Things to Do With Tomatoes

My drying tomato experiment resulted in about five successfully dried tomato chunks. The rest burnt in some spots while mildewing in others. I think I have the wrong kind of tomatoes; too juicy and not pulpy enough. Perhaps next year I will try growing some Romas.

In the meantime, Her Majesty informs me that you can just toss them in the freezer (inside a Ziploc) and they will be perfectly good to pull out and make salsa or soup from later. So that is what I am doing with the surplus this year.

Also, as DOB was beginning to look askance at yet another platter of sliced raw tomatoes, I tried making broiled tomatoes for supper last night. The recipe was a little too greasy--next time I will cut down on the butter and probably use olive oil instead. And the tomato halves were hard to eat, so I might go with my initial instinct and slice them. But there will definitely be a next time. Seriously yummy.

We picked a few more tomatoes today, in between trips down the street to watch the men working on the sewer line. The plants seem to be slowing down production, though, which is perhaps just as well. Or maybe the squirrels are getting more of them. I suspect the squirrels of evil designs on the pepper plants, too--I don't think I'm getting as many of those full grown as seemed to be budding. Maybe next year I'll plant hot peppers. That will teach them.

Because I Finally Unearthed the CD

These are some of the fabulous pictures taken by our friends from Blue Castle Photography while we were out in Washington. If you have any pictures to be taken in the Corvallis, Oregon area, I can heartily recommend them. Unfortunately that's hardly ever where we are.

You Say Weed, I Say Native Plant

I proudly exhibited my tomato plants to DOB the other day. He then looked over at the weeds towering over the patio. "The tomatoes look good," he said, "But it's like investing in tech stocks in the nineties. Everything goes up."

Being new to this garden, and not wanting to waste anything that might already be happily growing, I went easy on weed-pulling this spring. Some of those unidentified leaves might prove to be flowers. Some of them did. The others just got larger and weedier.

Next thing I knew, they were too big to be pulled by hand. I needed clippers. I forgot I owned clippers. Turns out there was a set ($2 pink yard sale tag still on the handle) in the basement. This morning I finally ventured forth to use them.

Too late, again. Clippers were not what was called for; I needed a hatchet. Little George Washington could be happily and productively occupied under our patio for quite some time. Unfortunately I haven't come across a hatchet at a yard sale. So I hacked, snapped, and mangled until I at least lowered a portion to within a foot of the ground. I caught an enormous yellow grasshopper and the ducklings watched him, fascinated. D1 tried to get him to jump on cue, but he did not catch on.

The tomatoes are doing very well. They have passed our ability to keep up with eating them; they have passed even the ability of the squirrels to keep up. I don't think I have quite enough plants to ever do a canner load at once, though, so perhaps I shall have to look into freezing them. Or drying them. (Can anything sun-dry in this humidity? I have an electric food dryer, but everyone always talks about sun-dried tomatoes--do they work any other way?)

I'm excited by the success of this year's garden. It is very small still. In a few more years, I shall have more helpers and be more ambitious. I was chatting with an elderly lady who grew up in the neighborhood of DOB's office, reminiscing about the huge garden she and her parents grew in their back yard. So did my grandparents, though it was long before I was born. People used to grow food (and even raise animals) in the city and suburbs as a matter of course. Now we all drive twenty minutes to the organic produce section of the nearest megagrocery.

The search for a simpler or more authentic lifestyle seems to send most people to the country. It brought us to the city. We were tired of driving fifty minutes one way for work, twenty minutes another way to church, and knowing no one nearby because they were all driving different ways, too. Here, we can spend our time living instead of driving, and we can still grow tomatoes and watch bugs. And if everyone who cares about homegrown tomatoes leaves for the countryside, what will become of the city?

In this line, there's a wordless picture book I came across at the library, called Home, by Jeannie Baker. It depicts what time and love and work can do for a place, even in the city.

Three Years

Three, I'm sure, is positively infantile from the perspective of a mother of teenagers. But it's as far as we've gotten, and it's a very long way from the floppy newborn with which we began. And despite the undeniable challenges of this age, I like it.

D1 just discovered drawing this week. She covers page after page with little huts with doors, and sometimes adds a sturdy capital A for good measure.

She has learned how to set and clear the table--some mornings, she even starts setting it just to get breakfast moving along faster. (Other mornings, she fights with D2 for lap space. She has not yet reconciled herself to the fact that thirty-five pounds of squirming little girl is hard to hold.)

She can almost (almost!) dress herself. She asks "why?" a thousand times in a day, and sometimes she even wants to know. She remembers why mosquitoes bite, and what we were going to do today, and she can tell when the big hand gets to the seven.

She invents long and complicated games, incomprehensible to adults, but utterly absorbing for D2.

I'm sure I'll like four and five and six even better. But three is pretty good.

Off the Road

There's been a lot of fun links over at i have to say's Back to Homeschool week as people tell various things about their homeschooling journey. Today's topic is getting out and about, which reminds me that we do not.

Yes, the ducklings are small. But it seems like even people with very small children have them enrolled in music classes or gymnastics or second language programs. Or they have zoo and museum memberships. Or they schedule frequent play dates. Or all of the above.

The very thought makes me tired. Especially right now, when the only activity that sounds fun is lying on the basement floor, pouring ice water over my head. But even in more clement weather, loading up the diaper bag and strapping everyone into the car is usually a long way down on my list of Fun Things to Do.

It's probably a warped view from my childhood. My mother had narcolepsy, so she did not drive if she could help it. We had twenty-two acres to play on, and we had each other to play with, and if we were bored there was a very long list of chores to do. Taking a trip out was reserved for the dentist and the doctor once or twice a year.

We tried doing story time at the library. First we went to the active-song time for 18-36 month olds, to which all the Hip Young Mamas go. It was fun, and it did inspire D1 to try some novel things like jumping. (She was not physically adventuresome when she was smaller. Now she likes to climb eight feet up.) But there were usually more than thirty kids, plus parents, and it was crowded and overwhelming. The ducklings love playing with a couple of other small children; they do not like large crowds of small children. I don't blame them. Small children and large crowds don't mix well.

The other story time was smaller, quieter, attended mostly by grandmas, and involved actually reading books. The ducklings liked it, mostly because they were allowed to color with markers. I did not like getting the marker off of their clothes (which is why they use crayons and colored pencils at home--also better for finger strength). The book selection was usually not too impressive, either.

Anyway, the whole matter was settled several weeks ago when we sold our second car and decided to just do without for a while. Now I don't need to worry about whether I should be taking them out for more Stimulating Events, because I can't. We take an evening out as a family to a park or library once a week, and we go to church.

There is still the park to walk to, and if we can't watch the animals at the zoo, we can learn a lot about the habits of squirrels and rabbits. We may miss out on group classes, but maybe we'll have the chance to get to know the kids who live on our street. (It's hard, though, because they're not home much. But someone has to be available.)

We still don't know the names of all the weeds that grow in our backyard, or the kinds of birds that hide in the bushes. We can't go to a farmers' market, but we could grow more things ourselves. They are missing out on high-energy-tons-of-kids social opportunities, but they are getting lots of chances to learn to play well together.

I'm sure there's lots of good things we could be doing, and probably someday we will, but I think for now we'll do just fine as it is.

According to the Ducklings

Song heard in the night: "The wise man built his house upon the rock, all around the town."

D1, reading from her Gideon testament: "Go forth and tell God that I need to go potty."

The Once and Future King

This phrase has echoed in the back of my head for two decades, like a call from a bird flying too high to see. I don't know how long it was before I realized that it was the title of a book, nor am I quite sure why it took me so long to read the book once I discovered it. Perhaps I was afraid that the book could never live up to the title.

I cannot say I was disappointed, exactly, even though it was not exactly what I expected. (But who would want things to be exactly what was expected? How dull life would be.) There was much to appreciate, and some to dislike. The book (or really four books) is full of too many things--comedy, tragedy, obscure details of medieval life, psychoanalysis--full like an overstuffed chair, and like an overstuffed chair, hard to get out of once you get in.

As a straight retelling of the Arthurian legend, it is not so good. Most of the auxiliary plot lines are left out; Gawaine (always my favorite) gets short shrift and most of the gallant knightly adventures are alluded to only in passing. (I like Rosemary Sutcliff's retelling for finding out what was happening.) But then, it wasn't really meant to be that, and it is hardly fair to critique a book for not being what it doesn't want to be. It is more of a commentary on the Arthurian legend (though still in a story form) and what it tells us about human nature and governance. Certainly from that perspective it will color how I read the story in whatever form.

One thing that annoyed me throughout the books was that the entire story line was moved forward to the twelfth century. Now I know Arthur is always presented in late medieval trappings, but the story still belongs much earlier; it's like reading a retelling of the Bible set in seventeenth century Holland to go along with those paintings of Bible characters in the clothes of Dutch burghers. The multiplied layers of racial conflict this caused (Norman vs. Saxon vs. Celt vs. Pict) just got to be mind-boggling, although I suppose the real reason for the time change was because the ideals being critiqued were best illustrated by the Norman nobility.

The books focus on Arthur's (and behind that, Merlin's) efforts to fight the rule of force in the world. First Arthur tries the Round Table and chivalric ideals to put Might on the side of Right. Pretty soon the knights run out of bad guys to fight, however, and inner conflicts begin to surface. Then Arthur hopes that spiritual questing can take the place of battle, and the knights search for the Holy Grail; this too fails in establishing a just order on Earth, as the best knights all leave for Heaven. Finally Arthur tries to establish impartial justice in a civil code, but even this is turned to bad ends through Mordred's scheming.

What makes the Arthur legend such a complete tragedy is that the evil is completely bound up with the good. Doom comes not as some relentless fate you can neither duck nor explain, like Oedipus Rex's mysterious obligation to kill his father and marry his mother, nor is it the consequence of milder quirks of circumstance that you can wish away with an "if only." (If only the friar had delivered the letter in time! If only Cyrano had talked to Roxanne before Christian died!)

Given Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere being who they were, bad things were bound to happen; turn them into other people, and the Round Table never could have happened at all. You could wish away Mordred, but to be effective that would require undoing the malice of Arthur's sisters, and to do that you would have to undo Arthur himself. The Arthurian legend is not so much about why good people do bad things, as to how bad people can accomplish anything good at all. And yet they can.

What finally spurred me to read the books this time was noticing their place in the reading list at Ambleside Online. Well, the first two books are on the list for the early teen years--The Sword in the Stone, which focuses on Merlin's tutelage of Arthur, and The Queen of Air and Darkness, which focuses on Arthur developing the ideal of the Round Table while also following the youth of Gawaine and his brothers and their mother's idle but malicious scheming. After that the series takes a more grown-up turn, and The Ill-Made Knight focuses primarily on Lancelot, Guinevere, and Elaine, and the motives and results, public and private, of adultery and seduction. It's not particularly graphic, but definitely not for children. At the same time, it shows the Arthurian court declining into a middle age of disillusionment and decadence.

The Candle in the Wind concludes the matter by showing the unraveling of the court. And it was on the last page that I was most frustrated. After reflecting on how each thing he has tried has failed--chivalry, religiosity, legality--and other ideas, like communism, seem just as insubstantial against the evil in human hearts, Arthur has one last bright idea that if only people could learn to disregard the imaginary borders of countries, perhaps through education, then war and strife could cease. He is going to die in battle tomorrow, and has no time to put it into practice. But still, he thinks it would work. I can't figure out what the author is trying to say here--is he really so blind as to think internationalism and education will succeed where everything else has failed? Or is it ironic, one last foolish notion of Arthur's in his old age?--in which case, what a horrible way to end!

At any rate, the exact ending is not that important in a book whose ending is ordained from the first, nor does it destroy the value of the understanding throughout the book of the great difficulty present in trying to do right and establish justice in the world. And the series is certainly not pessimistic. The title of the last book sums it up--public justice is like a candle in the wind. Always it is in danger of being snuffed out--and yet, there it is. Worthy of protection. Beautiful in its very fragility.

Dog Days

August is not a month I enjoy. I've tried to acclimate, I really have. Last summer I kept nudging the thermostat up, trying to take it a degree or two warmer. I hit the wall at seventy-four. At seventy-four degrees, I can function. At seventy-five, I start to melt. I know you southerners are snorting in your sweet tea, but that's as far as I'm willing to go.

This makes spending time outside a little tricky this time of year. Usually we abandon the breakfast dishes and head straight outside. At ten o'clock my internal thermometer starts setting off alarms and we can come in and clean up then.

After a week of very hot, still, muggy weather, though, even the early morning air wasn't worth the bother of breathing today. Every exhaust fume from every morning commuter still lingered in the air. I went out and got the wading pool and we set it up in the basement, where it stayed below seventy-five all morning.

Only four more weeks to September.

Ruth and the Idolators

The book of Ruth, beginning, end, and middle, is wrapped up in Naomi's search for a man for security. She's like an Old Testament Yenta: "Even the worst husband--God forbid!--is better than no husband--God forbid!" She hopes her daughters-in-law will find security with new husbands; she takes it on herself to help Ruth hunt one down; and she finally relaxes in the last scene with a baby grandson in her arms who will take the place of the husband and sons she has lost.

Partly it may be Naomi's personal obsession; partly it may be a sign of a culture in which women had to depend on men for security. More than that, though, I think it is a sign of a culture in which people had to depend on other people. Surely an old and feeble man would have been just as desparate to have someone young and strong to bring home the mutton. Their world was a personal one; there was no Social Security or Society for the Aged and Infirm. If there wasn't a someone to go to, there was no somewhere to go.

By the same token, their idols were personal ones. They worshipped gods with bad habits and shrewish wives. Their gods might have been lacking in looks, hygiene, and basic morality, but they were never lacking in personality.

I think we tend to have the opposite problem, which obscures our favorite form of idolatry. Sermons do preach against idolizing money or pleasure, but I think what we most like to idolize is systems. Systems are where we turn for security. Systems are what care for us when we need help. Systems are what we ask to fix things when things go wrong. Even the One True God sometimes has a little too much personality to suit our tastes, and we prefer to fit Him into one of our systems.

This is where a lot of things in modern Christianity go bad. We start looking for the System that will solve our financial problems, find us the perfect spouse, raise our children, grow our church, win the lost, care for the poor, or what have you. We want to know what the right steps are to follow, and if we just follow those steps, we would prefer a money-back guarantee on the results.

Lots of time the original idea wasn't a bad one--every step of it can be shown from Scripture!--but it's the nature of our age to turn it into a System. And from there it's an easy step for us to expect it to provide us with peace, joy, love and holiness. We still say those things come from God, but really we would be quite astonished and a little offended to find God working outside our beloved System.

The ancient Israelites wanted gods with bodies; we want gods with checklists. Just as much for us as for them, God is something far greater than we can conceive.

James James Morrison Morrison

"Disobedience" is D1's favorite poem from When We Were Very Young, whether for its irresistible rhythm, its intrepid three-year-old hero, or its depiction of the evils awaiting parents who disobey their children. ("You must never go down to the end of the town without consulting me.") The last concerns me. We are still sorting out just who is in charge of this house--she is, temperamentally, undoubtedly more qualified, but I still have seniority and experience enough to trump her.

My mother reputedly once accused my eldest sister, when she was very small, of sitting up at night and plotting out new naughty things to do. I used to smirk at the naivete reflected in this tale--by the time the rest of us came along I'm sure she had realized that no premeditation was required. But now I understand how she felt. It was the cry of desparation of a chaotic mind trying desperately to create order, confronted with a very organized mind still, by age and position, allied on the side of chaos.

Give D1 enough skills to run things with minimal supervision and an increase in seniority and she will be an invaluable asset. In the meantime, we are having some interesting moments. Putting a little more structure in the day has helped.

Professionally, I decline and fall, though as a mother I am lapsing into poetry.* I'm reading books on the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages, and it's all intriguing. We are also listening to some Gregorian chant, which D2 especially likes, and I found some picture books on early saints, some of which I've read to D1. I always feel sorry for D1 and D2 at being stuck being the oldest, and not getting the trickle-down of Interesting Things the older children are learning. D2 likes to "build castles" with his Duplos now, so I must be succeeding somewhat at my scheme to make it up to them without turning into some sort of Baby Genius fiend.

*There's an obscure literary allusion. Anyone know what it's from?

The Mom Clothes Catalogue

Rose's post of fashion tips reminds me of my long-standing fantasy of a catalog of clothes that would be suitable for mothers of small children.

Everything would be machine wash and dry on any setting and would not wrinkle just because it happened to sit in the laundry basket for three days. (Unless it was supposed to look wrinkled, in which case it would still be wrinkled the right way.)

All the fabric would be the sort that doesn't look noticeably different when wet or coated with snot. Some fabric is like that now. Unfortunately it's impossible to test this for yourself in a store, so you ordinarily just have to hope you luck out.

The necklines, although varied, would all be tested so that a twenty-five pound toddler could hang from them without revealing anything. Skirts and slacks would all be perfectly comfortable and appropriate even sitting cross-legged on the floor, and would not slide down when tugged on.

They would all be easy to nurse in, and would be able to adapt to at least a fifteen-pound weight gain or loss without fitting strangely.

MOST IMPORTANT POINT OF ALL: Nobody else would be able to tell they were "mom clothes."

End of the Road

Vacation is over, VBS is over. DOB returned last night from a five-day business trip, which we all survived. The insane part of the summer has drawn to a close, much to our relief. Now if we could just catch up on sleep. And thanks to other people, who take pictures, here are some:

Ducks & Bunnies

We've been doing quite a bit of yard saling lately. The adorable matching bunnies were DOB's idea, while I was looking for winter clothes. (We put initials on the tags to tell them apart; of course, they never bother to look before hauling off the nearest bunny.) Even Amy Dacyzyn (Tightwad Gazette) says it's good to make sure kids get something fun from a yard sale so they will always associate yard sales with good times.

We didn't get the skateboard that was D2's size. The next morning, he was standing up on his bike.

The Tomato Report

I am at war with squirrels. Not the Canadian variety. Just the local ones.

For the past week and a half, I have been eagerly watching the first of the ripening tomatoes. A few were nearly ready to pick. But when I thought I could restrain myself no longer and went out to pick them, all but one (the least ripe) had vanished.

I know who the culprit was, too, for earlier in the day I had startled one of the scamps in the backyard. He fled over the neighbor's tumbledown (but freshly painted) shed, tossing back a half-eaten carcass over his shoulder, whether as a taunt or merely an oversight I don't know. I still can't believe I left all the other tomatoes just sitting on the vine, but I still had not realized how dearly squirrels love tomatoes. (Where I grew up, tomatoes are generally an indoor plant.)

Unfortunately, I don't think I have the skills or materials to construct a squirrel-proof shelter for the tomatoes. Squirrels are wily things. So I shall have to resort to the other solution, picking the tomatoes as soon as they start to turn color and letting them ripen on the windowsill.

Alas for vine-ripened tomatoes. And alas for my kitchen windowsill, which is pitched down toward the sink, as if in a perverse desire to knock things off all by itself.

The Role of Women and the Glory of God

I've been intrigued by some discussions over at the True Womanhood blog lately, and various ideas have sprouted in my mind and, like my tomatoes, overgrown into rather different areas than intended, refusing to confine themselves to comments on any one post. This is why I have my own blog. What I have to say is meant in the spirit, not of a rebuke, but just a different angle to remember.

I very much value Christian women being free to think and speak and not arbitrarily confined to unscriptural gender roles. I do not appreciate rigid dress codes. I do not tell my daughter she can't like trucks or math or climbing trees. I have never been known to play dumb merely to salve the egos of less-intelligent men. And I do think there is a place for pointing out where such things are done or promoted wrongfully.

At the same time, it may well be that what is wrong for someone else to do, is not wrong for us to receive. That is a large part of what the love and humility of the Christian life is about. It may be bad for someone else to obsess over hemlines; it may be quite good for me to put on a longer skirt so we can both focus on Christ instead of wardrobes. It may be wrong for a church to prevent women from contributing to a discussion; it may be right for me to learn that God can work even when my mouth is shut. It may be wrong for a man to think a woman can't correct him; it may be good for me to learn a little humility, myself. If God could use the martyrdom of Christians to His glory, He can surely use some minor inconveniences.

Many discussions about women's roles focus on the danger that women might be thwarted in using their God-given gifts. That is a valid concern. But I don't think it is anywhere close to God's primary concern. God values all work done in His name and for His glory, but He commends by name the work that requires no gifts: giving a cup of cold water, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick. Looking for a place to use my God-given talents lives uncomfortably close, in my heart at least, to looking for ways to glorify myself.

Rigid gender roles may have repressed women in the past or even now; but not nearly so much, I would think, as life itself represses everyone. We will never know how many great poets died illiterate, or how many brilliant business managers spent their lives making mud bricks. If we find ourselves thwarted in our dreams and gifts, whether by life circumstances or false customs, we can hardly think ourselves unusual.

Nor, do I think, should we consider ourselves without hope. God has not made us for this world, but for another one. There--and only there--we can all serve Him fully, with our whole selves, with everything He has given us.

In the meantime, we lay all the things we have and want and are and can do before Him, ready to take up or lay down as He orders. He may be more interested in what we can learn by not using our gifts than in what we could accomplish by using them. Or He may ask us to do something we had so long given up we are afraid to touch it again. Either way, the slogan of the cross is not "Be all that you can be," but, "Come, follow Me."

Compendium

I have blogged little lately, less from a lack of things to blog about, as from too many. I cannot make up my mind which to blog about, and thus, like the old sailor, I do nothing but bask. (Which reminds me that I have been reading When We Were Very Young selectively to the ducklings, and they adore it. They demand "Cwis'pher Wobin poems" at every read-aloud time.)

So perhaps if I deal with some topics briefly, I will get my gumption up to tackle a few others at more length later on. Or forget them entirely.

Life Together: This book, by Dietrch Bonhoeffer, has long been on my List of Books it Would No Doubt Be Noble To Read, but a friend's intention to read it finally spurred me to actually read it. I was quite surprised; I had thought it would be a book about life in the church, but it is really much more about family (or religious community) life.

I tend to benefit most in family life from books that are not particularly about family life, or that are written to very different times and circumstances. If I read a modern mother of many young children say that of course you must do thus and so, and I don't, I tend to either feel guilty, or waste far too much mental energy arguing with her in my head. But if a seminarian from another place and time posits three chapters of Scripture read aloud before breakfast I can laugh at picturing him being dumped into our stinky-diaper and howling-tummy bedlam and then go on to think about how I can weave more Scripture into our everyday life, even at breakfast. (A prayer and a song from the Bible are working very nicely.)

Another intriguing idea from him (and there were many more) is that the test of true Christian community is whether you can confess your faults to each other. Now he cautions against confession as a religious work in itself, and I have seen the ugliness that happens when we are proud of the confessions we can come up with and scrape the recesses of our souls to have a testimony like everyone else's. But real community comes when we can honestly tell someone else the things we are truly, deeply, ashamed of. It only works and gives freedom and joy in fellowship when it's unpleasant. With all the craving for "authenticity" nowadays, one seldom sees this path mentioned, but I think he's quite right.

Vacation Bible School: We are VBS wimps, showing up only to do the opening and then departing (much to D1's disappointment), but that is really all we are good for this year. We are portraying farmers, who last night discovered a considerable treasure in the field we were planning on buying. Is it only me, or does that parable strike you as rather shady business dealings?

I needed a bucket of dirt to hide the treasure in, but it needed to be lighter than a bucket of dirt. I finally struck upon painting an old chex mix tub with leftover house paint, then filling it with styrofoam, including a styrofoam circle that would form a false bottom for the dirt. The ducklings gleefully helped me paint the bucket. I finally realized the secret to them not getting paint on their clothes is to take their clothes off--old T-shirts of DOB's provide ample coverage for decency's sake, and then the paint only bleeds through onto their skin, from which it will no doubt wear off eventually.

Tonight is the parable of the sower and the seeds. I am faking a withered plant from the stony ground. I feel slightly guilty about this. If only I had thought to plant a seed on stony ground a few weeks ago!

Ducklings: They seemed to grow up a lot while we were on vacation, even though we were there watching them. D2 talks (and talks, and talks) very well now. His new favorite sentence model is "I like . . . " (from a book about trains) and he is happy to inform us about all the things he likes. He is also happy to repeat absolutely anything anybody says. They are both obsessed with playing with dishes and cooking food. I sometimes worry that this indicates they are either underfed or insufficiently stimulated in their imagination, but mostly I hope it bodes well for help in the kitchen. We are working on doing more formal chores now, and D1 is getting fairly good at clearing the table.

This Letter is Too Hard

D1 and I were sitting over her new phonics page, I drawing pictures of things that start with "T" and she interjecting the following comments, after I had written the big T in the middle of the page.

"Can you draw me a little T?"

"Can you draw me a medium T?"

"Can you draw me a Goldilocks T?"

One Week, One Year

Today is one week since we arrived home, bleary-eyed, from vacation, and one year since we moved, shaky-legged, into this house. On my list of favorite things to do, not moving ranks very high.

A year ago tomorrow was one of the most unremittently miserable days of my life. Everything was misplaced in the wrong box, everybody was cranky, and DOB was passed out cold from consuming too many soy-containing snack foods during the move. We were, nonetheless, deeply grateful for the folks from a nearby church who had come over after their VBS program had ended to finish moving in all our furniture.

This year, we're gearing up to do the opening for VBS there ourselves. (It's just hard to say no to a church like that.) We still have a lot of boxes that need to find a better home, but I've just come up with a new scheme for reorganizing them and I might even have the energy to make it happen. For the first time ever, I've kept up on the housework every single day this week.

It's been nice to get a little taste of what normal feels like. For however long it lasts.

I Can Hold My Head Up Again

Because Birdy nominated me for a Thinking Blogger Award. Not that I've been posting enough to make anyone think, but still, one dreams.






Here are the rules:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,

2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,

3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

This has been going around for awhile, and all of the high-traffic blogs that make me think also make other people think, and so they've already been nominated. That gives me the chance to post the names of five blogs featuring fellow mothers of small children who still come up with intelligent things to say. Occasionally. Or even often.

Keeping Up

Thoughts & Adventures

Love & Blunder

Not Alone

Focht Tales

What We Learned On Our Summer Vacation

D2: If you're very small and very cute and you can utter polysyllabic names of juicy summer fruits with an endearing smile, people will continue feeding you said fruits indefinitely.

However, Mama believes that man does not live by strawberries and watermelon alone. So eat your eggs, too.

Walruses are way cool.

D1: I have the best cousin in the world. (Oh, and her brothers are nice, too.)

Rock-climbing is a great hobby.

QOC: It's a good idea to know what your husband thinks was your first date just in case you're ever playing games at an engagement party. (This is where courtship makes it so difficult. Define "date" first. Or maybe this is just where being a lawyer makes things difficult.)

It is fun to visit the zoo with other people. We do not want a zoo pass of our own until more members of the family are self-propelling.

DOB: Find out how to remove the emergency brake on a loaned vehicle before the ferry starts loading.

It really is possible to relax for more than three hours straight. At least if you have a western to read.

I didn't know this was possible

The library tells me I have too many holds. I guess I will have to wait on The Well of Lost Plots. And the remaining three dozen books I wanted to reserve.

Jiggety Jog

We had no blizzards, or even the stomach flu. Some of us did get colds, but that could hardly have been avoided.

A road trip is enough to make me wonder if perhaps children should not be potty-trained before seven. A plane trip is enough to convince me.

I'm sure it saved us a lot of money to leave our air conditioning off. I'm sure it will cool down again sometime. Meanwhile I must come up with a dinner menu that requires no ingredients or cooking. And not eating out. We did that on the way back from the airport and have had our fill for another year.

If you pack fewer clothes, you will do more laundry. Toddlers playing on the beach and the farm and eating in less-constrained locations than usual will not be able to wear the same outfit multiple times. Neither will their parents.

We saw nearly everyone we planned on seeing. We had a fabulous time pretty much everywhere. We will be coherent again in a few weeks.

Flypaper

I got this fancy-shmancy flypaper (well, as fancy as flypaper gets) that had bright colors that were supposed to attract the flies and not look so hideous. I put it in a safe, out-of-the-way corner and it attracted no flies. I put it on the other side of the sink and it attracted the dishtowel. I put it over by the door and stuck myself to it several times.

When I came up from switching the laundry and discovered a distraught D1 with her entire forearm stuck to it, I just took the whole thing down and threw it away. It still didn't have any flies on it. Back to flyswatters.

This and That

D1 awoke this morning asking us, "Did you see the balloons?" I guess she thought the Birthday Fairy had put them there. (I'm starting to understand the appeal of the whole Santa Claus thing.) Having a three year old is great fun. Just old enough to enjoy everything wholeheartedly and without a trace of self-consciousness.

We'd make a lousy credit card ad, though. Balloons and streamers: $3 (with lots left or reusable for subsequent birthdays). Homemade cake decorated with leftover Halloween candy: maybe $2? Game of hunt-the-button: $0. Best birthday party ever, priceless.

~~**~~

With summer comes flies. This brings out DOB's latent hunting instincts. Every evening after dark he girds on his fly swatter, turns out all but one of the lights, and goes forth to conquer. We have division of labor when it comes to insect slaying--I kill the spiders (which he finds creepy); he kills the flies (which move too fast for me). It seems to me that if I killed fewer spiders they would eat more flies, but he doesn't see it that way. I am relegated to clearing the body from the fields, a messy and inglorious job seldom commemorated in the movies.

~~**~~

Our trip will involve moving three time zones later, and also a switch from workaday time to vacation/visiting time, which is more like four or five time zones later. Anticipating the trauma this will wreak upon small children, we've been trying to gradually move meals and naptimes later and later. Unfortunately the rest of the city has not moved along to accommodate us. I am getting tired.

Cakewalk

Observant readers will notice that this is not a purple duck. Thereby hangs a tale.

For about two decades, it has been my custom for family members to make a birthday cake in whatever form requested. D1 had initially requested a purple triangle, and then a purple duck. Perhaps she remembers the white duck I made her last year, or perhaps she was inspired by one of her bath toys.

Unless specifically requested otherwise, the cake recipe I make is a very simple but delicious chocolate one. It is easy enough for an eight-year-old making her first cake, and it is easy enough for a twenty-eight-year-old trying to keep count with two toddlers helping. Three cups of flour, two of sugar. Even D2 can count that far.

But something about purple (and it was going to be purple) frosting and chocolate cake sounded icky. So I was going to make a yellow cake instead. I was getting out all the ingredients for the yellow cake recipe when I remembered the other reason that chocolate cake recipe was so handy: it doesn't have milk or eggs, rendering it edible by two more members of DOB's family. I once tried making the cake with orange flavoring instead of chocolate, but it was not particularly good, and orange cake with purple frosting sounded weird, too.

This was a conundrum that would ordinarily have been resolved by calling Wondergirl, but she was not around to answer the phone. Good wives do not call their husbands at work to discuss cake flavors, but DOB is a rather tolerant fellow and in desperation I called him. He suggested carrot cake, and ready to grasp at any straw I hung up and begin pursuing the carrot cake direction (even though on second thought carrot cake with purple icing also sounds icky) when I realized that carrot cake has eggs in it, too.

So now I was stumped and had used up all my free calls. Meanwhile D1 was getting increasingly anxious to bake a cake. Finally I laid the whole situation before her. She did not have anything particularly relevant to say, although she did drop a hint that she might be interested in a yellow duck. At last it hit me: make the cake that tastes good and everyone can eat. Worry about the color tomorrow, when you frost it.

I went on to a search for the round cake pans. Unfortunately I could only find one of them. In digging deeper for the second one, I tossed out the pan for a bear cake. Suddenly D1 forgot all about the duck cake and was eager for a bear one. I was all for this, as it would require no ingenious cutting and getting crumbs all over the kitchen. And bears were likely to come in colors mentally compatible with chocolate.

We proceeded to grease and flour the bear and started mixing the batter and then a truly ingenious idea came into my head and I asked, "What if we made the bear with green overalls, like Corduroy?" Yes, yes, and yes. All thoughts of purple ducks or any other icky colors were forever driven from her mind. And so it is.

Don't want to count my tomatoes before they hatch

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

Preparations

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

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

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

In Everything Give Thanks

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

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

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

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

The Blog Meme About Blogs

I borrowed this from The Common Room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you make money with your blog?

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

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

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

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

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

Changing Colors

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

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

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

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

I think I should get credit for keeping things interesting.

Things That Go

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make Way for Ducklings

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

Telling the Story of Jesus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you the man of your dreams?

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

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

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

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

Catch-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

Calling the King

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

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

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

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

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

Why Playdough is Not for Children Under Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someday

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

It's Chesterton's Birthday

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

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

Semicolon has some lovely quotes.

Of Course He Is

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

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

Potentially Useful Information

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

Break Out the Popcorn

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

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

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

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

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

Materialism and Science

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

~G. K. Chesterton, All Things Considered

Shrinking Violets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet Another Quiz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Anagram

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

Tonight's Menu . . .

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

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


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

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

The Week in Review

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

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

Why I Love Naptime

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

--Pliny the Younger, Epistles 1.9

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

Four-Star Menu Planning

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

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

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

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

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

Is it still OK to be happy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Profit is (not necessarily) Theft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cleaning House

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

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

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

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

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

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