Showing Up is the Hardest Part

Hej, friends, happy February! When I was growing up, February was one of my least favorite months. It’s in the grind of school and ski racing; far enough from the beginning that the newness has worn off and yet far enough from the end that the last frenzied joyful rush hasn’t started yet. But this year I can say that February has been pretty good.

Adventurer

It just keeps snowing, and I am HERE FOR IT. I will shovel every day; Peter loves to follow me around making footprints and playing in the snow. I will haul all the gear to the Nordic Center to get out for a little while. I just love the snow! Jonathan and I have had a couple of amazing days of skiing, courtesy of friends and families watching Peter for us. And Peter’s been skiing!!!

He’s…not entirely sure about this process. We’ve tried three times, and we definitely need to go back to the Nordic Center (pictured) rather than the park down the street. The park is closer, but I underestimated how important the grooming would be to Peter’s comfort and stability.

Each time we’ve gone, we’ve done three or four super short runs; this takes maybe twenty or thirty minutes. It’s short. The same is true when I ski with Peter in the Burley; sometimes I barely ski for as long as it took me to set the Burley up! But my endgame is repeat exposure for Peter. I want going outside to be normal for him, and I want to stop while he’s still having fun. It’s just about showing up for a little while and then having snacks in the back of the car.

As you might have noticed from the title, I’m a big fan of showing up right now. In adventure-land, it means getting out and doing the thing. I’ve spent a lot of time waiting because I didn’t think I was strong enough. I’m probably not strong enough; my knee still hurts sometimes and I was exhausted after Jonathan and I toured up our local hill. But just doing PT exercises is not super motivating to me; going skiing and seeing just how much farther I can push it today compared to yesterday is motivating. Hearing Peter giggle in the trailer is motivating. I’m still doing the work and exercising at home, but I’m not waiting anymore for some magic finish line to go have fun.

Nerd

Remember all those lovely novels I told you I got for Christmas? They’re still mostly unopened. This seems to have been the month for working on writing rather than reading! We just wrapped up the review weekend for Kaleidoscope, the biannual education journal I help to edit. We have some really amazing pieces this time and I had so much fun working with the authors to get them ready to go! It’s a long turnaround time to actually seeing them in print, but I’m really excited for it.

I also last night submitted an application to be a member of the team that runs Tales of a Mountain Mama, a blog and website that supports moms in getting their kids outside. I’ve been using this resource for over a year to give me ideas for getting Peter outside successfully, and I’m super excited/nervous/generally bouncy about this opportunity! The answer’s always no until you ask, my grandpa taught me, and that’s what applying is. It’s about showing up. And if I don’t get the spot? I had a ball writing the application. It really helped me clarify and articulate why I love going outside and why I want Peter to love going outside.

I’ve been doing a lot of this writing in a rediscovered favorite realm; the coffee shop. There is a small local place called Kaffe Merc ten minutes from my house, and it’s a really cool atmosphere! I’ve been going early in the morning on weekends a lot recently while Jonathan gets Peter up and plays with them for a little while, and it’s felt really good to have some time to focus and to really feel like I have the opportunity to be nerdy me. Walking into Kaffe Merc is a physical “showing up” that makes the mental showing up a lot easier.

Old Lady/Hobbit

This…has been hard. But I can finally say progress on the kitchen is being made! In fact, the kitchen should be done TOMORROW. I COULD COOK DINNER. IN MY KITCHEN. TOMORROW!!!

(Please note that “done” means the construction company will have finished their work. They’ve been amazing. But there will still be all the other stuff…like repairing and refinishing the hardwood floors, finishing up the massive amount of electrical work that Jonathan heroically did in two days, putting the new lights in the living room ceiling, building shelves for the pantry, planning and creating the tiny mudroom space between the pantry and garage door, wiping out the cabinets that spent the last month and a half in the garage, putting away all the stuff that’s been in boxes downstairs…this could be a very long list. Anyhow.)

I mentioned in my last blog post that the silver lining of all of this has been finding out how much my friends are here to support me. The most recent example: yesterday, my friend Rebecca and I (and Peter and her son Daxon, seven months old) went to Home Depot to buy six huge sheets of plywood to go underneath the flooring. We had one cart for the boys and one cart for the plywood, and we picked out our sheets and loaded them into her truck all by ourselves. Peter thought the whole process was a show just for him.

But it’s also been hard on one of the most important relationships I have, the one with Jonathan. Neither one of us has had much, if any, free time to just be Jamie or Jonathan in the last week. We haven’t had the time or energy to do a good job communicating, especially because I’ve taken Peter out of the house during all the banging and sawing and noise and dust.

And you know what I needed to do here? You guessed it. Show up. Our hard spots got softer when we listened to each other. They also got easier as the intensity of this project eased up a little bit; turns out Jonathan did around $8000 worth of electrical work in two days to get the wiring done before the construction crew needed to close the walls up. Now we have even more time (although neither of us has our energy back yet) to show up for each other and it’s so much better.

Musings

A couple of weeks ago I spent around twenty minutes searching for a very particular necklace. I’ve worn this necklace almost every day since June of 2012, with the exception of the last year and a half or so. I stopped wearing it when I had a tiny Peter resting on my chest and breastfeeding and then grabbing and I hadn’t really ever started wearing it again.

So…why, you ask, does she wear a Norwegian coin, a kroner, as a necklace? Let me tell you a story.

For my spring semester of my junior year of college, in 2012, I studied abroad in Sweden. For a whole lot of reasons beyond this particular narrative, I didn’t take advantages of all the opportunities I had living abroad, and I knew it even then while I was there. Then my mom came to visit for the last two weeks of my stay, and boy did we have a ball! We spent a week traveling through Norway and then the last week of my time traveling around Sweden. We went to museums and cafes and rode bikes to old churches and celebrated Midsommar with traditional food and dances and wove flower crowns and hiked and generally had a wonderful time. This is usually what happens when Mom and I get turned loose to travel together.

We rode the train from Stockholm to Oslo to start our Norwegian adventures. As we pulled into the station, I realized I’d forgotten to draw a map of the city in my notebook. I hated standing out, and having a map flapping around in the breeze is a great way to look like a dumb tourist. I’d gotten in the habit of drawing maps so I could look at my notebook instead. But without my map, we stopped by the information center in the Oslo train station and picked one up. As Mom was chatting with the nice guy at the desk, she asked if anything was going on in Oslo that we might find fun.

He thought for a minute. “There is a world festival, and a ceremony starting soon, in an hour I think, for a Nobel Peace Prize. It was awarded years ago, but she couldn’t come get it because she was under house arrest in Burma. I don’t remember her name…” he trailed off.

Mom and I stared at each other, incredulous. “Aung San Suu Kyi?” Mom asked.

He brightened. “Yes, that is her! I can show you on the map where to go.” And he did, circling that and several other locations of interest.

Outside the train station, Mom and I huddled over our precious map. We quickly realized we did not have time to check in to our hotel, so we just carried our backpacks on a brisk walk across Oslo. We saw Aung San Suu Kyi give her acceptance speech for her Nobel Peace Prize, twenty-one years after it had been awarded. I still have the notes I took in the notebook I was carrying with me. It was amazing.

Afterwards, we walked back across most of Oslo to our hotel to finally drop our backpacks off before figuring out something for dinner. We were both giggly and giddy with the good fortune we’d had to see such a cool event! We could have easily wandered around Oslo and never known the world fair was happening. It was because Mom is unafraid to ask. She’s incredible at making connections with new people and searching out cool opportunities. She shows up.

I started wearing my kroner a few days later as a reminder to be brave. To show up. It’s a reminder I need a lot. But all the best things in my life have happened when I was feeling brave, when I showed up, when I was open to opportunity. I’ve been very glad to wear it again. Who knows what I’ll have to report next month!

Hej då,

Jamie