I would like to...

My counselor has mentioned on a few occasions that we're all born like wild animals and part of my job as a parent is to tame the wildness, to teach Liza the skills she'll need to function as a member of a community. Liza and I have been working on changing her "I want, I want, I wants" into something more polite and pleasant for my mama ears.

Perhaps not as vocally as a three-year-old, I think we all fall victim to the "I wants" on occasion. Even as I have been encouraging Liza to change, I've been tallying up a list of wants recently. Mine are more goal-oriented rather than demands for this or that, but still I see the benefit of seeing them as "I would like to's" as opposed to "I wants". I thought I'd share them here in hopes that writing them down publicly would make them more likely to happen. 

Over the next few weeks I would like to...

*read more poetry. My aim is for at least one poem a day. I've got a few books on my bedside table, and I've been savoring some lines each night before I turn out the light. Listening to "The Writer's Almanac" with Garrison Keillor has been a fun and easy way to add more poetry to my life too.

*write one handwritten letter a week. My friends and family are very patient, but I stink at phone calls. I'm slightly better at returning emails. Though I am pretty stellar at conversations via text, handwritten letters are just so much more fun to send. Knowing that in a few days someone special to me will find some pretty stationary and a few lines of my handwriting mixed in amongst the bills and catalogs makes me smile. I hope it'll have the same effect on them as well.

*read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver. It's been on my to-read list for years and because it's the community read at my new library, I decided it was time to dig into it.

*keep the vase on the kitchen table filled with something beautiful. There are always pretty bouquets at the grocery store, though buying those on a weekly basis gets expensive. The farmer's market also offers gorgeous cut flowers that are a bit more cost effective (and local!). The purple coneflower and rosemary arrangement above was a gift from my mother-in-law's yard. Currently there is Queen Anne's Lace picked from alongside the road complements of my sweet hubby.

*make blueberry lemonade from scratch. There's a recipe in the latest Taproot magazine that I'm looking forward to trying.

What's on your "I would like to" list these days?