Unique, reasonable, sustainable gift idea...

...and it supports an amazing artist. Here's the new San Francisco Bay Area produce calendar by our friend who does letterpress out of her garage.

Not only does it tell you about what to buy in season and what to plant in any given month, it's a perpetual calendar so you never have to throw it away! Use it for planting notes or a birthday calendar.

I think it's gorgeous to boot!

Great for Bay Area residents or even homesick Northern Californians who'd appreciate the happy seasonal memories.

And for more holiday craft presents check out Renegade's Holiday Fair San Francisco. It's at Fort Mason, December 19+20:

Reduce your carbon contest

Dorky, snide remarks about "carbon-free" sugar aside, I'm all for greening the kitchen. Here's a great opportunity to offer up nuggets of wisdom about eco-friendly cooking. And to earn prizes in the process (Kindle anyone?)!

It's thanks to the folks at the Brighter Planet Blog. Happy Blog Action Day 2009!

Big plug for etsy's alchemy!

I can't be the only one with a growing pile of craft projects I'll get to ... when? And yet I keep feeding it, assuming that the day will come (and in some cases that I'll be magically imbued with new found art skills) to complete the projects. One of these was improving the horrible, drab blackout curtain in my kids' room:

It's a vital, necessary thing, but such a downer to look at. So I imagined sewing on some decals, or cutting out some fabric scraps to liven things up. This was not happening so I decided to try out Alchemy, the new custom order site by Etsy. Etsy is just what it sounds like. OK, so etsy doesn't really sound like anything but what it is is a fabulous online craft source. Alchemy is a place where you can post your craft project and people bid on doing it.

I posted a picture of the curtain and a description of the mural I wanted and within 24 hours I had 3 bids. I picked my favorite Etsy provider based on the links they sent, mailed off the curtain and 2 weeks later got:


The girls adore it... and it had all the elements they'd asked for... a sun, flowers, a tree and a bird. And the price was completely reasonable!

Two sewing thimbles up for Alchemy!

DIY Summer Camp

This is less on the green side and more on the cost cutting side... A friend just forward this AP article about DIY Summer Camps that parents are putting together in these tough economic times.

Great idea for an eco friendly bridal shower (even baby shower?)

I recently checked with an organization I did a story about a few years ago. It's called Village Harvest and it does backyard gleaning. They organize volunteers to pick ripe fruit from backyard trees. And then they donate the fruit to food banks. The group also picks in old orchards that dot the San Francisco Bay Area and donates those crops as well.

The founder told me that next weekend they're doing a bridal shower... someone contacted them saying that they wanted to have a bridal shower that involved giving back. Picking fruit to donate to food banks fit the bill. So a group of women are going to come to an old pear orchard and have a picnic/picking party. They decided on a "pear" orchard for the shower (get the pun?). Photo credit for above:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/suttonhoo22/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Thought I'd pass on what seemed like a nice green shower idea. Now for a visual pun. This photo is titled:

Pear: Shaped

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaptainkobold/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Lessons of a part-time working mom in a creative field

Keeping up your creative side is a challenge being a mom, especially daunting if it's a required part of your job. As a new twin mom it's pretty tough because keeping everyone happy often means finding ROUTINES that work and sticking with them. I spent some time the other day thinking about what has helped me the most with keeping up my creative side when working and when mom-ing. This is what I came up with:

+ Seek out other part-time moms to hang out with at least once in a while. I found myself overly critical of myself when I was always with just SAHM or else moms who worked outside their house full-time. Even though it was my own issues hearing what they were up to made me feel I wasn't giving either enough attention to my girls or enough creativity to my job. I know it was silly, but hey, post-partum/nursing hormones and being sleep-deprived doesn't really lead to being even-keeled. So checking in with other part-timers is great.

+ When you have time to read again, find a book that talks about the various stages of parenting. Yes, I mean all the way through the empty nest. I kind of stumbled on one at the library and took it home and, admittedly, just skimmed it but,man, it makes me feel better when I feel like I'm just not going to get through the next few hours. Helps me give me some concrete image of the distant future to keep it all in perspective.

+ Get rid of as much technology as possible on the days you're not working. It took me a little while to figure this out, but throwing myself into watching the girls on the days that I did - i.e. no email except during their naps and avoiding the phone - helped improve my performance in both realms. I will admit to trying to write an email about a story idea to my editor with unhappy kids in the background and no one won in those cases.

+ See this time as an opportunity to learn what you really love about your job and try to just focus on that as much as possible.

+ Keep up your creativity when you're not working OR watching the babies. For instance, date night should always be somewhere new and different. When you're exhausted going somewhere familiar sounds so appealing. But I've found even though I'm usually initially annoyed with my husband for insisting on going to a new neighborhood or town for dinner when we do get away from the apartment, I'm always really glad for the new perspective.

Mama inspiration

Literary Mama. This is a great site for fictional and journalistic takes on motherhood. Besides original work in the form of articles, stories and blogs it also has lists like this: good essential reads that may or may not be parenting related, but are probably easy to plow through even with the distractions of little ones.

And if you feel really inspired you can submit your own work!

Listening outside the box

One of the reasons I feel less creative than Before Children is the fact I can't explore the way I used to. I just don't regularly end up in settings that push me into a different mindframe. But we've found one way to mimic travel from home. And the girls love it! Internet radio. You can get stations from all over the world. We've found a couple stations with genres the kids like to dance to and we get the grown up pleasure of just hearing a different language or a different world in our ear.

Milos radio from Romania

Soca music from the Carribean - you can choose any of a number of stations here

Sri Lankan music radio

And if you have something in particular in mind, this is a world radio station directory

Be a very voting mom

Please vote tomorrow if you're in a voting state. I'm looking forward to putting those little "I voted" stickers on the girls after an early morning walk to the polls.

That said, one tip for voting as a twin mom is to register for an absentee ballot. You can either mail them in ahead of time. OR if you need till the last minute to make up your mind, or you just like the routine of going to a polling place, you can always do what I've come to like and fill out the ballot at home the night before, and then drop it off in person on voting day.

And for any moms interested in getting involved in campaigns I've heard it's more possible than you'd think with new technology. A mom friend of mine signed up to make phone calls and you can do it from home, one number at a time fed to you on the computer and the script of what to say pops up there too. No time pressure you just do it as you're able. One way to get out of the little bubble of mom-dom without leaving the house...

Have a Happy Super Monday (what else can come between the Super Bowl and Super Tuesday)!

Books and the new twin mom

Part of my push to get into more creative endeavors is a vow to read more. And not about Bunnies and Caterpillars.

So for a few months I've belonged to GoodReads. It's kind of like Facebook, if that site were called Faceliterature. GoodReads is part social networking, part lit crit. It allows me to keep a Netflix-style list of the books I want to read. Especially since it sometimes takes a little while for a book to show up in my library's catalog after I first hear of it. And o GoodReads you get to review it and see what friends are reading too.

Now GETTING to the books is a whole other issue. I came across this site called BookSwim which will let you rent books and will actually ship them to you. It's a little pricey... $14.99 a month to get 2 books at a time and the cost structure goes up from there. If I ever have a friend on bed rest, though, I'm definitely getting them a subscription to this site as a gift. Once the babies are born, it's a different story. I just don't think I have enough time to read to justify that cost.

Speaking of reading, I'm currently in the process of reading Boomsday. I wanted a good laugh and it supplies.

Time to laugh a little: Sky Maul

I've always noticed the Sky Mall catalogs in the plane seat pockets, but until the last flight we took with the girls, I didn't really read them. Looking at the pictures and flipping the pages completely held the girls' attention, though, so we got a peak at some of the over the top stuff inside. The First Insulated Mug with a Clock Embedded That's Dishwasher Safe? Or the Full Scale Replica Plane Propeller? It almost doesn't need a parody, but...

There is one.

And maybe because we had just studied the original so thoroughly I found it really entertaining. Plus there's some great stuff for parents... the hybrid stroller-lawn mower and the flask inscribed upside with a quote about your kids so you can think of them midgulp.

Hopefully there a few laughs there to chase the winter blahs away.

On-line book publishing deal

One of my creative endeavors this month was to make a photo book of the grrl-ios' first year. With everything digital these days I hardly have any prints and so I thought making the book would be an easy way to make albums for posterity for each of them, for us and for grandparents, too.

I just stumbled on this GREAT deal for printing photo books, in case it's useful for anyone:
http://www.winkflash.com/

It's $19.95 flat rate for a 10" X 8" book with up to 100 pages of photos.

Say "cheese!" (that just happens to be one of the grrls new words, too)

The Big Purple Mommy

That's not me (though I am wearing a big cozy purple fleece right now). That's the name of a book I just discovered about keeping creative endeavors alive while entering new motherhood. I'm looking forward to reading it after finding this article about it.

And speaking of creativity, I'm off to go ride the Imagine Art Bus for a feature I'm doing. Looking forward to being inspired by these kids!

New Year, new and improved Blog

Okay, time for my creativity manifesto:

One thing that I’ve been frustrated about since our twins arrived is feeling a real creative void in my life. My mom tries to give me pep talks,: “Raising a child, especially two at once requires lots of creativity.” I do get that. There’s the aha! moment when you figure out just the trick to meet two totally different needs at once. Or when you mentally rewrite your recipes to allow for entertaining two kids at the same time as cooking. And the there’s keeping up with a toddler’s delightfully fresh perspective on the world.

BUT when you have two little ones, especially two going through the same stages together, there are definitely periods that feel assembly-line-o-rama. Diapers. Getting dressed. Eating meals. Getting redressed after messy meals. Getting out the door. Immediately turning back around to get back in the door and change a diaper.

By creativity I don’t mean knitting and crafty things. I just miss the time to work over an idea in my head uninterrupted, the ability to just pick up and go to an event that sounds interesting. The chance to explore worlds other than my own that invariably make me think about what else is possible.

So my resolution is to try little things to get those sparks going even as my thought process is fragmented and my ability to get out of the house to non twins friendly events is limited.

And I'm going to blog about my attempts here – all in the context of mothering and keeping a career puttering along and trying to be good to the earth Sometimes that might be posting a YouTube video that got me inspired. Sometimes it could be a magazine or person I find online who is doing something relevant to my life but a little askew. I recently signed up for Facebook as a way to connect with friends and just be a part of a universe that’s new to me.

And I’d love any ideas others have to carve out and keep that creative space going.