august 2020: what I’m learning and loving

Trying to get back on my monthly WILL bandwagon…I started sharing weekly-ish thoughts over here if you want to check those out – subscribe if you want them delivered right to your inbox!

What I’m loving

Choppers. During #covid19season, the kids have been helping out more in the kitchen – Maeve because she wants to, and Jasper because he has been told to. They want to help chop stuff, but I have to keep an eagle eye on them especially with stuff like onions. So I decided to buy two different choppers that would enable them to chop on their own without much supervision to see which one we liked better, thinking that we would keep one and return the other. Well, we’re kind of obsessed with both of them – oops:

• Chef n’ Chop. We use this one mostly for making pico de gallo and guacamole because you just throw everything in there, pull the string a few times, and voila! Delicious pico in about 47 seconds that we eat straight out of the bowl we made it in.
• Chopper Pro. I have been using the heck out of this one for canning season. It makes uniform pieces (“so satisfying!” as the kids say) of peppers, onions, potatoes, cucumbers, and more I’m sure but those are the ones I’ve tried lately with tons of success. The kids love it too, it’s easy to clean up. As a bonus, I love it for freezing and canning hot peppers because I don’t have to touch them as much so I’m less likely to get burned.

This clock. Our range doesn’t have a clock on it, and our microwave lives in a cabinet, so we haven’t had a clock in our kitchen area for the last three years or so. It annoyed me, but I also hate traditional clocks. For whatever reason, it always feels like I’m doing math reading them. It’s like a block in my brain or something. When school started this year, I noticed that the kids sometimes didn’t realize how much time they were taking to eat and get ready and would always be asking Grant or me what time it was. I decided that we needed a clock in the kitchen, and I wanted a digital one. I found this, put it on the island where it fits in just right, and we all are surprised at how much we appreciate having an easy spot to find the time. $20 well spent!

DrinkMate Soda Maker. I have a little bit of a problem with Waterloo and La Croix: I love them so much. But the amount of cans in our recycling bin was really beginning to irk me, so I started looking into alternatives. We used to have a hand-me-down Soda Stream, but it never got fizzy enough for me. I did some research and landed on the DrinkMate instead because you can carbonate anything, not just water. With the old Soda Stream, we would carbonate the water and then add some lemon juice or something similar, but it would always lose so much of its carbonation in the process.

With the DrinkMate, I fill up the bottle with about 95 percent water (from our reverse osmosis filter, so likely better than whatever was used for my precious Waterloos) and then add a tablespoon of juice or simple syrup – and then carbonate the whole thing. (And then I drink the whole thing and start all over again 🙂 Because it gets really fizzy, we love just plain carbonated water too (it is as bubbly and refreshing as Topo Chico!).

So far, my favorite add-ins have been: 100 percent grapefruit juice, a whole lemon squeezed, ginger and lime simple syrup, and blueberry simple syrup. For the simple syrup, I just boil the fruit or ginger – about a 1/2 cup of fruit or about a dozen thick slices of ginger to about two cups of water. Once it has cooked down by half, I add a a few tablespoons of sugar. It is just barely sweet, but the sugar will keep the syrup preserved for at least a week or so in the fridge, which gives me plenty of ways to drink it in my various carbonated concoctions.

If you’re looking to drink more water and/or cut down on your La Croix habit, I highly recommend my new toy.

What I’m learning

Swimming against the current. Our old pastor used to say that if you weren’t actively swimming against the current of culture, you’d get taken away downstream. You can’t just stay still. (I actually think stillness itself is a practice that is about as counter-cultural as it gets, but that is another post entirely). The more I’ve learned about “the water we swim in” as Americans, especially white Americans, I have noticed his analogy mostly bears out. To that end, I need to be studying, learning, and questioning consistently in order to see my own blindspots and cultural conditioning. Some things I’ve loved lately that have helped me keep swimming upstream, so to speak:

• Seeing White season from Scene On radio. Required listening for every white American, if you ask me.
• Glennon’s Untamed. I read this at the beginning of quarantine, and it has helped me unravel some of those things that I always accepted as just the way things are.
• Sandra Van Opstal on the Inverse podcast (which is quickly becoming a new favorite).
• Listening to and discussing Clayton Byrd Goes Underground with the kids (thoughts on audiobooks with the kids here).
• SO many (free!) teachers on Instagram (pay the ones you learn the most from!):
  • Lisa Sharon Harper – I love her for her grasp of history and how she connects current problems to their roots
  • Sandra Van Opstal – Grant and I heard her preach at Evolving Faith, and I’ve loved her fiery-ness ever since.
  • Latasha Morrison – she is a great all-around teacher.
  • Austin Channing Brown – She preached one of the best sermons I’ve ever heard at Evolving Faith, and I’ve been a fan ever since.
  • Christena Cleveland – following her on Instagram makes my brain explode
  • Maria Beecham – she breaks down seemingly complicated or confusing topics into easy-to-understand bites. As a bonus, she has helped me to really see some of my biases that I was clueless of.
  • Black Coffee With White Friends – she makes me think, and I just really think we’d be friends IRL

Rest and joy are part of the resistance – and integral parts of what it means to be human. One thing I’ve been learning as I’ve tried to broaden my consumption of books, movies, music, and other art from people who don’t look like me is how much I have to learn from other ways of looking at the world. Black and indigenous cultures especially have so much to teach me about rest and joy; about what it means to be a human being instead of a human doing; about loving myself for who I am and not what I accomplish. Whatever you want to call this work, while some of it is hard and heavy, much of it has shown me how much I’ve been missing from only seeing the world from my white, upper-middle-class American lens.

Grant and I talk often about how raising our kids with a feminist mindset is just as important, if not more important, for Jasper as it is for Maeve. It enables Jasper to show up as his whole self, not just the masculine parts of himself that society finds acceptable or puts on a pedestal. The work of dismantling white supremacy and patriarchy in ourselves has similar benefits for us all – allowing us to see our own blind-spots, yes, but also giving our whole selves permission to show up and be loved and accepted, instead of cutting off parts of ourselves that white supremacy and patriarchy don’t find acceptable.

Find your “love novel.” One of my coping mechanisms during #covid19season has been reading A TON of romance novels (I lost count, but I have to be nearing 100). I usually read them on my Kindle via the library, but occasionally get the print versions from the library too. Jasper and Maeve are completely mortified by the covers. My favorites are the “Regency” romance novels – think dukes and earls and lots of balls, so the covers are cheesy but not too scandalous. They kept making fun of my “love novels” as Maeve calls them, and I got irritated one day and snapped back at them that a big reason I’ve been reading them so much is because 1) I think they’re fun and 2) the definition of romance novels is that they have to have a happily ever after. I told the kids that in the year 2020, I desperately need some guaranteed happy endings (get your mind out of the gutter!). Read this for all of the scientific data to back-up what I was telling the kids.

Similar to my thoughts about about joy and rest, I realized that the kids were falling prey to something that I’ve been really fighting against personally but also in teaching them: that their worth is not determined by what they do or accomplish. My own judginess about reading romance novels stems from my having bought into the idea that my time needs to spent purposefully – and reading romance novels is not good for anything except for fun.

So here’s my challenge for you: figure out what your version of my “love novel” (as Maeve would say) is. That thing that you enjoy doing just because it makes you happy afterwards, but it isn’t checking off any box on a to do list, it doesn’t make you more productive or efficient, and it brings you joy. Things that I think we’re tempted to call “guilty pleasures,” but even the title of guilty pleasures is maddening because it implies that we should feel guilty about something that brings us pleasure! GRRR! Obviously, there are some caveats to this like maybe don’t do cocaine or have sex with 27 people just because it brings you pleasure, but most of us aren’t walking around doing those things. Most of us are burnt out and then feel guilty when we do things just because they make us happy. Start noticing the things in your life that bring you joy – and start seeking out more of that stuff.

Your turn – what are you loving and learning lately?!