Movie Rant: “Into the Woods”

On August 25, 2015 By Anna EastlandIn Arts and Entertainment, Family Life8 Comments

I don’t think I’m that hard to please when it comes to movies. I laugh easily, like most things unless they are creepy or offensive, and even enjoy lots of kids family movies. But not this one! Despite loving the Muppets musicals and being a fan of most fairy tales, I could hardly handle this fairly tale musical, Into the Woods.

The basic recipe was:

Take a whole bunch of fairy tales.
Put them in a blender.
Sing A LOT.
Make it all rhyme. The songs don’t have to make sense as long as they rhyme.
Then, when everyone thinks it’s over, make it an hour longer!

Besides the headache of hearing endlessly rhyming songs sung loudly to a very similar tune, there was the added annoyance of a totally confusing message. At one point Little Red Riding Hood, while plotting to kill a giant, says, “I don’t think my mom would be very proud of me. I’m about to murder someone.” She is reassured by Cinderella, in song of course, not to worry, cause “Your mother isn’t here; you have to make you own decisions now.” So while we hear at one moment that giants are perhaps people, too, and there could even be good giants, we in the next moment witness the ‘good guys’ killing one anyway. Wha!?

Earlier Red Riding Hood is met in the forest by a creepy wolf, who is, unsurprisingly, played by Johnny Depp (please, Johnny, stop playing creepos—you’re too good at it!). He sings about her tender flesh in a way that seems quite unrelated to his belly (yuck!) and she, after being eaten by him and then rescued, pipes away about all she learned…and keeps repeating that it was scary but exciting. What are we supposed to make of that!?

Another “charming” moment is when the sleezy prince woos the baker’s wife, who just had a long awaited baby, by reassuring her that they should “live in the moment” and that anything goes “in the woods.” This is after he and his brother prince sang of their supposedly heart wrenching love struck “agony” for their newly met beloveds, Cinderella and Rapunzel, while tearing at their shirts at the top of a waterfall. Ugh! 😝 As the prince later explained, “I was raised to be charming, not sincere.” My girls were not impressed.

Well, anyway, forgive me as this was more of a rant than a review, but in the hopes of sparing precious hours of your life, here is my advice: If anyone invites you Into the Woods, run! 🏃🏻🏃🏻🏃🏻

The Feminine Touch

On August 8, 2015August 8, 2015 By Anna EastlandIn Family Life, motherhood, Ponderings2 Comments

To deny that making a home a beautiful and loving place is a valuable task is to deny the value of woman’s innate ability to nurture…and to place value only on money and perceived external power. Sometimes feminism makes the mistake of equating equality with masculinity…thinking anything typically feminine is lesser. What an impoverished view! How far from respecting the feminine, how far from liberating women!

True freedom lies in the ability to choose for love…whether it is to work in society, or to build society from within the family. Woman has much to add in both these spheres.

Whatever we do, wherever we are, we do as women, and proudly so. Feminine qualities of empathy, wholistic vision, ability to multitask, to communicate and bring out the best in people should be part of everything we do, whether teaching our children or designing a bridge. So wear the power suit if you like, but don’t throw away your feminine soul. You are richer for it, and so are those around you.

Tummy-Flutes and Air-Sickness

On July 31, 2015 By Anna EastlandIn Family Life5 Comments

3 year old: “Mama, what does tummy-flute mean?”

Me: “A what?”

5 year old: “She means tummy flu.”

Me: “Oh, to have a sick stomach and need to throw up.”

3 year old: “I won’t throw up cause I only have a little tummy-flute.”

Me: “Oh, that’s good.”

3 year old: “Sorry, I have a coughing tummy; don’t worry. And I keep coughing and the air doesn’t get my cough because the air doesn’t want my cough but I don’t want to be sick, except the air wants to be sick but it doesn’t want to have the tummy flu.”

Me: “Ooooh….”

Calico’s Get Fancy

On July 22, 2015 By Anna EastlandIn Family Life, Photos19 Comments

Today my kids are having fun playing carefully with my old doll house furniture from Holland. Their Calico Critters have never had it so good! Here are some pictures of their adventures…

Love Rebel: Reclaiming Motherhood

On July 14, 2015July 14, 2015 By Anna EastlandIn Family Life, motherhood, Writing28 Comments

I am so excited to announce that my first book, with four other awesome women writers, is about to be published!

This beautiful labour of love (sorry for the birthing pun!) started with a spark of friendship that caught fire a few summers ago, when my friend Laura’s cousin Roberta Cottam, now a close friend of mine, first came to my mom’s group. We were discussing the importance of spending time on our artistic pursuits, even as busy moms…how spending time on things that make your soul happy and stimulate your mind is actually good for your whole family. A happy fulfilled woman is a happy fulfilled wife and mother.

This was a huge point of connection for Roberta (artist, writer, designer) and me (writer and photographer) and began a series of great conversations about the topic. We both felt that our spiritual lives and our artistic output were very connected, and encouraged each other to deepen both. This book is one of the fruits!

It also came about because of another very good friend, Monique Leblanc, who had inspired me to start blogging about a year earlier. I found her blog so genuine, funny and refreshing that I decided to start blogging myself. I liked that her writing was so real…you felt like you were having tea with a dear friend…rather than remaining an aquaintence who is only shown all the pretty bits…it was the opposite of contrived. I connected with joyful Melanie Jean Juneau and fun-loving Bonnie Way online through blogging and mutual friends, and when we began the book project, Bonnie invited her good friend Monique Les to join in as well.

So five moms, five bloggers, five friends, brought together through the passionate work of Roberta Cottam and designer Laura Wrubleski (http://www.visualaura.net/), have resulted in an anthology which I hope will encourage and inspire many mothers in the beautiful and worthwhile vocation of raising the future citizens of the world (yup, I mean being a mom!). Look for it soon on Amazon in print or as an e-book!

Boys are like puppies…

On July 8, 2015July 8, 2015 By Anna EastlandIn Family Life, Photos2 Comments

Puppies need lots and lots of affection.

Puppies love to nap.

Puppies like to play with other animals.

Puppies love treats and getting messy.

Puppies enjoy being taken for walks.

Puppies like to play on the floor.

Puppies delight in popping out of funny places like boxes.

Puppies love big sticks.

If any of you are puppy owners, you’ll surely agree they are sweet, loyal and a little sticky, and make you feel very, very loved!

We woke up on Mars…

On July 5, 2015 By Anna EastlandIn Family Life, Photos3 Comments

This summer morning we woke to the strangest golden light emanating through the blinds…thick light and far brighter than it should have been for 8 am, but not in a usually perky morning sunshine kind of way…but heavy and strange.

We went outside to take a look. The clouds were oddly dark for the brightness of the air, and looked almost dirty, like a white blanket a kid had spilled juice on and then dragged through the sandbox. But the strangest of all was the sun. It was a perfectly round pink ball, and we could look right at it without hurting our eyes. My iPad couldn’t capture the huge, glowing pink eye in the sky…an apparition form Mordor!

“Maybe the moon stole all the light from the sun,” suggested my 5 year old. But when I looked up solar and lunar exclipses, nothing was reported. Maybe forest fires? Or maybe we really just woke up on Mars…and have become aliens in our sleep!

A Father’s Gentle Strength

On June 21, 2015June 21, 2015 By Anna EastlandIn Family Life, Marriage, Photos, Poetry4 Comments

Being a father is being strong enough

to sacrifice everything for those you love…

constantly giving your all for your family,

bearing your little ones up with the gentleness

of someone powerful enough

to put others before himself.

Having a father is knowing you are never alone—

that there is always someone to hold your hand

and walk with you through the paths of this life

and into eternity.

How blessed are my children to have a father like this!

Thank you God for creating men who know how to love like you.

Help me always remember why I fell in love with the man

who is the father of my children,

whose love for me has become flesh

and walks among us.

Unblogging My Clutter

On June 15, 2015June 15, 2015 By Anna EastlandIn Family Life, Ponderings13 Comments

Whatever you can’t give away, you don’t possess. It possess you.
Ivern Ball

For years I’ve had the problem of having way more stuff than I could handle. I’ve spent endless hours shuffling around junk and not knowing what to do with it. I’m constantly sorting, recyling and giving boxes to the thrift store, yet I never do more than melt the tip of the iceberg. I get paralyzed by the tiniest decisions…like keeping or chucking this trinket or piece of paper, and end up shoving it back in the box and running away to cook dinner.

My friend Reiko remembers me doing the same thing in highschool. “It seemed like every Saturday you were stuck inside cleaning your room again” she told me the other day, when I told her of my renewed mission to declutter my house. I realize now that what I was really doing was “neatening.” In her book “Let Go of Clutter,” organizational expert Harriet Schechter defines this as follows:

Neatening: straightening, tidying, and/or hiding things away to create the illusion of orderliness.

In other words, pretending. Ugh. I hate pretending. Trying to create an illusion of something I’m not. Keeping up appearances. What I really need is real change….to be liberated from the suffocating hold of too much stuff. I need to declutter, and this time not a little bit at a time, but in a radical major way.

Decluttering: discarding, removing, or markedly reducing any accumulation of material objects.

If it’s so obvious and simple, why is it so hard? Schechter believes we are hard-wired for hoarding. It’s an old survival instinct…our inner squirrel packing away nuts for a snowy day. Your waste-not-want-not squirrel might say while you attempt to declutter:

But it could be useful one day…
But it’s not broken…
But it was expensive…
But it was a gift from Aunt So-and-So…
But I don’t want to be wasteful and make more garbage…

The problem is that we live in a time at least in many parts of the world, of abundance rather than scarcity. Hoarding in this context makes no sense. We end up with more that we know what to do with…and as a result spend hours and hours every year shuffling it around, looking for new storage solutions, sorting and resorting.

If I had $10-15 for every hour I’ve spent sorting mismatched kids socks alone, I could likely take a cruise. Schechter suggests you add up all the minutes each day you spend sorting, looking for lost things, and trying to put away stuff that has no place of it’s own. If you value your own time, you’ll realize that clutter is a luxury you can’t afford. An hour a day wasted adds up to about $3500 a year!

What is your clutter preventing you from accomplishing instead? Playing music, taking an art class, trying new recipes, taking a long walk at the beach, taking time to stay connected with friends, getting a promotion? How does a messy house affect your sense of self-worth?

While I know clutter is a waste of time, space and money, and a stressful source of tension, I find it hard to deal with alone. I feel overwhelmed:

I’m really blessed to have some awesome friends who are willing to get up to the elbows in junk and chant, “Chuck! Chuck! Chuck!” So with their help and you all cheering me on (and sharing your best declutter tips, please!) I hope to at last conquer my clutter by letting it go…unblogging my emotional blocks around “stuff” to create a clear and peaceful home…and heart as well.