could take care of other people's kids when I felt so challenged with my own? It was a tough year with students at school too. I worked for wonderful families who I know trusted me but were frustrated with our class climate. At any rate, it was dark on all fronts and my conviction was pretty well worn.

I'm relentless about revering the role of timing in life. I can remember all the way back to grade school when I was consistently mystified that my challenge spelling words were always showing up in the books I was reading. Perhaps that was the beginning of thinking that timing can't just be ignored. With unpredictable irony, a timely and thundering gift struck me on my daughter's twelfth birthday, at the darkest and lowest interval of that personal storm. It was ugly and rough and delivered with unfortunate sincerity. But it was a valuable gift, one which the record of half a dozen years revealed I was not giving to myself: the gift of release. These words delivered the gift: "You are not the mom I would ever want for my kids." Delivered by the only person in the world with whom I have kids, it floored me into temporary and stunned silence which gave way to the ironic deliverance of release. And I needed that.

I needed that to accept the next gift which came into my life that same week when an old friend at the top of his profession and his game came looking for me from 3000 miles away after ten years of silence. You guessed it, he swept me off my feet with poetry and discourse and comfort and history's news. The attenuation of that gift eventually came along of course, and it was rough in its own right, but it came with great value. It came with a new currency of the heart.

The currency of the heart isn't only measured by what we have but often by what we have lost. It's the reason we waffle between grief and anger for indisputably long amounts of time. It's the reason we fight forgiveness, make concessions, and keep up unending vigorous arguments for years. Hearts need fuel to offset their heartbreaks. Hearts need gifts. It's the cycle that must go unbroken.

The Popular (Preschool) Vote

It's never too early to instill the value of voting. Rallying around the privilege of voting is the purest individual power. I was recently remembering how as a kid the sacred nature of voting meant that we kids had to hang around outside the curtain while mom voted. It was that secret. Now I love the ease of voting by mail, but I do wonder about the absence of my kind of voting nostalgia for young kids in my state. So it was that I knew even my three-year-old preschool class needed the right to vote on something to honor this Election Day.

Isn't being heard what every person wants at heart? Kids, especially young kids, want that unceasingly! I wasn't about to pass up the chance to rally around the voting privilege at preschool. The trick was to identify something that kids really had a choice about and would provide an immediate experience. That was the real key – to offer a voting choice that the kids really could have control over. There's nothing worse than offering someone a choice they don't really have. I believe there would be a whole lot less confusion and frustration in young children's lives if adults offered them more direct and available choices than framing them for disappointment with fake choices. Asking a kid if he is ready to leave when he clearly is not means you better be prepared to honor his choice to stay once you offer it. Asking a child if she wants to help with something when she clearly does not have a choice grants a false sense of power and ultimately undermines confidence in her voice. There's plenty of room to fail from poor decision-making as one grows up; we grown-ups need to do our part to offer kids choices they really can have.

A couple of choices came to mind that would be fun to vote on but wouldn't really serve the kids well: playing outside first instead of at the end of day would really inconvenience the parent teachers who get to clean up the school; voting on a snack item would be interesting but not equally impacting for everyone since so many kids self-select what they will eat at snack-time. Keeping everyone interested in the vote also seemed important. We'd need something out of the ordinary but agreeable – we'd vote on whether or not the lights would be on or off at school for playtime! It would be unusual to have extended play in the dark, something that would be interesting and within the grasp of imagination.

Our polling station was short and sweet and didn't command much of a wait. On each of two trays was a card; one card said “Lights On for Playtime” with a simple drawing of a light bulb shining, and one card said “Lights Off for Playtime” with a simple drawing of a light bulb crossed out. We identified the choices as a group. Votes were cast by depositing one's name card on the way to open play time. The votes came in steadily and confidently. A couple of lingering kids helped me count and recount the cards. I did not predict the results - it was a tie! As I went around to each of our three classrooms to announce the voting results, I explained that the same amount of kids who wanted the lights off wanted the lights on. Everyone would get some of what they wanted! All the lights went off for the first half of play time, and then they were turned on again.

The preschool vote was a success. Not only did everyone get a return on their heart's desire, they got a real-time affirmation of the power of making a choice and casting a vote. How sweet it was that everyone got something they wanted; even the child who was not happy about playing without the lights on was reassured to know when the lights would be on again, that life as he knew it would resume. The power of a true choice worked for all.

Ma Romdey & Bom-Bom

It's highly entertaining how public figures get nicknamed and enter personal lexicons.

About a week before the presidential election, my 4th grade daughter asked her teacher if they could have a mock election in their class. Undaunted by the response that in 5th grade they would study elections and do so then, my daughter parried by saying Obama and Romney would not be candidates next year. So it was that she embarked on a three-day project in which she donned a suit jacket and wrote a short speech (informed by the Voter's Pamphlet) to introduce herself as the Republican candidate Mitt Romney while her friend dressed in an over-sized dress shirt and tie and wrote a short speech to represent Barack Obama, encouraged everyone to think about who they would like to vote for vs. who they thought their parents were voting for, and conducted their own anonymous class vote on election day.

It was a three day process, initiated of their own volition, and other than producing the Voter's Pamphlet, finding a suit jacket in my closet and covering a shoebox in red paper and cutting ballot slips, I let the action unfold at its own pace. It occurred to me I ought to highlight the additional parties and candidates, but I was holding fast that the learning experience sometimes need to be guided by personal motivation more than it needs to be, well, a learning lesson. Judging by the ballots that were cast, not a single classmate had an inkling there were other candidates running for office either.

A week later I have emptied the ballot box. It was a write-in affair. I was aware that the fourth graders elected Obama by a landslide, incurring votes for "Bom-Bom," "Broca Obama," and "Barak." Romney had a token vote too: one for Mittens Ma Romdey. I have no idea if there is a back story on that moniker or if it's the haphazard byproduct of a ten-year-old's cognition. Either way, it seems to me that on their names alone Ma Romdey & Bom-Bom could get some fair mileage on a line-up if they wanted to reinvent themselves on a performance circuit.

Correction: A newspaper would be compelled to report an error for the following discovery; I need to report a new perspective. My daughter came along and read aloud the ballots. "Ma Romdey" was "Md Romdey" they way she recognized the handwriting. I think she was right. It steals the thunder right out of my inspiration, but not without exacting the new quandary of education. Md. Mitt. Ah.

Dating for My Daughters

What a mistake, eh?
Funnily enough, over the last three years I have come to realize that it's a mistake not to think this way.

A few years ago my elementary school-aged daughters grounded me with the realization that I was modeling far too few visibly healthful adult relationships between the sexes, platonic or otherwise.  At the time I wasn't feeling categorically aligned with my Single status, and it did not occur to me that on a day-to-day basis my kids needed to fathom it too. Within a matter of months two of my long-time male friends came to town and spent time with us that year. After my best male friend came to stay with us for a few days, my daughters assessed it frankly and definitively: they announced that they didn't like having my boyfriend visit. I was puzzled; I didn't understand how this person they had known of all their lives had suddenly become a boyfriend out of sheer presence. But that was nothing compared to their sobering reasoning: he was always nice to me, so he must be my boyfriend. Wow. That spoke volumes, and about too many things.

Dating isn't an easy byproduct for a single mom who lives with her kids 24-7. The same is true of adult socializing in general. Add to the mix the balance of ensuring your kids see you in healthful adult relationships while also aiming to have adult relationships that don't necessarily or immediately involve them.....you can see where time-turning would come in handy. It's exhausting enough to make it through a week of general scheduling let alone tangling with the who/what/when/where and why of dating. But if I don't set that pace, whose lead will they follow when it comes to valuing their own future significant friendships? And if I don't show off some measure of pleasure and hint of hardship about how much work that takes, it could be a big mistake at the expense of their emotional security too. Of course, always-nice is a cocktail of its own challenging proportions. The mistake for mother and daughters would be to avoid more of what's behind the bar.

You Belong To Me

I hate that my teenage child's sense of belonging looks like an electronic device. A device that makes or breaks her access to the most fashion-forward trends, her mobile social advice columnist. Yet I want her to have that advantage as much as I abhor it. I have to muster an attentive response when she gives me tutorials on her device savvy, zipping, swiping and flashing through screens and app avenues at the speed of light, careful to react lest she interpret my incredulity as disrespect for her interests. While I have a hard time fathoming how and what commands her highest respect and allegiance courtesy of the interweb's fast and vast culture, this is too easily misconstrued as disrespect for her as a person. I certainly don't want to be trumped by an electronic device in ranking for my teenage daughter's sense of belonging.

When I was her age, my primary ascent to cool social status hinged on whether or not I had call-waiting on the family phone line. Way back before cell phones and even cordless phones, I felt lucky to have a 25-foot long phone cord that afforded those hour-long chats about who-knows-what stretching down the hall, around the corner and up the stairs. My parents (and rightly so) considered call-waiting an unnecessary, frivolous and socially rude expense. I didn't disagree with that, but that constant accessibility and potential of who else might be calling me (or us) was the precise thrill I ached for, same as the mobile phone magnetism enabling Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube channels and the sea of other social connections functioning simultaneously for my kid and her peers today.

This morning my 9 1/2 year old daughter asked if she could watch a movie as I left for work. I said no, that her priorities included breakfast, preparing for soccer and practicing piano in the following two hours. She accepted that, got out of bed, and within ten minutes was planning a tea party for her stuffed animals - locating them with a charming, "Every one of my animals has a memory that goes with it!" Ah, the sweet and effortless ability to override the lure of screen time with something tangible and nostalgic. I'm not counting on that to last. I count my blessings it went down so smoothly as it is.

There is no escaping the human desire for gratification, acceptance or belonging. We're hardwired to respond to attention from birth to maturity. Middle-schoolers get the brunt of this challenge; while their bodies are cheating them out of childhood, their brains are still in infancy until age 14. When you think about all the sleep teens need to be their most functioning selves, doesn't it remind you a little bit of having a newborn? Sleep, wake, feed, be adored. Repeat. My girl exhibits signs of something quite similar: sleep, wake, feed, Plug In, be adored, adore, belong. Ironically, I hear "Leave me alone, You don't understand anything, You don't know anything about me" more often than I hear anything else. It leaves me wondering if I'd be more attractive as a parent if I had a charging system and a carrying case, something that could be turned on and off at will.

We never did have call-waiting, by the way. I survived....without that driving desire to always be on the cutting edge. And that may be why my daughters are always likely to be schooling me on electronic devices. I have no chance of meeting their standards of innovation. But without a doubt they belong to me, and I accept them for every ounce of confusion about who they are and how they belong in this world.

Mondays, the Marvel of Masking Radio Silence

My neighbor is tall, charming, charismatic, socially adept - the sort of person everyone finds engaging. I suppose it helps that he has an accent. We often drink tea before and after dinner, the habit of which keeps Mondays an honored momentum keeper in the week. On Mondays we dine. We have daughters (indeed the reason we met, in our neighborhood park) who share a keen and kindred ability to suspend  worldly care and play imaginary plots or marvel at nature's wink or spend so much time developing a story it's impossible  to stop them for meals. But that's what we do. We trade dinner duties on alternate Mondays, in a surrogate reclamation of the family meal which is stunningly stagnant when it's just one parent and one child.

For the past year and a half this somewhat simple weekly ritual has rescued the particularly challenging absence of family dinners. As a kid my dad was often away at dinnertime coddling and relishing his business, a one-man enterprise of guns and ammo and army surplus. On the occasions he did eat with us, spilled milk was the curse of any mealtime comforts  - and with four kids at the table I do recall a lot of such spills. As a grown parent and a partner, mealtimes long carried a conflicting element too. Food is fuel, but around the quality of its preparation and its provenance, my parenting partner and I long suffered. Needless to say, family dinner often came at a price. Once mealtimes became a mother-daughter affair, outright obstinance and distaste still came to the table over the years, but I avoided imposing rules like timed requirements for staying at the table or eating everything on one's plate (I know I'm not the only one with stories about getting uneaten dinner for breakfast the next day, having to eat anything unless it made you vomit, or the endless feeling of twenty minutes as a kid although for my mom it must have felt like vacation to get twenty minutes of guaranteed seating!). But mealtimes get lonely without a grownup attending now and then.

Monday dinners with my neighbor came along just before my oldest daughter went to live with her dad.  A night off of cooking one out of every fourteen days has obvious perks. Thirteen is less than fourteen! The less obvious and parallel elements of appreciation and housekeeping conversation emerged. While the inventive littles frolicked as fairies or sisters trapped on a mountain or storekeepers of vintage and collectibles, our kitchen tables served up a missing link for adult conversation and camaraderie made most special by the pure delight of the single block's commute to get there. Fancy that, an easy platonic dinner date by foot.

Dinner is as dinner does; there are nights when it feels like one extra thing, too much to accommodate at the head of a busy week or the recovery of a relentless weekend. Yet we usually do it anyway, now stabilized by the propriety of habit and the maturation of weathering each others' human moods. Without a doubt, the concurrent satisfaction of a ritual parent and child playdate is a lifeline to sanity. It's my great fortune to note this pleasure, the months of Mondays amid multiple households, work schedules, significant others and lessons of one kind or another. Monday evenings are a bright spot.

May your own incarnation of Mondays take shape for you.

Year of the Rabbit Report

2011 was good to me: 4 little vacations, 3 paying jobs, 2 children healthful, spirited and ever-growing, 1 better me.

I make a lot of plans.  One of my jobs is entirely about making plans for other people, field trips specifically.  This renders most of my work candidacy for fun, but by the time 2011 started, the general rhythm of life was rough and really rather buried under the inefficiency and demand of working two jobs, keeping two kids in balance, and nowhere did I really have my Self penciled into any schedule.  These were things that I conceptually realized, but what to do with this knowledge?  Through great fortune, power of suggestion and generosity, I rediscovered Vacation. 

First there was Boston between snowstorms - the great catalyst

If you have known me for any length of time, wanderlust was my mental M.O. in youth, and it was even in
practice for some golden periods of time.  But kids happen, and missed opportunities happen, and life throws unexpected challenges in the path.

followed by the tropical gift of the Bahamas -

Self vacations of most any kind, for me, disappeared. 

LA summer (complete with mountain anemones) for the lure of a wedding and good company

  But I collected four of these gems this calendar year, nearly aligned with the seasons, and they frame the real beauty of the spirit the Rabbit gave as the Dragon surfaces for a new year in time.As for those jobs, they keep me afloat and entertained, quite often.  I am fortunate to work with people, constantly, and to make a daily difference in people's lives. But there is a point at which one works her rear off and wants to be able to do more than pay the bills each month.  A friend entrusted me to peddle her wares at the local artisan's market this summer, rounding up sources of income to three during summer's paycheck drought.  I continue looking for the Next Phase of work as I count my blessings for the work that I have and do....and keep this perspective alongside the desire for work/life time efficiency and a financial future.
And children.  They do grow.  The days escalate into weeks and years and suddenly my kids see photos of their parents as kids and say, "I  used to look like that!"  Parents have the trickiest task of all, after nurturing and feeding and watering and exposing our kids to all kinds of basic goodness; we must give time and space and the art of invisible opportunity so the kids themselves can bloom and grow.  Not forgetting, of course, we need these things too.  I have two of these charges.  The script for each is different, the scene set even more so.  We're hard-pressed to settle on much of any activity that we all really enjoy together anymore; even in sleep our preferred hours vary.  Yet we muddle along and shine in our own ways that surely have impending sync.
Which circles the year back to me. 

...& finally winter's rest and coastal hegemony at Long Beach, WA

  I love this region, this city, even this apartment with no yard and the grief to stay in it for lack of monetary mobility to improve that.  I got a few tricks up my sleeve in the Rabbit's year, and without changing much environment or daily rhythm I did regain some of me.  Days are absolutely as full as ever, yet I now sit down in my own house at least once daily. And that, to subsidize vacations, brought goodness to me.

first published January 2012