Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Parenting

Lessons from the Trenches of Parenthood

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The other day as I was tidying the house for some impending guests, which involved removing a basketball from the bathroom, relocating a caravan of toy trucks from beneath the dining room table, and emptying ping pong balls from most of the shoes in the entryway, I found myself reflecting on some of the things I’ve learned since becoming a parent 18 months ago.

  1. They put those “Keep out of reach of children” warnings on medications, because when a baby is crying, parents look around frantically, wanting to hand the little one anything that might stop the crying.

  2. Babies speak their own language. Recently at the park, I was feeling quite proud that my son and I were conversing. Then I looked at the mom next to me and realized that we weren’t using any actual words. They were all words my son had made up : gagoom (park), ga ga (dog), nana (food), na-nome (book), gin gin (bath), etc.

  3. Babies will eat almost anything they find on the floor. And if it resembles food or if it once did, like a day-old apple slice or dust-covered Wheat Thin, most parents will shrug it off. Maybe it’s the sleep deprivation. Or maybe, we know it could be worse. My friend was at a fast-food restaurant several years ago and looked up to see his two-and-a-half-year-old licking the garbage can.

  4. If you get the feeling that you’ve gotten this parenting thing down and might be a candidate for Mother or Father-of the-Year, the next day, you will invariably be near tears by lunch time, feel hopelessly incompetent, and want to beg your partner (or the mailman) to come take over.

  5. If it’s your partner who’s having the above kind of day, you’ll have a hard time understanding what could possibly be so hard, forgetting the many times you’ve felt exactly the same way.

  6. Kids grow up fast. And having kids means you have to repeat that cliche over and over again.

Your turn. Are you a parent? What have you learned from the experience?

(This post is for Steady Mom’s 30 Minute Blog Challenge.)

Celebrate the First Day of Winter!

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December 21 is the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. Locales above the Arctic Circle, including parts of Canada, Alaska, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Greenland, and the very northern tip of Iceland will experience 24 hours of total darkness. You can find out when the sun will rise and set where you live here.

Winter was a long, dark, and difficult time for many of our forebears. The solstice provided an opportunity for people to celebrate the return of more daylight.

How did ancient people celebrate?

Gift-giving

The ancient Romans exchanged candles and other gifts during Saturnalia, their week-long solstice celebration.

Role-switching

In Persia, the king changed places with one of his subjects on the winter solstice, and the subject was crowned during an elaborate street party.

In Rome, masters and servants switched roles; senators wore simple, rather than elaborate togas; men sometimes dressed as women; fights and grudges were forgotten; and other everyday conventions were put aside.

Candle-lighting

In England and Scandinavia, people lit a Yule log, or oak branch, which was often replaced by a large candle that burned throughout the day.

Bonfires

Japanese Shinto farmers lit fires on the mountain sides to welcome back the sun.

Mistletoe and Evergreen Trees

The British Celts put mistletoe on their altars. And the Germans and Romans decorated their houses with evergreen trees, wreaths, and garlands as a symbol of life and renewed fertility.

Sun Festivals

The Hopi celebrated the return of the sun with ceremonies. Priests dressed in animal skins with feathers in their head-dresses to look like the rays of the sun.

Why celebrate the first day of winter?

The holiday season is busy enough for most of us. Why add anything else to the to-do list?

Well, celebrating the first day of each season has many benefits. It offers the perfect opportunity to:

  • Note the cyclical changes in the soil, sky, trees, plants, and wildlife.
  • Reflect on the lessons each time of year imparts. Winter, for example, reminds us of the importance of quiet, rest, and dormancy.
  • Learn about different celebrations around the world.
  • Celebrate! And seasonal celebrations are affordable, nature-based, and as easy or elaborate as you want them to be.
  • Be grateful for the gifts of food, family, and friendship.

The key to celebrating the first day of winter, when most of us are busy planning other celebrations, is to keep it simple, and choose traditions that give you time to relax and reflect.

Some ideas:

  • Establish a table-top, shelf, or mantel to display a seasonal tableau. On the first day of winter, replace the fall decorations with evergreen boughs, pine cones, candles, mistletoe, or whatever symbolizes fall in your family.
  • Collect books about the seasons at yard sales, used-book stores, and thrift shops year-round. Choose a special basket or shelf for them, and change them out on the first day of each season. Or take a trip to the library a few days before your celebration. Some of my family’s favorite winter picture-books are: Stella, Queen of the Snow by Mary-Louise Gay; The Big Snow by Berta Hader; The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats; A Kitten Tale by Eric Rohmann; Snow by Cynthia Rylant; Winter is the Warmest Season by Lauren Stringer; and Owl Moon by Jane Yolen.
  • Read aloud from The Winter Solstice by Ellen Jackson.
  • Go for a nature walk or go cross-country skiing, and enjoy the brisk air and winter scenery.
  • Watch the sun rise and set.
  • Make a seasonal feast, with foods like beets, winter squash, potatoes, onions, kale, cabbage, or parsnips.
  • Eat by candlelight.
  • Blow out the candles and turn off the lights after dinner, sit together quietly, and experience and reflect on darkness.
  • Share one thing you’ve lost and one thing you’ve gained over the past year.
  • Bring an evergreen bough inside and make it into a wishing tree. Secure the bough in a bucket with rocks. Cut leaves out of green construction paper. Have each person write down a wish for the coming year on each leaf. Hang the leaves on the tree using a hole punch and yarn or ribbon.
  • Sit around the fire and tell stories about your best and worst holiday memories.

Resources:

The Winter Solstice by John Matthews
The Book of the Year: A Brief History of Our Seasonal Holidays by Anthony aveni
Celebrate the Solstice by Richard Heinberg
Ceremonies of the Seasons by Jennifer Cole
The Winter Solstice by Ellen Jackson

Do you already celebrate the first day of winter? I’d love to hear about your traditions.

Winter Stargazing: 7 Reasons to Observe the Night Sky

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My husband Aaron was a devoted viewer of Jack Horkheimer’s Star Hustler (now Stargazer) when he was growing up in the eighties. Aaron still knows his way around the night sky. Whenever we’re out after dark, he points out stars and planets and entertains me with stories about the constellations. I enjoy it. Moreover, I’ve come to believe that stargazing is good for people, especially in the wintertime.

Why?

Because observing the night sky:

1. Gives us perspective.

Staring up at the infinite universe can make one feel small and one’s problems seem downright minuscule. Sierra Tuscon, a drug rehab center, in Arizona, even incorporates star-gazing into recovery programs. Leslie Davis explains on their website:

For those with mood disorders, the stars are something positive and inspiring to focus on. For people in treatment for addiction, the night sky takes them outside themselves, helps them to feel connected, and gives them a sense of purpose

2. Connects us with nature.

It’s hard not to be in awe of the natural world when examining the night sky. And being aware of the moon’s cycles connects us with nature’s rhythms.

3. Unites us with people all over the world.

We all live on the same Earth and look at the same sky, but it can be easy to forget that when we listen to the news and focus on conflicts around the world.

4. Shows us how life was through most of human history.

Winter was a long, dark, and often scary time for people before Thomas Edison invented the long-lasting incandescent light bulb in 1879. Spending time outside at night shows us how our forebears lived in a way that history textbooks can’t.

5. Gets us outside.

Let’s face it, many of us would stay inside, next to the fire, all winter long if we had the choice. Stargazing is an excellent reason to get outside and prevent that winter ailment that most of us are more than a little familiar with – cabin fever.

6. Is easy, inexpensive, and requires no equipment.

And there’s plenty of room to learn and grow. You can join your local astronomy club, save up for a telescope, or pour over Carl Sagan tomes if you enjoy it.

And…

7. The winter nights are long.

The sun is rising around 7 A.M. and setting around 4:30 in most of the U.S. in December, leaving ample time for stargazing. Why not make the most of all the darkness?

Finding the perfect spot

If you’re lucky, you can turn off all the lights in your house and head out to your backyard or balcony to stargaze.

But maybe you live where city lights block out your view of the stars? Consider contacting your local astronomy club. They may hold free monthly dark-sky meet-ups with amateur astronomers on hand to point out constellations. They also may provide telescopes. Or your city might have an observatory that’s open to the public.

Winter Stargazing 7 reasons to observe the night sky

Tips for winter stargazing:

  1. Get a good star-gazing field guide.
  2. Go to Night Sky Planner to get viewing condition forecasts for your area.
  3. Bring along a sky chart. (You can download and print a free one each month here or download a stargazing app for your phone).
  4. Bundle up.
  5. Bring blankets, binoculars, snacks, and a thermos of hot chocolate or tea.
  6. Look for winter constellations – Orion, Taurus, Gemini, Cassiopeia, Pegasus, etc – and bright stars – Polaris, Betelgeuse, and Rigel.
  7. Learn and tell stories about the constellations.
  8. If using a stargazing app, look for a red filter feature. It takes the eyes up to 20 minutes to adjust to the dark. And just one burst of light can ruin night vision. But red light is not as damaging to night vision.
  9. If you need to bring a flashlight, cover it with red filter film (or automotive brake light repair tape).

If the weather’s clear in your area, December is an excellent month for stargazing because it’s when the Gemenid Meteor shower is visible. It usually peaks mid-month.

J. Kelly Beatty writes of the Gemenid shower in Sky and Telescope:

With an average of 100 meteors per hour radiating from near the bright star Castor, this end-of-the-calendar shower is usually one of the year’s best. … Geminid meteors come from 3200 Phaethon, an asteroid discovered in 1983.

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

(Photograph of the night sky taken by By Anne Dirkse (www.annedirkse.com), available via Wikipidia Commons)

Do you like to stargaze? Do you have any tips, or are there resources you recommend?

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Slow Parenting

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I took swim and piano lessons and belonged to quite a few clubs at school, but when I think about my childhood, it’s the slowness I remember – infinitely long summer days, conversations with my parents that felt like they’d go on forever, leisurely afternoons of reading, wondering, day-dreaming and playing.

Some of my friends were in gymnastics, soccer, or Girl Scouts. But we all had ample unstructured time in our days. We spent our summers riding bikes all over town, walking to the swimming pool, or wandering in packs from yard to yard until it was time for dinner.

My mom, dad, sister, and I also spent countless hours telling stories, going for walks, hiking, camping, playing board games, and just being together.

And all of those seemingly slow moments added up to something huge – my childhood.

The rise of hyper-parenting

Apparently, in the last 20 years, when I wasn’t paying attention, childhoods like mine went extinct. According to “The Growing Backlash Against Over Parenting”, an article in Time Magazine by Nancy Gibbs, “overprotectiveness and overinvestment of moms and dads” has risen to almost comical proportions.

Gibbs writes that parents started buying knee-pads for their toddlers and hovering over their teenagers; protecting their kids from every bump, scrape, and bad grade; and pressuring their children to achieve more and more at younger and younger ages. She writes that modern parents are raising kids who are  “teacups,” liable to shatter with any stress, or “crispies,” already burned out, by the time they get to college.

I can’t say I’ve been monitoring parenting trends over the past few decades. But when I think about it, quite a few of the new parents I know have their infants enrolled in classes – dance, swimming, music, and sign language. And I’ve heard many parents lament that they can’t let their older kids walk to school or play alone in the yard, because “it’s just not the same anymore.” And a college professor I know entertains his friends with nightmarish stories about parents calling to try to get their kids’ grades changed.

The backlash

According to Gibbs, a backlash is brewing against all this over-parenting. Some parents and advocates are calling for a return to the slower, more laissez-faire parenting of my childhood. They’re calling the movement Slow Parenting, Free-Range Parenting, or Simplicity Parenting.

Carl Honore, author of The Power of Slow: Finding Balance and Fulfillment Beyond the Cult of Speed and Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting has inspired many Slow Parenting devotees (although he doesn’t actually use the term in his books). He defined Slow Parenting in an interview with Lisa Belkin for her NYT Motherlode Blog:

Slow parenting is about bringing balance into the home. Children need to strive and struggle and stretch themselves, but that does not mean childhood should be a race. Slow parents give their children plenty of time and space to explore the world on their own terms. They keep the family schedule under control so that everyone has enough downtime to rest, reflect and just hang out together. They accept that bending over backwards to give children the best of everything may not always be the best policy. Slow parenting means allowing our children to work out who they are rather than what we want them to be.

And Carrie Contley and Bernadette Noll, who run the blog, Slow Family Living, and hold classes and workshops, write that Slow Parenting is about:

allowing family life to unfold in a way that is joyfully and consciously connected. This means slowing it down, finding comfort in the home, and creating the space to see and honor the family as an entity, while simultaneously keeping sight of each member as a unique and valuable individual.

Slowing down family life

When my son was born a year and a half ago, I realized that if my husband and I continued on the same track, he would not have the same sort of childhood that I had.

My husband and I both worked full time, and we worked opposite schedules. So we would have almost zero time together as a family. My son would be in daycare. Our mornings would a frenzy. We’d be tired in the evenings. And there would be few of those long afternoons making cookies, doing art projects, or reading books, because I’d have to-do lists and errands piled up from the week. My husband and I spent most of my son’s first year rearranging our lives so that we could have a slower, more-connected family life.

So I’m thrilled to read that other parents are questioning whether kids need so many expensive extracurriculars; are stepping back and giving their kids room to play, think, make mistakes, and be bored; and are prioritizing spending good old-fashioned time together.

Do parents need space too?

I asked my husband, who teaches at a low-income highschool, if he’s seeing an epidemic of “helicopter parenting”, and he laughed. “I wish. It’s more often the opposite – parents who never show up, don’t answer phone calls, and don’t seem to care.”

His comments made me think that maybe kids aren’t the only ones who need room to breathe and make mistakes. Parenting is a tough job, and maybe we could do worse for our kids than being too involved.

So while it may be overkill to buy a toddler knee pads, have trees chopped down to prevent a nut from falling into an allergenic child’s pool, or repeatedly rush down to the school to drop off a forgotten notebook, lunch pail, or necklace, as some of the parents Gibbs writes about in her Time Magazine article did, I hesitate to judge. I know first hand, striking that perfect balance in parenting is no easy feat.

But if slow parenting is about striving to be more connected while giving our kids more room to be themselves, those certainly seem like worthy goals.

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If you liked this post, you may enjoy these related posts:

Childhood is not a race. Embrace slow parenting #parenting #familylife

What do you think of Slow Parenting?

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Giving Thanks

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A few years ago, gratitude became trendy. People started talking about gratitude journals, boxes, and notebooks. The Secret espoused that being grateful is a means to acquiring more material rewards – a better job, a new car, a diamond ring. Gratitude was supposed to be the answer to a happier life, better sleep, vibrant health, and material wealth.

Around then, I became a tad cynical about gratitude.

Maybe instead of sitting around jotting down our thanks for everything, we should be devoting ourselves to improving our health care and criminal justice systems. We should be spending those gratitude-journaling hours working for people in the developing world who don’t even have running water or a reliable food supply. And we certainly shouldn’t pretend that kids growing up in the slums of Delhi or Mumbai could be rich if they just learned to be more grateful.

Maybe I’d give up on gratitude altogether.

But, as it turns out, I have a pathetically grateful disposition. I can’t seem to turn it off. My cat dies, and I immediately think of how thankful I am to have had eight years with him. My husband’s hours get cut back at work, and my first thought is how fortunate we are that he got a cost of living increase this year. My son wakes me up in the middle of the night, and I lie awake just feeling glad that I get to know him. I fear that someone’s playing self-actualization affirmations while I sleep.

In all seriousness, of course, we can be grateful for what we have while working toward a better world. And remembering our fortunes unquestioningly brings more joy to our lives, which is a worthwhile thing to cultivate. But should we think of gratitude as something that could bring in a bigger paycheck or a new boat? I don’t think so.

Besides, with Thanksgiving a few days a way,  it’s those simpler things in life that I’m feeling thankful for – like swings (or ga-gums as my son calls them), sunny afternoons, and backyards and all the creatures that inhabit them.

So here’s to gratitude, just because.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This post is for Steady Mom’s 30 Minute Blog Challenge.

* Read Part 2 of this Thanksgiving post (On Gratititude) here. *

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A Wabi Sabi Life

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I first learned of the Japanese concept of Wabi Sabi many years ago. It is a tool for contemplation, or a philosophy of life, that finds beauty in things that are impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete. In other words, it’s the notion that patina; wear and tear; chips, cracks, and fissures;  assymetry; flaws; and defects actually make things more interesting.

I immediately loved this concept of Wabi Sabi, and I felt almost relieved to read about it. It was like discovering that there was a word for the way I’d always thought about life.

You see, a Wabi Sabi house is not a sleek loft with a-line furniture and stainless steel appliances. It’s clean, but it’s comfortable, and it might be full of lopsided ceramics, handmade art, knitted blankets, quilts, and weathered antiques, a little bit like my house.

And a Wabi-Sabi person is not perfectly made up with gleaming white teeth, manicured nails, and tailored clothes. She is content with who she is, and she enjoys a simple life stripped of what is unnecessary. And that’s exactly what I’ve always wanted.

It’s useful for me to remember my fondness for the concept of Wabi Sabi on days like today when I finally woke up (for the tenth time in a few hours) for good at six a.m. with my fussy seventeen-month old and that phrase “sleeping through the night” that parenting experts seem to like to bandy about made me want to laugh maniacally.

Or, when I glance around my home office, which I always envisioned would be a tidy, peaceful sanctuary of sorts, and see the fifty or so books that my son dutifully removed from the shelves and spread across the floor alongside his trucks, Legos, and blocks.

Yes, this life, with work and home-life woven together, feels a little cobbled together sometimes, a little taped up at the seams, and I’m quite sure there are some cracks lurking here and there.

But that’s exactly the way I always wanted it to be.

This post is for Steady Mom’s 30 Minute Blog Challenge.