So I’m totally ripping off people like Megan from SortaCrunchy in starting up a monthly “What I’m Into” series. And it’s not even the beginning/end of the month. But I love to get updates on what my favourite bloggers are reading/watching/listening to; so I thought I’d share some of my own recent faves.  In case you’re interested. I want to work one in each month. It’ll be fun!

Books

Like a good White Person, I’ve begun to feverishly read Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables in anticipation of the movie next month. Can you believe I have a Master’s degree in English literature and I’ve never read Les Mis? (My excuse is that it’s not originally an English work.) I’ve never even seen the musical or any other film adaptation, so I’m coming to the story as a complete newbie. I’m only a few chapters into it but I’m already totally sucked in. (Oh Cosette; poor little Cosette!)

I’m also re-reading Montessori from the Start: The Child at Home, from Birth to Age Three, since Lydia’s just entering the phase of life when Montessorians really start to stress practical life activities (i.e. 15 months). I have mixed feelings about the Montessori approach in general, or at least these authors’ interpretation of it; but I’m totally in favour of the whole Practical Life thing. It just really resonates with me.

As a consequence, Ben and I are trying to creatively arrange our home so Lydia can do more things for herself, from washing her hands to changing her clothes.

My book club is still reading When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself, which is challenging me in all sorts of wonderful ways. An excellent resource for folks who want desperately to help people  in need but who are concerned about doing more harm than good.

And I am LOVING the current edition of Conspire Magazine, with its focus on power and empowerment. But I always love Conspire.

Television

We don’t have normal TV in our house, so we can’t ever sit down and just flip through channels. But Ben and I are regular viewers of The Office, New Girl, and Big Bang Theory, which we watch on sketchy websites with troubling pop-ups. (You might not know this about me, but I’m a huge comedy fan. I like to laugh. And oh my goodness, Schmidt, Nick and Jess. They make me howl.)

Thanks to Sarah Bessey, who kept talking it up, Ben and I have also recently gotten hooked on BBC’s Sherlock (via Netflix). We’ve just finished the first season (which is only three mind-blowing episodes), and it took all my willpower to sit down and write tonight rather than go start up season two.

Music

First, I’ll begin by saying what I’m NOT listening to: CHRISTMAS MUSIC. There is not enough good Christmas music out there to merit two full months of hearing it. Instead, we’ll probably start turning on the jingly bells after December 1^st, which is when the tree will go up. One month of Christmas festivities strikes me as reasonable. No more than that.

Otherwise, there’s not much to report in terms of music. I’ve kind of forgotten that it exists, to be honest. Like the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, I’m loving the new Mumford and Sons album, but that’s so unoriginal that it hardly feels worth mentioning.

Web

I’ve mentioned her before, but I just want to re-emphasize how much I’m loving Dr. Markham at AhaParenting. I LOVE her parenting advice. Her writing is so accessible, but so full of wisdom. A recent post that I found superb was The Cure for Whining. So practical; such a beautiful and loving way to deal with such a dreadful problem.

I also really appreciated Michele’s recent post on babywearing, where she offers incredibly detailed stories and tips from her personal experiences. I am now so pumped to try a woven wrap with my next baby.

Movies

Haven’t seen anything worth mentioning lately. But I am crazy-excited about The Hobbit next month (who isn’t?); and I think I’m crazy-excited about Les Miserables, too (decision on feelings pending the completion of the book. I’m scared it’s going to be too sad and I’m just going to bawl through the whole thing. It’s called The Miserable Ones, for goodness sake.)

Well, that’s it for now!

How about you? What are you into this month? And can anyone please tell me whether Les Mis is going to be one big cry-fest, or can I look forward to some joy? Be aware that you’re talking to the girl who sobbed during the last scene of The Little Mermaid when she was five, and threw The Mill on the Floss  across the room at its conclusion because it was too sad.)

Hi folks! I’m just writing in to say that I’ve been wandering through these last few days with my head lost in autumn, and I only just realized it today.

I’ve been enjoying myself — having coffee with friends; making DIY Christmas gifts with my mom; pillaging thrift shops; learning how to make Lydia laugh until she cries — and also occasionally moping around, complaining about the gray skies and Lydia’s nighttime escapades.

I’ve just been living life.

Which means I’ve been forgetting about the Internet. Whoops.

I’ll be back soon. In the meantime, I hope you’re all doing well and getting geared up for the holidays. This is the first year in many that I’m actually feeling excited about Christmas.

I hope to talk to you all soon. Thanks so much for the delightfully engaging conversation last week. You guys seriously rock. I have the best readers ever.

Lots of love.

–Kathleen

P.S. I got new glasses.  I feel like I now have permission to be as nerdy as the Spirit leads me to be. Everyone will be like, “Well, she’s wearing wayfarers . . . “

It’s still harvest season around here. Which means I’m BUSY.

I love it. I’ve always wanted to live in harmony with the seasons. I’ve always loved the thought of planting in the spring, tending in the summer, harvesting and preserving in the fall, and turning inward in the winter. It’s how our ancestors have lived since the beginning of time.

I recently read (and LOVED) Sharon Astyk’s Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage & Preservation, which got me really revved up for preserving this autumn. (Seriously: read this book. She’s a wonderful writer and so full of wisdom. I loved her Jewish faith-infused perspective on the Welcome Table as well). But my enthusiasm for food storage and preservation has meant putting my art on the back burner for a bit (And never before has the back burner been a more apt metaphor).

In the last week or so, I’ve canned diced tomatoes, tomato sauce and pasta sauce. I’ve chopped and frozen sweet peppers and grated more zucchini for the freezer, too.

I helped butcher three pigs with my parents, my sister, my aunt and my uncle. We made smoked sausage, bacon, ham, liverwurst, and an assortment of Mennonite breakfast delicacies I don’t know the English words for. (Do you remember the “cracklings” described in one of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books? We call it griven, and eat it for breakfast with homemade bread and strawberry jam. It’s kind of like ground-up bacon, except instead of being cured with smoke, is made through a process of slow simmering and stirring in a big cauldron of bubbling lard. It’s to die for.) We also cut pork chops and loin roasts and stew pieces.

After all the cutting, grinding, stuffing, smoking, frying and packaging, which took an entire day, I then had to spend an evening organizing and inventorying my freezers. Which was sorely needed after all the fruits and veggies I recently started storing in there.

In the upcoming weeks, I plan to do more tomato-canning with my mom, before taking care of the squash and the rest of the peppers in the garden. I’m probably forgetting something. Oh, I also want to dry and store all my fresh herbs.

I want so badly to be a farmer as well as a writer and a present parent. But it’s HARD to do it all.

I mentioned on Facebook that all the tomato-canning was making me an impatient mother, and I hate that. And my writing life is almost nonexistent right now.

I’m trying to make peace with the fact that different seasons will require different emphases on these different aspects of my life.

Right now, my time must be devoted primarily to the garden and the kitchen. It will change yet.

I’ll get back to writing more frequently soon.

Are you doing any harvesting or preserving this fall?

Image courtesy of photon_de.

It’s been a busy week around here, with harvest and preserving season in full swing. Peaches, tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, potatoes, onions and squash. I’ve been butchering chickens with my mom, freezing and dehydrating and fermenting fruits and vegetables. Next week I plan to devote a day to tomato canning. It’s also our anniversary this weekend, followed quickly by Lydia’s first birthday.

And then there’s the matter of getting to the beach as many times as possible before the summer is completely over.

So I’m pressing pause on the blog for just a moment.

Be back soon, with my final thoughts on Unconditional Parenting!

What are you doing with your last weeks of summer? (If indeed you are in the northern hemisphere, enjoying the last weeks of summer)

Tuesdays and Thursdays are Kick Over Furniture Days here at the Quiring household.

[If you’re curious, Mondays are Meal-Planning/Grocery/Food-Prep Days; Wednesdays are Gardening and Preserving Days; Fridays are Organizing and Targeted Deep-Cleaning Days; and Saturdays are Housecleaning Days.]

Well, officially, Tuesdays and Thursdays are supposed to be Writing Days, but that’s not quite how they’ve been turning out lately. Lately, I spend so much time pulling gross things out of Lydia’s mouth, prying sharp objects out of her hands, whisking garbage cans away from her searching hands, rescuing her from the edge of the stairs, holding her over the potty, comforting her after tumbles and head-bumps, changing wet diapers, wiping down high chairs, washing my hands, and begging her to sleep so I can get some writing done, that at some point I end up wildly frustrated and start kicking over chairs and throwing notebooks.

It’s not pretty.

I do all of those other things with Lydia every other day of the week as well, but somehow things don’t end up quite as ugly on those days. None of those other activities — cleaning, cooking, etc — require the uninterrupted concentration that writing requires.

Constant interruptions are just part of life with a mobile baby, I’m learning. And I can deal with that on an ordinary day. But on a day when I’m trying to create? I don’t handle it so well.

Lydia at ten months is easily double the work she was at three months. She barely naps, is drawn to all the grossest and most dangerous objects in the house, can crawl with lightning speed, can open drawers and cabinets, and (most annoyingly) can reach the computer mouse and keyboard while I try to type.

She can also reach into the toilet (yay, splashing!) and can climb into the open dishwasher (yay, knives!). She loves to eat dog food and paper.

I hate that on Tuesdays and Thursdays I can’t be fully present to my baby. I’m irritable and distracted.

At the same time, I hate that I have close to thirty drafts of blog posts in my notebooks, and not enough uninterrupted time to turn them into complete posts. The way things currently run, a single post takes up to five hours to complete. I just can’t manage it these days.

All this is to say: blogging might be a little spotty for a while until I can figure something out with the munchkin. I’m hoping to make arrangements with the grandmas a few times a week so I can keep my butt in the chair and actually do some writing.

I must add that Lydia is also double the fun she was at three months. When I take her to the grocery store, she makes so many people smile that I feel like I’m doing an act of community service by taking her with me. And at the end of every trip I feel kind of bad that I’m the one who gets to take her home for unlimited kisses and snuggles. Why should I get her all to myself all day?

Anyhow, thanks for sticking with me, and I hope to be around more in the near future!

If you do creative work and have had a mobile baby, how did you manage? Please, tell me! I’m begging you!

So I  KNOW that there must have been readers across the globe who sat aghast before their computers this last Friday and went, “Nothing new from Becoming Peculiar? But it’s Friday!”

Alas, I’m making an amendment to my posting schedule. Instead of three posts a week, like I originally promised, I’m going down to two a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays).

Making time to write three quality posts a week turned out to be a little more challenging than I’d anticipated.

I know you’re supposed to post at least five times a week if you ever want to “build an audience,” but like I explained in my last post, I’m letting go of the notion that I need to be wildly influential.

And blogging is a lot of work, you guys! Not only is there writing (which involves coming up with topics, writing, editing, etc), but also finding images that then have to be edited and sized. This takes longer than you’d imagine, if you’re not a blogger yourself.

I have handwritten outlines for about thirty posts already, and ideas for at least another thirty, but I’m struggling to find time to actually write them all.

It’s especially hard to get to it all when you’re trying to make everything yourself — from mayonnaise to hair conditioner — and you have a baby who’s learning to crawl.

I know that there are mom bloggers out there with six kids who home school. They also knit everybody’s sweaters and make their own cheeses and are working on their second book, and they manage to crank out five quality blog posts a week.

I don’t know how these women do it.

I’m not one of those bloggers, though I admire them immensely.

So in order to give myself some breathing space, I’m taking it down a notch. I’ll be seeing your twice a week instead of three times.

Thanks for your patience and your graciousness!