Happy anniversary to us! No adorable pictures because our first born babies aren’t awake yet to help me undo whatever muck-up I did to our scanner the last time I used it. The kids these days say, “Pics or it didn’t happen!” but I know for sure these last 15 years did happen. They happened and they rocked so hard! So hard that my body and soul are pretty much ruined. But we both still have our sense of humor! Good damn thing. The next 15 years are going to be even more rockin’, in part because our kids can wipe their own butts now and we can sit around and reminisce about butt-wiping and pretend that we miss those days. And then we can laugh and laugh because, while those days are lovely to think about, we both know that those were some deep trenches we were in and we’re lucky we got out alive. I’m glad to share those memories with you. I’m glad to have this family we created together. I’m glad the five of us can sit on the couch and watch Conan together. I’m glad you’re my best friend. I’m glad I’m the mother of most of your children. I’m just plain glad to have you in my life as my husband and father of most of my children.

The next 15 years are going to fly by, I know. And there will be brand-new trenches as we watch our kids navigate adulthood and we’ll mournfully wish, for their sake, that they were babies again. For now, though, I know how lucky we are to be in this moment right here. We have the best of everything in this little family.

From almost the very beginning, it was clear that I wanted the feel of barefoot running, but with some shoe-like things on my feet because I couldn’t get the hang of not pushing off of the balls of my feet in order to minimize friction and avoid blisters. Back in those days (uh, 10 months ago), Vibrams were the recommended minimalist shoes. But I think they’re ugly and, though less expensive than regular running shoes, still more than I wanted to spend. Nowadays they have these minimalist shoes, which look totally rad:

Bad for Budgets!

But they’re $160 and it enrages me to spend that much of my clothing budget on a single item, so I’ll probably never buy them. Instead of real minimalist shoes, I bought $10 water shoes from the grocery store. To be honest, one of the reasons I started barefoot running last year was because I needed new running shoes, but I didn’t want to pay for them. I’d heard about barefoot running so I looked into more and gave it a try. I read Born to Run and all of the foot science stuff in there made so much sense to me, unlike most things I read which leave me mostly confused. And then I read some more things. But then I switched to wearing water shoes, so was I still running barefoot? Some of the internet says yes, but I have issues with exactness so I DON’T THINK SO! I’m a minimalist runner, but that phrase isn’t heard on NPR and whatnot so I’m saying “barefoot,” but you all know I really mean “minimalist,” right? In real life I say, “Well, not really barefoot, but almost.” which is too wordy for typing.

Good for Budgets!

After barefooting it for a few months, I put my regular old Asics on just to wear while having a garage sale and I threw my back out. The sciency stuff about barefoot running tells me that that was because the bulky Asics affected my gait so much that my back didn’t know what to do with itself so it tried to commit suicide. So I put those shoes in the Planet Aid box and bought myself some minimalist shoes that I could walk around in and not be embarrassed by (I’m looking at you, Vibrams. Yes, you’re embarrassing. And this is coming from me. Have you seen how I dress? If I think you’re embarrassing, then you have a problem). I believe that minimalist shoes should be cheap, so I bought these:

Lovely, under $40, room for my foot to experience its whole range of motion, no bunion pain, and no back pain. I had already built up the strength in my foot tendons and muscles by being close-to-barefoot at all times all summer, so I didn’t have that part of the curve to deal with. But the amazing lack of bunion pain when wearing real-live shoes caused a happiness to bubble up within me, the likes of which I usually don’t experience unless there is some sort of good food involved. Every single time I bought a new pair of shoes, I’d have bunion pain until my foot wore down that part of the shoe. I thought it was a fact of life. Turns out, I was suffering for no reason! And then I married barefoot running. (I didn’t really because I’m not adding a 2nd husband to my marriage until ALL people can get married to inanimate objects, ideas, or even just other people who happen to be the same sex. Wait, is that the “slippery slope” conservatives talk about? Haha, so dumb.)

When winter came, I knew I had to find a way to get through it without real shoes. I put some SmartWool on, upgraded to $30 water shoes, mostly because it seemed like I needed a little extra weather protection around the bottom of my feet, but also because we had sold our house and I was feeling so spendy! The shoes and socks were perfect if there was no precipitation or melty snow on the road. In other words, that combo was perfect for roughly 4 days of a mid-Ohio winter. Wet feet + cold weather = bullcrap. So I asked the internet to tell me what to wear instead, but the internet forgot that I don’t spend big money on single items that I can’t even wear to fancy places where I never go. It kept telling me to get those awful Vibrams and whatnot. I told the internet to try again and it found Seal Skinz for me. Good internet. Now that it’s allegedly almost spring, I have some things figured out. If it’s cold and wet, I wear my water shoes, SmartWool, and Seal Skinz.

If it’s cold and dry, just the water shoes and SmartWool. If it’s over 40 degrees and dry, it’s warm enough to wear just the water shoes and light socks. And that is so, so lovely. I don’t have to, but I usually choose to wear a light pair of running socks with my water shoes because, without the socks, the smell that grows within the disgusting shell of those shoes is life-threatening. Our house is small. If my running shoes smell bad, the whole house smells bad. Also, I like socks because I usually take the liner out of the bottom of the shoes because it tends to slip around and be weird, and then my feet don’t have to cope with leftover sticky stuff. That has only been an issue with the grocery store shoes, though. The Speedo ones still have their liner and I’ve been wearing them since December.

All of those things, including the walking around shoes, come to less than $100. The only part of my combo that will have to be replaced regularly is the water shoes, and now I know I can go back to the $10 grocery store shoes because the Seal Skinz eliminate my perceived need for more weather protection. I used to spend over $100 on shoes 3 times per year. Because that’s what they told me I needed to do and I am ever so compliant. I’d spend that money and still have bunion pain for weeks until I wore down the state-of-the-art cushioning that made my shoes more expensive. Stupid!

I’m totally going to make a list of all of the good food I can buy with the money I’m saving. And then I’m going to eat my way through Columbus barefoot. The end.

My Fat-Talk is for Babies post is featured on BlogHer today. This is what BlogHer is, according to BlogHer: Reaching more than 20 million unique women each month BlogHer is the leading participatory news, entertainment and information network for women online. Women turn to BlogHer to raise their voices, discuss relevant issues, aggregate their influence and engage with a supportive community of others doing the same. With blog directories including more than 25,000 quality blogs, reviewed by humans, and a publishing network joining more than 2,500 affiliated bloggers, BlogHer is the only place to find active, authentic conversations representing the full diversity of topics of interest to women.

So that’s nice.

I know you already read it here, but go to BlogHer and read it there, too. That way, they’ll know how much I appreciate their syndicating my post (because I super do very much appreciate it). You could even leave a comment there because, I suspect that most people who read that post will read it as, “Eat donuts every day for every meal and just buy bigger pants when you need to!” which, my smart readers know, is totally not the point.

Because it’s the New Year and everybody is resolving to do All of the Good Things and None of the Bad Things, I wanted to share something with you. Here it is: It’s ok to be a woman and have a good body image.

Before Thanksgiving, this post from Psych Central showed up in my Google Reader: How to Have a Fat-Talk Free Holiday Season and I immediately subscribed to that blog because, of all of the things in the world that I hate, I hate fat talk the most. I hate that I’ve done it when the conversation has been steered that way. I hate that when I started running I would feel guilty about it around women who don’t run, and then I’d say I only run because I really like to eat when, really, I run because I like the way it feels. I really like to eat, too, but that’s not why I run. I like to eat real food. Real butter, real cream, real sugar, and I eat what I like to eat without guilt. I don’t care what size my body parts are. I don’t weigh myself. I move how I want, I eat what I want, and I buy bigger pants when I need to. And I just don’t give a care.

It wasn’t always this way. When you’re a girl, you grow up with this culture of fat talk. How much do you weigh? What size are your pants? And it seems like that’s the most important thing. You’re supposed to look in the mirror and point out all the (unchangeable) ways your body sucks. My mom dieted a lot. She looked in the mirror and sighed, but she never turned a critical eye on my body. She never gave me “helpful” advice about weight loss and she never said, “If you eat that, you’ll get fat,” and, because of that, I think it was easier for my sister and me to grow out of that self-loathing that was just a product of our culture and not really who we were. I don’t like that culture. And, yes, I said “grow out of that” because I think it really is a maturity issue. There is nothing more immature than focusing on the outside when the inside is where the truth of Everything is. The inside is where the worthwhile work is and we can’t work on that when we’re distracted by the outside bits.

The other day, Lena (11) asked me how much she weighed and I threw a little bit of a hissy fit, telling her that she weighs as much as she’s supposed to weigh, and that weight is just a number and the same number on one person will look different on another person, and it’s also just a way for women to compete with each other. Women (and girls) step on the scale in the morning and use that number to make or break their day when it doesn’t mean anything. Every body is different. She was like, “Uh…A simple ‘I don’t know’ would do, crazy lady.’” Ahem.

I can remember being just about Lena’s age when I realized that I weighed more than my friends. It had never occurred to me before, but everybody was talking about it and it was…what was it? I was going to type “devastating,” but it wasn’t that. It was…odd. It was kind of like, “Oh, ok. I’m heavier. I guess that sucks?” And then I played that role with the sighing and the, “Ohmigod, my legs are huge!” But I was grateful for my powerful legs that helped me be super awesome at sporty things and stuff. I was supposed to think I was gross, but I was glad to be strong. Again, I think I was able to focus on strength because that was important at home. Nobody at home was telling me I was fat or warning me I was going to get fat someday or restricting my food intake, not even in a passive-aggressive-eyebrows-raised kind of way. Thanks, Mom.

Way back when my sister had her first daughter in 1993, she and I made a commitment to never let that little girl hear us talking bad about our bodies. No looking in the mirror with disgust, no “If I eat that, I’ll get fat,” nothing. That commitment lead to the eventual realization that I just don’t care how big or small my parts are, but I feel like I have to fulfill this womanly duty of talking as if I do when I’m around women who do that. So I don’t do that anymore. Fat talk is for babies. I love fat babies and I’ll talk all day about yummy fat baby rolls, but if you say, “Ugh, if I eat that, I’m going to have to work it off,” I will roll my eyes and walk away. I might have a good body image, but I’m still pretty bitchy.

So, if you’re a lady type*, who grew up with the lady culture of fat talk and you feel like you’re gross, I’m going to promise you that you’re not gross and you don’t have to talk like you are just to make other ladies more comfortable. And you deserve to eat good food. So let’s all go read Eleven Body Image Practices to Pitch in 2011 and throw away those negative body image things we do. Because our daughters are watching us. And if you’re struggling with feeding your children, go ahead and check out Family Feeding Dynamics while you’re at it. Go ahead. You’ll thank me for it.

*Maybe you’re a guy type, but you still struggle with body image. I don’t know what it’s like growing up with so much testosterone that I could punch a wall, but I know that everybody could benefit from loving themselves just a little bit more.

There’s supposed to be a video right here, but I can’t see it. I can see it sometimes, but sometimes not. So if you can’t see it, it’s supposed to be Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, and I’m not spending any time on figuring out why it’s not showing up. I’m busy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HNY0rx2fw4

We’ve moved! I’m not telling you where because you’re the internet and you’re weird.

What? I can’t write some nature junk once in a while? DON’T PUT ME IN YOUR BOX! I’m just kidding. I belong in that box because the real reason I paid such close attention to that buck is because I thought it would be spooked enough to gore me. And I thought it was stalking me. I saw 2 more deer that day, a doe running for her life with a HUGE buck running right behind. My first thought was that that doe’s totally in for some non-consensual sexy time. But, really, they were being chased by a dog so it’s all good. It’s all good until the buck stomps that lab’s face in, I guess.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khKrd1RNy2U

That settles it. I’m not spraying deer piss on me before running anymore.

It’s hard to write about why we should support libraries without saying, “Duh!” It’s like trying to write about why we should support breathing. Do either of those things really need an explanation? The library has been as much a part of my life as breathing and if somebody said, “I don’t think breathing is that important in this day and age,” I would tell them they’re ridiculous and it’s obvious that they don’t get enough oxygen to their brain. And if someone said libraries aren’t important in this day and age, I would say it’s obvious that they are dumb and they should try to use the library more often. Because I resort to name calling when people disagree with me over something as fundamental as this. It’s just who I am.

We should breathe and support libraries because both of those things are compatible with a good life. I don’t feel like I’m being dramatic here. The library in my hometown is having a rough time. My nieces and nephews and little tiny cousins and friends who live there don’t have library access because of some serious funding issues. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about that and feel a punch in the gut because of it. No story hour, no job help, no school help, no computer help, no free music, no free movies, no free books.

Did I ever tell you about the time that free music and movies from the library led to honest-to-goodness book learnin’ for my little kids? Have you ever heard Rage Against the Machine’s “Renegades of Funk” and wondered what in the heck those young men were yelling about? My kids did. So we learned about it. And *gasp* GRAPHIC NOVELS? The bane of every “serious” book lover’s existence? When Liberty was just a wee lass, she caught site of a page or two of Maus and wondered about that, which led to checking out the Paper Clips dvd, Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, all of which led to real-life learning about real-life things. And crying. There was crying because the Holocaust was pretty sad. But Zoo Tycoon is a happy thing! And kids can play that for free on the library’s computers without using up your home computer’s memory. And Zoo Tycoon teaches math, language, biology, and other stuff. And these are just the examples that are freshest in my mind. They’re freshest because they’re from a time when I didn’t trust that natural curiosity would lead to bonafide learning, so when it happened it was shocking, I tell you. Shocking. I didn’t trust the process, even though I had already read most of John Holt’s books about learning, which, by the way, I checked out at my local library. Anyway. Natural curiosity combined with unlimited resources from the library is just the perfect recipe for true learning.

Here in Columbus, our libraries have already had to cut staff, cut maintenance, cut hours, and cut book budgets. Because of state budget cuts, Columbus Metropolitan Libraries are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Voting for Issue 4 will replace the 2.6 mills we’ve already been paying for for the last 10 years, and add just a teensy .2 in order to make up for state cuts. If Issue 4 doesn’t go through, the skin of their teeth will peel away and, well, you don’t even want to know what happens to teeth when the skin peels. I mean, it will be gross. Some branches could close. More staff will be cut. Less books will be bought. Super gross.

If you need more info that might be a tad more coherent, go to KeepCMLStrong.org and get some! And then VOTE FOR 4 on November 2nd.

Turns out, it’s just a house.

We find this American Dream to be bullshit.

Bryan and I have a different American Dream. We felt it for the 4 years we spent renting when we moved to Columbus, and we thought something was wrong with us because we enjoyed renting so much. We figured we had PTSD from our first home-ownership and renovation experience, but now we are embracing our renter nature.

We don’t want to pay this kind of money (or any kind of money) for just a house. We want disposable income. We want to visit our family in Michigan and take a real family vacation. We want to take the kids wherever they want to go. Right now, this means Comic-Con and The American Girl store and to little cabins on Lake Michigan and Tawas Bay. We want to take them wherever else they want to go. We want to go away for the weekend, just us two. We want to be tourists in our own city and anywhere else we feel like it.  We don’t want to buy mulch. We don’t want to buy carpet. We don’t want to put in another new bathroom. We don’t want to spend the weekend in the yard. We don’t want to pull weeds. We don’t want to plant flowers. We don’t want to fix doorknobs. We don’t want to buy prettier doors. We don’t want to seal the asphalt. We don’t want to buy paint. We don’t want to go to the hardware store. We don’t want to buy more stuff to fill up this house. We don’t want to spend any mental or physical or financial energy on just a house. We don’t want to be in debt. We don’t want to keep up with the Joneses. And anyway, we suspect that the Joneses have at least 1 credit card that they will never be able to pay off. We don’t want that.

We want to do stuff, not buy stuff.

Except for consumables. I love to buy consumables. I want to go out to eat so much that I get sick of it. Also? I like to buy beer WHENEVER I WANT. I’m out of beer much more often than I care to be and that is not cool. And I think it’s extra important to have an unlimited beer supply when you have a mortgage that prevents you from doing the things you want to do with your life. You can see how owning this house is a lose-lose situation.

We’re not house people anymore and I blame HGTV for making us think we’re supposed to be house people. I’m totally deleting that channel off of my tv and I’m only ever going to watch the Food Network and the Travel Channel when I’m in the mood for reality tv. And then we’re going to follow Man V. Food around just for fun because that dude’s life looks AWESOME.

Yes, moving sucks b@lls, but owning a house sucks b@lls dipped in poop, and we are just not into that.

Oh, and the children? I was worried about telling the children because, after all, children are usually the reason people buy awesome houses in great locations, so I thought this house meant something more to them, but when they heard the plan, Liberty said, “Good, I’m bored of this house anyway!” and Lena and Maya agreed. One of the things HGTV told me was that kids need their own space to decorate however they want. They didn’t tell me that once the space is decorated, the kid will want to change it within a month, which is exactly what happened here. I laughed and laughed and laughed when first Liberty, then Lena asked me to re-paint her room. Now I know better. And all of the kids know exactly what they’ve given up in order to live in this house. It’s not worth it to them, either.

Personally, I would have stabbed somebody if I couldn’t take my little ones to story hour when I lived in Chesaning. On purpose. I would have deliberated and planned it and then done it. And a jury of my peers would have said, “That seems reasonable.”  I’m not suggesting that people get stabby, but I am suggesting that they call their township supervisor and harass yell at cry at let them know that it’s quite ok if they put this issue up for a vote so you all can decide if you want to pay less than 1 mil on your tax bill in order to have a FRICKIN’ LIBRARY. It’s a library. It seems like a no-brainer.

Oh, look! A list of township supervisors. With phone numbers and addresses! Just for you:

Albee Township Supervisor: Leon Turnwald (989) 770-4387  3395 W. Birch Run Rd., Burt MI 48417

Brady Supervisor: Ron Gasper (989) 845-3450  16172 Baldwin, Chesaning MI 48616

Maple Grove: Kevin M. Krupp (989) 845-6789 6352 Ditch Rd., Chesaning MI 48616

Edited to add: I forgot about New Haven! (thanks, Aunt Angie) New Haven Township Supervisor – Don Dickinson – 989-729-1043

Chesaning  and Chapin are both in support of the library, so send these guys some chocolate. Or your panties, whichever you think they’ll appreciate more. Bob Corrin used to be my neighbor. I don’t think he’d want your panties, but you never know. People change and I’ve been gone a long time.

Chesaning: Robert Corrin 429 S. Chapman St., Chesaning MI 48616

Chapin: Robb C. Maynard 19650 Fenmore, Elsie MI 48831

And to the school board members and township supervisors who are against even putting it on the ballot, this is what people say about  your town behind your back, and it’s all your fault:

h/t for the video goes to my friend Schmarol (not her real name because she might not want me to mention her in this post).