"Old-Fashioned" Courtship?

I'm in the mood to write about courtship again, which means I'm likely to be long-winded.

Here's a pro-courtship article that's a pretty good summary of the major points and arguments marshaled in its favor. One of those is that courtship is just a return to the good old-fashioned methods followed before the advent of dating, without going all the way back to arranged marriages which are assumed to be the default.

Now, the entire history of the world is a pretty broad swath to be dealing with, and I'll not attempt to argue it one way or the other whether most marriages have been arranged over time. I'm not a sociologist.

Instead, I'll just narrow it down to something more familiar, and most likely to be used as a comparison: the customs of Anglo-American society in the 19th century. To be familiar with those, one does not need to scour dusty records, one just needs to be an avid reader of 19th century novels. After all, no one has a stronger interest in portraying the mores and customs of their time accurately than a writer telling a realistic story for the entertainment of their contemporaries. (Though the success of modern moviemakers in grasping the finer details is a more doubtful.)

So, according to the article, courtship involves a young man approaching a girl's father to begin the process, an express purpose of considering one another as spouses, protection of the girl from getting emotionally involved with a young man not serious about marriage, and counsel and guidance from the parents, especially the girl's father, who is the final authority.

Does Mr. Darcy need guidance from Mr. Bennett?
For that matter, does Elizabeth?

But this bears very little resemblance to how relationships unfold in the stories that have actually come down to us. There is not the slightest indication of a young man approaching a father before pursuing a relationship with a girl. Rather, there were many social and community events at which young people were expected to mingle, dance, chat, and, well, flirt. It was not unheard of for couples to go off and spend some time by themselves, say, riding in a carriage, or to pair off and wander into the shrubbery. A young man might visit at a girl's house, but it might be unclear whether he was calling on the girl or just hanging about . There was a sort of filtering process that occurred here, in that persons considered utterly improper were socially ostracized (not that this prevented unsuitable matches entirely), but no requirement of formal consent before developing a relationship.

Flirtations that did not lead to marriage happened frequently, though there was a complex code about how far one might decently go without serious intentions, and much room for misunderstanding. There was an expectation that a serious relationship would lead to marriage pretty directly, though, so we do not usually have long years as a couple before deciding to marry--things went on or were over, unless the couple was too young or too poor to marry. After the match was settled between the young people, a decent fellow would get consent from the girl's father--though in most cases this seems to have been a formality. Parents and other relatives might work to promote matches they thought advantageous (almost always having to do with either money or social rank) but were not overtly involved. Engagements were taken very seriously, and breaking one was both difficult and disgraceful.

There's also the factor that these are the practices of people of some means. What glimpses we see of the lower classes suggests that they were even less formal. A girl who "went out to service" (most lower-class girls) had no one but herself to look after her honor, let alone her heart.

Anyway, while this had advantages and disadvantages and is obviously different from modern dating, it is also quite different from modern courtship. Above all, it carries not a whiff of "emotional purity," and while the father has a role, it is mostly as a figurehead, unless he wants to be thoroughly skewered as a domestic tyrant. All the best heroines have their own hearts and heads well in hand and can (and indeed must) learn to tell a rake from an honorable fellow, at least before things get too carried away.

Dear Grandchildren,

I'm not saving stuff for you.

Maybe by the time you come along we will have progressed to the point where all toys are holographic projections and cleanup consists of hitting the off switch. (Wow. THAT is a fantasy.)

Or maybe we will have regressed to the point where all you have to play with is sticks and dirt. (Oh, wait, that's what your parents are playing with.)

Or maybe things will be pretty much the same, in which case, there will be yard sales.

Or maybe your parents will stay true to their preadolescent forswearing of reproduction. In which case, they won't be your parents.

Whatever it is, we can get along without me saving things.

I didn't actually get rid of the blocks yet. Those inch cubes are pretty handy for teaching volume, so I can justify them through at least third grade.

By the time you come along, the colors that looks so cute now will be ghastly. The toys that are educational will be passe. The river will move on.

I may as well let it sweep some of this stuff away with it. Let somebody else enjoy it before it expires completely.

Of course, nobody will let me get rid of the Duplos yet, even though they have long since officially graduated to Legos. 

Or just let it go to the landfill. My time is not worth sorting out the cards from dollar store games of Old Maid, from cardboard puzzles that are warped and missing half their pieces. Some things even the poor don't want. And I need the space.

You want your grandmother to reach her old age with her sanity intact, don't you?

So . . . don't complain. When you come along, maybe we'll go to the park. Or the library, where they have librarians to make sure the pieces go back with the right puzzles. Or switch on the toybox holograph.

I may have to hang on to the elf hat. Your daddy was just too stinkin' cute in it. And it doesn't take up space. Much.

It's That Time

It is August. Children eat popsicles and contemplate the start of school. Geese contemplate the trip south. Leaves contemplate turning yellow. I contemplate cleaning up this horrible mess before I go completely insane and take it all outside and light a match to it.

Which would be bad, because there's a burn ban on.

Back in the olden days, I think I would have been a tolerably good housekeeper. I like menial labor--it gives the mind lots of time to work while keeping the hands busy. Scrubbing, sweeping, dusting--all nice, soothing activities.

However, modern surfaces need little cleaning and modern cleaning supplies take little effort. The test of a good housekeeper nowadays is not her willingness to put in a little elbow grease, but her ability to remain calm and organized and decisive in the face of the unrelenting onslaught of STUFF.

At that, I am a miserable failure. I am not calm in the face of STUFF. STUFF terrifies me. STUFF steps on my toes and shoves me into the wall and tweaks my ear and makes me cry. I hate STUFF.

And I can't organize. Not anything I have to touch. I can organize ideas beautifully. Can take a directory of ten thousand random documents and turn them into coherent narrative for trial. Can take an incoherent jumble of thoughts and turn them into a clear and eloquent pleading. But as soon as my hands get called on to do anything but type, it's hopeless. I'm at a preschool level. I can't even sort laundry and match socks without getting hopelessly muddled. (Sadly, this is not an exaggeration for the sake of the blog--it's the unvarnished truth.)

If it were just me, I could keep up, most of the time, because I also avoid acquiring stuff. But I have children, and children are to STUFF as socks are to burrs in an August meadow. It follows them home. It coalesces around them. Nice, organized valuable belongings melt into STUFF just from their presence. I was, of course, supposed to teach them "A Place for Everything And Everything In Its Place" back when they were two, but I was kind of busy trying to keep them alive back then, plus I couldn't remember the Places, plus the Everything kept changing.

So here we are, and once again, the STUFF has taken over their room and spilled over into the living room. We spent all morning at it and they, with a promise of extra computer time, worked as well as could be expected, and we took out bag after bag of garbage and basket after basket of toys to go in the basement to be sorted later. Blood, sweat and tears all put in an appearance. We did all this a couple of months ago and it's worse than ever. It just  . . . grows.

It is a problem that they have no space for their own things, except piled on top of their beds (which makes for uncomfortable sleeping and absolutely miserable emergency sheet changes). So in addition to the load to Goodwill and the library, we stopped and bought four identical underbed containers and labeled them. It might help for a little bit.

But I know the STUFF will be back.

7 Quick Takes (Maybe)

1. The local neurologist is stumped as to what's wrong with DOB. We have successfully eliminated everything he's ever heard of. So next stop is the university clinic. Fortunately he got an appointment in just a few weeks. A long appointment, presumably with lots of tests. But we're hoping it won't ever involve a hospital stay with lengthy observation, because as tenth anniversary trips go, a hospital stay with 24-hour video surveillance would pretty much be the worst possible option.

He is allowed to drive when he feels safe doing so. He interprets that like an attorney obsessed with liability. So maybe twice a week. On the plus side, I can even *park* the truck now. I feel very accomplished.

2. Last weekend our church had VBS. This week was Their Majesties' VBS. So that's eight straight days of VBS. Today I have finally gotten caught up enough on errand running that I am just sitting at home with my feet up. The kids are well stocked with craft projects.

3. The other day I made pasta salad. (Actually it was the night after the neurologist said it wasn't the potassium issue, so carbs were irrelevant.) Dash sat there eating it with his eyes closed, putting each bite into his mouth and then identifying what was in it. This morning he was trying to walk with his arms and his legs both crossed. He's a walking experiment. Or not walking, as the case may be.

4. One of the things I did this week was file papers. I found papers from last March. I think maybe I should do filing more often. Thanks to repeated efforts by Wondergirl, I have a very simple filing system that only requires me to figure out what month the paper dates from. Even this is difficult for me. With a typical bill, there's a start date and an end date and a due date, and I can't for the life of me figure out which month it belongs in. I know I should just pick something and stick with it, but I can't remember what I picked. So I just hope for the best and figure if I have things sorted to the point where I only have to look in three or four folders, I'm doing pretty well.

5. We watched Inception last week. (Why yes, we watch everything several years late when it is available at the public library on DVD.) It was awesome and engrossing and fascinating. I didn't complain about implausibility like I usually do in action movies because it's all a dream. (DOB suggests I should apply this principle to all action movies and then maybe I could watch them.) And Leonardo DiCaprio is pretty good to watch, now that he looks like a grownup.

Then afterward I thought of  a way he could have prevented his wife's death and avoided the problem that set up the whole movie. It sort of ruined it retroactively for me. I hate it when I do that.

6. See? Coming up with seven is just too hard.

Dog Days

For some time, the house next door has been sitting vacant, undergoing various repairs in preparation for a new set of tenants. The ducklings have been hoping for someone with children of a playable age.

This past Friday, new people started moving in. The older members of the family were busy playing our newest role-playing adventure, so it fell to the twins to sit on the hillside and make their acquaintance and bring us regular reports on the exciting events.

Unfortunately, the people next door do not have medium-sized children. (The youngest is 15.) Fortunately, they have the next best thing: three medium-sized and friendly dogs. The ducklings are enthralled. They sit for hours on the hillside and watch them. They pet them at every opportunity. Duchess painted a very fair likeness of her favorite and took it over to them.

DOB and I are pretty thrilled, too. We do not do pets. As DOB puts it, you care for a dog like a child, you feed it and clean up its messes, but it never talks to you, and just at the time when children head off to their own adventures, the dog dies.

On the other hand, we recognize the virtues of children enjoying animals and occasionally one of them has expressed the wish that we might acquire one. Now we have the best of all possible worlds--the children get to play with dogs, and we don't have to feed them. (The dogs, that is. The children keep asking for food, alas.)

The dogs seem to have taken a liking to the children, too. When B5 dropped by and played with the ducklings the other night, the dogs began barking fiercely at him, the only barking we've heard out of them.

Plot Twists

Things have been rather quiet on the blog lately, because just at the juncture of everything else quieting down, something we had been hoping was not a big deal jumped out of the bushes and sat on our chests.

Since May, DOB has been having occasional but noticeable episodes of . . . something. Sometimes he won't be able to move or talk. Sometimes he will be jerking uncontrollably. Sometimes he can talk, but with slurred or stuttering speech. Sometimes only a single area is affected, sometimes the whole body. They began rarely and under significant stress, but have increased in frequency and duration. Now that they have become noticeable, we recognize that he has had them before--but on the order of once a year or so, and usually while sick or otherwise under circumstances easy to dismiss.

What the doctors have figured out so far is what they're not: they're not strokes, or heart attacks, or seizures (turns out if you are having a *real* seizure, and you go jerky on both sides, you pass out). They're not, apparently, life threatening, as long as he doesn't have one while he is driving. (ER Doctor: "You do *not* drive yourself to the hospital to be evaluated for paralysis!") So now I am driving the truck, a terrifying change for both of us, although the ducklings have managed to remain calm.

The current odds-on favorite is a rare genetic disorder connected to the body's handling of potassium--the symptoms match pretty well, but so far the blood tests have not confirmed it. However, the hospital managed to botch the critical tube of blood, plus sometimes it doesn't show up in the numbers. So it hasn't been ruled out yet either. Coping with just one rare crippling genetic disorder is for underachievers, apparently. (He's been diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth, a condition affecting the nerves in the extremities, since infancy, for those not up on our medical files. Progression of that has put him in a wheelchair or braces since last winter.)

If that is it, it operates a lot like migraines with various triggers precipitating the attacks. (And various medications keeping them more manageable but not curing it.) We are wondering if he can use this to his advantage at work: if stress is a trigger, is it a "reasonable accommodation" under the ADA to insist he win every hearing? In the meantime, the court reporters will just have to put up with a lot of stuttering and spoonerisms.

Anyway, whatever it is, the consensus is that it's very strange. (ER Doctor: "I will never see another patient with symptoms like this.") If this were a House episode, we could be reasonably assured that it would be figured out in the next forty-five minutes, after two wrong diagnoses, one of which would be nearly fatal. But life seldom follows such neat plot arcs.

In the meantime, I really need to learn to keep reading material in my purse. Dante omitted the level of hell where persons afflicted with impatience are kept in hospital rooms with only a four-month-old copy of a Seattle art scene magazine for company.

Blog Readership

 . . . is down by one today. But since it's my grandma, it is a big one.

Grandma makes me regret ever saying, or thinking, that it is an insignificant epitaph to be a faultless housekeeper. Because she was, and it was significant. Her house was always a place of refuge and serenity and beauty. And dinner rolls mostly made of air, and quilts that were a family history in stitches, and delicious but strange tuna salad. She loved watching baseball and partisan politics.

The thing I think I learned the most from her, though, was a deep respect for the personhood of little children. She loved children, but she was not the type to pounce or coo or demand kisses. She insisted firmly that no child ever be forced to give hugs or kisses (she never lacked for volunteers). She listened to them seriously and talked sympathetically. She always kept the chest of toys and the stack of books ready. And when her eyesight grew too poor to read the books to the ducklings, she would listen while they read them to her.

Twin Time

It is the time of drama camp. (So any well-earned rest after the end of school must wait a bit.) This year Duchess and Deux are both performing in Beauty and the Beast. Deux is very excited to be playing the role of Chip, the teacup, and Duchess is the baker's daughter and a pepper shaker.

But beyond our one chance of the year to experience the joys of wearing shoes before nine in the morning, it is also my first chance in a very long time to have extended periods of times alone with the twins and get some answer to the question of what is going on in their heads.

The answer is, "A lot."

They have opinions on everything. And questions on everything. They talk about them all the time. And when the big kids are not there as a buffer, they talk to me. They talk about why cars need gas and whether zombies could have their brains and eat them, too, and whether anyone would donate cake to Goodwill, and whether the existence of the wind, with unseen causes, proves the reality of magic.

Dot asked me one day, "What is inside of bones?"

"Well," I said, racking my brains, "It's kind of like a sponge, with holes, only hard, and in the center there's a squishy part that makes your blood."

"Ah," she said.

Moved by her interest, I overstepped myself. "And birds have hollow bones, so they can be light and fly."

"So birds don't have blood?" she asked.

It took me a moment to see the connection. Then I was flummoxed. All these years I have known these two facts but never put them together. (Fortunately there is the internet and so I later discovered that yes, birds have bone marrow, as the hollow spots do not take up the entire bone.) We also checked out a cross-section of a bone at the grocery store.

I may need to start them on school to slow them down to where I can keep up.

Wind-up

I got to attend three days out of a six-day trial: pretrial motions and jury selection on the first day, opening arguments and the first witness on the second day, then missed the bulk of the testimony and showed up for end of trial motions, jury instructions, and closing arguments. The case involved a property that had once been used for dry cleaning--the family owning it has been cleaning up dry cleaning solvents out of the soil for several years since discovery, but the developer-neighbor who had his sights on the whole block wanted more, sooner, different.

The jury came back for the defendant (that's us). There's a piece left that the judge still has to decide--I haven't heard what yet, but she seemed fairly favorable to our case thus far. I got to make my first argument in court. Since it was on a question where we just wanted the judge to stick with her previous ruling, it wasn't too hard to make: "Yes, your honor, you're absolutely right." Still, I flatter myself that I avoided saying anything stupid, which is a good start.

My new dresses looked good, I thought, though no one was around who would tell me so. (I was staying with Bookworm, who does not offer opinions on dresses.) Opposing counsel, in recess discussions about technology, did make a reference that I would of course be too young to remember overhead projectors in grade school, so apparently I have not yet evaded the curse of never looking like a grownup. (I didn't tell him that I had, in fact, *taught* school using an overhead projector.) I undoubtedly should get pictures of the dresses, but I can only find the cord for the camera that doesn't work.

Meanwhile His Majesty stayed with the ducklings, and they had such a marvelous time visiting the parks and the library that they are most disappointed that the trial is over. To my great pleasure, they actually managed to complete a decent component of school work under their own steam while I was gone. This was done mostly with the motivation of getting their daily computer time despite my absence, but it will do for a start on personal responsibility.

And with that, and some more work since, we have at last come to the end of school, on time, and, in fact, a day ahead. (Once they realized how close we were, they plowed through what was left today.) And I believe all the research I had to do on that case--which has dominated my life since the end of March--is over. I feel rather as if we have come through fire and water to get here, but here we are. My feet are up. They need it.

Another Snarky Thing I'm Not Saying on Homeschool Forums

There's a news article making the rounds which says something like this: Homeschooling is growing at 7 times the rate of public school enrollment.

To which I can only say: Duh.

Most kids are already enrolled in public school. The only way public school is going to grow significantly in enrollment is if there are suddenly, say, twice as many kindergarteners as there were graduates. Which doesn't happen very often.

The vast majority of kids aren't already homeschooling. Therefore, it takes a very small number of kids switching to homeschooling to make a significant rate of growth.

If that doesn't make sense like that, try imagining a town with 100 kids in it. Ninety of them are in public school, eight in private school, and two homeschool. This year there are two extra kindergarteners, and one of them goes to public school while one gets homeschooled. Voila! Homeschooling is increasing at the rate of 150% (3 instead of 2), while public school is increasing at the paltry rate of just over 1% (91 instead of 90). So homeschooling is increasing at 150 times the rate of public schooling!

This is not exactly worthy of a headline.

(This turns up in other areas, too. Just keep in mind when someone talks about X belief system/activity/product being the "fastest-growing" in its field, it usually means it was really, really small to begin with.)

The Visitation

DOB's parents have been out for a two-week visit, during which we did lots of fun things like listen to the house be quiet because the children had all gone out to the trailer to see them. We did not go on a last-minute weekend trip to the coast, although we did all the packing and unpacking for it. We did go see Narnia in the woods and it stopped raining just long enough for the show, but the battle was very realistically muddy.

The case I have been working on for the last several months is supposed to go to trial this month (whenever a courtroom opens up), and I'm supposed to get to go along and help with voir dire. This, in turn, proves to be a good excuse for getting some very nice clothes and shopping at an actual department store. DOB was kind enough to do it with me, which was good, because if there's one thing I can't do by myself, it's spending money. Also, he has good taste. I went with dresses, which both looked better and didn't require me to hem. I am too tall for petite and too short for regular, so unless I want to wear four-inch heels (which is never, ever going to happen), I would have to hem all pants. Or just wear them to rags at the heel, which is what I do with jeans.

Also, with extra babysitters on hand and willing to stay very late, we went out for a late night Magic tournament at the local game shop. I astonished myself by coming in third. Bibliohippo came in fifth, and DOB seventh, so we were all prime numbers and pleased with ourselves.

School has been a little less than inspiring, what with all the other fun things going on, but I am determined to get finished before summer drama camp, so we slog on. I am hoping to enliven things a little this week by making comic books about Columbus. Also, it looks like we are going to start probability in math. And perhaps--just perhaps--it will really stop raining.

The Highest Calling

It's Memorial Day, but I never got around to finishing writing the things I wanted to write about Mother's Day. If I were a cool blogger I would have announced a series and published them on a schedule and invited other people to weigh in, but I am not a cool blogger.

One of those floating phrases that tends to draw fire when it passes is that motherhood is "the highest calling of a Christian woman" or something like that. And then comes the shots--What about those who can't have children? What about those whose children have (it happens) grown up? Why isn't fatherhood so important?

Those are all good questions, but they don't get down to the heart of the matter, which the "highest calling" people have expressed so poorly as to obscure it entirely. The highest calling of anyone, of everyone, is to love God and love people. Mostly to love God BY loving people.

So if you have small children depending on you, then yes, your highest calling is to love and care for them (ahead of others simply because of their dependence). But even if you don't, or never will, somewhere, somehow in your life there are people to show God's love.

Motherhood may be challenging, but caring for the sick and dying is just as challenging, and devoid of cute photo-ops. In many ways it is more profoundly human and divine than raising children. Even animals care for their young, but only humans honor the past.

But whether it's caretaking or missions or generous donations or just working a job that other people need and being nice to the janitor, all of us have the same calling and the same opportunity and the same commandment: Love one another.

The Grammar Commando Takes the Stage

When I was a kid, all the cool homeschooled kids did the spelling bee. Some of them even went national. I never did this, despite a significant natural aptitude for spelling. (This is completely a gender-linked trait in my family. None of the male members of the family can spell at all, while all the women are pretty good at it. However, the guys can fix washing machines, and on the whole, my life would probably be better if I could drop the spelling of "pusillanimous," a word I have never used except right now, and replace it with information on how to operate a socket wrench.) When we played Huggermugger, a word game with a heavy spelling component, my siblings would refuse to tell me the word I had to spell correctly: they would just read the definition and then I had to guess what the word was *and* spell it correctly. I thought this unfair, as it was the only game I could win. But I still got it right every time, so I didn't protest too much.

This week, DOB found me the chance to take spelling onto a slightly wider stage, as the local adult literacy group has a spelling bee as an annual fundraiser and his Rotary club was sponsoring a team. It was only a very slightly wider stage, and there were eleven three-person teams on it, on a very hot May night in a community college theater built in the good old Washington tradition of "Air conditioning? Who needs air conditioning?" The ice ran out before the eighth round.

Many of the other teams had themes and costumes and banners and special cheers, like the "Beeutifuls" the "Trio in Bee Sharp," the "Bee Gees" (complete with disco ball) and the "Spellz Angelz." Our team had the uninspiring name of "The Bee-Wheres." However, good spelling and good costuming were apparently not correlated, as in the final round it came down to us and another Rotary club with the slogan "We Bee Ducks" and fuzzy yellow headbands. (I don't get it either. But, they could really spell. In fact, their main speller kept correcting the pronouncer.)

My great triumph of the evening was "parricidal," a word passed on by two previous teams, including the ominous Ducks, because nobody had asked to have it defined. Once I knew it was "pertaining to the killing of a close relative" the spelling was obvious, but everyone else had been thinking of parasites. However, I went down in flames on "ciguatera," a tropical disease caused by fish poison. (The words to hope for at the end are the really long ones with lots of Latin roots. Get an obscure short word from India or Brazil and you're sunk.)

So, we came in second, but it was still a lot of fun, and it even counted as a date night although we spent the whole evening at opposite ends of a crowded room, most of the time unable even to exchange significant glances because the Trio in Bee Sharp and Spellz Angelz were in the front two rows.

And while I'm feeling inspired, let me point out a spelling error that I've been seeing a lot of online lately.

This is satire:

This is a satyr:



See? Not the same thing. Also, it took me awhile to find an image of a satyr suitable for this blog. Those dudes have a reputation to maintain, and they work hard to maintain it. 

DOB was gratified not to be called up as an alternate on the team--his spelling is solid for ordinary purposes but not at the competitive level--but he is volunteering for team theme design next year. His thought is to call them the "Spell Casters" and have everyone dressed as wizards, including one dressed as Gandalf who, whenever another team tries to use their one free pass on a word, stands up and shouts, "You . . . shall . . . not . . . pass!"

Stress and Motherhood

A survey is showing that three kids is the most stressful number to have, and after that it's easier. Since that is what my mother always told me, I will not complain to much about the lack of meaningful statistics given. She had cause to notice, having spread seven children out over nearly two decades. (I was the magic stress-reducing fourth child, too, so that may be significant.) I also noticed my stress level go down significantly when we went from three to four children, probably because I spent the whole time in between in labor.

This has not been enough to entice me to further exploits--not that an extra child would be so hard, it's the acquisition process I no longer have the stomach for (quite literally). Also, it was enough of a challenge finding a vehicle that would fit four kids and a wheelchair. Upgrading is not really an option.

But, I definitely believe I am less stressed than mothers with three, or two, or maybe even one child. There are so many things that just don't matter once you realize you don't have time or energy for them any more. I saw one mother write about how she found it so freeing to be reassured that "As long as your children are fed, clean, clothed, and loved, you are doing a good job." And I thought: clean? clothed? Why? Fed, yes. You can't get away without feeding them, although here economies of scale come in. Clean and clothed are definitely optional.

Or again, a lovely mother of one little girl posted on Facebook about the challenges of getting stains out of socks. And I thought: stains? socks? What are those?

Also, once you have four you have hit critical mass for playmates--chances are anybody can find somebody to play with at any given time. 

There are stressful things, like looking at the grocery cart and bill and imagining what they will look like with four teenagers. I try not to think about that. It's too noisy around here to think, anyway. I'm getting very good about not thinking about things. Which is, I suspect, the key to a low-stress life. 

Rethinking Mother's Day

I am painfully conscious of the awkwardness of me writing this post, but, alas, that will not stop me.

It's about Mother's Day.

I have seen churches where it is a kind of competition, with the mothers standing up and prizes handed out to those with the most or the oldest or the youngest. This, understandably, has been criticized as cruel to the bereaved or barren.

Our current church, trying to be more mindful of the variety of human experience, recognizes *all* the women at once. I understand the sentiment, but I don't really see the point. Why call it Mother's Day, then? It's like having all citizens be recognized on Veteran's Day.

But I think both approaches misunderstand the holiday. (For one thing, why is this part of church? Isn't church supposed to be about, well, God? But that's another post.)

No, we're even missing the point of having Mother's Day. Did you know the woman who brought Mother's Day about as a recognized holiday, Anna Jarvis, did not have children? Mother's Day was never about claiming honor as a mother. It was about giving honor to our mothers.

Back in the day, as my grandmother taught me, everybody got a corsage on Mother's Day. Red if your mother was alive. White if she was dead--because loss is also universal. It wasn't about a status some people had achieved and other people hadn't. It was about being grateful for the tremendous gift of existence.

Not everyone gets to be a mother, but everyone had a mother. Someone's body nourished yours before you even knew you existed. Someone risked her life to give you yours, and will always bear the marks of it. Someone (maybe someone else) put food in your mouth when you still didn't know what your hands were, taught you to use food and the toilet. Maybe they did it badly, even cruelly, yet still they gave you the moon and the stars and that is something to be thankful for.

Perhaps if our focus on Mother's Day was outward, on gratitude and not status, we could better share it without slighting anyone.

Bad Parenting Confession

At Easter, the ducklings got bags of candy from the church Easter egg hunt. In a fit of hurried Easter cleaning, I tucked them out of the way up high in their closet, intending to get back to them later. We do not take a Wonka Sr. approach to candy, but we do try to dole it out very slowly and, in the past, under supervision.

Then I sort of forgot about the candy, or at least it sifted down to the very large receptacle in my brain labeled, "Things I Really Ought To Do Something About One of These Days." Until one day I was tidying up their room (let's not go into THAT parenting question) and came across a sizable stash of candy wrappers. Evidently they had not forgotten about them. So then I thought perhaps I really should address it except I wasn't quite sure how. They hadn't eaten all the candy, so evidently they were not consuming it recklessly, I hadn't expressly forbidden the candy, and mostly I just really didn't want to be bothered with it.

I continued taking the blind-eye approach until I saw the boys dashing past me outside with something in their mouths. This raised two red flags in my mind--one being that actively hiding something from parents is a different category from not bothering to mention it, the second being that just possibly they were eating something dangerous from outside (though on reflection, the latter was very unlikely). So I made them tell me what they were eating and assured them that it was fine--eating a piece or two of candy once a day was not going to hurt them, just not to bother me about it.

No such luck. Immediately, and ever since, I have been barraged with questions. Can you get the bags down? My bag is out and everyone else still has some! How many can we eat? Can we eat this kind?

I kind of wish I had just let them keep hiding it.

It's time for a post

Because if I don't post, then all the posts I thought-about-but-didn't-make pile up deeper, and get muddled together, like the papers on my desk, and the bookcase, and the other bookcase, and the pictures of epic battles of merfolk get muddled up with the natural gas statement and the traffic ticket (ouch) and a rough draft of a map for the next role-playing adventure.

And then I never get around to recording the way the oven thermometer that exploded and destroyed the roast chicken, or how much I love spring coming because the ducklings play outside after supper--even in the rain--instead of jumping on the couches, or my mixed feelings about having work or not having work, or my brilliant insights on an issue I have since forgotten (that one must have sifted off onto the floor and gotten thrown away).

So now I have posted and we can think of it as a clear slate and the next time something drifts through my brain I can actually post about it instead of about not posting.

Now if I could just do the same for my desk.

Teaching to the Test

The Duchess turned 8 before this school year began, which means she has met the minimum school age in our state and must complete a standardized test every year. This isn't shown to anybody so it always has seemed a rather pointless requirement, but it is the law and if it makes them feel better, it is no great burden to us. Especially not now that (as I discovered) you can just get them done online. As far as Duchess was concerned, it was a freebie 3 hours of computer time she didn't have to earn. So what if it was all bland multiple choice questions?

When I was a kid, this was our big social event of the year, as we went down to our church's Christian school and did them in the nursery. We didn't usually actually do them with the class--that would have taken too long and we were always impatient--but we could go out at recess and play with the other kids. Also we got cooler snacks than usual. It was still very low-key--in fact, we often graded the results ourselves, or I graded them for the younger kids once I was done with mine. One year Rocketboy tested with the first and second grade class (I'm not sure why, he shouldn't have needed to take them yet--maybe just to keep him out of the way?) and brought home the chicken pox. That was most unfair to the rest of us, who being considerably older suffered far worse than he did.

I have mixed feelings about standardized tests. On the one hand, they pretty handily demonstrate all that is most wrong about systematized, impersonal, factory-model education. And building curriculum on the basis of scoring well on these tests is about the best guarantee of creating a curriculum that would bore anyone to tears.

On the other hand, they just don't seem that hard to me. Mind-blowingly dull, yes. But not hard. If you can read and think clearly, it's not that difficult to score well. And you don't have to be teaching to the test to teach reading and thinking.

Still, this was my first encounter as the teacher and I was a wee bit nervous. Especially about math. And grammar. I don't hold to the standard methods or sequence for teaching those subjects. Duchess has never done a page out of a math or grammar workbook. She reads a lot, she writes (or copies) a lot, we do lots of mental math and real-life problems and math games, but I have never shown her how to do multi-digit math problems on paper, or taught her the rules for comma usage, and I knew the test would be full of that sort of thing. Not that it mattered. But still. I figured we had reading comprehension and vocabulary and spelling covered, but everything else was up in the air. Mostly I didn't want to shake her confidence that she was good at math and that it was fun, and standardized tests are designed to have problems that are too difficult. Or there might have been a little bit of fear that I was teaching it all wrong. Maybe.

She did get a little concerned when she saw multiple-digit multiplication and other things she had never encountered before, but I told her to just think it through as best she could and give it her best guess. And she did. And it worked--in fact, she was off the chart in math concepts and way up in computation, despite never having done long division in her life. Grammar was the lowest, but even so she did fine, on the rather simple principle of "what looks right."

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming of making up word searches, designing historic paper dolls, and jumping off the bed.

Teachable Moments

For the last few game nights with the kids, we've been playing a role playing game I developed--basically a very streamlined version of GURPS set in the Olympics. They are all loving it, and the twins have finally overcome their fear of combat and were enthusiastically taking actions to take down a hungry cougar. Dot (a lizard) decided to jump on his tail to distract him, while Dash (a child) started digging frantically (he has been very fond of his shovel) and found several pails of water (why not? it was a beach and we are always losing pails there), which he then used to hit the cougar on the nose. This involves a lot of rolling and counting up dice, and taking away hit points when they are injured, and adding them on when they find healing herbs, so besides being a lesson in natural history and divergent thinking, it's a great math activity.

The next day, Dash was sitting more-or-less quietly while I read out loud to the older kids, until I noticed what he had drawing. On both sides of two sheets of paper, he had drawn recognizable scenes of his four favorite Magic: The Gathering characters and was conducting duels between them.

We may have the world's geekiest preschool curriculum.

Easter Monday

I kind of hoped that this would be the year I increased my blog postings up to those of the olden days, but clearly March was not the month for that to happen. I worked about as much in March as I have been doing in four months. Then there was school to be done. And Easter coming. And horrible colds.

So today we are taking a nice, slow, easy Easter Monday. Yesterday we had sundry family members over, lots of food, and a sunny seventy degrees. That last one is unheard of for a March Easter here. The ducklings insisted on getting out the wading pool and their small cousin joined in until they were turning blue.

Preparing for having everyone over meant catching up on all the housework that had been sliding for the past month. We got it done, thanks to Chore Wars. We are trying to make this a long-term chore system, turning in the XP or gold pennies for game time on the computer or with me. (I point out that therefore I should get to turn in MY XP for time by myself.) Duchess and Deux especially accomplished great things with the extra inspiration.

Two-thirds of the Duchy was involved in singing in church on Sunday. Well, Dot actually spent the time hitching her stockings up, and Dash suddenly discovered he was weak in the ankles and couldn't stand at all, but that is the expected function of four year olds in the children's choir. Duchess did a fine job with her solo, and so did DOB with his. I wrote the lyrics for DOB, and Deux did word searches under the counter at the back of the church. So everyone had a good time.

Miscellaneous

The environmental attorney I work for has had a case that he thought was headed for settlement suddenly turn out to be headed for trial instead, which has meant I have suddenly had almost more work than I can squeeze in sorting documents. This is, on the one hand, not the most scintillating of tasks, but on the other, one that it is easy to keep at for hours on end even when I'm seeing cross-eyed (unlike research and writing which require a certain degree of mental clarity) and I am attorney enough to know the joy of billable hours.

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Between work and school, then, I have been happy to let the cleaning part of life slide, until DOB started having dust reactions. He thinks it's more because of moving offices last week, but I'm thinking that not vacuuming in a month is not very helpful, so I have been getting reacquainted with the vacuum cleaner this weekend.

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I came across this link that reminded me of another not-actually-in-the-Bible statement I should dispute: "God will never give you more than you can handle." Actually what the Bible says is, "God will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you can resist." We are promised grace for temptation. We are not promised that we will never be taken beyond our physical, emotional, financial, or spiritual breaking points. I've been there and I know it's not true.

But not only is it false, I wonder if the very presence of the idea doesn't make us cold to each other. It's a pat, comfortable thing to say, "Well, you know God won't give you more than you can bear." Or, in other words, "Depart in peace: be ye warmed and filled." If God's not going to give those folks more than they can handle, then the rest of us don't really need to get involved, do we? But sooner or later most of us are going to come across more than we can handle; that's why we are commanded to bear each other's burdens.

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Late Friday evening I went to call the kids in for bed and discovered that Dot had outclimbed her range in the fir tree. Deux was up with her, being stuck above her in the tree. They did fine for a while pretending they were Tigger and Roo, but eventually Deux figured out  a way around and Dot began to panic. I climbed up to retrieve her while DOB talked with her about the advantages she would find from being a bird, which kept her distracted until she had to face the terror of me trying to lower her. Fortunately we had a friend visiting who helped bridge the last distance to DOB and solid ground.

Before we were up the next morning, they were all climbing the tree again, though Dot was careful to only climb as high as she was sure she could get down. I am very appreciative of gutsy kids, though I did wish a bit that they could have given me a little more time to recover.

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After doing classes at the Y through the fall and winter, we have decided to call it quits for now. The kids are tired of going to classes, and I am tired of being in a loud building full of moving people for three hours every Saturday morning. DOB shall have to just do his workouts by himself. Except for all those loud, moving people. Maybe I will take the kids to the park. Or maybe I will sleep in while they climb trees.

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I have moved and brightened up my homeschooling blog, so if you want to read the details of what we do and very occasional pontification on educational subjects, that's the place to go.

Urgent Notice

We interrupt this giant pre-deposition document sorting to bring you an urgent homonym bulletin from the Grammar Commando. (Spell-check proof errors are the bane of the Internet.)

Yoke = Implement used to harness animals, like so:



Yolk = Middle part of the egg, like so:



In metaphorical use, "yoke" is the one that is used in phrases like "laying a heavy yoke" on someone. A heavy yolk would be pretty messy. If you use yolk in such a context . . . you'll have egg on your face.

I'm Not Going To Put a Clever Title on This

Because undoubtedly all clever titles on the topic of knitting have been done to death.

Despite this, and despite the fact that I am not young and hip enough to be a young, hip knitter, and not old enough to be a granny knitter, and have the hand-eye coordination of a banana slug, I have gotten into knitting. It started with wool mittens for the ducklings, in the hopes that they would keep their hands warm in the rain, which is the standard winter weather around here.The mother of our park friends showed me how.

I started in December, and for the first week I felt like I was battling a porcupine. Then the porcupine vanished and was replaced by cheerfully clicking needles churning out row after row of even stitches. It took me until the beginning of February to get mittens for all of the ducklings, but we at least had a few cold, wet days left to appreciate them. Of course, after all that work they are worth quite a bit more than their weight in gold to me, so I am as strict as the mother of the three little kittens.

Then I finished all the mittens and didn't know what to do with myself next. I'd gotten used to having something nice sliding through my fingers during the evening viewing of Monk or while playing games. Fortunately DOB decided he needed a knit hat, and he doesn't do acrylic. So we found some gray Peruvian wool and the shop lady wound it into a giant cake of yarn for me (apparently you're NOT supposed to just pull from the skein until it gets into a big snarly mess. Who knew?) I'm going to make it with dinosaur spikes.

I still haven't gotten the hang of patterns. They all seem to have this crazy idea that I am going to want to do what they say and go out and buy yarn according to their instructions and be able to read their cryptic little code. But I don't want to. So I just keep trying things until they turn out the way I want. Which is why I have started DOB's hat nine times, though I may have what I want this time. It's OK with me, as it prevents me from having to start a new project, which might involve buying yarn, which costs money.

And I am NOT raising sheep.

Random Adventures

Except for the pictures with the Duchess in them, these were taken by the Duchess. (The others were taken by our January visitor.) I only found out about the tabletop statues game when I was taking pictures off the camera.

Toy Stories

Dear Sunday School Teacher, VBS Worker, Person Behind the Counter, Random Person Who Likes Playing Santa Claus,

I appreciate that you are delighted by the presence of little children and like to make them happy. I am very grateful for your vote of confidence in my decision to spread my genes around. I understand that gifts are delightful to children and that you love to see them squeal and open them. I also realize that gifts are a safe bet and that there are many, many inexpensive options out there.

That said, I would appreciate it if you would take into consideration the effect your gifts will have once they have come over to my house (times four) and been subjected to the churning process that is family life for a couple of days. Or, if imagination fails you, consult this handy guide. Remember, kids will be happy opening anything, including toilet paper,* so you might as well pick out things that will not tempt me to hate you.

Sincerely,

The Mom.

*I am referring to small children, of course. Teens and pre-teens only want cash and food, so don't waste your time. Medium-sized children are unpredictable.

Candy *
Thank you for another opportunity to rot their teeth and wreak havoc with their immune system. And I don't even have the kids with allergies, who must hear yet again why they can't have that. When you are going to pay for dental visits and sit up all night with a cough, then you should consider offering candy to children.

Stickers ****
Not bad, really. Yes, they get stuck to everything, but then, if you have kids, you have things stuck all over your walls (and their clothes) anyway, and stickers are far from the worst. Goo Gone works wonders. They don't have sugar and can be thrown away without a qualm in a few days.

Small Plastic Toys *
Oh yay, more things to step on in the night. And lose parts. And cause the children to cry when they break and get thrown away. And they WILL break, probably in the car on the way home, causing an emotional storm that will distract the driver and cause us to wreck. Do you want that on your conscience?

Legos ****
Although they are small and plastic and painful to step on, they at least do not break on the way home, and it doesn't matter so much when the parts get lost, I already have a large bin devoted to them, and I'm already stepping on Legos  all the time, anyway, so it really doesn't matter to have a few more.

Pencils, Erasers, Etc. ***
I have mixed feelings here. On the one hand, they don't involve sugar or injured feet. There is usually a logical place to put them. On the other hand, the pencils and erasers in colorful designs that you always choose are terrible quality and will neither write nor erase, and when I want to write something they are ALL I can find. I hate that.

Notepads *****
The kids can always use more paper to draw on. They are like little machines for converting stacks of paper into messier stacks of paper. I appreciate your contribution to their obsession.

Bubbles *****
Fun, disposable, active, and the worst that can happen is something gets soaked with soapy water. I'm a fan now. I wasn't when I had children under three, because then something getting soaked with soapy water was the ONLY thing that would happen.

Balloons **
Yes, balloons are fun and filled with joy and hope. Until they burst. And then all that built up happiness reverberates into despair. Have you ever spent the evening with a toddler who has just discovered the transience of human existence? (On the other hand, bigger kids are just after the biggest explosion possible. Which makes this a particularly bad choice for a house with multiple sizes of children.)

Noisemakers
Is there a way to do a negative number of stars? Really? I think I will make a recording and blast it into your house at two in the morning. 

Jesus is Not the Answer

So how does the modern penchant for approaching everything as a puzzle to be solved affect religion? It's almost swallowed it up. That's what BIBLE stands for, right? "Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth." How to have a better life, God's way. God's answers to man's problems.The instruction manual from the Maker.

Which is pretty sad. Think of the scintillating metaphors the Bible uses for itself . . . honey, a sword, fire, bedrock, precious jewels . . . and our favorite metaphor is the most tedious and forgettable lump of words literacy has produced?

There are so many practical examples of this that I won't even bother to list any. You've seen the books, heard the sermons, read the blog posts. Full of how to improve your marriage/financial life/parenting/relationships/happiness by doing things God's way.

Yet anyone who reads the Bible with half an eye for the actual story will find out that a lot of people followed God and had pretty terrible lives; and some other people did a whole lot of awful things and still got rewarded. If you teach the Better Life Jesus long enough and hard enough, people start to notice that life doesn't really work that way and start walking away from the whole facade.

The Bible wasn't written to be a self-help manual and if (God have mercy) that's really what you want out of life, you can get a thousand other more specific self-help manuals for much less trouble. People don't need yet another self-help manual that is a couple of thousand years out of date.

This is practical atheism. The eternal, the transcendent, the permanent--that's an afterthought. What matters is living right and getting rewarded for it right here, right now. It doesn't matter how correct your doctrinal statement is if that message is the one that gets repeated and lived.

Sometimes people don't miss the whole point; sometimes it's framed in terms of man's problem being sin and God's solution being Christ--but this, well, it's still missing the point. It makes the whole thing about us and slants it as if it were all over but the shouting.

The history of the universe, the meaning of life, is not a "problem" with a "solution." It's a story--a tale of love, betrayal, exile, restoration. It's a story we get to participate in, but it is not primarily about us. It is a true story. A real one. It is not tidy or predictable. And it is not over yet.

Links and Things

I have a couple of long and boring posts kicking around in my head, but they aren't quite ready to come out yet, so I'll gather up some links and things. I don't usually do link posts, but I can't figure out what else to do with a couple of tabs that have taken up permanent residence on Firefox.

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Germ report: DOB is just about all better. The kids are mostly better. Now I am sick. And I am really tired of sickness treatments. But I'm taking oregano oil AND turmeric milk AND ginger tea this morning, because I am even more tired of being sick. We had a fun visit from a very brave friend last week, too, and even went to the zoo and coughed at the monkeys. We have continued with school by using Librivox, which is why the internet is awesome.

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Project-Based Homeschooling is doing a series on finding meaningful work as an adult and I especially liked this post on learning to use the time you have. I probably should not be reading about following your interests, though, as my main problem always seems to be having so many interests that I work myself to the point of exhaustion.

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Yesterday I was lying on the couch being sick when I heard a banging outside the house. I ignored it. Then there was more banging. I got up to investigate and saw a police officer in the front door and several law enforcement vehicles parked in the driveway across the street. I went out.

"Is Gary there?" he asked.

"I don't know a Gary," I said. (On further reflection, I realized this was obviously not true. I have a cousin named Gary. However, I haven't seen him since last Fourth of July.)

"Who is in the house?" he asked.

"Just my four kids," I said. This, also, was not true, because they had all come out to stand on the porch.

"What is the house number here?" he asked. I told him, and this one I got right.

"Where is ####?" he asked. I said I didn't know. He seemed satisfied and the other police officer who was out watching the back of the house came and they went in search of the other house number, I presume.

Later that day I went for a walk and found the house in question, so that next time I will know.

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If I were to sum up why we homeschool, this would come pretty close. I am not a doctrinaire homeschooler; if I thought my children could go to school and spend their time reading real books and talking about them, I would probably send them. But I see very little evidence that this might happen.

It hasn't all been coughing

DOB did have the time to get the truck properly adorned. Though not fully washed.

A Brief Diversion

>>>>>Regular Life Stuff<<<<<<<<
DOB apparently picked up the flu in addition to the sinus infection and now we all have it, except possibly Deux, who is keeping everyone else entertained with battles between plastic figures. DOB is doing slightly better; by "slightly" I mean "able to breathe occasionally." This means that we missed the big annual bar dinner, at which DOB was being recognized for his contributions to the local legal community by getting the Young Lawyers organization up and running again. We watched it on Youtube, but it wasn't the same. Today I am missing the newest neiphling's baby shower. In fact, it's probably best if we draw a veil over all the things we are or might soon be missing and rant about random things total strangers have said on the interwebs.
>>>>>End Regular Life Stuff<<<<<<<<<

So some well-known pastor I haven't heard of writes publicly in answer to a question from an inquirer as to why previously-married Christian singles shouldn't fornicate since they can't get married right away for financial reasons. The writer actually does a pretty decent response right up until he gets down to what he thinks is the heart of the matter: a lack of concern for God's kingdom. Because if they were really, really sold out and on fire for God's kingdom, they wouldn't have TIME to think about such things. "Why do you lie in bed with your lady friend when the King has called you?"

Apparently if we were all really doing all we could to bring the Good News to everyone, everywhere, we would not be so bored that we fall in to sin. As an example, he cites a story of a secular couple who were so obsessed with rescuing Jews from the Holocaust that they had no time for their own passion.

If that's the case, though, it ought to apply just as well to married people. Really, Mr. and Mrs. Christian, what are you doing "sleeping in" when you could be out working for The Kingdom? Or to a lot of other things we could be doing with our time that, last I checked, weren't actually wrong but are not grabbing people by the collar and telling them the gospel.

Now, he also says--and I agree with him here--that if we actually believed God's laws were given to us for our good we would be more willing to obey Him. But he's gotten it mixed up with the wretched urgency that turns the Christian life into an exhausting treadmill of multi-level marketing. It is not normal or healthy for human beings to spend their entire lives in all-consuming missions. It takes a terrible physical and emotional toll. You can do it for a while in response to a great crisis, but you're going to get burned out, and fast. And meanwhile somebody's got to be making food and money and babies or the world isn't going to keep on running anyway.

Moreover, it repeats the idea that if we were just totally committed to God, really serving him, we wouldn't be sinning. Really? Let's face it, a lot of the worst sins--pride, anger, selfishness--don't take any free time at all. You know that meme people like to repost about how God can use anybody; how Noah was a drunkard, and David was an adulterer, and Elijah was suicidal, etc.? Stop and think about how many of these heroes of the faith ran into their big problems AFTER their great spiritual achievements. Sometimes RIGHT after. We've got this crazy idea that God takes sinful people and turns them into something else, when the truth is God takes sinful people and uses them anyway.

It also maintains that the work of the kingdom is somehow radically different from ordinary life, which doesn't seem to be the message of the Bible at all. "Study to be quiet and to do your own business and work with your own hands." "What does the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" What the original questioner should be doing about the kingdom of God is learning to love God and his neighbor, and that might involve asking himself what it says about his professed love for his girlfriend that he is more worried about his financial status than about committing to her publicly.

Waiting for the Apocalypse

Around the end of last week, it became evident that the old, lingering cold that we all were fighting off over New Year's was turning, in DOB's case, into something more sinister.

We tentatively diagnosed it as a sinus infection and tried to treat it at home with tea and broth. On Sunday morning the agony was sufficient that he went to Urgent Care, where the doctor confirmed that it was a sinus infection and that it should be treated with tea and broth, as they are stockpiling antibiotics for the zombie apocalypse.

So we did more tea and more broth. DOB usually handles illness by passing out in bed for between 12 and 36 hours, depending on the severity. Although this freaked me out on our honeymoon, I have come to appreciate it. All I need to do is pour water down his throat every few hours and wait for him to reemerge, leaving me free to concentrate on other things. However, a sinus infection does not cooperate with the "lying down" part of this equation, and so he has had to deal with being sick while being up and miserable and it is taking far longer. Especially at night.

Monday night he started having an asthma attack on top of the sinusitis. (Probably triggered by me thinking that that afternoon was the perfect time to go on a quick shopping trip with Duchess, leaving him alone with the younger three kids, and then they thought they smelled something funny, which is hard to confirm when you have a sinus infection, and then I couldn't hear my cell phone because it was covered with clothes we were going to try on, so that by the time I got home they had all been sitting outside, DOB bundled up in blankets with a towel over his head, for a couple of hours.) Anyway, he couldn't breathe and his chest was tight and he couldn't move or do much beside moan, so I called the 24 hour nurse hotline. The fellow on the other side was doubtful, possibly because it was me on the phone, which meant the conversation went like this.

QOC: "Hi, my husband can't breathe and his chest is tight, but I think it's just his sinuses and his asthma, so can you please tell him he's not going to die, and if it's OK for him to use the inhaler?"
Nurse: "Hmm, that's a little concerning. Do you think he might be having a heart attack?"
QOC: "Nah, it's mostly in his head. I mean, he can't move or anything, but he gets like that when he's sick."
Nurse: "Well, let me talk to him."
DOB: "Graaahwww."
Nurse: "Well, you could go in if he seems to be doing worse. Or you could try the inhaler."
Ducklings in background: "Hey mama! Mama! Mama!"
QOC: "It's an awful lot of trouble to take him in."
Nurse: "I can tell."

So we didn't go in and he used the inhaler and came to the regretful conclusion that he was going to live, after all. And things went along and he got a cough to go with the sinuses and this afternoon he decided that he needed to call the nurse hotline again. This time he talked to the nurse himself, and this time it was a different nurse. He thought he was answering all the questions right, but perhaps he shouldn't have used terms like "zombie green" in describing bodily discharges. This nurse told him to get back into urgent care immediately, because, while it might just be the sinuses doing their thing, it might be some far more serious condition she was not at liberty to disclose.

He took himself into urgent care and they did various tests of his mental functioning and decided it was still just the sinuses doing their thing. But at least they gave him some medication that may help with sleeping, which hasn't happened in a while. They never did tell him what the serious condition they were concerned about was, but I'm thinking it was probably the zombie plague. I should possibly wear a helmet to bed, just in case.

Most Excellent Books about the Middle Ages

The Zoomlians are studying the Middle Ages, and they are posting all sorts of cool projects and fun links.

I appreciate these, because we are studying the Middle Ages, too, and I am not very good on the fun projects end of things. In fact, my idea of a good project is one the kids think of themselves and do without consulting me. And clean up afterwards. I am going to try to do the stained glass one, though. And I may point out the helms to them as it might fall into the do-it-yourself category.

What I (unsurprisingly) do better at is books. So, at Wendy's request, here are some of the books about the Middle Ages we have loved the most, or that I expect we will enjoy when we get there. Most of these selections come from Ambleside Online, which is our primary curriculum source.

The Little Duke: This is an old book, but it is definitely worth the occasionally dense language and slow start. It's based on the life of Richard I, Duke of Normandy--great grandfather to William the Conqueror and grandson to Rollo the Viking. The story of an eight year old boy navigating a confusing and dangerous world of warrior and Christian ethics, gruff allies and flattering enemies. It's got a lot of food for thought and discussion and a good bit of adventure.This is the book the ducklings scream in protest when I announce we have come to the end of the chapter.

Our Island Story: This is actually a full history of England for children, but we are reading the Medieval kings this year. I think what I love about this book is that it was actually written for the reason we want the ducklings to study history at this age: to understand more about human beings, and to think long and hard about what it means to be human, what makes a hero, a good king or a bad one, and to begin to develop nuance and recognize the complexities of human existence and choices. It's heavy on the interesting people and even the legendary stories.

Castle and Cathedral: Because, you know, it's David Macaulay and therefore awesome. Nobody is better on how things were built and why. Also, there are movie versions which are wonderful.

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood: You have to get the real one, by Howard Pyle, and it better be unabridged. (I got cheated on that once.) If you want to listen to someone who can really roll the language out and sing the drinking songs, the Blackstone Audiobooks reader is awesome. Yes, it's pure fantasy of the Middle Ages and meant to be. Sometimes the legends are the most important part of history; as Chesterton once observed, the legends were written by the hundred sane people in the village, the history was written by the one crank. If Pyle works for you, then you could go on to his other medieval books, like King Arthur and his Knights, and Otto of the Silver Hand.

The Door in the Wall: We haven't started this yet, but it's one I remember enjoying very much as a child. It's about a boy who wants to be a knight but must find another path to greatness when he loses the use of his legs.

The Sword in the Tree: I wouldn't do this as a read-aloud, but it is a well-done early chapter book of knightly adventures.

The Apple and the Arrow: A very nice story of William Tell. We actually read this a couple of years ago, when we were studying Switzerland, but it fits nicely in the Middle Ages, too, especially if you feel the whole knights-and-nobility thing has gotten overplayed.

As for the twins, mostly they just tag along. They are fond of fairy tales and picture books about King Arthur and his knights.

The Universe

We do poetry regularly for school, which consists of reading poetry. This is one of the kids' favorite things, perhaps because they are not required to do anything but listen, but they do really seem to enjoy poetry itself. This term's poet was Walter de la Mare, who wrote mystical, evocative poems on themes that mostly appeal to children. We read this one today and it seemed the perfect description of their world:

The Universe
by Walter de la Mare
 
I heard a little child beneath the stars
        Talk as he ran along
To some sweet riddle in his mind that seemed
        A-tiptoe into song.

In his dark eyes lay a wild universe,--
        Wild forests, peaks, and crests;
Angels and fairies, giants, wolves and he
        Were that world's only guests.

Elsewhere was home and mother, his warm bed:--
        Now, only God alone
Could, armed with all His power and wisdom, make
        Earths richer than his own.

O Man! -- thy dreams, thy passions, hopes, desires!--
        He in his pity keep
A homely bed where love may lull a child's
        Fond Universe asleep!

Dorothy Sayers on Why Life Is Not a Detective Story

I've just finished reading The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers, a fascinating book on how the concept of the Trinity reflects and is reflected in the creative process. It's an unusual thesis, but one she develops well. If you want to read a lengthy discussion on the whole book, go see Cindy at Ordo Amoris, who's doing a whole series, chapter-by-chapter. If you want miscellaneous rambles on the last chapter because that's what I feel like writing about, well, here you are.

In the last chapter, Sayers looks at people--not just writers or painters, but everybody--as essentially creative, as being made in the image of God the creator. Thus, we act most in accordance with our natures when we approach life creatively. The modern tendency (and it hasn't gotten better in the last 80 years), though, is to look at life primarily not through a creative lens, but through an analytic lens. Life, social structures, events, are a set of problems, for which we seek a solution. If we just find the right solution we will solve the problem and all will be well.

In short, we treat life as if it were a mathematical equation, or a mystery novel. In a mystery novel (as Sayers, who wrote some of the best of them, knows full well), the author has already carefully taken all the untidiness out. There is a definite, ascertainable answer. All the data necessary to determine the answer are present. Any question that cannot be answered is never asked in the first place. There is one, and only one, right answer; all others are wrong.

All of this is fine as light entertainment. But it is not the way the real world works. Yet it is reflected in how we approach life; if we are ill, there must be a proper medicine or dietary adjustment to solve the problem. If there is a conflict between individuals, then there must be a procedure to resolve it. If a disaster occurs, there must be a way to prevent all future similar disasters, and we must find it.

But no one has gone through the universe for us, tidying it up so we can find a definite, right answer for each and every identified "problem." And when we look at life as a series of problems, we gain only frustration as we find solutions ever elude us. Public policy and personal choices become disjointed, slapping down one patch on top of another.

It doesn't work because it's not the way we were made; we were made to approach the world as creators. The stuff of life, good, bad, and indifferent, are the paint and canvas we have to work with. In our personal lives we have not a set of problems we will someday get through and all will be well, but today's set of raw materials to make of what we will. In public discourse we have, not a set of social problems to which we must find solutions, but the need to establish social structures that reflect a dynamic balance between competing ideals like liberty and order, justice and equality. 

It's not that it's wrong to ever identify a problem and find a solution--analytical thinking is part of human nature, too. It's just that we must constantly keep in mind that in doing so we have simplified matters nearly to the point of absurdity. In a real-life detective's life, every passing comment is not actually a key to the current mystery. Or in the mathematical context, it reminds me of the one about the mathematicians trying to resolve a question about a chicken eventually coming up with the formula, "Assuming a spherical chicken . . . "

We are the authors of our lives, not the readers. And when we realize that, we no longer need to gripe about the plot holes. Or ignore the shape of real chickens. We can take the raw material we are handed and make of it something, not perfect or final or settled, but beautiful.

What We Did On Our Winter Vacation

We measure our holidays by the yardstick of contagious diseases. If we don't have a communicable stomach disorder, it's a good Christmas.

It was a good Christmas.

We did have communicable disease--a nasty cough that lingers on for weeks. And we did have some stomach disorders--I'm suspecting a migraine, though we shall have to wait to see if more materialize. But we didn't have both. So it was an improvement. We even made it to the family gathering on New Year's.

In between Christmas and New Year's, I stayed in bed. Or tried to. That's maternal life--taking a light day because you're exhausted just means eighteen meals, two loads of laundry, five potty runs, and seven squabbles. The ducklings are interested in cooking, but their actual repertoire extends to quesadillas, and they can't get the refried beans open without help. As usual, I bribed them into getting the chores done with a new computer game that I got for Christmas. (It's Bookworm Adventures! It's educational! And besides, how could I not love a game where my prowess comes from being able to spell long words?)

I did not make good on any of my plans to clean the basement. I think I need to stop planning it, as it seems to guarantee that I will spend all of the vacation time on the couch.

The New Blog Look

Do you like it? Is it crunchable, precious? Is it tasssty?

Or is it too orange? Is the photo too much of a contrast in color? (I tried it with a blue background, which went well with the water but was just wrong.) Can I get some kind of recognition in bravery for putting a picture from an unflattering angle as my cover photo?

One awesome thing about the upgraded templates is that now, when there is only one comment, it says "1 comment" and not "1 comments," which always made me want to go and add an extra comment, even if I had nothing to say, just to make the number agree.

Mostly I wanted the labels cluster and the hierarchical post history, because the main reason I keep this blog is so that I can look back over my life, most of which I have already forgotten, and my past life on the blog was getting too long. Now I can see how my posting has dropped off over the years. It took a major hit when we moved. It seems to be trending upwards again, though. Perhaps I shall do better this year.

But I'm not making any promises.

Heroes of the Coast

If you are still casting around for a good piece of advice for the new year, I'll recycle some of C.S. Lewis's advice: read old books. There's no substitute for it. It's helpful, yes, to read modern books by people from different perspectives, but they're still coming from the same set of assumptions, addressing the same set of issues. A good book from a different era has the power of cracking your head open in a way that a modern book never could.

And there's no excuse about availability: almost every book that is in someone's library somewhere and is more than a hundred years old is available for free online somewhere. Whatever might slightly interest you is out there, and you can download it to your e-reader and read it in bed.

One book I came across recently is a collection of legends from the tribes of the Northwest coast. It's called Legends of Vancouver, which is a bit to the north, but the cultures were very similar up and down the coast before the Americans and English decided to draw the line somewhere. This is the world my great-grandparents invaded, looked at from the other side.

The author was one of those people uniquely positioned at a conjunction of cultures. Pauline Johnson, or Tekahionwake, was the daughter of a chief of the Six Nations in eastern Canada and a woman from England. She grew up on tribal lands reading the classics of English literature, traveled widely lecturing, including to England, and settled down in British Columbia in the early 1900s, becoming close friends with the local tribal leaders. This book is of the stories they told her.

Nothing tells on the values and goals of a culture like its legends. Not just what behavior is rewarded, but what the rewards are. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about these legends is that the most exemplary persons are rewarded with being turned into stone and forming one of the numerous coastal rock formations. Imagine that happening in a European fairy tale. The typical rewards of a European fairy tale--wealth, power, and sex--are notoriously hard to enjoy in a petrified state. However, once you realize that the reward is meant to be never being forgotten, it translates a little better.

As for the behavior being examined, it is, strangely to us, nearly all about parenting. Chief Joe Capilano, the teller of most of the tales, begins the first legend by explaining their custom of throwing a feast for a girl upon reaching womanhood: "During these days of rejoicing the girl is placed in a high seat, an exalted position, for is she not marriageable? And does not marriage mean motherhood? And does not motherhood mean a vaster nation of brave sons and of gentle daughters, who, in their turn, will give us sons and daughters of their own?"

And most of the stories turn on this theme: the young father-to-be so concerned with following the purification rites before the birth of his child that he won't even get out of the way of God's canoe. The tribe foolish enough to ask for a boy-child for their chief's first offspring, instead of welcoming a girl and the accompanying good salmon runs that would secure the future of the tribe. The father who devotes himself to ten years of solitary confinement to guard against an evil omen that may come on his tribe from the birth of twins. And most beautifully and sadly, the deluge story in which the adults place only the children of the tribe in the great canoe together with one young mother and one brave to look after them.

The thing that strikes me as so very different about these tales is how parenting is treated as the execution of the noblest service to the tribe. Imagine telling Chief Capilano about surveys attempting to determine whether people are more or less happy after having children. He would not see how the question could even be asked. What is more noble than securing the future of the tribe? And what greater happiness is there than in doing what is noble?

Compared to that, moderns of every persuasion treat parenting as a high-end hobby, and one that comes at a high cost in the things our society does value as rewards: achievement, wealth, sex. Something to be evaluated on the basis of personal fulfillment. Something to be tolerated in other people if it doesn't get in the way. Or, alternatively, something to be promoted rabidly as justification for the vast amount of personal investment it has taken.

Mothers and fathers are recognized as doing something valuable for their children but not for everyone. Yet, even though we do not face the fear of extinction as a culture as they did, what is more important for the future we must grow old in than that children have, before they have schools or streets or social programs, parents who love them?

This, I think, is the root of the "Mommy Wars." We feel the need to imbue with significance a task whose cost is vastly out of proportion to its shrinking returns. And so we add to the labor, stake out our own territories and proselytize our various approaches. Parenting is personal and therefore competitive.

When perhaps if we listened to Chief Capilano we could recognize that we are already heroes. Everyone who brings a child into the world, everyone who feeds them and rocks them and gives them a roof to sleep under and tells them stories is serving all of us. And maybe we could face our tasks with more calm and courage if we knew we were performing, not a personal act, but a public service.

Year In Review. (Warning: Guest Post.)

This looks interesting. So I'm going to do it, too. And I'm going to do it here because nobody ever reads my blogs. Mainly because I never post on it/them. But I don't post because people don't read them. Etc. You get the idea.

1. What did you do in 2012 that you'd never done before? 
Wore shoulder-length hair. Other than on stage.

2. How did your goals for the year come out?
Didn't have any. Worked out fine. Of course, I wanted to increase revenue by 50% and pay off all my debt, but that was just wishful thinking (i.e., an obsession).

3. Did anyone close to you give birth or get pregnant?
Thankfully, nobody has given birth close to me for nearly four-and-a-half years.

4. Travel?
A mansion in North Bend. A bed-and-breakfast in Port Townsend. A vacation cottage in La Push. A rental house in Moclips just down the road from where they train psychopathic cops to give low-overage tickets to mothers with small children. And a motel in Port Angeles with sticky-fingered staff.

5. Did you move anywhere?
Ditto QOC on this one.

6. What was the best month?
June 2007. This question is not appropriately qualified.

7. What would you like to have in 2013 that you lacked in 2012?
Hobbit Legos.

8. What date(s) from 2012 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
March 2. I have lost control of vehicles many times. I have been in multiple car accidents. But never both at the same time. Until that day.

9. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Voluntarily taking time off work for the first time since 2007. Five whole days off. In a row.

10. What was your biggest failure?
Working the first week of the two weeks I had scheduled for vacation. Then feeling guilty about being gone the second week.

11. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Let's skip this one.

12. What was the best thing you bought?
My Camaro. *sigh*

13. Whose behavior merited celebration?
Mine. And QOC's. We continue to slog along through life looking for a paved road. Or at least a path that isn't mostly sludge.

14. Where did most of your money go?
Vehicles. Fixing up the '77 Plymouth to sell. Buying a sports car. Fixing a wrecked sports car. Replacing critical components of the station wagon. Replacing a broken wheel on the sports car. Trading for a truck.

15. Compared to this time last year, are you: i. happier or sadder? ii. richer or poorer? 
No.

16. What do you wish you'd done more of? 
Time with kids.

17. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Work.

18. How will you be spending New Year's Eve/Day?
Wishing people would be quieter.

19. What was an unexpected surprise? 
Ditto QOC on this one, too.

20. Did you fall in love in 2011?
I love QOC. I have fallen many times, but never in love. It sounds painful. I do not like falling. Falling is bad.

21. What was the best event you've been to this year? 
I spend most of my time at events trying to fix or not notice all the problems in my surroundings.

22. What was your favorite TV program?
Yes, Minister. And Yes, Prime Minister. I laughed 'til I cried watching those two. Apologies to Monk, which is likely the most helpful show we've ever watched.

23. What authors did you discover this year? 
Jim Butcher. David Weber. Both great discoveries.

24. Random Memories from 2012? 
Standing barefoot in the ocean. Finding a queen ant on my legos in my room. Creating killer backspin when returning a pickle ball serve. Driving with the wind in my hair and the bass cranked up.



Okay, now back to your regularly scheduled programming. And with good reason. I might post on here again in another half-dozen years. It only took me 45 minutes to get the formatting just right on this.