We’re a Bluey house around here. Are you? Seriously every single member of this household is in love with that family. Finding a show loved by everyone from 40 to 4 is an impossible feat. It’s just Bluey, through and through. 

Bluey is actually the perfect show to love because the episodes are so short so you can tell the kids they can watch FIVE Bluey Eps and they think you’re almost as amazing of a mom as Chili. Almost. #momgoals But also, you can use it as an easy reward like I just did this morning. Keeping my kids motivated to follow through on their morning routine has been a chore lately. Tired of being the nag, I told my kids if they could get completely ready to walk out the door with 7 minutes to spare then I would let them watch one episode. Magic. They even pulled out the broom to sweep. Bluey for President. AND they didn’t whine when I told them only one because they felt like this was SUCH a treat. 

Wouldn’t it be great if it was always this magical? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every show my children watched was as wholesome as Bluey, if they always maintained healthy screen time habits, if every day felt as jolly and safe as, well, as the world where Bluey and Bingo live?

The thing is, it’s not and we all know this. So what are we to do?

Thankfully there are technology companies here to help. 

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a conversation with knowledgeable people from Comcast Xfinity as organized by Twin Cities Mom Collective about these same struggles. Parents at various stages of parenting sat around a circle and shared their feelings about technology in the home, what we love, what we don’t, and where we wish we could get help. I heard from a mother of children with autism who wanted to keep her children safe in her home. A mom with teenagers told us how she was balancing the push and pull of releasing responsibility, both in the world and online. Another mom with a two year old didn’t know what to expect, she just wanted to be prepared when she needed to be. 

We all had different rules for how we manage technology in the home but the one constant remained–we are all still learning but ultimately want to make smart decisions to help our whole family.

Participating in the conversation were team members from Comcast. Perhaps you are asking yourself the same question I did before arriving: so how can a media, tech and entertainment company help protect me and my family? The answer is pretty simple–by listening. 

While we discussed, team members from Comcast listened. In fact, they have been listening to these conversations for years. Comcast developers heard a constant refrain from parents that we want safety and we want ease. They developed Comcast Xfinity Products for that very reason. 

Comcast Xfinity Products cover a range of support. There is Xfinity X1 and Flex for video, Xfinity internet, even Xfinity mobile phone service. A feature I was unfamiliar with until that morning was the Xfinity Home security system with camera systems that work for home safety, chimes that alert you around the house and on your phone, even indoor cameras that you can use the way you might a baby monitor. I can see a world where we start adding Comcast Xfinity Products to baby registries! Demonstrators gave us a tour that morning of the system set up in the home and I was especially surprised at how seamlessly the system fit in to the rest of the home.

Another feature I found most helpful for parents like myself was learning about the apps Comcast Xfinity designed to help parents manage technology usage in the home. Their goal is to aggregate all the technology services you use in your home to one easy to use App. Comcast estimates by the end of 2023 every home will have at least 50 devices connected to the internet. Can you imagine balancing all of that? Thankfully Comcast Xfinitiy offers a digital dashboard app that can be downloaded on your phone or table designed to keep track, so you don’t have to. You can set up screen time rules, set online boundaries, pause or turn off WiFi at different times of day depending on needs. With everything else we have to monitor in our lives, what a relief to have a system in place to help manage this process for us.

What I loved most about this system was that the monitoring allows not for a top down parental control system but more of an accountability system. In our family we are trying to have conversations about internet usage and safety as something we ALL need to learn and understand. Technology is new to all of us, from kids to adults. We are going to get things wrong. But having systems in place that help us monitor and learn from our usage makes this conversation easier. 

I’m so glad we have companies like Comcast that understand the importance of learning and growing. They are making changes everyday to their processors based on the feedback from customers. Technology is still new and ever changing. The smart thing to do is change along with it. Comcast Xfinity Products are doing just that. 

As we left the conversation with Twin Cities Mom Collective and Comcast that day, I got to thinking about one of my most favorite Bluey episodes (I’m crying just thinking about it!) It’s called “Baby Race” and it’s the one where Bluey’s mom Chili is remembering how she struggled with how to help Bluey learn to walk, wondering if she was even doing anything right as a mother. Her friend, a mom of eight or maybe nine, she can’t remember, puts her hand on Chili’s and says “you’re doing great.”

Isn’t that what we want to hear? This balance of technology and kids stuff is hard. And you know what? We’re doing great. Especially with a little help from companies like Comcast. 
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This was a paid sponsored post but all opinions are my own.  

This is the first edition of The Darling Files, a series in collaboration with Callie Feyen where we dig into essay snippets discarded during editing, poems once forgotten, journal entries unfinished.

Today, I share an Ekphrastic for a painting in my home that once belonged to my granny. I wrote the first two parts in a poetry class (with Callie!) and the last one was cobbled together from a journal pondering.

I. Stringing the Beads

Little is known of her life,

is what is said of the artist,*

the artist who painted just this one girl,

the girl who is Stringing the Beads.

Little is known of her life,

is what I wonder when I study the girl,

the girl who holds beads of every color,

but the color she strings is just blue.

Little is known of her life,

is what I think of my granny,

my granny who lived in dozens of homes,

homes where this painting would live.

Why just this painting?

Why only blue?

Why move so many times?

What did she want?

What did she wonder?

What was she trying to find?

Little is known of her life,

is what I consider about me,

the me that now wonders which one is she—

the granny, the artist, the girl, or all three.

*Note: The “little is known of her life” came from a Wikipedia source about the artist Sara Macgregor and her painting.

II. Stringing the Beads

When I close my eyes I can feel my Granny’s home.

Fancy trinkets, too delicate to touch.

Chicken and dumplings and cobbler and rosewater;

her songs about Jesus and love.

Every wall layered with paintings of people and places;

telling stories I didn’t know but imagined.

But the one I remember most was the girl in the chair;

the girl in the simple blue dress.

Her painting stood as tall as I, hugged

by a frame as strong as my granny.

She sits, knees bent, in her lap, a shallow basket of multicolored beads,

stringing bead after bead after bead.

The strand reaches the floor, curls around, out of frame,

how long, we do not know.

Each little bead that slides down the string

is always the same color blue.

What does she feel?

What does she want?

What is she trying to make?

I’ll never know because the girl doesn’t speak,

she just strings

and she strings

and she strings.

My granny, she moved, twenty seven times,

maybe more; after a while you start to lose count.

The blue house with the porch. The apartment with better light.

The basement and the town far away.

Each time she packed up her stories, her life,

took them to start something new.

Like the girl stringing beads in an infinite line,

there were many; but inside all the same.

What did she feel?

What did she want?

What was she trying to awake?

I’ll never know, because her dreams she never spoke.

She would only sing

and she would sing

and she would sing.

When I open my eyes it’s my home I see.

the same painting but now on my wall.

My granny, she moved, one final time

And now her stories, they live with me.

Like the girl and the granny, I string a life together too,

like beads, like homes; mine are words.

What do I feel?

What do I want?

What am I trying to create?

I don’t yet know; I’m still learning how to speak.

But I can dream,

and I can dream

and I can dream.

III. Stringing the Beads

She moved in a year ago

The girl with the blue beads.

Her frame is different, just a simple silhouette

now, letting the girl inside

be the better story.

I pass her every day. Same

girl, same beads, row after row after…

But wait.

There’s something

there, in her hand, I hadn’t seen before.

The bead, it’s not blue, not like the others.

It’s white.

Like the moon reflecting the daylight

to come.

Has she been ready all this time

to try something new?

Or is it just me that’s ready now

to notice?

When Callie emailed me about The Darling Files project, I thought of pomegranate molasses. 

I should back up for a minute. If Callie were editing this intro, she would leave me a comment here that reads something like “nice intro but who is Callie and what are the Darling Files.” I’ll save her the effort and correct that. But don’t forget about the pomegranate molasses, okay?

Callie is a writer and a teacher and an editor, all of which are roles she has fulfilled for me in my creative life. She reminds me to look at my ordinary life and find magic. Her stories are the kind that make me want to stop reading and go write.

In the email I mentioned above, Callie reminded me of a conversation we once shared about writing and stories. We were talking about the words without a home, the ones we cut from essays because they weren’t quite right but we still love. Stephen King calls this “Killing Your Darlings,” because of course he would talk about killing. 

But Callie didn’t want to talk about killing–she wanted to talk about living. And she knew I did, too.

In this conversation, I told Callie about my “Darling Files.” I don’t kill my darlings. I let them live in a little corner of my very dusty Google account. Sometimes I’m super organized and I tuck them into a designated file labeled “Darlings.” Other files have fancy labels like “Random Musings,” “Thoughts from April,” or my most favorite “Untitled Document.” Then there are the scraps in journals and notes apps and once I found something on the back of my child’s drawing that just says “is this what it means to…” and I’ll be thinking about that one for a while. 

Callie has these words, too. (Although I’m certain she’s more organized than I.) That’s why she emailed me. She was sorting through journals of lost words and wondered, is there something that can be done here? And would I like to come along for the ride?

That’s when I thought of the pomegranate molasses. You hadn’t forgotten about that, had you?

I first learned of said molasses when I stumbled upon it in an intriguing recipe by Samin Nosrat. It was one of those recipes with many steps that you only try for the people you know will appreciate the effort (i.e. NOT the children). Last fall, my parents came for a visit and this felt like the audience I was looking for. I don’t know about you, but inside this strong independent forty year old body is an eight year old girl standing in front of her parents with her report card of all As and “Pleasure to have in class”es with a beaming smile saying “look at me and this great thing I did!” I don’t want to serve them the same tacos from a packet or spaghetti and meatballs from the freezer that I do on normal nights. I want to impress. I want to make the recipe with the pomegranate molasses. 

The problem was, on the morning they arrived, I remembered I had not yet procured said molasses. No worries, I thought. There was a fancy grocery store just a couple miles down the road and yes we could drive but it was a lovely fall day so why not take a walk with three year old Leo in the stroller. A win win for all. Except as we started to leave we discovered the stroller tires were flat. Hiking backpack it was. Perhaps walking down the city streets with a child in a backpack gives off weird hitchhiking vibes but alas we were doing this. We were hiking to the store to purchase the one ingredient we needed so I could cook dinner and make my parents proud. 

What I didn’t take into consideration was that the walk would involve construction that blocked off the sidewalk for the last mile of the walk to the store, thus requiring us to scale a six inch space between orange fencing and speeding vehicles, and between that and the sounds of jack hammer to concrete, we couldn’t hear each other talk so much of the walk was done with all of us fearing for our lives while shouting “WHAT?” and also it took us much longer than I expected to walk all that way with a three year old on my back so by the time we got home I had sweat dripping down my neck and my back and the idea of cooking in a hot kitchen sounded absolutely miserable, like the absolute last thing I wanted to do but anyway, that’s how we got the pomegranate molasses.

And then I used the one tablespoon for which the recipe called. 

Yes, you read that correctly. One. Tablespoon. We traipsed four harried miles across town in the scorching sun to retrieve one rather expensive ingredient (left that part out) for an over the top recipe and come to find out all that was required was one f*&^%$g tablespoon?! I almost dumped the entire bottle into the chicken just so I could actually use it up, but then decided that would taste terrible and only defeat the purpose of impressing my diners. Instead, I put the bottle in my pantry and vowed to make use of it soon. 

That was a year ago. I have not used the molasses again since. And yet every time I open the pantry, that little bottle sits front and center, after which I always think “I should do something with this.” But then I grab the balsamic vinegar or the honey or the Worcestershire sauce, not the pomegranate molasses. And I know I could just dump the molasses in the garbage and forget about it. But I think about how much effort I put into getting it. And more than that, the molasses is quite tasty. It’s sweet and sour and savory all at once and it would make for a really delicious salad dressing or bread topping or something else I haven’t imagined yet. But that’s the point. I need to imagine the possibilities. And then I need to put those possibilities to work.

That’s why, when Callie asked me if I wanted to participate in her challenge to make use of the words she had stored away, I thought of the pomegranate molasses. And I immediately said yes.

Because like the molasses, there are words sitting behind doors of files and journals and notes waiting to be used, words that once took great effort to collect, words I think are still pretty good. I just haven’t yet found the best use for them. 

Or, in other words, to steal a line from Callie, “if we faithfully write, even when it's feeling hard or awful or whatever, we will have a body of work - a work of darlings - that we can return to after a bit.”

So that’s how the Darling Files Project came to be. Once a month Callie and I will dig deep into our pantries of words and find the ones ready for a home. We’ll share it on our blogs and give those Darlings a life. 

Do you have some Darlings that need a new life, too? Maybe it’s one line that you finally complete. Maybe it’s a poem you forgot about. Maybe it’s an essay that never found a publisher and you decide to be your own publisher. We would love for you to come alongside us on this journey.

Here are the weeks we plan for this project if you want to participate: October 10-14, November 14-18, December 12-16, January 16-20, February 13-17. Feel free to share links on our blog comments, tag us in your work (@rachelnevergall and @calliefeyen) on Instagram, and/or use the hashtag #thedarlingfiles so we can all connect. Let’s give new life to the pomegranate molasses in our word pantries!

Now about that pomegranate molasses…anybody have any recipes?