(It isn’t toys.)

• buttons… I bought a bucket o’ buttons at the start of the school year with fond plans for little girls sitting quietly, stringing them while we have math class with the bigs. Surprise. They don’t string them, but they use them for currency, or hatch them like eggs, or carry them around like rare treasure in the toes of clean socks.
• socks… All of my children hate to wear socks. We have radiant heat in our floors, so the house is cozy and we go bare footed all winter. Somehow, the short people decided that socks are playthings. For the boys, they make perfect missiles, lumped up in balls. When they can’t find a pair for going away, we look for the balls under the basement steps and unlump them. The girls use their socks for wallets, knotting their pennies or little doll shoes or special hair bands into them. The only thing worse than unlumping socks is unknotting them after a few days of being dragged around, tied to a little girl’s belt.
• cardboard boxes. This is the confession of a weary mother, I suppose:  I quickly double up and plunge empty cereal boxes deep into the trash can. There are only so many short lived crafts one can be called on to bear reasonably. The sturdier boxes become everything from masks to swords and shields to doll houses, all taped or stapled within an inch of being real construction materials.
• tape… Prodigious amounts of tape. Duck tape, packaging tape, scotch tape, electrical tape. To be fair, they ask before they start dispensing any of it except scotch tape. I might as well get a regular Amazon subscribe and save shipment of scotch tape.
• paper and scissors. We have at least two pairs of adult scissors, two pairs of juniors, two pairs for fat hands, and two pairs of Strictly Off Limits Fabric Scissors. Today we needed to cut something, and found only one rickety pair from when I was in school, no kidding. It is a little unhandy when you really, really need them, but lost scissors sure do cut down on the insane amount of snibbled paper that results from one simple little dinosaur construction. Yeah, Greg. I can always find him by the trail of paper.
• blankets… Blankets are nests waiting to happen. They are tents and mountains and saddles and spy blinds. The boys went through a streak this winter where they would climb quietly up the stairs in their blankets, then inch along the hall way like little lumps of unfolded laundry, very subtly spying on the household activities. This activity was greatly enhanced once they had enough money saved to buy a set of walkie talkies.
• shoes… It isn’t enough to cache treasures in socks. Sometimes you need a few shoes as well. It is a fairly common proceeding at our house to dump shiny pebbles or bits of chalk out of shoes before donning them.
• which brings us to rocks… free and plentiful and the bane of a housewife. Oh dear, how I try to be patient with rock collections, but I really detest stepping on a sharp bit of limestone when I am least expecting it.
• sticks… These are such versatile playthings. You can gather a whole bunch and build a little fire, saving out the long straight ones for roasting marshmallows. We have various teetering teepees on our property, built out of humble sticks. Of course, our boys constantly, and I mean constantly, use them for guns and pistols and bows and arrows. Does anybody know what is with that?
• string and rope… My stash of bits of yarn is pretty much in constant demand. Occasionally I buy a roll of jute or some cheap string for projects, but when that runs out, lo and behold, I start seeing odds and ends out of my ribbon box. And that… does not make me happy! One morning this week Gregory was humming happily, creating some odd bit, when I noticed a strange bulge down the front of his britches. Then I saw that he was dispensing green yarn out of the front of his pants, where he had put the ball of yarn so that it wouldn’t roll away every time he needed it. At least that is what he said, but I think he may have deluded himself that his mother wouldn’t notice.

That is a start. We are definitely not top customers at Toys R Us, if you see what I mean. With the minimalist position we have taken on the toybox, there are still times I actually wish they would all just pick out a nice one-piece toy and play with it for one hour. And oh, I can hardly wait for the best play place of all to open up to us all: our backyard!

Edit: Right after I posted this, I found such a fascinating photo journey of children with their favorite toys. I look at the faces of the little Africans who have one stuffed monkey, and compare them to the children with a broad array of beautiful stuff… It isn’t in the amount of things, but in the richness of the imagination, that is what I say.

My Rita-child is a very plucky little girl, as you may have deduced from previous posts. But she does have some chinks in her walls where she is vulnerable. One of them is dreams. She has learned what to do about it. I hear the thudding of her feet as she stumbles through the dark house to our bedroom. “Mama, something roared at me. I think you need to pray for me.” I lay my hand on her head and pray, “Jesus, protect Rita from scary dreams. Help her to forget them and relax. Give her sweet sleep and beautiful dreams. Amen.” That is all it takes for her to regain courage and pad back to her nest of covers in her bed. There is no snivelling, because she now knows that all will be well.

Another thing that reduces her to tears is getting hurt. She just frankly opens her face and howls. Unfortunately, right now she seems to be in an accident prone stage. Today I took stock of her current “owies”. There is a yellowish goose egg on her forehead, a sore on her nose, a cat scratch on her cheek, a sizable patch of skin scraped off her knee, and an inflamed toe. I am not making this up! She goes through more band aids than all the rest of the children put together. I don’t run quite as fast as I used to when I hear her siren call, because it is usually some scrape or other that is not all that serious. Still, she is totally demoralized by blood oozing out of her own body. “I need a band aid,” she will blubber, “and pray for me.” So I put some salve on her band aid, stick it on, and pray for Jesus to heal her hurt. She shuts right up, squares her little shoulders, and goes out to face the world again. “Sometimes Jesus heals me right away, and sometimes it takes a while,” she informed me the other day.

This is such a powerful lesson for me when I do not feel brave. I do not have to deal alone with the disturbing thing that is causing me distress. All I need to do is go to Someone bigger and pray. Then I can move on and know that He is taking care of the scary stuff.

A few days ago Gregory made some really extra delicious chocolate chip cookies, just the right kind of cookies to share. I told him he can take some up to our elderly neighbor, and suddenly there was a clamor of others who wanted to go along too. Okay, since Eva has been begging me to let the children come visit, I said the older three can go if they promised to come home right away when Alex, who has a watch, said that their 15 minutes were up. After they had gone on their mission, here came Rita, puffing up the basement steps with her coat and boots, sad to have missed the action. She promised that she would definitely just sit quietly on the couch and visit and obey Alex and all that, so I sent her out the door to join the others. I stayed home with the littlest tot who has been having stomach upsets for a week, not wanting to spread her virus to our elderly friend.

After a bit the children came straggling home, full of enthusiasm from their sharing mission, each clutching a quarter. But wait a minute, where is Rita? They didn’t know. She never came. We speedily cased the backyard and all areas of the house. No Rita. Just as I was feeling a little panicky, we noticed her tracks across the snow to the neighbors two houses over, a family from our church. And there she came, tromping along home. 

What were you doing? Why did you go over there instead of to Eva’s house where the other children were? “Well, I just knocked on the door, and Jake answered and I went in to look for Livvy,” she said. 

As it turned out, that was a bit of a yarn. When I asked Jake about her visit, he said he got home from work, saw some little pink boots on the porch, and figured his wife was babysitting. Except his wife wasn’t there. When he got into the house, Rita came wandering out of their toyroom, where she had made herself entirely at home. She told him she was looking for Livvy, so he obligingly helped her look. Just when he was ready to call me to see if I was missing a little girl, she decided to put on her coat and run home. She was totally unfazed by her expedition into the wrong house. My doughty little daughter, unruffled by an upset mother, just said, “Well, where does Eva live anyway?” 

You wanna save money? Drink water.

This one is sort of a no brainer, but I have been crunching some numbers just for fun. With a family our size, we could easily drink a half gallon of fruit juice every morning at breakfast. Even at a very conservative estimate of 2 dollars for a can of concentrate, we could consume $730 a year just in juice. If we bought the high end stuff, fresh from the grove and all that, the number would double. I won’t even go into all the pure sugar calories, but here is a link for free if you want.

Then there is the soft drink issue, which in America borders on ridiculous. I absolutely cannot believe the numbers when I research, but I found them in multiple places. According to this site, the average soda consumption in America is 216 liters a year, per person. Our local grocery store has a sale on Coke this week. You can buy 2 liters for $1.33 . If you buy all your soda in 2 liter bottles when they are on sale, you can scrape by with $143.64  on one person’s soft drinks per year. Or, in a family of seven, it would tally to $1005.48 spent on an addiction to “poison”. Does anyone else notice a bit of insanity here? Obviously, there are a lot of people drinking more than their fair share, because I am sure we are not the only people who avoid soft drinks except for very special occasions. I won’t open the obesity can of worms.

Anyway, let’s get back to water, pure (we hope) and free and plentiful. Drink water if you want to save money (or if you would like to stay healthy) (unless you live near a chemical dump and therefore have to pay for bottled water) (in which case you won’t save money buying water) (except on your hospital bills). Dear me, the qualifications are getting to me. The uncertainty about the use of so many pairs of parentheses in one sentence is also getting to me. Oh well, moving on.

I can’t really get on too high a horse, because I am a dedicated tea drinker. We drink prodigious amounts of tea, gallons and gallons of it. One cup at a time, of course. If there is a study on The Health Benefits of Tea when I am old, I will volunteer for it. I should be properly steeped in it by then, with a touch of sugar and a splash of cream in my daily Earl Grey. To be fair, here are the numbers on tea consumption. I spend about 10 cents per tea bag, which at a rate of one a day comes to $36.50 in a year. Not everybody in our family drinks tea, but we often use 3 tea bags in a day. That brings our cost up to $109.50 in a year. Even nursing students can almost afford that. 🙂

Occasionally I like to brew coffee, but not often enough to know how to figure the numbers. I find that regular caffeine kills me with migraines, a great incentive to keep my intake down. On the mornings that I drink coffee, I look down my nose at my tea drinking self, and on the mornings I have tea, I feel superior to my coffee drinking self. My mind supposes this big divide between the two kinds of individuals: coffee drinkers are urban and sophisticated while tea drinkers are tweedy and contemplative. It amuses me to be both.

But mostly I drink water.

Today a conversation at church reminded me of a conversation I had with your mother about 14 years ago. She was describing the antics of her very “determined” little girl, shaking her head in bewilderment, not sure how to handle this little lady with her zeal for life and her strong opinions. At the time I had proven absolutely nothing in the area of child rearing, although I had plenty of ideas, and this is what popped out of my mouth, “Channel that determination in the right direction and it will be a real asset to her in life.” I remember the slightly startled look on your mother’s face as she conceded that I might be right. In retrospect, I think maybe she was startled at this bit of unsolicited advice from a green horn.

Now that I know you as a gracious young lady, I see that you still have determination. You are not a push over. You keep working at a thing to get it finished, but you are kind and thoughtful in the process. You don’t run over other people to get the thing you want.  You don’t sway in the breezes of every trend that comes and goes.  You are gracious in your opinions, yet you are not afraid to speak them. Here’s the thing: I do believe I was right when I said that to your mother so many years ago.

I look at my own small daughter, the determined one. Some days I use adjectives less kind to describe her willfulness. I understand now what your mother was saying, firsthand.  I see you, with your will surrendered to Jesus, and I see the loveliness of that. Then I take courage. “Channel that in the right direction and it will be a real asset to her in life.” Blessings to you today!

February is the month when our longing for spring becomes palpable. Like Gregory said, “Just thinking about spring coming in one month makes me all shivery.” 🙂

I spent most of the night attending to the needs of a sick little girl. This is the first throwing-up sickness for all seven of us, all winter! I guess she decided to make up for lost time, because I lost count after 9 times of cleaning out the bucket and comforting the sick one. It became a sort of hazy routine: Mama, please may I have some water? Against better judgment, Mama has mercy. Sip, sip. Mama falls asleep. Olivia starts making those noises and scrabbles madly for the bucket. Mama drags off the couch and does what needs to be done.

School is plodding along. I find myself bribing using all sorts of incentives to keep the ball rolling. I would feel guilty, except I distinctly remember  using all sorts of things to prod my [bricksandmortar] students along pleasantly when we hit February. We are now the proud caretakers of an elderly encyclopedia set, which really pleases my trivia loving Greg. “These books are for getting information, not picture books,” he importantly informed his little sisters. I am constantly amused at the flights of fancy that trail out of the right side of his brain. How can someone give you ten random facts about the electric eels he drew, yet ask, “Is before after?” I thought he was joking and started laughing, but he was aggrieved. “If you thought like I do, you would know what I mean.” Ah, yes, that is the thing.

I think about my second grade self, trying to explain to an exceedingly busy teacher why it was that all my subtraction problems were wrong by one digit. I had some complicated reason, which she just didn’t get, so she brought me an abacus to help me out. I remember how insulted I was, and I try to afford my little boy the dignity of at least listening to his case as to why it is confusing that Monday comes after Sunday because he can’t remember the difference between after and before. I would be quite open to suggestions as to how to clear up the confusion. This also explains the recurring problem with prefixes and suffixes. I thought I was so very clear about where they are applied to the root word. I made charts. I illustrated! I told him over and over that “pre” is like “preschool”. You do it before you go to school. But now I understand that his frustration went a little deeper to the whole after/before issue. If you see us playing Follow the Leader around and around the back yard, chalk it up to learning!

Addy is delighting us with her growing language skills. She just hit the repeating stage, which gives the older children lots of amusement when they ask her to say long, funny words. She has chosen our large, illustrated dictionary as her favorite book. It is quite hilarious to see her hefting it onto her lap and paging through with such an important expression. I think it makes her feel big, like she is catching up with the rest of the crew. When you are fifth in line, catching up seems to be really important. She reminds us of Petunia, the silly goose, who carried a book around under her wing to make her wise.

Well, it is lunchtime. We have three kinds of soup left over in the fridge. Long live soup!

I figure that I spent almost exactly 23 hours of the last 46 hours on the road. Last night when I stopped for yet one more coffee at 2:30 AM, I found that I actually couldn’t drink it. My body seems to have a defense mechanism that pleads, “Do not kill me. I will not tolerate yet another artificial spike in energy that is totally unrelated to hours of sleep.” I decided, instead, to curl up in my blanket for a bit of refreshment in the brightly lit Sheetz parking lot. Unfortunately, that decision coincided with a blue Jeep hitting and running from a UPS truck, as well as an over zealous fire chief who blasted his fog-hornish siren for ten minutes. Sleep was out of the question and anyway, I was quite refreshed. Irritation, I discovered, was quite as stimulating as a cup of coffee. That was also about where the snow started, so I granny-drove the last stretch home, both hands on the wheel, concentrating on the dry tire tracks of the only others on the road, the big trucks. The homely Osterburg exit never looked so good as it did at 4:15 on this blitzing cold morning.

My aunt Ruth, who lived in KY, died this week. She of the faltering steps, inarticulate tongue and wistful smile. Aunt Ruth had a debilitating disease that wasted away her cerebellum over the years. Her condition was not diagnosed until it was in the later stages. Now it makes me sad that she didn’t get much respect in life because she baked bread with baking powder instead of yeast and made cherry delight with lime jello and canned pineapple. I wanted to show her at least the respect of going to her funeral, which of course, was a gesture I doubt she appreciated, but my dad and the other uncles and aunts did. So I drove 3 1/2 hours to a rendezvous with my sister and her baby. Enroute, I found out that my brothers were also traveling together to the funeral without their spouses, so there we were, all four grown kids and our mom and dad, back in the land of our birth. It was strange!

The best part of the funeral was imagining Aunt Ruth giggling at being free of her wheelchair and hospital bed, able to say exactly what she means with her new tongue, whole and full of vitality. My brain got pretty scrambled, trying to keep up with translating the mixture of German, PA Dutch and sprinkling of English words that comprise an Amish sermon. To my surprise, although I was only nine years old when our family left the Amish, I still knew the German words for “grace” and “peace”, etc. I sat beside my brother, and found it is probably better not to think about how much the row of solemn long-bearded preachers look like the seven dwarves in Snow White. As my brother pointed out, there was even a Sleepy.

We spent the night in the great big farmhouse that my grandpa built, the one that we children spent so many happy hours in, romping with the cousins. My grandpa built a number of houses, and all of them had a cubby hole under the stairway with doors and shelves inside for the toys. The “Spiel-Eck”, or Play-corner. Sorry, I don’t know how to spell in Dutch. This house also has a long, deep pantry, the mysterious place where Grandma stored the special toys out of reach, where our Aunt Ruth of healthier days would go fetch them for us, but only if we stayed at the kitchen table to play.

When we were ready to leave yesterday, I convinced my sister to drive me past the school and our house so I could take pictures to show my children as a point of reference for my stories. It is pretty astounding to them that their Mama used to ride to church in a horse drawn buggy and walk to school with a black bonnet on, just like Henner’s Lydia. I find the Amish heritage to be rich and exceedingly interesting, but I really am grateful that my parents decided to steer us down a different path.

In our hours of driving together, my sister and I unearthed our very different views on following a GPS to go and come. Let’s just say we uncovered both the triumphs and disadvantages of the system, and leave it at that. 🙂 At any rate, I am so very grateful to be in my own home again, safe and sound.