Fun with Plato

I am still progressing through The Republic, although temporarily sidetracked somewhat by getting several Oz books from the library, but I'm only supposed to read them when I'm on the exercise bike. (I love taking walks. I hate riding the exercise bike. But the weather has been too cold for D1 to go out most days.)

I'm coming to a greater appreciation of why it's important to read all this ancient stuff. When you see the same errors repeated over and over in every century and every guise, you may start to get wise to them.

For all the title of the book being The Republic, and the purported topic being the defining of justice, Socrates offers almost no advice on what sort of laws his society will have. It's all about how those people will be trained and educated. If we just get the education right, everything else will take care of itself.

The same idea appears, in some form, in every vote-for-the-levy flyer sent out today. You would think after nearly 2500 years of believing education was the answer we might have lit upon the right sort of education to do it, but apparently not. Yet the faith continues.

But of course, to make sure people are educated correctly, you have to abolish the family. Otherwise people will wind up creating preferences for their own families, preserving old superstitions, and the women of the society will be distracted from whatever nobler tasks they are fit for. (For Socrates is quite modern in thinking women can do anything men can do, though not, perhaps, quite so modern in thinking they just can't possibly do it as well.)

Raised on his scheme, where no parent knows his own child, Socrates naturally expects these citizens to be purely public-minded guardians of the public interest. What they would be, raised without being permitted a lasting attachment to any particular human being, is sociopaths. Modern scientists have at last come to this conclusion by careful studies. Any mother could have told Socrates he was off his rocker in 400 B.C.

L. Frank Baum writes about a paradise rather like The Republic--but at least he has the humility to keep Oz a fairytale land powered by magic, not just philosophy. But whether it's Socrates or Baum, all utopian dreamers come down to this: People fight over X (families, religion, money). Therefore, if we can just remove X, people will cease to fight and all will be well.

The problem, as parents inevitably discover when they try to settle their children's disputes by these means, is that the problem is not in X, but in people's hearts. Take away what they're fighting over and they'll find something else to fight over. Indeed, take away families and religion and money--or tone down their influence--and you'll find you've removed most of the restraints that kept their fighting civilized.

It's by fighting and helping one's own brothers that one begins to get a glimpse into the brotherhood of man. It's by honestly believing in one's own religion that one can admire someone with whom one vigorously disagrees as a fellow-traveller in the search for truth. It's in search of earning money for one's self that one can work cooperatively with others for their good as well. All these things that people fight over are the very things that pull them together.

Solo Excursions

Last night I left my husband and baby behind and went out with a bunch of guys for pizza and beer.

I love doing things that sound scandalous.

Actually, it was our regular Young Republican meeting, but DOB was not feeling well. So, after considering that it was our annual election and attendance was important, we decided that I would go alone. As it happened, none of the other female members were able to make it, so I was the sole representative for gender balance. I also got elected secretary, which means it will now be my job to do the stuff I have been doing for the past few months. DOB is now treasurer, because we hope it will be less work than vice president.

Come to think of it, I don't know that anyone actually had a beer while I was there. (I didn't have anything, being too cheap to spend money on such luxuries.) Maybe the free refills on soft drinks were too attractive.

DOB and D1 survived just fine. D1 was starting to get fussy when I arrived home, but it turned out to merely be a problem of the diaper variety. (It was the first time I had gone out alone since I got married. I didn't much care for it.)

DOB is still sick, I presume, because he's been sleeping for eleven hours and is still going strong. This is the way he always handles illnesses--he just goes to bed and sleeps for twelve, eighteen, or twenty-four hours, depending on the virulence of the bug. He rarely has any other symptom, and he is never sick more than a day. It freaked me out the first few times it happened, but now I know to expect it and just go on with my business.

Questionnaire

This is one of those surveys that goes around the blogosphere. However, it's quite a bit more profound than most, and it also significantly predates the internet (perhaps not two unrelated statements). No obligation, of course, but it'd be fun to hear others' answers, too. Snagged it from Confessing Evangelical.

1. Are you really interested in the preservation of the human race once you and all the people you know are no longer alive?
   Yes.
2. State briefly why.
   I'm interested in my future children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc. being preserved, too.
3. How many of your children do not owe their existence to deliberate intention?
   One.
4. Whom would you rather never have met?
   If I have met anyone like that, I've apparently blocked the memory of meeting them out of my mind.
5. Are you conscious of being in the wrong in relation to some other person (who need not necessarily be aware of it)? If so, does this make you hate yourself - or the other person?
   Thanks to my bad memory, no. When I am aware of it, I'm more upset about myself.
6. Would you like to have perfect memory?
   Not if it means remembering everything (see 4 and 5). If it meant I could forget what I wanted to forget and remember what I wanted to remember--like paying the bills on time--it could be quite handy.
7. Give the name of a politician whose death through illness, accident, etc. would fill you with hope. Or do you consider none of them indispensible?
   This question doesn't quite make sense. Anyway, I don't wish anyone dead, even accidentally. I might wish some of them to suddenly take up a life as a hermit in Nepal, but that's as far as I'll go.
8. Which person or persons, now dead, would you like to see again?
   My mother and grandmother.
9. Which not?
   Well, I wouldn't really like to see anyone who was still dead here on earth. That'd be freaky.
10. Would you rather have belonged to a different nation (or civilization)? If so, which?
    No. I'm too attached to indoor plumbing and regular bathing.
11. To what age do you wish to live?
    Probably 97. I don't know why. Older than my grandmother, but 100 just seems too trite.
12. If you had the power to put into effect things you consider right, would you do so against the wishes of the majority? (Yes or no)
    Yes. But not everything I considered right. Just respect for the rights of others. Everything else I wouldn't put into effect, even if the majority was on my side.
13. Why not, if you think they are right?
    Why not everything else? Because I think that's beyond the proper power of the state.
14. Which do you find it easier to hate, a group or an individual? And do you prefer to hate individually or as part of a group?
    I don't generally find it easy to hate, probably from a lack of spare emotional energy for it. But if I have to, I think person-to-person hatred would fit me best. Groups are too vague to genuinely hate and I don't like going along with a group to do things.
15. When did you stop believing you could become wiser - or do you still believe it? Give your age.
    I certainly hope I can still become wiser than I am at the age of twenty-six.
16. Are you convinced by your own self-criticism?
    Depends on what it is. But I think I am for the most part.
17. What in your opinion do others dislike about you, and what do you dislike about yourself?
    Others dislike my capacity for self-absorption (not as in talking about myself all the time, just getting totally lost in whatever I'm doing and not noticing the needs of others) and my carelessness. I agree with them in theory, but not always enough to change.
18. If not the same thing, which do you find it easier to excuse?
    See above.
19. Do you find the thought that you might never have been born (if it ever occurs to you) disturbing?
    It does occur to me, but it doesn't really disturb me. I wouldn't exist to miss it. It's just everyone else who would have missed out. ;-)
20. When you think of someone dead, would you like him to speak to you, or would you rather say something more to him?
    I would think someone already dead would have the more useful knowledge to impart. Like what it's like to die.
21. Do you love anybody?
    Yes.
22. How do you know?
    I get more upset by the harm suffered by them than by the related inconvenience to me.
23. Let us assume that you have never killed another human being. How do you account for it?
    I've been told a battalion of angels rides around my car. That's probably the only thing that's done it.
24. What do you need in order to be happy?
    A good night's sleep, a good meal, and DOB and D1.
25. What are you grateful for?
    Let's not get too sappy here. Far more things than you all would want to read through.
26. Which would you rather do: die or live on as a healthy animal? Which animal?
    Die, of course. Ugh.

Your vote needed for the Best of 2004

I want to enter the 2005 Erma Bombeck Writing Competition in the "humor" category. Basic parameters: 450-word personal essay, previously unpublished. Deadline is Feb. 18. Prize is $100.

Since my blog is the only place whereby I now remember my life (before blog, I relied on email and random battered notebooks), I have been skimming past months for material on which to write a humorous essay. Then it occurred to me that perhaps asking my readers would be a good idea. I don't promise to operate on majority vote, but I think the insights would be helpful.

The following have struck me as possibilities. Which one do you think has the potential to make the funniest essay for a broad audience? (Not necessarily the one you find the funniest right now, although it would be interesting to hear that, too, if it's different.) Feel free to make your own suggestions, as well.

Marital Strength Test (In which we try to clean out boxes)
On the Line (An encounter with telephone support for telephone lines)
Nomenclature (The difficulties of describing ties)
Confession is Good for the Soul (diaper changing adventures)
Eating with Baby (what it sounds like)
Amazing Facts about DOB (the powdered sugar story)

Happy Anniversary to Us!

No, it's not our wedding anniversary. (Unless you're allowed to celebrate seventeen month anniversaries with a whole week of celebrations, but aren't we supposed to be beyond such sappiness at this point?) It's our one-year house anniversary! A year ago today it was -17 degrees and our soon-to-be pastor, his son and son-in-law, a few old friends and all available family members were trotting back and forth across town, moving us from a very crowded and smoky apartment to a house that is only crowded in the closets and where the only smoke comes when dinner boils over.

I was four months pregnant, and still had very little energy. (I think a lot of what I chalked up to morning sickness was really poor air quality--I felt remarkably better once we moved here.) My kitchen was packed up and moved entirely by a sixteen-year-old boy, who did a fantastic job at it. I just laid around and watched all the action for the most part. I also ordered pizza when the work was done.

With the inclement weather of the last month, let us not forget to mention the blessing of an attached garage. Last winter it was such a treacherous business for DOB to get to the car and get it cleaned off that he called me once he was safe inside the car to let me know he wasn't lying bleeding on the ice outside. Sometimes it was half an hour after he left the door that he finally called.

So, hooray for one year in our home, sweet home.

Random thoughts

• Just heard an advertisement for Advil Liquigels--"With real liquid!" As opposed to those competitors, who only have fake liquid in theirs.
• His Majesty has started taking a preventive tonic for high blood pressure: high-proof cayenne pepper in a vodka tincture. Now there's a manly drink.
• Why do I get more woken up by the alarm not going off on the weekend than by it going off on weekdays? Lying wide awake at 4:45 am on a Saturday is just not right.

My great wisdom

Yes, after a grand total of seven months of parenting, I think I'll benefit the world with my theories on child-rearing.

That's not enough time to learn much of anything. Still, I've been a parent as long as D1 has been in the world, and she's learned quite a bit in that time. Even if she hasn't learned much of substance, she's learned what kinds of things there are to learn: how to communicate and how to move. I think, like her, I've at least learned what it is I need to do.

I need to love her.

Don't I already? Sure, I get warm fuzzy feelings when I look at her (when she's clean, happy, and I'm not too tired). That's not love.

Love is ministering to her needs when I don't feel like it. Love is training her when I don't feel like it. Love is incredibly hard work.

I think this is where any book of advice on parenting, or any system of parenting, runs aground. Any system of parenting can be turned into a vehicle of parental selfishness. I could easily schedule D1 (who really is very compliant) to stay out of my hair most of the time so that I could do what I want to do. I could just as easily ignore her until she demands my attention, then give her what she needed to shut her up. (I fail in one or both directions practically every day.) I personally am not the sort to do it much, but there are others who will instead hover around, creating emotional neediness in their children so that they can have the gratification of meeting those needs. Any of the above could find books of good advice to justify their approach.

And the only way to avoid it is to love her like I need to. I do think parenting needs to be child-centered--not child-run, but child-centered. The parent is there to serve and train the child; the child isn't there to serve and gratify the parent. Of course, this means training the child to be obedient, to work hard, not to demand attention and all that--but it has to be done for the child's good, not the parent's.

I do have a fairly structured approach to D1's day, and I do want very much to train her not to fuss to get what she wants. But I keep revamping the structure with the primary goal of anticipating her needs, so that she doesn't need to fuss to get what she needs. (As she gets older, she gradually has more chances to learn to wait for the things she wants.) It's hard for me to do this--especially with giving her attention. But when I do, we're all so much happier.

The goal in parenting is not some middle ground between authority and love. It's the extreme of both--authority that, when asserted, is absolutely consistent and just; mingled with love that is incredibly delighted in the child and shows it every minute of every day.

Socrates is mortal

In my quest for thoughts on education, I decided to first try Plato's Republic, as it seemed old enough to start with. (Yes, I know I should start with the Bible, but I was already reading it.)

It's much more entertaining than I expected. For one thing, it looks like the Socratic method was just as irritating for Socrates' friends as it is for modern law students:

"Yes, he replied, and then Socrates will do as he always does--refuse to answer himself, but take and pull to pieces the answer of some one else."

And in filtering children's reading material, homeschool parents have nothing on Socrates. He wants to expurge any references to, say, great heroes bewailing the dead in The Odyssey, so that the young future warriors won't get the idea that death is something to be feared. Even references to the heroes or the gods laughing too hard is bad, since we don't want the youngsters to ever lose control of themselves like that.

One would be inclined to think that this is, at least in principle, a wise course: only expose children to the ideas and behavior you want them to emulate. But the Bible takes quite the opposite tack. It shows the heroes of the faith doing dreadful things, and accuses God of actions that Socrates would find quite blasphemous--ordaining evil events and deceiving people.

But then, Socrates is trying to find a way for us to achieve human perfection and explain the gods, whereas the message of the Bible is that we cannot do either.

Random list time

Things we own that have broken down in the past year:
Dryer
Hot water heater
Car
Rocking chair

Household items we are collecting for toys for D1:
Plastic vitamin bottles
Those flat plastic thingies used to close plastic bags
Film canisters (even though we only use digital!)
Old cds
Scrap paper

Items on my to-do list left from last week:
Install operating system on old hard drive
Write Christmas thank-yous (gasp!)
Get wedding present for friend
Baby-proof house
Get Christmas boxes out of D1's room

A long-awaited catastrophe

Last summer, I bought a rocking chair for D1's room. It was at a garage sale, and even though I thought $30 was a bit much for an unfinished, slightly rickety rocker, it was as far as I could talk them down, and I really, really wanted a rocking chair.

What with one thing and another, I never did get around to refinishing it or strengthening it. The front cross-piece kept falling out and it felt kind of wobbly. Every time DOB came in to rock D1 before bedtime, he would comment, "I know this thing is going to fall apart sometime while I'm sitting in it."

I thought he was exaggerating the danger, perhaps overly-influenced by The Patriot.

Last night, as we were rocking through the last lullaby, a loud crack rang through the nursery and DOB and D1 were suddenly sitting at a very strange angle. I sheepishly extricated them. Sure enough, the chair had given way altogether.

I will look at the chair later today, but DOB thinks it will require paternal intervention for him to trust it again.

Growing up too slowly

Time magazine had an article on what it calls "twixters" (don't you hate attempts to coin trendy new words for societal phenomenons?): i.e., twentysomethings who still don't have a steady career or a family of their own, who enjoy the privileges of adults without wanting to take on any of the responsibilities. There is much debate on why this is, whether it's a good or a bad thing, and what to do about it if it's a bad thing. (DISCLAIMER: Following discussion pertains to society as a whole, not to any reader's particular actions. If the shoe doesn't fit, don't cram it on.)

Yes, it's a bad thing. The generation is very much like Susan of Narnia: "Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can." As adolescence gets pushed down younger and younger and stretched out for longer and longer, there is little room for the innocence of childhood or the responsibilities of adulthood.

So what's wrong with that? People were never designed to have pleasures without responsibilities--they were meant to go hand in hand. A stable society cannot handle a large group of people entirely devoted to their own self-actualization. Society requires a willingness to sacrifice for others, especially for the next generation. But in our age, those best equipped to bear and raise the next generation are doing their best to dodge the bullet, or at least put it off another decade, when they will find it a much heavier burden. Nor is their current lifestyle preparing them well to care for their own parents in later years. Not to mention the moral consequences of encouraging people to put at least two decades between the onset of sexual ability and the onset of sexual responsibility.

But there are good reasons why people are choosing this route. For one thing, they've been raised to believe they can be and do anything, and that the only measure of a lifestyle's validity is whether it makes them happy. With all those choices, of course it's harder to settle down than it was when your life path was mapped out for you from birth. Although social mobility has many advantages, one of the great benefits of traditions is they save so much time.

For another, education takes a long time in our society. An unjustifiably long time, in my opinion. Sure, our society is more complex than it was 150 years ago. But it's not that complex. Maybe great-great-grandpa only learned how to read, write and cipher--but he learned it in six years, and he learned it better than most people who have spent twelve years in our current education system. Maybe we do need longer to prepare ourselves, but sixteen years of full-time schooling should not be considered the bare minimum for a living-wage job. That information could be processed in a lot less time.

People also talk about the cost of living and how folks can't afford things starting out like they did in the 50's--but I suspect it's more the expectations of livings that have gone up. If young couples nowadays were willing to live in 1000-square foot houses, with a single tv set, one car, no cable, no internet, and no cell phones, I bet they'd find they could afford it, too.

All the trends indicate that this prolonged adolescence is likely to continue, however. So, the next question is, having gone ahead and grown up ourselves, what do we do to make sure our children do--and get out of the house before we're entirely feeble?

Me Neither, Said the Little Red Hen

We had DOB's youngest brother over for the weekend in celebration of his birthday. At lunchtime on Saturday the following conversation occurred:

QOC: I'm making roast for dinner. Do you guys want mashed potatoes or baked potatoes?

DOB: Oh, mashed potatoes!

B6: Yeah, mashed potatoes!

DOB: QOC's mashed potatoes are the best.

QOC: Well, I'm getting tired and mashed potatoes make more dishes than baked potatoes. So if we're going to have mashed potatoes, I'm going to need you guys to help me with the dishes.

DOB: Hey, baked potatoes with lots of butter and salt and pepper are really good--why don't we have baked potatoes?

B6: Yeah, let's have baked potatoes!

Actually I wound up being really, really tired by nightfall, and thus they wound up helping me with the dishes anyway. But there were less than there would have been.

Bar hopping

Being a member, albeit inactive, of two bars allows me to compare their various services. California is definitely the superior at member service, probably due to its having ten times as many members as Washington, and therefore, presumably, ten times as much money. To wit:

• Both bars' annual fees are due on or about February 1. However, California doesn't start charging you for being late until March 15, while Washington cracks down on anyone postmarked February 2.
• California only charges $50 for inactive status--and you can reduce that $10 more in optional deductions. Washington charges $117, and you can only reduce it by $1.13. (This may also suggest that the California Bar spends a lot more time on things entirely unrelated to law, such as promoting the legality of topless beaches. The Washington Bar doesn't do this because their beaches are too cold. Actually I suspect it's just that the Washington Bar, emboldened by the example of the WEA, is less honest about its lobbying activities.)
• California's fees statements are much better organized and more attractively laid out.

I discovered today that it is not too late to elect inactive status for DOB and thus drastically reduce his dues and spare us the trouble of him having to spend the entire day tomorrow doing CLE. So, hurrah!

D1 and the hallway, which looks ever so much better since DOB's mother finished painting the trim last week.

Snowy day, as viewed from the playpen.

Why I can't get stuff done

I was bemoaning to DOB last night about the slowness of my progress at such tasks as organizing the house. Just keeping up with the bare minimum of chores fills all my time; I can't imagine having a hobby or going out except for grocery shopping. Why did I have so much less time than everyone else?

Then he reminded me that I do have a part-time job. For some reason it never occurs to me that this factors into my time. I do it at home, and I do most of it before D1 even wakes up in the morning. And I do it for DOB--doesn't every good wife spend a few hours every morning doing data entry for her husband? But it's still time I don't spend on other things. So. It's OK.

I do sometimes remember to mention it to people who ask if I work. Which makes me wonder: why does it make me feel more significant to tell people I work part-time for DOB's firm--a job for which I am, with all due humility, vastly over-qualified--than it would to tell people I am a full-time housewife and mother, a job which I could study for my entire life and not begin to master? Why does our society place value only on activities which lead directly to monetary remuneration?

I think the slighting of the contribution of housewives is just a symptom of a value system that equates productivity with money and leisure with amusement (i.e. mindless self-indulgence). We need to revive an appreciation for leisure as a means by which we can become better people; and a definition of success which only has a small place for money and much larger places for health, good relationships, and a capacity to appreciate what is excellent.

Difficult question

Last week I gave D1 the stuffed Noah's Ark I found for her at a garage sale last summer. We had been reading about Noah in our morning Bible reading, and she had reached the age where she would enjoy putting in and pulling out small squishy objects.

We were playing with it yesterday and she was chewing enthusiastically on the lions when I noticed that one of the lions was losing its mane.

"Mommy needs to repair that," I remarked as I set it aside.

Then I thought about it some more. The animals in the ark should be one male and one female of each. Female lions don't have manes. Shouldn't I therefore remove the mane from the lion altogether and designate it the mama lion?

Then again, maybe that would make it more difficult for D1 to match the two animals. Plus, she loves the orange fuzzy mane. So maybe I should sew it back on.

The lion is left in limbo while I loiter.

Missing Papa

DOB is working late tonight. And we are not sure what to do without him. D1 doesn't seem to think the usual daytime routine of "play quietly on the floor while Mama works" is adequate for the evening. I am wracking my brain to remember what all those things DOB does with her in the evening that terrify me and set her squealing with delight. But I'm not very good with them. And if I had never watched DOB do them, I'm sure they never would even occur to me. Yet I'm equally sure they're important for her learning and growing.

On the other hand, I don't think she'd get a very well-balanced raising if DOB tried to do it alone, either. (I'll let him figure out what would never occur to him to do.) Just goes to show that a child needs a mama and a papa. Not just any assortment of adults who happen to live at her house. Not two adults who happen to want to raise her. Each parent--each gender of parent--brings something unique and important to the mix of parenting that's very hard to duplicate when they're gone.

Sometimes tragic circumstances mean children can't have both. But no other combination should ever be held up as an equivalent to having a mother and a father.

The Bible and Everything Else

Jesus is Lord of all things. There is no division between the sacred and the secular. God is the source of all truth. God's Word is the ultimate in revealed wisdom, and all human experience must be subjected to it.

I agree with all of these. So why do I so often find myself squirming when I look at curricula that take these ideas seriously, and purport to relate all of learning to God and His Word? Is the problem with them, or with me?

Let me try it from another angle. The Bible says we are to eat and drink to the glory of God. Jesus also instituted the Lord's Supper, ennobling the act of eating to become a way in which we have fellowship with God. Now, suppose that devout theologian combined these two truths and taught that every meal should be the Lord's Supper. Every child sitting down with a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich must comport himself as if he was partaking of the bread and the cup. Every time we ate strawberry ice cream, we should meditate on Christ's sacrifice as symbolized by the red of the strawberries.

This new practical theologian would be taking things a little too far. And in his zeal, I think he would be undermining the Lord's Supper. It does take us from the human need for physical nourishment to the human need for divine nourishment. But if it were not a special and sacred occasion, if it were simply our ordinary meals, we would cease to see it as a vehicle to Christ and start to treat it as simply a way to get full. (Seems like the Corinthians might have had a similar problem.)

Similarly, if we get too carried away with insisting that every scrap of human knowledge must be extracted from, tied to, or analogized with Scripture, we run the risk of treating the Bible as simply a vehicle to the knowledge we need to function, and not as it was primarily intended, a means to reveal God himself to us.

I have also seen this ideal carried into dishonesty. For instance, a teacher script for introducing the alphabet I saw once had the teacher essentially instructing the children that God had created capital letters. Now, even if I had assurance that writing was a matter of direct divine revelation, I would be a bit perplexed as to why God only revealed the truth about capital letters in the last millenium to the scribes of a handful of alphabets.

Worse yet is the area of history, where it is far too easy to turn every twist and turn of events into an illustration of this or that Biblical principle, ultimately leading us to the conclusion that if we're doing fairly well (and if we can afford all these books, we probably are), God must be on our side. Presumption, pride and dishonesty are not honoring to God, however much lip-service they may pay to him.

Besides, if there really is no distinction between the sacred and the secular, then we have no need to convert every topic by pasting a Bible verse on top of it. If everything has been created by God, then that in itself is reason enough to study it. I think we will find more and more of God's character as we delve deeper and deeper into whatever we study--but the connections are often subtle and hard to tack onto a third-grade text.

This is not to say that we shouldn't hold all learning accountable to God's Word, and reject anything that contradicts it. Or that we should relegate Bible to a distinct study and keep it out of all our other subjects. It's right and proper to make God the focus of all our life. But seeing God reveal himself through all his world needs to come naturally, not be forced to increase the "spiritual" appearance of our schoolbooks.

Disturbing evening

Friday evening D1 and I opened our January books from the book-of-the-month club conducted by my family for small grandchildren. (The book designated for me did not seem to be quite at my reading level, but it was distinguishable from D1's by being non-chewable.) After D1 had crumpled the wrapping paper and chewed appreciatively on her book for awhile, we took her into her bedroom to get her ready for bed.

Suddenly DOB started whacking her on the back and fishing in her mouth. "What's wrong?" I asked.

"She's got something in her mouth!" DOB exclaimed.

I pried her mouth open and looked in horror. "No, she doesn't, but the roof of her mouth has turned blue!" My mind raced, trying to think of what loathsome disease would turn the roof of the mouth blue.

"No, it hasn't," DOB exclaimed, and indicated I should try fishing in there myself. I stuck my finger in and sheepishly pulled out a piece of sky-blue wrapping paper.

A little bit later, I took her wet diaper into the bathroom, glanced at myself in the mirror, and gasped in despair. DOB came to see what was the matter.

"I've got wrinkles!" I declared, pointing at tiny lines on either side of my mouth.

"Oh, those are no big deal," DOB said, "I have them, too, see?" He pointed to his mouth, and then realized that his moustache covered any applicable evidence.

I do find it somewhat consoling, however, that I've never had a gray hair, whereas DOB has been having them since he was eleven. I guess we'll just spread the aging around.

Monday morning review

Household items, Good: DOB's dad fixed the vaccuum cleaner, so I should be able to keep D1 from wallowing in grime today. He also fixed the iron, which had broken last week as well (he's not sure how, but he took it apart and put it back together and now it works). I got a new sponge for my mop.

Household items, Bad: The screw in our evil bathtub drain has rusted out entirely. Home Depot workers could not identify the screw type to replace it, and the fittings are so different from normal bathtub drains that I'm not sure the whole shebang can be easily replaced. I'm not sure what to do next.

Organization, Good: I only have last night's and this morning's dishes to do this morning, less than usual on a Monday.

Organization, Bad: I still haven't finished putting away Christmas presents--I have a whole box of books still to deal with.

Schedule, Good: I've been up and dressed and had breakfast before D1 wakes up every morning for a week.

Schedule, Bad: Owing to a church business meeting and then how long it takes us to eat supper on Sunday nights, we got to bed two and a half hours late last night. We've come to the conclusion that we're going to have to have popcorn night some other night of the week. It just takes too long to chew.

Seismic shift

While D1 was playing on the floor this morning, everything suddenly clicked and she realized: if I roll over, I can get other places. All day long she's been rolling back to front and round again, trying to get new places and crowing with delight at her own cleverness.

The change is almost as dramatic as having her born (though significantly less effort on my part). She's got her own ideas and her own means of locomotion. She's a person.

She's a person who wallows on the floor a lot. True to Murphy, today was the day my vaccuum stopped sucking and the sponge disintegrated on my mop.

Annoying parental post

So, what cute and clever things about D1 can we drone on about?

• She finally rolled over from front to back! She still seems to find the whole process a bit mystifying, though. We need more playing on the floor time.
• She has started babbling. Not only is she babbling, she even seems to be learning Spanish. She said, "Hola, mama" quite distinctly the other morning. Not sure where she's learning it, since I don't even have Eres Tu Mi Mama? to read to her, and my Spanish doesn't go much farther than that.
• If you show her that you've hidden a spoon under a cloth, she knows that she should be able to pull the cloth aside and find the spoon.
• She can pick up her squishy blocks now, whereas a month ago she could only bat at them in frustration.
• She has a variety of laughs, including the uproarious being-tickled laugh and a special malevolent cackle that probably means she's plotting something sinister.
• She's developed a very healthy appetite in the last week or so, and so far hasn't turned up her nose at anything offered, except when not hungry. (I appreciate my mother-in-law's advice to mix all the food together from the start; that way the baby never has a chance to notice she doesn't like something.)
• Also, she looks incredibly cute in this hat:

Chesterton (of course) on education

"Education is only truth in a state of transmission; and how can we pass on the truth if it has never come into our hands?"

"Education is violent because it is creative. It is creative because it is human. It is as ruthless as playing on the fiddle; as dogmatic as drawing a picture; as brutal as building a house. In short, it is what all human action is: it is an interference with life and growth."

"Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school to-day the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. . . . Many a school boasts of having the last ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea; for the first idea is that even innocence, divine as it is, may learn something from experience."

Resolutions and goals

According to the people in my life who pay attention to such things, resolutions are the more vague, general ideas, while goals are specific, achievable things. Here are some. (Yes, it's late, but so is everything right now. See Resolution #1.)

Resolutions
1. I resolve not to get annoyed because I did not accomplish today everything I hoped to accomplish in the upcoming week, year, or lifetime.
2. I resolve not to worry about problems that cannot possibly occur for at least five more years.
3. I resolve to enjoy what I have instead of saving it all for some unattainable future.

Goals
1. Always use decorative notepads when writing grocery lists. I keep receiving these, and is anyone likely to hope for a giant collection of carrot notepads when I die? I think not. Might as well use them up now, and if I run out, I can use the plain paper then. (See Res. 3.)
2. Get out some of the new dishtowels I got for my wedding instead of continuing to use the ragged ones I've been using for the last five years. (See Res. 3.)
3. Learn how to fry an egg. I can boil them, poach them, scramble them, and fling them against the wall, but I can't fry them. Time to learn.
4. Clean out all the closets in the house. (And not get annoyed if it takes all year. See Res. 1.)
5. Get published somewhere new.
6. Get a working internal-day schedule and working monthly/quarterly schedule for less regular household tasks.
7. Create adequate processes so that the desks get cleared off and stay cleared off.

We start with a bad example

Here is an example of education which is not serving good ends, on two fronts. If you're not a clicker, the article concerns a Korean practice of sending the mother and children to the US for years so that the children can get an American education, while the father remains in Korea working to pay for it.

The original problem is with the Korean education system, which is so oriented to achievement on a narrow range of topics that children have no time to develop in other areas, sleep, or do anything but cram from kindergarten to university. Keep that in mind next time you hear about US math scores being low. Our schools could certainly do better, but there is more to life than high test scores, and in trying to fix our problems we had better remember that.

I don't think the parents of these families have found an acceptable alternative, however. In an effort to get their children English and an education that leaves room for development of the whole human being, they have taken away the most key ingredient to a whole human being: a whole family. This is probably rarer in America, but it certainly happens, especially where the children have special athletic or performance abilities. I don't believe any educational end justifies tearing apart a family. You don't make whole people by breaking families.

The end of education

I have been rather displeased with myself over the last several months because I lacked the focus to learn anything of much substance. I read few books, because I couldn't decide which ones were worth reading. My thoughts were dull and scattered. So I decided I needed to pick something to study and study it.

I considered making this topic financial planning, which is what DOB is about to embark upon further study of, but acquiring a CFP didn't seem nearly as useful to me, and the required studies were not intriguing at all. So, although it would be fun to study things together, I decided to pick something different.

I finally decided on the topic of education. This is a topic that is relevant to my life as a homeschooling mother. (A career I consider myself to have already embarked upon. After all, today we will have lessons in Bible, pre-reading skills, music, physical education, and eating bananas with our fingers. On the last we still have a lot of work to do.) But, given sufficient freedom it can encompass almost anything of interest to me and provides lots of room for abstract philosophizing.

It's ironic, because the part of my former job I generally liked the least was doing research on education. But those were specific, concrete topics, like "How effective is value-added assessment at determining teacher quality?" or "How is No Child Left Behind being implemented in Washington schools?" Way too practical for me. Plus, immensely frustrating because I just felt that the whole system was wrong from stem to stern, so there was little point in finding miniscule areas for improvement.

Now I can start at the very beginning. Education really boils down to two questions: What is the end goal of education--what kind of person do we want education to produce? What is the means of education--what are the best techniques to achieve that kind of a person?

Lots of room for abstract theorizing there. Some of which will probably make its way here, so please bear with me.

The screaming you hear . . .

is me opening the property tax statement.

Sometimes being a grownup really stinks.

Sleep, blessed sleep

For some reason, D1 had a hard time sleeping after we got home. Actually, I can think of several reasons: change in time zones, being up all night with sickness, being hungry because she lost weight while sick, sleeping in strange places. She was convinced that if she awoke at, say, 2 a.m. and found herself bored, sufficient squalling ought to bring several adults to entertain her.

It took us nearly a week to convince her otherwise. But last night, apparently, she finally got it. And I finally got a decent night's sleep for the first time in two and a half weeks.

Ahhhhhhh.

Et tu, Brute?

You believe in doing the right thing, but aren't
always sure what that is.


What is Your Shakespearian Tragic Flaw?
brought to you by Quizilla

Messes of varying degrees

The house is a mess. But the degree to which it is a mess makes a huge difference when it comes to how traumatic that state is. I have identified three degrees of messiness:

First Degree Messiness: The mess is shallow, consisting of things that have an obvious place to go and can be put there without much thought. Examples: one meal's worth of dishes; a pile of already-read newspapers; a bunch of toys that all go back in the same box. On the day after a party, the house tends to be in a first degree state of messiness (unless you have friends like my aunt's and they throw jello in the heat registers): a quick pick-up, and you can enjoy the Especially Clean pre-party state all to yourself. First degree messiness really isn't troubling, as long as one has a reasonable amount of physical energy to deal with it. No brainpower required.

Second Degree Messiness: This is a deeper mess, consisting of things that may have a place to go, but it's not entirely obvious or they have to be sorted out before they can get there or there's just so much it's overwhelming. Examples: a pile of bills; one weekend's worth of dishes; the still-packed luggage from a trip. Any first degree mess that sits around past your tolerance level (for me, about a day and a half) automatically becomes a second degree mess. Second degree messiness is probably the most depressing messiness because it is at once highly visible and requires both mental and physical energy to deal with it.

Third Degree Messiness: This is the mess that has dug in its heels and sits defiantly sticking its tongue out at you. The mess that has taken on a life of its own. It is a mess that has no legitimate place to go, until you make one for it, and usually it's sitting in the way of you making it. Examples: Boxes never unpacked from the last move; a pile of magazine clippings; whatever it is that's in the back of that closet you never look in. Everybody (except Martha Stewart) has a spot of third degree messiness somewhere in their life. Third degree messiness can be more easily ignored than the other two, both because it usually is somewhere outside the normal lines of vision and because you've adapted your life to ignore it. The downside is, third degree messiness tends to spawn greater second and first degree messiness, because it takes up space that belongs to something else. And it tends to grow on its own volition.

Most of the mess I'm annoyed by right now is a second degree post-trip messiness. But it's reminded me of all the third degree messiness that I've been wanting to deal with for months and been making very little headway on. What I should do is either deal with it or go take a nap. But it's so much more fun to analyze it.

The more presentable aspects of the trip in pictures

This should have been Christmas morning, but wasn't. Oh well, we still look sharp.

DOB demonstrates to the niephlings how to build a train out of my grandparents' colored blocks.

D1 models the traditional reindeer antlers, which are getting a bit battered after three Christmases. Note how well she sits up now.

D1 reads the newspaper while waiting for her parents to finish packing and go. (This picture was not staged. Honest.)

Smart women, hard choices

Another study on the obvious has come out, confirming that smart women have a harder time finding spouses than smart men do. (Thanks to Amey for the link.) I know the problem full well, having had many spurts of mingled despising and envy of those big-eyed airheads who somehow won the hearts of guys who apparently saw me only as a nicely-accessorized brain. Fortunately that did not last forever and I found an intelligent guy who actually wanted an intelligent wife, etc., etc., happily ever after.

Except even then it's not quite that simple. People will blame men for being misogynists and feeling "threatened" by smart women, and no doubt that is sometimes true. But the smart men are probably smart enough to realize something, at least instinctively, about the nature of marriage: marriage is meant to be a union, and union cannot survive two separate life focuses. If the husband is off having his great career and achievements and pursuing his goals, and the wife is off having her great career and achievements and pursuing her goals, they aren't really spouses anymore, they're just two people who sleep together fairly often.

No wonder a smart man doesn't want a woman who will simply pursue her current life course without any reference to his. So instead he finds someone who doesn't really have any particularly grand goals and will support his. Even if she doesn't have a clue about quantum physics, they're happy, because she's helping him quantumize better. They're in it together.

One could theoretically imagine a parallel universe in which smart women could generally do the same thing, and find a domesticated house husband who would cheer them on. One occasionally finds a situation in which it works even in this universe, but in general, a man who will simply support his wife's goals and ambitions is a wuss. No self-respecting woman would want to marry him.

The ideal situation, however, is neither of the above. It's one where both husband and wife have the same goal and work towards it together. A smart man and a smart woman, working towards a goal that they both share, is a beautiful (and dangerous) thing.

But it's still going to require some sacrifice on the woman's part. At some point, she's going to have to deal with some hard questions: Am I willing to just be part-of-his-thing, or will I always wish I was my own thing? Wouldn't I accomplish so much more without being weighed down with kids and all the things that accompany marriage? What if he shifts focus--do I go along with him or strike out on my own?

Sometimes a woman must choose between "greatness" and goodness, between success and happiness. All the media coverage goes for the successful, but I still think I'd rather choose happiness.

I don't have any of our pictures downloaded yet, but Jeremy captured a great set of pictures while we were visiting them. They're all here.

We are home

We got mostly better; we saw some of the people we wanted to see, though far from all; we made our return journey; we are home. The only excitement on the trip home was when we were driving from the airport and I was trying to figure out how to apply sour cream from the squeezy package to my Wendy's baked potato. I aimed inaccurately and wound up shooting sour cream across the windshield, instrument panel, steering wheel, and DOB. In his fatigued state, DOB was most perplexed as to why cracks started appearing across the front of the car and simultaneously I started laughing hysterically.

It's good to be home. It's even better to be able to look forward to being home. Last Christmas, neither of us wanted to come back. The only thing that made us do it--besides the threat of wasting plane tickets--was the hope that perhaps we might be able to buy this house and get out of the apartment. This time, we had much to anticipate upon coming home: a house, a church, our family out here. I realized while out there that I was even a little homesick. I even missed the corn fields. It seems like there were a few too many trees in Washington.

The Journey Continues

We got all over the stomach ailment. A few family members seemed to catch it, but they got over it quickly. We spent one day recuperating and one day visiting Marsha (who is supposed to blog again once she gets internet hooked up at home), sampling her bookshelves and eating more pull-apart bread than was good for me.

And then D1 developed a funny cough which turned into a full-blown fever and congested lungs that has left her miserable and kept us more or less up all night. (DOB more--now he's gone to sleep and I'm taking over.) She seems to be doing a little better this morning. So far neither of us has gotten definitively sick with anything related.

This is starting to sound really whiny. I'm sure in another five years this trip will become an amusing legend, like the year my sister-in-law's family came for two weeks over Christmas and brought a flu that kept them and us all flat on our backs for the entire visit. That was the second Christmas after they got married, too--maybe there's something that condemns those Christmases to misery and woe.

Anti-socialism

As I discovered shortly after posting, I was infected with the same ailment as D1, although with a different manifestation. We spent Christmas at the trailer formerly occupied by my late grandmother, trying to avoid contaminating various relatives and trying to get D1 to keep something down, the latter of which did not occur with any degree of success until late afternoon.

In the evening, DOB determined he would sit up with D1 as long as possible and let me get some sleep. About 3 a.m. he awakened me and traded places; within an hour or two it was evident that it was not just his turn to sleep, but his turn to be sick.

Fortunately D1 and I seem to be doing much better, so it appears to be relatively short-lived. It is frustrating to be infected with a most unfestive disease on Christmas, and a most anti-social disease on the one week out of the year one has to visit half one's friends and relations.

Christmas Morning

Every set of new parents has to have their first experience with the stomach flu sometime. This morning is ours. I awoke at about 3 to hear gagging noises; upon inspection I discovered D1 had thrown up all over herself and her playpen. We cleaned her up and I fed her, whereupon she promptly threw up again. She still seems fairly happy and is sleeping peacefully now. I am watching for awhile and then DOB will take his turn.

An odd way to celebrate Christmas, and yet appropriate. After all, Christmas is about how the Lord of all time and space chose to become a baby too helpless to roll out of his own vomit.

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.

Merry Christmas.

The Incredible Journey

We are now in Washington. My brother now has a wireless network, so I can blog while sitting by the fire, which is good because it's the only warm place in the house. Sometime they should stop upgrading the electronics around here and install some old-fashioned central heating.

Our initial journey plan was relatively simple. However, when complicated by the Great Storm of the Year, it eventually assumed epic proportions, like Kon-tiki, or Shackleton's Antarctic expedition. Maybe ours didn't last as long, but they didn't have a baby along.

It really started the afternoon before, with Ronald trying to come home early, but with his windshield freezing over so that he couldn't see except hunched at odd angles, with the heater up full blast in an attempt to help the windshield thaw. By the time he made it home, he just oozed out of the car on the garage floor and I had to sweep him up and feed him cheese sandwiches until he was able to face the world again. Then we went out to the chiropractor, probably useless considering the driving conditions, and picked up two siblings to take over the housecleaning for me.

Once we got home we ran around frantically finishing packing and eating, because we had decided to drive up to Columbus that night. The roads were exceedingly bad with several inches of snow, it was sleeting, and once again the windshield was freezing over. When we first got on the freeway, we could not see more than vague shapes out of the window, so we both made our best guess as to where the ruts were. After about ten minutes of driving blind with truckers trying to squash us, the ice finally cleared enough for small patches of visibility. The trip took about twice as long as usual and about ten times as much energy. We finally arrived in Columbus about eleven and spent the night at a friend's condo. Abbey, meanwhile, was having a great time. A car ride and getting to sleep in Mama and Papa's bed!

We left for the airport with ample time, contrary to our reputation, and arrived just after they had restored power, but before the computers were quite functional. After we finally got our boarding passes, we made our way to the Northwest gates, where we discovered there was one agent to do everything--rebook passengers, unload planes, and load them up again. And all the flights were delayed or canceled.

DOB called around and found us an alternate set of flights, through Detroit instead of Memphis, that should get us in only a few hours late--while people around us were calling and finding nothing until the following evening. So we set up camp near a plug for the laptop and awaited the later flight. Around us the airport began to assume the semi-settled look of a refugee camp, albeit an exceptionally well accesorized one.

Finally the long line had shortened at the counter while the agent got a flight boarded, so I went to stand in line so that we could get our new boarding passes. Just before I made it to the head of the line, the agent had to go to the bathroom. Then when she got back, the Detroit flight had arrived and she had to go greet the plane. Finally a second agent came and I told her what I needed.

"That flight has canceled," she said. "But I'll try to get you standby on this one. Just hang around and if I have room I'll call your name. I should know in five minutes."

I called DOB and told him to pack up and get ready in case we were called. He started doing so, then called me back, "I think D1 needs changed," he said.

We decided to hold off as long as it didn't seem to be leaking. Sure enough, our name was called and we whisked aboard. I thought about changing her in the air, but on the Columbus/Detroit flight there is a grand total of five minutes when one is neither in ascent nor descent. So I gave up the attempt and waited until we landed. There was nothing leak-prone, so our worry was in vain.

Once we got our Detroit tickets, we discovered to our great delight that we had first class tickets. We forgot that they actually feed people in first class, though, so we went ahead and ate several tacos and a burrito. Then we got on board and cheerfully tackled the meal they gave us.

Up until this point, D1 had been having a pretty good day. Lots of being held by Mama and Papa, and her favorite toys. By this time she was getting pretty tired, so whenever she couldn't sleep she was a bit fussy, but fortunately she was too young to have the loud, agonizing cries that can be heard over airplane engines.

So we arrived in Seattle and went to check on the status of our bags, which we had been told would most likely head through Memphis and arrive the next day. While DOB was giving descriptions to the agent, he said, "Go check and at least see if they came through."

And just as I set off, he called after me, "There one is!"

I raced for the machine and grabbed it off. Sure enough, it was ours. I checked which one it was, and called back to DOB, "We got the diapers!"

Within a few minutes, all the other bags had appeared and we were only five hours late, quite an achievement, considering.

One day left

One day left to:

* Wash all laundry
* Pack
* Take down Christmas tree
* Pay all bills, make deposit, and buy things needed for trip
* Finish wrapping
* Clean house
* Go to chiropractor

Oh, and we're having an ice storm, so I'm not yet positive DOB's sister will be able to make it up to help me. Here goes!

D1: An Interview

In honor of D1's six-month birthday, the Duchy conducts an interview:

Duchy: In your long life, you must have seen many changes. What stands out to you?

D1: The thing that concerns me most is the massive global cooling trend I've seen. When I was little, Mama and I could go outside in t-shirts. Now she has to put me in this giant fuzzy suit that makes it really hard to move, and we hardly ever go outside any more. If it gets much colder, I don't know what I'm going to do. We definitely need to find out what's wrong with our weather.

Duchy: What do you look back upon as your greatest accomplishment?

D1: I have to say that being able to sit up on my own has been a great thrill. I still fall over sometimes, but it's much easier to play with stuff this way. Learning how to grab stuff has been good, too.

Duchy: With a new year ahead of you, what do you look forward to doing in it?

D1: My main goal for the new year is to figure out this standing and walking thing. It looks really fun. I'd also like to teach Mama and Papa to understand what I'm saying. They can be pretty dense sometimes, but I think they'll learn.

Duchy: Let's shift gears and talk about entertainment. What do you find most amusing?

D1: Mama and Papa keeps these carrot toys on their bed. When Mama makes them dance and talk, that really cracks me up. I mean, a dancing carrot! Can you imagine? Pretty much anything Papa does is hilarious, too.

When I'm by myself, I think it's really funny to make gagging noises. It keeps Mama paying attention to me.

Duchy: And in conclusion, what words of wisdom do you have for us?

D1: It's ok to bite spoons, but not the other things that feed you.

In front of the "window" in the Christmas play. Unfortunately I forgot to get a picture after DOB was in costume. D1 is so happy because she has found her shoe. The color is nasty because it was too dark in the church and there was nowhere to stand where the flash was close enough.

Weekend Recap

• Office party was dull. They don't believe in entertainment, just standing around and talking. The food was decent but one can only eat so many appetizers.
• Church party was fun. The herb shredder proved surprisingly popular among the men, who were mostly trying to figure out what it was. The final owner dubbed it a manure spreader--for houseplants, I guess. The books were not at all appreciated by their initial owner, but one of DOB's brothers stole them. The pastor's 3-year-old granddaughter took a strong liking to The Communist Manifesto. I need to keep an eye on her. The Sesame Street characters were rejected outright (only the older children participated in it and they didn't want them), so we had to shamefacedly take them back home.
• As for what we got, DOB discovered that his mother had number 39, one brother had 40, and he had 41. This enabled him to orchestrate a sequential steal so that he could secure a set of eight water guns. (Third stealer keeps.) He worries that this ploy may have been too obvious, but I assure him that no one would ever guess that his mother didn't earnestly desire the water guns for herself. I wound up with a scented Christmas pillow which will decorate our garage for the next year until the scent dissipates; then it will go quite well in our house. D1 got a small bear and cocoa cup.
• Saturday morning DOB and one of his brothers tested how many squirts each water gun had so that they could distribute them equitably between two teams next summer. He once asked me, "Do normal people spend this much effort having fun?" I didn't think so, but my experience with normal people is fairly limited.
• Saturday afternoon we went over to DOB's parents' house and played various games, including Mafia, Charades, and one that involved hitting people with a rolled-up newspaper. D1 found this all highly entertaining. I am dangerous with a rolled-up newspaper.
• Sunday was a long, but good day. I missed DOB's Christmas story telling because I thought D1 should not be permitted to talk all the way through it like she did at Thanksgiving. We sang a Christmas medley. The play and cantata were good, and we cleaned up all our mess.
• It would be the day it got down to zero that I forgot to even get a blanket for D1. Fortunately I had an extra skirt with me for the cantata. Few babies get a black velvet blanket, so I hope she appreciates how privileged she is.

Begone, profound thoughts

No more thinking deeply permitted between now and Christmas, because if I do I will not get Christmas presents ready or remember to pack half the things we should take.

We have two Christmas parties this afternoon, office and church, both of which I must take something to. This is where all those cookies made earlier come in very handy.

One of them is also a white elephant gift exchange. (DOB's dad, if you read this, at least don't tell the rest of the family until the party is over.) We made up a "set" of books from our duplicate book collection: Democracy in America, The Communist Manifesto, and The Day Lincoln was Shot, for a complete overview of political history. I'm taking an herb shredder that has never worked for me, and D1 (if she is allowed to participate) will contribute a box of Sesame Street-themed Duplos that came with a large garage sale haul. (Mama and Papa don't care for Sesame Street.)

I spilled water on the laptop and it's striking keys randomly without my permission. Once we get back from our trip, I am supposed to locate a new hard drive for the other computer so we can use it, but in the meantime I must hobble along fighting the current one in order to check email (can't set up personal email on the office computer I use most of the time). Our computer situation is starting to bear an eerie resemblance to our normal car situation.

A disturbing subject

Yesterday's diaper was nothing--nothing--compared to today's. I know I've been spoiled. From about two months until last week, D1 had one dirty diaper a week. Maybe two right in a row. A "blowout," I thought, was when a small stain leaked through onto her clothes (although occasionally we had a worse issue when she was in disposables).

Now I know what a blowout really is. It's the kind of diaper that creates the need for a laundry load of its own. One that takes three cycles. It's a diaper that demands nuclear containment technology.

The way I see it, I have three options:

1) Modify diapering techniques
2) Quit feeding D1 solid foods
3) Potty train her

I'll probably start with 1, but I'm not ruling anything out.

My niephlings always saved their most explosive diaper episodes for cross-country plane trips. I'm growing more and more apprehensive about our flight next week. Does impeccable timing run in the family?

The Messy Family

This has nothing to do with more sweet potato stories, nor with the colossal diaper I just changed (the kind that requires a bath, change of clothes for Mom, and redecorating the nursery).

Rather it pertains to this excellent interview (thanks to the Joneses for the link) on what the Biblical concept of family should be. Too often in defending the family against the encroachments of a culture that is defining it into irrelevance, Christians have acted as if the mom, dad, brother, sister, all beautiful and smiling model is the biblical standard of a family.

To see where this concept leads, here's a Washington Post article linked to by the Worldmagblog yesterday on fertility clinics offering gender selection. One of the proponents asks, "Why shouldn't patients have the right to choose this? It's one of the most basic rights in our society that we can build our families the way we wish."

Well, no, actually one of the most basic things you do not have a right to is compelling other people to fit your model of who they should be. Killing (or perpetually freezing) half your children so that you can have the kind of baby you want is not a fundamental right. (And I think this pertains to infertility as well. I cannot understand how Christians can think killing some of their children so that they can have their "own" baby--when there are so many babies out there who need them--is justified.)

One of the things I found truly chilling about the article, though, was the realization that the only current ethical debate is over whether it's alright for parents to pick a child's gender just because they want to. As an example of established ethical practices, the article said, "So far, most of the couples doing this either suffer from infertility or want to avoid passing on devastating genetic diseases, primarily ailments such as muscular dystrophy that afflict boys more often than girls."

I was breezing along through when I stopped and realized, "Wait a minute---that's us." DOB's disease, although less severe than muscular dystrophy, is genetic, and does indeed affect boys more often than girls. Apparently it would be ethical (and to many people's minds, no doubt preferable), for us to make all of our babies in petri dishes, and then kill the boys so we'd have less likelihood of passing on the disease.

This view of the family as designer perfection and the "anybody who wants to love each other and live together are a family" both have the same flaw: they say that we humans can define what is and should be a family. But God says the family is something He joins together. And the family God joins together is a good thing, and a thing with boundaries, but it's rarely a neat thing: it's caring for the old and the sick as well as the young and the healthy; it's welcoming the child who came at an inconvenient time or with inconvenient features; it may mean seeking out and taking in those who have nothing to recommend them but the fact that God loves them. That's a family.

And still more random observations

Our house is done the wrong way around. They should have put the kitchen in the east, so that I would have the shining morning sun motivate me to clean it. Then we wouldn't have the computer room on this side, where the morning glare is highly annoying.

DOB is directing the church Christmas play and also playing the role of a character whose tin is missing a few cookies. He's good at it. During the last scene of the play, when he's been caught just short of a DUI conviction, he looks so guilty and forlorn I have a hard time suppressing the urge to march on stage, drag him home, and make him feel better.

I, meanwhile, am set designer and prop manager. Since the play is set in a Goodwill store, there are a whole lotta props to manage. And my "Goodwill" posterboard letters on the "window" keep falling down, no matter what I tape them with. Tape doesn't stick well to cloth, but I'm not sure what else to use.

Random Observations

It's snowing. Although I hate snow in March, I love snow in December. As long as it doesn't interfere with travel. Yesterday it just blew around, but this morning it's starting to build up deep and thick and even, in good King Wenceslas-y tradition. (One of these days I'm going to look up when the feast of Stephen is, too.)

D1 is starting to get the concept of swallowing food. The novelty of fixing it for her has worn off and I am looking forward to her being able to eat what we are eating.

I don't like reading instruction manuals (recipe books, how-to-books, child-rearing guides, etc.) for instructions. However, I find them quite entertaining as fiction.

What I don't like about Santa Claus

There is one thing that really does bug me about Santa Claus. It's not all the fanciful stuff; it's the very hard-nosed practical part of Santa. It's his list.

As we all know, Santa is making his list, checking it twice, going to find out who's naughty or nice. If you're bad, you'll get nuttin' for Christmas. Or maybe a lump of coal or a switch.

A man popping down the chimney and bringing gifts can easily be a fun supplement to the true meaning of Christmas. But a man who brings gifts only to the good girls and boys is directly contrary to the true meaning of Christmas.

Christmas is about God sending the gift of his Son, and the promise of eternal life and joy, to all the bad boys and girls. Christmas is about how we were all on the naughty list, and so Jesus came to give us everything beyond our wildest dreams. Santa Claus blesses us for our works; Jesus blesses us through his free grace.

Funny how every religion and system of life that rejects Christ, and even those that turn their eyes aside from him for a moment, wind up right there. The good people get good stuff, the bad people get bad stuff. We can save ourselves if we just behave.

I've been a bad girl this year, like last year and the years before. But Jesus came for me, anyway.

Confession is good for the soul

(And entertaining for one's friends)

Last Saturday we were going to take cookie plates to the neighbors on our way out to the Christmas program rehearsal. It was time to go, DOB was loading up the car, and I took D1 back to change her one last time. She was already all dressed in her snowflake overalls, suitable for Christmas-cookie delivery.

When I took her diaper off, I decided to let it air a little to combat the diaper rash she'd broken out with that day. (I still labor under the delusion that every time she has a diaper rash I have failed in my duties.) After a few minutes I started slathering on Desitin and was about to put the fresh diaper on when she wet. All over. She soaked her outfit, my outfit, the changing pad, and the carpet.

I mopped up what I could, took her outfit off, and then decided now that she'd already wet everywhere, she might as well air a little bit longer while I went and changed. My skirt was wet, so I changed it. But my blouse didn't go with my new skirt, so I had to change that. Then my socks didn't go, so I had to change them. I was just about done (one boot left to put on) when DOB went into the nursery and exclaimed in horror: "Where did you get this?"

D1 had grabbed the package of Desitin, which I had left on the floor, and was happily chewing on it. DOB took it away and I checked her mouth for remnants. Judging from her usual difficulty in getting normal food down, and the emptiness of the package to begin with, I decided that we probably did not need to call poison control, although I remained concerned for the rest of the day. DOB brought a washcloth and we wiped her hands off so she wouldn't get any more in her mouth.

Since it was high time to get going, I got out a less-well-suited outfit and started to put D1's diaper on, but just before I did so, she wet again. Fortunately this time I stayed out of reach.

Later on that evening, while I was changing her at church, she did it a third time.

I've read that you can condition even a very small baby to associate relieving themselves with a particular phrase or sound of your choosing, and then potty-train them. I have never tried it out, but if D1 associates anything, it's probably, "AAHHHHKKK!"

YR Party

Last night we had the Young Republicans Christmas party. It came off surprisingly well, considering I sent out the wrong address. (Turns out the host's address was listed wrong in our contact list, and since his email was down he never got the invitation to know it was wrong.) We hope we didn't permanently lose any members who were unable to find it, but we had a good turnout of people who wandered up and down until they found the right house number.

The keynote event of the night was a donkey pinata, which we were going to beat with a flip-flop. (You figure it out.) Fortunately the night was warm and dry enough to take it outside, as our host's mother did not want a pinata in her living room. Unfortunately the best place to hang it was a tree whose branch was a little too high for anyone to toss the rope over, finally necessitating the use of a stepladder to hang it. Also no one involved in hanging the donkey (my hands were full with D1) noticed the nifty little plastic loop to hang it with, and instead hung it around the neck. The general visual effect of the guys stringing the pinata up in the tree was that of a nighttime lynching.

The guys quickly rejected the flip-flop as being too wimpy an implement for pinata-beating. Instead they requisitioned DOB's cane. By the second or third whack, a beheaded, three-legged donkey went soaring across the street. They took the carcase inside and left it on the living room floor without bothering to actually whack a hole in the side big enough for the candy to come out. The entertainment factor was plenty high enough without the candy. It's surprising that such a violent custom is still considered socially acceptable.

Eating with baby

At some point in my prenatal visits, one of the nurses took me aside and encouraged me, even if nursing proved to be difficult, to persevere because it really was worthwhile for the baby. This puzzled me, because I never thought it was that big of a deal, and sure enough, (for me at least) it always seemed like by far the easiest available option. Babies are born instinctively sucking, and who wants to get up and fix a bottle at 2 a.m.?

What the nurse should have warned me about was the perseverance needed to introduce a baby to solid foods. Let us consider a sample encounter:

1:45 p.m. Mom decides to start Baby on sweet potatoes. She peels and chops a sweet potato and puts it on the stove to cook. (Yes, jars would be easier but I can't bring myself to spend the money and distrust the nutritional content. I was going to save the sweet potatoes until I was cooking them for dinner anyway, but she was so hungry I thought I should speed things up.)

1:55 p.m. Mom gets Baby up and starts nursing her. They sing Christmas carols together. All is well.

2:20 p.m. Mom smells smoke.

2:25 p.m. Mom decides that the tops of the sweet potato chunks are still OK; scrapes them off and mashes them. Baby eats toys.

2:30 p.m. Mom puts Baby in high chair, rolls up sleeve, and puts on the largest and most stained bib.

2:31:00 p.m. Mom puts spoonful of sweet potatoes in Baby's mouth.

2:31:15 p.m. Baby makes strange face and gagging sounds.

2:31:30 p.m. Mom wonders if Baby is really ready for solid food.

2:32:00 p.m. Mom decides to try another spoonful and loads it up.

2:32:15 p.m. Large chunk of slobbery sweet potato emerges from Baby's mouth. Mom tries, vainly, to catch it with the already-full spoon before it splatters on the bib.

2:32:30 p.m. Baby makes cooing sounds and opens mouth for more food.

2:32:45 p.m. Mom scrapes what she can off the bib and mouth and resubmits it.

2:33-2:36 p.m. Repeat.

2:37 p.m. Baby decides to chew on thumb. Gets sweet potato all over hand, whence it rapidly spreads to sleeve and tray.

2:38-2:40 p.m. More of the same. Baby chews some on the other thumb, too.

2:41 p.m. Mom looks at fragments remaining in bowl, on bib, face and hands, and concludes that a small portion of sweet potato may have been swallowed. She waits for baby to finish processing last bite and ponders whether it makes more sense to take the bib off first, allowing the face to contaminate the clothes, or to wipe the face off first, allowing the bib to recontaminate the face.

2:43 p.m. Confident the last bite has been swallowed, Mom manages to get the bib off and face washed without too much cross-contamination. Mom gives baby toys and sets about straightening the kitchen.

2:45 p.m. Baby spits last bite of sweet potato all over toys and clothes.

Amazing facts about DOB

Actually, only one fact. Two humorous stories. (At least I find them humorous.)

Fact: DOB is not one of those ordinary mortals who puts his pants on one leg at a time, like everyone else. He lies on his back and puts both legs in at the same time.

Story #1: A few weeks ago, DOB came home reporting that he had had some incredibly tasty pumpkin cookies at the office. They were flat and crispy, he said, which puzzled me, as my experience with pumpkin cookies was that they were puffy and cakey. So I told him to get me the recipe and I would try it some time. Earlier this week, he forwarded an email with a cookie recipe. I IM'd him back: "I thought you said they were pumpkin cookies. This is a sugar cookie recipe!"

His response: "Well, they looked like pumpkins."

Last year my aunt made hippopotamus-shaped cookies for Christmas. Wonder what he thought was in those. The recipe was good, though.

Story #2: The scene is the Duchy master bedroom, at a time way past anyone's bedtime. QOC is already in bed, half-asleep, while DOB wanders around contemplating the meaning of life and getting ready for bed.

DOB: Hey, what are these white globs of powder on the bed?

QOC: I don't know, probably powdered sugar that stuck to my skirt when I was making the icing.

DOB: Hmm. They look kind of like soap flakes. Hope they're not soap flakes, that would be gross. (He puts one in his mouth.)

(DOB dances around the room, making horrible faces and finally dashing for the sink to wash his mouth out. QOC is helpless with laughter.)

QOC: You know, that would be a really interesting way to poison someone--just leave globs of arsenic lying about waiting for them to taste them.

DOB: You made me eat soap! You deceived me into thinking it was powdered sugar!

QOC: I did not. I said it was probably powdered sugar. If there was a seventy-five percent chance of it being powdered sugar, then there's still a twenty-five percent chance of it being soap flakes without me lying.

DOB: Hmmm, there are eight globs left. I wonder which two are powdered sugar.

Cookies for all

We had our mothers with small children cookie bake, with a total of six children and four adults. (I borrowed DOB's sister to increase the adult tally.) It went well. No one broke anything but cookies, and nothing got iced but cookies. And we didn't burn any pans. Or any fingers.

Clockwise, starting with the green ones: Rumprints, Moon Rocks, Candy Canes, Gingerbread Spritz, sugar cookies, and Krumkake.

We only made the Moon Rocks and sugar cookies today. Some notes for future years:

Never make candy cane cookies alone. Way too tedious.
Next time you see Christmas cookie tins for $.10 at a garage sale, buy them. Duh.
Malinda's frosting for the rumprints is much tastier. And the green really isn't all that appetizing.
Small children have no concept of spreading the sprinkles out over the entire cookie. Until they do have the concept, and then they have no concept that one ever has enough sprinkles.

D1 enjoys her exersaucer in front of the Christmas tree. The tree is a bit sparse this year, owing to being bigger than ever before, but it looks better when I remember to turn off the flash.

A productive day

Yesterday I had a lot to do. Christmas with all its accompanying labor is looming close. I had cookies to bake, parties to plan, Christmas letters to write and presents to make, the house to clean, and all the props and stage design for the Christmas play to worry about.

Yesterday D1 also continued her six-month growth spurt in earnest. She's been eating extra for about a week, and yesterday she seemed to want to do nothing else. I was tired because of the activities of the weekend and from trying to keep up with her eating. Seems like I just recovered from the four-month growth spurt. So I finally gave up, left the house a mess and the cookie dough in the fridge, and went and laid down with her for the afternoon. She ate for well over an hour without interruption, then played and dozed awhile, then ate again. I napped.

It was a productive day. I spent it providing my baby with the best nourishment she could get, and ensuring we can keep that up for several more months. Fifty years from now, D1 will still be enjoying better health because I decided to let the cookie dough fossilize. And by then I should have plenty of time to bake cookies to sabotage it.

There was a "Baby Blues" cartoon a year or so back in which Darryl comes home and finds Wanda with her feet propped up. "So, what'd you do today?" he asks. "Oh, nothing much," she says, "Just made a few billion cells in the tiny human being I'm growing inside my uterus--what did you do today?" "Hey!" he says, "Just because I'm not creating life doesn't mean my work isn't valuable!" Well as I know it, it's hard to remember sometimes which of the things I do are really the important ones.

I did decide to bow to the inevitable and break out the applesauce. This morning we added a little oatmeal gruel to the mix. She makes horrible faces and most of it comes back out on her bib, but I think there's a little less on the bib than was in the bowl, so perhaps some goes down. She keeps opening her mouth for more, though, so I don't think she hates it.

Santa Claus is Coming to Town

That song was stuck in our heads all day yesterday, for some reason. It didn't help that the pastor happened to mention it in his sermon, while criticizing the practice of letting Santa eclipse the celebration of Christ.

The line, "He sees you when you're sleeping/He knows when you're awake/He knows if you've been bad or good/So be good for goodness' sake!" tends to come under especially heavy criticism, since it appears to ascribe divine powers to Santa Claus. DOB pointed out, however, that it could just as well work on the Santa Claus is Daddy theory, since Daddy does come in and check on you when you're sleeping, he does know when you're awake, and he does know if you've been bad or good, all without the help of any supernatural powers (unless you count Mommy as having supernatural powers, which many children suspect).

Personally I never had a problem with Santa Claus one way or the other. He was always a very tertiary person in our Christmas celebrations; someone to joke and tease about, and someone whose name was on certain packages so that we wouldn't have to write thank you notes for them, even though their true origin was obvious from the wrapping paper. It probably helped that I had much older siblings and that I understood imaginary things. Santa Claus was like Alice in Wonderland; you knew, of course, that Alice didn't really fall down the rabbit hole. But you didn't have to go around proclaiming loudly that Alice was just pretend; that would spoil the fun. Whether literally-minded children would distinguish so easily I don't know. I hope none of my children are too literally minded, or we are going to have some real conflicts.

Anyway, we were discussing what kind of tree topper we want some day, since we have yet to find the perfect one.

QOC: "I want to find a star for it someday, of course."

DOB: "Naturally."

QOC: "I don't like angel tree toppers, and of course we don't want a Santa Claus."

DOB: "There's nothing wrong with Santa Claus."

QOC: "No, but he doesn't belong at the pinnacle of the tree."

DOB: "True. Perhaps we could get a little plastic Santa to float in the tree stand to indicate his proper place."

In the air there's a feeling of Christmas

As I finally got out the Christmas CDs last week, I was pondering the enduring popularity of the mid-twentieth century in the realm of secular Christmas music. I admit that I like that era of music all year round, but it seems that at Christmas it appeals to a lot of other people, too, and the radio and stores inevitably resound with Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, and Dean Martin. Even more modern stuff is often simply remakes of the songs from that era.

It's all about nostalgia of course, but I think that says something bigger about Christmas as a cultural phenomenon. Christmas has become primarily a holiday about nostalgia. The only trouble is, we can't remember exactly what it is we are being nostalgic about. The mid-twentieth century Christmas music doesn't exactly depict a culture who actually was celebrating the birth of Christ, either, but it gives the feel of a culture where people could still remember when they did. They might not really believe God invaded earth, but they could remember when they did and after they'd sung "White Christmas," sing "Silent Night" with a straight face based on the memories of the past.

In today's culture it's hard to remember that far back, even. So we can only be nostalgic about being nostalgic for it. A pretty thin sort of celebration. No wonder most modern stuff about Christmas is cynicism about the stress and the misery of having to put up with your relatives for a day.

This article by Gene Edward Veith makes much the same point, only about movies. And it's a good reminder that those of us who do know what we're celebrating shouldn't let ourselves get sucked into the spirit of being stressed-out and complaining about the season.

Looking on the Bright Side

It turns out that Target (for which we still have oodles of gift cards) has a very nice spritz gun, made out of metal so it will not disintegrate upon use. It is not in stock right now and couldn't possibly arrive in time for me to make Christmas cookies this year, but I can have it for years to come.

I do still have to figure out what to do for cookies, though. (I had already planned to distribute a dozen plates' worth on neighbors, parties, and the like.) I was going to make red rum-flavored wreaths and green peppermint-flavored trees.

If I'd had a working spritz gun, I probably wouldn't have gotten the shower scrubbed out yesterday. And wouldn't that have been terrible.

We also got a Christmas tree yesterday. By the time we got to Lowe's the trimmer people had gone home, so instead of getting one small enough to fit on top of the table ("fit" meaning "not fall off if you were careful not to collide with it") as we did last year, we got the biggest seven-foot tree on the lot. (Only $13!) We will take down the playpen to put it up in front of the patio door. The brothers-in-law will be here today, so we will get them to endure the prickles of putting it up, and we will decorate it tomorrow evening.

The sun is shining. It will be a nice day to go grocery shopping.

I think I can see the looming shape of a tooth about to emerge on D1's upper right gum. Maybe it's just my imagination. But that's what it looks like to me.

Only three weeks until Christmas!

Waaahhhh!

After my successful krumkake experience yesterday, I was all gung-ho to make spritz today, using my great garage sale find. But halfway through my first batch (gingerbread hearts), the plastic disk that pushes the cookies out broke in half.

It's a Martha Stewart Living product. I don't care what she did on the stock market, she deserves to go to jail for making such defective merchandise. (OK, so I did get it at a garage sale, but that shouldn't make the plastic insufficiently tough to push out cookie dough.)

And now what am I going to do for Christmas cookies? I want spritz!

Krumkake

In a daring leap over childhood division of labor principles, this is the year I made krumkake on my own. Krumkake, for the unenlightened, is a traditional Scandinavian cookie: light, crispy and cardamon-flavored, made one at a time on a flat griddle with fancy designs. Unlike other Scandinavian traditions, such as lutefisk and cosmologies in which everything freezes, it is generally well received among those from more southerly climates. Being Scandinavian, however, the making of it must involve some suffering.

When I was growing up, we made krumkake on the traditional cast-iron forms, which must be heated to the precise temperature over the stove and flipped midway through the baking process. Then you burn your fingers while rolling them up. (Some people shape them into cones, but we would rather store more.) Several of them would stick, requiring a session with a wire brush to clean out all the grooves. This painstaking process was reserved for my much more patient and attentive sister, who despite this still usually ruined most of the first batch trying to get the griddle to the right temperature. The evidence usually disappeared by the end of the day. In later years we would join a great Norwegian Baking Day at Camp Woodworth, but even so I was usually relegated to mixing batter or the toilsome task of rolling out lefse.

As a wedding present I received one of the modern krumkake irons, which cooks them two at a time on a non-stick surface at the precise right temperature. Last year I didn't feel up to making the attempt, but this year I decided the time was right. Sure enough, the new machine does make the process if not effortless, at least not a major ordeal. You still burn your fingers rolling them up, though, so it still counts as Norwegian cooking.

I note with displeasure, however, that the manufacturer is "Villaware," an Italian company. How can an Italian company possibly understand the nuances of Scandinavian cooking? (They should at least form a subsidiary to concentrate on Scandinavian cooking implements--they could call it "Pillageware.") That probably explains why the iron doesn't press the krumkake quite as thin as the old cast-iron ones do, resulting in a slightly less crispy and delicate cookie. So maybe some day I'll have to try for the whole cast-iron experience.

We Return

Some of you may not have noticed we were gone. Others of you, however (I refer specifically to our progenitors who use this means to keep tabs on us) apparently have. We are back.

We were gone because we were a) celebrating my birthday and b) upgrading our DSL service. The price one must pay for halving the cost and increasing the service is two days of hassling with tech support guys and pondering imponderable strings of numbers and acronyms. Things seem to be working better now, although I think email is still having trouble.

My golden birthday (26 on the 26th) was excellent. DOB cooked me dinner and I made a skirt, which I am still trying to make up my mind whether it is really cool or just weird. Also we put up Christmas decorations. I now have my 45th birthday all planned, too. DOB and I will take off for a romantic weekend getaway while D1 and D2-Dn will clean the house, decorate for Christmas, and cook a fabulous dinner to await us when we return. Now that that's settled, back to 2004.