by Heather Plett | Nov 13, 2006 | Uncategorized
Yesterday, as I drove from Brooks back to the Calgary airport to fly home, I caught myself smiling while I bopped to the music. I was feeling energized and happy. It was a good trip. Even better than the miles of smooth, nearly empty highways with nothing but good music and my thoughts, were the many good people I spent time with. This trip was just what I needed. I was refreshed by relationships.
1. My brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew. On Thursday night, I hung out with my niece while she showed me a cool powerpoint she was working on for school. Later, my brother (sometimes known on this blog as bbb, though he doesn’t have a blog – unless you count the five entries he did while he drove across Florida) and I went to a movie (Catch a Fire – worth seeing, by the way). Movies have always provided a bit of a common bond with my siblings and I. It’s what we often do when we’re together. Two of us (bbb & ccap) are more addicted than the other two, but we all enjoy a good night out at the movies now and then. The next morning, we played a couple of games of Settlers (and nobody cried :-), and then went out for Vietnamese food for lunch. It was a delightful time. Comfortable, relaxed, and just the right way to start a business trip that I initially thought would have its stressful moments. I am blessed with good family.
2. Volunteers and supporters of the non-profit organization I work for. On Friday night, I drove to Red Deer for a annual meeting with about 100 dedicated volunteers who commit time and energy to our organization’s mission to end hunger. It was SUCH a good meeting. There was a great spirit in the room. Given some of the challenges we’ve been through lately in that province, I really didn’t know what to expect, but it turned out much better than I even dared to hope. I’ve made some good friends there over the past couple of years, and it definitely feels good to walk into a room where you know there are people who support you. They energized me to come back home and re-commit myself to doing my job the best way I know how.
3. Staff. In the Spring, we hired 2 new staff to work on my team in Alberta (there are staff across the country that report to me). It’s a husband and wife team that job-share in the role. They are the kind of people you want on any team – compassionate, understanding, cooperative, energetic, committed, and all those other good things. More than anything, they feel safe – the kind of people you just know you can be yourself around and they will support you and continue to respect you. I spent Friday night and Saturday morning with them, and the trip was worth it just to see them in action. Their presence was one of the reasons Friday night’s meeting was so successful. Also, another new director was there from our Winnipeg office, and he’s a similar kind of person. (I was also on the hiring committee when he was hired, so I’m starting to think I have good instinct when it comes to hiring!) After the meeting Friday night, the four of us congregated in my hotel room and hung out until about 1:00 a.m. It is so much fun when you enjoy the presence of the people you work with. Things have gotten much better in that regard.
4. Hope. Yay! I got to meet another blogging friend! I hooked up with Hope for lunch on Saturday and it was everything I’d hoped for and more. We chatted for two and a half hours and it felt more like half an hour. I don’t think there was an awkward silence throughout. In fact, we probably could have chatted for another two and a half hours if I hadn’t had alot of miles to cover to get to Brooks. What can I tell you about Hope? Well, I think I’m in love. I want to live next to her, share recipes with her, wander along the river with her, stay up late at night chatting around a campfire, you name it. She is warm, comfortable, safe, kind, funny, and lots of other good things I can’t think of words for. Plus she’s the classy kind of woman who thinks to bring a gift AND pay for lunch. Wish I’d thought of at least SOME little gesture! Maybe when she makes her way to Winnipeg, I’ll get a chance to return the favour. I’m waiting for your visit Hope.
After my second successful blogger meet-up, I’m getting a little addicted. Anyone else want to meet me? You never know where my travels might take me. In my limited experience, you really CAN get to know someone from reading their blog, and so far, I’ve been drawn to just the kind of people I would like in “real” life.
5. Julie (and family). My third night in Alberta was spent near Brooks at the home of my very dear friend Julie. When I arrived, she was alone (her husband and sons were at a birthday party) so we got a few hours of alone time to reminisce and catch up on family news, etc. Julie and I have been friends since we were in diapers. We grew up about a mile apart, but out there in the country, they were our closest neighbour. We used to ride bikes or horses or walk to each other’s houses all the time. Our families did lots of neighbourly things together too. We didn’t have a TV growing up, so we would sometimes get to visit their house to watch special shows like The Sound of Music, Disney, or the Santa Claus parade. One of the memories Julie and I reminisced about was the time (I think it was around Halloween) she and I decided we wanted to be world-changers and we wrote and performed a play for neighbours and friends as a fundraiser for a charity. I think there were about 10 people in my parents’ living room, and if I remember correctly, we donated about three dollars to the Gideons (an organization one of our neighbours worked for). I guess life has come full circle since I now work for a non-profit organization and part of my role is leading the fundraising campaign. It was such a treat to see Julie again and actually get some one-on-one time without our kids clamouring around us.
6. Julie’s church family. Part of my reason for visiting Julie (or at least the reason that justified my visit on a business trip) was so that I could make a presentation at her church. It was one of those incredible services where you know something bigger than any of us is at work. The speaker spoke on exactly the same topic I had planned to talk about in my presentation. The story I told couldn’t have been better suited than if we’d sat down and planned it together (which we didn’t, since I’d never met or talked to the speaker before and we’d made no arrangements through Julie about the topic). I felt completely at home there, and left feeling happy that Julie and her family have a wonderful church community surrounding them.
So there you have it – relationship refreshment. I have been renewed by the people I met. Thank you to all of them for sharing pieces of themselves with me.
Speaking of relationships – now I think it’s time I start catching up on all of your blogs so you don’t think I’ve abandoned you. (And just so you don’t think I’m doing this on work time, I’ve taken today off to recuperate from my trip. Catching up on blogs sounds like recuperation to me!)
Before I go though, Hope, this picture is for you, just so you know how much I enjoyed the gift. Mmmmm…
by Heather Plett | Nov 9, 2006 | Uncategorized
In a few hours, I’ll be on another plane heading for Alberta. No, I don’t have much time to formulate any meaningful thoughts, but here are some of the things I’m looking forward to and some of the things I’m not:
Looking forward to:
– Seeing my brother, sister-in-law, niece, nephew, and dog-nephew. (Yes, AP, that last one is for your benefit.) I’ll stay with them in Calgary tonight.
– Hanging out with my sister-in-law tomorrow morning. She is one of my best friends.
– The airplane rides. I love planes and airports and just about anything associated with travel.
– Miles and miles of open road and me, alone, in a rental car. I love driving, and I’m rather fond of driving alone, with no fighting going on in the back seat and nothing to interrupt my thoughts other than the radio.
– Meeting another blogger friend. I’ll tell you more later.
– Spending time with my new employees in Alberta. They’re both beautiful people with good souls.
– Visiting my closest childhood friend Julie and her husband and sons.
– A quiet night in a hotel room.
– Meeting some of the friendly supporters and volunteers who have become friends in the past year and a half when I’ve had to travel to Alberta more than I wanted to.
Not looking forward to:
– Three nights in three separate beds.
– Weariness from an agenda that looks a little too full.
– A potentially contensious management issue I have to deal with.
– Being away from my family.
– Spending part of a day with a pasted-on-smily-face working at a booth at a trade show.
– Missing the weekend routines at home, like Friday night supper with my extended family, lazy Saturday mornings, good conversation in church on Sunday mornings, Sunday night supper with Marcel’s extended family, and watching Amazing Race on Sunday night with my daughters.
– Not being the one to drop Maddie off at the second birthday party she’s ever been invited to.
There’s not much chance I’ll be blogging or catching up on your blogs while I’m gone. Since I’m already behind on the “catching up” side, I’ll have lots of reading to do when I get home. Talk to you then! In the meantime, like my dad used to say whenever we parted, “Be good.”
by Heather Plett | Nov 7, 2006 | Uncategorized
When we were kids, we would wait with eager anticipation for the arrival of the Sears Wishbook. After Mom had a chance to peruse it, it was our turn. With pens in hand we would scan the glossy pages, skipping quickly over anything that looked naughty (like the lingerie pages), and heading straight for the toys. In awe of the world full of wonderful things that we had never seen or even imagined, we’d page through it carefully and with what was almost reverence. The first time through, we’d just look. The second or third times, we’d put little marks beside the ones that caught our attention. And then, when we were brave enough to mark up the shiny pages, we’d circle the things we dreamed of, going back several times to gaze upon the pure beauty of all those things we knew we’d never own.
It was all about the dreams, really. We were poor growing up. If we got one small toy (a doll, a second-hand bike) we were lucky. We never really believed those extravagant things in the Wishbook would arrive under our tree on Christmas morning. It was just too far out of reach. But that didn’t stop the dreaming. I remember the years I dreamed about the Barbie camper van that my cousin Christine was lucky enough to own. I coveted that camper van with every fibre of my being.
As much as we loved to dream about the beautiful things on those glossy pages, I don’t really remember it feeling too painful knowing that we wouldn’t own them. Sometimes dreaming is enough. Sometimes owning only serves to extinguish the dream. We were happy kids. Yes, sometimes we felt the sting of poverty, wishing we could have what some of the other kids had, but mostly we were content with our second-hand bikes and our hand-me-down clothes. Even though I never owned the camper van, I remember all the things my friend Laurel and I constructed for our Barbies to make up for its absence – three-story houses out of stacked chairs, cars out of cardboard boxes, you name it.
My kids have a lot more toys than I ever had, but still they have to live with less than most of their friends. Sometimes it’s about what we can or can’t afford and sometimes it’s about what we choose not to buy. Nikki wants a Gameboy more than anything else she can imagine. She knows she won’t get a Gameboy. Too expensive and too anti-social for my Christmas-buying list. And maybe it’s better for her to dream about it than to own it. If she owned it, she’d probably be bored with it in a couple of months.
Don’t get me wrong – I DO like to indulge my kids (and myself) now and then. When we sold the camper last year, every member of the family got to buy something their heart cherished. Nikki got an mp3 player, Julie got a bean-bag chair, and Maddie got some toy she had her eye on (I can’t remember which). I got my digital camera. Marcel got a new bike. But that was a rare moment. I think the indulgences have to be rare and special for them to mean anything. In between, some of the dreams have to remain just that – dreams.
All of this is my meandering way of getting to the original point of this post – bashing Wal-mart. Have you heard about their new advertising ploy – Toyland? It’s a website where kids get to play a “game”, pick out all the things they want, and it then sends an email to their parents with their wishlist, saving them the time of writing it down, and helping them do some of the parent-nagging. Is it just me, or does this turn your stomach too? Maybe it’s no different from the Sears Wishbook, and maybe I should just chill out, but it bugs me how sneaky advertising is getting these days – especially when it comes to marketing for kids. To disguise a marketing campaign as a cheery little game, where little elves appear to tell you how cool each toy is, seems just a little too manipulative. I’ve gotten used to all the advertising on the internet, but I’m an adult and I can tune it out fairly successfully. Although we often talk about it with the girls so that they’ll be able to recognize clever marketing when they see it, they’re still very susceptible to what the advertisements tell them they should want.
In one of Anne Lamott’s stories (I think it was in Traveling Mercies), she talked about how it stunned her to realize how “entitled” her son seemed to feel – like the world owed him all kinds of things and he could expect to receive them. That’s what I fear in my kids – that with all this advertising being pelted at them thousands of times a day, they will begin to feel that owning all that stuff is the norm rather than the exception.
In spite of all of this, though, I have to say that our kids are fairly well grounded and not particularly greedy. Oh, they beg for things like every other kid, but they don’t make a lot of demands. They know their parents’ buying-power is limited and they’re also well aware that there are a lot of things we choose not to buy even if we can afford it. Mostly, they’re okay with that. As much as advertising to kids makes me see red now and then, I still believe it is possible to influence your kids to not be overly materialistic. (In fact, I’ve so indoctrinated my girls that the running joke in our house is that I start to twitch if we get too close to Walmart. I boycotted it a couple of years ago and haven’t been back since. In fact, they’ve been so influenced by my shopping choices that their favourite store is Ten Thousand Villages, a fair-trade store with cool stuff from all over the world.)
I guess I just get a little weary of fighting the Wal-marts of this world to re-inforce my values with my kids. Those mega-stores have got the big bucks behind them, and a bunch of highly paid marketing gurus. My arsenal seems a little paltry in comparison.
by Heather Plett | Nov 4, 2006 | Uncategorized
Random thought #1: First of all, I wanted to say thank you to all those who responded so kindly to my last post. I expect I’ll go through some rough spots in the coming weeks and months, and I’ve come to realize that one of my support groups is made up of you, my blog community. Thanks for being that. I wish I could tell you more about what’s going on, but it’s complicated, involves legal issues, and is just a little too risky to discuss in an open forum. If anyone is dying to know, feel free to email me and I’ll tell you more. Just say “spill the beans” in the subject line, and I’ll bring you up to speed.
Now, some more random stuff…
Random thought #2: Has anyone seen the movie The Prestige? If so, what did you think? I LOVED it. It’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in awhile. I went to see it by myself on Friday night, when I needed a break from the mental callisthenics my brain was doing, and it was just what the doctor ordered. It’s smart, full of intrique and drama, well written, unpredictable, and has a delightfully surprising ending. It’s about 2 young up-and-coming magicians who become obsessed with outdoing and ultimately destroying each other. In an odd way, it helped me understand a bit more about the human psyche in relation to the difficult situation I’m going through. At the beginning, the non-linear fashion of it (it hops back and forth through time) is a little distracting, but when you get used to it, it adds to the quality of it.
Random thought #3: Even though I know that part of being a good parent means teaching responsibility and life-skills, sometimes it would be WAY easier to send the kids away for a day, clean like a fiend and then let them back in the house rather than involve them in the cleaning. The girls and I cleaned all morning (in preparation for out-of-town guests and a birthday party we’re hosting for our niece tomorrow), and between settling arguments about who had to clean more, checking the 4 year old’s bedroom about 15 times when she asked “is it good enough NOW?”, helping them haul the vacuum cleaner down the stairs, and saying “if the cleaning doesn’t get done soon NOBODY gets a Slurpee”, I barely got anything done. But I suppose the long term gain should be worth the short term pain – when my daughters invite me to their homes and they’re at least reasonably clean, I’ll be glad I made the effort. (On another note, someone tell my WHY I’m bothering to clean the house for the birthday party of a one-year-old? Like she’ll really notice?)
Random thought #4: I just traded an old bicycle for a phone. Some guys from our youth group showed up at our door, playing the trade-up game that’s inspired by the one red paperclip, and when they offered me a phone, I said “hey – why don’t you take this old bike off our hands?” They were thrilled.
Random thought #5: One of my newest blogging friends is a talented artist named Andrea Pratt. One of these days, when I have a little extra cash, I’m going to buy one of her paintings, and hang it on my wall to inspire me. If you’ve got a minute, why don’t you go on over and look at her art work, and while you’re there, congratulate her for being the featured artist in an upcoming edition of Cahoots? When I first saw her art, I thought “she would be PERFECT for Cahoots”, and it turns out I was right, ’cause they’ve decided to feature her. What’s even more fun is that the article I wrote about blogging (which some of you provided quotes for – thank you very much) will appear in the same edition. You really should go on over to Cahoots and subscribe so you don’t miss any of the fun.
Random thought #6: My beautiful niece Abigail turns one year old today. Our whole family is totally smitten with this little girl. The girls love to remind people that she is their “double cousin” (her dad is Marcel’s brother and her mom is my sister), and they dote over her every chance they get. It’s fun watching her grow up surrounded by cousins who adore her.
updated to add:
Random thought #7: If you’re desperate for a little mommy-quiet-time, you might want to try my new trick. When the kids are all downstairs, wash and wax the upstairs floor (which includes the space just above the stairs) and every time they start to come up, shout “Stop! You can’t come up right now. The floor is wet.” When you’re done, curl up on the couch and read a good book. Or just stare out the window aimlessly like I just did. If you’re lucky, you can convince them it takes an hour for the wax to dry.
by Heather Plett | Nov 2, 2006 | Uncategorized
Nope, I will not promise you a post every day (especially since I already missed yesterday). Normally I’d be happy to – in fact, I often post every day. But this month, I need the freedom to sulk and pout, and just be uncreative and occasionally uncommunicative. Yes, sometimes I might be found curled up in my bed with the covers over my head instead of at the computer being all friendly. It’s not the pending winter – no, I rather enjoyed the fresh layer of snow. It’s not the restlessness I talked about a little while ago. It’s not even my sleepy soul.
It’s something else entirely, and I’m dying to talk about it, but I can’t. Let’s just say it’s ugly and unpleasant, and my name will probably be dragged through the mud a few times in the coming months and perhaps even years. And, starting next week, I will probably need to make a few too many trips to another province.
I’ll just say that sometimes it’s really, really hard being in management. Most of the time, I enjoy being in a position of leadership, but some days, it’s not worth the “big bucks”. Some days, I just want to be a working stiff who shows up in the morning, counts widgets, and then goes home at the end of the day. Some mornings, when I wake up from a nightmare brought on by all of this like I did this morning, I’d rather stay in bed.
On another note entirely, I’ve been reading Torch by Cheryl Strayed (recommended by Laura before she disappeared from the face of the earth under the allegations that she was a fake), and I have to say the woman (Cheryl Strayed, that is) knows how to get alot of things right. Like grief, for example. Like the deep trench left in your life after the loss of a parent. And like the betrayal you feel when you watch a parent move on to another relationship.
Here’s a quote:
“…as the weeks passed and then turned to months, Claire’s sorrow thickened, deepened. She came to see that her grief did not have an end, or if it did, she would not be delivered there. Grief was not a road or a river or a sea but a world, and she would have to live there now. The world was different for each person, for her and for Joshua and for Bruce. She couldn’t say what Joshua’s or Bruce’s was, but hers was a place vast and wide. It was everywhere, went on forever. The sky at night in a place famous for its night sky: Montana or the Sahara Desert. And her face eternally tipped up to that sky.”
by Heather Plett | Nov 1, 2006 | Uncategorized
Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, but everyone had their own ideas about costumes this year, so it was a fairly motley crew of trick-or-treaters at our house tonight.
I love Halloween, even on a cold snow-covered night like tonight. I like the cheerfulness of children on the street, I like opening my door to neighbours, I like sneaking peeks into other people’s homes (who knew that our bachelor neighbour played the organ?), I like costumes, I like jack-o-lanterns, I like candy, I like wandering around outside with my kids, and I like the momentary feeling of community on our block.
The children are growing up, though. Nikki and Julie made plans with their friends (which included roaming the richer neighbourhoods because they give out better loot), so it was only Maddie and I making our way around the block. Nonetheless, it was a treat walking around with her, listening to her chat happily to everyone she met on the street and remembering to say Thank You (and then proudly reporting to me “Mom, I remembered my manners at FOUR houses in a row!”)
Some days, I think my heart will burst with love for these children I’ve been entrusted with.
