Book #23: How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen

This book really resonated with me. I don't know why I picked it up in the first place, but, like many people, I enjoy inspirational self-help books and this one is on a higher plane than most other "quick fix" self-help books. Christensen (and his co-authors) argue that getting specific suggestions for how to improve our life is not the way to become better; we need to gather theories on what works based on observation and experiences gathered from large sets of data. And that is what he has done with his business work, and he suggests that many of the theories that apply to making a business successful can also be made more specific to us as individuals, which is what he does very successfully in this book. He tries to tailor his advice to three questions, things which he has seen many of his business colleagues and students struggle with over the decades: How can I be sure that:
1. I will be successful and happy in my career?
2. My relationships with people become an enduring source of happiness?
3. I live a life of integrity--and stay out of jail?

All of the chapters have individual theories that he explains how they apply to businesses and also to us as individuals. The first few chapters are about being successful and happy in your career, which are very important but not super applicable to me, so I didn't focus too much on those. But I really liked the chapters about relationships with your family.

• One section that really stuck with me--because it says exactly the same thing that I have been thinking about lately about parenting and why being a stay-at-home mom is so important to me--was when Christensen talked about the problems some companies experience when they outsource one part of their business, and then another, and another. They eventually lose the competencies that they once had and don't have any control over their business any more. He makes a parallel between this issue and outsourcing our parenting to outside activities and other people. So many people these days sign their kids up for numerous activities and their kids basically are doing everything outside of the home (not to mention that they're not doing any WORK inside the home any more). So all of the learning that children are doing is being done with the parents not being involved. And therefore, when they learn, they often learn from people that the parents don't even know--and eventually, all of the children's priorities and values and understanding of the world has come from all outside sources and none of it from the parents themselves. He says, "If you find yourself heading down a path of outsourcing more and more of your role as a parent, you will lose more and more of the precious opportunities to help your kids develop their values--which may be the most important capability of all" (138-139). I have been thinking so much about this lately!! I feel so proud of myself for being on the same wavelength as Clayton Christensen, although he was able to use language to articulate it that I have been struggling with. But the older Dane gets, and the more sponge-like he becomes, the more I realize that this is so true and so important--and I imagine it only becomes more important the older they become (and into teenage-hood). 
• He also makes the point that many people try to build their resume for work by checking boxes off a list--instead of trying to build skills and competencies that will allow them to truly succeed at their goals for the future. This is something we need to work at as parents as well. What skills and capabilities do we want our kids to have? We need to provide experiences and opportunities for them to get the experiences we want them to have--not just things like piano lessons, but experiences with failing something and getting back up again. Or missing a deadline and suffering the consequences. This is our job as their parents, and we can't be fooled by the desire to just build their self-esteem and helping them get good grades and allow them to miss out on the experiences they will need to survive in the real world.
• Christensen describes companies that focus on expressly creating a company culture--which can be so strong that eventually all employees in that company will follow the same procedures just by knowing that this is what we do at this company. Similarly, we should try to deliberately and consciously create our own culture for our family and our children, because then kids will know, "This is the way our family behaves." You need to decide what characteristics you want to encourage in your family, and those elements become your family culture--which will then help you focus on what activities you want to choose as a family, and what goals you have to accomplish. He says, "Make no mistake: a culture happens, whether you want it to or not. The only question is how hard you are going to try to influence it" (169). 

All of these ideas, plus several more about the overall goal from the book in the epilogue, have been very thought-provoking and motivating for me. The thing that really was emphasized to me, and which I know and have thought a lot about in the past, but which is hard to follow through on, is how important it is to be conscious and deliberate about my choices in all aspects of my life. It is so easy to let everything slip when I'm not feeling well or when I'm tired (like when I've been pregnant or with an infant), but since we want to have several more children, I can't just let 10 years slip by without deciding deliberately about how I want to spend my time and what decision we want to make about our life. I hope that I can get Tommy to read this book next so we can have some serious discussions about things and maybe make some overall goals we can work towards together.

Books #20-22: Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman trilogy by Pamela Aidan

Tommy and I were sitting down to watch something the other night and couldn't decide on anything until we somehow came to the classic Pride and Prejudice miniseries and watched that over a couple of nights. And naturally, that made me want to get into a Pride and Prejudice reading kick, so I pulled out this trilogy that I liked when I read it a few years ago. I am not really going to even bother trying to come up with any thoughts about it, except that I didn't really enjoy the second novel (which covers the period in P&P when Darcy and Elizabeth are separated and makes up this whole weird mystery). These were a total pleasure read, and I definitely enjoyed the process. I am going to find some more similar P&P stuff to read soon.

Book #19: Things I Wish I'd Known Sooner: Personal Discoveries of a Mother of Twelve

This book looked kind of old and maybe like it would be out of date, but I took it from my parents' bookshelf anyways, because who isn't curious about how a mom of 12 kids did/does it? I thought it would be interesting, if maybe not all that good--maybe this lady had twelve kids, but did she really know how to write? But it turned out that it was beautifully written and that the author wrote five or six novels before writing this book, which made it even more compelling to read from start to finish. I read a lot of it while exercising at the gym yesterday, and it was such an affirming, strengthening read for someone in my stage of life and being a mother. One of the most powerful parts of the book was at the beginning when she talked about how it was like to decide to be a stay-at-home mom with lots of kids in the seventies when the women's rights movement was going on, and how she felt so strongly that she was supposed to be a mom and be there raising her kids. People talked about how women shouldn't be restricted to only "dirty diapers and dirty dishes"--which she says is the lowest common denominator of what being a mom is really like, and they made it seem like that's all it was. But she then thought a lot about it and how changing diapers really is a huge part of a mom's job, because that's one time when the mom and baby bond and spend time looking at each other and the mom sings to or entertains the baby, so it is really important for moms (or dads) to be the one doing that instead of leaving it for someone else. I really liked that idea and I tend to agree--I think it is really, really important for the mom to be home and to be the one bonding with and raising and doing even those seemingly menial tasks with her kids.

One other thing she said really stuck out to me: "My present life as a mother has three profound purposes. (This aside from the relationship with my husband, which is my dearest and consistent preoccupation.) The first is to fulfill all my obligations of love, as I understand them. The second is to educate my children--educate in the broadest sense, not just by helping them achieve skill and success in school, but by giving them a sense of awareness, responsibility, and joy. By far, the greatest amount of my time is spent in this endeavor. Third is my responsibility to give the best possible physical care to children and home. If any of these three purposes is neglected, the balance and richness of our family is impaired" (25). I think those three/four purposes are so important. But many people put so much more emphasis on the third purpose than on the other two. I also think I have spent a lot of time just "killing time" with my kids, going to parks and trying to get through the day, instead of really trying to spend it doing constructive things--or even not constructive things, but truly enjoying my time with them. In the next paragraph she described how she picks up things throughout the day and does beds and dishes, and they all do chores once a week to fully clean the house, but the rest of the time, no real cleaning is done because "the center of the day is too important to spend on unenduring things" so she can spend that time with her little kids reading, doing projects, visiting friends, gardening, or singing. I loved that. And I want to change my attitude that I've had of just trying to get through the day and make it more enjoyable (which I think is easier now that I have a kid old enough to actually learn things and interact with me on a more obvious basis).

I feel like there wasn't probably a realistic representation of how stressful or crazy twelve kids probably really was--it sounded like just a ton of fun and like piling twelve kids in the van to go to the beach took no time at all. It almost made me feel worried that I wasn't doing enough and there was more I could do to be a better mom, since this woman was apparently Super Mom. But I know that it's not really possible to compare her life with 12 kids with mine with 2, and hers probably looked a lot like mine with two kids. And in all, that didn't really detract from my enjoyment of the book. This is something that I will want to read again and again, I think.

Also, I realized after reading it that the author, Jaroldeen Edwards, wrote a note in the front to my mom talking about how she loved my dad as a kid and how they had such beautiful children. And apparently she was my dad's seminary teacher in Connecticut and he was friends with one of her sons. That made it even more interesting and personal to read.

Book #18: Life's Lessons Learned by Dallin H. Oaks

I took this book from my parents' house while I was helping them pack up to move, and I read it yesterday. It was very short, and each chapter was only about 3-4 pages, which made it move along even faster. Each chapter was basically just Elder Oaks sharing specific personal experiences where he learned important principles of the gospel and how he knows those to be true, starting with his father's death and what he learned from that and going through his life as a lawyer, President of BYU, and then his calling as an apostle. So there wasn't really a connected story throughout the book; each chapter had its own "life lesson" (as expected from the title) and what things he thought were important enough to share. I liked best learning about his life and when he was sharing candidly about the things he has done in his life and about his family. It was very interesting hearing about his wife dying and how his children handled that, and how they eventually suggested that he go get married again, and learning about how his mom recovered from her husband dying and starting to take care of her family again. I think that the format of this book really emphasizes that we are all made up of our individual experiences, and we learn what we know just by what we go through. So everyone has their own individual testimonies and opinions and ideas, and they can't imagine why people would see it differently--but it's just because we've all gone through totally different things. Elder Oaks went through these specific things in his life that taught him these principles of the gospel and of life, and he's now sharing how he knew those things with us. Each chapter was individually powerful and good, but when you read too many of them in a row it starts to blend together. I feel like they would be more powerful if you considered them just on their own.

Book #17: The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

The book club I just joined is reading this book, which is the main reason why I picked it up. The main character of the book is Victoria, who was a foster child and who has serious attachment issues. She spent her childhood bouncing around between 32 different foster homes, and the story starts as she ages out of the group home she was living in, and she becomes homeless. But she has this magical ability to do flower arrangements and she manages to get a job at a flower shop, and people fall in love with her flowers. She believes in the flowers and how each flower means something specific (according to the meanings of flowers in the Victorian age, very kitschy of the author to name her Victoria) and somehow her meaningful flower arrangements make people fall in love. She begins to have relationships with people and tries to overcome her natural desires to leave every relationship she has before she gets hurt. There are flashbacks every other chapter to Victoria's last foster parent, who she had a wonderful relationship with and loved, but you just knew something bad happened to ruin their relationship since she didn't end up there, and I felt like I was reading the whole time waiting for the hammer to fall.

I felt like Diffenbaugh was asking us to suspend a lot of disbelief by saying that Victoria was this magical flower arranger (knowing the meaning of flowers doesn't = amazing flower arrangements automatically) and that she immediately had this huge flower business after she started one. But overall, I really liked the part of the story dealing with flowers and how she handled them and made her flower dictionary; that was the fun part of the story.

[SPOILER ALERTS FOLLOW]: I just hated, hated, hated how depressing the main story of the book was. Victoria's history in the whole foster care system is super depressing to think about--I follow a blogger who writes about foster parenting and the sadness of it all really is hard to take. So I know this is real life for some people/kids, but oh man, it is really sad to think of them turning out like this. I also really, really hated how she got pregnant and gave away her baby. I cannot read those sorts of things while thinking about my own babies and all the real babies who are treated poorly. I was BLASTING through those chapters, just skimming and getting the main ideas, because I did not want to wallow in thinking about that. I knew that it would end up happy at the end, and it does, everyone reunited in almost too easy of a fashion, but I hated it still. I feel like a spoiled, privileged rich kid saying that I don't want to read about sad hard life stuff like that, but I don't. Particularly when it has to do with little kids or babies.

I do feel a lot of interest in looking into the foster system to be foster parents sometime, though. I feel like that is possibly the best place for service, the best one-on-one sort of service you can give to a child, although I don't think I would want to do it until we were done having our own babies. If the fictional Victoria had had one nice family try to take her in, she could have lived such a different, more secure life. And there are too many kids living in the same situation in our world. Maybe someday.

Book #16: Don't Sweat the Small Stuff by Richard Carlson

This book seems like the quintessential in self-help books, but not the current stylish kind of self-help books. I know I've seen it before because it is pretty ubiquitous, but I'd never considered reading it. But it is really chock full of great thoughts and great strategies for managing stress and making your life slower and more enjoyable. Some of them almost seemed gospel-related if you tweaked a couple of his ideas. I think this book would be better reading if you just took each vignette/idea individually instead of reading it in one sitting. They need to be considered separately in order for them to have the most impact, I think. I didn't read it in one sitting but I did push through it too quickly because I was pretty interested in it. I'm thinking I might make a list of my favorite 10 or so and try to apply them one at a time or something. Because I have so many moments a day where I need some reminders to calm myself and to remember not to take myself (or whatever frustrating predicament is going on right then) so seriously!

My favorite ones (I folded over the corner on the pages that seemed especially applicable to me):
1. Be aware of the snowball effect of your thinking. Notice what's happening in your head before your thoughts have any chance to build momentum. Say, "Whew, there I go again," and consciously nip it in the bud. <--- I have already figured out how to do this when I'm laying in my bed late at night and trying unsuccessfully to go to sleep. It's so important to get your brain to stop whirling!
2. Create "Patience Practice Periods." Set up periods of time in your own mind to practice the art of patience. Start by saying to yourself, "Okay, for the next five minutes I won't allow myself to be bothered by anything. I'll be patient." Just having the intention to be patient will strengthen your capacity for patience. And you can build up to longer and longer periods.
3. Ask yourself the question: "Will this matter a year from now?" This helps you to see what is really important or if you're making it out to be more than it really is.
4. Become an anthropologist. Be interested, without judgment, in the way people choose to live and behave. Be genuinely curious about the way someone feels about something, and the less likely you are to be annoyed.
5. "Wherever you go, there you are." Don't constantly wish you were somewhere else and think that if you were, somehow you would be happier and more content. The truth is, if you have destructive mental habits, those habits will follow you wherever you go, and you will likely be as unhappy in other situations as well. You need to focus on becoming at peace with where you are right now.
6. Count to ten. When you feel yourself getting angry, take a long deep breath, and as you do, count the number one. Repeat with all the same numbers up to 10 (or even 25 if you are really angry). The combination of breathing and counting is so relaxing that it's almost impossible to remain angry once you are finished. <--- This would be an excellent one to use with kids. I have tried to implement this before but it's hard to break out of the cycle of anger once you're in it. You've got to catch it beforehand.
7. Be happy where you are. This reminds me of President Uchtdorf's quote, "Life is not meant to be appreciated only in retrospect."
8. Remember that you become what you practice most. This reminds me of another favorite quote by Richard G. Scott: "We become what we want to be by consistently being what we want to become each day."
9. Become an early riser. Having a peaceful, meaningful life is made much easier when you have time for yourself. Consider that fatigue is caused by a lack of fulfillment and a sense of being overwhelmed, and getting up early to take care of things you want to do yourself is one way to combat this. You can have your "me" time before anyone else wakes up in order to have the quiet activities you never have the time to do. <--- This one is way easier said than done; particularly when in this phase with young babies. I have good intentions maybe once every few months but it never lasts very long. But it does sound lovely in theory.
10. Keep asking yourself, "What's really important?" Reminding yourself (consciously) of what's really important helps to keep your priorities straight. <--- I have thought about this but not on a super regular basis. It is easy to get caught up in feeling like my life at home with these kids is slow and not filled with anything important, but if I ask myself this question, I remember that the important thing is that they have a happy life--that we all have a happy life together.
11. Be open to "What Is." When we have preconceived ideas (expectations) about the way life should be, they interfere with our opportunity to enjoy or learn from the present moment. This prevents us from honoring what we are going through. Rather than reacting to a child's complaining, try opening your heart and accepting the moment for what it is. Make it okay that they aren't acting exactly the way you would like them to. <--- This reminds me of something my mom said to me: "Those expectations, they'll kill you every time."
12. Look for the extraordinary in the ordinary. We see in life what we want to see. < --- This one should be easy to do while staying home with adorable, sweet, precious kids.

I want to start implementing these strategies in my everyday life. I can totally see how if they became habits, you would be a calmer, happier, more peaceful person.

Book #15: The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

I've literally had this book on my to-read list on Goodreads for two plus years. And I'm glad I finally got around to it. This book tells the story of the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893, and how it came about, how they put it together, and how it affected American culture afterwards. At the same time, the book also talks about Chicago serial killer H. H. Holmes, who lured innocent and vulnerable fairgoers and murdered them for his own pleasure. He may have killed up to 100 people, although that's probably an exaggeration, but he definitely built a whole hotel, with a creepy murderer's basement, for the express purpose of finding and killing victims. So you basically learn about the whole story of the fair and this murderer at the same time.

Honestly, I felt like these two storylines didn't overlap all that much. By the title, I expected that the murderer was going to the fair and killing people at the fair itself. But no, he was finding victims before and after the fair; his actions weren't all that related to the fair storyline. So I don't know, I think that Larson maybe could have done these stories completely separately and been pretty successful. There wasn't much of an overarching connection at the end to bring everything together. I also didn't really like how Larson dramatized some of the elements he was writing about. Unless it's a stylistic decision about the genre, I don't think that non-fiction writers should dramatize or imagine things about their books. Larson tended to make up motives for things that Holmes did and included them as facts, but they were completely made up (as he said in the notes at the end).

However, each story was very interesting. I loved seeing a look into Chicago in the 1890s, and I felt like I really got the emotions of the city and the expectations they had for the Fair. I loved learning about the World's Fair and the amount of community pride and work that it took to get it ready and going in time. And it was very interesting to learn about all of the things that are still familiar to us in culture today that came out of the fair itself, considering how most people today barely know that it happened. And I was very creeped out and disturbed by the story about Holmes and his evil plans, which is to be expected. This book was definitely worth a read and definitely a great glimpse into a time period that I wasn't familiar with, but probably should have been.