Barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen

I’m feeling pressure to blog something again, because it’s the last day of August!  The whole summer has just zipped by!  I will “try” to catch up on some of the fun details (our vacation) and not so fun details (the move) later, but for now, I feel like I should focus on the present.  I’m hoping the next 2 months of my life will be titled “barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.”  (after I finish unpacking anyway…).  That’s right, I’m going to revel in my new found domestic role, a role I’ve never really played before, at least in the solo form. 

I feel really lucky actually, to be able to take a few months away from work.  I feel like I’ve never had that option before, that I’ve rushed from one experience to the next to the next (sometimes overlapping experiences like going back to work when Asher was just 2 weeks old).  But the truth is that all of those things were my choice, and now I recognize I have (and have always had) the ability to make changes, it just doesn’t happen overnight!  So I am lucky that my husband was willing to support me in this endeavor to stay at home for several months and really get to be a mom and a wife.

Something I’ve realized already is that I’m not particularly good at it (the domestic thing), and so it is going to require some effort on my part.  It is sort of a scheduling nightmare to get everyone where they are supposed to be on time, appropriately dressed and groomed and with the right homework and such.  Also, everyone needs to be fed at what seems like a constant pace, requiring repeated meal preparation and clean up.  Then there is the mess making, sibling fighting, and general “kid issues” that take place.  And cap it off with laundry, which there is always more of every day!   So there are all of these demands laid on top of a fairly wide open schedule (which gives the illusion that it should be easy to fit it all in) but in reality there is very little free time.  Put on top of all of that my own emotional baggage and fatigue and all that and most days I’m happy to make it to the end!

 

So now that sounds kind of bad, like again I don’t have a choice, but I’m realizing each day I DO have a choice and I just have to exercise it more.  I’m working on getting our schedule more organized so less time is wasted so that I can carve out my own free time.  And I’m also trying to find some tasks that fill more than one need at a time (I enjoy baking and cooking so I’m trying to use this as an opportunity to try new recipes and stuff).  Today, for example, I experienced the joy of blanching, peeling and chopping fresh peaches for my plan to make little individual peach pies that I can put in everyone’s lunch.  It was actually fun, and while I’m not sure that my kids really understand that making little pies from scratch is a way to show I love and care about them, at least it will fulfill one of the many times a day that they require food.

I’m looking at the whole thing as a fun little experiment.  Sadly one without a paycheck.  Hopefully I won’t forget how to be a doctor, and maybe, if I’m lucky I can learn to be a better mom.

Our World Population Growth

Yesterday I was sitting in an office waiting room and I picked up a National Geographic and was skimming it and came upon this article, which I found totally fascinating. 

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/01/seven-billion/kunzig-text

I'm not a big follower of the news and so I tend to miss stuff like this, but basically, this year our world population will reach 7 billion people.  I found it so fascinating to see the exponential growth in our population over the last 100 years and the graph of expected continued growth and to hear different people talk about the issue.  You can certainly read the article and see what you think yourself.  I came away from the article with a few things. 

First, I feel a tiny bit guilty about having another kid now. I would be more globally responsible if I only had 2, which is the "replacement rate" that we are aiming for.  But, too late now! (although I was made to feel slightly better hearing that it is really not the U.S. or Europe or China that is the problem as we have reached replacement rate or less, it is Africa and India, who have continued exponential growth that are adding to the world population more than we are). 

Secondly, it may be our consumerism that does us in, not the actual number of people.  The article suggested that more people around the world are going to move into the "global middle class" and that means they are going to be consuming more, which is great, because there will be fewer starving and poverty striken people in the world, but if they start consuming American style then we're totally screwed, the world can't provide for 7 billion people living like we do.  (which really gets back to the point of all of us cutting down on our consumption of food and products that I have been thinking/talking about for awhile now).  It makes me think about when we were kids and our parents told us to eat everything on our plates because there are kids starving in Africa.  Now we'll be saying the opposite, encouraging our kids to take less food onto their plates, buy less at the store, so that there will be some left for other people.

And lastly, and to me the most poignant because I actually see it occurring when I see patients, is the increasing elderly population.  Since we've now reached replacement rate in our country, we're going to have a problem because of the mid-century baby boom where the exponential growth took place.  The total number of elderly are not going to be proportionately matched by the younger population since the population growth rate has now stabilized.  How are we going to physically care for all of the elderly people?  Not to mention financially care for them which is obviously a huge problem already (social security, medicare, etc.).  We haven't structured our society with a system that might allow for us to care directly for our parents (unless we purposefully choose that, which is a great choice I think, but not an easy one with expectations for work and housing and providing for our own children).  As physicians we see this too often, where an elderly patient starts to get demented, but still thinks they can handle things themselves but then clearly becomes potentially dangerous to themselves when left alone (leaving the gas on the stove, leaving food out, soiling themselves and not being able to clean up).  Then we have to try to get someone to intervene, sometimes an adult child will step up and take their parent into their home, or do the hard work of finding an affordable living arrangement (hard to do, if you've ever looked at the cost of assisted living facilities -- especially the ones that don't smell like urine -- you will want to start saving your money now).  But sometimes we end up having to call Adult Protective Services, who are the only people who can help in these scenarios, and even they can't really do that much other than to force someone to take responsibility for the person.  They are so busy we have to call them multiple times to even get anything to happen and it sometimes takes months.  It is a sad statement about our society, the way we treat our aging population, and it is going to become an even bigger problem I think as our population grows.

Anyway, you can read the article and see what you think.  Feel free to comment.

Review of "The 100 Thing Challenge" by Dave Bruno

I don’t think I’ve ever blogged a book review before, but I wanted to do so mainly to be able to share and comment on his main points, particularly since I’m into minimizing right now.  I’m also trying to summarize it for Andy so he doesn’t have to read it if he doesn’t want to.

 As a quick overview, this book was not exactly what I was expecting.  It is partly a commentary on American-style consumerism and partly the story of how he came up with this idea and then spent two years of his life both getting ready and subsequently living out  the 100-Thing-Challenge.  I expected to see more of the down and dirty, the suffering of his minimalism, and both the good and bad news is that it isn’t there.  Good in the sense that this ends up being an achievable and liveable sort of idea.  Bad in the sense that it isn’t that dramatic and doesn’t lend itself to great storytelling.  The author himself makes reference a few times to the fact that what he did on a daily basis is really not that interesting (which, if you ask me is not a great way to sell your book, however, I also appreciated his honesty).  He talks about it in reference to being asked and then turned down for interviews and TV spots:

  

…basically, my workaday 100-Thing-Challenge lifestyle didn’t fit the formula of eccentricity that shows well on television.  That was the same reaction of the producer from ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson, who inquired about doing a “Day in the Life of the 100 Thing Challenge.”  He too felt like my life wouldn’t make good TV.  I don’t think he could imagine a compelling lead, (“Watch next week as we visit a guy named Dave who often wears the same shirt for two days in a row!”).

I do think it was interesting, from a human perspective, to watch him wrestle with decisions of what to get rid of, and to learn lessons along the way.  My favorite purging stories were of him getting rid of some train sets that he had purchased as an adult but recognized as a dream of recapturing childhood and then of him getting rid of a bunch of his wood working tools.  I could identify with that struggle and how part of his wanting to keep the tools was the dream of mastery of a skill and imagined sense of accomplishment he would have and found his commentary insightful:

After selling the tools and thinking about my time with them, I came to understand why mastery is not the road to a finish line of contentment.  Mastery is a journey without final arrival.  This is the response of the best “masters.”  For example, those people who, by their exceptional use of tools, we call master artisans are proud of the epithet but are themselves aware that they have reached no state of repose. The master confronts a problem in need of a solution, not through perfection but by skill and creativeness.”

 I was sort of disappointed that the lines of 100-Things are fuzzy.  It wasn’t really 100-Things.  He has a family that includes a wife and 3 little girls.  He didn’t count any collective belongings in his 100-things list, they were only personal-use items on that list.  So the house, bed, cooking utensils, furniture, hygiene items etc. etc. don’t count.  He is up front about that, and reports he received a lot of criticism about it on his blog, although he makes a valid point in that he thought this up for himself, he made the rules for himself and not for anyone else, he’s not telling anyone they “should” do this.  Probably the biggest “cheat” (which again he admits) is that he counted his book collection as “1 library” on his list.  But in all fairness, I actually think “100 personal items” is still limiting for any of us and is still a “challenge.”

The other thing that sort of surprised me was the mild religious undertone.  But you know, after reading it, I don’t see how he could have left it out.  He sounds like a pretty religious person and he founded Christian Audiobooks so clearly it is an important part of his life.  He never really got preachy (thank goodness) and only made a couple of Bible references.  I can live with that.

Probably some of the more interesting parts of the book to me had nothing to do with his challenge but were more related to the connections he made between American consumerism and American entrepreneurialism.  Having been both he has some valid points relating the two to each other and looking at why we pursue both so aggressively:

Who is the satisfied person?  The person who has it all?  The person who has done it all?  The person who has gone further than anyone else and gotten more than anyone else?  There is no such person. Of course not.  We all know that.  But try going to the mall and believing that.  Try starting up a business that becomes financially successful and believing that.  In the heat of the moment it’s not so easy to remember that contentment is an attitudinal choice, not a buyable product.

He also devotes an entire chapter to what he states was the most common of the suspicious reactions he got which plays out in a talk he has with his Dad about the challenge:

“Hey Dave, I’ve figured something out.”

“Okay, what is it?”

“Well, if everyone did your 100 Thing Challenge no one would buy things anymore and you would be responsible for destroying the world’s economy.”

The author tries to argue against this point in the chapter, and given he is not an economist I think he does a good job.  I tend to agree with him, that it actually would not be the downfall of our economy, and in fact, maybe it would make our society and our economy better.  Maybe we wouldn’t be in a recession right now if everyone had done this 10 years ago?  Maybe people would choose to buy a made-in-America product for the extra money versus the cheaper version because they would appreciate the quality and the lastingness of the object and there would be more jobs here and not overseas.  Maybe without all the time spent shopping or consuming (including TV watching) we would have more innovations, more creativity, more giving of ourselves, more time invested in our community.  He doesn’t have economic models to support this but it makes sense to me.

 In the end, the parts that resonate the most for me are really his personal self-discoveries, as I feel going through the minimizing process my eyes are being opened in a similar way.  He makes a point that as humans we have limitations, he’s not saying we shouldn’t dream, but he is suggesting that buying and consuming things won’t get us there:

Somehow I have thought that fancy pens could knock away at my circumstances and shape me into a rough-and-tumble businessman.  Or toy trains could refashion my youth.  Or gear and adventuring could chip away until a perfectly content and secure soul took form or woodworking tools could manufacture a life of confidence.  Maybe my sculpting handiwork could turn me into someone bigger and more competent than I am.  Someone who could grasp at things beyond my reach.

One of the best lines of the book, the most true I think, was actually in the middle, as the author is describing some of his joyful but simple days working and spending time with his family.  That is when he reveals the not too surprising “naughty secret of the 100-Thing-Challenge” which is also the part that makes it feel possible, and hopeful, as a potential lifestyle choice:

Life is just about the same without an abundance of stuff – shhh, quiet now --- except without all that crap, there’s more room for living life to the fullest.

So, will I do the 100 Thing Challenge?  Initially I thought I might, but after reading it all, seeing what an overall struggle it was I’ve decided not to do it.  Quite honestly I have too much going on right now to structure another project (getting rid of one thing every day is still a challenge).  But I believe in the principle of minimizing and opening up space in my life and will continue to try to do that without hard and fast rules, lists and numbers of objects.  It is nice to know, however, that it can be done and that there are personal lessons and rewards that can come from removing ourselves from American consumerism.

Burdening Others

This weekend I continued to get stuff out of the storage unit, which felt great, but also came with a little guilt.  The guilt is because I burdened my friends with some of my stuff.  I did ask them to make sure they wanted it, but it still feels like the opposite of what I'm trying to accomplish and the last thing I want to do to a friend since I feel like I'm benefiting from minimizing and dumping stuff on them!  One thing was this kid's activity table that I got from the container store 6 years ago.  It was great, the kids both used it a ton and I have so many fun memories of us coloring, having snacks and doing projects at the table.  So I didn't want to just give it to "anyone," I wanted to know it was going to a good home.  Not sure why there is so much emotion involved over a table but apparently there is for me.  So I was able to offload that this weekend and it went to a good home (Leah, you can really say "no" at any time).

I also took another trunkload of stuff to Goodwill.  I reduced 6 boxes from the storage unit down to 3 (I'm aiming for a closer to 70% reduction but it's not easy).  A big chunk of what I got rid of were vases and cookbooks.  For some reason I had kept a ton of vases.  Is it the idea of a vase full of flowers that kept me collecting them?  Because I love that idea. But what I know is that I only used the same 2 over and over again and so I kept those and parted with all of the rest.  The cookbooks were much harder.  I love cooking and so ended up sort of "collecting" a lot of cookbooks over the years.  "The Joy of Less" book helped me a lot in this area, I just kept telling myself that these might represent what I used to cook (the extension of that is "who I used to be") but they don't contain what I cook (or who I want to be) anymore.  I got rid of about half of them.  I hope that the vases and results of the cookbooks will grace someone else's table and make them happy.

While I was at Goodwill I was watching them load these large metal crates of clothes into a semi truck.  They were probably 6 feet square and just full of clothing.  It almost made me ill to think how we, as a society, have created that sort of excess, that they wouldn't be able to sell it all at Goodwill, that it has to be shipped elsewhere to be gotten rid of.  I read in O magazine that there are some countries that are refusing our used clothing shipments because we're negatively affecting their textile industries.  It is crazy to me that someone would choose a used T-shirt that says something ridiculous about beer on it over a beautiful (maybe even handmade) textile.  And don't worry, I'm not saying this is everyone else's problem, I used to look in my closet and wish "gosh, I wish I had a bigger walk in closet."  But now I see it differently, no one should really "need" a walk in closet, no one needs that much clothing, including me!  While I'm still not to my goal yet, my clothes are finally feeling what it is like to be able to breathe, they aren't all crammed together, and I can't tell you how liberating that feels, to have just the amount you need, to know that I like and wear every piece and it doesn't just hang out waiting to be worn (or fit into).  I don't want to be a contributor to burdening others, including other countries with my excessive purchasing and owning of "things" (even if they are useful, like clothing) and so that means that not only do I have to continue to get rid of things, but I have to be strict with myself about the 1:1 rule, when something comes in, something also has to go out.  If I can stick to it hopefully I'll breathe easier along with my clothes, and the guilt will fade with time.

What I've been getting rid of lately...

Last week I was home with a sick kid for a couple of days so I had the luxury of "nap time" to spend a couple of hours going through my closet, for what feels like the 20th time over the past year.  I was shocked at how much more came out, two large shopping bags worth of clothing!  And most of it was "hidden" because at first glance the closet doesn't look too much different. 

My strategy was to think about a type a clothing (running clothing for example) and think about how many running outfits I really need.  On a good week I'm running 4 times a week, on a bad week probably 2, usually in the non-freezing-my-ass-off months I run one or two times outside and the others indoors (although I'm hoping to run more outside, it's been a function of exercising at night time and not wanting to do that outside).  I figured we do laundry at our house daily, so it would be reasonable for me to keep 3 indoor/warm weather running outfits and 1 outdoor/cooler weather running outfit (and even that might be more than I need but I'm trying not to make this too painfully hard!).  Ends up I had 7 sets of running shorts/outfits and I didn't even know it!  Having the limit made it easier for me to pick my top 3 favorites and get rid of the rest.

Another thing I looked at was "lounging around clothing."  Apparently I want to be doing more of this than I do because again I had about 6 options for lounging around yoga type pants (2 pairs were from college, which is really just stupid, I haven't worn them in over 10 years!).  I allowed myself to keep 2 figuring I could have one for each weekend day (which in reality is the only time I wear them).  In addition I got rid of several pairs of pajamas.  For some reason I get a little sentimental about pajamas and they generally don't wear out as fast as other clothing so I hold on to them a long time.  A few pairs were "matching" with Avery's pajamas, and her sets have been long gone for a few years now and so I don't know why I was holding on to mine!  Especially when I'm one of those people who wears old T-shirts to sleep in, why do I have any pajamas at all???

Ok, so here was the biggest (and equally hard) thing to get rid of, but it has been also been the biggest relief, sort of like getting the monkey off my back.  I'm getting rid of a velvet quilt (and matching pillow shams) from our bed.  I got it from Pottery Barn a few years ago.  It was on sale but it still felt like a significant chunk of change for something that essentially served no purpose.  When I bought it I did "think" it would serve a purpose but then when I got it I realized how incredibly heavy it was (we already have a duvet and putting the quilt on top was like being smothered).  So it got relegated to sort of looking fashionable folded in half at the end of our bed.  EVERY NIGHT the heaviness of the quilt pulls the duvet off the bottom of the bed, which means I will wake up with the covers at my waist, shivering and have to sit up to try to forcibly haul them back up which ends up pushing the quilt onto the floor, then in the morning it is a process to get it back on the bed and straightened up.  Additionally Howie loves to sleep on it, and it collects cat hair like nobody's business and so I'm always delinting it.  I hate doing all of this!  For a quilt!  Yes I "paid good money for it" (a frequent line in my head that prevents me from getting rid of things from time to time) but it has made me cold and cranky every day!  So maybe someone out there who needs a heavy quilt will find it at Goodwill and it will make them happy and warm.

Iron Cupcake!

One of my physician partners, Stephanie Skladzien, and I entered a cupcake making competition this weekend!  We spent a lot of time preparing, we baked 7 or 8 different sample cupcakes over the past 2 months and in the end decided on the following:  Chocolate Cupcake with Marshmallow Buttercream Frosting and Marshmallow Fondant Flowers.  We were happy with our product and enjoyed the process! We didn't win, one of the professional bakers did (and her cupcake was very good, it was a smores cupcake and she put a graham cracker crust at the bottom of the cupcake liner, sort of like a cheesecake and it was really good!), so she deserved to win, but we got a lot of votes and a lot of compliments so we were happy!

One of the great things for me was that I learned a new process, and that was making and working with fondant.  This is the recipe I used and I thought it turned out pretty good (with one batch I didn't have butter extract and so I substituted some almond extract and one of the people at the competition came up and said she loved it that it tasted like marzipan to her -- which is great because a lot of times fondant tastes kind of gross).  It's almost like working with sugar cookie dough, except it is more pliable and dries out much faster, but it was fun to learn a new skill!

Here are some pictures:

The Minimizing Efforts

Ok, so I'm going to try to occasionally blog out my minimizing.  Not that anyone cares about the crap I'm getting rid of.  More to keep myself accountable to continuing to do it!  After reading "The Joy of Less" written by this woman http://www.missminimalist.com/ I have set up two rules for myself:

1)  I will get rid of one thing every day.  That thing will have a brief interview where I will review it's resume and see if it is worthy of remaining in the house and then I will have to decide where it goes (donation, selling, garbage, recycling, etc.).
2)  I will live by the 1 in 1 out ratio, so if we buy something new, the old item has to leave in a 1:1 ratio.

As an example of what I'm talking about I posted this on Facebook the other day:
"Handtowels, 2 of you have been doing strong work, the other 6 of you have been lazily hanging out in the linen closet for years.  The free ride is over, you will be leaving us now, no more staying perched up on your high shelf looking down on all the other bathroom items, good luck in the real world handtowels!


Today I am getting rid of something that is actually really a hard one for me.  I'm going to (try) to donate the kids halloween costumes to Asher's preschool.  It's difficult because 1) there are happy memories attached to them (Avery was so cute as Bo Peep!) and 2) they were (relatively) expensive costumes.  But right now they are sitting in a bin and no one is using them, they are too small for Avery and Asher is unlikely to want to be Alice in Wonderland next Halloween and so they need to leave.  I might take pictures of them before I donate them so I can have a digital reminder of how cute they were if I ever feel like looking at them again, but they are going.