The Better Me

The Easter Egg Smash (Or, Other Kids' Parents)

This year I took BabyMoney to a community Easter egg hunt.

I was not prepared.

Not knowing what to expect, BabyMoney and I arrived early. The park was roped off into four areas, one for each of the appropriate age groups. I thought it was a brilliant idea to split the kids up. That way the younger kids wouldn't be competing with teenagers for eggs. They could wander around the field exploring and laughing as they discovered their treasures. I pictured little kids running around, their Easter baskets flying, their limbs tumbling awkwardly around as they scurried across the colorful field. There would even be some good opportunities to teach sharing, I thought. I imagined myself saying to BabyMoney, "Sweetie, let that little girl have that egg. she doesn't have as many as you do."

Those of you who have actually been to a community Easter egg hunt are by now clutching your sides and rolling on the ground with laughter.

About ten minutes before the hunt was to start, a palpable tension began to fill the air. I kept getting jostled from behind and the sides, and I started to sense that five a.m. outside of Wal-Mart on Black Friday feeling. One little girl crossed the rope and began snatching up eggs, and it seemed like it took a bit longer for her mother to admonish her and bring her back across the line than maybe one would have expected it to; some of the other parents were visibly anxious and angry about the transgression. "Okay," I thought. "These parents are nervous and want to make sure that their kids have a good time. I get that. But how bad can it get? It's a bunch of three year olds running around with baskets."

Then the woman in charge came and stood in front of us. Lifting the megaphone to her lips, she said these fateful words: "In this section, parents can accompany their children onto the field. GO!" I reached out to guide BabyMoney onto the field, but before he realized that he was supposed to step forward, a wave of parents smashed past us. Several hands ripped down the rope, and several other hands lifted their children and swept across the field with them. As I stood there watching in astonishment, a cascade of parents rushed out before me. It was like watching the locusts sweep across the fields the Egypt. Within sixty seconds, the lawn that had previously had an egg dotted every square foot was utterly desolate. The only eggs that remained were the few that had been crushed by the stampede. BabyMoney and I stared in speechless confusion as people began returning to the sidewalk. The Easter egg hunt was over. A few parents were carrying baskets and plastic sacks full of eggs. Several children's baskets, including BabyMoney's, were completely empty.

I was one-sixth angry, two-sixths disgusted, and three-sixths ashamed to be a twenty-first century parent. It made me nervous about sending my kid to school, about having him play sports or have theater with the children of these parents. The whole episode left me thoroughly shell-shocked. (Mr. MoneyDummy's suggestion, by the way, was that I should have videotaped it and then posted it on Youtube with the caption, "Why there will never be peace in Iraq.")

I've begun to realize that it's true what they say: the hardest thing about being a mom is not dealing with other kids, it's dealing with other kids' parents.

(This post was cross-posted on One Money Dummy Getting Smarter)

I Don't Care About Deserving. I Care About Consequences

It seems like I often hear people telling other people (or themselves) not to think about consequences, but instead to focus on what they "deserve." There are extreme examples, of course. The sub-prime disaster occurred because too many people were thinking about the fact that they "deserved" nice homes and not thinking about what would happen when the terms of those loans adjusted, or what the long-term consequences of paying on a 9% mortgage for 30 years would be. There are more subtle examples, though, like when someone at a party or on a commercial tells you to take a break from your diet because you "deserve" a treat. Or those times when my husband tells me not to worry about doing the dishes because I "deserve" to relax. These comments puzzle me. What matters is not what a person "deserves," what matters is what they ultimately get as a result of their actions.

Is my body going to say, "Hey! It's Christmas and everybody deserves a few treats at Christmas. We're not going to count this chocolate cake as caloric intake." Or maybe magic kitchen elves will creep through my window and wash my dishes during the night so that I can have the relaxing night I "deserve," and still avoid the consequence of awakening to a messy kitchen in the morning. And don't even get me started on the gambling commercials which try to tell people that they "deserve" a night at the casino.
   
I'm convinced that many people make decisions that others view as extreme and sacrificial because they're ignoring what they "deserve," and instead have a razor-sharp focus on what they want. They know that they want a size four pants size, and that whether or not they deserve chocolate, they won't get what they want if they eat that chocolate. Sure I want to sit down and put my feet up after I've cooked dinner, brushed two little sets of teeth, read two stories, and tucked two little boys in bed, and some people would say that I even deserve to relax. But more than that, I want to wake up to a clean kitchen, so at eight-thirty at night I turn on my Ipod, schlep into my kitchen, and start filling the sink. Because ultimately, I want a clean kitchen more than I want to relax.

Here's my suggestion: instead of telling each other and ourselves what we deserve, we need to start focusing on the consequences that we and each other need. Next time I'm tempted to tell my mom that she "deserves" to sit down and relax after making Sunday dinner, I'm going to get up and help her clean it all up so that she actually can sit down and relax without having to accept the consequences of a dirty kitchen. I'm going to make it so that she doesn't have to sacrifice quite so much to achieve what she wants. That's helping; that's support; that's what we as a society need, and what we actually deserve.

The First Challenge: A Week of Decluttering

I'm pumped up for my first challenge! If you came here from reading MoneyDummy, you may remember the story of the jeans with sixty bucks in the pocket. Well, those jeans have turned out to be just heavenly. I had no idea that I was buying "name brand" American Eagle jeans for a buck; I just knew I liked how they looked, and that they fit me like a second skin. Unfortunately, the fact that they're my only good pair of jeans (and that they're apparently cut long in the leg) has meant that I wear them a lot and they've frankly had a bit of a beating, as you can see.

So the first challenge is to complete fifteen minutes of decluttering every day, and to maintain my progress for one week. If I do that, then I can take these suckers into a seamstress and have her hem up the edges. (I could do it myself, but I haven't a sewing machine and I don't know how to sew, and the seamstress said that she'd only charge four dollars.)

Looking at the sorry state of these denims I realize that I have to complete this challenge because oy! This is what they look like after having been worn through the mud and along a one-hour hike with my kiddos, and it is not pretty.

Test

I apologize for unnecessarily crowding your RSS reader, but I really must know if I've successfully stopped Type Pad from publishing my full name every time I post.

Please accept these flowers as my apology.

It's Like Mary Kay, Only Totally Different

If I ran the world, this is how it would work:

A group of women who wanted to improve themselves would get together. They'd make goals and create charts and report on their progress and when they met their improvement goals, there'd be cheering and celebration and small, beautifully wrapped prizes and refreshments. It would be awesome.

(If this sounds like a Mary Kay meeting, that's because Mary Kay, whatever its failings, does an amazing job of motivating women to do things. Only in my version, no one has to sell stuff or go into debt in order to get the prizes.)

Well, I'm not in charge of the whole world, but I do run these two tiny bits of it called my apartment and my blog, and I'm going to bend them to my fantasy. Here's my plan: I'm going to set myself goals and promise myself appropriate prizes when I succeed. And all y'all, if you want to, can provide the cheering and the encouragement. I may also need some help with the judging and regulating because hubs, bless his heart, is absolutely useless at helping me enforce discipline upon myself; he thinks that I should get anything I want at any moment my heart desires it.

So here's the plan: I'll make goals and post about them, including how I plan to reach them and what the prize is. I'll report my progress and post pictures (I want to post before and after pictures, but my cowardice is great, so we'll see how that goes), and then I'll see how well I did and if I get the prize.

Scary, but exhilarating. I'm going to make my little pieces of the world great.

The Beginning of Organization

Hi! My name is Heidi and I'm disorganized.

I always have been. When I was in fourth grade my desk was so full of books and papers and books and pens and books and ponytail holders that my teacher finally got sick of it and dumped the entire contents of my desk out on the floor near the coat rack where the entire class would see it when they came in in the morning. She wasn't trying to be mean; I think she genuinely thought that if she made it clear to me that I needed to change, I would. But the problem was that I just didn't know how to be organized, so then after that I was still disorganized, I just felt embarrassed and slightly frantic about it.

For a long time.

It's not that I didn't try. You must know that I tried so much. A lot. With lots of programs. I studied the blogs of domestic goddesses and read Flylady emails and talked about it with other people whose homes are perfect, and still I struggle. I'm not slovenly, mind you. The dishes are always washed and beds are always clean, but there is a distinct aura of busyness and clutter.

Then I stopped scrambling around my house trying to pick things up and figure out how Born Organized people manage to do it, and I started to do one of the things that I'm actually good at: thinking. I analyzed and brooded and mused and held elaborate conversations with myself and I started to realize some things about being organized. Deep things. Things that surprised me; things that surprised other people when I told them. I'll talk more about them this week, but for today, I want to start with this discovery:

I do not want to be an artisan homemaker.

For years, I aspired to be like Martha Stewart or Bree Van de Kamp or even Meredith (well, let's be honest, we all want to be Meredith), but then I realized something. I don't want to be an artisan homemaker; I just want to be a functional homemaker. I want surfaces to be uncluttered, laundry to be done, everything to be findable on the slightest whim, and things to smell nice. Beyond that I'm fine. You can keep your ruffled curtains, your chafing dishes, and your tea light rosebud candles floating in a fluted glass bowl. I want to develop a clean, functional house and then I want to leave it and go to the library. Or the park. Or the pet shop. Or up that little dirt trail that leads to who knows where, but has a lot of delightful twists and curves that look like they're just perfect for two kids in a double jogger.

And through steadiness and methodical persistence, I'm going to develop that clean house, day by day. I hope some of you will come along with me to watch me, encourage me and even, on occasion, judge me. (You'd think I'd have had enough of public humiliation, but I have an idea that puts a challenging twist on growing organization, but won't be too awfully scary.)

Subsequent weeks will focus on other things I'm trying to improve like attitude, follow-through, and physical health but for this week, the house is getting cleaner.

It's going to be wonderful!

Becoming a Better Me

A couple of years ago, I started a personal finance blog. It was an on-again, off-again relationship, but overall it was a passionate affair. Not only did I make a ton of friends (can I call them friends?), I learned a lot about finance (you have to take information in if you want to continue being able to put information out) and in the area of personal finance I became a much better, stronger person.

So I got to thinking, what if I started a blog about the other areas of my life in which I'd like to improve? Organization, attitude, follow-through, ambition  . . .

So I've started it. I'm jittery and grinny and excited, so if you're reading this, I hope to see you back here again.