Working At Home With Kids: A Survival Guide
Posted by Abby Quillen in Household, Parenting on May 20, 2013
When I decided to work at home a few years ago, a lot of people thought I was crazy. “You can’t work at home with little kids,” more than a few told me. On occasion (think: screaming toddler, ramshackle house, hungry cats, imminent deadline), I’ve agreed. The work-at-home parent life is not always easy.
But most of the time I love it. I get to hang out with two charming little boys, spend lots of time outside and in my garden, see friends most days, and write. It’s a pretty wonderful gig. Here are some tricks I’ve learned to make it work if you too are doing the work-at-home life or contemplating it.
- Divide the day
In the mornings, I do the house chores, including making a healthy lunch and sometimes dinner in advance. Mid morning, we often meet friends or go to the park, on a walk, or to the library. In the afternoons, I work (during nap and preschool time and when my husband gets home). By dividing the day this way, my kids know what to expect, and I rarely have to multitask home and work tasks.
- Reprogram your relationship with time
I worked outside of the home for more than a decade, so it took me a long time to shift to a work-at-home mentality. When I was gone all day and got home at 6:30 or 8:30 in the evenings, my main cooking concern was short preparation time. Now, I have plenty of time. So I can easily make nutritious meals that require little effort but lots of cooking time, like beans, grains, and stock. We rely heavily on those staples for most of our meals.
- Plan, but not too much
For a long time, I made detailed to-do lists every day, which helped me remember everything I needed to do to manage a house and business. Now I’ve mostly gotten the house chores down, and I’ve discovered a new deceptively simple trick to stay on task with work. Right after I wake up, I think of the one thing I want to get done during my work time. I can’t believe how much this helps me prioritize and focus.
I’m also learning when to ditch the plans and take advantage of the perks of working at home. We’ve had some insanely nice weather this spring, and I’m grateful that I’ve gotten to revel in it. My garden is grateful too.
- Schedule alone time
This year, I started waking up at 5 and going on a run or walk before my family wakes up. It’s completely transformed my days. I savor that quiet time outside (especially now that the sun is up and the birds are singing), and I have infinitely more energy and patience all day long.
- Fill their tanks
When Ezra went through a hitting stage awhile ago, I discovered a magical solution to almost any behavioral problem. After trying nearly everything else I could imagine, I told Ezra to come sit on my lap for a few minutes when he felt like he wanted to hit his brother. He did, and the hitting completely stopped.
No matter how busy I am, I try to remind myself that it’s easier to give one-on-one attention each morning than to manage the whining, tantrums, and fights that ensue when attention tanks run low. Likewise, lots of outside play and regular high protein snacks work miracles.
- Silence is golden
A few years ago, I read an article by a police officer who responds to domestic violence situations. The first thing he does when he enters a house is walk around and turn off all of the background noise. He says usually a radio and TV are blaring. It took me a long time to realize how much noise can affect a household. I listen to a podcast or turn on music for a while every day. When it’s on, I really listen to it. Then I turn it off. We all get along a lot better when we can focus on and hear each other.
- Turn off notifications
I heard that they design “you’ve got mail” bongs to stimulate the opiate receptors in our brains. Maybe that’s why it’s nearly impossible to ignore one when you hear it. I check my email about three times throughout the day. Other than that, I keep it closed. The same is true for Facebook and Twitter, which I allocate a small window of time to each day. Trust me, I learned this lesson the hard way.
- Beware the learning curve
Managing a house and business and parenting at the same time requires new skills, tricks, and tools. For me, it took about two years to feel somewhat competent, which leads me to my last point and the giant caveat to everything I’ve written above….
- Be ready for change and setbacks
Every time I think I’ve got the work-at-home parent life down, things change. One of the kids goes through a monstrous (three-year long) bout of separation anxiety. Another gets four molars in two weeks. An editor emails with an amazing opportunity the same week everyone in the house gets the flu. It’s inevitable.
And finally, the most important thing I’d recommend for the work-at-home life is an awesome partner. My husband watches two little boys while he’s getting ready for work most days. Then he gets home from a long work day and usually makes dinner while I work. There’s no doubt about it, he’s the rock star behind this operation.
Do you work at home with kids? Do you have any tricks, lessons, or hacks you’re willing to share? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
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Revisiting the Car-Free Life
Posted by Abby Quillen in Alternative transportation on May 13, 2013
“Drive to work. Work to drive,” my husband likes to say. He has a point. The average cost of owning and operating a vehicle soared to $9,100 this year, according to AAA.
Saving money is not the only reason to consider living sans vehicle, at least for awhile. We’ve done it on and off over the years, and every time, we’re amazed by all the perks of the car-free life.
As long-time readers know, we lived car-free for more than a year. We bicycled our way through a dark, rainy Western Oregon winter. We fetched groceries, hauled chicken food, and toted our son to parks and play dates on two wheels. My husband rode twelve miles round trip to work every day, and I pedaled across town and over hills when I was nine months pregnant.
A few days before our second son Ira was born in August 2011, we welcomed a vintage gold Volvo sedan into our family.
Why?
We loved so much about the car-free life as I documented on this blog. However, most authorities on the matter agree that infants should not ride in bike trailers or seats until they’re about a year old. That would leave me car-free and bike-free throughout an entire winter.
I’m a huge believer in choosing a joyful life when you have the option. So that’s what we did. And our Volvo brought us a lot of joy in those early, overwhelming days of parenting two little ones. I loved taking it to the library and piling the trunk up with books. I loved zipping across town to my mama friends’ houses when it was pouring rain. I loved being able to go on hikes on nearby trails and visit my sister, who lives an hour away.
My husband biked to work most of the time. I walked (and then biked, when Ira was ready) nearly everywhere. But we also had the option of driving. My friend calls this the car-optional life. It felt like a pretty good one.
Then something happened a couple of months ago. Our Volvo needed an alternator, and we didn’t have time to fix it right away.
So we revisited the car-free life … and loved it.
We loved it so much that we’re still doing it. The weather is lovely and we’re biking everywhere, sometimes up to 15 to 20 miles in the course of a day.
This time, perhaps because we took a year-long crash course in the subject (and because of that lovely weather I mentioned), car-free living feels infinitely easier. Joyful. And we’re astounded all over again by how quickly it transforms your body, health, mind, and spirit.
Now that our transit is entirely human-powered, we both feel fitter and healthier, have more energy, and are less stressed.
Arthur Conan Doyle sagely advised, “When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.”
I agree. I know of no better mood lifter than gliding along the river or stream beneath newly leafed trees beside meadows of wild camas, community gardens, and unfurling irises, rhododendrons, and roses.
It’s been almost two months, and we just don’t feel in a hurry to jump back in the car.
The car-free life is not right for everyone in every place at every time. But it may be an adventure worth trying if you are able. You might find out you love it.
More posts about car-free living:
- Car-Free and Loving It
- Car-Free Chronicles
- Confessions From the Car-Free Life
- Lessons in Car-Free Living
- Car-Free Delivery
- Car-Free With Four Kids!
- Plan a Car-Free Vacation
- A Snapshot of Car-Usage in America
Have you ever lived car-free or car-lite? Have you ever wanted to try it? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
(Note: Do you read New Urban Habitat on Google Reader? It will be shut down soon. You can sign up on my blog to have my weekly posts delivered to your inbox.)
And Then There Were Three
Posted by Abby Quillen in Backyard Chickens on May 6, 2013
For those of you who’ve followed New Urban Habitat from the beginning, you know we got four fluffy backyard chicks in May of 2009. I chronicled our early days with them in The Hen Diaries. Raccoons, lost hens, a ransacked garden, that beautiful first egg … so much drama!
You can follow our adventures as fledgling chicken-keepers below if you missed it:
Weeks:
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six & seven
- Eight, nine, & ten
- Eleven to nineteen
- Our First Egg
- Twenty to Twenty-nine
- Update
We lost one of those girls this week. Emily got suddenly ill last weekend and died on Tuesday. She was our first layer, and I always had a special fondness for her.
Rest in peace, Emily. We’ll miss you.
Jefferson’s Garden
Posted by Abby Quillen in Gardening, New Urban Habitat on April 29, 2013
Photo by stereogab
“No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.” ― Thomas Jefferson
I am happily in a season of gardening right now. We’re enjoying a beautiful, sunny late April here. All of our doors and windows are open, and our garden feels like another room of our house. We weave in and out of it all day, planting, watering, and watching. There’s so much magic happening out there right now.
I’ve also been helping a neighbor in her garden, and I’m learning a lot from her. If you have a little time and the interest, I can’t say enough about pitching in at a garden work party or offering to help a more seasoned gardener. You’ll take home all sorts of practical wisdom, and perhaps some seeds and starts too.
Thomas Jefferson, one of history’s legendary organic gardeners, understood the value of sharing horticultural know-how and plants with his neighbors. Jefferson collected seeds and cuttings from all over the world and reportedly always shared a little with his master-gardener neighbor George Divers. That way, if a plant died in Jefferson’s garden, he could visit Divers for some more seeds or clippings and try again. It was “a great lesson about sharing stuff,” Peter Hatch, the director of the Monticello garden, told The New York Times.
Jefferson’s Monticello garden is a thousand- foot long terrace built into the south side of a hillside. It houses a pavilion “reading room,” a recreation of the one where Jefferson spent many evenings.
Jefferson ate little meat and said vegetables were his “principle diet.” With the help of slave labor, he grew 330 varieties of 89 vegetable species and 170 fruit varieties. He planted lettuce every Monday from spring through fall, including heirloom varieties like Tennis Ball and Brown Dutch, which he apparently ate boiled. (Has anyone tried that?)
Jefferson kept detailed gardening journals, which you can read in his immaculate handwriting here. According to Hatch, Jefferson once wrote that even if he failed in the garden 99 out of 100 times, the one success was worth 99 failures.
When Jefferson retired, he rose with the sun every day and spent his mornings writing letters and working in the garden. “Although an old man, I am a young gardener,” he wrote in 1811 when he was 68 years old.
I have a feeling I, too, will always be a young gardener.
Learn more about Thomas Jefferson’s garden:
- At Monticello, Jefferson’s Methods Endure by Anne Raver – New York Times
- Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy in Gardening and Food by Peter Hatch – Monticello
Are you a gardener? What are you growing this spring? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
Happy Earth Day!
Posted by Abby Quillen in Household, Nature, Social movements on April 22, 2013
In honor of the holiday, I’m posting a column my dad wrote for the April 21, 2011 Denver Post. I have a cameo appearance, and I love my dad’s hilarious and true take on how we should celebrate the day.
Replace Earth Day with Binge Day
By Ed Quillen
The Denver Post
Earth Day is Friday, and as a loyal resident of Earth, I want to celebrate properly.
I may have already found the wrong way to celebrate. In 2003, I was invited to speak at an Earth Day rally in Alamosa. Being rather immodest, I accepted.
But my 170-mile round-trip drive must have damaged the ozone layer or accelerated global warming or otherwise worsened whatever we were worried about eight years ago. The gathering in Cole Park was pleasant, but there were generators growling and smoking to provide electricity for the amplifiers. This didn’t strike me as especially Earth-friendly.
And when my stage turn came, I followed Peggy Godfrey of Moffat, who’s a cowboy poet or cowgirl poetess. However you describe her, she’s a great performer. I felt like the local garage band that somehow ended up appearing after the Rolling Stones. Peggy is a hard act to follow.
This was clearly not an appropriate Earth Day commemoration for me. But what would be?
To find out, I called the greenest person I know, my daughter Abby in Eugene, Ore. She has a big garden and keeps chickens. She and her husband, Aaron, don’t own a car; Aaron bicycles 12 miles each way to his teaching job. Abby’s always on the lookout for local foods and gentler ways to run her household — for instance, she washes her long brown hair with vinegar instead of commercial shampoo.
(I should point out that we did not raise Abby to turn out this way, as we had a car but no chickens. It’s a choice she made after graduating with honors from the University of Colorado Denver with a degree in history.)
“So how do you plan to celebrate Earth Day?” I asked Abby, expecting to hear that she’d be at a big rally in a downtown Eugene park.
“I know some people who are driving clear up to Vancouver, B.C., for an Earth Day festival.” She laughed at that irony. “But for us, it will be pretty much the same as any other day. I’ll feed the chickens, gather eggs, tend the garden, take Ezra (their 3-year-old son) for a walk, hope he naps long enough for me to get some writing done — what I do most days.”
Abby’s got the right idea here: If you care about the environment, forget about Earth Day trips and celebrations, and live simply every day. When you think about it, focusing on the environment once a year doesn’t make much sense, especially when that celebration often involves burning a lot of fuel.
But there does seem to be a basic human need for annual celebrations, and to that end I propose a yearly Binge Day.
On the other 364 days of the year, we would live simple green lives with local food and drink. We would walk, bicycle or ride public transit to get around. We would eschew gaudy imported novelties, fad electronics destined for quick obsolescence and other trashy food, goods and geegaws.
In other words, we would live prudently and sensibly, following adages like “Waste not, want not.” The global economy might contract on that account, but it seems to be doing that anyway.
On Binge Day, though, we could pig out on champagne and corn-fed prime rib. We’d rent a Hummer or an Escalade to drive to the shopping mall for an orgy of conspicuous consumption. We’d ignore the recycling bins and just toss our abundant trash in a barrel. And after the once-a-year Binge Day blowout, we’d go back to living sensibly.
Add it up, and Binge Day should be about 364 times better for the environment than Earth Day.
I’m editing an anthology of my dad’s columns. To find out more about it, visit edquillen.com. How are you celebrating Earth Day? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
How To Learn Anything
Posted by Abby Quillen in Family life, Parenting on April 15, 2013
A few months ago, I said “shoes” in a conversation with my husband, and one-year-old Ira appeared in the doorway carrying his Stride Rites. That’s when we realized he can understand everything we say. It seemed to happen overnight.
Every day Ira learns a new word or two. “Doggy, doggy, doggy,” he squeals as the neighbors’ poodle trots over. “Bawk bawk,” he calls to the hens. Meanwhile, he’s guiding himself through a crash course in running, climbing, and riding a strider bike.
Four-and-a-half-year-old Ezra is teaching himself how to read, write letters, draw, paint, ride a scooter, and take photographs.
It begs the question, is it easier for kids to learn new things?
Scientists used to think so, especially when it came to language acquisition.
But new research in neuroplasticity suggests otherwise. It turns out our brains optimize themselves throughout our lives, reorganizing sometimes in dramatic ways, like after someone has a stroke.
That’s great news if you’ve always wanted to learn a second language or become a painter. If you put some effort into it, you can probably do it.
Here’s a little example from my life:
When I was about five, my best friend and I put on a concert for our moms. We sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
When we were done, both of our moms applauded.
“He’s a natural,” my mom said, beaming at my friend. My friend was undeniably musically gifted. He went on to later sing in a band.
I, on the other hand, sounded a little bit like a wounded tabby.
Into adulthood I struggled to stay on key even when I was singing along to my favorite songs. By the time I reached 30, I figured I should erase singing, at least in public settings, off my list of past times. Most people who heard me politely agreed. Read: my husband.
Then Ezra was born. When he was about a month old, I was pacing up and down the hallway in the middle of the night rocking him as he wailed. On a whim, I sang a lullaby I halfway remembered my mom singing to me.
Ezra grew instantly quiet and gazed at me.
Singing, it turns out, is a maternal super power. So, of course, I was going to continue singing even if I needed to buy a case of earplugs for my husband and cats. I crooned the same lullabies over and over — at naptime, in the car, at bedtime.
A few months later, after I (coincidentally) finished singing” Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” my husband grinned. “You taught yourself to sing.”
He was right. For the first time in my life, I could hold a tune. Effortlessly.
What had changed?
I’d paid attention to it.
As I’ve written before, we often forget the astonishing power of our attention. Paying attention to something invariably transforms it.
“Whatever you pay attention to thrives; whatever you don’t pay attention to withers and dies,” Karen Maezen Miller writes.
We tend to pay attention to what we’re interested in. So if you’ve always wanted to learn something and haven’t yet, maybe it’s time to ask yourself whether you’re really interested in it.
Or, you could try to find a screaming infant who loves the sound of Spanish verb conjugation or PBS painting shows.
Have you learned to do something new lately? Do you want to? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
Why the Most Powerful Thing in the World is a Seed
Posted by Abby Quillen in Gardening, Social movements on April 8, 2013
As promised, here’s my review of The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food
by Janisse Ray.
Why the Most Powerful Thing in the World is a Seed
by Abby Quillen
Janisse Ray celebrates the local, organic food movement but fears we’re forgetting something elemental: the seeds. According to Ray, what is happening with our seeds is not pretty. Ninety-four percent of vintage open-pollinated fruit and vegetable varieties have vanished over the last century.
Ray begins The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food by explaining how we lost our seeds. Feeding ourselves has always been a burden for humans, she explains. “So when somebody came along and said, ‘I’ll do that cultivating for you. I’ll save the seeds. You do something else,’ most of us jumped at the chance to be free.”
But, according to Ray, when the dwindling number of farmers who stayed on the land gave up on saving seeds and embraced hybridization, genetically modified organisms, and seed patents in order to make money, we became slaves to multinational corporations like Monsanto and Syngenta, which now control our food supply.
In 2007, 10 companies owned 67 percent of the seed market. These corporations control the playing field, because they influence the government regulators. They’ve been known to snatch up little-known varieties of seeds, patent them, and demand royalties from farmers whose ancestors have grown the crops for centuries. The result is that our seeds are disappearing, and we miss out on the exquisite tastes and smells of an enormous variety of fruits and vegetables. More alarmingly, “we strip our crops of the ability to adapt to change and we put the entire food supply at risk,” Ray writes. “The more varieties we lose, the closer we slide to the tipping point of disaster.”
However, The Seed Underground is not a grim story. It’s a story about seeds, after all, which Ray calls “the most hopeful thing in the world.” Moreover, it’s a story about a handful of quirky, charismatic, “quiet, under-the-radar” revolutionaries, who harvest and stow seeds in the back of refrigerators and freezers across America. Sylvia Davatz, a Vermont gardener who advocates that local food movements produce and promote locally grown seeds, calls herself the Imelda Marcos of seeds, because she has a thousand varieties in her closet. Yanna Fishman, the so-called sweet-potato queen, toils over a wild garden in the highlands of western North Carolina, where she grows 40 varieties of sweet potatoes. Dave Cavagnaro, an Iowan photographer, teaches people to hand-pollinate squash with masking tape to keep vintage varieties pure.
Seeds, it turns out, don’t just grow plants—they build stories, heritage, and history, which tend to be shared every time seeds pass from hand to hand. So it’s fitting that Ray, an accomplished nature writer and activist, shares some of her own story in The Seed Underground. When she was just a child, Ray got her first heirloom seeds from her grandmother—Jack beans, which resembled eyeballs. At 12 she set a brush fire trying to clear land for a garden. At 22 she joined Seed Savers Exchange.
Perhaps we learn the most about Ray from her present-day gardens at Red Earth, her Georgia farm. Ray writes that in the garden, she is “an animal with a hundred different senses and all of them are switched on.” She grows crops like Fife Creek Cowhorn okra, Running Conch cowpea, and Green Glaze collard. Her barn is filled with drying seed heads; her kitchen is stinky with seeds fermenting. “Seeds proliferate in the freezer, in my office, in the seed bank, in the garden shed—in jars, credit card envelopes, coffee cans, medicine bottles, recycled seed packets.”
Ray outlines the basics of seed saving in The Seed Underground, but it is not a how-to book. It’s a call to action, which often reads like a lyrical love letter to the land and to varieties of squash and peas most of us have never tasted. It’s also a love letter to us, Ray’s readers. “Even though I may not know you, I have fallen in love with you, you who understand that a relationship to the land is powerful,” she writes.
The truth is, Janisse Ray is on a mission to turn you into a quiet, under-the-radar revolutionary, and if you read The Seed Underground, she just might succeed. At the very least, you will look at seeds—tiny, but vital to our survival —differently.
“A seed makes itself. A seed doesn’t need a geneticist or hybridist or publicist or matchmaker. But it needs help,” she writes. “Sometimes it needs a moth or a wasp or a gust of wind. Sometimes it needs a farm and it needs a farmer. It needs a garden and a gardener. It needs you.”
Abby Quillen wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Abby is a freelance writer in Eugene, Ore. She blogs at newurbanhabitat.com.
Welcome
Hello! I'm Abby Quillen. Welcome to my blog. You can find more of my writing at abbyquillen.com.
