Happy Easter!

Happy Easter from the Kelleys! 

Maddening March Madness

If you follow college basketball, you know that we're now in the Sweet Sixteen round of the NCAA tournament. Usually, I am following the games with much excitement. Matt and I have a great time filling out our brackets and cheering both for the teams we love and whatever team whose win would put us ahead of the other in our family pool.

Ten days or so ago, we were all geared up. Our fridge was stocked with pizza and beer. Our pantry had plenty of chips on the shelf and three tournament brackets taped to the door. Matt's was filled out with the help of insight from Sports Center, regular season stats, and a dash of team loyalty. I use my gut and a little more loyalty (which often beats Matt's carefully-researched picks, nonetheless). Kate uses an even gutsier gut, which frequently chooses 16-seed teams to beat number ones, and a number of 15-2 upsets. She's among the few Americans to have correctly picked #14 Harvard's win over #3 New Mexico, as well as Florida Gulf Coast's Cinderella run. Amazing.

And now it's all blown to bits.

Kentucky (my family's team) didn't even make the tournament this year, despite winning it all last year. Then Memphis (Matt's family's team) lost in the first round and Butler—Matt's alma mater and all of our choice to win it all—lost in the second round. So I don't really care anymore, but I'm very bummed to not be caring, if that makes any sense.

All three of us have lost three of our Final Four picks. I guess I'll be rooting for Kansas, since that's the one I have remaining. Matt and Kate have Louisville and Duke, respectively, both of which we collectively despise. (Louisville is enemy of both UK and Memphis. Matt's mom was alarmed when she learned Matt was dating a Louisvillian, until she learned I'm from a family of Wildcats, not Cardinals. And Duke is evil.)

We're a lot more focused on Holy Week and Easter festivities this weekend anyway, so it's just as well that basketball is off my radar.

I hope you all have a very happy Easter, made more meaningful by some reflection on Christ's crucifixion today. . . and if your team is still in the tourney, I hope you're happy with that as well (grumble, grumble).

If you made it to the end of this post, you must be a sports fan, so I'll mention something I forgot to when announcing my virtual Thirty-One party the other day: Thirty-One has a collegiate line! So if you or someone you buy gifts for is a college sports fan, a thermal tote or game day bag with their favorite team's colors and logo would be perfect! Check it out and remember to place your order by Monday at noon. Go team!

WMW: Leaning In

Have you been hearing all the buzz about Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead? This new book by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has been getting a lot of press and apparently sold 140,000 in its first week.

I haven't read it, but I'm following the media discussion with great interest. Sandberg's premise seems to be that women need to stop trying so hard to be "nice" in the workplace and stop worrying about the common double-standard by which an assertive man is considered a strong, confident leader, but an assertive woman is considered a bitch. Then again, a lot of her advice, apparently, advocates walking a fine line: be assertive, while being "eternally pleasant." (There go my chances :0)

Lauren Hansen of TheWeek.com gives this helpful synopsis (followed by a good run down of the most well-reasoned arguments flying around about the book):

Sandberg posits that due to forces both internal and external, women make small decisions throughout their career that impede their progress. Whether it's planning ahead for a family, feeling obligated to think of others before themselves, or shying away from their triumphs, women's degenerative choices over time have resulted in the gender as a whole earning only 77 cents for every dollar men make, and holding only "a meager twenty-one" of the Fortune 500 CEO positions.

A lot of the criticism of Sandberg's book seems to be that it is "elitist," seeming to take for granted opportunities and luxuries that have enabled her to get to the top. I've read some insightful responses, including one from a Latina perspective, and one about how Sandberg has a very 1970s approach to gender differences.

The conversation around Lean In has also brought more attention to the question of whether women who "opt out" of the workplace to stay home are doing so because they really want to or because—for whatever reason—it is hard for women to succeed in business. Or as Lisa Belkin, author of a well known article from ten years ago called "The Opt-Out Revolution," says, now rethinking her 2003 assertion: "most women who leave the workforce are more pushed than pulled."

I read all this with great interest, having recently halfway-opted-out myself to become a freelance editor and writer. I'm still working quite a bit, but with a lot more flexibility than before. And I'm loving it. I keep saying it's the "best decision I ever made." I control my own schedule, work on a wider variety of projects, and enjoy the satisfaction that comes from gaining new clients. I am more available to my kids and (when we have them) foster kids, making breakfast in the mornings and having dinner started when they get home, not to mention sick and snow days. Our marriage is stronger and happier, presumably because I am more relaxed and we have more time for just the two of us, having lunch on his day off, working in a coffeeshop together on his sermon writing days, etc. And—a plus for an introverted pastor's wife—I am less resentful and drained by all the time we spend at church because I have had plenty of "alone time" while I'm working.

My decision to leave my old job was motivated by a desire for more flexibility and work/home balance, but my new situation is so fulfilling, it's sure hard to think of it as a Plan B. So, according to Belkin, was I "pulled" home by the desire to better care for my family, or was I "pushed" by the corporate environment?

Belkin says,  

"Had their workplaces been ones that adapted to a world in which workers no longer have other halves (read: wives) focusing on home so that they can focus on the job, and where technology could be used to free employees from their desks physically rather than tethering them metaphorically, and where the "ideal worker" was understood to have priorities outside of the office — in other words, if they'd had a third path — they might well have taken it."

I'd probably call the path I'm taking a "third path," but I know that's not possible for everyone. I wonder if people are really making a false dichotomy between "leaning in" and "opting out." When I first heard about Lean In, I thought, "That's a book I would have eaten up a year ago," but I figured it no longer applied to me. I stopped climbing the corporate ladder when I opted to work from home, right? My husband quickly disagreed. "Being your own boss sure sounds like leaning in to me. And you've got the corner office—overlooking the neighborhood pool, no less!"

I'd like to say "leaning in" can mean actively pursuing a career life that works for you, whatever that means; but it's not my term to redefine. All I know is that the combination of push and pull that leads a woman to make a change does not necessarily have to derail her professional success and fulfillment.

Show and Tell: Thirty-One Bags

This week, I want to "show and tell" you about my Thirty-One bags. My friend Nancy has been a fan for years, and she finally rubbed off on me. In the last year, these things have become some of the most useful and used items in our house.

If you're not familiar with Thirty-One, you might call it the Mary Kay or Pampered Chef of lugging and organizing. My consultant (that's another fun thing about companies like this—you have your consultant :0) Allison got married this month (yay!) and since she wouldn't be able to do as many parties as usual, with all that vowing and honeymooning, I thought a virtual party might be in order!

So let me tell you about some of my favorite things (and a few special bonuses at the very end!) They're all pretty, but more importantly in my mind, very practical. So I don't feel too indulgent spending money on them, and they make great gifts! (Mother's Day will be here before you know it!)

I use my Large Utility Tote for groceries and other random stuff I might need to take somewhere (Christmas presents to the in-laws' house, a huge pack of diapers and other baby gear when going out of town...).

I actually got the black damask one last fall because I loved our pool bag so much and wanted one for everyday use. I got my first LUT (Large Utility Tote) two years ago when we moved into our new house and would be going to the neighborhood pool a lot. This thing holds everything! We took it on our beach trip and saw so many other families with the same bag (in different fabrics, of course, since there are a bunch of options). I put the bunch of bananas next to it just to give a sense of scale. It's huge!

Here's my black one holding all the groceries for our food pantry challenge a few weeks ago. That's a lot of food!

My other most-used bag is this Keep-It Caddy, which I use as our family lunch box to take leftovers, utensils, and paper products to church every Tuesday so we can eat dinner as a family before taking Kate to her gymnastics class. It's not too big to carry around when you've also got a purse, gym bag, and other stuff to lug, and yet you can fit a lot of stuff in it. For a pot luck at church, I once fit a tupperware of veggies, a container of dip, a large jar of spiced pineapple, and the dishes/platters in which to serve all that. This year's version also has pen pockets on the side that would be great for spoons as well.

Note: I see a lot of people using the above caddy as a small diaper bag, which feels very small for a diaper bag, and yet there is plenty of room for diapers, wipes, a spare outfit, and a sippy cup on the side, which is really all you need and doesn't require the digging through a bottomless bag! For a bigger diaper bag, a lot of people are using the new Super Organizing Tote, with its seven pockets and zipper top.

These Littles Carry-All Caddies were gifts from my mom to each of the girls for Christmas, filled with stocking-stuffer type things. I know the girls would love to tote them around with treasures, as kids tend to do, but I've made them our "upstairs-downstairs bags." They sit on the steps to collect items that need to go up to the girls' rooms, and then I load them up with downstairs stuff that has somehow found its way upstairs.  (As you see, shoes seem to end up where they should not quite a bit.)

The Littles caddies are only $12 and so useful. I've seen people use them for remotes in the living room, office supplies on the desk, and creams and such on changing tables. Kate actually mentioned out of the blue how they would be great as trick-or-treat bags, so I'm thinking about getting some in the "black happy dot" pattern and orange monogramming for the girls to use at Halloween!

My treat for myself in December was the Timeless Beauty Bag, for travel, and there are smaller accessory pouches that I'm thinking of getting for the kids to hold her toiletries when we travel.

I hope you'll come to my virtual party! There are also thermal lunch bags, office organizers, duffel bags, purses, and more. And here are two added bonuses:

1. For every $31 you spend, you can get a tote (one of five options) for 50% off! (click "Monthly Specials" on the site for details)
2. My dear Allison—I mean my dear Mrs. Kennedy*—is going to draw one of my virtual guests to get free shipping! 

So come to my party and get some fun, useful stuff for yourself and your loved ones, and maybe get free shipping too! The party will close Monday at noon, so take a look and at the very least get your Mother's Day gifts out of the way! :0)

*Anybody get the Gone With the Wind reference there?

Project Life: January

I'm continuing my monthly approach to memory keeping this year, creating a spread or two featuring our big events and little moments of each month. I just finished February, so let me share January this week and I'll save February for next week. (Feb needs a few more photo edits since I can't show our foster child's face or real name online.)

January in our family is generally a re-settling time, getting back into a routine after Christmas and that "clean" feeling of taking all the Christmas decorations down. (I love holiday decorating, but that uncluttered feeling after the tree and other stuff go away is so refreshing.) Plus, January leads up to Kate's birthday on the 28th, so I usually decorate for her party a week or so early, so we can enjoy it and celebrate the birthday child all week long!

I got the Project Life Mayfield Childhood Mini Kit, which has some cute "prompt" cards and filler cards with fun patters and sayings. Since I do my spreads monthly, I don't need as many supplies, but it's fun to try the new designs for 2013, so this mini kit is perfect. I wish it had two more header cards so I'd have one for each month, but I'll survive.

This first page is both the first of the year and first in a new album, so I wanted it to be simple and pretty, with some good "life right now" photos. I've got Claire with her piggy tails and toothbrush, and sitting in the fridge, as she loves to do. I've got Kate with her birthday sticker and star sunglasses, and looking cool in Claire's bunny hat. Also, the girls together in matching jammies, a "daily routine" prompt card (perfect to set the stage for the new year), and a pic and key card from Matt and my little getaway to the Opryland Hotel. The banner on the mantle was for Kate's birthday. Since we were having her party away from home, I put up the banners I made for her first birthday three years ago to decorate the house.

The first full spread of the year is about Kate's party at Monkey Joe's. I love the pics of the kids in their star sunglasses party favor, and of Kate looking so happy bouncing on the inflatables and when Monkey Jane came in. 

The second spread isn't so pretty, but the left side tells the story of Kate's girly loves right now: Dora (including friend Emery's Dora party), princesses, and Fancy Nancy, plus our favorite board games and a shot of Kate's writing of the whole alphabet. The right side is a short page of Claire's cheesy faces!

After flipping through my 2009-2011 scrapbooks, I realize how much I miss doing full, 12x12 pages highlighting just a few pictures or a single memory. They take a little more time, so I tend to put them off (I have a barely-started page for my friend's baby shower last summer and the baby is now seven months old!) I really want to do more of those this year, so that's my goal, but in the meantime, monthly spreads work for me! 

[I'm linking up today with The Mom Creative's Project Life Tuesday, so if you want more memory-keeping inspiration, click on over!]

My Quotable Kids

I'd always heard (or maybe I heard it once and it became law in my mind) that younger children talk later than the oldest child because the older sibling tends to speak for them. This was certainly the case with my husband and his little brother, who apparently spoke nothing until he was two and then it was a complete sentence.

Claire has really surprised us with her vocabulary. At 16 months, she has probably twice as many words as Kate had at 18 months. (Here's my favorite video ever of Kate, naming body parts at 18 months.) Claire seems to lean toward the verbal and fine motor skills, whereas Kate's gross motor skills were so impressive. At Claire's age, Kate was climbing rope ladders and stuff on big-kid playgrounds, and climbing onto and running back and forth on the coffee table! I remember worrying about Kate's language development a little around age two, but obviously she's fine. Kids just develop at different rates and with different strengths!


Roughly in order of her learning them, here are Claire's words:
Daddy, whoa!, kitty, ball, book, Kate, Mama/Mommy, banana ("nana"), yellow, here, Lila (a classmate), cheese! (a smile, not the food), Popi, Nala, Opa (sorry, Granna--you're the hardest!), nose, eye, teeth, no, mine, thank you, help, shoe ("yoo"), baby, ow, and Elmo (which appears to also mean diaper, since Elmo is on some of her diapers).

She's coming out with a new one every couple days now, and it's so fun to communicate with her more. I write each new word in her My Quotable Kid journal so I'll have a record. (Kate's has lots of funny sayings and sweet memories in it, so I'm glad to have one just for Claire too, so they can each keep their own one day, along with their baby books.)


These days, Kate demonstrates her four-year-old verbal skills with increasing . . . personality, shall we say. She has a few go-to exclamations that make us laugh:

Now a big fan of Dora, Kate says "Aw, man!" like Swiper, but added her own spin to often say, "Aw, manners!"

A while back, Kate learned the expression, "No way, José!" (even asking sometimes about Spanish words by saying, "How does José say _____?") but her PK colors are showing, I guess, because now she likes to say, "No way, Hosea!"

When it comes to exclamations of frustration, we definitely have to watch ourselves. She picked up a bad one about a year ago, but she only did it a few times before our lack of reaction (or very calm, "let's not say that; that's not very nice") dismissed the behavior. She does say, "What the HECK?!" like I do, though. Switching to German isn't a cure-all, since we heard Kate saying "Scheiße" repeatedly the other night. Parent tip: act like they've misunderstood you. "Size of what?" I asked her. This works to defuse annoying sayings too. In our house, "nana nana boo boo" has become "banana banana boom boom."

Combining Kate's strong will with the verbal reasoning skills of a preschooler makes for some difficult arguments as well. Kate picked up the use of double negatives from some teachers at her day care, so we're trying to correct "I don't have no shoes," or whatnot into "I don't have any shoes." And while she tries to tell me "no" is okay because Ms. So-and-so says it (arrgghh!!!) she now corrects herself to say "any" with just a look. But, with the legalistic tendency of a preschooler, the word "no" is now verboten (except in terms of general defiance, of course) so when I happen to say something like, "She has no shoes," Kate will say, "Ah, Mommy, it's 'ANY shoes'!" Then we have to try to explain the concept of a double negative and how you can use a single negative either way, and it just gets complicated.

Some preschool logic is just too hard to argue with. 

Yesterday morning, Kate was telling me she is going to be a princess when she grows up. Matt and I both try to combat this, and explain that princess is not a career (click for the Justice Sotomayor/Abby Cadabby video about that). So, I told Kate how you can't just become a princess, it's usually a family business, and that in our country, we have a president, not a king and queen.

"There are only, like, ten real princesses in the whole world, Kate," I told her, expecting a "nuh-uh" kind of retort.

Instead, she said, "Well, then, I'll be the eleventh."

Show and Tell

I'm starting another new series here on The Parsonage Family, basically designed to showcase random stuff worth sharing. Like the name indicates, Show and Tell is reminiscent of that classic kindergarten activity where you bring in something from home to show your classmates and tell them all about it.

Blogging in general is more or less just a giant exercise in show and tell, so I guess you could say this series is basically an excuse to share more random things than I usually would! Maybe a recipe I've tried or a new craft project, or some other fun thing. I'll invite you to tell about any random thing you want in the comments too!

First off, allow me to introduce our Show and Tell mascot, Sunny. Sunny is a yellow Kennel Kuddlee (a knock off of Pound Puppies, I guess) from the 1980s. I loved Sunny and even wrote his name on our deck in black crayon when I was five, and held him by the ear with my teeth when climbing on the playground monkey bars. I took Sunny for Show and Tell every week in kindergarten. We had weekly themes, like "something blue" or "something green," so I would tie a different colored ribbon around Sunny's neck each week so he would fit the rules. Mrs. Cruickshank finally sent a note home saying I needed to bring something other than Sunny for Show and Tell.

Justice for Sunny! He can appear every week here on The Parsonage Family with no teacher to tell him otherwise :0)

But just in case Mrs. Cruikshank is looking down on us (we were her last class before she died of breast cancer) and wishing we'd share something else, I will point you over to Ministry Matters to see a series of collages I made in 2006 for a Stations of the Cross worship experience at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Matt and I have used these for Holy Week in various churches every year since then, and I finally photographed them so they could be shared more widely and projected during worship.

Here's a sampling of my favorite stations, and you can download all of them, with corresponding scriptures, at Ministry Matters.

Have a blessed Holy Week!