Did you know sippy cups are optional?

One of the easiest ways to clean a sippy cup is to use the dishwasher, but easier than that is not using one.

Our kids learned to drink from small glasses. (Actually, they’re shot glasses. They are just the right size.) We start by giving them a little water. If it all dribbles down their chin, it’s no worry. It doesn’t take long for babies to figure out how a cup works.

I like that I never discover a three-day-old sippy cup on the floor of the car with milk gunking up the straw.

If you’re worried about glass over a tile or concrete floor, you can use a plastic medicine cup instead.

And our broken glass count? Kids: 1 Me: 100.

Lane, 14 months

One thing that helps us is our household rule to keep food and drinks at the table. The kids don’t wander around our home carrying their drinks.

It’s easier to go places when my kids can drink from a regular cup or water bottle. (There is a small amount of confusion at friends’ houses or the church nursery. All the kids are given sippy cups and my kid didn’t know how to use them.)

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© 2008-2010 SmallNotebook.org (all rights reserved)
Never Clean a Sippy Cup Again

I can always tell how busy my family is by how often we end up at Chipotle.

Seven times this past month.

Thanks for meeting me back here.

While I gave my blog a vacation, I stayed here and took some time for reflecting, brainstorming, and a little life laundry.

Because it’s so easy not to see the forest for the trees, and I wanted to make sure the direction I was heading in was where I really want to go.

And it definitely is.

I can’t wait to get back to my regular routine of writing here. Have you ever taken a vacation just to find yourself doing more than you would in normal life?

I did do a lot this month. The first thing that I can’t wait to show you is my closet. When I looked in my closet I saw four sizes of clothing and nothing to wear. It was crazy.

Is anyone up for a closet makeover?

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© 2008-2010 SmallNotebook.org (all rights reserved)
And we’re back!

Photo by Muffet

To go to bed on time.
To drink water instead of soda.
To moisturize properly.
To eat right.
To take my vitamins.

One of my primary responsibilities is to take care of other people. People who don’t know how the washing machine works. People who can’t even bathe or feed themselves. And yet I wasn’t doing a very good job of taking care of myself.

I finally learned to go to bed and finish a task in the morning instead of staying up late and fooling myself into thinking I was being productive.

The other day at the grocery store I almost decided to buy a bottle of soda, because I had been so good about not drinking it. Why do we try to reward ourselves with the very things that aren’t good for us and that we have been trying to avoid? I came to my senses and turned my cart around just in time.

I still don’t always get it right. I forget to eat lunch sometimes. If it’s not on my to-do list, I don’t stop to eat lunch. Fortunately my husband knows this about me, and if I’m feeling like I’m ready to have a breakdown he knows he needs to make me a snack.

I used to think taking care of myself was all about the outside of me. Looking good. My toes were always polished. I spent a lot of time thinking about my hair. But I didn’t feel very good.

Now, in this season of life, taking care of myself is essential to survival. Most days I have no time to myself to start the morning quietly, even on the days when I wake up before six a.m. There’s always a little person making his needs clearly known in those wee hours of the morning, whether or not I have fully woken up.

Taking care of myself makes the difference between making it through the day or feeling miserable the whole time.

When free time is so precious, do I use it on something that will revive my spirits, or am I too beat to recognize when an activity is just “filler?”

Do you even remember which activities revive your spirits?

Right now (because it might change) my favorite free-time activities are sewing and reading books. Even if it’s just for half an hour or less.

So in my favorite keep/drop style, here is how I’m spending my free time.

Keep: sewing small things
Drop: doing last-minute cleaning so I can “relax” with a nice clean view.

Keep: reading books
Drop: watching movies

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© 2008-2010 SmallNotebook.org (all rights reserved)
Taking Care of Me

It was a weekday night, Doug had spent an extra forty-five minutes stuck in traffic for his daily commute, the kids were bouncing off the walls, and I, well, I was a desperate mother looking for freedom from childcare.

How could we make it through the rest of the night?

It was a make-it or break-it moment.

We looked at each other and made a pact: we decided to act like it was six o’clock on a Saturday morning, our favorite time of the week, instead of six o’clock on a Tuesday night.

It would only work if we did it together. Doug jumped in the shower, and I made a pot of coffee. Doug fixed breakfast for supper: scrambled eggs and thick cut bacon. We started to feel better already.

Sometimes starting over doesn’t require all of that, sometimes it just takes one of us saying, “I had a really bad attitude earlier. Will you forgive me?”

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© 2008-2010 SmallNotebook.org (all rights reserved)
How to Save the Day by Starting Over

Doug and I married in the fall of 2003. We had a little one-bedroom apartment that was decorated in the odd fashion of wedding-gift serving trays mixed with hand-me-down lumpy couches, as I’m sure is a fairly customary tradition for young couples.

That was the year we paid off all our debt together, so we didn’t do much in the way of personal decorating.

We had trouble finding how our different styles could coincide. Doug liked clean modern lines and industrial steel, like The Modern in Fort Worth.

My childhood dream house was cozier.

Our cozy apartment kitchen was big enough for only one person at a time, and I stuffed wedding gifts into a high cabinet in the bathroom.

With each passing anniversary, we wondered if the next year might be the year we found a house to be ours.

Year 1 — “Maybe when our job situation is more clear…”
Year 2 — “Maybe as soon as the housing bubble bursts…”
Year 3 — “Maybe we just needed a new couch instead of a new house…”

We added to our apartment a little at a time, first a table, then a couch, and then a painting. We watched friends find houses of their own, but we moved to another apartment, and then another.

* * *

It’s odd what you remember about a place. My memories of the apartments that Doug and I have lived in are frequently marked by food accidents. The first apartment where Doug shoved an entire bundle of cilantro down the sink disposal using a plunger. The second kitchen where I repeatedly set toast on fire (actual flames coming from the bread). The third where Doug made a cookie pie and then dropped it fresh from the oven, all over the floor, with much howling from our three-year-old.

When we became pregnant we felt like we were almost expected to find a house to settle down and grow our family, but it didn’t seem like the right time. (It still doesn’t, in case you thought that’s where this story was going. We just renewed our lease.)

This story ends where this blog begins: finding a way to settle into a temporary place.

Becoming familiar with Craigslist as we traded stuff we didn’t need anymore.

Planting a ridiculous number of container plants, and even naming the big ones.

Not letting an apartment kitchen hinder me from trying my “home experiments,” like canning jars of kumquat jam that no one wanted to eat.

Finding parks for my little one to run around outside, since I couldn’t shoo her out the door into a backyard.

Keeping track of our child’s growth by marking lines and writing dates on beige painted walls, even though they will be covered with another thin layer of beige paint as soon as we move out, in time for the next tenant.

Liking our things, but holding on to them with a loose grip.

Being reminded all the while, with every longing, that this earth is not our home. 

A better place awaits.

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© 2008-2010 SmallNotebook.org (all rights reserved)
Making a Home — the Last Chapter (but not the end)

There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you about.

I haven’t been able to figure out how to work it into a post, because it’s a little unusual. You might think it’s weird. But I’ve found that when you’re among friends, the best thing to do is to just come out and say it.

I have a baby item that I consider essential, a true “must-have,” but you never see it on those “Top 10 Must-Have Baby Gear” lists.

I’m sure one of the reasons that it never makes it to those lists is because if the person even knew what it was, they wouldn’t know what to call it. Snot sucker? Nose hose?

It’s a nasal aspirator, and it works much better than those bulb syringes that you have to poke into your baby’s nose over and over again.

You gently place the tip against your baby’s nose, and suction clears out your baby’s congestion.

This one I have was given to me by a family member who lives in Europe, where these are much more common, and this particular style hooks up to the vacuum cleaner like an attachment. I am not even kidding. Fortunately, the design keeps you from feeling the full force of the vacuum.

Another style that you can buy is a Nosefrida.

I’m not sure how we survived without it for my first child, but I remember there were a lot of tears, fussing and some prescription decongestant.

With my second child, when he became sick recently, it was easy to use this to relieve him of his congestion so that he could sleep and eat in peace.

I highly recommend it.

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© 2008-2010 SmallNotebook.org (all rights reserved)
The Essential Baby Item You Don’t See on “The Lists”

I’ve made only two vows in my life.

One was when I married my husband.

The other was to never live in a place with an HOA (Home Owner’s Association) ever again.

Both vows stemmed from the year spent in the condo that I bought, the one I bought so I could build a sure place for myself.

I wanted a place that would look better and different from the regular apartments that all looked the same. I found one, but it needed more work and had more hidden costs than I imagined possible.

Doug and I had broken up earlier, but it didn’t last long. He offered to come help me do repairs for my new home over Memorial Day weekend. He brought his heavy tool bag with him.

I kind of fell in love with him while he changed the light fixtures for me.

Together we pulled astroturf up from the front porch. We knocked down wasp nests. I bought an industrial-grade buffer to grind 30 years of buildup off the fiberglass shower, the way people restore crusted old boats. We switched out the dining room wicker light for one that looked less like a rolling tumbleweed. We scraped pink tinting off the windows twenty feet up in the air.

We sanded and painted and filled and power-washed. We fixed holes and stopped leaks. And all this was before the downstairs flooded from a week of heavy rain that fell over Houston.

When Doug asked me to marry him (far too many months later) I couldn’t sell that condo fast enough. I got a realtor, put up the sign, and started the desperate two-fold prayer, “Please let someone buy this house and please help it not lose a ton of money.” You’re probably familiar with that one.

Waiting for your home to sell so you can move on to the next stage of your life is a trying ordeal, for certain.

God answered, I moved, we married… but that’s not the end of this story.

–To be continued. -

(As a side note, earlier this week Doug SAVED MY GRANDMOTHER’S LIFE when he was at her house and noticed all the gas streaming from her vintage stove. I don’t love him for what he can do for me, but he has blessed my family again and again.)

The Making a Home Story:

Chapter 1: The Beginning
Chapter 2: The Single Girl Apartment

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© 2008-2010 SmallNotebook.org (all rights reserved)
Making a Home: The Money Pit

Photo: The commute where I prayed that my ‘92 Ford Tempo would get me to work and back home again.

Accustomed to the activity of college life, staring at a computer screen for eight hours in a cubicle every day exhausted me. I came home to my one-bedroom, single-girl apartment and slept. I slept all the time, for several weeks.

In my awkward business-casual attire, I longed for days when I could wear my overalls to class and my favorite pink Patsy Cline cowgirl shirt.

Making friends was slow-going, and new friends often moved away. What was the point of living somewhere where I didn’t have relationships? I wanted to run back to my college town where I still had friends.

I got used to cooking for one, freezing leftovers, and listening to the hum of the dishwasher. I bought a washing machine and a dryer. Most of my furniture was still garage-sale castoffs. I gradually started cleaning out some of the clutter I had brought with me in my hurry to furnish a home by myself.

One thing I bought new was my Fiesta plates (six place settings, each in a different color), and I still use those today.

It was after I’d lived in this apartment for a couple of years that I started dating my future-husband Doug, though we only saw each other once in a while since we didn’t live in the same city. He was carefully vague about what he thought would be the future of our relationship, so I decided not to wait around.

I was ready to shed the temporary feeling of an apartment, and my rent was going up. Doug and I seemed to have different life goals, so I decided that we shouldn’t date. We broke up.

It was the early days of the housing bubble, interest rates were low, and buying a home was the thing to do. I wanted to feel established. I bought a condo by the lake (the second place I looked at), and even though it was dated, I had seen enough home makeovers on HGTV to imagine its potential.

A couple of hours after getting the keys, I remembered that I didn’t know how to do any of those repairs. I was short on funds, the condo needed a ton of work, and I didn’t know how to change a light fixture, much less repair the shower.

All those hours spent watching HGTV had failed me.

–To be continued. –

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© 2008-2010 SmallNotebook.org (all rights reserved)
Making a Home: The Single Girl Apartment

The first home that I made for myself was when I was a college student twelve short years ago. I lived in a blue house on Gorman Avenue in Waco, Texas.

The house was old, built in the ’20s, and it was divided into four apartment units. My roommate and I shared the apartment on the upper right with big windows surrounded by trees that when the leaves were green made me feel like I lived in a treehouse.

The rent was $350 a month, which we split, and for $175 each we got a big apartment with hardwood floors and run-down charm.

There was no dishwasher, no laundry, and of course no central heat or air conditioning. My bedroom had an air conditioner window unit that didn’t work at all, and the other bedroom had one that worked too well, so depending on where you sat in the apartment you could either sweat or freeze your buns off. The heater was an old gas unit that roared when I turned it on in the mornings. The old plumbing had a rag stuffed in it to stop leaks. The plumber just shook his head.

The kitchen had glass cabinet doors, a pile of dirty dishes in the sink because we had no time to wash them, and a wide staircase outside the screened back door. I loved living there. That neighborhood felt like a different era. We sweated in the humid Texas summer, ate $2 burritos from down the street, and sat on the back stairs when it rained. I had a life-changing moment the day I realized that if I never owned more, I could be content.

Our neighbors were an eccentric bunch. One man wandered up and down the streets talking to himself and asking for cigarettes. The neighbor on the other side of the fence liked to mow his grass while wearing a bandana on his head and little shorts. The old men who lived across the street sat on the porch all day and yelled Good Morning at us when we left for school.

I always had full days at school but I came home whenever I could.

My roommate watched Days of Our Lives weekdays at 3:00 p.m. with a Diet Coke. The screened windows would be open to catch the breeze. Our couch was a garage sale find for $10, and the pink chair was $5. (Small town garage sales are the best!) The coffee table was $5 as well. We often rearranged the furniture at two in the morning, because what else do you do?

That home was where I wondered who I might marry someday, where I panicked over career paths, and where I dyed my hair to see if I would look better as a blonde. (I don’t. And always do the small test section first. And be sure to rinse it out when the instructions say, don’t just leave it in there because it seems like it hasn’t worked yet.)

We thought nothing of inviting thirty people over for dinner. With the small table commandeered as a buffet, our friends found places to sit in our apartment with plates of spaghetti balanced on their knees. We went to Kinko’s to print fliers to pass out to anyone who wanted to come over and watch the football game with us.

With some close friends, I’m the second girl from the right.

It was good to have friends, and we dropped by each other’s apartments with ease and welcome.

Back in those days, my cell phone was as big as a one-pound breakfast sausage, and I never used it because the network coverage wasn’t built yet. Home internet access was another luxury no one had. We had to talk in person, and it was no problem because we saw each other all the time.

Home was a place where I could grow community.

Then I graduated, got a job, and moved to a town north of Houston, and suddenly…

I was completely alone.

–To be continued. –

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© 2008-2010 SmallNotebook.org (all rights reserved)
Making a Home: The Beginning

I’m reading through Jamie Martin’s new book Steady Days, and my copy is covered in highlighter. I am not even kidding. Written in short chapters with busy moms in mind, she wastes no words with extra fluff.

Do you ever think that the word inspiration gets tossed around lightly nowadays? We even use it to describe decorating ideas. Not this book…this is the kind of inspiration that gives moms purpose and vision, and it practically helps you design your day to see those desires fulfilled.

The suggestions are easy to implement. I’ve already added “morning books” from page 26 to our day. They are special selected books that Lane can look through in the morning while I continue getting ready.

One thing I like about this book is that it’s about balance. I’m busy, and though it sounds nice to sit around doing crafts or go on outings all day, I have other things I need to do too. Jamie suggests ways to help kids play independently so that I can finish tasks, as well as intentional activities that we can play together, so that each day I give my kids my best.

Steady Days: A Journey Toward Intentional, Professional Motherhood focuses on four principles:

Getting organized

Retaining enthusiasm

Learning together

Making memories

When I left work at my corporate job to stay home with my first child, I didn’t know any other stay at home mom. If you are longing for a friend and mentor to share ideas, this is the book you need. It’s not just for stay at home moms, it’s for any mom with young children who wants to be more professional in her approach to motherhood.

Jamie also writes at the blog Steady Mom, which I subscribe to.

It’s always best to hear it in the author’s own words. Here’s a little preview:
(Click through if you don’t see this video in your email or RSS reader.)

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© 2008-2010 SmallNotebook.org (all rights reserved)
Inspired by Steady Days (& Giveaway)