TheBombDotMom: Mandatory Family Game Night

Between M.H.’s job, my job, and Mik’s training schedule/social life, there’s really only one night a week we can have a family dinner, and that’s Mondays. But it seemed awkward to set the table and light a candle and all the stuff we used to do back in simpler days, and it’s hard enough to connect with our extraordinarily reserved 17-year-old. So I came up with a better idea: Family Game Night. Actually Mandatory Family Game Night.

The “mandatory” part is key. Besides appealing to my sense of humor, it signals to Mik that it’s really important to us to stay connected—and that there’s no weaseling out of it. In practice, this is just a quick game of Settlers of Catan played while we eat, but it works because Mik loves games—he comes alive in any competitive situation, and it’s the easiest way to get him talking.

And it is really important to us to stay connected. We’ll have him under our roof for less than two more years, and I intend to squeeze as much awesomeness out of that as I can.

TheBombDotMom: Learning tai chi

I held back on writing about the OTHER amazing gift of the nonfiction DVD section in the library: a treasure trove of guided workouts. I have been toying with the idea of learning tai chi but don’t feel quite so strongly about it that I am ready to sign up for a real-life, in-person, other-humans class. But a video demonstration seemed perfect for my needs—which are to just have some more interesting things to integrate into my do-what-I-feel-like morning yoga time. (Which is probably a subject for another #awesomethings post, but I digress.)

So far I have worked through two library tai chi videos. Interestingly, they contain two mutually exclusive sets of moves, but, again, that’s fine for my purposes. Tai chi seems more complicated than I imagined, so it may be awhile before I am able to blend any of it in naturally with my yoga practice—but I have the rest of my life and about five more videos to work that out. Awesome.

TheBombDotMom: Charity shops

Two miles from my house there’s an awesome charity store that supports the Montana Rescue Mission, which provides services to the homeless. If you have something like this where you live (and I don’t think Goodwill is one), you should really start donating to it AND shopping there.

There are so many upsides: The profits go to charity instead of sweatshop operators; you’re helping people to recycle their unwanted items, which keeps them out of the trash; there is a huge and ever-changing variety of items, which makes finding something good really fun; and you’re reducing the demand for new items to be manufactured. That means that even if you’re a minimalist, you can feel fairly good about any money you spend and any items you bring home. And if you decide the thing you bought is not right for you after all, you can just donate it back to the very same store you bought it from, and all it costs you is a small donation to charity.

I guess the downside is that you can’t always find something you need right when you need it, but I would consider that less a downside and more a “slight inconvenience of the type most ‘consumers’ should really learn to deal with.”

TheBombDotMom: Loving-kindness meditation

I was perhaps the last person on earth to read “Eat, Pray, Love,” but among its MANY virtues it talks about several different kinds of meditation and introduced me to one I had not heard of: loving-kindness meditation. As I understand it—and I may not have it quite right, but that’s fine—you simply sit or lie still, choose a person, and then send warm and loving wishes to that person in your mind.

I usually do mindfulness meditation at some point during my morning yoga, but I have taken to doing loving-kindness meditation while I’m lying in bed at night. It is lovely, and as a bonus it usually puts me to sleep fairly quickly. Does it actually DOOOOO anything for the person you’re meditating about? No idea, but it’s also hard to imagine that the world wouldn’t be a heck of a lot better place if everyone did this.

TheBombDotMom: Nonfiction library DVDs

Today’s awesome thing—because I said so, and because I only recently discovered it—is the nonfiction DVD section of the library. We started checking out DVDs recently because we canceled our Netflix account but did not want to cancel Movie/Laundry Folding Night. The library has more or less everything—of course much later than in the theaters or on the air, but we are patient.

Right away I looked for “Project Runway” (an awesome thing for another post, perhaps), because I discovered the show in approximately its 58th season, and there’s no way to watch old episodes online without (gasp) paying money. I was disappointed that our library didn’t have it but didn’t think much more about it. Weeks later, I accidentally strayed into the nonfiction DVD section and LO AND BEHOLD there are a bunch of new-to-me “Project Runway” seasons.

Not that I will have time this month to watch any of them, but it is really nice knowing they are there.

TheBombDotMom: Monthly challenges

As I opined about last time, Facebook and Twitter are not good for me. I find them useful for keeping up with people (that’s mostly Facebook) and extremely entertaining (that’s mostly Twitter), but they are also addictive and I think destructive, in the sense that they encourage a lot of impotent outrage. At least in me.

So anyway, it’s November, I am wearing my NaNoWriMo sweatshirt in support of my NaNoWriMoing husband, and the Twitter/Facebook detox has commenced. I also decided that, to enhance the detoxing effects of this month, I would come over here every day to write a tiny something-or-other about “things that are awesome because I said so, that’s why.”

Today’s entry: monthly challenges themselves!

You know how I love a good monthly challenge. A month is just the right amount of time to break you of a habit or kick-start a new one, but it’s not so long that it seems daunting. It’s nice to think about how you can do different things during different seasons of your life, or just celebrate the actual seasons by changing things up a bit. If I had decided on some random Wednesday that I wasn’t going to visit Twitter, it would have been hard and felt like deprivation. But for some reason doing the same thing on Nov. 1, for a November-only challenge, it is fun. At least for me.

I guess this is about the human condition?

I haven’t done any monthly resolutions for a while now—I guess it started to feel too forced, or too structured, or something.

But yesterday M.H. mentioned that he was thinking of giving up social media during NaNoWriMo, and that sounds like a great idea. He of course will be working extra hard on a novel that month, but I would be doing it (a) to support him, (b) to give myself more productive time in general, and (c) to stop making myself crazy with the news.

Sigh.

About that last one:

I keep struggling with how you’re supposed to function in a world like this. It seems heartless to just go about your business and be happy when (to pick one example) there are people dying of racism in Puerto Rico. On the other hand, everything is pretty great in my house and my life, and it seems pointless to be furious about something that I can have very limited impact on. (I’ll just throw out that we give quite a bit to charity, and I write to lots of politicians and the occasional school principal, so it’s not like this is empty sentiment with an obvious solution.)

The mood of nearly everyone I know swings around two extremes called “guiltily happy” and “helplessly angry”—and it’s not like there’s a magical middle ground somewhere in there where we can find peace in being just the right amount of content-in-our-blessings-yet-concerned-for-our-fellow-humans.

Probably on some basic level we humans are equipped to deal only with our own problems and those we experience with our own senses. But that’s not our world, and everyone is dealing with this in the way they think is best, and doing the right thing seems to involve a lot of mushy gray area and confusion. Regardless, I think it’s OK if I let the impotent fury go on without my contributions for a while.