EP 107: Q&A – Passports, Prayer, Post-40 Pregnancy, and Purged Inboxes

I’m cleaning out my inbox for the new year and answering some of the questions that have piled up there since my last Q&A. On the list of inquiries this time around: passports to state capitol buildings, free printable prayer guides, maintaining a healthy pregnancy after 40, and tips for dealing with an overflowing inbox. If any of those topics interest you, stick around. I think you’ll be encouraged.

Q&A: Passports, Prayer, Pregnancy…

complete transcript from Episode 107

Hello, friend. Welcome to Episode 107 of Loving Life at Home.

This week, I’ve been working on paring down my inbox, so I thought I’d devote an episode to answering some of the questions that have piled up there since last time I did a Q&A – including a sort of meta email question about dealing with emails.

So let’s peek at some of the inquiries that have recently landed in my inbox.

Q: Do all state capitol buildings offer ink stamps?

First up is a letter from Linda who writes:

A: Yes, they do!

Well, I kept thinking I’d get a post published about this (and I still fully intend to do so), but as that hasn’t happened yet, I decided to just address the topic on my podcast. That counts, doesn’t it?

The answer is yes to all Linda’s questions except for the one about why these travel stamps aren’t common knowledge. My answer to that one is “I don’t know” — but if this episode can help change that fact for my listeners, I’ll count it as a success.

Yes, every capitol building has a unique stamp, most with the current day’s date, that you can collect for free when you visit.

Our family had already visited several state capitols ourselves before we learned about these stamps — and we’re talking about rubber ink stamps here, not perforated paper stamps that you lick and stick – but then I saw a fellow visitor at one of the capitols take out a little passport book at the information desk and have the attendant stamp it. So I asked all sorts of the same questions this email asked.

But when I went online to track down a state capitol passport of my own, the only ones I could find either had a whole bunch of blank pages – kind of like a regular passport, where you just stamp each place you visit wherever it will fit – or they had two or three pages for each capitol with all sorts of questions to answer about what you thought of it and when you visited and your favorite parts, etc.

Those were opposite  extremes – like Mama Bear and Papa bear. But I wanted something in the middle. So I ended up making my own, which I printed off for every member of the family.

There are only 50 states, so I dedicated one page for each state with a picture of the capitol building, a couple of lines of information already provided about when the state joined the union and where the capital is located – all that fits on the top half of the page, and then the bottom half is blank, so you have plenty of room to add the appropriate ink stamp.

As I said, we printed ours at home, sewed the pages together, and bound them by hand. But I also uploaded my files to Amazon, as well as a matching passport we made for the National Parks – because, yes, all the National Parks have similar unique ink stamps you can collect, as well.  I’ll  be sure to include  links to both those passports in today’s show notes, so that if you’d like to use the same format to collect stamps that we use, you can.

Our family has really enjoyed doing this with our kids. If I ever get around to writing about it in a dedicated post, I’ll include pictures and details from some of our favorite capitols, as each one is unique and full of history, art, and sometimes surprising opportunities!

For instance – in Little Rock at the Arkansas State Capitol, they’ll let you go into their vault and hold $600K in cold, hard cash in your very own hands. Of course, you have to give it back before you leave, but you can take lots of pictures before you do. Our tour guide was so funny. He loaded me down with all those stacks of cash and then handed my husband a role of quarters, and then volunteered to snap a picture of us on our own phones.

Or at the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka, they’ll let you climb all the way to the top of the cupola and walk around outside. It took 296 steps to get there, but the views were worth it.

Interestingly, as an adult, I really don’t care for heights, and there was an extremely long expanse of stairs between the inner dome and the outer that sort of just hung in the air, exposed on both sides that took you up to the very top. It was a little scary looking, but just focused on my feet and tried to keep breathing and took one at a time, even though I really wanted to turn around at that point and go back. But I was thinking, no, I don’t want to be a wimp, and Doug is right behind me. And I don’t want to slow him down, so I kept plodding until I got all the way to the top, and then, as I squeeze through the passageway onto the landing and turned around to watch my husband come up though the same opening, I realized he wasn’t there at all. He’d taken one look at that staircase and felt the same way I felt, but didn’t bother to tell me that he was ditching the group and going back down to ground level!

At first, I was a bit upset that I’d endured all that climbing for nothing, but then, I looked around the views and felt all my kids slapping me on the back and congratulating me on making it to the top, and I was suddenly glad I didn’t know Doug had bailed, because then we both would’ve missed it. And I wouldn’t have gotten to wear one of those matching yellow T-shirts that said “296 Steps to the Stars” that Doug bought for everyone who made it to the top.

But, that’s enough about that. Let’s move on to the next question. This one is about my free printable prayer guides.

Q. How do you use your free printable prayer guides?

Nelli writes:

A: I use them as a reference, not as a rote prayer.

Okay, so the prayer sheets Nelli is referring to are some free printable guides you can download from my Loving Life at Home blog. I’ll include a link in the show notes to a page that has them all.

I started publishing these guides way back in 2013. The first one was called “Praying for Your Husband from Head to Toe.” It was very popular – I think is was shared half a million times during the months that followed my posting it.

And soon, I started getting requests for other prayer guides: Specfic prayers for sons or daughters or teens or adult children or grandchildren.

One precious young girl wrote to say that her mother had been using my prayer guide to pray for her and her siblings, and she wondered if I would publish a prayer guide they could use to pray for their parents, which of course I gladly did.

The more prayer guides I published, the more requests rolled in: So now I have prayer guides for teachers, pastors, soldiers, caregivers, unborn babies, cancer patients, brothers, sisters, singles – you name it. There’s about 50 of them in all.

Some of them are head-to-toe prayers. Some are 31-Day Prayer Challenges. Some take the form of an acrostic, where the first letter of each request spells out a word to make it easier to remember – like pastor – P-A-S-T-O-R. P is Peaceable, A=Above Reproach, S=Self-Disciplined, T=Teaching Truth, O=Obedient and R=Respected – which is essentially the qualifications of elders given in Titus 1:6-9.

In fact, all of my prayer guides are solidly based on scripture – with the Bible verses I’m referring to for each and every request clearly listed.

I love praying scripture, because and when I pray the Word of God, I feel like I’m praying with the mind of Christ and in accordance to His revealed will.

To me, the point of my prayer guides is not to give readers exact words to pray over and over and over again, but to familiarize them with specific Bible verses that speak to the needs they are lifting before the LORD, so that they can draw from that knowledge every time they pray.

That is how I use these guides myself. Yes, I occasionally read through the prayers and supporting passages, but the thought of trying to recite all fifty prayers on a daily or even weekly basis would be quite the time commitment.

Instead of doing that, what I do and what I would recommend you do is look up the scripture citations for a given prayer yourself and hide those verses in your heart so that you can draw upon them any time you pray – whether you have a free printable guide in front of you or not.

I did an entire episode on Scripture Memory Tips, which may help you with that goal. I’ll be sure to link that episode in the show notes, as well.

Q. Did you take any special supplements during post-40 pregnancies?

The next question deals with geriatric pregnancies – don’t you love that term? That’s what they call it when you carry a baby after age 35 – which is still pretty young in my book! When I think geriatric, I think Sarah or maybe Elizabeth – not mid-thirties. But they didn’t ask me, so here we are.

This 40-something mother writes:

A: I only took prenatal vitamins during any of my pregnancies.

My answer – and I’m just sharing my experience, not giving medical advice– but I did not take any progesterone during my post-40 pregnancies. However, I did take a multi-vitamin which, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, was called Super-Mom vitamins. I’ll put a link in the show notes in case you’d like to check them out for yourself.

The thing is, I was much more faithful taking those daily during my last three pregnancies (the babies I had after 40) than I ever was when I was younger. That’s mainly because my husband told me that if I were going to keep having babies in my forties, it was really important that I took a daily vitamin. So I followed his advice and did exactly that.

Interestingly, I was not nearly as fatigued during those post-40 pregnancies as I had been in my earlier ones and I never felt the least bit queasy, either. So that made me wish I’d been better about taking my pre-natal vitamins all along….

I didn’t really know anything about progesterone back then, so the fact I didn’t use it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be beneficial to you. I did have one miscarriage in my forties at about eight weeks gestation, just as you did. It would certainly be something worth discussing with your OB or midwife.

And now, onto the last letter I want to tackle today.

Q: Can you give me any tips for paring down an overflowing inbox?

This one reads:

A: I can share the things that help me stay (mostly) on top of it.

Well, if it helps, I don’t think you’re alone. I’ve read that the AVERAGE American has in excess of 1000 unopened emails sitting in his/her inbox at any given time. But I’ve known lots of people (possibly even a couple of my own children) who let email messages pile up into the 10s or even 100s of thousands. I’m always surprised that inboxes will even hold that many messages!

Yet, to be honest, I rarely achieve inbox zero. I almost always have at least 10-12 emails awaiting a response. And usually 50-60. Once my inbox starts approaching 100, I begin to get a little nervous, because I feel like something important is going to slip through the cracks.

So in the past, when readers have reached out asking for tips for staying on top of email, I’ve felt like my own never-quite-done situation with unanswered emails has disqualified me from giving advice in that department. It would be like the blind leading the blind.

But then I hear from friends and family members or online acquaintances who confide in me the fact they have 10-15-20 thousand or more unread emails currently sitting in their inbox, and I realize, maybe I could offer a few pointers that would help them dramatically reduce that number.

There are lots of approaches to handle the situation when it gets that dire. 

You could just erase everything and start fresh, maybe even with an entirely new email address (several of my daughters created a separate account for just for using when they sign up for various promotions: [email protected]. Although I’ve never done that myself, I wish I had, as I think it’s a really smart practice) or…

You could move everything to a holding folder (to make sure you don’t erase anything you might need) then start fresh, trying to stay on top of new emails as they come in, unsubscribing to the ones you no longer want, and sorting through the messages in your holding folder as time allows. Or…

You can leave everything in your inbox and sort through the backlog as quickly as possible using the following tips:

1 – SET A TIMER:

Don’t try to get through 25000 emails in a single sitting. Instead, set smaller goals, like working at it for half an hour or deleting 200 emails before taking a break…

Quit when the timer goes off and take a walk, play a game with your kids, eat a snack… your inbox will still be there tomorrow.

2 – CONSOLIDATE IMPORTANT INFO:

Keep your calendar next to you while sorting through emails, and write down any important dates, activities, reservation information, etc. as it comes up.

3 – UNSUBSCRIBE (or not, depending):

When you see emails you no longer want to receive, unsubscribe (if you formerly signed up to receive it) or mark as junk (if you didn’t) and/or create a rule (to automatically move future emails from that email address to the trash).

The reason I don’t just hit unsubscribe for all of them is that if I’m getting emails I never requested, I think it’s probably because my address is on some list that is getting sold and if I respond in any way – even just hitting unsubscribe – it will let the sender know the address is still good and it may get sold again.

4 – DELETE IN BULK:

There may be mailings that you don’t want to unsubscribe from, but you also don’t need to read over everything currently in your inbox from that organization. I feel this way about some of the news services I subscribe to. I like to peruse the headlines as they come in, but if I’ve been on vacation and haven’t checked email for a week, I don’t want to read over all 54 emails I missed.

In that case, you can use the search bar to locate all emails from a given business so you can delete them all in batches. That saves time and clears out your inbox in a hurry.

5 – FILE THE IMPORTANT STUFF:

I got a message a couple of weeks ago from a reader who asked, “How do you decide which emails to keep and which to throw away? Are there emails I should hold onto?”

I think that will vary from person to person. My husband keeps essentially zero messages – email or text – once he’s read them. I keep nearly everything except SPAM. Probably there is a happy medium somewhere in the middle, but neither of us is likely to change our habits at this point. 

Things that I would definitely recommend keeping would be information about airline/hotel reservations you’ve made (confirmation numbers, addresses, dates, cancellation policies, etc), messages about things you’ve ordered (although if you’re shopping amazon, that information will be available online, so I guess you wouldn’t have to keep that), tax receipts, upcoming event details/ tickets, and (if you are the sentimental sort, like I am) any special emails or messages you can’t bear to delete – like the lengthy updates one of my sons sends me on a monthly basis. I keep all of those.

You can just hit “archive” on any email you want to keep then pull it up on your search bar when you’re ready to access it. Or you can create a few files to sort the keepers into: TO READ, TO ANSWER, ETC. I have a much more elaborate system of files, including “recipes to try,” plus files for each of my blogs, for my co-op classes, for business expenses and receipts, etc. But that is all overkill. Archive would probably serve me just as well in about 85-90% of the cases. My next tip is to…

6 – BLOCK OFF TIME TO WORK ON IT:

Schedule a regular time when you will work on email. But keep in mind, this is not – or should not be – your highest priority. So try not to give the best hours of your day to that task. Don’t check email multiple times a day.

That’s one reason I don’t have my smart phone set up to receive email. I don’t want to know every single time an email comes in – nor do I want to type our replies using only my thumbs – that would definitely not be time efficient for me.

Unless you happen to be waiting on a specific time-sensitive message, logging in once or twice a day should be enough.

My daughter in-law sent me a wonderful article last week about the need to make new year’s resolutions that are aligned with your current life responsibilities. It was entitled “New Year’s Goal Setting for People with Actual Lives.” I’ll look up the link and include it in today’s show notes, as it’s definitely worth the read. But at one point in the article, the author was differentiating between stated and revealed priorities. He writes:

Isn’t that the truth? Let’s do what we can to prioritize things that really matter – or at least make sure no one mistakes answering emails as our top priority, okay? And in order to do that, we’ll have to…

7 – MAKE PEACE WITH THE FACT YOUR INBOX WON’T STAY EMPTY:

Try to keep it at a level manageable for you. As I said earlier, my manageable level is 10-50 messages. The thing to remember is, it doesn’t have to be perfect.

Inbox zero is a little like laundry-basket zero. Even if you manage to get there, it won’t ever last for long.

So instead of making that the goal, just schedule routine times that you’ll attend to the piles so that you don’t end up drowning in dirty clothes — or in unanswered emails. 😊