Erin Go Bragh

I look forward to St. Patrick's Day for a number of reasons. 




1. It is a reminder of my connection to the Emerald Isle.  I've always suspected I was part Irish, but this year I had it confirmed with the DNA test my husband got me as a Christmas gift.  This year I felt validated for always celebrating on March 17th.

I bought this tea cup set this summer at a flea market.  This was before my Irish ancestry had been confirmed.  I've always been drawn to the shamrock.  My advice to anyone: if you're drawn to some symbol over and over again and you don't know why, there's always a reason.

2. I grew up going to St. Patrick's church in my hometown. It's where I was baptized, made my first communion, was confirmed, and was married.  Now, living in a different city than where I grew up, I go to St. Patrick's church again.  My husband decided to join this church a few years ago.  I'm so glad he did.  I love the circle it creates.


3. My husband always takes our kids to march in the St. Patrick's Day Parade here in our city.  Although the parade is not always on the actual date of St. Patrick's Day, it's held on the closest weekend before the actual holiday.

4. It's a reason to have a "special dinner" with my family.  Around here, we eat together every night.  Every once in a blue moon, we have an exception to this, but it's mostly the law.  But I like having a special theme once in a while.  In the past we've done corned beef and cabbage and Guiness Beef Stew with Irish soda bread.  This year it was shepherd's pie with ginger beer and Irish cream cheesecake. Thanks, Aldi!  I didn't have to cook at all.

5. For me, St. Patrick's Day is the unofficial beginning of spring. Don't get me wrong. I like winter.  I really do.  I love December and the build up and celebration of Christmas.  I enjoy the cold and snow of January.  Then there's the short month of February and Valentine's Day.  But then I'm ready for something new.  What better way to prepare for spring than to bring out all the green?  I always buy a shamrock plant.  Seeing this little green plant makes me so happy.  (It also makes my cats happy as I discovered they like to eat it.) Having this little plant inside is like I'm doing prep work for the actual season.  It's coming.  That's very welcome after the rough winter we've had.

6. The Rainbow

Appearing almost as much as the shamrock around St. Paddy's Day is the symbol of the rainbow.  I know I sound like a ten year old girl, but I have a thing for rainbows.  (Incidentally I also have a thing for butterflies and unicorns, so maybe I am a ten year old girl.)  At a particularly low time in my life, I saw one.  And then again, at a particularly pivotal time in my life, a child gave me a drawing of one and said something profound (He didn't know it was profound, nor would you if I told you what he said, but I found it profound in the circumstances.)  Oh, and I had a rainbow appear on my wedding day.  It's worth mentioning that there was no rain that day.  Oh, nothing.

Someone once asked me if the rainbow was photo shopped in this picture.  Nope.  It rained off in the distance and appeared after the short shower.

So welcome Spring!  St. Patrick's Day tells me you're around the corner.  You're not always punctual, but it's good to know you're inevitably arriving and will be staying for a while.

Kim

The DNA of My Story

It may seem a little late to be writing about Christmas presents, but I have a good reason.  My husband really hit it out of the park this year with my gifts.  I'm going to write about one in particular because I just received the other half of it this week.

When I was younger, I believed that people are the captains of their own destinies.  I wanted this to be true because it means we can be whatever we want.  When people asked me about my heritage, it kind of bugged me.  When someone bragged about their heritage, it really bugged me. Why should it matter?  It didn't make sense to me why anyone would be proud of where people were from who were long since gone.  I was a firm believer in the here and now and that you are your own person.  I didn't want the credit or blame for what my ancestors had done.


Although I do still believe the choices you make are a huge determination of your fate, I've changed my stance a bit as I've gotten older.  I still don't want the credit or blame, but I'm more curious now about the how and why of how I'm here.  My story.  Gaaaa, if there's anything I love, it's a good story!  For the last couple of years, I've become more and more interested in ancestry.  I first started watching Who Do You Think You Are? on TLC last year and was intrigued.  If you haven't seen it, a different celebrity guest stars each week.  The show has experts and uses Ancestry.com to help the weekly guest trace his or her family back to different points of history.  It's somewhat contrived, but I found myself sucked in to some of the stories just the same. Then just about six months ago, I discovered Finding Your Roots on PBS, which I like even better.  It's not currently running, but if you get a chance to catch the new season, do it.  The format is different in some ways, but it usually focuses on three somewhat famous people who have something in common. Their ancestry is traced and explained by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.  Man, that cat is cool.  And so is his show.


Although both my paternal and maternal grandparents lived into their nineties, I had no idea where any of my family came from before we ended up in America.  I had asked my paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother at different times in my life, but neither of them were sure either.  They both had some vague guesses, but no one had any particulars.  France was mentioned, as was Ireland, but nobody knew anything for certain.  I went to Ancestry.com's website and armed with little more than my grandparents' names and birthdays, tried to figure it out.  Although I found my grandparents and even my great grandfather in different records like military and census forms, I still wasn't able to go back any further.  And the more I watched these two shows about ancestry, the more I began to wonder.  I started to ruminate about a book I had read a couple of years ago, Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell,  Gladwell contends that there's no such thing as a self-made or stand alone person.  And I wondered more.

Which brings me to the part of a Christmas gift I got this week.  On Christmas Day, Dan gave me the gift of having my DNA analyzed.  No, I am not kidding.  Ancestry.com will send you a kit to analyze your saliva for a mere $99 and tell you what parts of the world your family originated in.  I had seen this on their website and had mentioned to him how much I would like to do this.  He told me to go for it.  I kept thinking one of these days I would bite the bullet and shell out the $100, but I never did.  So he actually did it for me and gave me the kit for Christmas.  He even got a $20 discount because he bought it on Cyber Monday.  I love that even Ancestry.com was having a sale on Cyber Monday.


The kit came with a little tube for me to spit in.  Ewwww. Gross. Okay, so then I had to register my test and mail the tube back in the prepaid package.  Next came the hardest thing. I had to wait.  I am not known for my patience in most circles.

I checked online many times in the next few weeks, but the website just kept informing me my test was being analyzed. I had to admit that a couple of times I had a hard time believing this was really going to work. Then on this Wednesday morning, my information was up.

My results were 99% European.  I was completely expecting this since I am the whitest white girl in terms of my appearance.  But a further breakdown showed I am 29% Western European (France/Germany, Switzerland), 28% Scandinavian, 23% Irish, 9% British, and 9% Italian/Greek.  Just like that.


My mom had told me she thought her maiden name was French, so I think that's the Western European part.  I was most excited, however, about the connection to Scandinavia and Ireland.  I had told my brother I was betting that we were from Viking stock.  I even read the book, The Vikings, by Robert Wernick in January in preparation.  I was right!  As for the Irish part, I've just always had a feeling.  Maybe it's the Catholic girl in me.


This was one of the most thoughtful and interesting gifts I've ever received. And it truly was a gift in the grandest meaning of the word.  It's a gift to have this information that years ago would have been impossible to obtain.   When I told people about it and how I was waiting for my results, they were fascinated.  Almost everyone expressed interest in doing this themselves. 


As I was putting out my decorations for St. Patrick's Day this year (and yes, I've always done this, and now it seems apparent why), I found myself wanting to know more about the country and its history.  So I plan to do some more reading about Ireland.  And Scandinavia.  And France.  They're all important to me now. I don't stand alone, no matter how badly I wanted to when I was younger. For better or worse, my story only came about because of hundreds of other stories.

As Malcolm Gladwell notes in Outliers, "It is impossible for a hockey player, or Bill Joy, or Robert Oppenheimer, or any other outlier for that matter to look down from their lofty perch and say with truthfulness, 'I did this, all by myself.'  Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience.  But they don't.  They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy.  Their success is not exceptional or mysterious.  It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky - but all critical to making them who they are.  The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all."

Kim

The Volunteer

I've been thinking about sacrifice this week for a couple of reasons. First of all, Lent began this week.  Second of all, my brother Tim had a pretty exciting moment when he released a song he wrote about volunteer firemen.

Most of my life, I've never been willing to give up my own safety, let alone life for someone else.  I was single until I was 32.  Although I always wanted kids, I was pretty well self-insulated until about 13 years ago.  That's when I got married and had kids.  This, of course, is a game changer for most of us.    You don't know how much you can love another person until you become a parent.

Then another revelation comes along that this is how much Jesus loves you. He loved you enough to give up his life for you. I'm not sure how anyone really understand that love, but I do think God gave us children so we could understand it better.  He did it, knowing that some would never say so much as thank you.  He did it anyway. Lent gives us a yearly reminder of that.  We try to focus on becoming more open to sacrifice as we remember the sacrifice he made for us.


I'm a firm believer that things merge together in life to show us how everything is connected. We get the same lessons over and over again in different forms.  As I mentioned, my brother released a song he wrote this week called "The Volunteer".  It is a tribute to volunteer firemen who take this concept of sacrifice very seriously.  They put themselves in danger for people they don't even know. Tim was a volunteer fireman himself for many years and wrote this song from his experience. Check out his song here on YouTube for a sample.  You can purchase this song as a download as well from CDBaby.

It's important to remind ourselves there are people in the world like this.  It can seem impossible at times to live up to Jesus's example until we remember there are people like volunteer firemen who do it on a daily basis.  They want to do it for people they've never even met, whether or not they ever get a thank you.  They do it anyway.  Isn't that just what Jesus did?  He volunteered for us, for our lives.  Wouldn't it be a better deal for all of us if we could embrace this notion?

Thank a volunteer fireman if you get a chance.  And download "The Volunteer".

Kim

The "Bill" Jar

Last year, my New Year's Resolution was to save more money.  I don't know about you, but for me money has always been an elusive concept to truly master.  I've always just tried to live by the edict, "Don't spend more than you have coming in." This is a good rule of thumb, but it's not as highly effective as I'd like it to be.  If there's one thing I can tell you that I've learned for sure about money, it's that it's all about adjusting.  Adjustments I've had to make in the past include but are not limited to: being a full time graduate student and living on $5000 for a year, being single and learning to live on my first "professional" salary, living with my husband and managing two incomes, not working for 12 weeks after the birth of my daughter, stepping up to a bigger mortgage and two children.  Alterations had to be made along the way. It's a constant balancing act.  And although I've never found myself in serious debt or trouble, I've always found consistently saving for extras a little tricky. 
.




Enter this 52 week savings plan found on Pinterest.  I liked this idea because it was so concrete.  Increase the amount you save by $1 every week.  Have $1378 saved by the end of the year.

I did it!  Yay me!

I'm happy to report, I kept my resolution.  It started out very painlessly.  Then it got a little tricky until I had enough in there to make change because there were weeks when I didn't have exactly $13 or $37 on hand in cash.  There were some weeks I got behind, but I liked the way the paper kept me on track.  I could cross off the weeks.  If I got behind on weeks 23 and 24, I knew I owed the jar $47.  I could catch up by checking the paper. 

And yes, I did save it as CASH.  This probably wasn't the safest thing to do since it was just stored in a jar in my house, but it did go into the bank at the end of the year. There were times I considered putting it in our existing savings account, but I didn't because I really wanted to keep track of it as a separate amount. I didn't want it to be part of the regular savings.  I wanted to have it for something special.  It would be too easy for me not to be accountable for it if it were lumped in with the other, regular savings. There were also times when I considered opening a separate account for it.  I don't really have a good reason for why I didn't do that, other than I just never got around to it.  It definitely would have been easier to transfer the odd $17 online and safer than having the actual cash in my house.  But I do think using actual money was a constant reminder to me to keep up with the plan.

Here's the other thing I didn't do.  I didn't earmark this money for a particular purpose.  But guess what?  I had the perfect thing come up just as I finished the plan.  Several weeks before Christmas, I tried to get tickets to a concert in Nashville for my husband and I as a Christmas gift to him.  The website the tickets were selling on crashed due to an overwhelming response, and I wasn't able to get them using my phone.  But then an e-mail came the week before Christmas saying there were tickets still available. I had gone on the waitlist and could still get them if I wanted to!  I secretively did so and surprised him with a two day getaway between Christmas and New Year's.  I knew we could afford it (especially important right around the holidays when money is going out right and left) because I had twice the amount of money saved in the jar for the travel, tickets, and accommodations!  Half of it is saved for some other purpose that has yet to present itself.

On our way to a little vacay!

So this year, I'm trying something different. No more jar or trying to make change - just $50 a week into a separate account.  I made up a similar sheet to keep myself on track. If that works, I should have $2600 by 2016.  And I'm not sure what I'm saving for, but I know it will have to wait until 2017 to figure it out.  That is a lovely feeling.

Kim

15 Books in 2015

Last year as everyone was making New Year's Resolutions, I decided to do something that was loosely along the lines of a resolution.  I set up a book group on Facebook called "14 Books in 2014".  The idea was to try to read at least 14 books during the year and to keep track of each one while sharing the books I read with members and getting suggestions from them.  You can read the original post for this here.

A birthday gift from my sister-in-law!



This was an excellent challenge for me.  There were times when I actually said to myself, "Turn the t.v. off/put the iPad down and pick up your book."  So I did.  And I think I'm better for it.

This group ended up with more members than I imagined.  Some of you I know very well, and some of you I've never met.  I'm glad I got to spend some of 2014 with you!  I enjoyed sharing my thoughts with you and hearing your suggestions and thoughts on the books you read.

I'm proud to say I read 27 books this year.  I was hoping to get to 28 (double the number 14), but things were busy around the holidays and it just didn't happen.


Here's my list:


#1 Black Heels to Tractor Wheels by Ree Drummond
#2 What The Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell
#3 Notorious Nineteen by Janet Evanovich
#4 This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper
#5 Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
#6 A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby
#7 The Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter
#8 Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
#9 Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
#10 Wonder by R.J. Palacio
#11 You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz
#12 The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
#13 The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
#14 Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler
#15 Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
#16 Happier At Home Gretchen Rubin
#17 The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
#18 Horns by Joe Hill
#19 The Switch by Elmore Leonard
#20 Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill
#21 Kinsey & Me by Sue Grafton
#22 Frindle by Andrew Clements
#23 I Never Met a Story I Didn't Like: Mostly True Tall Tales by Todd Snider
#24 I Can't Complain: All Too Personal Essays by Elinor Lipman
#25 The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty
#26 What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty
#27 The View From Penthouse B by Elinor Lipman


 I'm proud of the number 27.  One way to look at that number is that it averages out to one book every two weeks for the year.  Of course, it didn't actually work out that way.  I'm sure I read more over the summer when I wasn't working.


Here are some other ways to look at that number:

8 Non-Fiction Books
19 Fiction Books


2 Children's Literature Books : Wonder and Frindle (I actually could have included two others I read aloud to my class this year, but neither of them was worth mention.)


Six Books that Were Made Into Movies: This is Where I Leave You, A Long Way Down, The Monuments Men, The Fault in Our Stars, Horns, The Switch (Life of Crime was the name of the movie).  I 've only seen one of them, The Fault in Our Stars.


6 Authors That I Read Multiple Books Of: Malcolm Gladwell, Gillian Flynn, Gretchen Rubin, Joe Hill, Elinor Lipman, and Liane Moriarty


13 Never-Before-Read-Authors: Jonathan Tropper, Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter (counting them as one since they collaborated on the same book), Gretchen Rubin, John Green, Nickolas Butler, Margaret Atwood, Donna Tartt, Joe Hill, Andrew Clements, Todd Snider, Jean Hanff Korelitz, R.J. Palacio, and Liane Moriarty


And then because I can't pick a favorite, I made up a few special awards...

Most Inspirational To Read More Historical Non-Fiction goes to... The Monuments Men


The "Stayed With Me For The Longest in an Unsettling but Fascinating Way" Award goes to... Oryx and Crake


Most Overrated and Beat-A-Dead-Horse Award goes to... The Goldfinch (I'm sorry.  She's obviously a very gifted writer.  But the painting! My gosh, the painting!  Enough!  This did have one of my favorite characters of the year, though, in the form of Boris.)


Mentioned the Most in Anecdotal Way Award... Blink


Best Love Story Award... Black Heels to Tractor Wheels


Made Me Cry Award... Wonder


Fastest Read Award...The Switch by the incomparable Elmore Leonard.  RIP, my friend.


The Never Before Read Author I'm Most Glad to Have Checked Out Award... A tie between Joe Hill and Liane Moriarty


So, are you ready?  15 Books in 2015 is just beginning.  I hope you'll all stay on board and invite some new friends.  First up for me is Little Big Lies by Liane Moriarty.  Enjoy and please share what you're reading and your thoughts!

Kim

Chain

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is one of my favorite stories of all times. Because it's a classic, it's been retold in all kinds of different ways via books, television, movies, and on the stage.   Then there's the fact that the main character's name has become a part of our everyday language.  Everyone knows what it means to be a "Scrooge". 


When I was young, we would go to midnight mass on Christmas Eve.  While we were waiting for midnight to roll around, A Christmas Carol starring Alistair Sim would be on and we would watch it until it was time to go to mass.  That version is, of course, a classic in its own right, but I think my very favorite version when I was younger was Rich Little's A Christmas Carol.  It was on HBO nonstop in December.  And I watched it nonstop.  Little played nearly every character in the story as a different actor: W.C. Fields as Scrooge, Paul Lynde as Bob Cratchit, Peter Sellers as the Ghost of Christmas Future - you get the idea.  It was delightful.  I haven't seen it since I was young, but I would love to sit and watch it again.


Which brings me to the fact that I recently read an excellent book entitled What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty.  The title character hits her head and wakes up thinking she is thirty years old, happily married, and about to become a mother.  The problem is she's forty, about to be divorced, and the mother of three children she can't remember.  It hit me about a week after finishing it that this story reminded me of A Christmas Carol.  The present day Alice with amnesia is seeing what she thinks of as her future, but she is in fact stuck in her past because of her memory loss.  I loved the way this book explored how people change so gradually, they can wake up one day and not even recognize who they have become.  It's a great read that I highly recommend.


But back to A Christmas Carol.  Two things about this story come to mind for me during every Christmas season.  One is this:

This is probably what a lot of people take away from this story and certainly what I took away from it when I was younger.  Goodwill should be year round, not just honored at Christmas.  A great moral to the story and one we all need to remember.


But as a I grow older, this one comes to mind more and more:

We all have a chain we carry around with us.  Am I feeling tired?  Sometimes it's because I've been dragging a chain of grudges around all day.  I get better about letting things go as I get older, but it's still so hard not to keep adding to my chain as I drop other links of it.  It's a daily challenge for me to refrain from lengthening my chain with the annoyances and conflicts of day to day life.  It will never get lighter if I let some things go but constantly replace them with new links. There are five important words in this quote I need to remember, "of my own free will".  I decide what I link on that chain but also what I can take off.  Links can always be taken disconnected and left behind.


The image of the chain Marley carries is one of the things I love about this story.  It makes a bad habit into a very concrete, unappealing image.  When I think of these grudges as literal links of a chain, it shifts my thinking about it.  It reminds me to drop some of those links, but it also helps me pause and reflect before I add another link of my own free will. 

Kim

A Few More Favorite Things...

Last year before Christmas, I wrote a few posts about "Favorite Things" after the famed Sound of Music song.  Two of those posts were about Christmas ornaments.  You can find those posts here and here if you're so inclined.  This year, I wanted to update the new residents on our tree in a post.  I find that as the year comes to a close, it's an excellent way to remember the some of the highlights.


I mentioned in my previous posts how I like to find a Christmas ornament for the tree whenever we take a trip or vacation.  On our first trip to Michigan in 2013, I failed to get something for the tree.  I found one that was kind of "meh" and thought I'd go back to get it.  Didn't.  I made up for it on our next trip in the summer of 2014. 


We visited New Holland this year.  I became very fond of windmills during this trip.  I wrote about why that is in this post.  We later visited the Delftware factory in Holland.  I was hoping to find something cute for the tree here.  Man, did I hit the motherload.  They had so many, it was hard to decide.  I finally settled on this little number to represent my new affinity for windmills:

And then because there were so many, I had to take this guy home too.

But I wasn't done there.  We also went to the John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids while in Michigan.  I picked this up at the gift shop. They sell these at lots of zoos.  They are made in third world countries with recycled materials.  We have a tiger from the St. Louis Zoo too.  But I have a special, albeit unlikely, connection to flamingos.  My class, along with my sister-in-law's class, raised money several years ago to get an aviary for the flamingos at our local zoo.  The hope was that they would lay eggs if they had an aviary.  They haven't yet, but this year they actually "adopted" some eggs from another zoo.  So baby flamingos did hatch at our local zoo this year!  And that is how this Midwesterner is linked to flamingos besides seeing them at the John Ball Zoo.  Of course, I didn't know there would be babies this fall when we were visiting Michigan this summer.  But I love it when things work out like that.

I also got some new handmade ornaments from my students this year.  Love these.  Love that some of the ornaments on my tree are from kids who are now adults.  This little bottle cap snowman is adorable and will always remind me of the child who gave it to me.

I'm always on the lookout for ornaments that mean something to our family.  Every year we go to a hot air balloon festival in my husband's hometown.  I found this little charmer that was handmade by a local artist.  Not sure if it was meant to be a Christmas ornament, but it is now.

Another tradition we have is Grinch night.  I think I've mentioned before, The Grinch is my favorite.  We designate a special night to watch it for the first time. We also hang a Grinch ornament on the tree that night.  Here's this year's Grinch:

Another new addition is my son's blown glass ornament that he made at Cub Scouts this year.  I wasn't prepared for this to be as beautiful as it is.  It came with its own stainless steel, free standing hanger, and it may just stay out all year on its own.

And finally, proving that you don't always need to get a "traditional" ornament from a store, I saved this wine cork from a vineyard my husband and I visited on our trip to the Southern Illinois Wine Trail.  That is a very fond memory from this year.  Not an ornament? No problem. I just stuck a ornament hook in it. 
I think this might be my new "favorite thing".   ;)

Kim