Doing it all over

If you could do it over, would you?

If you could go back and change your mind, choose a different path, would you?

Do you ever think about that?



I know none of us would trade our children — not for anything, not for millions of dollars or a home on the beach or a perfect-all-the-time husband. Of course, not.

But what if we could go back to that boy we dated in high school and choose … not to date him. Choose to instead have more girlfriends or spend more Friday nights getting to know our parents … or getting to know ourselves. Reading more books, watching more classic films, starting a scrapbooking club or a bible study group or … anything else.

What if we could go back to that moment in college where we had to bite the bullet and pick a major? Would you still choose journalism? Or would you go that other route you’ve always wondered about, you know, that pre-med route?

What if your parents hadn’t split up? What if you’d stayed with your dad instead? Would you have the same friends, the same kids? Would you have married the same guy? (The uncomfortable answer to these questions is no.)

But we all take the life path we do for a reason. Everything happens for a reason. People come into our lives at the exact time they’re meant to, and then later, some of them leave. We make the choices we do for a reason. We deal with the fall-out from some of those choices because we have to. But every day we get a new day. This world keeps turning, no matter what we do.

I think our challenge – my challenge, at least – is believing this is all how it’s meant to turn out and being patient with the changes, with the bends in the road, without knowing the final destination.

This post originally appeared at momaha.com.

Brave girls

Do you guys know about the Brave Girls Club?

If not, go there. Sign up for the daily e-mails. It's not spam.

Here was the daily truth today:

"One of the paradoxes of life is that sometimes the very best decisions have the most difficult consequences. And sometimes what is best is not what we want most. And sometimes when we want to feel peace, we have to do something that feels painful first. Sometimes, we have to do such hard things, and there's absolutely no other way.

"You can do it, though ... you know what is the right thing to do.. you know for sure in your gut and deep in your heart and a million signs have led you to what you are supposed to do. It still feels so scary, so difficult and so impossible, even for a very brave girl.

"Just know that most of the best things in life come after making the most difficult choices and doing the hardest things and taking the biggest risks.

"You really can do this ... and miracles are going to happen when you do."

Babies

My goodness, they are tiny.

You forget. Right? Isn’t it crazy how we forget?

My boss, aka mom2lulu, had her third baby girl last week and she brought the new one into work the other day.

She even said to me, “You’re not much of a baby person, right?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that, if I was or wasn’t. I like babies very much when they’re not crying non-stop for seemingly no reason. Yes, at every other time, I like them lots. When they’re crying those tiny cries, well, yes, I’d prefer an 18-month-old.

At any rate, I liked her baby a lot. She was so delicate, just a small bundle of coziness. Her skin was perfect, her brown hair was fluffy, she opened her baby eyes and just looked around the room - at the lights on the ceiling and all the strange faces peering at her.

I held her briefly – until she started to cry. And then Mom took her and all was well in her tiny world again.

It made me want one.

Which is out of the question for all sorts of reasons.

But still, my goodness, babies are sweet.

Do you ever get baby fever when you see a newborn?

This post originally appeared on momaha.com, the World-Herald's website for moms. (It's Veronica's full-time job.)

Bye-bye, baby tooth

Rye lost his first tooth!



I'm so excited for him. He wiggled it out himself tonight, while he lay in bed. He opened the door around 9:15 and came to find me in the living room.

"Mom," he said, "I lost my tooth." And then he looked down into his hand and showed me the tiny tooth.



He had blood on his fingers and blood in his mouth, but he was smiling.

I feel like this is a milestone. And I'm actually mourning - slightly - the loss of that tooth that was in his mouth for so many years. That tooth that we've brushed and brushed and brushed. That tooth that helped him eat and helped him talk. That tooth that was a piece of my first baby.

Now, it sits in a plastic baggie under my baby's pillow.

(He did write a note to the Tooth Fairy, though, requesting to keep his tooth! That's my boy!)

Who knew my son losing his first tooth could be so exciting!? (And, yes, that is a permanent tooth already coming in behind).

Rye's 6th birthday party

We had Rye's birthday party at the activities center at Mahoney State Park yesterday.

He had a GREAT time (read: sweaty mess of boyness after running and climbing and playing in those tunnels). I felt so blessed that he had so many friends there to help him celebrate. Truly, we are lucky.

Thank you to everyone who came and spent the afternoon with us.

Here's the birthday boy:

Here are some of the girls going through the tunnels:

Here's the G.I. Joe cake I made. Turned out OK!

And here's the party room before everyone got there:

I said to Rye afterward, "Wouldn't it be fun if we could have birthday parties every month?"

He said, "Yeah, but then I'd get old really fast."

So much wisdom from my nearly 6-year-old!

Unless you're really not paying attention...

We're going to get a little smarter as we get older.

That's what superstar author Elizabeth Gilbert told me last month when I called her for an interview. She was in a hotel room in Idaho, in the middle of a speaking tour that brought her to Omaha last week.

I was so nervous in the days leading up to the interview that I started wishing someone else was writing the story instead. I do that sometimes: wish I could forsake what always ends up being awesome just to get out of the agony of the build-up.

But she was great and I was capable, if even confident and articulate. She thanked me for such thoughtful questions at the end, and that just about made my entire week.

She was what journalists call "a quote machine." Just about everything she said was wise and worded well and quote-worthy. Writing this story was challenging mainly in making sure I kept my voice, that I didn't rely too much on her words, that I let myself be the writer. (How crazy is that? Letting myself be the writer instead of ELIZABETH GILBERT!).

Anyway, here's what ran in the World-Herald. I'm pretty proud of it.

The influence of 'Eat, Pray, Love'

By Veronica Daehn

World-Herald staff writer

As far as Elizabeth Gilbert can figure, it was all an accident.

The author of the mega-successful “Eat, Pray, Love” just happened to write a book about her spiritual journey to find herself at the same time millions of women happened to be re-examining their own lives.

“When you're struggling with those hard questions about love, despair, God, the point of your life, you really feel like you're alone on an iceberg with that,” Gilbert said in a recent interview. “It turns out those exact questions were being shared by about 10 million people. Turns out my own personal drama is an extremely representable one.”

In her early 30s, unhappy in her marriage and her life, Gilbert left her husband and her new suburban house in New York. She ultimately traveled to Italy, India and Indonesia, where she sought spiritual guidance and healing as well as forgiveness. “Eat, Pray, Love” is a memoir of that journey.

It has sold more than 10 million copies, has been translated into more than 30 languages and was made into a major motion picture starring Julia Roberts.

Gilbert is still figuring out how to deal with all that success.

“I try to respect it and be grateful for it and keep a little tiny bit of distance from it,” she said. “There was nothing in my life that led me to believe anything like that would have happened.”

If she's lucky, she said, people will be asking her about “Eat, Pray, Love” for the rest of her life.

There's little doubt that its impact will be long-lasting, at least for many readers.

Mandy Horrocks, a 34-year-old Omaha mother, is just one of many women who read Gilbert's book at that accidental right time.

Normally too busy with her career to read, Horrocks bought “Eat, Pray, Love” in the Omaha airport on her way to a business meeting in Boston. She couldn't put it down.

“From the first lines, I just thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is my life right now.' I just really connected.”

Horrocks read “Eat, Pray, Love” in October. A week before Christmas, she left her husband. In February, she left her job, a career she'd had for 12 years — 10 at the same place. A sales manager for a financial services company, Horrocks didn't want to be “on” all the time anymore.

Before quitting, she told herself every day for a year that her career would get better. Put your head down and work hard, she said. She knew she could make herself do that.

“But then I woke up one day and thought, ‘Why am I making myself do this?'”

Taking a cue from Gilbert, she's no longer doing it. Instead, she's trying to figure out what's next.

As for her marriage, Horrocks said she and her husband were on their way to separating anyway. But reading the book gave her a little more faith, a little more courage.

“It just kind of confirmed and reassured me that things like that can happen and be OK,” she said. “It reassured me that you do move on and do what's important in your life.”

Women today have an added challenge, Gilbert said, because they don't really have older generations to look up to. Their mothers and grandmothers didn't feel pulled in so many directions because they didn't have as many choices.

Gilbert said: “I can't ask my mother or my grandmother how they did this because they didn't have the life I had. She didn't have to do the thing we do where we look down our street and there are 10 different women with 10 different paths and each one forced us to ask ourselves if we did it the right way? Was I supposed to get divorced and move to India?”

Women have enormous political and educational freedoms now, Gilbert said. And because they don't have generations of role models to learn from and follow, they're all pioneering their own way. (“Thank God for the blogosphere,” she said).

It can get overwhelming, but women have a responsibility to own up to their choices, even when it means they don't get certainty, she said. Women often second-guess their decisions.

“Let us not deceive ourselves,” Gilbert said. “This is a tricky time to be a woman. Almost every day, we have six doors we could go through. Choosing one always comes with the danger that you should have gone through a different door.”

So what about Gilbert's choice? Is she happy?

She is. She remarried (her most recent book, “Committed,” is all about marriage), and she and her husband live in a river town of 1,000 people in rural New Jersey.

She has a garden where she grows mainly flowers (the town has a wonderful Farmer's Market for vegetables, plus she likes to look out her window and “see a ridiculously pointless pile of beauty.”) She takes yoga at a local studio. She walks her dog, Rocky. And she's working on her next book, a novel about 19th century botanical exploration.

At ICAN, Gilbert will talk about the process of writing “Eat, Pray, Love” and surviving its aftermath.

She'll start at the beginning of her writing career, when she was 8 or 9 years old and writing plays with her sister (she wrote, produced and directed a 10-minute musical in the fifth grade). She'll talk about the creative process and how to live a creative life as long as you're alive.

She'll talk about failures, too — the 10 years she spent trying to be a writer but not getting published.

But now, she's Elizabeth Gilbert. She took this scary step, left her marriage, traveled the world, found herself and love, wrote a best-seller, has been on “Oprah” ... isn't her life perfect?

Nah.

“The world is a shifty, spinny, complicated place where nothing is promised, where nothing remains the same,” she said. “Just when you get yourself straightened out, there's everyone else to deal with, too — all their fears and issues. The degree of compassion that's required to endure it is mighty.

“But unless you're really not paying attention, you're going to get a little smarter as you get older.”

Such a big girl

Certain things must happen for a child to fully grow up.

They must master skills like tying their shoes, zipping their jacket, blowing their nose, brushing their teeth, using the potty, going to sleep on their own in a big kid bed. Playing at a friend's house without Mommy there.

Also: eating cereal with milk. With a spoon. All by yourself. (What? This isn't on your list?)

Paige is apparently now a big girl.

And I'd say she's pretty pleased about it, wouldn't you?

Her big brother yesterday went to a Nebraska baseball game with a good friend and his mom. I sent him with money and a juice box, temporary substitutes for me. He had a great time and I was excited for him to get to go. The independence he's gained this year in kindergarten definitely signals that he's growing up.

But he has yet to eat cereal with milk. So his little sis has got that on him at least.

We're on vacation this week! Happy week to all of you, too.