Don't want to count my tomatoes before they hatch

But these are by far the best vines I've ever grown.

Preparations

We are going on a trip next week. I know you're not supposed to announce that to the Big, Bad Internet, but it would be an awful lot of trouble to find our address from our blog, and frankly, we don't have anything worth that much trouble. Our treasured collection of used books just wouldn't bring you that much at Half-Price Books (we tried once). Also DOB's family will be here painting the bathrooms (maybe someday I will have towel rods in a bathroom!) while we are gone. And we may have hired a large, hairy, heavily armed housesitter with a mean ol' dog.

So I am trying to pack for the trip and trying to get enough excited to get the work done without getting so excited I set myself up for disappointment. I know I'm a pessimist. But the last time we took a trip of any significant length to see my family, first we had to fly out in a blizzard, and then D1 was violently ill for nearly the entire trip. Come to think of it, we've never had a real visit out there that didn't involve someone puking. And it's been two years since we visited at all. So I'm trying to stay calmly excited. We should at least be safe from blizzards.

Also, this week is D1's birthday, and as she has been chattering on and on about her upcoming happy birthday for three months, it behooves me to come up with something fun. Fortunately at her age I'm pretty sure a few guests and some balloons will be ample excitement. But I do have to clean the house. And make a purple duck cake.

In Everything Give Thanks

We started the ducklings praying before they could speak, as soon as they could sit up during family Bible reading. We'd hold their hands and help them tap the appropriate family member, saying, "Thank you for Papa, Mama, D# and me! Amen!" Pretty soon they learned to do the tapping themselves, and as their language grew they supplied their own Amens, names of family members, and eventually branched out into thankfulness for whatever struck their fancy. (Especially doggies. And trains.)

So far, though, neither of them has realized that there is a way to pray besides saying "Thank you." Whatever petition comes to mine, it is couched in terms of gratitude. "Thank you for the pastor going to Othopipia." "Thank you for Mama's cold." (ahem!) But then, I suppose there's no better way to pray than in gratitude for all things and in confident faith in the goodness of God's answers.

And they have many, many things for which they are thankful. Houses. Toys. Family. Friends. Wheeled vehicles of all kinds. Animals of every description.

One evening D1 provided a short but earnest prayer, "Dear Heavenly Father, Thank you for all the laughing." Amen.

The Blog Meme About Blogs

I borrowed this from The Common Room.

How did you start blogging?
I signed up with Blogger and started typing. As to why, I don't know. DOB was working late and I was getting hungry, I think. Other people had one. I wanted one. Eventually it took the place of a large group email of my adventures which I used to send out regularly, and was much less trouble to maintain.

Did you intend to be a blog w/a following? If so, how did you go about it?

No. Every once in a while I ask myself, "Do I want to be a blog with a following?" And the answer is "No." Except for when it is, "Sort of, but not really." A blog with a following turns it from being a nice little chatty place where I can do whatever to having social obligations and attracting people (many of whom are Not Nice), and you have to have something to actually say, which I usually don't. And you often have to stick to one subject, which I never do.

What do you hope to achieve or accomplish with your blog? Have you been successful? If not, do you have a plan to achieve those goals?
I hope to get myself remembered in my extended family's wills and be able to mooch meals off my old friends when I visit them. I don't know if I've been successful at all these yet or not. But I keep putting up cute pictures in hope.

Has the focus of your blog changed since you started blogging? How?
I have fewer household catastrophes now. I don't seem to have as much time for them. Also I more deliberately avoid being controversial than I did at first, because I just don't have the time or emotional energy to spare for controversy. (I used to love it, but then I had toddlers.)

What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started?
I'm not sure I know it now, but sometimes I stumble across where you can find out what weird searches might have brought people to your site. I always wanted to check that. Not that many people search for weird enough things to come here.

Do you make money with your blog?

No. It does, however, keep me sane, and insanity is expensive.

Does your immediate or extended family know about your blog? If so, do they read it? If not, why?
Yes indeed. DOB reads this blog, but he seldom reads the other one. My guess is DOB's father and my grandparents are my most faithful readers. The rest of the extended family read fairly often. The ducklings cannot read yet, but they are trying to fix that as fast as they can, and then watch out.

What two pieces of advice would you give to a new blogger?
1. Delete spam. People who introduce themselves by hurling personal attacks at you are spammers and should just be summarily deleted. Don't try to engage them in dialogue, they are not interested.

2. Don't write anything you wouldn't want read at your funeral. Not original advice that, but still worthwhile.

How did you come to name your blog?
DOB has always been the Duke, and discovered it was of Burgundy shortly after we met in person. I have always governed the land of Carrots, and was titled as Queen around the same time. Naturally when we married the lands were ruled jointly; hence the Duchy of Burgundy Carrots.

Changing Colors

My Many Colored Days is a Dr. Seuss book published posthumously with (as he had hoped) pictures by a very different artist. I checked it out for the ducklings, who like colors. The ducklings are very fond of it. But I am certainly not too old to identify with it.

"You'd be surprised how many ways/I change on different colored days."

I think I have too many yellow days (when I am a "busy, buzzy bee"), which lead directly to brown days ("I feel slow and low, low down"). I need more green days ("cool and quiet fish"). Think Green.

DOB, however, disagrees with the last part of the book. "But it all comes out all right, you see/And I go back to being me." He's not so sure there is a me behind all the different colors.

I think I should get credit for keeping things interesting.

Things That Go

We bought D2 matchbox cars for Christmas. These are, of course, Not For Children Under Three, but we both have many years of experience in large and destructive families, and we've never seen a wheel come off.

He was reasonably pleased at Christmas. But in the intervening months, moderate pleasure has developed into an obsession. To wash his hands, one must first pry three cars out of his grip. He wants to take them to bed. To dinner. To church.

The library is giving out prizes for every five books you read (an easy target indeed!) and he selected his first prize this week. Naturally, it was another car. Another purple car. (D1 got a bathtub alligator, and spent all her time at home trying to wheedle D2 out of his car.)

He has names for all his favorite cars: purple car, blue car, gray car, taxi. (It's not a taxi. It's a gray truck.) He asks for them, and woe betide if you can't find that particular one. This morning B6, who is visiting, was trying to catechise him on the makes and models.

Naturally he likes to watch cars, and trains, and myklecycles, but the one thing that will completely absorb him--that pastes that dangerous Mr. Toad expression on his face and renders him oblivious to all parental words--is a skateboard.

I haven't even told him what it is called yet. I don't want him getting any ideas.

Make Way for Ducklings

Reading in bed; Flower doll; Playing dress-up.

Telling the Story of Jesus

In a online discussion of teaching the Bible to children, someone remarked that they did not use the word "story" when reading the Bible, because that might imply the Bible wasn't true. Instead they called it the Biblical "account," as if the Bible were a check register of transactions.

I do think it is more than a semantical distinction and more serious an error than arbitrarily limiting the definition of "story." The Bible is a true story. To sideline the truth is a grave error, but it is an equally grave error to sideline the story. God could have simply written us out a catechism, but He didn't. He wrote us a story. He lived out a story.

A story is not just a listing of events; a story is events with meaning. Story allows us to experience an idea with our whole selves, heart and mind and even body. Story allows us to participate in what has happened and to understand it. Human beings need stories like they need food; they need to hear stories, they need to see their own lives as a story.

In A Bridge to Terebithia, some sporadically-churched children take a friend to Easter services. The friend remarks on the beauty of the Resurrection story, and the other children are perplexed. Beautiful? What does the Bible have to do with beauty? "It's strange," the friend says, "You have to believe it and you don't like it, and I don't have to believe it and I think it's beautiful."

"But you have to believe the Bible," another little girl says, "Otherwise God will send you to hell."

This, of course, goes beyond even the truth issue. One believes, not because it is true, but because some Fascist dictator in the sky will send you off to jail if you don't toe the party line.

Still, I think that is a very natural impression children receive from a teaching of the Bible that emphasizes facts and transaction at the expense of stories. You have to believe this list of things because you're supposed to, and that's that. I would think my children closer to genuine faith if they saw the beauty of the story but could not quite be sure it was true.

Real stories, true stories, beautiful stories~this is how the gospel comes to us. Once the King of all the Universe came to live among the rebels; once the Prince slew the dragon to win his bride. One day it really happened.

We believe because it is true, and we understand and take part and experience the truth through stories, because we are humans with hearts and heads and bodies and God has made us this way. That is how I hope and pray we can teach the Bible to our children.

Are you the man of your dreams?

Are you the central character of your own dreams? And if so, do you always appear as yourself, or are you sometimes someone quite different?

It's hard to quantify dreams, since so many of them are forgotten, but it seems to me that in a fair number of my dreams I am not involved at all. It's like watching a movie. I feel some identification with the main character, but not as if they are me. In others, I am, as it were, playing the main character, but I can (even in the dream) see a distinction between my real self and the character I am playing. And some dreams seem to be happening to the real me.

It also seems to me like I dream fewer dreams with my real self as the central character than I did when I was younger.

Anyway, I had a very interesting dream at naptime involving a young lady repeatedly attempting to poison a young man at the same time her uncle was trying to coerce the young man into marrying the girl--but alas, I was awakened and never found out why he stayed around or what happened. Of course, if I hadn't been awakened, I probably wouldn't remember it at all.

Catch-up

Well, I was going to do a longer post on various things, but life keeps moving on.

Suffice it to say: DOB fell up the front stairs coming home from work Friday, simultaneously ruining his chin, his good blazer, and the evening. The only damage he felt was to his shin, but that doesn't count because it didn't drip blood. The blue string goatee is an interesting fashion statement.

I am not the equal of that, but I do have a second-degree burn on my upper arm from the biscuit pan. DOB thinks we should have gravity installed in the kitchen.

SJ has put words to the terror all parents of young children feel.

We had some long-awaited thunderstorms over the weekend. The ducklings were thrilled. Loud noises! Pouring rain! D2 was looking for a train; we told him that if he heard a train, he needed to head for the basement. They weren't so thrilled when our evening at the park the next day got rained out, too, but we came home and played hide-and-seek instead.

My cold is still stopping up the flow of brilliance from my brain. So you'll just have to wait until it gets better.

Calling the King

Over the past couple of months, D1 has begun to change from imitation-driven play to imagination-driven play. No longer content to just mimic what she sees, her play now encompasses words, songs, books, and anything else that might catch her fancy, whether she understands it or not. Sometimes she takes trips to California, and sometimes she talks to California on the phone.

She sees new connections everywhere. We were making the "Kk" page for her alphabet notebook and I drew her a king. "A king!" she said, "Like in 'Henny Penny!'"

"Henny Penny" is the new favorite naptime read, notwithstanding its rather gruesome ending. A few hours later she was driving by the old telephone stashed in one of the desk cubbyholes and picked it up to make a call.

"Hello," she said, "The sky is falling."

I guess that mode of communication would bypass Foxy-Woxy.

Why Playdough is Not for Children Under Three

I only have two settings, speed and crash. Today is crash. I have a summer cold, which is no worse than a winter cold except that nothing sounds worse than hot tea and chicken soup when it's ninety degrees outside. I have two social events this afternoon (the life of a hermit is looking more appealing.) So I have to get all my crashing in this morning.

It is always on crash days that the ducklings need a little something extra in the entertainment department. (Or perhaps it is on such days that I notice it.) Anyway, playdough seemed less terrifying of an option than paint. Of course it says "Not for Children Under Three," but we don't pay any attention to that because nothing but large foam blocks are suitable for children under three, and they just had a product recall because of the danger of eating them.

Throwing caution to the wind in favor of really serious crashing, I let them pull their picnic table next to the couch and play with it there instead of being immobilized at opposite ends of the kitchen table. I didn't put bibs on them. I gave them the green and yellow because those were already getting mixed and I figured yellow-green wasn't too awful of a combination.

The problems started when I tried to get out the green for D2, only to realized that D2 usually plays with the green. The trouble is, D2 drools. Rivers of water run down his face. Into the playdough. It gets stored like that and oozes onto the sides of the container with inspiring tenacity. So when I lay down the couch to relax it was while holding high in the air hands covered with green slime.

D1 has just discovered the word "why" and used it to good effect with regard to any rules about not touching the couch or me or anything else. D2 has already figured out the answer is "'cause." That should keep them busy for awhile.

Today D1 has been inquiring of people (the same two people, since that's all that are around) if they have ever been to a wedding. Then she took the green playdough and smooshed it on top of the yellow playdough in a large, flat circle, and announced it was a "wedding." I think she has a future in modern art.

It only took about five minutes for the playdough to lose most, but not all, of its interest, and for sports like Climbing on Mama and Ramming the Picnic Table into the Couch to take over, interspersed with refreshing the finger supply of playdough.

We wound up, of course, with playdough on shirts, jeans, hair, floor, matchbox cars (also not for children under three!) and couch. I think we came off pretty easy. I also think I'll just pretend I painted D1's fingernails yellow-green.

Our newlywed yellow-green playdough is out of reach on the dining room table, drying out.

Someday

Someday, when these places have grown too narrow,
I hope you remember when they held heaven and earth.
I hope you remember days as long as epochs
And always too short.
Bushes that towered like redwoods, puddles like the seven seas,
Weeds that were the fairest of all flowers.
Someday, in some dark moment,
I hope you remember the afternoon sun throwing rainbows on the floor.
I hope you remember the front porch that looked out on the universe
And was covered with popsicle drips.
Someday, when you walk past the bushes
And keep going to the ends of the earth,
I hope you remember that here was the beginning.

It's Chesterton's Birthday

And I'm going to celebrate it by reading a Chesterton book I have never read. (DOB: You mean there is one?) The Poet and the Lunatics; I found an old copy in the library system.

I like the idea as a birthday tradition. There are, in fact, a great many Chesterton books I've never read. He was a journalist, after all, so he wrote an awful lot.

Semicolon has some lovely quotes.

Of Course He Is

You scored as Darcy,Your husband/boyfriend is most like Mr. Darcy of Pride & Prejudice. A beloved hero, he may be quieter and sometimes mistaken as proud, but in reality he has the most thoughtful generous nature. He appreciates good character and is extremely devoted to those he cares for. As a couple, you enjoy the company of those closest to you and may engage in thought-provoking conversations.

Who is Your Jane Austen Boyfriend/Husband?
created with QuizFarm.com

Potentially Useful Information

• The distinction between writing with chalk on a cement basement floor and writing with crayons on a wood living room floor is not immediately apparent to toddlers.
  
• Magic Erasers will get crayon marks off of wood floors.
• No one around this house will be using crayons for a long, long time.

Break Out the Popcorn

One of the most-anticipated joys of parenthood is sharing some long-treasured activity with the child and seeing them enjoy it, too. Unless you count "sleeping" as such a shared activity (joyous though it is) this joy is delayed (and with some babies, even sleeping is delayed far too long).

All that is a rather pompous introduction to say, we showed the ducklings a movie this weekend. Understand, we don't have anywhere to put a TV and have thus never obtained any movies for children. (Let's not go into any children's movies we may have obtained for ourselves.) If there's something we really want to see, we sit at the computer and watch it on DVD while they are in bed.

This weekend, though, they woke up from naps, still sleepy and cuddly, while we were watching something we thought they would enjoy, so we hoped their brains had developed enough not to be damaged and let them watch with us. No, it was not a heartwarming family film. There were no animals, talking or otherwise. Nor any talking vegetables.

It was The Great Escape. Fortunately they woke up right as the prisoners were trying to escape across Germany. Mokorcycle falling down! Train! More mokorcycles! Boat! Train again! Bicycle! Mokorcycle! This is the kind of movie toddlers would make if they could direct movies.
D2 is already a Steve McQueen fan.

Of course, we had to stop before anyone got shot. That would be a little too much falling down to explain. Still, it gave us a taste of family movie nights to come. How old do they have to be to watch The Princess Bride?

Materialism and Science

A man can be a Christian to the end of the world, for the simple reason that a man could have been an Atheist from the beginning of it. The materialism of things is on the face of things; it does not require any science to find it out. A man who has lived and loved falls down and dies and the worms eat him. That is Materialism if you like. That is Atheism if you like. If mankind has believed in spite of that, it can believe in spite of anything. But why our human lot is made any more hopeless because we know the names of all the worms who eat him, or the names of all the parts of him that they eat, is to a thoughtful mind somewhat difficult to discover.

~G. K. Chesterton, All Things Considered

Shrinking Violets

The towering stranger, her voice dripping with sweetness, pokes them under the chin. "Well, aren't you adorable? What's your name?"

The duckling, thus accosted, looks about with a dazed expression.

Then, turning to me, she says, "Are they shy?"

And now what do I say? To me toddler behavior doesn't rate as shy unless they spend all their times with their heads buried in my skirts. Which the ducklings are far too filled with curiosity to do.

Naturally it's a big, strange world out there, and they have not yet mastered all the niceties of social conventions. But then, seldom does the person accosting them follow social conventions very well. If a stranger accosted me like that, I would probably feel a bit dazed, too.

Even if they were problematically shy, it seems like announcing it to the populace every time they met someone new would hardly be a helpful way to deal with the problem. Announcing children's flaws in front of them seems like the best possible way to simultaneously encourage the bad behavior and engender serious resentment.

So I'm not quite sure what to say. I don't want to pretend that a blank stare is the social equivalent of a firm handshake, yet expecting a two-year-old to have completely mastered a complex speech and perform it on the spot in front of a stranger seems a bit unreasonable. I have to say something. I usually settle on a vague, "Oh, he's just thinking," which I figure must certainly be true.

Correcting the children right then and there seems ill-advised, and correcting the manners of the stranger would, of course, be rude. But I would suggest this to adults meeting adorable toddlers: Greet them like an adult. Offer a hand for a handshake. Say, "Hello, how are you today?" in a normal tone of voice.

They might surprise you by actually knowing what to do under such a circumstance. If not, you will have shown them how to act, and you can try again next time. And don't comment on their personality unless you want them critiquing yours.

Yet Another Quiz

I'm sure the degree of self-focus and analaysis in this age will be beyond the credibility of later ages. But I might as well get in on it. After all, this quiz has more of a veneer of science than most.

Auditory : 43%
Visual : 56%
Left : 55%
Right : 44%

Actually, my original results were more skewed to the left hemisphere and to the visual, but I lost them and had to retake. Retaking the test seems to lead me to overthink the questions, and get a less accurate response.

QOC, you are somewhat left-hemisphere dominant and show a preference for visual learning, although not extreme in either characteristic. You probably tend to do most things in moderation, but not always.

Your left-hemisphere dominance implies that your learning style is organized and structured, detail oriented and logical. Your visual preference, though, has you seeking stimulation and multiple data. Such an outlook can overwhelm structure and logic and create an almost continuous state of uncertainty and agitation. You may well suffer a feeling of continually trying to "catch up" with yourself.

Why yes, I may well suffer such a feeling. This may explain why I can create the most lovely organizational plans, and immediately blow them all to pieces by stuffing too much into them.

Your tendency to be organized and logical and attend to details is reasonably well-established which should afford you success regardless of your chosen field of endeavor. You can "size up" situations and take in information rapidly. However, you must then subject that data to being classified and organized which causes you to "lose touch" with the immediacy of the problem.

This is the moment at which I shout, "Everybody be quiet! I need to think!" Unfortunately everybody has not yet figured out how to do this.

Your logical and methodical nature hamper you in this regard though in the long run it may work to your advantage since you "learn from experience" and can go through the process more rapidly on subsequent occasions.

True, if the exact same situation ever repeats. But it so rarely does.

You remain predominantly functional in your orientation and practical. Abstraction and theory are secondary to application. In keeping with this, you focus on details until they manifest themselves in a unique pattern and only then work with the "larger whole."

I'm not so sure about the first part of the paragraph, but that last paragraph does describe exactly how I learn subjects or tackle a problem. I love that moment when everything comes into focus--it's like seeing one of those 3-D pictures, or so I presume, since I've never been able to get them to work.

With regards to your career choices, you have a mentality that would be good as a scientist, coach, athlete, design consultant, or an engineering technician. You can "see where you want to go" and even be able to "tell yourself," but find that you are "fighting yourself" at the darndest times.

Can't say I ever considered any of the above. But I do find myself fighting myself a lot. I rather like that the results of this quiz aren't universally flattering. (DOB's sounded much saner.) Now instead of having my ego stroked over having such a lovely personality, I can have it stroked by having such a difficult brain to work with.

An Anagram

It turns out my name is an anagram for "Crazed Thinker in Home Lab."

Tonight's Menu . . .

. . . is Humvee with a side of pine needles. I had a fleeting moment of concern that letting D1 have an official toy kitchen set might stifle her creativity, but I doubt there's much need to worry.

And that animal D2 is holding? That thing with long, pointy appendages on its head? And a fat nose? And (though you can't see it) "Texas" emblazoned on its belly? It's a bunny. Or maybe that's it's name. "Bunny." No effort can convince him that it's a longhorn. Not even a longhorn bunny. A boy knows his bunny when he sees it.


Some other things they say~
D1: "I'm taking a trip to California." I think she got that from the second verse of "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?" California has been much visited of late.
"We start off with high hopes." I still haven't tracked this one down--perhaps it's from Henry the Explorer.

D2: "Eggies! Mo peez! Mo peez! MO PEEEEEZZ!!!!" He would have scrambled eggs three meals a day if he set the menus.
"Potty!" Of course he knows what it means. It means instead of having to be still and quiet in church you get to run all the way down the hallway and go in the bathroom and wash your hands and bang on the mirror and giggle and get a drink of water. It means--if you do something, he's not sure what--you get a cookie.

The Week in Review

Lowlights:
Having a cold.
D2 having a cold.
DOB having a cold and thinking it was allergies and taking the wrong stuff and making it worse.
Wearing myself out planting tomatoes and peppers.
Coming to the conclusion that none of my flower seeds are going to sprout.
One of my two casserole dishes shattering for no clear reason and distributing glass shards and greasy detergent water all over the kitchen.
D2 falling and scraping his chin on our way inside to clean up the shattered dish.
The other 56 times D2 fell and hurt himself.
Deciding that it wouldn't work to get a tree planted this spring.
Wearing myself out planting a tree.
Having twenty minutes after hand-mixing clay and peat moss to put around the oak tree to get the dirt out from under my fingernails and ready to go out to dinner.
The grain grinder malfunctioning right at the beginning of fixing breakfast and making it worse by trying to fix it.

Highlights:
The neighbor across the street offering me a free toy kitchen set, good condition once washed, that his grandchildren have outgrown.
The beautiful new bed of tomatoes and peppers, with the charming little deep-watering system devised out of old water bottles.
Uproarious giggling at my rendition of "Goldilocks."
Going out to dinner with DOB, getting a table in the courtyard by a bubbling fountain, and having a waiter who even looked Italian.
Seeing A Midsummer Night's Dream set in 1950s Hollywood. (Oberon in a smoking jacket and--when invisible to mortals--shades. Puck in a orange corduroy/leopardskin blazer. Theseus as a studio exec, with a bald head and fat cigar. And all that music of love found and lost and maybe found again just fits perfectly.)
Having an oak tree growing in the back yard.
The granola parfaits that were actually much better than what I was going to fix and didn't require the grain grinder.

Why I Love Naptime

"I am troubled by no hopes or fears, I am disquieted by no gossip; I converse only with myself and my books."

--Pliny the Younger, Epistles 1.9

Only I left Lost Horizon in the bedroom where D1 is napping. Bother.

Four-Star Menu Planning

There seem to be four factors that matter to me in selecting a meal: cost, ease of preparation, appeal to the ducklings, and messiness. (All of our meals, after various adjustments and justifications are pretty healthy, and I don't cook foods the grownups don't like.) The ideal menu, then, would get four stars, one for each category.

I tried seriously applying this to my menu plans, and discovered that I only have about one four-star menu a week. Those are the days when I look at the menu and think, "Hooray!" Most of the menus are three-star, which usually means either the ducklings don't care much for it or it's messy. (Spaghetti, for instance, is cheap and easy to fix and beloved by the ducklings, but is oh so very messy. Same goes for black beans. Pasta salad, on the other hand, is cheap and easy to fix and not messy, but for some reason the ducklings don't usually get too excited about it.)

I only have one two-star menu: cottage cheese enchiladas. It's expensive (because I refuse to buy cottage cheese with fillers) and messes up the whole kitchen. But everyone loves it so much that I can't quite bring myself to drop it from the plan.

It seems to me that the way to upgrade a menu from three-star to four-star would be for the ducklings to learn to like it. This doesn't work very quickly, but I persist, especially if it's something I know they already like all the ingredients of and therefore ought to like together. (Hey, it took me twelve years, but I eventually did learn to like lasagna.) That, or they could learn to eat more neatly.

But perhaps I should look into some modifications to bring more menus into the four-star category. Anyway, now I know where the problems are.

Is it still OK to be happy?

Rose posted a reminder of this long-ago post I made on the potential happiness or misery of mothering small children. It had to do with a particular short story on a mother's disillusionment with her life and recovery through finding friends to complain with. Rose, who now has two, finds things are still going quite well, and she is happy but a little worried about what may be lurking around the corner.

I felt like I had to answer not just Rose, but also my new-mother self. I remembered the old post, of course, and was immediately quite sure that I would find the date stamp on it to be before D2 was conceived. Rereading the old story, I could only say to myself: "Oh, no. Life hasn't been that bad. It's been much, much worse."

At least the protagonist of the story has the energy to clean her house once a week and is still able to talk in complete sentences. At least she has the energy to put food on the table and watch the kids throw it, instead of listening to the children cry because she's just too tired to feed them.

But for all that, and for all the black, black days when just speaking the next word required all the strength I could summon, I can also say: "Life has been so much better than that."

I still think I have the most wonderful husband in the world, and I'm thankful that he knows how hard it can be, that he knows when to dial 1-800-Grandma, when to apply information from the CCLI, and when to provide a shoulder to cry on, even when I want to insist on soldiering on if it kills me. (Happy birthday to him! He's now the perfect age!)

I still have the most adorable, brilliant, hilarious kids in the world and I wouldn't miss being with them during this part of their life no matter how hard it is.

I don't think everybody's life at this stage will be or should be as hard as mine has been. Most young parents don't have chronic health problems to start with, and most of them don't have two children within fifteen months and then move twice in the next nine months. What's done is done and I am very thankful for now, despite the trouble it took to get here. The average day is getting better, and in the meantime I have learned a lot about being content with my own limits.

And on the other hand there are mothers parenting more or less alone and children with life-threatening diseases and lots of other situations that leave me realizing I have no cause to complain.

So I can now honestly say to Rose: Hurray for you! I'm glad you're having a good time! If everyone were this messed-up, whom would we call for help? And who would organize the playdates?

It also helps that I never really looked forward to this stage of life or expected it to be particularly pleasant. Truthfully, even if I had all the energy in the world, my brain is not well-adapted to making it through the day with small children. My brain type could best be labeled "absent-minded professor." I'm not good at foreseeing problems and heading them off, or rembering what it was I was doing before the last six interruptions, or even hearing someone calling my name. Some people are good at those things, and that's great.

But I believe that parenting is not something that should be left to the people who are naturally good at it. My kids need me, not the most excellent preschool teacher. If that means I have to learn to do things I don't like to do and am not good at, so be it. (On the other hand, there are reasonable limits to doing things one doesn't like. You will not find me providing in-home daycare.)

That's something important, I think. If only mothers who were really wonderful, natural, energetic mothers were at home, that wouldn't say anything about how important this job is. But if I can say: "This is really, really hard. It's the hardest thing I've ever done,"--and still say that it is worth it--well, that means something.

And this is not forever, even though some days feel like forever. Someday D1 will be old enough to really run the house, as she so eagerly tries to do now. Someday D2 and I will be able to have conversations that involve more than three words. This is not the end goal and never was.

Profit is (not necessarily) Theft

Meredith has drawn my attention to an interesting discussion on frugality, and Mama Squirrel did me the favor of posting on the personal side of it. Which leaves me more opportunity to lecture on the appalling lack of economic understanding shown by a frightening number of commenters.

Wealth, contrary to the apparent assumptions of many, is not some magical thing that comes down from the sky. Profit is not simply the result of taking things away from other people.

Profit is the wages of a varying combination of labor, insight, hassle, and risk. To take the subject at hand, let us suppose Frugal Shopper goes out and amid the piles of tacky Christmas decorations and battered candle holders at a yard sale finds a Treasure. FS, who pays attention to these things (and that, friends, is work) knows that many people want Treasure and are willing to pay, say $25 for it when it is marked for $5 here at the yard sale. Gasp! A 400% profit! Even an oil company exec might envy that!

Anyway, most of those people who want Treasure do not want to hunt all the yard sales in Ohio for Treasure. That is also work, and it is work most people are unwilling to do. So FS pays $5 for it, takes it home, and posts it on EBay, where people who want Treasure can just type in "Treasure" and see FS's listing. FS, however, is not home free. There are fees and such to be paid. Treasure must be kept around the house until it sells, and then she must bother with going to the post office and shipping it.

And there's always a chance that everybody has all the Treasures they want and the going rate for a Treasure is no longer $25, but $4. In which case FS would be stuck. Also, we have not seen (but FS's sore feet have) all the yard sales she went to at which she found nothing. It may be that FS has made almost nothing, considering all the time and trouble she puts into it, but we'll assume FS is not an idiot and would either stop working if that was the case or enjoys it so much she doesn't care.

In any case, this ghastly 400% profit turns out likely to be a small hourly wage. Middlemen have been beat up on from time immemorial, but they provide a very important service, or they wouldn't exist. They take stuff from the people who have it to the people who want it, when those people don't want to hassle with hunting up the people who have it for themselves.

I, personally, hope I never ever ever have to try to make money from such activity, because I have no talent or interest in it. I have no qualms about paying those who do. They are providing me with something useful.

And they are not taking something away from Poor Person who might have been able to buy Treasure for $5 had they not taken it. That is part of the risks of life. Things are not distributed evenly and they never can be. Nobody is stopping Poor Person from getting up an hour earlier. (And given the glut of material goods our society has, which for some reason the same people who bash profit want to bash, I doubt that Poor Person is without an opportunity to find many other Treasures if she wants to go look from them.)

Now profit can of course be theft, just like wages could be. If you don't do your job, taking your paycheck is theft. And if you lie or cheat or steal to make a profit, your profit is theft. But (given how other people feel about being cheated) profits are much more likely to be an expression of how valuable the activity you do is to other people. And what's wrong with that?

Cleaning House

I've been mulling ways to pare down the ducklings' room for some time, in an effort to make keeping it tidy a task within their compass--or even one within mine. It seems their favorite game to play, the one that never fails to interest them, is to take everything within reach out and drag it around the house. Now they have figured out how to take the lids off the toy bins (which were supposed to be opened only one at a time), so they can do it with everything at once.

So I finally had built up my courage and was going to sneakily, while they were gone, move the toy bins downstairs. Only then it turned out that they couldn't go to visit Grandma today, as is usual, and there I was with all that cleaning momentum built up and nothing to do with it.

When I went into their room this evening to try to distract them until DOB got home for supper, I found myself starting the job. At least I could have them help me sort the toys out, and perhaps it would be best to be honest about what was happening. Then I started paring down one of the toy bins by pulling out toys that they had outgrown, mentioning that we needed to save these for babies since they were too small for D1 and D2 any more.

I forgot that D1 apparently inherited the genes that Wondergirl got but that skipped me. Clearly I could not have proposed a more delightful early-evening-delayed-dinner activity than getting rid of stuff. She gleefully picked out toys and blankets that were "too 'mall," piled winter and outgrown clothes into bags, and generally egged me on until we had cleaned out nearly the entire room. She got rid of things I never would have dared, like most of the pile of blankets and stuffed animals that were edging her out of bed at night.

In the end, the only things left in their room were the dollhouse, matchbox cars, most favored stuffed animals, and dress-up scarves. I also put in a reshelving box to hold books they take out to read, as I should dearly like for us to all learn not to leave books on the floor. We did have to reclaim one blanket from the attic, but that was the only hitch at bedtime.

We haven't really tested how this will help yet, but it stands to reason they can't make as much of a mess if they don't have as much stuff to drag out. After supper they seemed just as happy to drag out the reduced pile of blankets and stuffed animals as ever.

Not Quite Montessori

It's supposed to be good for young children to work with activities that build concentration, attention to detail, and fine motor skills.

So just think how much D1 must have learned while stuffing an entire mini-can of playdough through the filling hole of a water gun.

"I put my playdough inside! It rattles! It doesn't come out."

And just think how much DOB must have learned taking it all out again with a toothpick.

Some days you're the British, some days you're the 'gator

DOB used to have an away message to this effect, long ago when we were just another name on each other's IM Buddy lists. After some time, I found it was an allusion to The Battle of New Orleans, a song from a genre of music with which I was as yet entirely unfamiliar. Anyway, I deduced that the away message meant that some days you were bound to lose no matter which side you took.

Yesterday was a British/'gator day. Articles of advice to young mothers will say lovely things about how when everyone is having a bad day you should just let the dishes go and do something fun with the children--take a walk or read a story or just have a nice snack and take a little nap. All good advice. Only some days it just doesn't work. And those dishes always come back to bite you, anyway.

The day actually started deceptively well--dishes done and laundry going and an hour of contented work with playdough while it poured rain outside. But then the rain let up a bit and I had the bright idea of going outside to splash in puddles. Come now, this should be Mother of the Year material in Toddlerland, right?

We found everyone's coats and everyone's boots and the umbrella and everything else, and then we put them all on, and then we managed to get through the door without anyone falling down, and we had just made it down the street to the next house when D2 announced "Stinky!" and "Falling down!" and began heading home to get changed.

This is not typical behavior for him, so I figured I had better comply while he was willing to help with the process. So we went home and I changed him and we got all ready to go again, but something during this time set D1 off, and when we went outside she Did Not Want To Be There. Neither coaxing nor threats were of any avail--she simply sat and wailed while D2 now happily splashed through the puddles.

I figured it must be hunger and fatigue, so we went back inside and changed out of everything and fixed lunch, which they ate, and then hopped down to play. For some reason I was by this time very, very tired. So I sat and got tireder and tireder while they, refueled, got wilder and wilder. I finally mustered up the energy to read them stories, but they just squabbled over sitting in my lap. Finally I put them down for sleep and retreated to the other room, figuring a good nap would do us all good.

But a good nap was not to be had that day. D1 and D2 danced on their beds and uttered jokes in an incomprehensible dialect and laughed uproariously and threw things across the room. So I sat in their room so they would go to sleep, but though they lay still for quite some time, sleep was not to come. And D1 needed to go potty every ten minutes.

Finally about two o'clock everything grew quiet. I had just enough time to doze off when I heard D2 crying. They were awake, and showed no signs of having rested enough or of going back to sleep. I was more tired than when naptime started. I tried to settle them down by reading to them, but they just fought more over lap space. I tried to interest D2 in duplos, his favorite toy, but he sat on the edge of the bin and it collapsed under him, whacking him in the head. We had a snack, which was well received initially, but eventually led to more grief when the preferred food items ran out.

So I gave up on trying to fix things. I sat and tried to muster up the energy to think about dinner and ignored the fact that they were very happily constructing a mountain out of coats, carpet squares, and library books. They begged for supper early only to throw most of it on the floor. They finally went to bed and I tried not to think about the great personal cost at which I was making their lives so miserable and failing so utterly to train them. (This effort at not thinking about it greatly aided by DOB, who brought home Harvey to watch.)

Fortunately not all days are like that. Today we had a much-enjoyed art project which resulted in a charming card to take to a birthday party tomorrow. We went to the park and stomped in the puddles for a glorious hour--just in case I was in doubt, D1 shouted, "I am having a good time!" They ate lunch with hardly any trouble and sat happily during story time and went right to sleep at naptime. And they're still asleep.

My Big Back Yard

This is our back yard: small, muddy, and mosquito-infested. But I'm starting to know its little quirks and see its magnificent possibilities.

Since a large part of our homeschooling philosophy (and for that matter, life philosophy) involves spending time outdoors, both in active play and observing nature, I want to make the back yard a good place to do that. What we lack in money, muscles and space we will have to make up for in inventiveness. Fortunately we have no shortage on that.

First of all, the lawn is just not big enough for a full game of football. So if we nibble away at it here and there, it's no great loss. That swampy spot in the back end of the property, with the thicket of shrubs just past (in the neighbor's yard, but he shows no interest in cutting them) is a favorite haven for birds. We can dig that away to make a real pond, and next to it work on growing a small meadow of other bird and butterfly-friendly plants.

The pond should improve drainage in the rest of the yard, and will provide some extra dirt to heap up a little mountain for the ducklings to climb, and later run, up and down. It can go over near the back left corner of the property, which being a shady spot and supplied with some old stacks of cement blocks and bricks, and a good pile of clay, already serves as a sort of open-air playhouse. Planting a screen of tall grasses there will make it feel cozier, and eventually we can build a little stepping stone trail that winds through the yard, around by the pond and the bird meadow, and back into the little playhouse corner.

In the back right corner we can put in a quick-growing climbing tree (and dig up more dirt for the mountain) and all along the fence and patio can be narrow (someday perhaps raised) beds for growing vegetables and berries. Somewhere, someday, I want to find a spot for a bean tent or a sunflower house. And somehow I've got to find a way to camouflage that compost bin.

That should leave enough yard for a game of horseshoes or croquet, while attracting all the birds and bugs (except mosquitos!--I continue to vow biological warfare against them) to keep our little naturalists busy for years.

Yes, it will take years to do all this. But a girl's got to dream sometime.

Note: My own imaginings have this past day been greatly enhanced by checking out A Child's Garden, by Molly Dannenmaier.

Transplanting Weeds

Yesterday I thought it was about to rain, so we stayed in the back yard instead of venturing to the park. The ducklings, naturally, were drawn to the mud pile like worms. I planted the six parsley seedlings that survived an infancy under my care, in hopes that they will do better in the open air. We also planted sunflower seeds, because sometime in your life you simply have to try planting sunflower seeds.

I showed the ducklings how to make "soup" out of various leaves and flowers from the yard; our yard is a diverse ecosystem that supplies many tasty possibilities. Then I worried about whether I play with them too much. (Yes, friends, there are no limits to the possible variations on mother guilt.) Maybe I should leave them more to develop their own creativity with undirected play. Then again, why should I have to miss out on the fun? As long as I play nice, I think I should get to play, too.

Anyway, once they had caught onto the idea (D1 is all for any activity that involves pretending to cook and eat) and I had built them a stove out of bricks, I tried redirecting myself by considering the patch of bare clay that lies at the border of our yard. It needed something growing on it; on the other hand, given my track record, it hardly seemed worthwhile to risk a plant for which I had paid good money.

All I needed was some sort of ground cover--and then I noticed the little purple flower groundcoverish weed that grows all through the yard and into any unnoticed part of the flowerbeds. The very thing. So I transplanted a dozen or so little clumps of it. If it dies, it dies. If it lives, the spot will look much less slimy and I will know it's capable of supporting life.

It did start to rain, and I took the ducklings inside and got them all cleaned up, and even gave them baths and put them in clean clothes (which I do not usually bother to do--if God meant little kids to be clean, he wouldn't have made them out of dirt), and looked outside and realized the rain had stopped as soon as we had come inside. But we really needed to do the laundry and dishes anyway. Nice weather is very bad for the housekeeping.

Raspberry Crisp

“Raz 97” scrawls in grease pencil across the lid of the jar. Which means it has been nearly ten summers since the day when these particular berries were mashed into a pulp and squeezed into this jar.

If you’re a moderately frugal person, you read up on the Consumer Reports list of how long food keeps, and you try to use it up before it passes the date, and if it doesn’t, you regretfully throw it out and recycle the container.

If you’re a true, deep, dyed-in-the-bone tightwad, you look it over carefully, and then you smell it cautiously, and then you put a tiny finger in and taste it, and if you don’t fall ill immediately you come up with a clever dish in which it can be artfully disguised. My mother, who studied just enough microbiology to approach aging leftovers with a scientific flair, taught me the art and science well.

The raspberries pass. We will have raspberry crisp for supper.

Ten years ago means I was eighteen, living at home, working part-time and studying law more for my own amusement than any impressive goals. Grandma would still be living in her little trailer next to the house, and Aunt Dee’s car would be parked outside while they played a game of Scrabble, the door propped open to catch the breeze.

Raspberries are the high summer fruit. Strawberries still taste of spring, and even the early apples hint of fall. Raspberries come when summer has settled in to stay, bold and warm as the July sun. The long grass would have been turning golden, and the pheasants would have been calling the lonely, haunting note that I thought, when I was very young, was the noise time made when it passed.

I wonder what inspired the canning of a quart jar of raspberries in the first place. Our raspberry harvest was seldom impressive. We had planted them in reclaimed pastureland, and the pasture did not give up so easily. If you wanted to pick berries while the day was still cool, you had to brave the slimy, yard-long grass to coax the berries off their stems. (Raspberries must always be coaxed, never yanked. If you have to yank, they’re not ripe yet.)

Usually the berries we did get we turned into freezer jam, or into Raspberry Lush, a concoction of almond cookie, cream cheese and whipped cream that left one with little more to hope for. A few might be made into canned jam, but canned raspberries lose their brilliance.

This jar barely hints at the gleaming red of ten summers ago. It offers up a lump of burgundy goo, only the seeds still identifiable. Raspberry seeds persist when all else gives way. It is sweet, very sweet. The crisp will need no extra sugar.

Who did can this jar? It came from my sister-in-law. She and my brother were practically newlyweds still, living in the most charming of little newlywed apartments. She was learning life on the farm and must have helped with some of the canning that year. Then again, grease pencil is not the most precise mechanism for revealing handwriting, but there’s something about the hasty scrawl that suggests my mother’s cooking. The men are hungry: get the food on, girls.

I am getting the food on today: roast, mashed potatoes, salad, vegetable, dessert. Alone in the kitchen, unless I have a toddler volunteering to wave the potatoes under the water, I tend to cook one-pot meals. But something about a Saturday makes me want to pull out all the stops. Really, it’s not so hard; it just makes a few more dishes.

Perhaps somebody found a good deal on a flat of overripe raspberries and there was already plenty of jam that year. Perhaps it was canned in a spasm of concern over Y2K or general societal chaos that might imperil the freezer. Anyway, these berries were mashed and canned and here they are.

A long way these berries have traveled to get here. They moved with my brother and his wife across the country; moved with my brother and his wife and three children halfway back, to where we were living in a newlywed apartment that was in no way adorable. Then they've moved with us three times. My brother moved back into a house in a bright new subdivision that took the place of the empty fields and overgrown trees next to the house. I left on a summer afternoon and I am still gone.

Somewhere I have a recipe for crisp topping, but I never look at it. The recipe is part of my instincts, like the right way to pick raspberries. I adapt it to what is handy and the quantity of berries. It turns out just right, which didn’t happen so often ten years ago. Perhaps in some way my mother and grandmother and great aunt, who have left their own kitchens behind, give me a little nudge now and again to help me get it right.

I was not so wrong, when I was a little girl, to think the pheasant’s cry was the sound of passing time. Every sound is the sound of passing time. Everything is always being lost to us forever. Tonight we will have the distilled essence of ten summers for supper. My toddlers will smear it on their faces and pajamas, and then they will go to bed.

Deep and Deeper

Some years ago I was sorting through the ideas floating around my brain, and was disturbed to discover that my Christian faith was not my most deeply-held belief. Not even close. I could imagine abandoning it long before I could imagine abandoning, say, my passion for individual liberty and economic freedom.

This bothered me, as it seemed to me that religious beliefs ought to be the most important, certainly more important than political beliefs, but I could see nothing in particular to be done about it, so it sat in the "Perplexing Things" file for a decade or so.

While reading through a fascinating series on design and creation by John Mark Reynolds, I came across this article on ordering ideas. Suddenly it clicked. Christian faith was not the core of my beliefs because it simply couldn't be--it requires understanding of a complex historical record, faith in some rather difficult doctrinal points, and above all divine revelation. It's not something you can just instinctively know. Instead, it depends on deeper things in the soul, beliefs with which it resonates, questions which it answers.

Some beliefs we can change comfortably as evidence demands; others we can hardly change without losing our minds. For me, the most fundamental core belief, the one which it would break me to renounce, is the significance of everything--most especially, the importance of every individual human being.

This leads in a fairly straightforward sequence to a deep commitment to individual rights. It leads in a slightly more complex sequence to a faith in a spiritual realm, a personal Creator God, and thence to God as revealed in the Bible and through Jesus Christ, who died for all. (And by the same token makes me always uneasy around strict Calvinism.)

No doubt because it is so fundamental, and likewise so instinctive, it is also the point at which I feel most vulnerable. I can't prove every blade of grass matters, or even that every person matters. It is where I start, not where I finish. So when I read secularists blathering on about how material existence is all there is, I get, briefly, nervous. Maybe they're right. Maybe everything is meaningless. Their case is tidy and neat.

But, as Chesterton points out the best, it is simply too small, like the lunatic who is convinced that everyone is conspiring against him. He can explain all the relevant phenomenon--this person smiling at him and that person ignoring him. It's perfectly rational. But it's still entirely wrong. The world is not, cannot be, so small as they imagine. If it was, I could not fit inside.

I am curious as to what other core beliefs are out there. Reynolds listed his as a faith in reason. DOB's most core belief is in a just order. What is yours?

Complete Randomness on Sense and Sensibility

I always find the title difficult, because nowadays, a person with sense and a sensible person are precisely the same thing. I think it was sensible that meant the opposite when Austen wrote, and thus Marianne is the sensible one, but I always have to look it up and even then I'm not quite sure. Perhaps we should rename it Sense and Sensitivity, and then it would be all clear. For another hundred years.

In the Emma Thompson version, the picture of Marianne on the cover looks simply dreadful, but her hairstyle is actually quite fetching in the movie. I don't know why they caught it at precisely the wrong angle for the front cover, but then the front covers of movies usually bear little resemblance to the insides. Generally they show a scene that doesn't even occur in the movie, and would completely contradict the plot.

I haven't read this book nearly as many times as I have the other Austen books. It's quite sedate after watching the jazzed-up plot for the movie. In the book, Marianne takes damp walks on several successive evenings, catches a slight cold which worsens through neglect (over several more days) into a bad fever. Colonel Brandon watches in silent dismay. In the movie, Marianne takes one long walk in a downpour, Colonel Brandon hauls her in unconscious, and she immediately succumbs to a life-threatening illness. I think Marianne would like the movie better, but Elinor would prefer the book.

After all, only in the book can you revel in lines like: "They had in fact nothing to wish for, but the marriage of Colonel Brandon and Marianne, and rather better pasturage for their cows."

DOB, who often asks to watch Austen movies with me (no envy, ladies, he's mine), thinks right now that he likes this one the best. I think it does have a plot that ought to appeal to a decent man, since the quiet, decent men get the girls by being quiet and decent men. However, my younger brother once dubbed it "Stupid and Stupidity"--but he sat through it! So you never know. No one gets shot.

Jane Austen's heroines are getting terribly young. Sixteen and nineteen! And Marianne thinks it impossible that a woman of twenty-seven can ever inspire love. Well, people live longer nowadays, but I suppose the opinion of sixteen-year-olds on the advanced state of decrepitude that strikes by thirty has not really changed.

International Diplomacy and Potty Training

On Sunday we were having a friend with small children over (husband out of town) and invited along a college-age couple who were visiting church. The conversation turned, inevitably, to potty training, a topic on which all of the parents present were weighing in with considerable passion and eloquence.

"Great," I could imagine the young couple thinking, "This is the fate that awaits us. Get married, have kids, and be unable to talk about anything more interesting than potty training."

People who think discussions on potty training represent an intellectual backwater have simply never potty trained anyone. Potty training is a task of diplomatic intrigue on the level of persuading the despot of a third-world country, armed with an unlimited supply of bombs, to lay down his arms and enter peacefully into the family of nations.

Our friend was discussing her imminent plans to potty-train her son, who is two months younger than D2. This led us to discussing the possibility of me potty training D2, which I insist will not occur until he is five, even though he runs into the bathroom saying "Potty potty potty" and sits down. Still I will not.

But then, her daughter potty-trained at two in a week. D1 and I have been working at this for nearly a year and a half, and three is looming close, and we are not done. Oh, we've been very close to done for a long time now. But like the race between Achilles and the tortoise, we never seem to be able to cover more than half of the remaining distance. Closer all the time, but never there.

Sometimes I wonder if people claiming to be done are just using semantical sleight-of-hand. In the potty-training-in-a-day book, it defines being potty-trained as being able and willing to take yourself to the potty when you need to go. Well, in that case, she was potty-trained a year ago. But I don't consider a child potty-trained until I never have to pull out a spare pair of pants, and that day, though I know it will come sometime between now and college, still seems exceedingly distant.

So, am I willing to consider having two rogue states running around the house? I am not. Especially not given the propensity for imitation, which tends to run far too much in the wrong direction. D2 will just have to remain a colony until the international situation is more stable.

All Creatures Great and Small

D2 had been spending the last few moments before Bible reading observing the "amuls" out the back window, most particularly a doggie. He's at the stage where kids learn a new word every four waking hours, but I think he went over his average today. (New words heard: "kite," "sky," "fun," "animals," "applesauce," someting indecipherable about birds, and of course lots of that old favorite "bubos," which being interpreted is "duplos.")

When he sat down for Bible reading, he chattered on and on about the doggie. In fact, he uttered that same word non-stop. I reconciled him to the idea of Bible reading by pointing out the possibility of finding doggies in his picture Bible, so while DOB read Mary and Joseph down to Egypt and back, we spotted every doggie from Creation to King David. You might not think there are many doggies in the Bible, but since D2 still happily classifies all largish quadrupeds as doggies, we could impress all the sheep and donkeys into service, too.

But unfortunately Bible reading had to come to an end sometime, and then it was time to pray. And still the refrain of "Doggie, doggie, doggie" would not cease.

"Would you like to pray for the doggies?" DOB asked him.

"Yeah," he said.

"And I will pray for the cats!" D1 added.

DOB assented and began to pray.

"You can pray for the rabbits," D1 interrupted.

"What about Mama?"

"Mama can pray for the bears."

So in addition to our usual petitions for family, friends, and the pastor's trip to "Othopipia," we spent a few moments in earnest prayer for animals wild and domestic. Especially doggies.

Killing Things

Someday I'm going to give up on gardening. This year I started four flats of seeds--two of herbs and two of flowers. The only trouble is, we really don't have a sunny window where they can sit. So I kept them in the basement, bringing them out to the back patio on days that were warm enough.

The trouble is, I'm really not good at taking care of anything that doesn't scream when neglected. Sometimes they got left out overnight. Sometimes they got left in the basement for days on end. Sometimes they got drowned in thundershowers and sometimes they didn't get water at all. Sometimes the kids dug their dirt up and used it to make mudpies.

It's a wonder that even the parsley has survived. The sweet williams are done for, I'm afraid, but I'm still hoping a few basil and coneflower plants will pull through. If I don't forget them again.

So my hopes were pinned on the seeds I had planted straight in the ground, on a benign and sunny day in early spring (and the package said "Plant outside as soon as ground can be worked"). Then it frosted and frosted again, and I did nothing to cover them because I couldn't think of what wouldn't blow away. But when the weather warmed up again the little seedlings still stuck up bright and green.

On Wednesday night, on the way home from church, we started noticing odd patches of white. Sure enough, the terrific rainstorm that had hit during the church service had been a hailstorm here. With children still fussing in their carseats, I dashed out in the dark and started raking an inch of ice pellets off my tender little plants.

They do still look alive, but I'm not sure until I've seen them actually grow some. They hardly seem to have the nerve to do that anymore.

A long ramble on feminism

I was filling out an online survey on parenting ideas last week (if you're a mother of small children, you might like to participate), and encountered the question, "Can you describe feminism in a sentence or two?"

Blithely I typed in, "Sure," and continued with the survey. DOB, reading it over, suggested it might be better to respond in a more serious tone. After all, it wanted me to declare whether I was one or wasn't one.

Dear me.

I don't know.

But I "don't know" not in an "I am ignorant on the topic" sense, but in an "I know far too much to side with anybody" sense.

Do I support women being able to vote, own property, and practice law? Most certainly. But that's a definition of feminism almost too archaic to count.

The modern form of feminism is sort of a twisted form of patriarchy--they both think men are the Superior Example of Humanity, the partriarchs just think that women should bow to this superiority, while the feminists think that they should turn themselves into men. Do men work ridiculously long hours and neglect their children? Then women should, too. Do men engage in casual sex? Then women should, too.

Even complementarians seem to me to harp unduly on men and women as separate camps of people. Men and women are different, yes. But the only difference you can really count on holding true is that women have the equipment for bearing children and men for begetting them. This is not just a petty biological difference, of course--producing another human being is one of life's most profound acts, and the outworkings of this distinction colors life from infancy to death.

But it's not a simple distinction. Once you move past the biological facts and start generalizing about abilities and roles, the generalizations (like almost all generalizations) start being wrong. Women on average might be more nurturing than men, but not all of them. Men on average might be more interested in abstract reason and higher math, but there are plenty of women who love calculus and plenty of men who threw their algebra books across the room.

My mother complained about how my dad, with his masculine, one-track mind, would weed the garden in happy oblivion while the children committed clamorous crimes a few feet away, but now DOB complains about my happy oblivion while the children howl. Apparently one-track minds don't only travel on the Y chromosome.

So when someone actually gets so far as trying to define a particular role for a particular gender and say wives and husbands must relate to each other like thus, or we should raise our little boys and our little girls to do this, I never quite can see that far. Marriage is a complicated dance, and who leads or follows is much less significant than whether they're dancing to the same tune. And neither men who harp on submission nor women who harp on independence are listening to the music at all.

Children need to be raised to be people, first; boys and girls both need to learn to be brave, kind, generous, hard-working, appreciative of beauty and willing to get their hands dirty. Only girls wear dresses in our culture, but other than that, I'm quite happy to have my children play however they like, and I smile just as broadly when D2 picks up a baby doll and changes its diaper and when D1 asks to hear the book about trucks for the sixth time. Or vice versa. Forcing kids into or out of gender stereotypes is not what parenting should be about.

As for what women should do with their lives, they should do what they want to do, what they're good at doing, what's important to them. But like anyone, they should consider other people around them before they decide. Children might need their mother even if their mother doesn't need them all that much. A husband might need respect and a good dinner even though he's being a jerk. The Christian ideal is not about serving ourselves, after all, but about serving others--and that still applies to women as well as to men.

I don't like the word feminist because it splits the human race in half. Neither women nor men are more important or necessarily all that different. But we don't need to force them into being the same, either. Women in general and men in general and boys in general and girls in general are only the vaguest of abstractions; what matters is the particular man, woman, boy or girl we have to do with.

W is for Wagon

I've been working on a picture alphabet book for D1, since she always wants to know what letters go with people's names. Pictures of "M" for Mama and "P" for Papa and so forth were easy enough. For letters where she didn't have any close friends with appropriate names (and I'm picky, it has to be the most common sound of the letter, too) we used family pictures of appropriate objects. Like this "W" for "wagon."

Some of these required special efforts--we don't customarily take a picture of housecleaning, but we needed to illustrate "V for vacuum." That was the third letter she learned, because she kept finding it among the scattered Scrabble tiles and thinking it was an "A." I had to explain it with the first thing that came to mind. A violin no doubt would make a prettier picture, but then, we don't have a violin.

Now I have everything except for a picture of an insect for I. (That letter had me stumped for quite awhile until I had the bright idea of googling for "Words that begin with I.") I am going to begin giving the book to her one page at a time. I'm pretty sure she'll like it, as a picture album if not as an alphabet book. And I figured I should do some alphabet things with her before she figured the whole thing out on her own, or I'd miss all the fun.

Jesus and the Fish Fry

This Sunday's sermon was on what is one of my all-time favorite Scripture passage, John 21. Passion Week is over; the Resurrection is over. Everything is over. And the disciples go fishing.

I've seen commentators make out from this that the disciples were somehow slacking off on the job and returning to their old way of life. Not sure what's up with Jesus, guys; let's go back to work. I disagree. No other group of humans has gone through such a tumultuous week as the disciples had, with death turned to life and eternity shaken and the world turned upside down. But if I ever did have such a week, I can tell you where you'd find me after it was all over: at the kitchen sink, washing the dishes.

Sometimes when the heart and spirit have had all they can bear and more, the body needs to take over for awhile. You need to work until it hurts. So, I think, the disciples needed to do something hard, something familiar, something that would give their minds time to sort through all that had happened. They went fishing.

Jesus, who knew them not just as a detached omniscient deity, but as a friend, knew they would be fishing. He is waiting for them, on shore. He greets them with the same little trick of a miracle he used when they first met, like an old joke between friends. Once again they have fished all night and caught nothing, once again Jesus fills the nets with fish as morning breaks.

Here is none of the flash and show of signs you would expect from a resurrected God; here are only the homely miracles of fish in the nets and a fire lit on the shore. Jesus, his deity confirmed forever, is standing by the barbecue, wearing an apron.

No doubt our spiritual needs are the greatest, and it is those Jesus came to fill. But he also knows that we cannot feel them so acutely as we can feel our tired feet and empty bellies. So he starts there, even with his oldest friends. First, we eat. Then we can talk. Here is our God; here is the one who puts every meal on the table and every fish in our nets; here is our friend.

Easter Pictures

This looks like a picture from a nursery school with a ridiculously high dress code for teachers, but actually it's us enjoying the booty from our egg and carrot hunt. They had sidewalk chalk inside them this year, but as it was too cold to go outside, we tested them on black paper. Chalk is certainly a low-sugar surprise, but a messy one.

Also, if you don't often check the other blog, you really should pop over and see what we did with the dyes from our Easter eggs. D1 and I had way too much fun.

Below is our resurrection scene, constructed on Friday afternoon during naptime from mud out of the backyard and fabric scraps tied on clothespins. A soldier stood guard over the closed tomb on Friday and Saturday; although D1 certainly did catch some of the excitement over Jesus being alive, she was also very concerned about where the soldier had gone on Easter morning.

Good Friday Thoughts on I Peter

The Christmas season seems more contiguous than Easter. You can spend the whole month building up to the big day. Whereas before Easter the joy of Easter coming is always tempered by the knowledge that Good Friday must come first.

If we were the ones having the baby we might see Christmas differently. I'm sure like any new mother, Mary's anticipation of holding her new son was tempered by her anxiety over the suffering she would endure first. Joy comes not in spite of suffering, but because of suffering.

In his first epistle, Peter applies this theme to us. The book has the feeling of a general's speech before battle. Gear up for action, men. Prepare to take some hits. But Peter takes it beyond the merely human response to trouble.

There are two human ways to respond when we are treated unjustly. One is to fight back, which at least does something about the injustice, but so often we overdo and trigger a reaction and injustice piles upon injustice beyond all human remedy. Or we can suffer in silence, but while this may be good for our souls it does little to set the world aright.

Here, indeed, we need Divine intervention. Only God could find a way to set us right both within and without. Through Christ's suffering, He restored all things. Christ did not just endure, he overcame.

Now, Peter says, we too can suffer like that. Not just a stoic endurance of what cannot be helped. Suffering that is itself a power. Meekness that wins the battle. Kindness that conquers.

Whatever small injustices we have to face let us participate in the one Great Injustice, when God took the sins of man. As we receive the grace to face curses with blessing, hardships with joy, we see from within the power of that last moment when God suffered death and defeated death forever.

April Fools' Day

The weather seems to have pulled an April Fools' prank on us and reverted to early spring, after convincing us that summer had already arrived. I just hope my seedlings survive.

We had our monthly church potluck, er, fellowship dinner, on April Fools' day this year. Naturally this required special preparations. I made up two big pans of meatloaf in muffin papers and frosted them with garishly-colored mashed potatoes. This was heartily disappointing to the preschoolers, who had finished all their noodle casserole so they could have a cupcake, but highly amusing to everyone else. I think I really did initially fool everyone except the ladies who caught me microwaving them before the meal.

As for our own ducklings, D1 thought the "cupcakes" were the greatest thing ever. She will be disappointed if she ever has a real cupcake. D2 loved the meat but was skeptical of the food coloring in the potatoes.

DOB has this idea of a sort of reciprocal prank dinner, where the main dish would be meatloaf disguised as cupcakes and dessert would be cupcakes disguised as meatloaf.

The quality of an April Fools' day prank reflects several factors: amusement, of course, but also how uniquely suited it is to the recipient, lack of any serious harm, and as far as I am concerned, ease of setup. The best prank is one that takes only a few minutes to do and has everyone--or at least me--laughing all day.

With that in mind, two of my all-time favorites date from when I worked in an office. One was sneaking on to my boss's computer when he was out of the office and modifying the "Autoreplace" feature in Word so that when he typed certain frequently-used phrases they would be replaced with apropos substitutes. (His name, for instance, would be replaced with his office nickname, "The Machiavellian Mind," and our chief opponents would become "The Evil Empire.")

Another one came after our landlords had spent most of the month of March working on the plumbing in our bathroom. They had not warned us in advance of this project--we just came into work one morning and found the toilet in the kitchen. Since we had only that one toilet for twelve people, the situation was desperate and we all ate lunch out a lot that month. It had finally been repaired just a day or two before April first.

So I got in early and put an "Out of Order" sign on the door.

Read about more April Fools' jokes at Life in a Shoe.

Travel photo

The Queen of Carrots, as an M&M, tours Greece along with her luggage. The chocolate rabbit is a decoy so that people will not eat her.

Get your own M&M. HT to MM-V.

Spring in the Backyard

This is the first year I've felt we truly had a back yard. In our old neighborhood, one road swooped so close to the other that our house had two front yards. A front yard is a tolerable place to grow tulips and watch the world go by, but it lacks the cozy homishness of a back yard, as if you were still in the house. Not that our back yard is private by any means, but still we are freer to be our composting, mud-slinging, diaper-drying selves than out front. Out front the messiest thing I feel comfortable with is popsicles. (And even so, I'm never doing grape juice popsicles again.)

I hope the mosquito-larvae eating bacteria will continue to hold the bugs at bay so that we can continue to enjoy it, since last year, even after we moved in, I couldn't stay out back longer than two minutes. That's how long it took me to get two mosquito bites, and I refuse to voluntarily subject myself to more than two mosquito bites a day.

The ducklings have discovered mud. That icky, cold, scary stuff of a few weeks ago has turned out to be a lifetime supply of playdough, free for the taking. D1 will spend hours baking with it--not mud pies, generally, as pie is a dish I seldom make, but mud pizzas and bread. The dirt around here, despicable for growing things, is wonderful mud, firm and smooth and holding its shape when it dries. I foresee entire cities of mud bricks growing out of it in years to come.

As for me, I am hanging out diapers again--and after a long winter they desparately need some time in the sun. This morning D1 was so insistent that they could finish up the job of hanging out the cloths by themselves that she sent me back inside. I worked on the dishes for a few minutes and came back out to check on them, only to discover that they had decided to use the cloths to wipe down their picnic table with water from the iced tea pitcher I had just started.

The patio is a dangerous place. The whole big backyard, with its lack of a fence and presence of a pond, is too much for me to let them play in unsupervised just yet. But surely the patio, right outside the kitchen, is safe enough while I dash in and work on supper. Well, it is perfectly safe for ducklings. It is considerably less safe for my projects. The sheets out drying weren't meant to be used as a tablecloth for a mud feast, and mud in general is not to be confused with the potting soil in which I am starting seedlings.

Spring is here and dazzling me again. Long ago, when I lived in Olympia between the mountains and the sea, my boss learned of my interest in DOB and commented, "He lives in Ohio? It must be love." But when I first visited Ohio, it was in April and the redbud trees were blooming and the green, green grass was full of flowers. There are real, live violets in our lawn (and I never saw a violet before) and I just learned the black birds with the shimmering blue heads that love to bathe in our little puddle go by the mundane name of the Common Grackle.

Never mind about heaven. I have not been good enough to deserve one spring morning of tugging dandelions out of the flowerbeds. I'll enjoy it thoroughly all the same.

Confessions of a Book Glutton

The library is just too strong of a temptation. I can be strong in a book store, if I don't go in for more than five minutes. These things cost money! Spending money is evil! So the voices in my head go, and if I leave quickly enough they will not be drowned out.

Ah, but the library. At the library, everything is free. Free! That uber-libertarian voice in my head intoning that libraries are not a Proper Role of Government is not nearly so loud as the tightwad voices. Furthermore, the library has an online catalog, where no one is watching me indulge my passions. Just one more search, it whispers to me, one more book. I find another website with another booklist and it makes me want to check again.

Now I have not only myself to reserve for, but also the ducklings, and then there are books to preview for them to read in future years. It's always good to get plenty of extra because you never know which one will be just the right book.

As much fun as browsing online is, with the entire county's books at my disposal, it has never eclipsed browsing on the shelves. This is where the serendipities appear, the books that were looking for me. This is where I wind up with mammoth photo books of castles and obscure biographies of people I wasn't meaning to read about.

Unfortunately, I don't get to browse when the ducklings are with me. They want to browse, too, and somehow their browsings don't precisely correspond with mine. The train table, which might keep them predictably still for five minutes, is not within sight of many interesting books. As for the rest, I'm lucky to keep the ducklings in one place long enough to check out.

Checkout. Here is where the accountability comes. Here is where my gluttony is called to task and the pile of books I managed to browse combines with the pile of books I had reserved--always three times the size I thought it was--to make a unified pile of terrifying proportions. Keep in mind that on most days I must get out to the car while holding two hands of wayward toddlers, and then tell me how I am to transport the twenty-seven large books I just checked out. Big thick ones for me and big wide and long ones for them.

I purchased a large and classy-looking bag for transport purposes, but it's always strained at the seams. One of these days it will disintegrate on me. Those crates on wheels look practical, but too small. My mother used a laundry basket, but laundry baskets don't leave free hands.

What I really need to do is grow some older children who can carry piles of their own. Except they'll become book gluttons, too, and then how will we get out the door?