Today’s Mother’s Day, and I’ve been thinking a lot about my own mother, who died going on ten years ago, when I was still far too young to appreciate her. Mom and I had a complicated relationship, but the older I get–and the further I get away from the more dysfunctional aspects of her life (time has a great way of sanding away the bad and leaving the good) the more I see the many gifts she gave me. Here are a few.

Gift: The knowledge that people are more important than money or things, and that family is everything. My mother’s greatest wish for my siblings and I was that we would stay close as we grew up. We all get along very well today, which I think she’d be happy to know.

Gift: Making do. No, better than making do–being truly content with what you have. My mom re-used everything, but not in a sloppy pack-rat kind of way (when she died, her home had remarkably little clutter for us to go through). She simply used everything within an inch of its life, and felt no need to rush out and buy knick-knacks or a new sofa or curtains in the latest style. I don’t ever remember feeling deprived, even though I was acutely aware that friends of mine had more toys and new clothes than I did. Sure, I would have loved a few more pair of acid-wash jeans in Junior High, but not always getting what I wanted did a lot to help me be more appreciative and content with whatever straws I draw in life now. And it’s the memory of her resourcefulness that makes me feel a huge twinge of conscience whenever I’m being wasteful or lose perspective on how very materially blessed I am.

Gift: She wasn’t small-minded. My mom wasn’t college-educated, and she didn’t hang out with an artsy or intellectual bunch. Yet I grew up on a media diet of classical music, Harry Chapin and Fiddler on the Roof, NOVA and Masterpiece Theatre, Sesame Street and Peter and the Wolf in addition to the piles of books we brought home from the library. Mom didn’t read celebrity magazines or tabloids or watch vapid morning shows…ever. We had conversations about history, music, religion. I think my mom recognized that life was too short–and the possibilities for learning important things too endless–to spend much time indulging in petty entertainment, a lesson I would do well to remember more often.

Gift: Body-un-consciousness. My mom never dieted. She never commented on the size of her thighs or butt. More important, she didn’t comment on the way other women dressed or did their hair, or make remarks about my friends’ looks. She didn’t force me to clean my plate or hover over me to make sure I didn’t eat too much junk. She kept the house fairly free of unhealthy food (we weren’t allowed to have sugar cereal, for example) but wasn’t about to tell me how to spend my own money if I wanted to go to the corner store for Little Debbies. As a result I grew up with a remarkable absence of body-image issues. I’m not going to say I never moaned over my flat chest when I was a teen, or that nowadays I don’t notice that everything’s heading southward, but I feel like I’m able to notice these things without letting them take over my life. In fact, I wrote an essay about her comfort in her own skin, which I’ll put up in a separate post.

What gifts did your mother pass on that helped make you who you are today?

It’s been a full week of officially spring-like weather, and we’ve been enjoying it to the fullest here (that would explain the lapse in posts.)

First, there was the ill-fated fishing effort behind our house (we are fortunate enough to have spent the last 8 months living on a channel emptying into Lake Michigan, so there’s a beach a couple hundred yards from our back door, and a pier even closer. We are unfortunate enough to be leaving said home in a month.) The trip scored no fish, but it was abundant in photo-ops.

Last Friday, Jon, Clara and I accompanied Isaac’s third-grade class to Conner Prairie in Fishers, IN. I have been to a lot of historic parks, but this was one of the best I’ve seen. It’s authentic and huge–you could spend all day wandering through the gardens, striking up conversations with the costumed interpreters, and gawking at the historic buildings (real, not reproductions) with period decor and furniture. Starting this week they’ll be offering hot air balloon rides , but since we were there too early Isaac had to settle for throwing a hatchet:

which then broke,

holding a chick,

and playing old-fashioned games.

Saturday was spent walking the 1.5 miles downtown with the baby strapped to my chest in order to watch the community parade. I unfortunately got no pictures, just a bad sunburn.

Sunday, we went hunting for morel mushrooms. My brother-in-law, Scott, found ten or so, and Jacob found one.

I was completely unsuccessful, despite really going for gold, tearing through thorn bushes and crawling around in the dirt. But between the two guys we had a decent little haul.

Last night, Jenna and I made chicken, asparagus and morels with rosemary new potatoes.

It was delicious, and none of us wound up in the hospital due to eating toxic false morels.

Today it was a trip to the nearby nature center for a romp through the woods with Jenna, her kids, our friend Missy and her two kids and William, Owen and Clara. I forgot the camera, so I didn’t bring home any photos. What I did bring home? Ticks. Three found so far, one of which was ON MY HEAD. Now, of course, I’m convinced I feel crawling and itching all over my body. Something tells me I’m in for a long night…

Welcome Spring!

Or keep your dining room table clear. Or sweep under your dining-room table regularly. Or make sure your dressers aren’t overstuffed with clothes so they don’t shut all the way. The point is, all of us have that one thing (or half a dozen things) that drives us crazy. Whether yours is crumbs on the counter or rooms where half the lightbulbs are burned out, taking care of your biggest crazy-makers (BEFORE they get to the point of making you crazy) sets the whole mood for the day.

For me, that one thing happens to be making my bed. I used to roll out of bed in the morning, look at the rumpled sheets and blankets and think “eh, what’s the difference? I’m just going to be messing it up again in 15 hours.” But I spend a lot of time in my bedroom, even during the day, and I found that every time I went back in, the sight of that unmade bed made me feel…slumpy. It made the house feel messy even if the house wasn’t particularly messy. It made me feel disorganized. And every time I sat on the bed (like I am now with my laptop) I would feel like crawling under the sheets and going back to sleep.

I’m far from being a neat freak, but I began to realize that I require a certain level of cleanliness in order to function. I spend most of my day in my home, and if it feels too messy or cluttered I just want to retreat and watch bad TV instead of being productive. I also realized that it pays to stay on top of mess by constantly straightening up instead of saving it all for some mythical 2-hour stretch when I’ll be able to do a big clean. So four or five years ago I started making my bed every day, as soon as I could after waking up. What a difference. It took a couple of weeks to really get into the habit, but soon I found myself looking forward to making my bed–it feels like tearing out a fresh sheet of notebook paper, clean and crisp and full of possibility. Now, no matter how the rest of the house looks, my bedroom is a neat and pleasant retreat. When I go to bed, it’s so satisfying to pull back the smooth covers instead of climbing into a tangled mess of sheets. And it really makes a big difference in my mood.

I have other “must do” chores, too. For example, I really like my bathroom to look clean (with four boys this means wiping down toilets at least daily) and it’s important to me to have a clean kitchen sink (which I realized after doing FlyLady many years ago). I also Can. Not. Stand. to have couch pillows and throw blankets all over the living room so I stop a few times a day to toss pillows back on the furniture and fold blankets. I call these things my “triggers”—I’m actually crankier to my kids and anxious when my sink is messy or there are sofa pillows on the floor. So I try to stay on top of it through the day—and it all begins with making the bed.

One note, though: I have my older kids do a lot of chores, but I almost never put them in charge of my “trigger” tasks. It’s too important to me that they’re done right–not to mention promptly.

Do you have housecleaning “triggers” that can make or break your mood? What are they? How long did it take you to figure them out?

You’ve probably noticed I’m posting a lot more pictures than I usually do. It’s not just because of our firstbabygirl and the dozensofadorableoutfits she has and her ridiculouslycuteface: I swear, I haven taken lots of baby pictures of pictures of all my kids. The only problem was that usually those pictures stunk. I always blamed myself…and then my husband got a second-hand Nikon D70 from a co-worker. Now suddenly, even my worst attempts at photography seem to turn out…pretty good. At least not embarrassingly bad, and that’s progress. So here are a few we’ve snapped of the kids recently:

Clara loves the bath.

The boys love Clara.

Owen loves being three.

Owen really, REALLY loves being three.

William loves Miley Cyrus, but finds talking about it rather embarrassing.

I love this.

You may have noticed that I haven’t done a lot of posting here over the last two weeks.

Over the holiday, I practiced the benign neglect…of my life.

Dishes went unwashed (not for an entire two weeks, mind you. In a family of six, the longest we can go is about a day, or people just stop eating or shovel food directly from the container into their mouths like animals). Floors went unswept. Bedtimes were ignored. Alarm clocks were turned off. Wake-up times were, some days, almost grossly late.

My kids ate all their Christmas stocking candy (and then when it was gone, scrounged around for leftover treats), laid around and read, played with their gifts and were basically a bunch of lazy slugs. Often none of us changed out of our pajamas at all until showering sounded like more fun than going any longer without a shower. Once I looked at my 11-year-old son and realized he’d been wearing the same shirt for three days.

We survived on Christmas leftovers, cereal, sandwiches, fruit and the occasional guilt-induced salad or steamed broccoli. We did a little traveling but mostly stayed home. My husband kept stealing my new Crabtree & Evelyn bathrobe, which is so ridiculously soft you feel like you could fall asleep instantly after putting it on. And then he’d fall asleep instantly after putting it on.

I got hardly any e-mail. I sent hardly any e-mail. I turned on my instant messenger, but most days there was nobody on so I didn’t do any chatting. I checked in with Twitter but barely engaged in any conversation. I mulled over a few ideas for new projects but didn’t do much work on any of them.

Of course, we had to make up for our sloth today by paying a little extra attention to restoring the house to its former glory…er, adequacy. And some work had to be done to get the kids ready for returning to school tomorrow (clean underwear and socks suddenly seemed a lot more necessary, and I realized I’d never bothered to see if they had any school notes that needed dealing with over the holiday. And there were the two-weeks-neglected lunchboxes to deal with…)

But basically, none of us accomplished anything for two weeks. And it was glorious.

How was your holiday? If it was as lazy as mine, I hope you’re not wasting your time feeling guilty about it. After all that sluggishness, who has the energy for regret?

Every year, the boys and I make a trip to the store, where each child gets to pick out one ornament to put on the tree. The intention is that one day we will actually remember whose ornaments are whose, and they will have a small supply to take off to college or their first apartment or wherever life takes them. And of course, in the meanwhile we get a pretty tree that’s full of character but growing more crowded by the year.

On these shopping ventures it can be hard to stay on task: just get one ornament per person, then head for the checkout aisle. I see SHINY stuff everywhere and suddenly I find myself creating a need for those tree lights shaped like the ones from the 30s or that new beaded runner for the table. And of course, I don’t always manage to quell the urge. Our Advent calendar was a fairly recent impulse purchase (though I’d been wanting to buy a nice one for years). A few years ago I really needed new gold balls to replace all the ones that were pulled off the tree and broke when I had toddlers in the house. And I always find myself looking at new tablecloths and candles.

But when I was surveying the house yesterday photographing my holiday decorations, I was struck by just how many of those things have been constant from year to year. I’ve had my Mary/Jesus statue and wooden creche for at least 11 years, maybe longer (that’s nearly my whole adult life). I have a little wire tree that I hang these little antiquey ornaments on. I remember finding the ornaments in a little gift shop here in town–years before I lived here!–and loving them. That was at least five years ago. There’s a tin that my Aunt Kay gave me when I was maybe 9 or 10 years old. (it came with a puzzle inside; the puzzle did not survive my childhood, but the tin did). The Santa with his reindeer was a gift from Jon’s aunt the year we got married. Many of the ornaments on the tree date back 10-15 years, some longer.

And I realize that the things I get the most satisfaction from are the ones that have been around the longest, that I pull out year after year. I absolutely love taking out my creche and setting up my little wire “tree” and seeing my old friends emerge from the tissue paper. I even love putting it all away when Christmas is over, wrapping each item carefully and looking forward to seeing them all again. To me, one of the coziest parts of Christmas is seeing the same, familiar old decorations around the house and knowing that no matter how much things change, our Christmas decor looks pretty much the same year after year.

I still enjoy and want to continue the tradition of buying one new ornament a year for each child, but when I really think about it, I get by far the most enjoyment from the things that have been constant from year to year. They may fall out of fashion or chip, come unglued or lose pieces, but I still plan on hauling them out year after year. When it comes to holiday decorations, I just really love my old stuff.

And that’s a good thing to keep in mind when I’m looking for an excuse to stay away from yet another display of new holiday tablecloths and runners.

I rarely do picture posts because I am still working on acquiring 1) skill and 2) a fabulous camera, but as Christmas is one of my favorite times of year and decorating for Christmas is one of my very favorite things to do, I thought I’d share a little glimpse of our house…

This year, we decided to go a little more modest than we have with trees in the past. Due to the current economic climate? A little of that…and the fact that we live in a house with a much smaller living room now! The tree is in our little sunroom off of the main room, with a view of the channel emptying into the lake behind it. By the way, this was perhaps the pokiest-needled tree I’ve decorated in the last decade. Ouch!

From left to right: the Mary & baby Jesus my mother gave Jon and I for our first Christmas together, our Advent calendar (we got it out of storage a week late so haven’t actually been able to open up that first week’s worth of doors!), and a very cool wooden puzzle-style creche my mother gave me, and which remains among my favorite Christmas decorations. I’d love to leave it out year-round, I enjoy it that much! But some things are more special when you only use them once in a while…

Also propped up against the Advent calendar are two little angels the boys made in school last year. I thought they were too cute not to put out.

Having no fireplace, the stockings were instead hung on the non-functional woodstove with care…

In hopes that Saint Nicholas soon would be there. In his sleigh, or a car, or hanging from a rope, or whatever.

Now where are those Wise Men, Joseph and Mary? And where’s Jesus, for goodness’s sake? Even an oxen lowing would give this empty stable some life. I went through all the Christmas boxes, and all I could find was this paper Jesus that Will made in preschool, and from this angle it looks like a piece of toilet paper. Guess I gotta get to the gift store stat.

and…

just because it’s funny, look at the picture below–a little above the stable to see the part of the picture I cropped out.

That belly is always getting in the way these days and showing up where I least expect it!