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I am an organizer of things. I combine orders and inventory into packages. I sort piles of dirty laundry into piles of neatly folded clean clothes. I take an unending task list and make of it a schedule which has a chance of allowing the tasks to get done. I turn jumbled piles of papers into neat files. I transform masses of weeds into flower beds. I tally invoices and checks into accounts and tax forms. I take a room in which everything is topsy turvey and turn it into a livable space. I even organize stray thoughts into blog entries. All of this is as natural to me as breathing, but sometimes I am forced to face the fact that the tasks themselves are not easy. They are actually complex processes that I have performed so often that they have become routine to me.

My primary confrontation with the complexity of these tasks is when I attempt to teach one of them to my children. When faced with a messy room, my kids will start to pick over the mess at random. They’ll pick up a few things, but if they don’t know where the things go, they shove them on shelves until the shelves are ready to topple. It is not enough for me to say “clean your room.” I must couple that command with teaching them how to go about sorting and organizing a room. I have to teach them about picking up large things first so you can see the small ones. I have to teach about scraping the mess out of the corners and into the middle. I have to teach that small things need to be put in containers, not shoved on shelves. Each of these things is a separate piece of knowledge all of which combine into knowing how to organize a room.

This weekend Kiki was feeling buried under things to do. For a week or more I’d been telling her to prioritize and do the most important things first. She kept ending up in a stalled panic rather like the rabbit staring frozen at the headlights of an oncoming car. I finally realized that while she knew the meaning of the word “prioritize” she did not actually have a clue how to go about doing it. So I gave her a piece of paper and made her write down every single To Do item in her head. I told her not to fret over the size of the list because we knew it would be far more things than she could accomplish in a single day. The idea was to pull all these fretful things out of her head and pin them to a page where she could see them. Then I took a second piece of paper and used the Franklin Covey square to help her sort her list. Suddenly she could really see what she needed to focus her time on and which things she had been stressing over that were neither important nor urgent. Using the paper helped her see what I meant by prioritize. Kiki still has a lot to learn about organizing her time, but this gives her a method to start learning.

A friend of mine is getting ready to start using Quickbooks for her small business. My first reaction was to tell her not to worry because it is easy. But then I remembered how scary it was to get started all those years ago. I remembered driving to Salt Lake for an 8 hour seminar on small business accounting. Accounting is not easy, but it can become easy with practice. I find this very encouraging because there are things in my life that are not easy, things that frighten me. I would really love to pull together a book and have it published by a large house. This task feels like an impossible pipe dream, but I’ve begun to see where to start and if I can just keep going the things that feel daunting will get easier. I will only stay daunted if I stand still. Practice makes difficult things become easy and that is a good thing to know.

Today I spent $25 which was not strictly necessary. This is not a major crime, except for the fact that we’re trying to live lean at the moment. We need to be careful about spending until we get the next Schlock book into print. This means I’m pulling out all those frugal habits I developed during the post-Novell years and dusting them off so I can use them again. I’m cooking from scratch, hanging some laundry to dry, reading sales fliers, and browsing through thrift shops. It is fortunate that I currently have time available to do these things. But packed away with all the good frugal habits were the fears about spending any money at all. Those fears were helpful and necessary when we could see ahead to the point when our money would run out. But the situation this Fall is different. We have a source of income. We are trying to manage a tight patch without increasing debt, not scraping to make the savings last. In one way the current situation is harder. We are allowed to spend on a few small wants as well as the needs, but we have to figure out which of the many wants is the best choice. We also have define “small” in terms of how much we are allowed to spend.

All of this brings me back to my spending today. I bought flower bulbs. Could I get by without them? Yes. They aren’t actually going to provide me with anything right now, except motivation to get outside and dig in the dirt. I can dig in the dirt for free. By the time these bulbs bloom, we’ll be through the tight patch. It would make sense to just buy flowers then, except for the fact that I have to plant them now if I want them to bloom at all. These little bulbs that I stick in the ground are a gift that I am giving to my future self. I don’t know exactly what her life will be like in February and March, but I am betting that flowers will be a positive addition. It makes me happy to know that the bulbs are out there in the dirt waiting to be beautiful. I can hold on to that thought in the doldrums of winter. Sometimes we need to realize that “not strictly necessary” purchases can be money well spent.

One of the odd things about keeping a blog and running a business is that my head is always full of things about which I can not blog. It is not that business is always full of hot secrets or major changes (although sometimes this is the case), but there are lots of little business deals and decisions which need to be settled in private before the details can be made public. Last February my head was full of the fact that Tracy Hickman wanted to work with us on a book, but until the ink was signed on a contract it was not wise to be going “squeee!” on the internet. The privacy saves everyone trouble. It saves fans from being excited about a project that never happens. It saves us from explaining repeatedly why the project won’t happen. Even more important is not having to discuss all the details of internal business decisions and argue with folks who want to armchair business manage. Energy spent explaining business decisions could much better be spent creating comics or writing blog entries.

So the fact that my head is full of business things I can not talk about is normal. Unfortunately sometimes those business thoughts jostle about and are so noisy that I can hardly find any other thoughts. The good news Howard and I both have the same problem and so conversations about business thoughts are a large percentage of all our communications. We pull these yammering thoughts out of our heads and toss them around until we find solutions. I can’t imagine running a business without a partner whom I trust completely and who I can depend upon to still like me even when I quash his shiny idea. Even better are the times when his shiny idea runs right over my doubt and proves that the shininess is actually golden, which is what happened with the ACEO sketch cards. At this point the balance is honed over years of practice in communication and in making business decisions. We always come to a consensus before moving forward.

But even with frequent conversations with Howard, the business thoughts still linger. Sometimes they bounce around like hyper-active hamsters. Other times they loom like a storm cloud. There are even days when they just slump in untidy piles where I am likely to trip on them. Then there are the days where I’m watching looming, while dodging hamsters and trying not to trip. Those are stressful days, particularly if I have to handle parenting and household tasks simultaneous to all the watching and dodging. Those are the days when my life feels like too much to handle. The difficult days are balanced by the days when I am exhilarated by the cool things I get to do and the times when I am awed by the amount of support our business receives from fans. Sometimes my life feels overwhelming, but I chose all of these things and I wouldn’t want to give them up.

Back when the first sprouts of Spring poked out of the ground I made a decision.  I decided that this was not a year for me to stress over gardening.  There were too many other things in my life and so I did not even try.  I didn’t plant vegetables.  I handed off the lawn mowing to the two oldest kids.  I hardly even went outside.  This was critically necessary during the insane Springtime months.  It remained necessary during the busy summer.  It was the right choice.  I didn’t even miss it, or so I told myself.  True, I did not spend time looking longingly at the garden and wishing to weed, what I did instead was feel depressed.  Every time I walked past the weeds in my front yard, I felt a small twinge of failure.  This was greatly alleviated when my mother came to visit and gave my front garden a make-over.  That lifted my spirits immeasurably, which should have told me something.

I took the lifted spirits and went back to working a lot.  Even when business activities slowed down this Fall, I found myself emotionally tangled by parenting responsibilities.  I continued to ignore the lawn and garden.  But Kiki has also been having a rough time, which meant that the back lawn got longer and longer.  This morning I hauled out the mower.  I mowed the edges, then Link mowed the middle.  I thought it was just something that needed done, a chore.  But as I mowed past all the plants in my back garden, thoughts and plans rolled over me.  I have a relationship with all the green things which surround my house.  I have tended them.  Most of them, even the trees, I dug holes for and planted with my own hands.  They are all wrapped up with memories and plans and dreams.  I feel bad when I see them struggling.  I feel joy when I see them thriving.  Just being outside reminded me of all this.  When I handed over the mower, I stayed outside to pick up the pears that had fallen to the ground.  I looked up at the pear tree I planted with my own hands.  It dwarfs me now.

How is it that I keep forgetting gardening is solace to my soul?  I keep forgetting that time spent outside in my garden adds light and peace to my life.  There will be times when I am too busy, but when I am not busy, I need to get out there.  I need to be in the sunlight touching the plants, digging the dirt, breathing outside air.

The best thing about gardening is that the plants do not sit idle while I am too busy to tend them.  They grow and struggle and find ways to thrive.  Such is the case with the grapevine I planted 5 years ago.  I planted it, but never quite built the arbor I intended for it.  So it mounded and ran along the ground, then up a bush.  I’ve paid it some passing attention.  We picked the grapes we found last year, but many of them had been eaten by birds.  This is because the birds know a good thing when they find it.  These are delicious grapes.  Once I was done picking up pears (two boxes and more still on the tree), I sent Kiki out with a pair of scissors and instructions to pick all the grapes.  She kept coming back in for additional bowls.  In the end we had four big bowls full.

It was far more grapes than we can eat before they go bad.  So I pulled out my food dryer and arranged grapes to be dried into raisins.  All Fall I’ve been telling myself that I don’t have time for this kind of thing.  That canning and food drying are more trouble than they are worth to me.  From a financial standpoint this is true.  However I found immense satisfaction from washing and prepping grapes, even more so because I know these are grapes from a vine I planted with my own hands.  This kind of task connects me with my ground and with the generations of food-storing women who came before me.  It reminds me that all my blogging, and computing, and inventory keeping should only be part of who I am.  Computer time is all eyes and brain.  My life needs to contain activities with smells, tastes, and touches as well.  I need to spend time hot, cold, sticky, sweaty, dirty, all of which sound unpleasant in bare words, but all of which can contribute to a feeling of wholeness, of well being.

I know not everyone has the emotional connection with plants and gardening that I do.  Not everyone can find wholeness pulling weeds.  But I think everyone does have something that fills them up.  We just need to not forget it.  We need to make time for it, what ever “it” may be.   Because, as I rediscovered today, time spent in a wholeness activity adds energy to everything else.  Even while it uses up time, it makes accomplishing everything else more possible.

It should not have surprised me that after nearly a week of highly focused schedule keeping, I had two days where I let everything slip.  None of us broke any rules, but I let the schedule slump into an untidy heap and there was lots of wiggle room without technically breaking any rules.  We still more or less got to bed on time.  Homework got more or less done.  Chores were skipped.  And both Howard and I played instead of working.  This kind of a day is good to have every once in awhile.  The fact that I’m now working on my second day of slumpiness indicates some things.

I need more exercise.
I need to get out of my house more, especially when the weather is nice.
I need to be getting more sleep. (Staying up too late makes tomorrow worse without making today any better.)
I need to put things into my schedule that I look forward to doing.
I need to be cautious about time slurping games.

I have a three day weekend.  Hopefully I can use it to recharge.

In adventure/drama movies there is often a scene where Character X is desperate/overwrought/frantic and Character Z must attempt to restrain  X from an action that would be detrimental.  Sometimes it is one person stopping another from running into a burning building.  Sometimes it is one person stopping another from diving into a fight.  The key is that Z restrains while X struggles, flails, and beats upon Z in an effort to escape restraint.  The crisis passes and the scene moves on.  We frequently get to watch how X regains composure, but it is not often that the film shows the effect of this moment on Z.   Character Z had to stand there and be pummeled.  Z had to hold tight and not get pulled off balance.  Z frequently has no clue whether thanks or blame will be coming later.  When all is said and done, Z must be tired, bruised, sore, and emotionally wrung.

I have a lot of sympathy for Z.  I’ve been Z.  I have never had a dramatic moment such as those in film, but I can not count the number of times that I have physically restrained a flailing child, often for the child’s safety.  It isn’t always physical either.  Of late the battleground has been homework and Link has been playing the part of X.  He twists, and mopes, and throws pencils, and deliberately provokes others, and breaks pencils, and yells, and whines.  It is all flailing in an effort to escape restriction.  My job is to hold tight and require him to do the work.  Unsurprisingly, once he stops fighting it, the work goes quickly and fairly easily.  Then Link skips away, free to squabble with siblings over games instead.  I am left feeling pummeled, bruised, sore, and emotionally wrung.

This will not last forever.  I know it won’t.  Kiki had a similarly bad patch when she was in 5th and 6th grades.  It passed.  I’ve got the Kiki experience to draw upon, so I’m better equipped to handle it.  At the moment things are bad because I had a meeting with his teacher on Monday and we figured out how to require him to get work done.  Link has been educationally cornered, thus the flailing.  Each evening the flailing is less.  Each conflict gives me clues about how to manage better.  How to anticipate, prepare, prevent.  But there is so much to manage all at once.  Link is not the only child with homework.  I may have to move the Link homework battles into the after school hours to leave space for the Gleek/Kiki/Patch homework battles in the after dinner hour.  Last Spring the post-dinner hour was a very pleasant time of day.  At the moment it is the most grueling.  It uses up my patience so the kids have a cranky mommy at bedtime.  I need to shuffle so that Nice Mommy gets to do bedtime instead.

It is hard to stand firm and not be pulled off balance.  It is particularly hard when the other person is simultaneously trying to flail their way free and really hoping that you stay strong.  Kids want to know that parents will stay calm and firm for the things that are right.  Link would love to escape his writing homework, but he would also feel bad about not doing it.  He needs me to take the pummeling calmly.  He needs me to stand firm.  Later, when the battle is over it is okay for him to see that standing firm wore me out, but in the moment he needs to see calm assurance.  I just wish it didn’t make me so tired.

I’ve been dealing with some tiring stuff this past week.  None of it is difficult or drama laden.  I just get worn down by the one-thing-after-another with few breaks in between.  I am worn down by the end of most days.  Often I feel like crying.  The parenting load is particularly heavy because of the time I spend worrying about long term repercussions of the day’s decisions.

My tiredness does not change the fact that I am much happier this Fall than I was last Summer or Spring.  I am still buried under things to do, things which wear me out, things which tax my capabilities, but last Spring I kept sacrificing important things to manage urgent things.  Now I am spending most of my days on the things which have long term importance to me. The difference is huge.  Even when I am so tired I want to sit and cry, I feel calm.  At peace.  Life is not easy, but it is good.

The good news is that things are going to get even better.  The kids have already settled in to the school year, but as we keep going they’ll get practiced at interpreting the desires of their teachers.  They’ll internalize the expectations and make meeting them habitual.  All of that will take time.  Some days are going to be harder than others, but on the whole I think we’ll see slow improvement in the next few months.  Status quo through Thanksgiving sounds really good to me.  After that we’ll be headed for Holiday shipping and the finishing touches on a book.  December is always busy.

From the moment I send friends away so we could have dinner and homework, Link transformed into the walking manifestation of contrary.  From refusing to come for dinner until I scolded him at high volume, to making a whining screech when anyone dared speak to him, to shooting dirty looks at everyone, Link made Oscar the Grouch look like Mr. Rogers.  I got frustrated quickly, but I noticed that any angry response to his behavior only made things worse.  Link was looking for a fight.  I knew why.  He had a writing assignment and he was mad at the world about it.  He hates writing.  Unfortunately for him, this is the year that I have decided that he must practice writing.  He’s significantly below grade level and I’m convinced that this can be remedied if only we can force him to actually practice instead of avoid.  He was attempting to continue to avoid writing by making the experience so unpleasant that I would give up.  This was not a conscious effort on his part.  He was not aware that this was why he was being so awful.

The solution was for me to clear the room of all other people except me and Link.  He was trying to provoke reactions which would distract us all from the assignment.  I denied him those reactions.  I even told the other kids that this was what I was doing while Link was listening.  Then I remained calm and insistent while bringing him back on task.  I rewarded effort by providing drinks of milk or snacks.  I praised where I could and did not react to bad behaviors.  It took an exhausting 90 minutes, but the assignment got done.  (Amusingly the assignment was to write about school subjects he hated.)  Then Link stomped off to his room.

I turned my attentions to the other kids.  It was not long before Link was back.  He had calmed down and was very apologetic for all the trouble he had caused.  He felt really bad about it.  He even made a plan to make things up to everyone.  I think the right lessons were learned.  I just hope that the penitence can last long enough to get him established in the habit of writing without being completely upset about it.  But even if the penitence doesn’t last, my determination needs to.  This is what my son needs from me right now.  He needs me to make him do this thing he hates enough so that it gets easier for him.  Once it is easier, I think he will stop hating it so much.

I predict a string of exhausting homework times ahead.

An excerpt from an email I wrote this morning:
Most of what I write these days is blog entries about small stuff.  It took me a long while to really get the fact that life is mostly constructed of small stuff, that small stuff matters. Little happinesses can make all the difference in the world.  Little dreams are wonderful because they are attainable.  I can go a very long way merely by chasing little dream after little dream.  I don’t need to change the world.  I can just change me.  Me being different may have an effect on the world, or it may not, but it definitely gives me peace and happiness.

Last year I was lousy at making kids get their homework done because I was too insanely busy to do more than a token effort.  This year is offering me the opportunity to atone for that neglect.  The good news is that the heavier load is an indicator that my kids are being challenged academically this year.  Kiki is learning how to tone down her perfectionism and how to time manage for an array of assignments both small and large.  Link is going to be miserable while he is forced to practice both spelling and writing regularly.  Gleek is having her first experience with reports and regular homework.  Patch is thrilled to have homework at all, and wishes he had more of it, except on the days when he does not want to do any.  All of the above requires my active participation, sometimes simultaneously.

Mondays are going to continue to be hard because of the marathon organizational run from beginning dinner all the way until bedtime.  Most evenings will have something of a break between homework and bed.   I hope.  Or I shall be cranky.

I’m sure there are important insights to be made from all of this, but I’m too tired to give them coherence.  Three spelling lists, two spelling assignments, one reading book, one book report, one grammar paper, two maps, two math sheets, and one writing assignment are enough to fry my brain.