Planning to fail

I have a love-hate relationship with planning. That is to say, I love the idea of planning, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only mom who feels that way. I truly admire those who can say with confidence that they know exactly what they will do each day, espousing the virtues of weekly menus and chore charts. I also think they're lying. Well, maybe "lying" isn't exactly the word I want. Exaggerating? Being overly optimistic? The fact is, every time I attempt to make some semblance of a plan, life happens. I'm too busy, too tired, too sick, or I just plain don't feel like following through. And then I feel like a failure, because I made a plan and didn't stick to it. I have to remind myself that if we're all reasonably clean, fed, and alive at the end of the day, things are going okay. Riiight. It's pretty easy to say, but much harder to believe, this idea that simply surviving can be succeeding.

There really isn't anything wrong with planning, per se. The problem is in the execution. It's all very well to make a list of things you want and need to do in a day and figure out when to do them. The problem comes when, at the end of the day, you know you did things that needed to be done, yet the to-do list remains unchecked. Incidentally, these are the nights I dream of being chased by pencils, unending lists of chores with their teeth bared (what? Your dream chore lists don't have teeth? Get with the program!) and the house collapsing under the weight of the undone chores. The laws of physics clearly do not apply in the land of nightmares, because it would obviously be the crawl space collapsing and not the house, but... I digress.

Maybe the answer is to plan to fail. I know, it sounds preposterously dumb, but hear me out. If you anticipate life and its twists and turns, maybe planning works. For example, this might mean picking up a frozen pizza along with all of the from-scratch ingredients at the grocery store, knowing that you won't be able to get dinner on the table every night without it. Maybe it means only washing one load of laundry each day, instead of trying to do five in one day. Maybe it means allowing six hours, as I did today, to get four errands done. The funny thing about planning for failure is that when the inevitable happens, it's not nearly as frustrating. I smell a catchy slogan - "planning to fail takes the fail out of failure!" Yikes. Maybe not. But you get the idea.

After all, we moms plan for failure all the time...if we didn't, there'd be no such thing as diaper bags or bibs. But collectively (with the help of Pinterest) we seem to have fallen short when it comes to allowing for life to intervene on a daily basis. So my goal this week is to plan for failure. Won't you join me? I have a feeling we'll get a lot more done!

I'm linking up with Megan at Positively (Im)perfect for Make it Count Monday!

Thoroughly Thankful Thursday, Week 7: It's the Holiday Season

Happy Thursday, all! In case you've been hiding under a rock, perhaps deliberately, for the past few weeks, the holidays are upon us. Thanksgiving is next week, and while some stick firmly to the old tradition of waiting until the day after Thanksgiving to start Christmas preparations - well, let's just say I'm not one of those people.

My taste in Christmas is like my taste in cookbooks - comfortably vintage. I love the images of 1940s and 1950s families kneeling reverently together in church pews, gathered around tastefully decorated Christmas trees in front of the fireplace, and eating Christmas dinner. To me, these idealized pictures represent the perfect marriage of secular and religious traditions. I've heard it said that the 1950s were the golden age of Catholicism in America, and though I'd like to think we're headed towards another, even better one, I can't really argue there. Religion was just an accepted part of day-to-day life, and being Catholic was becoming a more acceptable part of that. Christmas, therefore, was still undeniably a religious holiday, even as the secular elements were becoming more well-defined.

Wondering what all this has to do with thankfulness? Well, this week, I am first and foremost grateful for the opportunity to build Christmas traditions as a family. As Catholic Americans, we have a wide variety of traditions to incorporate and cultivate into our holiday season. While some of these might seem better saved until the girls are old enough to understand, I figure that we can take pictures of them now (and practice to get them just right!) to preserve the memories for years to come. Remembering the true reason for Christmas is foremost in our celebration, and we attend Mass on Christmas Eve and sometimes on Christmas morning as well. We also mark the tradition of Advent as preparation for the celebration of Christ's birth, and the Twelve Days of Christmas leading up to Epiphany, when the three wise men reached the manger where the infant Christ lay. I won't go into more detail about Christmas traditions today, because I am planning a longer post for later, but feel free to share your traditions in the comments along with what you're thankful for!

I'm also very thankful for the opportunity to spend time with my family over the Thanksgiving holiday. I am at a loss as to why the need to shop has so overtaken Thanksgiving day itself. Stores are opening for Black Friday shopping on Thanksgiving Day now, leaving employees just a few hours to celebrate with their families. While there will always be those who need to work on holidays (doctors, nurses, firemen, police officers), the majority of establishments could be closed to observe most or all of the holiday. Dan has worked on Thanksgiving Day in the past, and I am very thankful that both of us have the day to spend with Emily and Erin and our families this year. Let's pray that this is the case for more families next year, and we can look back on this as a foolish phase!

Other things I am thankful for this week:

1. God's love, mercy, and all the blessings in our lives, including food, shelter, and warm clothes that fit.

2. The love, support, and companionship of marriage, and the ability to grow continually within marriage to better meet each other's needs.

3. My loving husband.

4. Our beautiful baby daughters, who continue to amaze each day as they grow and learn.

5. The loving support of our family and friends.

6. Those who have served and those who are serving our country, especially those who sacrificed life and limb for the freedoms we so often take for granted.

7. Nice, hot cups of coffee with yummy vanilla creamer.

8. Gainful employment for both Dan and me.

9. A few last sunny fall days.

10. Hot showers (even if I don't get one every day!)

That's my list - what are you thankful for this week? Share below in the comments or write a post of your own for the link-up!

Maybe Grandma knew best: Part 1

This post will be the first in a series drawing on what I've learned from my collection of vintage cookbooks and home economics books.
As some of you may know, I collect vintage cookbooks and home economics textbooks. I got started on this at a fairly young age, probably 7 or 8, when my dad brought home a 1950s-era Betty Crocker kids cookbook. I had started cooking with my mom around age 4, helping stir, peeling and cutting up vegetables, etc. So many of the recipes were within my reach immediately, without need for further lessons. I loved how neat and tidy the results looked: the messy chaos of food preparation could produce a gorgeous meal. I'm not sure how old I was when I cooked dinner for the first time (mostly) by myself, but I think I was about 8 or 9. I sat down with the aforementioned cookbook and selected a menu (the book included several) and proceeded to read the instructions on how the food should be prepared. In my opinion, this is a concept sorely lacking in modern cookbooks- it's rare to see any mention of the order of operations, or how to combine foods to have a balanced meal That is, you must plan your dishes, but you can't cook everything at once. You'll end up with burnt toast, under-cooked bacon, and rubbery scrambled eggs, if you're making breakfast. And where's the fruit? But I digress. I went on to make dinner that night, and many other nights. I wasn't an expert cook, but I knew I could make a meal. As I got older, I could take over for days at a time- a huge help to my mom for sure, and a great skill to take into marriage. Now don't get me wrong. I definitely enjoy modern food, and I think that a lot of current recipes offer a variety of flavors completely unknown to the humble housewife of the 1950s. But I loved that old, battered cookbook and its idyllic pictures for another reason: it, along with my mother's patient tutelage, prepared me to feed a family. I had to think about the whole meal. A lot of people now grow up learning how to grill a fantastic steak, or bake beautifully light and fluffy cupcakes. But the basics of putting a full meal on the table - main course, vegetables, salad, bread, and dessert - seem lost today, left to holidays and other special occasions. Cooking meals at home enjoys trendy phases, but most families are too busy to do it on a regular basis. Perhaps once again embracing this concept could help with several issues today, including our obesity epidemic. Healthy, balanced meals cooked at home can be tailored to a family's needs, and reduce the risk of missing out on vegetables or overloading on portion sizes. Maybe we need a basic cooking class as a graduation requirement for high school students. It could go along with financial literacy and resume writing, spread out over a year. Students could learn the essential skills of cooking, as well as how to shop, plan balanced meals, and prepare a meal. This shouldn't be an elective skill. Meal preparation is something everyone will have to do at some point. I definitely don't want our generation to lose sight of the fantastic flavors and textures that young chefs are creating right now, but not everyone is as lucky as I was and grows up knowing how to plan and prepare meals for a week. It's time to reclaim the full meal from the holidays. Let's bring healthy, well-rounded, balanced meals back to our homes, and teach each other how to cook them so we can feed our families.

A little about our family

How we met
My husband Dan and I met in high school in our church's youth group, in 2004. We found we had a lot in common: we both liked running, sports, time at the coast, going for walks, and while Dan didn't share my love of cooking, he did like to eat. Dan's learning to cook now, and I've learned to watch football (I even took a couple classes on it!) We started dating partway through the school year and continued through college, even though we went to different schools directly out of high school. After our freshman year of college, we both attended University of Oregon, and in July 2007, we got engaged. We were married one year later, on July 12, 2008.

Posing with our cake before we cut it.

Our new life together
We are both from Eugene, so we knew we wanted to start our new life together here. Luckily, we both had good jobs and found a nice starter apartment within a few weeks of graduation. Since we got married about a month later, this meant a lot of changes in just a few short weeks!
The first couple of years we were married, we focused on spending as much time together as possible. We knew we would be postponing starting a family for those years, since I was having my teeth straightened and couldn't finish the treatment without a number of X-rays and a possible surgery (not recommended during pregnancy). That's a whole story in and of itself, but suffice it to say I am thankful every day for my improved bite and my fantastic post-braces smile!
Since both of us tend to work long hours and our schedules didn't always overlap, we tried to plan little getaways to the coast or to visit friends in Portland or Seattle. The highlight of these trips was a ten-day road trip in 2010, where we drove down the Oregon and California coasts to Carmel, California, and then headed up to San Francisco for a few days before driving home.

Sure, you can pose with a streetcar in San Francisco- you just have to be at the baseball stadium!

This past summer, we did take one trip up to Seattle in early June, but we spent the majority of the summer focusing on something else: making our living space work for us instead of merely adapting to whatever space we were presented with after a move. We have moved a few times since we got married, once to get closer to Dan's work so we could keep living with one car, and once last summer to improve our living space. Look for an upcoming post detailing why we made this move and how it changed our lives for the better. Most recently, we were able to move into a two-bedroom apartment so we would have an extra room for our nursery - in case you haven't heard, we're expecting twin girls in June!

Me, 30 weeks pregnant

Getting ready for life as four
Over the past weeks, while I've been on bed rest to help prolong my pregnancy, my husband and our parents have been working hard to get the nursery ready for our girls. I am allowed up for small chunks of time during the day, so I've seen the progress and had input on many of the aspects so far. It's been a blessing knowing that we are opening our life together as two for the two little girls squirming inside me right now. The nursery is certainly the most tangible evidence of this, although the feeling has been there the whole time.
What about God's plan?
Though I've already written about the moment when we found out we were having twins, and plan to write more about my pregnancy, I haven't touched much on how much of a wake-up call this was for me. I was raised Catholic, as was my husband, and we continue to practice our faith. While we were dating and engaged, as well as in our early years of marriage, we'd discussed how many children we thought we'd have. I grew up with just one brother, while my husband has two younger siblings. Obviously, our experiences shaped our beliefs about the perfect family size. As our new family went from fantasy to reality when I got pregnant, I began to wonder anew about how many children we would have. I'd always pictured two, probably because that's what I grew up with. We knew we wanted to be young parents, to share our life with our kids instead of feeling like we had to sit back and watch them have fun. I could picture us playing with two little ones, running with them in the jogging stroller, eating meals together. I can think of so many times in my life where I looked to the future with exactly this type of image. My plan for the future. What about God's plan?
Around that time, someone had told me "the best way to make God laugh is to tell him YOUR plan". This resonated with me for some reason, and I began to feel more comfortable with our upcoming journey as a family, however many of us there might be. It was only about a week later that we went in for our first ultrasound and saw two tiny hearts beating on the screen. Ever since that day, I have had a deep sense of calm in regards to my pregnancy, knowing that this, like everything else, is part of a larger plan for us and for our life.
As a pregnant mama of twins, I get asked pretty frequently if the girls were a "surprise". After 7 months of answering this question, I am very comfortable with my answer: "They were a surprise, and we feel very blessed." Our little blessings, Emily Grace and Erin Maureen, are expected to join us sometime in the next 5 weeks or so. We can hardly wait to meet them, the tiny bundles that have been cradled so safely in my belly for the last 7 1/2 months. Their daddy loves to feel them wiggle, hiccup, and kick, and both of us want nothing more than to cradle them in our arms and let them know how loved they are.