Sandra Tayler's Blog, page 60

Coming Home

Gifts from my children today:

None of them called me at the conference to ask for anything.

The kitchen was clean when I got home.

They ate three actual meals during my absence and only one of those meals was cooked in the microwave.

My younger two kids where lightly sunburned, evidence that they spent large portions of the day outdoors playing instead of glued to computer screens.

The fridge had more groceries in it when I got back than when I left.

There were flowers in a vase on the counter and a ring of notes, one from each child. (Patch’s note: “Mom, you’ve been nice to me ever since I was born. I just want to say thank you.”)

I came home and they were all watching a show together.

They went to bed without arguing or delaying.

I remember all of the times when I experience the opposite of everything above, to the point where I wondered why I bothered to go anywhere. Today they demonstrated that they’ve actually learned all the lessons in self-sufficiency, hard work, empathy, kindness for others, and home management that I’ve been trying to teach for so many years. It is hard to believe in evenings like this one when at the beginning end of raising kids, but here I am and life is good.

I’ll have thoughts about the Storymakers Conference tomorrow. Tonight I am quite tired.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

LDS Storymakers Presentations

This morning I’m headed down to the Marriott Hotel in Provo to teach at the LDS Storymakers conference. If you’re planning to be there too, I hope you’ll find me and say hello. My first presentation will be one that I gave last February at LTUE. Structuring Life to Make Room for Creativity. If you click on that title it’ll take you to the post I did of my presentation notes. In fact, since most of you will not be able to attend the conference, I’ll list several blog posts where I report on a panel or presentation:

Little Stories Everywhere: Notes from a Panel Discussion on Blogging

Schmoozing 101: Notes from a Presentation with Mary Robinette Kowal

Or there is a listing of other posts in that same vein.

On Saturday I’ll be giving a presentation on blogging where I talk, not about marketing or setting up a blog, but about the actual content generation parts of blogging. I have a hundred ideas that I’m still pounding into shape. When I’m done I’m likely to write up that presentation as well.

If you’d like to follow the conference in more real time, you can follow the #storymaker13 hash tag on twitter. I can’t guarantee that anyone will tweet from my panels, but if they did, that’s where you’d see it.

Alternately you could step away from the internet and go enjoy the outdoors, which is a lovely way to spend a Friday and Saturday.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

The Butterfly Dress Photos

I promised to let all of you see the photographer’s shots of Kiki wearing the butterfly dress. Here they are along with appropriate credit for those involved.

My original write up of the photo shoot can be found here. It has pictures that I took.

The butterfly dress was created by Rebekah McKinney

Kiki’s hair was done by Ashley of 9 Salon and Spa

Kiki’s make up was done by Sammie of 9 Salon and spa

The photography was done by Gary of Meaux Photography

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Book Editing

My day began with this:

Each of those little paper flags sticking out of the pages is an error that needed fixed before Body Politic could go to print. I went through flag by flag and fixed all the errors. There were at least 80 of them. It always amazes me how many dumb mistakes I make when putting a book together. Then I print it out on paper and suddenly they are glaringly, embarrassingly obvious. When all the things were fixed, I exported the book to a PDF and paged through it again. I found 30 more errors. I fixed those and exported again to PDF and handed the file to Howard. He found 14 errors. This is always the process. We go through iterations of book creation, each time focusing our attention on a different way of reading. Sometimes I read every word. Other times I just flip pages and look at image spacing. Eventually my eyes glaze over and it all looks like a blur and possibly even a bad idea. At some point we declare it done and I send it off to print. It is out of my hair for a couple of months until it comes back home bound in paper. By then I’m not tired of the book anymore. We’re excited as we open the boxes and see the book made real. But I guarantee that on that first flip through we’ll find a mistake we missed. It happens every time.

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Pondering the Months to Come

The school year draws to a close in just a few weeks. The teachers from my kids’ elementary school have begun sending home notes with the last lists of things to accomplish before the year ends. I am glad, because this year has exhausted me. I’m ready for it to be over. Yet I haven’t been feeling joy when contemplating the end of the school year and today I figured out why. It is because the school year is not the end of those things that have been most difficult in the past few months. I’ve got three kids in transition and that process can not be complete until they are settled into their new schools next fall. The cessation of school is not the end, it is a pause. This thought is somewhat discouraging. I’d like to have a sense of completion, tying things off so that we can start fresh in late August. Instead I’ll just pack away many of these thoughts, store them while we manage months of summer conventions, family events, major shipping, and everyone being home all day. Then the thoughts will come back to me, unresolved, needing attention. This was my experience last year and I expect it again.

Summers were so long when I was a kid. They are far too short now. I’ve spent lots of time toggling through the months on my calendar and pondering what is to come. It doesn’t feel calm to me until sometime in November, because that is the point when we will have completed all the current things to do. Then the kids will be settled. The conventions and shipments will be done. Except November will be cold again. I don’t want to skip ahead to cold. Also, life does not calm down in November. Ever. That is when the holiday craziness kicks into gear. My life is going to be crazy for years to come. I chose this when Howard and I went full time with cartooning. I chose this when we decided to have four kids, who are now beginning to launch themselves in different directions rather than moving as a family unit. It is messy and crazy, but I’d pick this life over almost any other one that I was offered. This is an important thing to remember when it all feels impossible.

The other thing to remember is that each day offers me spaces. There are quiet moments to savor, flowers in bloom, warm outdoor air, and sunshine. Yes, the rest of May is one long task list. Yes, June is double booked every weekend and a whole week in the middle. Yes, August is week-long convention followed by week-long convention with dropping a child at college sandwiched in between. But July is almost empty. I keep skipping over it when I’m toggling my calendar, discounting the spaces there because of what comes before and after. I’m a little afraid to hope for calmness in July, as if I’d rather be surprised to find it instead of using the hope of it to get me through. Mostly though, I need to stop looking so far ahead. I can not solve June today. Instead I should focus on this week and the empty spaces between me and Storymakers conference on Friday. My life is not as crazy as my stress would sometimes have me believe.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

A Hundred Things to Do on a Saturday

“What have you got to do today?” Howard asked me first thing in the morning. He was headed for the shower and knew that his day was full of completing the last pieces for The Body Politic. There were words to write and pictures to draw; he was the one who had to do it.

“I don’t know.” I answered, not because I lacked for things to do, but because on a Saturday morning when I’ve finally cracked my eyes open, the one day a week when I get to sleep late, my brain does not immediately present me with my list of things that must be done. Truthfully I doesn’t on the other days either, but there are auto-pilot patterns to follow until my brain comes online with a plan for the day.

I am tired, worn from being the keeper of the schedule all week long. I track all my people, all their appointments, many of their tasks. I track more than I should, but it takes conscious effort for me to let go of things once my brain has flagged them as important or as likely to turn into a crisis if they aren’t managed well. On Saturday my alarm does not go off. Instead I lay in bed until my eyes open of their own accord. I’d like to spend the whole day free of assignments, but the week spills over and the weekend becomes the time when we do all the things that there was not time to do on the other days. For the past several weeks my Saturdays have been full of events and appointments, today was blissfully clear, a blank square on the calendar. It meant that my approach to the day could be free form instead of focused.

In the end I worked harder today than I have on many of the weekdays. I wrangled the kids into doing housework and I did a lot of it myself. The clean clothes are tucked safely into drawers instead of heaped in baskets. Rooms got vacuumed and I removed bags of trash from various corners of bedrooms. At one point Gleek complained about my decree that screens were to stay off until noon. “But Mom, if we all work until noon there won’t be any work left to do.” I wish child. The more I clean up, the more I can see that still needs to be organized. I could use a half dozen more Saturdays all in a row. I don’t get them. Not for quite a while. Summer will provide an unending stream of Saturday-like days during which my kids will need to do more housework. They’ll also be in the house making messes far more frequently. And there will be the influx of lunches to make.

Before we embarked on all of the cleaning, I put a reward at the end of it. I bought tickets for us all to go see Iron Man 3. It was a worthy reward and a nice way to end the day. Now the kids are in bed and I’m sitting on the couch alternately pondering plot points from the movie and all the things I’d still like to accomplish in my house. When Monday comes we’ll be back to school and business priorities. Someday I’ll get the flowerbeds weeded and the trim painted for our front room, but probably not this week.

Next Saturday I’ll be at LDS Storymakers conference. It is an event that I enjoy, but I’ll confess that I’ll miss having a free Saturday. This one was so very nice.

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Cobble Stones Available and Switching into High Gear

See the lovely book cover lingering over there to the right? This morning I finally put the newly re-sized Cobble Stones books into the store. I’m supposed to take delivery of Cobble Stones 2012 on Friday and can begin shipping as soon as I do. This means you can place your order now, I’ll start shipping on Friday, and the books can be in your hands–or the hands of a mother you know–before Mother’s Day (if you live in the continental US.) At $5 per copy these books are a great giftable size and price. If you’re local, I will have both of these books along with Hold on to Your Horses available for sale at LDS Storymakers conference. The conference itself is sold out, but the bookstore they run is open to walk-in traffic. At 5 pm on Friday May 10 there will be a mass signing that is open to the public. Just come to the Marriott hotel in Provo to meet a room full of authors who will be happy to talk with you and sign books. I’ll be there and I’ll have my books with me.

In other news, I’m behind on all of my work. I was already behind on all of it when I spent yesterday on a 4th grade field trip shivering in the cold wind out by Utah Lake to learn about biomes, invasive species, adaptations, and to have a giant walleye fish leap out of the ranger’s hands right at me. I may have made an alarmed noise because it was a big fish (easily three feet long) and they’d just finished showing us how it has teeth. Fish attacks aside, I’m glad I went along on the trip because Patch was obviously thrilled to have me there. He’s why I went, even though I was ready to fall asleep on my feet and even though I got so chilled that it took the rest of the day for me to feel warm again. The trip and the cold shut down my work brain.

It did not help that when I finally warmed up enough to think, I had to spend all of my thinking to help Gleek put together her history fair project of doom. I’m only sort of kidding about the “of doom” part. Anxiety has been an issue with her these past few months. Her science fair project in February was a series of emotional battles and stress. The theme of the history fair is “turning points” and while Gleek quickly became fascinated with her chosen period of time, getting her to narrow down to a specific turning point was difficult. “We need to show how all these escapes from East Germany made the world change.” I would say when she was dictating a barrage of facts about how the Strelzyk and Wetzel families made a hot air balloon and floated themselves over the border. I began feeling like that one character in the Star Wars moving, chanting “stay on target, stay on target.” I’m still not sure if the project hits the target in the way the teacher would like, but we’re in the vicinity and whatever we’ve managed to hit, we’ve done it very thoroughly. Gleek has not under achieved on this one.

Of course the most urgent work of the week is finishing up The Body Politic, which is mostly waiting on me. I’ve got copy edits to enter, footnotes to place, footnote boxes to build, and test prints to run. These things all need to be done last week, because this week I was supposed to be turning my eyes ahead toward Phoenix Comic Con and making sure that everything is lined up for Howard’s trip there. I’ve also got to help Kiki put together artwork for her two panels at Conduit, which is taking place the same weekend as Phoenix. Also, I should probably create and print up Kiki’s graduation announcements because the relatives would probably like to hear about that event before it actually takes place. With all of this rolling around in my brain the Monday night insomnia which made me so tired on Tuesday and Wednesday begins to make sense.

Time to get moving and do all of the things.

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Kiki Facing Graduation

“It’s like someone has dumped out a big jar of marbles and right now they’re all falling in a clump, but starting to separate out. Then on graduation day all those marbles are going to hit the ground and scatter in hundreds of directions.”

–Kiki’s observations on her last month of high school

Kiki is right, we’ve hit the last free fall before her life trajectory is in her control. She’s really feeling it both in her readiness to be doing something else and in her relationships with her friends. Some of those friendships have become a bit more complicated, people who’ve been close for a long time are beginning to pull apart because they know they’ll soon be headed in different directions. Everything in her world is shifting, simultaneously picking up speed and slowing down. Most days she and I end up sitting down and talking about how things are shaking out. A friend of mine warned me about the last months of high school. She and her oldest daughter quarreled lots during the final run to graduation. I’m glad that Kiki’s emotional shifts have not manifested in a similar manner. Though I won’t be too surprised if they do at some point. It is easier to leave people you love if you create a rift first. One more month and then she’s off into her next adventure.

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Interpreting Dreams

I am not an advocate of dream theory. Most dreams are random and fairly meaningless, but some are significant. The interpretation of these significant dreams can lead to enlightening insights, but I think that the only person qualified to interpret a dream is the one who dreamed it. This is because the dream itself may be nonsense, but our minds can pull meaning and inspiration from the shape of the nonsense.

In March I had two significant dreams. One featured an amazing house full of amazing stuff and I was going to get to live there, except everything in the house needed cleaning or repair. It was a reflection of my emotional state at that time when it felt like everything could be amazing, if only I did a lot of work first. The second dream I’m not going to share, except to say that it showed me exactly what I feared for Gleek when we were in the midst of wrestling with anxiety. Neither dream was pleasant, but contemplating them helped me understand myself and that new understanding changed the shape of things going forward in good ways.

Sometimes the entire dream is not important, just an element of it. I can tell which pieces matter, because they stay with me even after I wake up, they feel important even if I do not know why. Most of the time what matters most is the emotion of a dream rather than the events or objects in it. In my dreams I feel the things I’ve suppressed when awake.

I’m thinking about all of this because Howard had an interesting dream last night with elements that have been re-occurring over the past 20+ years. I kind of want to assign meanings for his dream, to declare that this dream object represents that life challenge, but I don’t get to. Meaning or dismissal are his to assign. I try to do the same for my kids, teaching them that while dreams can be indicators, it is what we do when awake that changes our lives for better or worse. Dreams show up, what we do with them after that is what matters.

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Learning Anxiety Management

We sat in the therapist’s office with nothing to discuss. Three weeks and there had been no meltdowns we could talk through, no major stress episodes, no panic. It was as if the troubles ceased the moment we attempted to observe them. Whatever the reasons for the vanished anxiety, there did not seem to be much point in paying out of pocket week after week so we could sit on a leather couch with nothing to discuss. All parties agreed that perhaps therapy might be more useful again in the fall with the stresses of beginning junior high. So we walked out and cancelled the remaining appointments.

Ten minutes after arriving home Gleek shrieked and panicked because a wasp got into the house. Twenty minutes after that she saw another one outside and plunged again into fear, but channeled it better. During homework time she pulled out a familiar array of stress tactics such as whining, flopping, singing out loud, making random noises to annoy her brother, dropping pencils, and resisting the help she asked for one second previous. My job was to stay calm, expect her to get a grip on herself, and wait for her to settle down and do the work, which she eventually did.

I am left with questions about coincidence and causation. Ultimately I think that Gleek would have been alarmed by a wasp in the house whether or not we’d decided to discontinue therapy. It also makes sense that her first big panicky event would dredge up all the old tactics out of storage. Or it could be that some part of her considered the therapy sessions as a sort of safety net and discontinuing them raises her ambient level of anxiety. In which case, discontinuing is exactly what we need to do so that Gleek can practice managing her stresses and fears.

Even with the resurgence of old coping strategies, Gleek still had a better handle on herself that she would have a month ago. She faced the second wasp without shrieking. She completed her math assignment before curling into a ball under a blanket. Then when I requested that she emerge so we could plan for the remainder of her homework, she used a visualization technique to bring herself back into a planning state of mind. We’ve come quite a long way since March. Now we just need to hang tight for the next four weeks of school.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.