Thankful for ...

In life, I'm generally running five minutes late to a meeting; an hour late to getting dinner on the table, two to three days late on a birthday card; and a month late writing a blog. Life is fast and furious and on a day to day basis, I have a hard time keeping up.

Even though we are nearing the end of the Christmas countdown, I'm still reflecting on Thanksgiving. This year, we didn't go around the table addressing the things we're thankful for. And in a way, I was relieved. I didn't have a thoughtful answer.

A month later, I do. And while no one is asking me to share, I will.

***

This past weekend, I should have stayed longer at our department holiday party on Friday. I should have gotten dressed in something other than sweat pants on Saturday. I should have gone to my girlfriends Christmas party on Saturday night. And then on Sunday, watched Christmas movies all day, in a glorious hung over stupor from the night before. At least that is what Instagram told me.

Instead, I spent my Saturday and Sunday trying to fend off the second coming of strep throat and dealt with the revenge of amoxicillin.

Let me explain. I had strep throat in October and all weekend it felt like it was coming back. Yesterday, I was diagnosed and got a Z pack to recover. Bobby and Margaret on the other hand had ear infections so both were on antibiotics. While Bobby was progressing nicely, Margaret was suffering from side effects. That is, lots and lots of poop.

On Friday night while watching Elf, she pooped in her pants. Then pooped on the floor while I was cleaning up. Lots of poop.

On Saturday, she was back in a diaper, with diaper cream, pooping the day away.

On Saturday night, we put her to bed, only for her to wake up twenty minutes later crying about a sore rear end. For two more hours, she cried and cried the same lament.

My bummy hurt. My bummy hurt. My bummy hurt. 

Over and over and over again.

She ended up in our bed, kicking, rolling around, crying, taking a turn sleeping on me, taking a turn sleeping on Peter, trying out her crib again, crying, pooping, getting changed, asking for her undies, asking for more cream, more cream, MORE CREAM - I WANT MORE CREAM, not sleeping, at all, all night long.

Through the night, I watched the neighbors host a late night party, Ubers arriving from both directions. I saw the same party end at 2:00 AM, Ubers departing from both directions. I dispensed Tylenol twice. I pleaded to her to just go to bed. I worried that she would poop in her undies on me for a good hour. And then I finally fell asleep at 3:00 AM, only to be woken again by an alarm clock saying 'my bummy hurts, my bummy hurts.' At 6:30 I got out of bed for the day. Saying that I woke up hardly fits, because that implies sleeping.

At Church, I prayed for one thing. A good night sleep. Both Peter and I had been deprived for too long.

Throughout the day, we both got short with the kids. We both seemed a little less enthusiastic with each other. And when Opa's brass band of grands came marching around the house blowing trombone, trumpets and a bugle to celebrate his birthday on Sunday evening, we put an end to the noise, noise, noise. Breath. Sleep is approaching.

On Sunday night, the kids were asleep by 7:30; I was out at 8:30. And miraculously, everyone slept silently through the night. Thank you, God. 5

Peter and I woke up different people. It was an amazing reunion; seeing each other with rested eyes makes all the difference.

So what I'm thankful for (a month late) ... besides the gift of family, being able to go home to the place where I grew up, stopping at Notre Dame on the way of course ...


my dad's turkey and stuffing ...

first hair cuts ...

friendships that don't age ...

familiar faces at familiar places ...

the chance to play some tennis ...

laughs with loved ones ...

and those moments when you just got to be alone ... 
cousins and aunts and flag football games ...

the joy my kids get out of coloring books and the relatives that gift them (thank you, Aunt Erin) ...

those who bravely fight for our country ...

and those that pray for them ... and set us up with Frozen 2 tickets ...

for shopping trips with my mom, walks around the neighborhood, and talks around the dining room table ... besides all those things ...

I'm most thankful for the times when God knows I can't handle one more thing. When he answers my prayer to take something off my plate so I can thrive not survive as a Mom.

Being a parent is such hard work; especially at this time of year; especially when colds are going around and around. And I think there are a lot of couples out there at a breaking point on a weekly basis, likely derived from a lack of rest in their life. I firmly believe though, that keeping God in the center of a relationship, believing that he will ease the burden, trusting in his graces, is the secret to success.

Also ... I'm thankful for everyone who forgive my tardiness on a daily basis. The slack is appreciated.

Lo.

Other Shots

My daughter loves dumplings - Jamie Oliver's recipe for Gyoza to be exact. Every week she adds the ingredients to my grocery list; I successfully capture said ingredients in my cart about once a month.

After at least a dozen tries, dumplings have become relatively easy for me to make, but they remain time consuming. The filling takes a lot of chopping. The dough takes kneading. Then one by one, to get the desired level of thinness, I roll and roll and roll countless little balls into flat circles. Finally, there is the stuffing and pinching of each individual dumpling. From there, they are fried, then steamed. I make a little Asian sauce concoction to go on the side. Serve hot. With chopsticks. Voila. One happy little girl. 

Mary requested that I make them last night.

I had the ingredients after many pleas to put ground pork in my cart on Sunday morning. But I'd been in meetings since 8:00 AM (a pattern on repeat recently.) I had to take one last conversation as I was trying to head out of the office for the day, so ended up running most of the way to catch the train. I was home after an icy bike ride at 5:45 PM. The dumpling preparation process described above takes at least an hour, so I figured dinner would be later than usual. Bobby had a soccer clinic in the afternoon where the coach didn't show up, so all three kids ended up running around a gym with their friends for an hour. They would all be starving, requesting snacks every 30 minutes. I looked at the frozen chicken tenders in the freezer. Nope. I can do it. I will do it.

Chop, mix, knead, roll, roll, roll, roll .... stuff, pinch, fry, steam, stir, serve.

At 6:40, one hungry, overjoyed girl gobbled up five and a half dumplings. I didn't count, she did. The faces she made bite by bite were comical. Filled with pure ecstasy. Margaret requested one after another as well. I told her enough, but she kept saying, 'no ... I wan more.' Bobby meanwhile had fallen asleep on the basement couch, curled up like a little angel, bowl of Fritos still in his hand. A full day of school plus soccer was a little too much for that four year. The images of those three last night, all well and wonderful, made the work worth it.

***

I was asked in an employee survey recently if I believed that I had a work / life balance.

My answer: No.

However, that response was unfair. I actually do have several hours of any given day plus weekends where I'm not working for my company - time where I could be doing yoga, reading books, socializing with friends, refining a unique hobby - time that corporations deem as 'life.' Those sacred, lively spare hours are dedicated to something else though - being a mom. So in essence, I'm always working. I call that a trick question.

Here's the thing though - I've always viewed life in general as hard work - at least that was the discipline my parents instilled in me. I try to express the same with my kids as well. I believe work gets a bad rap though - it's pinned as the stuff that no one wants to do. But I love my work - both in the office and at home. And I feel balanced as a person in my dual career. Save the example where I'm independently wealthy, I wouldn't want it any other way.

I will say though, even on the busiest of days, it does help to just sit and breath after the kids are asleep and after my brain has given my job all it can. Recently in that mindless time, I've been opening up my phone and scrolling through pictures. Ones where the kids aren't kids, but babies.
Ones that show how much fun we had at the pumpkin patch ...

       
and Cider Press party this year
       
Ones of Halloween parties and parades

  
And trick or treating through the snow.
   
Ones with family.






And ones with 'Older Friends.'

Ones when it was just Peter and I. When things were quiet, calm, and life was a little more in tune with what the corporate survey hinted at.

The pictures remind me of the gaps between all the hard work - the times when things seem a little easier. The times when you can pause and reflect on what you're working for.

Lo.

Head Shot

It's been more than a month since I've last written. And in that time I was supposed to write a sabbatical part two post, which I didn't do. I wanted to continue to do Yoga and carve out some time to play tennis. I haven't. I should have kept practicing piano. I swear I will, but I was setback when my thumbnail was removed to assess if had melanoma. (Straight out of a torture scene with lingering pain for a week. But I don't have cancer.) I have friends I need to call, school pictures to mail, bills to pay, shopping to do, prayers to say, and a family that needs more attention. The lingering 'sabbatitude' that I wanted to keep is gone, and that's kind of a bummer.

However, in the literal race between being a mom and a marketer, I did manage to get one thing done: I got a new head shot.

To level set, this was not on my to do list. I should have prioritized other more important things. But it was presented as an opportunity at a marketing off site recently, so I signed up.

For background, currently, I don't have a professional head shot. And head shots seem like a requirement in today's business world. For the past two years, I've been a Mom with a floating baby head. Exhibit A below.

And before that I was a 25 year old having fun at a wedding. Exhibit B is missing.

Neither of these images reflect the way I show up at meetings, so I took the hint that change was of the essence.

On the day of the photo shoot, which included half of the U.S. Marketing team, I bandaged my thumb, biked the kids to school, walked briskly through a very windy city, and rubbed my itchy eyes till my mascara smudged. I stood in line waiting to be called for a full makeover, but they were running late. There wasn't time for touch ups let alone a session camouflaging my adult acne. So all too prematurely, it was lights, camera, action. And action there was.

I was told to turn to the left.

'That is my bad side, so I'll be going right' (The photographer didn't like that.)

She told me to, 'Look up. Come on, up, up, up.'

I stopped her. 'No ... I like looking slightly down cause it makes my nose look less broad.' (She didn't like that either.)

She told me to relax. I tensed up. She told me to shake it out as she turned up the background disco music. I did nothing of the sort. She told me to have fun. But it wasn't fun. She asked for a bigger smile. No less smile. She told me laugh it off. I couldn't fake laugh for the life of me. There was a line of 20-something marketing girls with salon grade hair and makeup peering in. All friendly faces, all people that I know were routing for me, but all I could think about was the era in my life when I had time to get ready in the morning.

The last command she gave me was 'make a silly pose.' I ended up with this photo.

The rest of my head shots are about as bad. I'm sticking with 'mom with floating baby head' for now.

***

If you haven't noticed, there are very few photos of me on my blog. I prefer when my kids, friends and family are the subjects. And after psycho analyzing my response to this photo shoot, I think I know why.

In my mind, I perpetually should look a certain way. In essence, like those younger girls on my team. I see myself as 25-year old; not a pound heavier, a size bigger, a flaw more. And when I get a photo back that doesn't look like my vision, I delete it. Basically, there are very few pictures that I've kept over the past ten years.

I don't think I'm alone in this though. In fact, I think the whole selfie, photo filter, and strike a pose movement is a testament to it. Everywhere you go, people are creating self portraits that tend to be a good distance from reality.

At the end of the day, I don't mind staying behind the camera. (Although I probably should get a better head shot.) The position of photographer is more a reflection of how I process the way I look anyway.

For instance, Margaret is very into getting up close and personal with me. She will touch my face all over, squeezing it in different ways. She will stare deep into my eyes and then squish my cheeks, open my mouth, wrap my hair around my face, and ultimately give me a big hug while saying 'I wuv you.' I'm sure all the angles she inspects during this close encounter are unflattering. Lots of nostril, many wrinkles, very bad hair, mouth agape ... but no matter she sees her mom. She loves the unfiltered face pressing against her chubby cheeks. And seeing her smile back at me, is the only reflection I need in my day. 

At work and at home, I tend to spend more time looking at myself through other people's eyes, then in the mirror. It keeps me in check, in balance. And it validates that people are seeing the whole me, not just the perfect angle.

Lo.

Sabbatical (Part 1)

Two months ago, I started my Sabbatical. I left work that evening knowing the gift of time would go quickly, anticipating the sad day I'd have to return, thinking about the blog post I would ultimately write to summarize the experience.

As expected two summer months came and went in the blink of an eye, but there was a lot crammed into them. Below I've tried to summarize the highlights (things like weeding, doing jigsaw puzzles, and drinking too much wine not included.) I also decided for the sake of my attention span as well as the reader's, to break the post into two parts: The first about the stuff I did (below). The second about the application onto my future career ambitions (yet to be written).

Here goes ...

First off. You might have the question: What is Sabbatical?

Answer: After ten years of service (or rather hard work) at my company, you get to take a two month paid break from doing your job. Yes, you read that right.

Next question that I get a lot: What do you have to do during sabbatical?

Answer: Whatever you want. However (and this is subject to interpretation) I believe sabbatical is supposed to give you time to do the things you've put aside for a decade because you've been too busy working.

Final question (and I will be fielding this for the next week): So what did you do?

Answer: Read the following

Going in, I was given many suggestions: vacation itineraries, book lists, ways to disconnect, warnings that I will never want to come back. I applied some advice, left the rest and improvised along the way.

I Moved:
On the first day of my Sabbatical, we sold our old house, bought a new one, moved out of the old house and into the new. It was a magical day - so magical that I never changed out of the stretchy pants and t-shirt that I wore to bed the night before and believed that I didn't make a splash looking like a slob at the title company while signing my life away. 

Over the next two months, I made the house our home. I unpacked boxes. I bought furniture. I coaxed my husband and then my dad to hang pictures for me. We did everything from acquiring the fundamentals (a working air conditioning unit) to the superfluous (an upright piano.) Basically with a lot of time off and digital marketing stalking me across the Internet after a mere glimpse at a Pottery Barn bookshelf, I ended up spending too much money decorating, but hey, the house is looking good.

I Went On Vacation:
While coworkers of mine had done European tours, African safaris, and experiments in agrotourism, I knew with children aged 6, 4 and 2, that sabbatical travel would be a little more domestic. While I was hoping to do more, we ended up doing a weekend in Quincy, Illinois - a Mississippi River hot spot with a lot of family history; and a week in Martha's Vineyard, providing the kind of respite our family needed at a particularly tough time.

After that, I read a couple of travel books to get my fill of escapism: I hiked the Appalachian Trail with Bill Bryson and his portly friend, Katz in A Walk in the Woods and I relived past journeys through Australia by reading another of Mr. Bryson's books, In A Sunburned Country. I never left my kitchen table, but I felt like I got away from the Midwest during increments of the day ... without the fear of going missing on a trail or getting eating by a crocodile.

I Hung Out with Friends: 
If you've ever engaged in small talk with me, I very likely ended our conversation with a suggestion that we continue the dialogue over lunch, or a game of tennis, a run perhaps, better yet, let's grab a drink some time. I have made so many suggestions to friends over the past ten years, and so few of them have actually played out.

On sabbatical, I kept promises and hung out with friends. I hosted my Bridget for a night. I played tennis with my sister-in-law, Claire. I ran with my friend Erin. I organized play dates: at our house, to the zoo, to the pool. I had drinks and hearty laughs with Mom friends. We took couples on the boat for a dinner party and river cruise. I lingered at pick up for just another couple minutes of socialization and I gloried in all of it. 

Now friends, unfortunately you won't see me again for another decade. 

I Exercised:
For the past ten years, I've watched the community of moms around me go from buff to buffer as the number of exercise studios proliferated. Within a mile radius of my house alone, there is The Dailey Method, Orange Theory, Shred 415, Core Power Yoga, Yoga by Degrees, Treadfit, and Get Fit for Women (worst name ever.) And for the past ten years, I've avoided the fitness class craze completely. But inspired by or rather envious of the Mom Militia on parade, I signed up for some Yoga Classes.

I chose the studio, Yoga by Degrees for its mere proximity to the grocery store, figuring I could check something else off my list after class was over. I walked in for the first time with a Yoga Mat and nothing more. A spunky woman named Alex greeted me and told me she would be my instructor. She looked me up and down and said, do you have a towel? 
Uh no ... I'll just use my t-shirt to wipe off the sweat. 
Um, you need a towel; here you go. You need water too. 
She handed me a bottle as I brushed off the unnecessary concern, Oh thanks - I should be good though. I played lacrosse in college. 
Uh huh.
I walked into the hot studio thinking, seriously, how hard could this be?

I took a seat on my mat as Alex walked in and took off her sweatshirt, revealing (surprise!) she was literally the strongest woman in the world. There were perhaps eight other people in the 95 degree studio with me. We started our practice with an intention of some sort and then began a warm up that is best described as not a warm up at all. I struggled through it, wondering how on Earth it could get harder from here. For an hour we did a combination of weight lifting, squats, jazzercize, push ups (and I can't even do a push up), abs, and sets of pulsing the same position over and over again until my will to move was broken. I had so much sweat dripping off my body that my feet and arms kept sliding off the mat, making me tumble to the ground. I wasn't the only one that found it hard - the only male in the class gave up after 20 minutes and just laid on his mat the rest of the time.

Miraculously, I survived. And more miraculously, Alex was very enthusiastic about my performance. So I stuck with it. I've been going once a week, towel and water bottle in hand. Now I can not only do a couple sets of push ups, I'm also developing a two pack. I call that a success.

I Took The Helm:
For more than a decade, Peter has been trying to teach me how to boat. During those ten years, all I've learned to do was balance as I was pouring champagne. So my in-laws, likely sensing how worthless I was on their boat, sent me to a Women at the Helm course in Chicago. It was designed to get more ladies off their butts and into the drivers seat to combat the vast inequality of male to female boat ownership. Instructed by 100 Ton Master Captain Pam (she's the one in the back of the picture), I absorbed the day long curriculum like a sponge, reciting everything back to Peter when I got home that night. In short, I loved it. And since the class, we have spent many days on the boat putting my lessons to practice.

I Was A Mom 
Of all the things I did, this was probably my favorite. For the first time outside of maternity leaves, which are a blur due to sleeplessness, I got to focus, singularly, on being a mom. I took the kids to the Zoo and to parks. I colored and built Lego creations. I packed picnic lunches to eat at the pool and swam with the kids till we pruned. We rode bikes, went for walks, and ran around the new yard. I was there for bed time and there to get them up in the morning. I got to attentively transition them to their new school routines and help with homework. I was present physically and mentally and I loved that.

As I went back to work on Thursday, I could see that Mary was getting a little upset going into school. She told me that evening that she had cried because she was sad that I was back at work. She wanted me to be at home, and that was hard for me to hear.

Quickly, and then I will express the rest of my thoughts in Part 2 of this post, I would love to be a stay at home mom. There were moments when Margaret sat on my lap on the patio and we would just talk about the bunny rabbits hopping through the yard. There were days when I would escape with Mary to do some shopping or get our nails done during nap time. There were evenings when Bobby and I would do soccer drills and laugh and laugh in the backyard. And then there were those hugs after school. How I loved those happy faces, lighting up cause I was there. These were hours typically filled in by work over the past ten years.

Counter to past thinking, as a stay at home mom, I was very busy; there was always something to do and if there wasn't, there were clear ways to get more involved in the school, church and community at large. I spent time thinking about what it would be like if I could continue in this role or if I could find an alternate career with more flexibility. But in the end, the economics never worked. At least, set in our current lifestyle.

If there is one thing that I learned on sabbatical, it's that being a stay at home mom is both an amazing gift and a satisfying career. And I am so thankful to my company for giving me that time with my family. I won't forget it and I will work hard toward my next one.

Lo.