The Common Household Mystery

My boys love mystery stories. They can spot the obvious clue a mile off. “Duh,” Gregory said, “these detectives are so dull! It’s so easy to see what is going on.” But of course, from the all-seeing perspective of the author you can solve the mystery. I wish they were as good at figuring out some of the things that remain unsolved in this house.

Top of the list right now is my missing journaling Bible. The cover is loose, but I was still using it because there is so much history in it and I planned to get it rebound. I love that Bible. And it is lost, lost. How does one even do that? It’s not under the bed or on my nightstand or in my reading room, all the usual places. Did I send it off to be fixed in a dream? Did a child use it to play church? All of us combined cannot seem to solve the mystery. I ordered a new one from CBD, along with new fine tipped journaling markers, but it feels like a stranger to me yet.

Here is one for the experts. How come my first attempt at making a simple cheese was beautifully successful. And my second and third. And then, when I tried cottage cheese, it refused to coagulate at all, so I put the milk back into the fridge and went to bed. The next day I decided to use it to make my simple spreadable cheese again because I knew I could do that, but when I heated the milk, it made ricotta. Hey! I am not complaining. The lasagna was fantastic. But I just wish I knew why the rennet acted so funny.

Where did all the shampoo/toilet paper/toothpaste/every other health and beauty aid go? Sometimes I think I might as well have a list with bandaids and hankies pinned to the top. The men of the house all despise tissues, so I am constantly struggling to keep them in hankies. [I think] sometimes they stay in the uniform pants pockets and the hospital laundress throws them out, even the monogrammed ones. But what do I know? I know that the boys use them for everything from parachutes to dog collars because I find them in the lawn.

What about spoons and forks? I only have cheap ones in the drawer for everyday use, but this fall I noticed that they were quite depleted. Nobody had any helpful suggestions until I jogged their collective memories when I turned up six forks in the flower bed right off the deck while I was raking leaves. “OH, yes… we were having a contest with the cousins, just chucking our forks over the railing. That is all.” I may have spoken a few choice words of admonition. They no longer question why I remind them after every picnic to produce the used plates and utensils before they go play. And while we are on the subject of silverware: How does all that grody gritty stuff get into the Rubbermaid tray in the drawer? Seriously? It’s not like we open the drawer and butter the toast over the tray.

This fall I also noticed that we were constantly running out of stamps. We don’t even send much snail mail anymore, but the boys both have a pen pal that they communicate with regularly. Still. Out of stamps again? Then a young sleuth (our favorite Nancy Drew quote… she is “the young sleuth” so often that I want to hurl a Thesaurus at the author) tipped me off on a certain stamp collection in a certain notebook where I found at least ten brand new Forever stamps neatly arranged in rows, as well as a bunch of postcard stamps. It really kind of broke the back of the stamp collection when I reclaimed what was mine, but he didn’t have $6 extra in his piggy bank, and we had had a very clear conversation about stamps when the collection started.

This morning started with a huge upset about six missing Lego figure hands. Yes, you read that right. Do you know how tiny those hands are? Can you imagine how awful? And nobody did it or knew where they were. Except maybe the dog ate them, but I am betting on the vacuum cleaner. I actually will stoop and pick up a Lego when I am cleaning, if I see it. Sometimes the vacuum cleaner rattles crazily and I just hope it was a pony bead.

I have to put in a blurb for some of our favorite fantasies about household conundrums. Have you ever heard of the Borrowers? They are these tiny people who live, kind of like mice, in the walls and floors of the big people’s houses. I am sure I have referred to them before, how they borrow whatever they need from what they find laying around, and that is why there are never any safety pins when you need them.

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If you see this book, or any of the series, just know that it will “explain” a lot of mysteries and your children will absolutely love them. The audiobooks are done really well too. (British!)

We have Christmas secrets going on right now, too. We have started on our cookie baking tradition, 2 down, 3 to go. Usually the recipe selection is based on pictures in the Taste of Home cookbooks: the more complicated the better, and I try to stay sweet about garish food coloring in dough and sprinkles all over the kitchen. I am hiding the cookies deep in the freezer this year because last year we had some sad children who were unrepresented on the cookie trays when their batch got eaten prematurely.

I also squirreled some presents away in the attic in a black garbage bag. Each child gets an article of clothing, a game or activity, and a book or audio. I hope they don’t think to look up there. 🙂 As I mentioned before, the children voted to give up some of the Christmas fund for the book fundraiser we are doing to send to refugees. I have ordered some books already, and when Addy saw them she pouted a little, “You are treating the refugee children better than us.” So, no, we are not nominating anybody for sainthood just yet.

Speaking of the fundraiser, I want to thank you, thank you, so much. It has been mostly blog readers who have been so kind in sharing. The donations on the website added to private donations is just at $1,700. That is really close to the goal, more than I actually dared to hope for! I plan to close the Youcaring site next week and place the completed order. I have been poring over the catalog and making selections with Davy and Janelle’s help. They were there and they know which books are most suitable. It is so exciting I can hardly stand it!

I know that has nothing to do with mystery except just maybe that we have no idea what God will do with these tokens of care and Christlike love.

One last thing. Our furnace has only kicked in a handful of times in the whole of December. What is up with that? It has been amazing, like a gift straight from heaven. Or is it just global warming? At any rate, it is a “problem” for the experts that I am thanking God for!

A Date With a Small Boy

I have a boy. He isn’t really small anymore, because he is now eleven, and that is practically grown-up! He wants Responsibility! He already knows how to do the laundry so I don’t have to remind him to put it on low setting for the permanent press clothes, even if he forgot last week and I had to iron twenty-eleven pieces of clothing that should have been wash and wear. Or, wait, maybe that was the time I just rinsed them and twirled them in the dryer again because ain’t nobody got time to do that much ironing.

Anyway, he is still a small boy in my eyes, and I like to ask him why he is so cute when he is taking life (doing dishes) too seriously. Then he has to laugh and show me his dimples, but it is true: he also has callouses on his hands and plenty of survival skills in his head and a whole back pack of gear for the woods. One day after school was over I found this note: “Gone to the woods. Might stay all night.” He had the dog and his bug-out bag and a pile of snacks raided from the cupboard. I didn’t have any problem with that, except that we had a supper invitation that evening and I didn’t think it would be quite responsible to leave him home.

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Being the second born, he tends to wander off and depend on others to remind him of basic needs like meal time and when he should change his clothes. He also wears hand-me-downs and gets stuck with the little-boy-jobs and, like I said, he wants Responsibilities. Often he stays home while someone either more competent or more needy goes along to the store to push the cart or ride in it.

Last week the call came that his reading glasses were in. (Yeah, that is two down in a family of five children. The genes are against us.) So this time it was going to be just the two of us, running errands and visiting. We picked up the glasses first and he self consciously wore them for about five minutes at Walmart before putting them in his pockets. Then we spotted

our pediatrician, a lady he does not care to ever see in normal life, and out came the glasses quick as a flash. “These are almost a disguise, wouldn’t you say, Mama?”

I have been startled, when I really listen, to realize how easy it is to miss a quieter child, not hear their ideas in the chaos of the talkers. It is so much fun to hear them because often when they get a chance to talk on their own, they have volumes to say. While we were driving we discussed his bucket list. “I have so many things I want to do when I am big, I don’t think I can ever do them all.” I told him that I know just how that feels. Not that I want to go sky diving or hang gliding or even set a snare that actually catches something besides siblings. But still.

He told me long stories of people who survived airplane crashes, plummeting down from 33,000 feet or so, to smash into a jungle where vines fortuitously broke the fall and they lived to tell the tale and how they survived in the jungle for two weeks before they found another human. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s all about survival these days. 🙂

We bought a bag of sour cream and onion chips at Walmart, and ate the whole greasy lot of them. He did. While I was at Aldi’s. While he was reading King of the Wind which we had just bought at Goodwill. It was his idea of a really good time, reading uninterrupted without needing to share the chips.

So, all we really did was run errands, but he had my undivided attention, and I have come to conclude that is really all a child needs to feel special. Maybe it is all any of us need to feel special.

More on the Books

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I have to share these photos with you, because they just thrill my heart. These are the children, the ones with the eyes-that-have-seen-too-much, that are benefitting from the books sent to the refugee camps in northern Iraq. David Godoy, who volunteered there in the fall, took these photos of some of his English students with the beginner science readers we hastily scraped together to send along in a suitcase. It was about $300 worth, a pitifully small offering for so many, many children. I made a big goal this time, to raise $2000, which Literacy for a Lifetime will match by 50%. So that is 10 times as much, and with some donations received privately, not through the website, we are over half way to the goal!

I asked David to describe his classes, then put his story on the Youcaring site, but it deserves a wider audience. Nearly all of the donations have come from you kind, generous folks who read the blog. I feel very humbled by this, so I am copying David’s words here for you to read just what it means to receive a book, with pictures, with fresh ideas, with new things to learn about the wider world in it.

“Writing about the time I spent with the Yazidi children in Kurdistan, Iraq could possibly fill many pages with various happy, sad, or whimsical occurrences that I experienced. My aim with this is not to get carried away with many details but rather to condense several weeks into a few paragraphs in the hopes of influencing your mind to understand the need there among not only the adults but especially the children.
I taught English classes to the village boys ranging from ages five to
fourteen or fifteen. The day started around nine o’clock with the five
to seven year old boys. After going over the alphabet, the colors of
different objects, shapes, and so on for about an hour the children
from all the different classes would meet in a courtyard area and sing
children’s choruses at the top of their lungs. It was always enjoyable
to listen to them and also to sing with them and perform the motions
to many of the songs.
After two hours of classes in the morning school was adjourned until the afternoon. It seemed to me that along with the dry, 100+ degree weather a Middle Eastern summer afternoon brings the 15 ten to twelve year old boys of the first afternoon class also brought along to school their heated tempers and everything else that made the
afternoon much warmer due to the rise in frustrations. One would think the heat alone would bring a calming affect but it was quite opposite.

They would hoot and holler through the alphabet at varying speeds,
climb around on the desks and each other, spill water so they would
have the joy of splashing it around, get into fights, steal each
other’s pencils, and do everything except sit like good boys who are
trying to learn what a circle is, and that orange is a color and not
the fifth letter of the alphabet.
The singing after that class was always held by ourselves in our class
room as the other classes were similar in student attitude and would
have been next to impossible to maintain structured singing period.
After the dust settled and the room was put back into a presentable
state my last and favorite class would come in. There were usually
only four or five of them and they were the most advanced in English.
They could very easily recite the alphabet and could read small easy
phrases. The comprehension may not have been there but they are off to a good start.
All this being said there is one tool that I found extremely helpful
in the different things I taught them. Two weeks into my stay in Iraq
a wise and generous person donated a few of these tools to the school
over there and some of them were accepted very happily as a gift for
excellent learning by some of my students while I used the remain onesin my teaching.

What was this tool you may ask? It was a book! Yes, a book. Something that here in America I have taken very much for granted and have, to a degree, lost touch with the immense value and information that even a simple child’s picture book can bring.
Charles Darwin in his skewed philosophy was able to influence and
change the mindset of millions of people all through the power of a
book. And when the age group is too young to comprehend the stages of evolution, artists come up with the most absurd pictures

illustrating the process of evolution staring from a standard ape and transitioning into a creature I hope never to meet then finally ending with a human.
The sad part of it is all that information is taken in and processed
by many school age children shaping there minds into believing a lie.
Why did I mention this?
The same kind of approach can be taken with the Iraqi children. But
instead of pumping their heads full of artists perspectives of
nonsense wouldn’t it be better for them to see in detailed pictures
what the steps of a metamorphosis are? Or what the Himalayas look
like? Or what the earth looks like from space? Or how many continents there are?

If a Yazidi child can look at these things and process them in childlike manner they may begin to see that outside their torn apart

lives exists a bigger world, a world that is also looking for answers in
their desperation for the true meaning to life. The children may
slowly begin to understand that maybe there is a higher power that
created the world they live in, maybe there is forgiveness, and that
the Light and Love they sing about does really exist.

A book can go a very long way in influencing a child’s mind. Even if
they are taught from a reader, what they learn will form words in
their mind giving them the ability to one day comprehend the Book that has the key to eternal life.
I will always remember the uncontainable smile the gift of books
brought to my little students. The way they proudly shook my hand on the way out of the room that last day of school helped me to see

that one little picture book may be one tiny stepping stone in the walk way towards a better life. But if eternal life is gained through the small gift of a book, I would give every last book I have.

I look back over my time spent in Iraq and am greatly humbled by the fact that God uses all sorts of ways to show His love to the precious people of Iraq.”

There you have it, the cause that I feel passionately about: the children and literacy. When I see those little faces in the news, I think that they will grow up to be either the next generation of fighters or peacemakers. So much depends on now, on the influences that come into their lives. As David so eloquently pointed out, books can introduce a child to a whole other world. (I want to sincerely apologize for the fomat of the quote. WordPress is giving me fits tonight, no matter how much I edit. This is a problem with blogging on a budget, also known as free blogsites. : } You don’t get so many pretties. )

Many of us cannot volunteer to go to the camps, but we can share. I thank you. Some day, I believe, there will be children who have received Love and they will thank you. I put more of the photos on the sharing site, if you would like to take a look. When you go there, read the comment from a little girl named Ellie. It brings tears to my eyes and a nod to some wise parents who are raising their children to be kingdom-minded.

If God moves your heart to help us (<Click there, obviously) reach the last half of our fundraising goal, I thank you in advance.

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Something I Can Do

I appreciated hearing from some of you after my last post, that yes, you make yourself look and care, too. Even when it haunts your dreams and you carry the weight with you throughout the day and the only thing you can do is pray. Look at the little children squeezed in those masses, caught up in a chaos where innocence and routines are shattered.

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Refugee children

See them carrying burdens too heavy for them. Burdens too heavy even for the adults in their lives who are worried every day. And yet. Look at them. Still little children.

Iraqi children

There are makeshift schools going on in the camps in northern Iraq, a sad reminder that life in the dispossessed world of the tents in the wilderness is indefinite. On the bright side, the children are learning and have something to do during the day. There are volunteers teaching English classes. Many of these households average 8 children. So much potential and energy!

One day while this was heavy on my mind, a thought flitted through. “You know, you could do a fund raiser and send those children books.” It startled me a little, because I hadn’t really thought about being able to DO something. Usually that is my default mentality: I just want to be able to do something to make things better. And I hate feeling like I am powerless, so sometimes I rush in when I should stay out, you know. I decided to wait a good little while to make sure this was not an impulse I had just cooked up on my own.

Meanwhile. A small stash of savings that I was cherishing hopes to use on a bit of unnecessary spending got delegated to another need. I have to be honest, I really struggled with this. I just wanted to buy what I wanted this time. Also meanwhile I kept seeing so many GoFundMe’s and St. Jude’s Hospital at the checkout, and Salvation Army bell ringers. I realised again that the causes dear to my heart are not always the causes that others feel drawn to support. With a little spanking from God about my uncheerful attitudes and the reminder that there are many ways to care for the world, I decided to ask my husband what he thinks of the fundraising idea.

He said sure, go for it. I contacted Plain Compassion about shipping the books. They said they like the idea and will be glad to arrange shipping. They said it’s fine to use their name in the fundraiser, as well. I certified with Usborne Books to do fundraisers, and here we are.

My ambitious goal is to ship a whole skid of books to the refugee camps in northern Iraq. I want to send them phonics readers with bright illustrations, beginner science readers with easy text, picture books, even coloring books and activity books of all sorts.

Of course, I share all this with you, my kindly readers. 🙂 In doing this as a fundraiser, I am using the Literacy for a Lifetime provision, which matches all sales or donations with a 50% grant.

If you feel a tinge of desire to share in this endeavour, here is how it works. I set up my Usborne sales page so that all sales will benefit refugees (not me 🙂 ) by 50%. You can buy books, really nice books at this site, for the children in your life and the refugees will get half the amount in books with Usborne’s matching grant money. Or if you want, you could donate here and your donation would be matched 50%. All this to say that $10 will stretch to $15.

I am hoping and praying that many of us can do a little bit each and send a great big pallet of educational supplies and story books to these precious little children. Everybody should have a bedtime story.

We Have to Look

Is there anyone else out there who can hardly bear to read the international news these days? Something about the plight of homelessness in winter strikes me as unbearable hardship. Add to that the loss of loved ones, the gouging of life savings by unprincipled men taking advantage of desperate people, the mud and the trekking in the cold and the uncertainty of when life will ever get better and it is just more than I can stand. I look at the photos of refugees huddled around small fires built out of bits of scrounged trash, the chapped lips, the bloodshot eyes with a film of hopelessness and I can’t stand it, but I can’t look away. Because it could be me. By some accident of grace (is there such a thing?) it isn’t me, but it could be.

All last week Gabe and I were fighting off a cold/cough that kept sitting hard on our chests every morning with that ugly feeling that it was settling in to stay for a while. We fought it with all the stuff in our cupboard: the Vicks rub, the eucylyptus oil, the Emergen-C, the echinacea by the handful, the Immunotea with raw honey, the elderberry syrup, the grapefruit seed crush to gargle for sore throat. And we won. It never did get a chance to settle in. Every time I fixed another cup of soothing tea, I thought of those refugees shuffling miserably through the mud, wiping a runny nose on a coat sleeve, hoping for asylum only to come up against a barbed wire fence. No comfort and no hope. I can’t stand it , but I can’t look away.

I keep reading opinion bits here and there on the interweb about short term missions and how ineffective they are. “It should have been sold and given to the poor,” Judas said about the priceless ointment Mary used to bathe Jesus’ feet. That is what some folks say about youth group missions trips. All that money spent on tickets for 6 weeks in a foreign country. It’s a waste. You could feed hundreds of people with that money. It’s not a good use of funds. They go, take a bunch of pictures of themselves being the angel of mercy to post on their social media, and they go home again and feel good about having done their bit, and then they buy the next generation phone. I suppose there is some truth to that, and the funds may be wasted sometimes.

But. What if that youth can never be the same? What if she is impacted profoundly by the dignity of a lady singing as she bends to her twig broom, sweeping her packed-dirt courtyard outside of her mud hut.. what if she thinks about this countless times when she wants to grouse about the state of her kitchen floor? What about the pastor who is spending his entire life in evangelism, living by faith, cheerfully serving the youth team cooked spaghetti noodles and fruit compote and they bless the food and are truly grateful… what if she remembers this when she serves bread and soup to her visitors and she doesn’t apologize because hospitality is not just food and she learned this in a village in Ukraine? What if she thinks about the mile walk to the well for water and the small amounts allocated to washing and general cleanliness because it is just really far to that well… and she cannot find judgement in her heart for the dirty begger standing by the intersection because without easy access to water, who can be clean? What if she met someone who literally never had a chance and she learned to care about the family that is all across the world? What if she learned an entirely new and perfectly acceptable way to peel a banana and got thoroughly embarrassed by her own condescending ideas of how things ought to be done? What if that short term missions trip changed the way she lived her whole life, made her see how much she has been freely given? What if she could never just not look because the people are all God’s people?

I don’t even know what this post is about. You are allowed to do that on a blog, I have heard. Maybe it’s about investing in a plane ticket, or exposure to the miseries and inequities in the world, about stripping away the insulation that keeps us self-centered and absorbed in our entitlement to more and better stuff. Maybe it is just plumb stream of consciousness. But we have to look. We have to see around us. What can we even do about it? As much as I would like to be there at the barbed wire, handing out hot coffee to the refugees, I am here and my children want popcorn.

Still. What if we all look at the brokenness and let it settle on us and know that there is only one solution, so we lift it up with groaning and pleading. What if all our collective whispers and petitions rise and God moves to change the affairs of nations? What if we don’t look away and we see what is coming with eyes of faith, so that we start investing in a better place “where righteousness dwells” instead of busily attempting to make heaven on earth?

As hard as it is, I really think we have to look.

Underfoot or Out of Sight?

I sighed a private little gust of weariness when I saw those bags of apples on the front porch, still sitting there, getting riper and sweeter by the day. I mean, I don’t even like applesauce myself. Except maybe frozen/chunky/with cinnamon, and then only when I have pizza or casserole. I ate so much applesauce as a child, I completely filled my life-quota before I turned 16.

But my children love them some applesauce and it is about as cheap and easy a side dish as you can imagine. Not to mention “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” and all that.

So there I was, walking past those apples every day and pushing them to the back of my mind because we needed to do school or we had to fold laundry or it was raining or the leaves needed raked or the seasonal clothes swap was more important or the canner was full of tomato chunks in the freezer.

This year, for the first time ever, I needed to do 3 bushels, because we had been out of applesauce for months, except for occasional batches of chunky stuff we made fresh. So yesterday I was out of stalling material, except that two of the children were mopey with sore throats and headaches. We decided to just get ‘er done anyway.

Friends, we cranked out 60 quarts in less than 5 hours. That included washing the dishes, even the nasty, sticky food mill and the canners. Just me and the kiddos. I couldn’t quite believe we were done at 3:30, but there it was. And I had flashbacks to about 10 years ago when I only did 2 bags of apples and had a 1 year old and a 3 year old who were constantly pushing chairs across the kitchen and taking bites out of random apples and sticking their fingers into the sugar. I remembered how I would be cleaning up the mess at supper time and feeling as exhausted as if I had been attempting to employ a lively flock of gophers all day.

I also recalled how tempting it was to shoo them away, the little ones who pushed chairs around me, everywhere I went for at least ten years. There were just always these chairs to trip over. The floor in front of the sink became a lake by the time the apples were washed. They wanted knives to chop and I had a special set of really dull ones with bright handles for them. They wanted cutting boards. They dropped apple snitzes on the linoleum with such regularity that I quit picking them up until we were all done and then just salvaged the whole lot of them. They insisted that they were big enough to crank the food mill, then strained and panted as they slowly turned the handle and watched, fascinated, as the applesauce squished out.

It just took really long back in those days. I am not going to pretend that I was always sweet about that. We all know better. It is a special sort of therapy for adults with an agenda to include little children in their work. If you have ever tried it, you know how all the squirminess inside you has to simply slow down and just chill, you know, because it will be all right and we have plenty of towels to sop up the mess.

Here is the thing I can’t quite get over. It only took a few years and now they can actually really help. If I had sent my oldest son out to play or sat him down with a movie every time I did a project, then yesterday he would not have known how to assemble the food mill and exactly which picnic table bench we always use to attach it to and why we do it. If I had never bought those brightly colored dull knives for them, my middle boy may never have graduated to whacking skillfully with my chef’s knife like he did yesterday. If I had never let anybody mess with water, then my girls could not have washed those apples like a boss (sorry, I just like that phrase) yesterday, and without even needing to change clothes when they were done! I shouldn’t forget to mention that they hauled all 60 empty jars upstairs. Divided by 5, it’s not so bad!

This is an aspect that I didn’t really consider back when it was a trial to let the children help. I think I mainly involved them in what I was doing because then I could be sure they weren’t getting into trouble somewhere else. Honestly, I had no lofty goals about teaching my 3 year-old life skills. But that is how it works, and when I think back, I know that is how my mom taught me things. I have known how to make applesauce ever since I can remember because… we all had age-appropriate jobs when we made applesauce. The chicken butchering didn’t quite catch hold in the same way, no matter how much Mom said every girl should know how to butcher one before she gets married.

All this is just to say, you young mamas with your hands full and your long chore lists that you have to accomplish single-handedly and your small fry hovering around and breathing your air… Do you wanna work yourself out of a job? Don’t just hand them a device all the time and tell them to bug off. Let them “help”. Let them feel the importance of making a contribution in the household effort. One day you will pinch yourself when you realize that they are, indeed, making your life a lot easier and there is no need to dread applesauce day anymore.

(Love, love The Family Circus)

What Have I Been Doing?

I looked at the calendar recently and thought, “What have I been doing?” I can tell you what I haven’t been doing pretty easily. I haven’t been sitting around reading a lot and I haven’t been writing. I can honestly say that I missed the writing bit pretty much every day. One sentence in a diary doesn’t scratch the itch at all. I sat around just enough so that I wouldn’t miss it too severly. Haha.

We had days and days and days of rain in late September. It was cold and the dog stank and there was mud in our classroom every day. I started burning candles and plugged in air fresheners.

During the long wet I sewed dresses for the little girls so that we could coordinate somewhat for a family photo shoot. Then I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out what I would wear to coordinate with everybody else. Shall I just admit that I got three sweaters at Boscov’s so that Gabe could help me figure out which one to wear because I really just don’t have a good sense for that sort of thing? And that, of course, I wore the simplest, most unassuming one and took the other two back? At the last minute I decided not to wear the charcoal skirt after all, but the grey dress. Why was that decision so hard to make in the store? I did not consult Pinterest, which is what other people do when they can’t figure out what to wear, because I don’t get along well on Pinterest. ‘Nough said.

We had an anniversary, our 14th, and it was the first sunny day after all that drear. I dug out our love letters and we read a bunch of them, laughing a bit at ourselves, reminiscing and agreeing that 14 years has taught us a few things about loving each other, even though sometimes we lose track and forget to appreciate the one we love. Which is why we took a day off and went biking Rails to Trails without the children. No eavesdroppers in the vehicle! And just for a day it was nice not to have to settle any fights or wait for the slow ones. We ended the day with dressing up for a fancy meal out, then descended gratefully back into normal life. After all, back in the day when we had dates every weekend, we yearned to live normal life together, more than anything. And here we are, doing it!

Gabe has lived with me long enough to know the kinds of books I love. For our anniversary he got me blink (you have no idea how hard it is for me to write a book title with a lower case letter) by Malcolm Gladwell, subtitled “The Power of Thinking Without Thinking”. It is packed with insights into what makes people decide things: those split second impressions that affect our choices. For the first week or so after he gave me the book I only had time to stroke the cover, but by now I have read enough to know it is just as interesting as The Tipping Point, which I discovered a few years ago.

Once the weather turned clement (is that right? the opposite of inclement?) our friend Michelle Fisher took the photos. I knew she had lots of experience in posing children because she has nine of them and they always end up with really sweet family pictures. Want to see a few? I think you will agree that she did a good job on them. When these were taken, the children were 12, 10, 8, 6, and 4. This only lasted for one month, but it was kind of fun to say. 🙂 The 10 turned 11 yesterday.

My friend Caroline and I spent a forenoon together, picking up a large meat order about an hour’s drive away. Either one of us could have gone alone, but it just so worked out that we could team up. I was supposed to be the navigator, since we didn’t have GPS. Even with a Google Maps printout, I stink at navigating. Let’s just say we saw a lot of beautiful countryside and enjoyed our extra time to visit. It was nice to be with someone who didn’t get uptight about the unmarked roads and was game to try routes that appeared to go in the right direction. Not to mention someone who didn’t run out of interesting topics of conversation, especially with no eavesdroppers in the van. 😀

The next day I texted her that I had just been running some errands in a nearby town and had to turn around three times, so I think I do need a GPS because of all the stuff in my head that isn’t down on the earth. She replied, “Well, I just read, ‘Set your affections on things above, not on things on the earth.’ With that mindset you might lose your way driving every now and then.” She is witty like that. The thing is, I am pretty sure I was thinking about that meat we hauled home and how it needed to be canned, as well as these apples I am picking up and how they also need to be canned.

I have 2 1/2 bushels of apples still sitting on the front porch and some frozen tomatoes that I have to process and after that I put my foot down. No more! Today I tilled the gardens one final time and sowed a cover crop of rye. I love summer so much, but at this point it is only sensible to move on, wouldn’t you say? For the first time we put in a bed of garlic. Some bulbs in and some bulbs, like the dahlias, out. Gardening is endlessly fascinating. And time consuming. I hope to have more time to write now that the outside stuff is getting wrapped up.

Last, but not least, I have been industriously starting a small book selling business. I signed up to become an Usborne consultant and am still learning the ropes. So far the most rewarding thing has been to be able to send really nice books to refugee children in Iraq. I also was thrilled to get our church school a lot of free merchandise through a book show. I genuinely like connecting anybody to a source of educational books like these. Someday I will do a whole post on this topic. I have been having a blast with this, especially when the boxes of books come and I can sort out orders and stroke the covers (I know. I have a problem. But it isn’t a bad problem.) But there. The final and biggest reason why I have not been writing. I am still figuring out how to fit this business, not into every crack of spare time, but into reasonable hours. My children don’t mind. They drool over the catalog and revel in all the new books! I am systematically turning them all into bibliophiles (That’s not a bad thing either. After the dishes are done.).

Gabe is back on an evening schedule, which means he will be home around midnight. It has been a pleasure chatting with you kind folks while I wait up for him.

The Country Mice Go to a Resort

Last weekend we combined two events and made a family field trip out of the entire works. Family field trips are so much fun, starting with “Are we about there?” every five minutes enroute to “Make her stop singing!” and “I am starving hungry. Did we pack any snacks?” Then you finally get there.

“Does anybody need to go to the bathroom? Where is Rita? Yes, we will eat just soon! Everybody stay together. We don’t want to lose you!” And so on. But it is fun, really. “Please don’t touch! Maybe you will have to save your money for the next 20 years so you can buy that. Yes, I know this display is boring for big boys, but humor us for a little. Where is Rita? Wow, that is a really neat knife with that bone handle, but we don’t have 45 dollars hanging loose right now. Where is Rita? Here, you hold tightly to my hand for a while. Yes, I know you are hungry. Shall we get some popcorn?” We did have fun. This is just my running dialog of the stuff that makes me feel like I am developing a twitch.

Wanna know what we did? Every year Gabe has to take an Outdoor Emergency Care refresher course in order to stay certified as a ski patroller in order to get a free family pass at the slopes. The course itself is interesting for him: what to do with a patient in shock from whacking headfirst into a tree, how to splint that broken-up person for the trip up or down the mountain to an ambulance, or how to assess why that person is coughing blood. It gives me the willies, just looking through the course handbook.

Fortunately for us, there was another event held at Seven Springs that weekend. The Mother Earth News is a magazine that we subscribe to for ideas to develop our small acerage. They hold various fairs across the country, and this one happened to be at the same resort as the OEC refresher course. We bought a pass online and a room for the night, making it a two day affair. A real field trip for our underprivileged homeschooled kids. 😉

The fair was held mostly outside on the hotel grounds from the bottoms of the ski lifts to the outdoor courtyard, but it meandered through conference rooms and hallways as well. There were hundreds and hundreds of vendors, the nicest people you will ever meet. If you are country and going to a resort with a family, this is the time to do it. Earth-mother types like children and they don’t really dress up that much. I saw a lot more turbans and hippie skirts and Ugly Shoes than I have ever seen before in one spot. In the middle of all the herbs and chicken butchering equipment and log splitters there was one lonely booth for flu shots. I nearly laughed out loud. What? I would have hated to be that salesperson.

There were about eight stages with different breakout sessions, all the way from Keeping a Family Cow to Worm Composting. We split up so that we could cover more information.

I took

Growing a Sustainable Diet (Very interesting talk by a woman wearing a linen vest she grew, spun, wove and crafted)
Eating the Whole Plant (Meh. You can eat carrot tops and beet tops… Don’t throw them away! There were two men in the session who were unabashedly snoozing in the A/C. Also my girls were down to the crumbs in the maple-syrup-popcorn bag and they needed to go potty and get drinks.)
One Hour Cheeses (the most fun, as the children were watching How to Pack a Llama for a Hike and I could actually follow. It was fascinating. I bought her book.)

From various friendly vendors we got open pollinator seeds and useful information about saving seeds from one year to the next.. One woman bought corn seeds for meal 25 years ago and has saved them for her annual crop ever since. Another kindly dread-locked lady didn’t have the sweet pepper seeds we wanted, but she did have a few of the peppers and offered us one to save our own seeds. I turned around for a few seconds and looked at Rita just in time to see her eating the last of the pepper, ready to throw away the core with all those lovely seeds attached.

They showed us how and why we should grow mushrooms and explained the science of herbal remedies. I bought teas and tinctures that I usually pay lots of shipping on. My favorite vendors were the good folks from Beeyoutiful. They served the girls and I freshly brewed Immunotea and I bought my winter’s vitamin C supply for the children and essential oils called ProMiSe Blend. Some of you will get that. 🙂

The boys gravitated to the wilderness survival supply booths and the alternate power sessions. Alex has a list of supplies he needs to make an electric motor bike. Gregory now has a Life Straw for his bug-out bag. The girls got batik-patterned head bands and a tiny succulant plant for their windowsill. By the end of the day we were all funned out except for one more thing: the indoor pool. We went during the supper hour when it was deserted except for a few little boys. Alex cannonballed right in, just like at the pond, putting the lifeguard on high alert. So did Addy, only she didn’t have her lifejacket on and was too short even for the shallow end of the pool and had to be fished out. I realized that our children have hardly ever gone swimming in anything but creeks and ponds. They thought the clear water was a blast. By 8:30 they were all asleep and Gabe and I could sit on the balcony to compare notes and make a game plan for the next day.

That included me taking the children for breakfast at the hotel restaurant while he did his refresher course, then meeting somewhere at the fair around lunchtime. The kids were up bright and early, bickering and giggling by turns. I made sure everybody was shiny and well aware of ettiquette at a breakfast bar. The dining area was decked out with white tablecloths and goblets, buffet lines with polished silver serving covers on every dish. I was the only adult with that many children. A buffet line with a child in tow is never easy. Too many choices, they can’t see what is up there, they want to touch stuff that they won’t eat, and the plates are too heavy for the little ones to safely manage without spills. Add in heavy lids on everything and you have a true white hair producing situation. Add in crowds of adults who only want to get their bacon already and don’t know that your kid is counting the strips he is getting because that is what he has to do at home when we have bacon and then you know where the twitch comes from. Here is the dining room, only this web image has flowers and chair covers for a wedding.

Imagine my little country mice, freshly rested and full of ginger, there, around that table.

It did turn out to be a great breakfast. The only Where is Rita? moment was when she had ducked underneath the tablecloth for some privacy. They were very careful to only drink decaf coffee and choose their doughnuts wisely. I was proud of them. 🙂

We spent a good while in the hotel’s backyard, a rock garden area with a fountain and trails. The twitch had almost worn off when the acorn wars started. All this happened while many other guests were still blissfully sleeping and I could just imagine an errant acorn clattering against somebody’s window. I decided our best option was to hang around the animal tent. The little girls plucked up grass to feed the sheep and the boys examined all the rabbit options and chickens and pigs.

When Gabe’s course was done, we wandered around for a while before heading home with our heads just packed with information.

I have been inspired to learn more about foraging for edibles in the wild and growing interesting foods. Next year we want to have a plot for broom corn and zuka gourds. I have been a little obsessed with the One Hour Cheese book, garnishing my end product with flower petals and herbs. I did feel ridiculously happy with that.

We went on a hike yesterday and brought home some turkeytail lichens to make a tea in which “clever prodding helps us keep our systems on their toes, invigorating us in the process.” (Click on the link for an almost lyrical description of the benefits of the humble little turkeytail.)

I don’t buy into the theory that everything will kill you unless you do it the natural way, because I have noticed that everybody eventually dies, one way or another. Hopefully the weekend did open up some fresh neural pathways, possibly staving off alzheimer’s for a few years. Last week I had a vivid dream about an edible caterpillar foraging session that the boys and I were taking, complete with taste testing. I had to brush my teeth when I got up, just to get the taste out of my mouth. We aren’t quite that far gone, but I suppose if you see me coming around in clothes died with geranium petals and walnut hulls, subsisting on fermented vegetables and venison jerky, you may have cause for concern. 🙂

Pumpkin Pots and Paint

We are walking in fresh sunlight these days. I do not take it for granted. I marvel at it and try to store it up. An art book we are reading describes warm colors as orange and red, and cold colors as blue and green. I have been working on a game plan for winter, because I know it is coming and I dread the chill and dark already. Our basement rooms have been the same color for 11 years. We drywalled and painted it grey just before Gregory was born. It’s a nice neutral color, but back then I couldn’t even imagine doing school down there with 5 children and a dog who thinks she is a child. I didn’t dream how much time I would spend in my laundry room.

I decided to liven things up a little, and I am glad I did it every time I walk into the laundry/bath room. Less than $20 dollars worth of paint (because I got one on the mistints shelf…I am cheap like that.) really made a difference. This room was off-white for 14 years. May I present to you Sunbaked Orange with the light off and with the light on. Hey, I saw you blinking. Isn’t it cheerful? This was not the mistint. I deliberately chose it while in my right mind. And yes, that space between the washer and the laundry sink is really small. When I was pregnant, it was uncomfortable. But I like my large sink for scrubbing things and rinsing bits of our property off small children, so I put up with the crack.

(I did this painting while Gabe and the boys spent a week up north helping his dad dismantle a huge old barn. When they first talked about doing this, I weighed my options. I could sit and drink tea and read and write in a space of small appetites and little noise and bazillion paper snibbles, or I could tackle some projects on my list that I had despaired of ever getting done. I chose the latter and worked like a crazy woman. When Gabe got home, I had just finished showering off the last of the projects.)

The other room I painted Tavistock Green. I know. It’s not really a warm color, but it is a different color, and that is what I needed.

I don’t have a clear photo, so this will have to do. Maybe you think this is still grey, but you should see the difference beside the grey wall. It just occurred to me that, being a mistint, this color swatch is not entirely accurate. I think the paint mixer person dribbled a little extra bright green into my gallon, because mine seems to be fresher on the walls.

This is one of my favorite colors in the world, and I picked it up when I saw it on clearance because you never know when you will want to paint something Tavistock Green. That was five years ago. See, I was right!

I did not go yard saling, even though it was Labor Day weekend and the roadsides were just littered with signs. I did not go shopping in Altoona, like I had hoped to do. But I did go up to Rome for 2 days to help out with cooking and whatever I could while the guys were so busily tearing down the barn. That was 8 hours of driving. And Olivia and I did our fall trek to Pittsburgh to see her specialist, so that was another 5 hours of driving after I counted in the detours and the missed exit and the bridge out at a very crucial point. One day I went to a party an hour away and back again for another 2 hours driving total. And I went to pick grapes 1/2 hour up the mountain, so I figure I put in at least 16 hours on the road in my “week off”. I also got pulled over by an officer for the first time in my life. Not that I never deserved it before, but this time seemed mild. I was just at the edge of a small town, speeding up now that I was through it, only I wasn’t through it. I was already past the “End 35” sign when I got pulled over for going 52. Bummer. There went that record. I got off with a warning because I ~~looked harmless~~ wasn’t local.

The girls and I picked all our pumpkins. I wanted pie pumpkins when I bought the plants, planning to sell the extras out beside the road. This usually works out as a nice little cash crop for the boys. But this was the year for funny mistakes. Remember how the tomatoes turned out to be cherry-sized? Well, the pumpkins turned out to be Jack Be Littles. Ever so cute and decorative and… little. I roasted a bunch of them for pies and lattes, scooping out the minuscule bits of soft flesh and blending it. Then I made this one night:

It was the prettiest dinner I made in a long time and I spent a good part of it coaxing the children to eat. What is with that?

I think I will spray paint a few of them for decor and give the rest away.

You haven’t heard the end of our mistaken identities in the garden. This was entirely my own fault. I wanted mini bell peppers because I heard that they turn colors quicker than the big ones and it always seems to take so long to grow a beautiful sweet red pepper and then it frosts on them. I bought plants labelled Cherry Bomb because the picture looked exactly like Mini Bells. When we cut into the first brilliant red baby pepper, it nearly blew us away with its heat. My mom said, “What were you thinking? Bombs? That should have been a clue!” And she was right. But they sure are pretty. My yellow Bells are ticked off about something, but the red ones have finally started turning sweet. Those are the bombs at the bottom of the photo.

I turned a whole bunch of them into pepper poppers and they were fine, indeed. Then I called my sister-in-law Ruby for her hot sauce recipe. One bottle of Tabasco typically lasts us about 8 years, but last year Ruby gave us a pint of her homemade hot sauce, something I had never even thought of making. We are down to the last of it, in one year. It is that good. I used the Cherry Bombs for hot sauce, and in my humble opinion, I think it is even better than the stuff made with Habaneros. Still, we will need to convince the kids to join in if we want to consume 8 jars of it.

The garden is down to a straggle of late tomatoes and green beans, a total failure of a broccoli crop, some really slow pole limas, and lots and lots of sweet red peppers. And weeds. Unbelievable trees of weeds that helped themselves when we got all that rain in August and we couldn’t keep up with them. But in September we do not pull weeds. We mow them off. It is really fun.

Are you getting bored yet? Just one more quick story about this cabbage that Alex kept until it started to split. It was 18 pounds with three babies attached around the bottom. We sliced it up and packed it with salt where it is happily fermenting into sauerkraut, amassing healthful probiotics by the millions. The children don’t like kraut either, but Gabe and I don’t really care. That’s more for us. Hopefully if they see how much we enjoy the stuff, they can get past the stink. 😀

That is about all the creativity I could handle the last few weeks. We are hitting the books with renewed vigor, finishing out 25 days this week. Ahh. It’s a long road is a school term. Rita misses her carefree outdoor existence. “Do you mean I have to do this for twelve years?” she wept one morning when the flashcards overwhelmed her. Because she just turned six this summer, I am letting her off with half days, taking it slowly, letting her go pet her bunnies and look for caterpillars. She can read, and surely she will know her facts by the time those twelve years are over.

Addy, on the other hand, feels left out because she is the only one without real school books. I bought her some wipe-clean preschool materials and that helps, but still is hardly official enough for her. Yesterday she sighed gustily, “I am so tired of this ‘yong, yong’ week! Because I am still not five!” The child talks in italics. Really. Talk about drama. It is just hard being the smallest, especially when you are dead serious about something and the other people at the table smirk. And especially if you still can’t say your l’s.

Well, look at that. I have managed to stay up until my husband gets off work. Thanks for listening!

Tyranny of the Urgent

So August is over and I have to admit to being a little relieved. August yells too much.

Everything yells. Back to School! Get on board! Buy your supplies! Come on, get excited! And yet.

The garden yells. I am ready! Eat me before I rot! Pick me! Pickle me! Can me! I am going to fall off and waste away if you don’t!

My flowers yell. Water! Then they subside into wilting gasps. Water please. Please. Please…. And even with loving ministrations that only forget them once in a while, they fade away.

My house yells. I have dirt everywhere! There’s fly poop on the windows! There are spider webs in the curtains! There is fur on the fans!

There are picnics and family reunions and a frenzy of things to do. Now! While the weather is nice!

The insects even yell. Have you heard them? Its like they have to get in all their decibels really quickly before the Long Cold.

My children yell in sheer barefoot delight, and that is the only yelling I don’t find wearing. As long as it is outside.

It’s just too much yelling. I find it hard to stay serene with so much racket. My diary reads like a sprint through August. I am not sure whose fault it is, but it’s time to slow down a little before I have heat stroke. How about you?

My friend has a wedding anniversary in August. They have been married 25 years, I think she said, and hardly ever can they manage to celebrate until later when life slows down, and how her mother consented to an August wedding, she has no idea.

Still. There was a day when I was doing bushels of tomatoes and it felt so surreal because I knew my sister-in-law was at her mom’s bedside in the hospital, watching her suffer in acute pain while she waited for a diagnoses. Cancer.

Sometimes something yells so loudly that all the rest seems relatively quiet.

I do have some defenses when life gets so urgent. I fix my coffee exactly how I like it, and ~~if I am fortunate~~ if I got up early enough, I get to drink the whole cup in quietness while I shore up my soul for the day. Some days I have to reheat a couple times, and it is still in the cup at lunchtime. I just try not to think about it.

I go on walks by myself whenever I can. Even a half hour is rejuvenating. Sometimes it is the only time in a day that I can think an entire thought to myself and I spend the first 15 minutes just trying to get used to the sensation.

I stop what I am doing every day after lunch and read my little people a story. I need it as much as they do. Sometimes I even fall asleep. One day I woke up at 4 o’clock and felt oddly gratified that nothing yelled that entire time. That was the day Gabe took the boys along to Ag Progress.

We are not supposed to let the urgent dominate and squish out the really important things. I struggle with that. We had a speaker at church recently who talked about about redeeming the time. It comes down to priorities and soul care, first of all. Everything else flows or gets stopped up there. He suggested that the best question is: What does God want me to do right now?

It might not be the house or the tomatoes. What is going to keep my head above water, cleaning the ceiling fan or taking a breather to quiet my heart? Being a self-confessed Martha, I know what yells loudest, and I know what He wants me to do right now, too.

Here’s to a Serene September!