Category: growing up (Page 5 of 6)

Focal points: Cucumbers and Vrksasana

August 25, 2014 / Michele Minehart

Our garden consists of 82 tomato plants, 6 green pepper plants, a few hot peppers and just a couple vines of cucumbes. However, those cukes are hearty. My most recent plucking yielded 15 new ones, and I had just checked about 2 days ago.

Picking cucumbers is tricky business. First, the dang things are prickly. DO NOT RUB YOUR HANDS TOGETHER. Ouch. Also, the part that connects them to the vine: strong stuff. (I’m contemplating how to use cucumber stem as sticky tack so that Miss M’s foam letter O will stay on her wall, because the 3m squares clearly are not working.)

(If there is a secret to cucumber harvesting I’m clearly not aware of, I beg of you to share your secrets. I will pay you One Million ~~Dollars~~ Pickles.)

Not only do cucumbers have the evolutionary survival tactic of remaining green while ripe and thus blending in with surroundings, but their choice of placement is spot on. I have discovered it’s nearly impossible to see a cucumber by looking at the plant head-on. Instead, you have to rummage around, pretending to look for tomatoes and steal a glance over and notice that a nearby vine has 14 green prolate spheroids dangling alongside you. You have to get on the ground and look up. I suppose one could even begin digging up the garlic heads and see a cucumber sprouting out easier than if you went up to the vine and looked straight at it.

Just when you think you’re done – the heavy bucket protruding and you’re wondering if the neighbors locked their car doors, because if not, you’re dropping in a minimum of 5 cucumbers and a quart of tomatoes – you see 4 more. Just hanging out, in what would appear to be clear view. Except, it’s not, if you’re looking directly at the plant.

Not long ago I took a yoga class with a special guest teacher who had us trying a variety of standing balance poses. Note: balance poses are Yoga’s gift to us so we can practice not being competitive. If you think you’re a bad ass yogi, start standing on one leg and swinging the other one around.

As an exercise, she had us in Tree pose and asked us to set our gaze across the room on a specific focal point. By narrowing our eyes, it becomes easier to root into the ground and maintain balance. Then she asked us to look at a spot on the floor right in front of us. I was not the only one to topple over.

It turns out we tend to loose our sense of balance when we keep a shortsighted focus.

The rhythms of summer have nearly evaporated. JJ returned to setting an alarm and prepping the coffee the night before, as if the coffeepot would ever wake up before me. Though my own 2 school kids have another week at home, we’ve thrust ourselves into school-year pace. And I’m exhausted.

Historically, I’ve kept a sacred 1.5-2 hour afternoon window of stillness, that precious time in which work is produced and sanity recovers itself. However, this autumn I have 2 older children who outgrew naps. They still head upstairs to “rest” but at most I can get an hour of tranquility before they just start finding new ways to annoy from across the house.

It is so easy to look at life right now and wonder how in the world it’s all going to happen this year. The school stuff. The church stuff. The work stuff. The spending quality time and soaking in precious young days with my children stuff. Trips to the museum, trips to the zoo, trips to friends houses and trips to grandparents’ homes. And then there’s the eating. All of the food that I seem to be cooking all of the time. This morning I made pot full of oatmeal, a dozen muffins and one kid drank half my smoothie while another also devoured the last bowl of Rice Krispies. By the time we finally finished breakfast, someone asked if it was time for lunch.

If I zoom in and only look at life right in front of me, chances are, I will fall over. Balance is laughable. Looking at our state of life right now, head-on, I will see no fruit – only a mess of vines and leaves growing in 15 directions, threatening to suffocate my tomatoes.

A step back and slightly to the side and I see the bigger picture. I see children enjoying days together. I see play. I see a family enjoying healthy dinners, sitting around the table together and talking about the day. When you turn off the zoom, you don’t see splashes of pizza sauce on the counter top or the toy dishes spilled out of the basket for the 19th time.

The Motherhood Balancing Act requires us to firmly plant one foot, strengthening muscles you didn’t know existed (which will be sore after the first few uses) while you stretch and move the other leg. It’s a tug and pull while remaining rooted. We’re forced to be in the moment, dealing with each day as it comes but we often forget another gift: the view from the big picture.

From time to time, pulling back and remembering how we’re not just filling days but building a life, gives us the strength we need to stay firm. We take a deep breath, we look at another spot across the room and enjoy the surprise of finding yet another treat ripening right in front of us.

The Play Behind Closed Doors

August 22, 2014 / Michele Minehart

A frustrating morning this week rendered my children to a “different room, anywhere other than right beside Mr. M,” who was being suffocated by sibling presence. Soon I heard them skitter upstairs. Then silence. A worrisome silence.

I finished my task and opted to sort laundry on my bed so I could ~~spy~~ prevent disaster. What I found changed the pace of the morning from monstrous to magical. They had shut the bedroom door. They shut me out.

When they came out, unknowing of my presence, they donned bath towels as raincoats, pushing a stroller to take Lady C “to a friend’s house.” Then they dropped Miss M off at “school.” When I peeked into H Boy’s room, they had made a bed on the floor with the girls’ blankets and he had been “reading” to them before bed.

Soon they returned “home.” The next time they emerged, Miss M had a baby stuffed under her dress. “Bye grandma and papa, we’re going to the hospital!” I hear them say. Apparently Lady C was stuck at home with the grandparents because I heard H & M go into another room and then an uproar of laughter: “I pooped it out!” I hear. And then there was a baby. (So. That’s how it happens.)

I kept folding, trying to remain invisible because the truth of the situation rose to the top: while I should be intentional about playing and interacting with my kids at home (and I’m trying to do a better job of this), in their time without me my kids become more imaginative and cooperative. They stick with their play for much longer spans of time when I’m not involved. They try new things, find creative props and tell their stories of life using lenses I simply don’t know how to operate.

This is such a good thing.

I half-jokingly say that the best thing I could offer my kids in life is siblings. On this morning, it was simply a true statement. At one point I told myself, “this is the childhood I dreamed for my children. Right here.” Because it is. When I look back at my early years, I see my sister and I lining the staircase with stuffed animals to play school and getting out our Barbies to live in their piano home with my dad’s basketball trophies serving as doors, beds and furniture. We ventured outside on rusty grain augers and “shredded” snow in the winter. We climbed a dirt hill where one of our cats hid her kittens and affectionately and appropriately called it Kitty Peak. Our industrial-sized gas tanks became horses named Silver and Goldie (which, ironically, were both silver).

Play, play, play, my children. Go. Create. Do. Find the ordinary and discover it with new ideas, see it with imagination goggles.

They rarely do this in my presence, just as my parents were mostly absent from my own adventurous memories (though I can look back to plenty of examples of quality time filled with love and play). I’m not sure why, but I think it has something to do with the responsibilities we carry as adults and our inability to set that down at the door. We’re always thinking of the pick up involved after or the unlikelihood that this could actually work. We feel the need to correct and make everything into a teachable moment. I wonder if sometimes our teaching results in less learning than these episodes of creativity the kids embark upon by themselves.

I just read a fascinating article on children’s learning styles around the world and literacy, but what jumped out at me was the author mentioning how often kids want to learn in private: “When I entered the room they looked up like kids who were caught doing something illicit. This is another thing you learn about kids when they don’t go to school. They don’t want to be watched all the time. They don’t want to be scrutinized and measured. They often don’t even want to be praised or encouraged. They have a remarkable sense of dignity and autonomy, and they defend it fiercely. They want their learning to be their own.”

So while JJ and I converse about my participation and engagement with our kids (as opposed to work, which I am prone), I agree. Treasure these days with them, sit at the table and make a mess.

And yet.

Send them to the basement. Direct them upstairs. Shut the door. See what magic they come up with on their own.

Our fear of growing wings

November 21, 2013 / Michele Minehart

When I don’t get dinner on the table until late, the kids devour whatever is presented. So I shouldn’t be surprised when H Boy eats 2.5 large pieces of chicken. He had just asked for another half a piece and I remarked, “you’re going to turn into a chicken!” He looked at me funny, so I ran with it.

“Oh, look! Your nose is turning into a beak!” He ran to the bathroom to check.

When he came back out I could tell he was concerned, so I let the gig drop. “I’m just teasing, honey, you’re not turning into a chicken.” But it was lost on him.

“I’m not going to eat any more chicken. My belly’s full,” he said.

And my heart kind of broke a little.

Not necessarily because we were teasing, (I asked later and he said it didn’t make him feel sad or scared.) but because tonight was an induction into something I have dreaded to experience with my little ones.

He walked into the cold, lonely world of covering his inadequacies with falsities.

He covered his nose with his hands but he declared that it was his belly that was speaking. He used his words as protection, even when they weren’t true.

Maybe there’s a little guilt at the fact his own mother brought this on, but mostly I’m sad for the world that awaits him. I’m the first to admit the joys are bigger and stronger and brighter than the sorrows – I believe that with everything that is in me. But man, the world is far from perfect and the battle to navigate it with dignity and grace can be a painful one.

Little man, you are enough. I’ll sing it ’til I’m blue in the face. You’re enough and you’re loved and you’re beautiful. Even with a beak and wings and chicken legs, you’re worthy of love. This world will try to convince you otherwise and that’s when Satan will whisper in your ear, “You’re all alone. No one else has ever felt this way. Everyone else is normal.” And it’s simply. not. true.

We all cover our nose and talk about our bellies when all we want is someone to love us when all the imperfections show.

I promise, I will. I always will.

Category: growing up (Page 5 of 6)

Focal points: Cucumbers and Vrksasana

The Play Behind Closed Doors

Our fear of growing wings

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