TJ Hirst

Try-It With-Me Tuesday, an interactive weekly time and place to foster connections that challenge and encourage the process to become a well-rounded person.

I didn’t pull out a new backpack or sharpen my pencils when my children went back to school, but I did challenge myself to evaluate my routines and identify one or two that need a change and make that change.

Did you try it with me?

I anticipated some of my changes, but once I started evaluating, I was surprised by possibilities I hadn’t imagined. See if you can guess which change from the ones below had that unexpected impact.

Change of Habit. My father-in-law believes exercise should be productive, like working in the yard or walking to the store. I buy into the theory, but in practice, I just can’t raise my heart rate enough even with all the  running up and down the stairs that I do. And while Paul expends a lot of mental energy at work, he doesn’t burn many calories at his desk, in his car or standing at a job site. Both of us are nearing forty. Our metabolisms are changing and our activity level needs to increase.

Ironically, the same day our family hauled loads of firewood inside for our Tulikivi wood stove, Paul unpacked our new elliptical machine. He’s been working out regularly at the YMCA for more than eight months to reduce his risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Now that we’re both sticking to a routine, we’ve canceled our 8-year-old membership and created daily workouts at home.

What habits are you changing?

Change of Schedule. My mother always said that her father always said, “An ounce of morning is worth a pound of afternoon.”

After my young babies grew up and learned to sleep late, I eased back on getting up early myself. Now, everyone in our house has shifted to an earlier schedule, again, and we’re praying that my mom is right.

That’s the reason for the elliptical at home—to get our exercise in before the day begins, and that’s 4:50 a.m. for me! Can I keep it up? I hope so. I would have to be up by 5:30 anyway, and I don’t know how I would wake up otherwise.

Is your schedule changing with the change of seasons?

Change of Tradition. Something else we’ve been doing for the last eight years, too, has been to sit in the exact same church pew every Sunday. We sit in the back 1/3 of our chapel on the left-hand side. When we first sat there, the door was a close escape for a our crying one-year-old. Now, I’m distracted from my real purpose in being there.

No, we didn’t cancel that membership, but we did need a change. This past Sunday we sat on the right-hand side of the chapel in the third row from the front. I received some looks and comments, probably stunning a few people, but we loved the move. My daughter said, “I feel closer to the meeting and more a  part of it.”

Have any of your traditions diminished in meaning? How have you changed them?

To be honest, the few that I included only prompted a large evaluation of all my goals, especially my writing goals. I have written at this website for nine months. Today is post #235. Consistent posting is a routine that develops my writing, but I keep wondering if I am just toiling or if this is a productive use of my writing time. I’ve opened the door to another pondering process, and I’m wondering where that will lead.

When is a routine leading somewhere and when does it just become repetitious?

Join in by trying the challenges with me, commenting, linking, or suggesting a challenge. If you want to write a post on your blog about what happened when you took the challenge, I will publish your link. Just link to my website in your post and send me your link. Feel free to use the TIWMT image in your post.

While I love the toasty taste of marshmallows lightly browned over a campfire, I am not the biggest fan of s’mores. They are tradition more than a temptation and make a mess of already messy campfire cooking. Still, each time we camp, we indulge.

I’ve determined that my biggest qualm is that the chocolate does not melt around the marshmallow, even when I prepare it all ahead. So, this time I decided that I would create a new combination. My husband calls it s’more heresy.

First, prepare the graham crackers. Break a large square in half and spread peanut butter on one side. Lay Hershey chocolate squares on the other side. If you are in a precarious spot, you may wish to lay the Hershey chocolate directly on the peanut butter, to secure it from slipping off the side.

Second, toast the marshmallows to a golden color. Make sure to slowly turn the marshmallows over low coals to heat slowly and provide enough melting power.

Third, assemble the marshmallows in the middle. You can choose the goo of two or just one for a cleaner eat. But plop the desired number directly in the middle and pull off.

Fourth, press the s’more togther for a minute. This ensures that the chocolate, marshmallows peanut butter will melt and the flavors meld.

Finally, enjoy with a snack of napkins nearby. Eat slowly without thinking of trying to make another. Your appetite for s’mores will have been satisfied for the night and the whole year.

The trail dinners sizzled from their foil when I flipped them on the rack above the open campfire, and I set off to prepare the picnic table for serving. I searched around for the paper grocery bag filled with paper goods. “Has anyone seen the bag of paper goods?” I said.

The kids determined that they had only unloaded three paper bags. I looked desperately at Paul. “Are there any other bags in the car?” He shook his head.

I opened the tailgate and searched for myself; he’s right. Panic set in. Just a little panic—OK, a whole lot of panic. Thinking of eating trail dinners directly off the foil might not be too bad but eating without utensils might be a little too much roughing it. No brown paper bag appeared at the side door either; instead, I found a soft, yellow fabric one—stuffed with rags.

“Why did we bring the rag bag?”

Here we began our camping and biking trip to end a most unusual summer—prepared with enough rags to clean a whole campground but without the basic necessities to get us through our first meal. Although we think we would prefer to hike or canoe into our campsite, this may be why we are still in the car camping stage of family life. Even though we wanted to ignore the town down the road, their local Supervalu saved us from our emergency.

Despite our annoyance at bringing too many of the wrong type of things and not enough of the right ones, the unseasonably cool weather and long afternoon showers, and our impatience with each other, camping together is a quirky way to remind us to be grateful for permanent shelter and personal privacy.

It is the other part of our adventure that pulls us together and prompts these kinds of trips. We love to bike as a family on Minnesota bike trails. We live near the Paul Bunyan State Trail, a paved 100-mile bike trail created from an abandoned rail line, and connect on short rides around the Brainerd Lakes Area.

We explore the rest of the state on longer bike trips. Last weekend, we set up camp in the Norway Beach campgrounds in the Chippewa National Forest near Cass Lake and rode nearly 19 miles on the Migizi Trail. The first ten miles of this trip took us through what is called the Ten Section Area of the Chippewa National Forest, where old growth, large diameter red and white pine trees stand alongside Pike Bay. Their height humbled me; yet, surprisingly, as we rode under their canopies and over the reddish needles, the trees sheltered our family.

Our children’s endurance had obviously grown and except for an unfortunate incident with my bike, we didn’t have to prod each other to keep going until the next stop. In fact, 12 or so miles in, as we rounded the south side of Pike Bay and connected to the Heartland Trail, we were all still able to laugh when we nearly ran into a porcupine in our lane. We stopped for plenty of pictures with him and giggled at his baby-like waddle while he crossed the road.

Even though we saw this up-close look at a porcupine and hidden views of Minnesota forest and lakes, the “fresh-tasting” water at a rest stop on Highway 2 won for the kids’ most talked-over highlight of the ride.

The now-humorous ending to the whole trip came when we again tested our endurance in repacking our gear and bikes and discovered our vehicle had a dead battery.

I say humorous because we couldn’t do anything but laugh at the response from the campground host when we asked for his help to jump start it.

“That’s too dangerous to do with modern-day vehicles,” he said. “I won’t put my car in that kind of jeopardy.”

A neighbor camper next to us offered his big red truck with two batteries for our service, which stopped us all from singing the R.E.M. song, “It’s the end of the world as we know it.”

Certainly the trees will change, strangers will refuse to serve and others will give, but our children, too, will also grow. And while that growth is obvious in their endurance to make bike trips easier, it also means that the canoe trips Paul and I plan for “someday” will be a whole lot lonelier than the simple car camping ones we have now.

The Questions: Have I Seen the Hand of God Reaching Out to Touch Us Today?

For all my grumbling lately about being overwhelmed with busy extras, I have failed to recognize some of the important ways my family works together to make our house a well-ordered home.

This week, in particular, I noticed that help. On Monday night they agreed to forego playing a family game to gather camping gear for this week’s trip. My youngest daughter and son worked with me, and we organized the tents and sleeping bags.

Nh’s scout camp experience reminded me to “be prepared” with essentials like rope and a lantern with fresh batteries. Kh’s attention to detail encouraged me to put together a container of dish-washing essentials like dish soap, paper towels, scrub brush, drying towel and dishcloth in a dish pan with a lid while she made a similar bucket for hand washing.

While we did that, Paul and our oldest daughter worked to fix her broken bicycle. When we camp, we choose a site near one of the many bike trails in Minnesota’s trail system. Eh’s bike gears haven’t worked all summer, and that meant the whole family couldn’t go on a family ride. But in a matter of an hour or two, Paul fixed the gears and her flat tire, saving the time and money of a visit to the bike shop. I know he is pretty handy at the technical stuff, but this was an unexpected bonus blessing.

And now, we’re all happy campers.

Composting toilets, fields of prairie grass on the roof and cob wall art greeted my daughter and her friends for an Activity Day field trip to the campus that houses several companies with goals of researching, developing and promoting sustainable living through renewable energy and high efficiency housing.

The composting toilet and worm composting brought the young titter of embarrassment from the group, but they all took a sniff of the bathroom where deposits are made and then covered with sawdust and could prove that it doesn’t smell.

One of the young boys in the group said, “I’ve got to use the bathroom, Mom.”

She quickly grabbed his hand, pulled him in the opposite direction and said, “We’ll use the first one.”

The companies on campus include a nonprofit, Happy Dancing Turtle, a for-profit, Hunt Utilities Group, and RREAL, Rural Renewable Energy Alliance. The offices themselves are an experiment in different earth-friendly products and materials. Our tour guide, Quinn, showed how the main office is made of straw bales and covered with cob. Cob is a stucco-like material that is made from basic ingredients: clay, sand, straw and water. They use cob to cover the straw bales, decorate the walls and even to build bathtubs and sinks.

Quinn is one of the artisans who paints the cob, often using a natural milk-based paint called casein. In the back room of some offices, one might expect to find old storage boxes, but they produce cob right on site and made their back room look more like a stable with stalls of straw and sand, water troughs and giant mixers.

In another building on campus with 76 solar panels, we visited the greenhouse where 10 miles of black tubing bring warm air from other parts of campus and deliver it to the floor of the greenhouse. There, Quinn also explained the layers of roofing material (which are identical to our roof garden layers) that lie underneath the dirt and prairie grass on top of the building.

The kids were bored by some of the more complicated processes like the intricate technical monitoring of the moisture and temperatures in the buildings and looking at an actual solar panel. But they held on through the heat and walk until the time to make paper from their used paper.

I admit that I hang back from fully embracing the green movement. It seems funny to label some of the things I am already doing like planting a garden, preserving my own food, using smart building and energy products in and on our house as sustainable living.

With that perspective, though, I realize that my children through educational opportunities like these will grow up with less reluctance and may adopt some of the more unusual practices. Let’s just say, though, that there are limits and if I find a composting toilet at their house when I go to visit my grandkids years in the future, I’ll stay somewhere else.