Newport Beach:  Sandy beach for kids with safe water access, shade for parents to sit; on the east side

Olympia:  1.5 hrs drive; state capital, nice buildings and landscaped parks

So here’s the thing, it really is freezing here today.  At home in June I would either have the AC running, or I’d have the fan on in the house to get the cold air from the basement to the 2nd story.  Here the fan is running to get the warm air from upstairns down here to the main floor — where I am sitting in slippers and a sweater.  I refuse to turn on my furnace in June.

It is summy outside and looks gorgeous, but it is most decidedly chilly.  I need to adapt to this quickly as the boys are not dressed properly for school — I need to ship them in pants, shirts and sweaters.  Yesterday, Finn wore his fall coat inside all day, becuase I had put him in a t-shirt and shorts.  Oops.

Here’s an episode of The Current on the topic from last week. The interviewee is Laurie David (Larry David’s wife) and she’s a huge advocate of family dinners and how to get your family back to the table, and why you should want to put forward the effort. No surprise she’s on the show to promote her new book: The Family Dinner: Great ways to connect with your kids one meal at a time. Laurie’s discourse on the radio reminded me of an episode of Oprah from a season or two ago in which she spent time with families to reform their dinner times. Oprah saw families that were ordering takeout and each taking their food to a separate part of the house to eat on their own with their digital device of choice (texting, TV, laptop, whatever). The Oprah episode horrified me, but even Laurie’s interview seemed to indicate that the family dinner is a challenge.

More nights than note, we have dinner as a family. My kids are 2 and 5… so I can’t really imagine how they would get fed if we didn’t sit down with them. That said, we have friends whose nanny feed the kids before the parents get home from work, or whose kids get a big snack at daycare and don’t eat dinner, or who simply don’t enjoy the toddler meal and have a husband/wife dinner after the kids go to bed. I’m inclined to think that the latter is a great idea for us to try, at least once or twice a week.

But for now, we’re still the old fashioned four of us sitting down for dinner. It might not be fancy – in fact it’s definitely not fancy, but we’re there. I’ve been warned that this will get harder and harder to do as the kids get older. We’ll see. For now, Monday’s are definitely a challenge, as both boys have classes as 6pm. So we usually have eggs and crudités at 5:15. When the boys are older, I expect they’ll have more activities, but I’m also hoping we can push our dinner time back to 6:30 or so. Now if we have dinner at 6:30 the boys are falling asleep by the time we finish at 7pm.

I would love to hear success stories of how you’ve managed family dinners? Who’s able to get their 7/9 or teenage kids to the table for dinner more nights that not and how did you do it?

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A friend sent me a note a while back asking if it was her. Was she the only mom who found that there was no ‘me’ time? She’s resorted to getting up at 5am to have a moment of piece and is quickly finding the kids hear her rustling in the house and are now getting up even earlier. It’s not her, it’s moms. Regardless of the age of your children or whether you’re at home or in the office – it’s busy, and the list of things to do is way too long. As soon as you cross 2 or 3 things off your list, another 4 or 5 seem to get added.

Last year I decided there were too many things to keep track of – aerobic exercise, weight training, yoga, family hiking, core strengthening, eat veggies, eat fruit, get enough fibre, don’t get too much saturated fat, get enough protein, no whites, take your multi-vitamin, and your vitamin D. Wait isn’t using a sauna supposed to be good for you? The list of do/don’ts was too long, and this was just the health oriented stuff. I divided my good intentions into a series of monthly ‘to-do’s. My premise was that if I did something for a month, there was a chance that I’d be able to a carry the habit forward So January was take your vitamin every day month, and February was daily exercise (as opposed to a couple of times a week), etc. Well I had fun making the list, but I don’t think I got very far with it. I found the schedule while cleaning up some office paperwork the other day, and am now working on the revised 2011 version.

This version I’ll share with you, my family and friends. I’m also trying to make it less serious: incorporating new activities– perhaps kickboxing or latin dancing, or date night ideas into the mix. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

Time for a change?

Forgive what is undoubtedly a blasphemous topic for this post…

I’ve been thinking about Lent. My particular brand of church doesn’t have any strong traditions with respect to Lent as a season, apart from the sermons, the liturgy surrounding Lent is a pretty tamed affair. When I was at University, a good chunk of the student body was Catholic. At the time I became accustomed to hearing “can’t do it… I gave it up for Lent” or “no dessert for me, I gave it up for Lent.” In school the give ups were mostly: beer, cigarettes, dessert, chocolate and occasionally meat.

Long out of school, the phrase “gave up for lent” doesn’t come up very often. When a friend of family member mentions it, I assumed that: a) They were catholic, and b )more religious than I had originally realized. But other than that, I gave it not much thought. Turns out I was wrong on both counts.

In the save way I’ve adopted Chinese New Year as my own personal holiday and set of traditions (in spite of not having been to China), my friends are adopting some of the Lenten traditions, because they resonate with them. These friends view it as an opportunity to :

• Make a break from any bad habits that have crept up over the past year (or 10!)
• Introduce positive lifestyle change
• Put a halt to the consumption of all baked goods… in case that didn’t end at New Year’s
• Introduce a new habit (or kill an old one). 60 days (or there about) is plenty of time for the change to take hold
• Even if you don’t make a permanent change, 60 days without “pick your poison” is better than 60 days with it.

Yet another variation on this same theme is to not only “give up” something for Lent, but also to “add” something positive. This is akin to the Oprah style of management – if you want to bring something new into your house, you have to give up something. Now the big question is what to pick:

Where is this coming from? Well I was reading Body&Soul magazine last week (I had the flu… my reading selections deteriorate) and there was an article about this woman who started a with a challenge to herself to do give 29 gifts in 29 days. Christmas with a large extended family did not count. From that one month of giving, she started doing it again, and again and then started sharing the idea with others. Now there’s a whole web site dedicated to the whole idea of 29 days of giving. The idea behind why she started this campaign resonated with me. The focus was to stop being so internally focused. I’ve been finding myself saying “when I get through this patch, I’ll start doing XYZ again”. Well that was the plan in August, and September. I don’t even know what happened in October, and here we are in November. Clearly that “patch” is longer than anticipated and I need to find another way out. Perhaps 29 days (or 38 until Christmas) would be one way.

I couldn’t find the article from this month’s Body&Soul, but here’s one about the benefits of giving. Apparently it’s good for you (the old better to give than receive notion come true).

Needless to say, this article got me thinking: thinking about the toys I’m supposed to give to my nephew, about the friend I was supposed to call, about what to get my dad for Christmas. These people, and so many more give me a lot every day – chores, advise, shoulder to cry on, and lately I’ve been focused on me and my little family, just trying to get through work.

I’m not ready to commit to publishing my daily gift, as you likely don’t want to know that I gave the guy outside my office $5, and I’m not sure my ego could take letting the world know that my big gift for the day was returned a phone call after 2 months. I will however try to have regular updates, in the vein of: “things are going great, I love this giving thing”, to “what giving project? I’m not doing that any more.”