Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Simple Living

The Empty Table

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mount pisgah fall day 081

My husband and I recently achieved the pinnacle of our domestic lives together. We cleared the counter in our laundry room. It was like jumping into a time machine back to the spring of 2008 just before we became parents. Apparently that’s when we last had time for organizing. Handouts from our birthing classes and congratulations-on-the-new-baby-cards mingled with mail, tools, broken toys, and bits of wayward debris. This tucked-away rubbish pile enabled the rest of the house to look relatively tidy and clutter-free. But occasionally one of us would have to suit up and traverse into this danger zone to try to find something. So finally we spent a morning sorting and shredding, recycling and organizing . . . and we unearthed a glistening, white counter.

As we gazed it, the inevitable question arose: what should we put on it? The bill file? The laundry detergent? Cleaning supplies?

Then, it occurred to us.

Nothing.

If we left the counter empty, we could actually use it for folding laundry, brewing beer, or making crafts. For activities, rather than stuff.

I’m in love with our empty counter. I feel happy every time I see it. So I’ve been on a mission lately to empty tables. My desk. The table in my office. The kitchen table and counters. They’re not always empty, of course. There’s nothing I love more than a table full of food or craftiness. But empty is their default state. And when they’re full, they are intentionally so, because someone’s using them.

I’ve taken this empty-table approach into my working life as well. Working at home means maneuvering around the clamor of family life, which is the best and hardest part of it. When I sit down to work, I have to focus regardless of what’s going on in the wider world of my household. I’ve found it immensely helpful to take a few moments to empty my table, so to speak, by focusing on my breath and clearing away any mental clutter before I dig into my work.

Now, if my husband and I can just tackle the garage.

Have you discovered any household tips or tricks that make you happier? Leave me a comment. I’d love to hear about them.

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Cruising the Blogosphere

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Last week I asked you for your favorite blogs, and you gave me so many to explore. Thanks for your feedback! I’m already familiar with some of them, but it’s exciting to find a few new ones.

For anyone looking for new reading material, here’s a small sampling of the recommendations, described in the bloggers’ own words.

“I created the Art of Doing Stuff  because let’s face it, I’m going to do all this stuff anyway so I might as use my self diagnosed OCD to make the world a better, cleaner and more organized place. Because currently, my know-how only benefits my ungrateful friends and family members who make fun of my somewhat fanatical approach to figuring stuff out, and yet, call ME when they want to know how to rip the membrane off a rack of ribs. They can suck it.” – Karen Bertelson

“The idea of foregoing the convenience of modern America and embracing a do-it-yourself attitude is a daunting one for many people. But mostly? It’s about a change in attitude. In a world where soup comes in a can, pudding from a box, and bread from a bag it’s easy to forget that just a few decades ago those items were made at home from scratch – maybe even from foods grown right outside the door.” – Kris Bordessa

“After a conversation with my neighbor on Memorial Day 2008, we decided to become minimalist. This blog is about our journey. … This blog is about the joys and the struggles. It is written to inspire you to live with less. And find more life because of it.” – Joshua Becker

“My hope for this blog has always been to share kind honesty, beauty, and simple guidance through a hectic world.” – Heather Bruggeman

“This is a journal of my small organic gardens in north eastern Ohio, zone 5(a).” – Susy Morris

“I write about old-fashioned cooking, which means: from scratch, with real food, and great taste is more important than fancy presentation.” – Drew Kime

“As humans, our priorities have been skewed. We have lost sight of what true happiness is and can bring, succumbing to a lifestyle that is unsustainable, unhealthy, and so disconnected from the natural world that we have resorted to “saving” it. We have found false solace in the material while being dominated by its pursuit. This blog is about changing that.” – Bill Gerlach

Still don’t have enough to read?

There are many, many other great suggestions in the comments section here, and be sure to check out all the suggesters’ fabulous blogs as well.  In addition, here are a few blogs that I’ve discovered recently in other ways, which I think you may enjoy:

“6512 and growing is the story of growing a family (plus 7 chickens, thousands of honeybee, a large garden and a small orchard, while butchering an elk or two) at 6512 feet, our Colorado hometown elevation.” – Rachel Turiel

“FOTL is the intersection of food, foraging, and the outdoors.” – Langston Cook

“I created this blog because I saw a need to formalize the advice I was sharing with friends and family about ‘green living’ including habits and routines that are better for your health, the health of those around you and the planet.” – Lane’ Richards

“The Urban Country‘s mission is simple. We publish 2-3 quality articles per week to advocate for using bicycles as transportation in North America to improve our cities, our people, and the world. – James D. Schwartz

Happy reading!

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What’s Your Favorite Blog?

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Lately I’ve been cleaning, and when I say cleaning, I mean emptying dressers, stripping closets, and purging file cabinets and hard drives. I feel agitated when the kitchen counter is not scrubbed clean. I eye the newspaper moments after bringing it in from the porch, eager to recycle it.

The other day, as I was uttering “Why are these (fill in the blank: trains, balls, cars, clothes) always on the floor?” while I zipped around the house tidying, it occurred to me that the intensity of all of this scouring, scrubbing, and sanitizing isn’t, um, exactly normal for me.

Then I remembered something my friend said during her first pregnancy. “I knew I was nesting when I finished vacuuming and then took the vacuum apart to clean it.”

Oh, right, nesting. Is that what I’ve been doing?

Here’s what Pregnancy Weekly says about it:

Nesting brings about some unique and seemingly irrational behaviors in pregnant women and all of them experience it differently. Women have reported throwing away perfectly good sheets and towels because they felt the strong need to have “brand new, clean” sheets and towels in their home. They have also reported doing things like taking apart the knobs on kitchen cupboards, just so they could disinfect the screws attached to the knobs. Women have discussed taking on cleaning their entire house, armed with a toothbrush.

Okay, so that does sound curiously like what I’ve been doing. But I’m still clinging to the idea that I rationally make decisions about my day-to-day activities.

In any case, I figured I’d put all of this organizing mojo to use and attack a few of the more messy, disheveled, bedraggled corners of my life.

Enter: my Google feed reader.

A minimalist blogger recommends regularly purging your feed reader entirely and adding back only the blogs you miss. Sounds like a great idea, right?

I opened my reader, resolved to click on “delete all”. Except first I had to browse through my list of blogs … and then read through a few recent posts … and then click on a few of the posts those posts mentioned.

Full confession: I added seven blogs to my feed reader and deleted maybe six. Oops. So much for purging. But I fully intend to return to said reader with a more discerning eye in the near future.

There are just so many great blogs out there. Recently a reader recommended Drawing America by Bike, where Eric Clausen documents his 14-month round-the-country bike tour with ink drawings. It’s very cool, and it made me wonder what else I don’t know about.

I know it’s the opposite of purging, but in the interest of making my feed reader more interesting (albeit a little cluttered) will you help me by answering a few questions:

What’s your favorite blog? What blog(s) deserves to be on my feed reader? If you have time, I’m also curious, approximately how many blogs do you read? How do you keep up with them? Do you use a feed reader or some other method? Do you read blogs every day, once a week, or less often?

Thanks for your feedback! I’ll check out all of your recommendations and report back next week on my favorite new finds.

(To reach me, you can leave a comment below, email newurbanhabitat at gmail dot com, or tweet @newurbanhabitat.)

17 Ways to Celebrate the First Day of Summer

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Tuesday, June 21 is the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. The sun will bathe the Arctic Circle in 24 hours of daylight, and ancient monuments around the world will align with the sun. Historically Europeans celebrated the summer solstice by gathering plants and holding bonfires and festivals. Native American plains tribes held sun dances.

The first day of summer is a great time to start new family traditions. Seasonal celebrations are a fun way to connect with nature and they can be as easy or elaborate as you want them to be. Here are a few ideas:

1.  Take a trip to the library a few days before your celebration and pick out books about summer. Some of my family’s favorite summer picture books include:

  • Before the Storm by Jan Yolen
  • Summertime Waltz by Nina Payne
  • Canoe Days by Gary Paulsen
  • Sun Dance Water Dance by Jonathan London
  • Summer is Summer by Phillis and David Gershator
  • Under Alaska’s Midnight Sun by Deb Venasse.

For adult reading, check out these lists of 2011 summer must-reads compiled by NPR, Newsweek, and Oprah.

2.  Place a bouquet of roses, lilies, or daisies in your family members’ bedrooms while they sleep, so they wake to fresh summer flowers.

3.  Find a special place outside to watch the sunrise and sunset. You can find out what time the sun will rise and set where you live here.

4.  Eat breakfast outside.

5.  Trace each other’s shadows throughout the day to note the sun’s long trip across the sky.

6.  Take a camping trip. Light a fire at night to celebrate the warmth of the sun. Sleep outside. Wake with the sun.

7.  Go on a nature hike. Bring along guidebooks to help you identify birds, butterflies, mushrooms, or wildflowers.

8.  Make flower chains or a summer solstice wreath.

9.  Display summer decorations: seashells, flowers, sand dollars, or whatever symbolizes summer in your family.

10.  Gather or plant Saint John’s Wort. Traditionally Europeans harvested the plant’s cheerful yellow flowers on the first day of summer, dried them, and made them into a tea on the first day of winter. The tea supposedly brought the summer sunniness into the dark winter days. If you don’t have any Saint John’s Wort in your garden, consider planting it. It is  an incredibly useful herb, and it thrives in poor soil with little attention. Find out more about it here.

11.  Visit a U-pick farm to harvest strawberries, snap peas, or whatever is in season where you live. Find a “pick your own” farm near you here.

12.  Make a summer feast. Eat exclusively from your garden or the farmer’s market to celebrate the bounties of summer in your area.

13.  Host a “locavore” potluck.

14.  Turn off all the indoor lights, light candles, and eat dinner outside.

15.  Play outside games, watercolor, or decorate the sidewalks with chalk until the sun sets.

16.  Read aloud from The Summer Solstice by Ellen Jackson.

17.  Read aloud, watch, or put on your own rendition of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. For kids, check out the book A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Kids by Lois Burdett or Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Kids: 3 melodramatic plays for 3 group sizes by Brendan P. Kelso.

Need more inspiration? Check out these resources:

The Magic of Storytelling

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“Mama, will you tell me a story?” my three-year-old son Ezra asks as I tuck him in at night.

Who could refuse, right? Of course, the moment I utter, “The end”, the follow-up request comes: “Another story, Mama? About a turtle.” We usually negotiate the number of stories to three.

Inventing three stories a night and often a couple at nap time can be daunting. Fortunately Ezra likes to hear about the same characters over and over again: a little boy named Henry, a lion he named Anagoa, Horatio the hippo, Fiona the crocodile, and an elderly turtle couple who live by the ocean. He also likes true stories, especially about the rainy June day when he was born three years ago and the sunny September afternoon when I met his dad 12 years ago.

Like most things to do with parenting, storytelling could feel like a chore, especially at bedtime – a time of the day that recently inspired one dad to write a bestseller called Go the F**k to Sleep. But I’m enjoying our daily stories as much as my son for a few reasons:

  • It gives my imagination a workout.

Hanging out with a three-year-old is great for your creativity. They are master pretenders and can jump into the imaginary world instantly. Just as when writing, I try to include sensory details, setting, conflict, twists, and dialogue in my stories. Those devices make for more entertaining stories for my son, and using them is great practice for all kinds of writing.

  • It forces me to turn off my inner editor.

At the keyboard, I can go over the same sentence five hundred times moving commas around. But when I’m telling my son stories, I have to improvise and let the characters lead me forward. It’s great practice for writing first drafts.

  • I have a captive (and honest) audience

It’s fun to tell stories to someone who’s enraptured with your every word. When Ezra is still talking about a character or story days after I told it, I know I successfully created a world for him. On the contrary, when I ask him, “Was that a good story?” he occasionally replies, “Not really.” For a writer, honesty really is the best policy; it’s the only thing that makes you better.

The Magic of Storytelling #narrative #parenting

If telling stories sounds boring or more pressure-packed than taking the bar exam, you might be surprised at how much you enjoy it. As Lisa Lipkin writes in Bringing the Story Home, “Since the time we enter this world, we live in stories, inhaling and exhaling them.”

As a society, we pay lots of money and spend hours having people tell us stories on television, in books, at the movies, and on podcasts. We can also do it for free at home, and tap into the magic of live entertainment and human connection at the same time.

If inventing yarns holds no appeal, don’t let that deter you. Fictional stories can help us understand human emotions and relationships and take us to faraway places, but telling true stories to your kids probably serves an even broader purpose: it helps them connect with their parents and understand who they are.

“Our children need a sense of somebodiness,” Roland Barksdale writes In The African American Family’s Guide to Tracing Our Roots. “Giving them a connectedness to the past can help, which comes through story telling.”

When I was a kid, I loved the stories my dad made up for me and my sister, memorably nightly installments of the adventures of a pica. But I was even more captivated by my parents’ true stories about where they grew up, how they met, and about those mysterious years they spent together before my sister and I were born. Those stories placed me in a family, connected me with relatives I’d never met, and helped me to understand who I am. Most importantly they helped me get to know my parents and set up a family culture of openness, conversing, and enjoying one another’s company.

So if you don’t already tell stories as a family, consider carving out some time to do it. Once you start, you might be amazed at how entertaining you can be – and by how much your family loves this simple, free, and ancient pastime.

If there's one universal thread that binds all people together, it's their need for stories. - Lisa Lipkin #storytelling #narrative #parenting

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5 Simple (and Free) Ways to Entertain a Young Child

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According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average American child will cost his parents $222,360 by the time he turns 17. I’d like to refute that number since so far my husband and I have needed to buy very little for our three-year-old son Ezra. We thrived without many of the must-haves on the infant lists: a bassinet, crib, diaper-changing table, infant car seat, etc. Boxes of beautiful hand-me-down clothes seem to show up the moment we need them. Family members and friends have generously gifted Ezra toys and books, a wagon, a tricycle, bikes, and a scooter. And he mostly just eats the same things we do.

Having kids isn’t so expensive, I like to muse to myself. But then I remember the major costs of having a small child: daycare ($10,740 a year on average for an infant in this area) or lost wages, and health care. Oh right. There’s no denying it: having kids can be costly.[clickToTweet tweet=”Having a child can be expensive, but entertaining one doesn’t have to be. #kids #parenting” quote=”Having a child can be expensive, but entertaining one doesn’t have to be.” theme=”style1″]

But here’s a little secret my son keeps teaching me – entertaining a small child can be simple, free, and fun. We spend most days doing the following free activities, all of which Ezra loves:

  • going on walks
  • riding bikes
  • visiting city parks
  • packing picnics
  • gardening
  • going to events at our local library
  • picking out and reading library books
  • telling stories
  • visiting friends
  • drawing, coloring, or painting
  • playing with homemade play dough
  • listening to music and dancing
  • playing with the neighbors

5 Simple and Free Ways to Entertain a Young Child #parenting

Honestly, he even loves to make beds and sweep. He can spend 20 minutes examining a ladybug and is endlessly interested in the gas caps on cars. It’s not hard to amuse him. Sometimes we go out for lunch or pick up a treat at our neighborhood market, but most days, we don’t buy anything.

On occasion, though, the old routines grow tiresome, and I sense that a more creative approach to entertainment is in order. Of course, a special event, elaborate art project, hike, or out-of-town trip is sure to please. But here are a few far more simple and free (or almost free) ways to entertain a small child that you might not have thought of:

1. Visit a construction site

Ezra is a huge fan of “tractors,” a class of vehicles that includes forklifts, dump trucks, cranes, front loaders, diggers, and all of the other big, loud machines you find at a construction site. He can stand mesmerized by these giant tools and the people using them for more than an hour. And then he talks about it for days afterward.

It only occurred to me recently to seek out construction sites for his entertainment. Fortunately, it’s spring and there are construction projects happening on all over the city. What’s surprised me is how entertained I am by watching humans construct giant buildings. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it.  

2. Go to the train station

Ezra loves trains. He builds tracks all over the living room and is quite particular about which train cars can go where. We’re planning to take him on a long train ride this summer, but recently it occurred to me that just visiting the train station when the passenger train comes in might be a big hit. It is. I imagine visiting an airport would be similarly entertaining if you live near one.

3. Ride the bus or light rail

We don’t ride the bus often. In fact, we ride it so little that I didn’t realize how much Ezra would love it until we needed to get across town on a rainy night and decided to opt for public transit instead of bikes. That was several months ago, and Ezra still talks about it. He loves sitting in the entry garden at our library, because across the street is “where the buses live” and he can watch them come and go. This pretty much sums up how easy it is to entertain a three-year-old.

4. Watch a game

It’s almost softball season, which means endless free entertainment opportunities in our neighborhood. There are a couple of games going on most summer nights at a park a few blocks away from our house. This year we’re looking forward to watching one of our friends play there, but in the past, we’ve watched many strangers play softball. With the night lights on, fans cheering in the stands, and kids running around on the grass – it’s fun and free entertainment. And if softball’s not your thing, there are almost always tennis matches, ultimate Frisbee games, and Frisbee golf tournaments going on in that same park. I’d guess a park near you offers similar free entertainment opportunities.

5. Turn a walk into a scavenger hunt

When motivated to get somewhere, I can’t believe how far Ezra can walk. When he’s tired, on the other hand, a few blocks can feel like an ultra-marathon. That’s when we hunt for things. Looking for cats, snails, things that start with the letter A, certain kinds of flowers, purple things, etc. can make a walk far more entertaining and help the blocks pass more quickly. Plus, I’m almost always amazed by the things Ezra notices that I never would.[clickToTweet tweet=”Stumped for ideas for entertaining a preschooler? Try these. #kids #parenting” quote=”Stumped for ideas for entertaining a preschooler? Try these.” theme=”style1″]

If you like this post, check out more of my popular posts about parenting:

I’d love to hear your ideas (especially for entertaining girls, since I’m not as experienced in that area).

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