How to be a less annoying human, or Dianne’s other rules of civil society

1. Park your one car in that one space between those two big lines.

2. Turn your lights on when driving in a parking garage.

3. If you own a car that beeps when you lock it, leave it unlocked.

4. If I can hear your radio over my own, it might be too loud.

5. If you don’t get an immediate answer to your email, sending two more will not help your request get done faster.

6. If you schedule a meeting for an hour, an hour is all you get. 

7. If you schedule a meeting for longer than an hour, there should be food involved.

8. Use redline.  I don’t really want to read that whole contract again.  It was fascinating enough the first time.

9. Do not refer to people who work for you as paraprofessionals.  That’s like quasi-workers.

10. If you have a dog, keep it on a leash, and if it barks at night or naptime know that I will call the police for disturbing the peace.

11. Make a cell phone that keeps a charge.

12. If you deliver a package to my house, wait long enough for me to get to the door to sign for it.

13. That clamshell packaging needs to go.

14. Do we really need can openers anymore?  Why don’t all cans have a pull top?

15. Doctors, car inspection places, the DMV, and all those other places that you have to go to in order to take care of life stuff should be open until at least 10 pm at night.

16. Libraries should be open on Mondays.  People need to read that day too.

17.  If you want me to self-checkout to save the cost of hiring employees, at least make that machine stop telling me to bag everything when I already did.

18. It’s called a sidewalk because that is where you are supposed to walk.  Streetwalking is not a good thing for various reasons.

19. When you shower at the gym, pick up your towels and put them where they belong.

20. When you work out at the gym, don’t grunt when you lift weights.  You are not a professional tennis star.

21. Make pitchers hit.

22. Let me bring my own food to the ballpark.

23. Two and a half weeks off of school in the middle of the year for Christmas is about two weeks too long.

24. If you charge a service fee for me to let you hold my money in your bank, I would like some service.  I could use help with laundry.

25. All refills should be free.

Grocery shopping for baby

I try to get my shopping done at Aldi, but there are usually a couple of items that I think I need that Aldi does not carry.  So recently I was standing in the dreaded line at Albertsons with my bar of laundry soap, and I was almost moved to TALK TO A STRANGER.  I just don’t do this.  Strangers are bad.  Strangers are scary.  It’s none of my business what strangers do.  However, I was thisclose because of what the lady in front of me was buying.  She had some normal groceries, and then 30 jars of baby food.  Based on the size of the jars, they were the level 3 or almost toddler kind, which I think run upwards of a dollar a pop.  I wouldn’t know, since I haven’t purchased one in over ten years (Dodge was my practice child and I didn’t have my system down yet*).  

Let me be explicitly clear here: My issue with jarred baby food is the price and nothing more.  The ingredients and nutritional value are totally fine.  I have no desire to debate what kind of food is best for baby.  All I know is what is best for mom’s bank account.  For her thirty dollars, this lady probably could have fed her baby solid food for his entire babyhood instead of just a week if she would have put back the jars and bought some fruit and veggies in the produce department.  Making baby food does not require a recipe, special equipment, or any extra time.  Really!  You don’t even need a blender.  You're not making special food.  A bowl, a spoon, an ice cube tray, and a freezer and you’re done.  A few ideas:

1) Smash up an avocado or a banana.

2) Open a can of peas – perfect first finger food!  Mash up with whatever kind of milk your baby drinks if you want them smoother.

3) Peel, chop, and cook down some apples in water.  Applesauce in minutes.

4) Nuke some carrots in water until they break up easily with a spoon.

You can do this one meal at a time – just cook and mash a bit of whatever fruit or vegetable you’re already having for yourself.  Or, you can do batches at a time, spoon into ice cube trays, freeze, and pop into freezer bags for storage.  Take out a couple at a time, thaw, and serve. 

It’s a no-brainer, people.  Thirty dollars is like eight fancy coffees for Mom. 

*Note to self: write blog on why you need to have more than one kid to work out all the bugs in the parenting system.  Obviously our system had a lot of bugs since we have so many little Supruns. 

Dianne’s first rule of civil society

Be decisive, but know that it is never too late to admit when you've made a bad decision and apologize for it.

If you are the parent, boss, head volunteer, or a person in any other leadership role, your main job is to make effective decisions that set the course for the group that trusts you.  Such decisions require thoughtfulness and consultation, lest you become an irrational dictator.  Hastiness and stubbornness would be unfortunate uses of the power granted to you.  The flip side of that coin, however, is that taking too long to make a decision equates to missing an opportunity.  People are going to make your decisions for you if you don’t step up.  So after the appropriate input, be decisive, and show people why this decision is going to benefit both the group and each member individually.  Then equip your people with the tools they need to carry out the mission.

 

My real life example is that we recently started dish team.  The kids have always had to take their dirty dishes to the sink, but it was time to teach them how to carry out the entire process.  We needed to do this now while everyone was still young enough to be eager to help.  Waiting might lead to the impression that dishes magically wash themselves, and to the decision by default that only the grownups can do dishes.  So after a few days of practice and juggling of roles based on the kids’ heights and abilities, we now have a three member dish team knocking out a daily chore in record time.

What if this decision to delegate dish duty at this time had failed?  What if every meal ended with broken dishes?  What if we never had enough clean dishes for the next meal?  Then it would have been our responsibility as leaders to be willing to change course (no matter how invested), to revise the plan, to apologize for the mistake or poor timing.  A leader without humility will fail, and bring the team crashing down at the same time. 

“The chief executive who knows his strengths and weaknesses as a leader is likely to be far more effective than the one who remains blind to them.  He also is on the road to humility, that priceless attitude of openness to life that can help a manager absorb mistakes, failures, or personal shortcomings.” – John Adair

 

More of my rules to come…

Best baby ever

I knew all last week that I would have to do extra work work on Saturday.  No, that’s not a typo.  You know about work work – that stuff you get paid to do during most of your waking hours.  Not to be confused with house work, family work, volunteer work, or whatever other responsibilities you squeeze into those few hours before bed.  I assumed that I might get an hour’s worth done during the day and then a little more during the nighttime playoff game.  Baby Mac woke up around 7 am and by 10 was getting awfully snuggly, which is a little unusual for this busybody.  I put her in her crib at 10:30 and walked away, not hearing a peep.  I immediately got on the computer and started checking off the to-do list.  After a couple of hours there was a brief intermission to pull teeth….I mean get Hank to do some homework (oh yeah, that's another kind of work for me).  At the three hour mark Christopher called and was surprised to hear that Mackenzie was still asleep.  I kept working until I reached a good stopping point at the end of four hours.  Then came a late lunch, a little exercise, and the realization that a good mother probably would have checked the baby’s breathing well before four hours and forty-five minutes had passed.  With visions of how to get myself, three children, and an unresponsive baby to the ER dancing through my head, I tiptoed into her room and watched for movement.  Mac rolled over, smiled, yawned, and said Mama.  So, should I ever get a little bonus for my hard work work, I will treat Miss Mac to a few of her favorite things for being such a good baby.  Here are my ideas so far: 1) toilet paper to unroll; 2) socks to pull off and hide in strange places; 3) pencil erasers to chew; 4) Cheerios; and 5) travel size bottles of shampoo to try to unscrew.

Recipe optional

If you haven’t heard of the author Michael Perry, stop reading this and go to his website right now.  Over the years he has chronicled his small town life in Wisconsin from the point of view of a volunteer firefighter, part-time pig farmer, and more recently, husband and father.  In Truck: A Love Story, he remembers the year he rebuilt his truck (and somehow made this fascinating to me) and met his wife.  With self-deprecating humor he describes the cooking paralysis he experiences when calculating that it would take him over fourteen years to try all the recipes in his relatively limited collection of thirteen cookbooks…and that’s not even counting “the Internet, otherwise known as the Devil’s Mind-Fryer” where he finds twenty recipes for snickerdoodles on one recipe site.  “How in the name of sifted sugar do you choose?”

My cookbook collection is more than thirteen, and that’s after spending much of the past year weeding out the ones that I don’t use and selling them at Half-Price Books.  I am down to a few basic must-haves and several restaurant cookbooks so that I can recreate dishes that I have enjoyed elsewhere, like the mac and cheese from Reata in Fort Worth.  However, I am more likely to read a cookbook than cook from it on an average night.  There are pretty pictures, you can read a few pages at a time and set it down, you can dream about all the yummy stuff you’ll make when you have the time and unlimited resources necessary to buy exotic ingredients at Whole Foods…what’s not to love?

I don’t rely on recipes to cook dinner for the family because I’m comfortable enough with the “I don’t have any swiss chard but spinach is green so nobody will know the difference” approach.  When a recipe catches my eye, I think in terms of 1) would I eat that and 2) do I have some of the key ingredients?  For example, this week we had my version of this recipe for white bean stew.  Got some of the ingredients?  Check.  Cold enough to have soup?  Check.  I replaced the can of white beans with dried white beans that I soaked.  I replaced the chopped tomatoes with crushed.  I added some minced onion and a couple spoonfuls of pesto.  It all went into the slow cooker before work and when I got home I stirred in some spinach.  Easy peasy lemon squeezy.  

Yes, spaghetti can be lucky

Each time I watch the movie or read the book Julie & Julia, I think I need to cook more and write more because doing one or both will make me rich and famous.  If it worked for Julie Powell, then it will work for me, right?  We'll ignore the fact that her next book was about how a little bit of fame led her to butcher her personal life, because that part of the story doesn't really factor into my ten year plan.  So, in combination with the arrival of the new year, plans for healthy eating, schemes to get my kids to do what I want them to do, desires to somehow capture these fleeting moments so that I will have something to laugh about when they all move away (and they will move away), and the aforementioned goal to be rich and famous, I present to you Wednesday Words.  I am far too busy with the logistics of working, mothering, and wife-ing (because that is now a word) to promise you my foibles, recipes, and words of wisdom more frequently than that, but as Julie and her husband say, you need a deadline if for no other reason than to hear it whooshing past.  So if it is Wednesday (in this or some other time zone or dimension), you can plan to hear from me.

On this Wednesday, the goal is to get the kids to eat the traditional New Year's Day good luck foods without complaint.  By that I mean without them knowing it.  So, rather than breaded veal chops and tiny scoops of black-eyed peas and stewed tomatoes (I don't know why those bring good luck, but I am not one to question such things), this mama is making spaghetti and meat sauce.  I just won't talk about what kind of meat or what those lumpy things are in the sauce.  I'm betting that four out of the six of us enjoy this meal and the other two will just have to make their own luck, which, by the way, is the message we preach the other 364 days out of the year anyway.