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Tuesday Tidbits: Vacation!

Jun4

When this post publishes, we’ll be in an airplane on our way home from our vacation to California. Our first purpose in going was for my grandma’s memorial services, but we decided to make a full-scale trip out of it. We went to Disneyland, to Legoland, and to go tourmaline mining. We went to Fresno for my grandma’s committal, which I planned and facilitated, and for her Celebration of Life luncheon, which was beautifully planned by my aunt and had an excellent and touching turn out (260 people when we only planned for 200). Then, we ended with four days at Pismo Beach where my uncle has a condo. Everything went well overall and I will post some trip picture albums soon. For my Tuesday Tidbits this week though, I’m just offering a couple quick shots:

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Lann ended up going on Space Mountain three times! I like this picture because the strangers behind us look so casual and like they should be on an ad for Disneyland.

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Playing at the beach in Carlsbad.

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Waiting for the gate to open at Legoland! We went on Memorial Day, which I was dreading, and it was shockingly deserted!

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Couldn’t resist a pic with Lego Indy because he’s holding a birth goddess! The classic golden “idol” from Raiders is really an Aztec birth goddess figure—for some reason in the big Lego version, there is no baby emerging though. :(

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Alaina loved the “tea party ride.”

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Had to have one of these iconic pix, taken by friendly passerby!

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Lego Darth Vader!

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We were dragging by the time we got to Miniland and to Star Wars land, but these guys were so cool!

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 The crew getting ready to catch some waves. My brother and sister-in-law, plus my uncle and cousins and Mark. (I love Zander in this picture!)
 

My uncle showed us how to take silhouette pictures at sunset at Pismo and I love how they turned out. 972019_10151924432264256_2006971388_n 931168_10151924432394256_435101882_n

Okay, so that was more pictures than I originally thought!

I’ve heard my grandma’s blue hydrangea is blooming at home and I miss my woods and my own house! Homeward bound…

Birthdays! (and lots of other stuff)

May20

My birthday was at the beginning of this month. I uploaded some pictures and was going to just post a quick post, but then some days passed and then some more days. I added some more pictures and thought of more things to write and it has just been languishing in my drafts folder. Things keep happening and so I think I’ll add a couple more pictures before I post, blah, blah, blah. I almost deleted the whole thing since now May is practically over and my bday was weeks ago, but since I bothering uploading the pix, I’m just going to post it!

May is a busy month for us. It is my birthday and then Mother’s Day and then my mom’s birthday and my dad’s birthday and Zander’s birthday. We also have a whole group of our work party friends who have May birthdays (and playgroup friends too!). May 12th was the 18th anniversary of my first date with my husband. May 16th was the fifteenth anniversary of my college graduation. I feel like I’m getting old! And, it is weird to think about how close that college student girl feels and also how very far away she feels. My parents both turned 60—I had a surprise party/healing ritual for my mom as part of our spring women’s retreat as well as a ceremony for our 12-year-old work party friend whose birthday was the same day. On Mother’s Day, we had a family memorial ceremony for my grandma. In the middle of all these celebrations, I’ve been wrapping up the school session (including grading almost 100 papers…split up in two batches of almost 50), preparing for the summer school session, plotting with Mark about him quitting his job, trying to help motherbabies breastfeed happily, trying to stick with some kind of homeschool “schedule” for my kids (using the term extremely loosely). Oh yeah, and my tiny little sweet daughter also had major dental work under general anesthesia last Tuesday. One of my Facebook friends pointed out that no wonder I’ve been feeling taxed. Yeah, duh. I don’t know why I can’t extend myself that grace. Instead, I’ve been berating myself at various intervals about my “inability” to handle it all. I’ve also been planning our big trip to California. $2300 later and WAY too many hours thinking, checking, and strategizing, I ended up with five plane tickets and we’re going. We decided to to go ahead and make a full vacation out of it—Disneyland, tourmaline mining, Legoland, and Pismo Beach! My grandma’s committal service (which I am planning and facilitating) and her celebration of life luncheon is in Fresno in the middle of our trip.

This week as I tried to finish those last bleeping papers, I found out that I’d made a mistake with our plane tickets—having a p.m. flight from San Diego to Fresno rather than the a.m. flight I thought we had. I almost lost it. Flipped out. I’m serious. I felt like I had officially exceeded my actual ability to cope and that I may possibly break down in some way. More. Than. Humanly. Possible. To. Handle. As it was, we made the semi-bizarre choice to just buy some new tickets that restored the “rightful” a.m. flight schedule. These middle-of-the-journey tickets were only $68 each and we decided it was really a fairly trivial amount and we should just do it. We’re taking our family of five to CA with carry-on luggage only and we’re packing like a boss! Seriously, we’re rocking this thing.

Oh, and just this afternoon I also finished my twelfth class for my D.Min degree. I’ve got about 14 left, plus my dissertation. I have three in progress and signed up for two more to start during the summer session. How do I do it?!?!? Heck if I know. ;-) Maybe it is time to feel impressed at my own capacities again rather than mad at myself for not getting more done, for being “behind,” for staying up too late, for taking too long to return phone calls, for leaving some emails unanswered and books unreviewed, for being sometimes short-tempered, for screwing up a.m. and p.m., for not getting around to the blog posts I’d hoped to write, for not keeping up with requests for new sculptures, for not having a birthday surprise of some kind for my dad too, and for never feeling “finished” enough to rest.

Here is what I originally swiped from my Facebook to share about my birthday:

Uh oh. I spent the first 8 minutes of my 35th year still working on these dang bibliographies. This has been my worst/least productive grading stint yet (the CA trip planning/purchasing ate up my usual “free” day). I’m determined to have a FREE day tomorrow (okay, technically, today, but it doesn’t count until I go to bed!)–I’m going to wallow around in books and listen to guided meditations (you know, with the three kids climbing on me!) and plan rituals and celebrations and not do anything I don’t feel like doing :)

It is SO flipping hard to focus on grading these bibliographies when my brain is turning over Disneyland plans, hotel reservations, car rental, and also finding just the *right* stuff for my grandma’s memorial service. The good news is that I have some really rocking students this session and they make some of the grading easy!

–

Later update:

Thirty-four years ago I was born! As my birthday present to myself, I DID manage to finish grading the last bibliographies and I’m taking the day off to hang around and wallow in books. I think I might do a tech-off day (or, at least, a class-off day!) Oh, and I bought two tiny little Japanese dolls for myself at Goodwill too. I do birthdays right!

When I wake up and hear rainfall on my birthday I always feel like the planet is wishing me a happy birthday too (there was a heavy rainstorm the day I was born). Alaina told me I should have a cake with “nonnie babies” on it. On my actual birthday, my mom took me to a tea room in a neighboring town for a birthday lunch and then I came home with three kinds of tea and the kids and I had a tea party! (in many ways an excuse to eat sugar cubes and this involves sort of obsessive negotiation over them rather than just enjoying ourselves!) I asked the boys if they would play with Alaina so I could have an easier time getting ready to go. After about ten minutes, Lann said, “whew, she’s pretty much like an energy tick.” I rolled! I love having a nine-year-old and a toddler. So much different and easier than having a toddler and a preschooler was.

Okay, so here is a gallery of the pictures I meant to post on several occasions, plus some more I just added in today:

Kidbits

Apr22

“They look so small and frail but they are so great and magnificent. They are born of the same womb that birthed the cosmos and knitted together the galaxies. If you could see them as they truly are, you would be astounded. You would see not little children, but dancing clouds of light, energy in motion, swimming in an ocean of love. They are so much more than what you see. As are you.”

-William Martin
The Parent’s Tao Te Ching

Some things I saved recently to remember about my funny little children:

  • Adorable toddler nursling moment: I was carrying Alaina in the kitchen and she patted my chest and said, “love you, nonnies.” Then, she said, “sank you, mommy.” :) ♥
  • Another charming moment: Alaina standing before me and giving that cute toddler hands raised sort of shrug gesture and saying, “babies…grow…up!” She has also started doing a thing wherein she points at her own belly and says, “baby…belly…me…grow…up,” telling me that she will grow up to have a baby of her own and then points to herself and says “Mama…ME! Babies…grow UP! Mama…ME!”
  • Zander bought hair gel and spiked up his hair, put on a gold chain and sunglasses, took off his shirt and started doing some rocking dance moves and handstands in the living room. Lann said: “hey, we could start a band and call it the Wiggly Brothers.” Zander continued to groove with no response. Lann repeated himself about three times and then said kind of to himself, “I guess I’ll be the weird one…” ;-D
  • At the beginning of this month, Lann brought me an illustrated “breakfast menu” and said I could start ordering breakfast from him in the mornings. Each item is 50 cents or $1. SOLD! He has been making me a spinach and cheese omelet many mornings and I really appreciate it. The café is called Big Spoon. It is so fun to have a kid that is nine!
  • Alaina found some shiny tappy shoes at the thrift shop. The same day, we also bought the Gremlins movies (which I’d never seen) and she  energetically explained how she will use her new shoes to kick bad gremlins–she will “hug good Gizmo” and “kick bad Gizmos” (complete with demo-kick shiny shoe action). In case anyone cares, we didn’t let her keep watching it after they mutated and we muted the computer during the “Santa dad in the chimney” story, which Mark mercifully remembered (due to his own past childhood trauma) just in the nick of time.
  • Said tiny girl likes to push (literal) buttons and last week while still in bed in the morning I was surprised by the serenading CD from the living room where she must have programmed it to be on a timer (I don’t know how to do that myself!) She woke up and I said, “did you make the radio start playing?” And she said, “yes, mommy. Me do dat ting.”
  • Me last week: “Argh! I have SO much I want to do.” Lann: “Me too, Mom. It IS kind of the primary feature of our family.” ;-D

And, video special: Alaina dancing in the car while we waited to get Lann from gymnastics.

 

Blog Integration (and Greenhouse!)

Feb20

I go back and forth a bit on my relationship to blogging. Sometimes I feel like maintaining separate “spaces” in the form of different blogs and sometimes my attention feels too splintered and I feel like integrating everything together under one umbrella. I originally started out as a book blogger and kept my book blog going for several years as well as starting a blog specifically about birth art. I started this Talk Birth blog really as just a website for my local birth classes, but as it took off (while the classes themselves did not) I started to devote more energy to it. As time went on, I started a blog for Citizens for Midwifery during my time on their Board. I retired from the Board several years ago, but maintain the blog on a limited basis. As the role and presence of Facebook grew, I steadily moved more of the content I normally would have shared on the CfM blog to the CfM Facebook page instead and find this seems like the most effective use of my time. I was one of ICEA’s bloggers for a short time and wrote book reviews for CAPPA for two years. With all of these, I get an itch to centralize my writing in one location…here…rather than dividing my attention (hence the retirement of my book and birth art blogs several years ago also).

However, then sometimes things happen for which a separate space feels more appropriate–this was true when I had my first miscarriage-birth and felt very strongly that my writing about miscarriage needed a new, distinct home. Interestingly, now that three years have passed, I’m bringing more and more of my miscarriage writings over here, mostly in conjunction with The Amethyst Network, and I feel like it is important to include and acknowledge pregnancy loss in the spectrum of topics covered on a birth blog. After Alaina’s birth, I felt my miscarriage-specific blog was officially complete and I no longer update it. This summer I became ordained as a priestess and again the urge to differentiate blog spaces struck. I started a separate blog for my more spiritually oriented writings and my thoughts about feminism and religion. More recently still I became a contributor to a blog on Patheos. While these blogs intersect, my interest in Goddess spirituality having been born out of my own commitment to birthwork and women, separate spaces at the time feel most comfortable to me.

I’m not sure if anyone noticed and the actual words on the screen are hard to see in my blog header’s layout, but in an effort to communicate my own expanded focus, a while ago I did add “WomanSpace” to the title of Talk Birth.

I’ve minimally kept up a separate farm/land blog as well in various incarnations and this brings me to my motivation for the current post, as I’ve decided I’m going to go ahead and just include those farm life/land picture posts here in the future. This is my primary internet home/presence and I’d like to integrate the two spaces. I’ve resisted because I don’t want to turn off any regular, birth-oriented readers (same logic behind separating out to a new spirituality blog) by “boring” them with greenhouse pictures. Likewise, I have nonbirthy family members and friends who follow me here just for the few slices of “other life” that I include amidst the birth and breastfeeding content!

So, that brings me to…updated greenhouse pictures! ;) The greenhouse has been almost exclusively a work party project. Mark has done a little bit of independent work on it, but it has primary been built by the members of our work party over the last year (we started it in March of 2012). During our work party this month, we got the building finished and got the grow beds (for aquaponics system) much closer to being finished!

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Soffit and fascia up!

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Washing river gravel for the grow beds.

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New grow beds!

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Cat investigating the ooky muddy water coming from the river gravel.

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Grow beds looking the other direction.

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The clear front wall.

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This picture was taken before the greenhouse was actually finished, but it is still my favorite greenhouse picture!

Annual retreat

Feb1

January 2013 028I held a blue flower in my hand, probably a wild aster, wondering what its name was, and then thought that human names for natural things are superfluous. Nature herself does not name them. The important thing is to know this flower, look at its colors until the blueness becomes as real as a keynote of music. Look at the exquisite yellow flowerettes in the center, become very small with them. Be the flower, be the trees, the blowing grasses. Fly with the birds, jump with the squirrel! –Sally Carrighar in The Earth Speaks

It is that time of year again…time for a retreat! I recognize a pattern in my own life that I’ve been conscious of since my first miscarriage, the deep call to retreat beginning in November of each year and finally having a chance to be held in February. I’ve been feeling it coming. I started hearing the call in late October/early November and I was like, oh yeah, THIS. This call for silence, for mindfulness, for taking heed, for regrouping, for calling my spirit back, for resting. I set aside the first week of February each year to take a “computer-off retreat,” in which I unplug Facebook and take a break from blogging. Since the rest of my life doesn’t necessarily recognize this rhythm, I can’t take a completely computer-off retreat this year (having the computer off isn’t really compatible with teaching online, especially during midterm week!), but I can take a Facebook retreat and a retreat from feeling compelled to write/blog and to stay “caught up” with a variety of miscellaneous time-eating, online-based activities (like clicking on interesting articles or updating my ScoopIt page). I will also try really, really hard to check email only once a day. I’d like to actually deactivate my FB account, but that will take away my pages too (from what I understand) and I don’t want to do that—if I’m wrong, tell me please! (and, I’ll see your message when I check my email once a day ;) ) And, guess what?! This year, I’m not making a to-do list. I know what I want and need and it isn’t a list.

I went out to the woods to think about this and this is what I said:

Keep vigil
bear witness
hold space

open heart
open hands
open mind

share stories
share healing
share laughter

Keep vigil
hold space
circle round

Amazon affiliate link included.

This is mainly a noise-silencing thing for me. I’ve been looking forward to it since November. I’ve been feeling it coming. I need it badly!

My favorite retreat resource is Woman’s Retreat Book: A Guide to Restoring, Rediscovering and Reawakening Your True Self –In a Moment, An Hour, Or a Weekend by Jen Louden. I also treated myself to a Breathe Peace online class (ah, the irony, since I’m having a computer off retreat! Luckily, the online class lasts throughout the month of February, so I can take my break and still come back to it!)

"Turtle" rock in the woods :)

“Turtle” rock in the woods :)

Holiday Pictures

Jan14

Now that the first week of January has passed, the holidays seem like a distant memory! However, I purposely took several pictures with the intention of doing a personal holiday-in-review post, since it also seems unfortunately easy to forget favorite gifts of the season. So, here are some photos from our family’s Christmas in 2012!

“May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder”

–J. Donohue

 

 

 

 

Grand Gulf/Mammoth Spring Mini-Vacation

Oct17

This post is one of those primarily-for-myself/family members-as-well-as-memory-record/virtual-scrapbook sorts of posts. Will return to more appropriately birthy, womanist posts soon…

My college classes run on 8 week sessions, 5 sessions per year. This means I get five breaks of 2-3 weeks each during the course of the year. We have a family tradition of taking a vacation during my October break. This year, due to multiple weekend commitments (my brother got married! Yay! It was beautiful! Our close friends are building a straw bale house and the big bale-raising is this weekend. More yay! I’m really excited for them!) and due to the fact that Alaina is still too young to be a very awesome care traveler, we planned a mini vacation rather than a full-fledged vacation.

Since long before we had kids I’ve wanted to visit Grand Gulf State Park in Thayer, Missouri right by the Arkansas state line. It is billed as a “little Grand Canyon” and while the real Grand Canyon is also on my bucket list, it doesn’t make any sense to go to the big one when the little one is right in your own two-hours-away back yard! Grand Gulf is a collapsed cave system that collapsed about 10,000 years ago, leaving a true chasm behind. The Gulf is a mile long and 130 feet deep. Water flows underground in the remainder of the cave system and emerges two miles later in Arkansas at Mammoth Spring, where it produces nine million gallons of water an hour and is the tenth largest spring in the world. After driving for about 2.5 hours, we visited Grand Gulf on Sunday afternoon. Then, we continued on for 18 miles to our hotel in Hardy, AR which is a small, historic town with little shops. On Monday, we spent the morning checking out Mammoth Spring and then the afternoon visiting the shops in Hardy. On Tuesday, we ate homemade cinnamon rolls for breakfast at the hotel and then headed back home, arriving in plenty of time to take the kids to taekwondo and to get me to my faculty meeting that night.

Here is a gallery of pictures from our three destinations! (if you click on any picture, it will open up a large version and then you can page through all of them like a slideshow)

 

Family mini-vacation officially earns a two-thumbs up from all of us. It was low-key enough of a destination to do everything in the time we had without feeling rushed at all and being able to take leisurely pace with detours as need be. It was close enough to get there in under three hours with three kids, but far enough away to be located in “exotic” Arkansas so we could feel like we actually “went somewhere.” The trip was short enough in duration that we’re not exhausted and struggling to recover and the kids didn’t get overdone in the car. We’ve already thought of some other potential destinations for future class breaks and also discussed drawing a circle on the map with a four-hour radius and see how many places we could go.

Dress Deja Vu (Remember to Look)

Oct3

My family is in a whirlwind of activity and excitement preparing for my brother’s wedding on Sunday and we have relatives visiting from out-of-town. The wedding is at my parents’ house and so there has been a frenzy of cleaning! During said frenzy, my mom found several sweet little smocked dresses made by my grandmother. Alaina wore one to homeschool co-op on Wednesday where she was complimented on her “vintage look.” That night, my grandma arrived from CA and we were talking about the dress. I said I thought it had been mine and a vague memory of Easter pictures of me wearing it surfaced. I snagged my infant photo album and sure enough there it was! (and, appropriately, I’m actually wearing it when we were visiting them in CA.)

Check me out:

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I took a picture of my aunt holding Alaina before I found the pictures of myself and coincidentally, she was looking off the same direction!
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Hmm. Look familiar?! I’m only about a year old here though and Alaina is now closer to two.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Since my grandma is visiting for my brother’s wedding and she is the person who made the dress in the first place, of course I had to get a photo of her with Alaina:

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Back to me with the Easter egg I was happy to find!

And then one of the former dress-wearer and current dress-wearer together:

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In this picture, I’m also wearing a lovely new sweater that my grandma knitted for me. It is gorgeous!
If I feel weird about this picture, how must my mom and grandma feel?!

Moments like these are sweet and beautiful, while simultaneously feeling shocking and almost depressing.

And, I’m reminded of this poem I have previously shared:

“Holding tight to my neck, my son
trusts – he knows no other way – my touch lightly
dries his tears. I am his queen, his goddess, handily
his slave. Blink, it’s a photo again, a trick of the eye,

a frozen captive of time, paper, light and silver: my son
is a grown man: he drinks from his own hand.

Reader, I urge you,

spin slowly, take pictures, remember to laugh.”

(emphasis mine)

I would say, remember to look. Remember to feel. Remember to notice. Pay attention. Tell about it.

This is what I looked and noticed yesterday when we went to pick my boys up from taekwondo class:

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Oh, does my heart both swell and ache to see those little tippy-toes.

Homemade Extracts

Sep11

Every other weekend we get together with four other families who all live in the same 20-mile, rural region and we have a “work party.” In an admittedly sexist division of labor usually the men work on the large, house-building type project and the women work together on a cooking project or some other type of project, while also taking care of the children and preparing lunch and dinner for the whole crew (our families together total over 20 people and so it is actually a lot of work to feed that many people for an entire day!). I could write a long post about the many wonderful things we’ve gained from this work party experience, but it will have to wait for another day. We just celebrated our one year anniversary and it has been amazing what a positive influence the work party experience has been on the lives of everyone in our family.

During the last work party at our own house during which the men worked on Mark’s greenhouse project, the women gathered in my kitchen to make a variety of homemade extracts. Our main goal was to make vanilla extract to be ready for the holiday season, but we also made orange and lemon extract, mint extract, and flavored vinegar.

We bought our vanilla beans from Amazon. They were $25 at the time there for 1/2 lbs (about 50 beans), which was much better than the $9 per 3 beans from the bulk spice company (looks like the same ones are $27 now). They were pliable and easy to work with.

I followed the general ideas from these two websites about how to make your own extracts, but took the even lazier approach and decided to make the extract right in the vodka bottle! My share of the beans was about 11 beans. I slit them all lengthwise, separated the sides a bit with my fingers and dropped them into a 1.75 liter bottle of 80 proof vodka. Voila! It started to turn a lovely golden color almost right away and then deepened to a dark brown. We’ve tasted it and it tastes like…vanilla! I’m continuing to let it steep though, since there are conflicting reports about whether to let it sit for 6 weeks or 6 months.

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Think we’ll have enough vanilla to last us a while?!

For the lemon and orange extracts I used about a 1/2 cup of peel and 1 c. of vodka. I loosely based it on the recipe from this site. We did the mint extract the same way. I used mint from my yard.

We also experimented with flavored vinegar based on information from this handout. I used strawberries in apple cider vinegar. I plan to use it for salad dressing, but haven’t tried it yet. It retained a lovely red color!
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Extracts all lined up while freshly made (see how much lighter the vanilla was on the first day?)

And here are the work party women after a full day of extract-making!

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I really value these friendships and what we’ve created together!–

Amazon affiliate link included above.

Kansas City Adventure

Aug4

This post is my final post in my CAPPA re-cap series.

In addition to going to the CAPPA conference while in Kansas City, we did several other things for family fun—some with only marginal fun-success. Looking back at our trip, I see that we had good times, did fun things, and overall had a successful trip. While we there it felt a lot more stressful and much less fun. Why? Mostly because we had to do a ton of driving and most of our plans each day got messed up in some way—turning on the wrong roads over and over again, getting to the store when it was closed, etc., etc.

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Kids went swimming in the (green, murky) hotel pool every night and loved it!

On Friday afternoon we went to Kaleidoscope a free kid’s art center offered by Hallmark. I lost track of the boys (they were with Mark and my mom), but had tons of fun watching Alaina step right up to work on a project. She was serious about it!

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I love these curls, this sweet neck, and these powerful shoulders.

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Can you possibly guess what noise she is making in this picture as she instructs me to acquire additional paintbrushes for her?

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Okay, too many pictures of this same scene, but I just loved seeing her be so big, serious, and into this painting project.

There was a free dinosaur exhibit at Crown Center also (the same mall where the art room was).

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On Sunday, we went to the American Girl store in Overland Park.

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Alaina was very entranced by this stroller.

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Figured out how to push two dolls in stroller AND pull two dolls in wagon!

After buying a set of Bitty Twins, we headed out to lunch with my brother, his fiancé, and my sister and her husband (who I’d never met before!). Alaina enjoyed eating the gravy off of Daddy’s chicken fried steak. 20120724-224553.jpg

On Monday, we went to the Legoland Discovery Center, which was our only reason for staying over an extra day past conference’s end. I tried really, really hard not to remain preoccupied with the fact that it cost SIXTY-FIVE dollars to go to this place.

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My annoyance at the cost was mediated by seeing Lann’s hands in these two pictures.

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The Miniville part was cool (so was the “4-D” movie). Alaina developed a fever and conked out in the Ergo most of the time we were there (this is an example of one of the kinds of thing that made the trip trend towards the stressful, rather than pleasant).
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On the five hour drive home, I spent much of the time nursing feverish Alaina in the car seat like this. My mom reports that antics like this are part of what caused her to eventually have back surgery! Notice my strategically placed iPad so that I can read books and send emails while contorted.

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Luckily, we have a fabulous set of Bitty Twins to ease our sorrows.

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You can pick any combo of Twins you want. Mine has the curly hair, Alaina’s has the straight hair. I like both of them and have trouble letting her play with them. Perhaps they need to live with just me for a little while longer.

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Can you tell that I’m on a three week break from teaching? I’m possessed with blog post ideas and trying to keep this flurry of posting activity somewhat restrained via post scheduling so I don’t overwhelm my readers!

(It’s over now, so there’s no point in retroactive complaining/stressing about how the school session ended DURING our trip, and so I actually graded final exams in the car on the way to the conference and stayed up until 1:00 on Saturday night entering final grades for my online class so I could then be “off” for the rest of our trip. If anyone wants to compliment me on my skillful managing of my life that enables me to meet all these needs during one trip–my own need for continuing ed and birth peep networking, my kids’ need to go to Legoland, the needs of my 30 students for prompt grading and attention/teaching, my mom’s need to visit her other kids, and my feverish baby’s need for carseat nursing, I’ll accept them. Instead of beating myself up for the parts that didn’t go well and for crabby episodes and bad directions, I think I’ll take a couple of minutes to feel impressed at how I managed to do it!)