Crazy Idea?: February Bread Challenge

In The Happiness Project, the Gretchen Rubin occasionally gives herself a challenge, such as the Week of Extreme Nice. Here is her explanation:

What is “Extreme Nice”? It’s an extreme sport like bungee jumping or skydiving—pushing the envelope, exerting myself beyond my ordinary efforts, finding new depths in myself to meet the hardest challenges. And I can do it in my own home.

So this week I intend to be utterly nice to [my husband]. No criticism. No pestering. No bickering. Jumping up to do whatever he asks me to do, responding enthusiastically to his every suggestion.

Maybe I need a challenge like this? According to GR, being happier requires you to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth. I have grown in many ways since becoming a mom 5 1/2 years ago, but these ways were largely chosen for me and out of necessity, by this or that Parenting Challenge. Now I finally feel like I can attempt a little growth for myself. I have a few areas of my life in mind that could use some attention, and this challenge would address a couple of them. Here's my idea: make bread every day for a month.

In order to get really good at something, in order to become an expert, you need to do it A LOT. Like, for 10,000 hours. I'm not proposing spending 20 hours/week for 10 years making bread. I don't need to do it that well. But it's certainly something I'd like to get better at, and I think a lot of baking for a few weeks would take me to the next level.

Gretchen Rubin also says that it's easier to do something EVERY DAY than to do it every other day or every few days. I have definitely noticed this with exercise. And with this blog.

But that would result in a lot of bread, especially considering that I am currently working on ways to increase efficiency by baking more than one loaf at a time and freezing the extra. Even though we have a pretty big freezer, 1 or 2 loaves a day for 29 days--or 21 days if I do only week days--or 25 days if I were to only take one day a week off--that would be a lot of bread. So there's another component to the Bread Challenge.

A friend from Cleveland, Emily, has been making pies (a. lot. of. pies.) since last summer, and blogging about it at her blog, Pie Eyed. A couple of months ago, she started giving away pie once a week to someone she encountered in her daily life who brightened her day: the oil-change guy; the lady at the convenience store; the guy who works as Subway. She calls it Pie It Forward. Maybe I could give away fresh-baked bread?

We have only lived in this area for 4 years, and the first couple I was either pregnant or taking care of a baby, and I don't tend to learn new areas very well, and I am not always one to jump in and meet someone new because I do a lot of second-guessing myself, and I always want to find ways to help the community but it can be a project to figure out where, say, Ronald McDonald House is and do they take used toys, or do they have a rule against it, etc.

So I think this would

1. Get me out in the community, meeting neighbors on our street as well as learning where a place like the Ronald McDonald House is;
2. Give me a chance to do something nice for other people, which will hopefully lift their spirits as well as my own;
3. Give me a chance to thank people who have helped me out in the past, like the Bunny Foster Home Lady who gave me a bucket of bunny poop for my garden and who works really hard helping bunnies find homes--gratitude is an important way to help you appreciate the Abundance in your life;
4. Get me chatting and connecting with new people--who knows? I may even make a friend, which would help me feel more Abundance; and
5. Help me to share what I have, which I believe is a big way to feel Abundance.

I don't know if or how I'm going to do it. If I do it, I will definitely post about it on my blog. I will leave you now with a quote I found on the Internet yesterday that probably doesn't really apply, but here it is anyway:

"Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one."  -- Nikolai Berdyaev

Patience vs Time

Getting the kids up and dressed and ready for school today, I continued to try to remain positive. And gentle. And loving and appreciative of the fact that them. There was some deep breathing. There was some "taking a moment." But there was also some stopping and looking and listening. Stopping myself from constantly trying to nudge them toward our goal of leaving the house. Looking at their beautiful faces and listening to their creative language and the tone of their voices. Listening to what they wanted to tell me (Maury is from Africa and likes to eat Panamanian soup, which is African, since Panama is in Africa while I was helping them get dressed). Looking at what they wanted to show me (a snowplow plowing a driveway on the next street over while we were supposed to be eating breakfast.

Because paying attention to them, for my own sake, is a priority for me. But so is getting to school on time. And because I want them to feel to feel that their home is a safe and happy place. Because I want them to remember me as  to be present in the moment.

The other day I started reading World Enough & Time, On Creativity and Slowing Down by Christian McEwan. I stopped because I was reading a sample on my Kindle app, and I think I might like to have the brick and mortar book better. One big thing I got from the first chapter or two was that many people have had an experience that slowing down, even just consciously doing things more slowly, can make it seem like there is more time, even to the point of getting more things checked off the old To-Do list on a Saturday that on a Saturday spent rushing around. This seems difficult to believe, but as I am desperate to feel a roominess in time, I am trying to slow down. I have a lot more to say about this, but will hopefully do that another day.

For today, what I want to say is this: on a practical level, when dealing with my 3- and 5-year-old, on this particular Tuesday morning, not only did I enjoy the morning more than I would have with constant nudging and trying to shut them down any time they strayed from the goal, the boys seemed more willing to move forward and less likely to dig in their heels or tune me out. In sum: I felt that my acting as if there were plenty of time actually resulted in greater efficiency in getting up and out the door.

UPDATE 4 jan 2012 (the next day) lest you get the wrong impression of me:  Another thing that helped me have such a patient morning yesterday was the fact that I got up at my husband's regular time (5:50) as I usually do, and the kids didn't get up until after 7 (very rare) so I actually had time to get myself dressed, empty the dishwasher, get breakfast going, etc. That makes a HUGE difference,  rather than, say, top use this morning as an example, one kid getting up at 5:50 and fussing at me for an hour to "pick me up!!!" while I'm trying to get dressed, gather the laundry, etc. I also feel I should add that I had a nice, calm morning yesterday, but after picking up my 3-y-o at school and eating lunch with him, I completely hit a wall (partly because I am getting over the worlds most lingering cold and partly because I always get tired after lunch) and found myself being very short and impatient and not interested in appreciating anything other than laying down on the couch with my eyes closed.