A Two Year Old's Guide to Eating PB&J

Step One: Make sure Mommy has separated your sandwich into halves, even if your sandwich is only a half to begin with.

Step Two: Open each half to inspect the contents. Determine whether Mommy used creamy or crunchy peanut butter.

Step Three: If she used crunchy, pick each peanut chunk out of the sandwich and eat it. If she used creamy, pick each imaginary peanut out of the sandwich and eat it. Make sure to leave behind holes where the "peanuts" were.

Step Four: Complain about your sticky hands in your "pre-meltdown" voice until Mommy wipes them clean.

Step Five: Hold each open-faced sandwich in both hands and eat right down the middle, biting like a half-starved T-rex into the fleshy center of your sandwich, but only on three of your four portions. Stay well away from any crust portion. Cry crocodile tears if the bread rips even a little.

Step Six: Using your fingers, pull small bits of the sandwich, including bread this time, away from the area of the crust, saving them from potential crustiness by quickly devouring them. Do this down to the crust on only one portion of your sandwich, and halfway on a second portion.

Step Seven: When you have consumed all the peanuts, three of middles, and one and a half of the sides of your now open-faced sandwich, call out "Done! Down!" and "Wash hands sticky hands!" until Mommy gives up on her "one more bite" pleas, wipes you down, and frees you from your high chair.

Step Eight: Immediately request a snack.

A Few of My Favorite Things (Read: Books)

I often get asked for reading suggestions, and I try to tailor them to the asker as much as I can. But there are some books (and "book" here can mean novel, essay, play, or poetry) that I recommend to everyone, that I liked so much that no matter a person's preferences, they end up hearing about. That list includes:

• The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
• The Bromeliad Trilogy by Terry Pratchett
• The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
• The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
• The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
• The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
• King Lear, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Macbeth by Shakespeare
• Born to Run by Christopher McDougall 
• The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum

Obviously, this isn't a full list of the books that I love. Some literature I can't recommend to just anyone.  "A Modest Proposal," for instance, is not for those who cannot joke about fiscally motivated cannibalism. And all of the above recommendations are more serious in nature, even those by Oscar Wilde (because it's earnest, you see). So if you're looking for something lighter in nature, maybe something what one might call "beach reading," I'll tell you what I took to the lake the other day: Emma and Anne of Green Gables. (No, really, I did, but I didn't open either, so you can lower those eyebrows.)

But if you really must know what I read when I'm not pretending to be intellectual, here's what made it into the one box (for weight and space reasons, we couldn't bring my books or bookshelves, and yes, I do actively miss the books that got left behind) of books that made it onto the moving van to Idaho two years ago:

Editing references, History of the Church (my mom's set that I borrowed and have--ahem--never finished), Jesus the Christ, various Shakespeare, Austen, poetry, and cookbooks. Fire hid during the real packing and so became a stowaway to Idaho. I like it, but it didn't make the original list.

Didn't I say I love Harry Potter? I'm still waiting for the sequel to Pegasus. You hear that, Robin McKinley? My toes are still tapping impatiently.

Not pictured: Ender's Game, Ella Enchanted, Summers at Castle Auburn, and The Ugly Princess and the Wise Fool

On Starting Over

It's been four years--FOUR YEARS--since I've written seriously, and almost exactly that since I posted anything at all here. So much has changed: two kids, a new state, two new jobs, several new hobbies. Let's start with a constant: running.

I started running about the time of my last post. The previous February, I was promoted. It was my first post-college full-time job, and I hated it. The complete truth is that I loved what I did, but I really disliked who I did it with. My bosses had made it quite clear that I wasn't their first choice, and each time they came in, they spent a couple of hours telling me and my coworker of the week (it was the worst revolving door position I've ever seen) what a terrible job we were doing of running the place. And I, I who had never cared all that much for anyone else's opinion of me, had started believing the story of my own worthlessness. I didn't have friends near to buoy me up because I worked long hours, so I mostly spent my time away from work sitting on the couch eating ice cream and escaping into fiction. Soon I gained twenty new friends on my hips. And each pound made me believe what I was being told just a little bit more.

I remember one night I was lying in bed crying and thinking, "Why am I so sad? I've never felt so sad in my life." Jason didn't know what to do, and I can only imagine how helpless he felt with a wife who was paralyzed by her own sadness. I couldn't tell him how to help me because I didn't know what was wrong. But that night, I realized that the problem went beyond my unhappiness at work: it wasn't that I hated my job, but that I'd started hating myself. I'd bought into the rhetoric I was hearing at work that I was boring, stupid, and completely unproductive. And I wasn't doing anything to get a second opinion: I was completely neglecting not only my relationships with people who loved me, but also my relationship with God. And that was the killer. As long as I'd been secure in His love, it didn't matter what other opinions were expressed.

So the next morning, I ran a quarter mile and began to love myself again. It started as a way to lose those 20 pounds (and let's be honest, get hopped up on endorphins) but I found that what I really needed was the sense of accomplishment I felt when I ran. Endurance is something humans are built for (have you read Born to Run? You really, really should) but that doesn't make running easy, especially when your adult life has been primarily composed of sitting and reading. So every run was an accomplishment for me, and it still is. Running helped me climb out of the hole I'd willingly climbed into when I started believing what other people thought of me. I've only stopped running for pregnancy and injury.

That first quarter-mile run was one of the best decisions I've made as an adult. The verdict is out on other decisions I've made (letting the two year old play in a bucket of flour, for instance), but I'm hoping a return to writing will be one of the better ones.