Honest Scrap

Kate Hopper, the writer, teacher, and community builder behind the blog Mother Words:  Mothers Who Write, recently tagged this blog with an Honest Scrap Award--ironically, right as I was beginning to question if I should even keep doing a blog.  (Insert Homer Simpson-style headsmack here--Dope!)  All it took was that li'l' bit of acknowledgement, and the blogging bug has bitten me anew. 

The Honest Scrap Award is a sort of blogging chain letter that lets bloggers recognize blogs they find brilliant in content or design.  (Thank you so much, Kate, for the kind acknowledgment.)  Kate also awarded another blog I'd already found through Mother Words, Lynne Marie Wanamaker's Mind Body Mama, and two others, The Blue Suitcase and Maggie World, that I was happy to discover, as well).

I hereby bestow the Honest Scrap Award on the three blogs that I turn to most often for inspiration, provocation, insight, and electronic companionship:

Unschooling is Dreamy

A friend of mine's funny, energizing chronicle of her family's unschooling life, including one son obsessed with rockets and the Wicked Witch of the West, and a younger son with a penchant for impish destruction and mayhem. 

Just Enough, and Nothing More

An exhaustive, beautifully organized compendium of parenting and homeschooling information--not so much a blog as a treasure chest, in my opinion.  

Wonder Farm

Patricia Zaballos's blog chronicles her family's pursuit of creativity, which takes a wonderful variety of forms, from her daughter's miniature Indian kitchen diorama to Patricia's year-long study of excellent personal essayists. I found her blog via her dead-on "Waldorf guilt" posts, and I've been hooked ever since.

Wear your Honest Scrap with pride, ladies, and do share the love!

I am supposed to list ten honest things about myself as part of the whole Honest Scrap protocol.  If you are one of the bloggers listed above, feel free to skip this step if it doesn't appeal to you.  It did appeal to me, however, so here goes:

1.  I actually really do like being forty, and like my friend Katrina, I think my friends look more beautiful as they get older, not less, because, as Katrina put it, you can see more of their lives in their faces now.

2.  I tend to think that the secret to happiness is the right schedule.

3.  I had an obsessive crush on Heath Ledger's Joker character last summer, at the height of The Dark Knight hype.

4.  As a kid, I forced my friends to act in basement theatrical versions of the books I'd read recently, and I always gave myself the leading role, because after all, I was the one who'd read the book.  Jane Eyre and Gone With the Wind were two long-running productions. When I told my friends about the plot of Wuthering Heights, two of my ensemble's players rolled their eyes at each other and asked snarkily, "I wonder who's going to play Cathy?"

5.  I am utterly fixated on the idea of self-improvement, perhaps to the exclusion of actual peace and happiness.

6.  I'm good at beginning things, but I have a hard time finishing things.  My husband laughs (when he's not cringing) at the way I put jars of jelly that have the faintest smear of jelly back in the fridge for someone else to finish off, or how I'll leave a box of crackers with one cracker in it on the shelf for months.  Endings make me deeply uneasy.

7.  I dream of living deep in the woods in northern Minnesota, Oregon, or Montana when I am an old lady.  I would love to be doing that right now, actually, but can't because A) My husband and I have sunk way too much money into this house to try to move now, B) I could never in a million years "stage" this house for buyers without completely losing my mind at this point in my life, and C) I would miss the friends I have here too much and all the things I've grown used to here in St. Paul.  

8.  I set out as a mother determined to be more patient and understanding than my mother was with me, but I think I am actually more consistently crabby than she was.

9.  I am very good at noticing what my children are interested in and finding them more information and resources to explore those interests.  I'm also extremely generous when it comes to playing make-believe games and stories with them, though not as generous as they'd probably like me to be.

10.  It has been over seven years since my husband and I have gone out on a nighttime, stay-out-dancing-til-the-bars close kind of date, or even a go-see-a-movie-in-a-theater-that-isn't-a-matinee date.  The last time my husband and I went on a date, we took a walk along the Mississippi, had lunch, then spent the last half-hour or so of our date at the LIBRARY.  That's the kind of unrepentant dorks WE are.

All right, that's enough honesty for one post.  Over and out.