Schlabach Family Camping

I guess it wasn’t actually camping. Since my siblings have all procreated fairly steadily in the last decade, we have given up on rough camping. We found a cabin large enough to accommodate our needs and converged there. This post will be mainly pictures, for those of you who know my family and are interested. Apologies to anyone else.

Here we have my parents, affectionately known as Pops and Mama. We are so glad they fell in love a long long time ago. We are even more glad that they kept on loving and raised us in a happy home.

Here is a line up of the offspring. It appears that we have now exceeded the bounds of one photo frame, so I have it in two. You can splice them in your mind right there by the little blue boy. There are five boys and twelve girls. Lots of drama in this family!

I remember doing photo shoots like that when I was little. It was never as much fun for the children as the grownups. Oldest in our family is my brother Nate, who is turning 40 this year! Hi Nate! He and his wife are raising four lovely daughters.

That’s Gabe and I with our crew in the second photo. Kenny is third in the line. We had the honor of meeting Jenica, the youngest of the entire crew, for the first time on this trip.

Last, but certainly not least, there is Rachel and her family. She is turning 35 this year. Yup, that’s right. My Mama had four babies in less than five years. It was probably a lot of work for her, but it sure was a blast for us. For some reason Nate and I used to refer to Kenny and Rachel as “the little children” despite the fact that they were right on our heels. Probably that is why Rachel resented it so much when we called her the baby of the family.

I have one photo that deserves a spot as the most delectable meal I have eaten in a long time. Kenny’s wife Carma served us this plate full of flavors that were just delightful. I can’t remember what it was called, but it involved chicken and mangoes and cilantro, among other ingredients. Isn’t it so purrrty?

It was great to get away for a few days and just visit and eat and eat and visit. You know how it goes. It is also quite a bit more relaxing now that the most of the children play nicely together. The older ones found a game that kept them occupied for hours and hours. And the little girls… well they just kind of trolled around being mostly sweet.

We are so blessed!

Odd Stuff and Owning Your Life

There are a number of quirky things in my life right now. I sort of like anomalies. They keep things interesting. And weird. Of all the things I wrote in my head in the weeks, the two I actually typed to post disappeared in unexplained computer glitches. Isn’t that hilarious?

One of the library books we checked out in February was missing. We renewed it repeatedly and scoured this house, even going so far as deep cleaning the boys’ room. Finally today I called the library and told them we give up. I will pay for the book, but could they just check their shelves to be sure it wasn’t there. It was. They had missed it when they scanned the returned books. I did all that cleaning and digging and offering of reward money for a book that wasn’t even in the house.

We planted rye in our garden last fall to enrich the soil this spring. It felt so good to till that green manure under this spring and plant our peas nice and early. Until Gabe’s dad, the greenest thumb we know, told us that you have to wait a while to plant after you till the rye under, because it messes with the germination of seeds. I kept hoping he was wrong, but those peas did not come up and he was right. Two weeks later we replanted without that smug glow of earliness. At least it is supposed to be a cool, wet June, so the peas should still feel happy.

Then there was the wonderful feeling that the month of May was deliciously empty of assignments, yet I somehow managed to drag out portfolio finishing and homeschool evaluations until the last week of the month. I did it just because I had the luxury of time, but then it hung over my head the whole time. Silly me.

I am also interested in the fact that we made it through the entire winter, all seven of us, with only one episode of puking, and that with my husband working daily with sick people in the ER. And yet. Here we are, on the 10th day of a vicious stomach bug that is working its way through our family one person at a time. Yesterday I thought we were finally home free until I heard the familiar, “My belly hurts,” in my deepest sleep early this morning. Do you know how fast a mother can spring out of bed with fight or flight coursing through her veins as she grabs a bucket to shove under her child’s nose? It is very speedy indeed.

Most amusing of all is my perusal of Own Your Life, by Sally Clarkson, in just about the most disorganized weeks ever. I did really enjoy the book. Here is why.

I like organization. I like the idea of having order and purpose to life. I like to have a clear vision of my role and a plan to fulfill it. However the reality is that I am a “fly by the seat of your pants” person deep inside. With discipline issues. Recently I had an aha moment when I thought of what would happen to the wife of a nurse with weird working hours if she was incapable of dealing with irregularity, and I embraced my spontaneity a little more. Yet I liked Sally Clarkson’s book with it’s emphasis on calm and sanity.

In chapter one she talks about basic training in our lives: the soul stretching, mind numbing, mundane sameness of faithfulness. In our youthful dreams we don’t think about sagging curtains or ugly carpet or fighting children. We don’t assume that there will be illness or peevishness or cabbage worms. Our dreams are noble, full of greatness, which goes to show that we are meant to rise above the grittiness in life and flourish. Sally is an older woman now, recounting a moment when she realized that she had unhappily succumbed to a life of monotonous drudgery. This became her prayer, (page 9)

“No matter what happens…

I will be as obedient as I can to

bring joy into this place,

create beauty in this wilderness,

exercise generous love,

persevere with patience.

I will choose to believe that wherever You are my faithful Companion

is the place where Your blessing will be upon me.”

I relate wholeheartedly with that prayer, with embracing the seasons of life, with deciding to like God’s will for me. Anybody out there with me?

I was challenged to identify the things that drain me, sources of life-noise and chaos that produce “sawdust souls”, as Sally describes it.

Chapter seven is titled “Allowing God’s Spirit to Breathe in You”. This, really, is where it’s at if I want abundant life instead of living constricted by human inabilities. When I keep tryst with the Lover of my Soul, I flourish; when I live in my own strength, I become impoverished nigh to death. This is a simple fact. I know what happens with constant activity, becoming preoccupied with all that needs to be done, where pressures cause harsh reactions to the people I love, all for lack of refueling my exhausted soul.

I think that the defining statement of the book is this: “Home is the stage where the play of your life is delivered. As you clarify your vision, accept your limitations, and cultivate grace, you are laying the foundations that will build influence and legacy… Own your home life, right where you are.” (page 201)

So that’s where I am right now, hugging life with all it’s rare oddness and boring sameness combined.

Of Dreams and Syrian Refugees

Gregory has discovered a way to wake up when his dream is not to his taste. He says he figured this out one night when he was riding a motorcycle extremely slowly back and forth until he was so bored that he looked for a ravine to plunge into so that he would wake up and quit the dumb dream. I thought it was a good idea, right up there with how I figured out as a child that if I wanted to keep on with a good dream, I could concentrate really hard on falling asleep again and make it play out how I wanted it. 🙂

Last week I had a nightmare that haunted me for a long time. I don’t usually pay much attention to my dreams, because I have so many of them, and they are mainly bizarre. But this one was so real that I woke up exhausted, like I had been fighting all night instead of sleeping. It seemed, in my dream, that I was fleeing through hostile territory with my children. My husband had died and we were alone, without a safe place to hide. Over and over evil men would approach us and try to snatch one of the children. I cried out repeatedly for help in Jesus’ name, and we would be left alone for a while in our endless wandering. If I could have found a ravine to drive into to make it stop, I would have. In the end we were all chucked over Niagara Falls because we wouldn’t deny our faith.

I struggle to make sense of this sort of thing. Without over-spiritualizing things, I felt like God was saying, “This is really how life is, and this is the fight you put up for your children against evil principalities and powers. You don’t need to be afraid, because you have the power of Jesus, but you need to be aware.”

A few days later I read an article about the struggle and privations that Syrian women refugees endure in their enforced homelessness in Turkey. It was like someone described my nightmare, complete with husbandlessness and evil men snatching the children. Maybe it was a dream to give me empathy so that I pray more. A few days after that I started a book set during the Spanish Inquisition. I am having a major case of story grip. But what is with this sense of deja vu?

Do you take dreams seriously?

Maybe you can tell me about that Niagara Falls bit? 🙂

I Blinked

And here we are at March 12. I am not sure how that happened, but it is a month of life happening at amazing speeds. I love when things start livening up, when the sun puts out actual rays of warmth, and all the water outside turns liquid and starts to trickle to other places. On the last day of snow the children wanted one more sledding party before the great melt began. I did this (on a Saturday morning!!!)

while they did this.

The thaw… It is such a glorious gift, disguised in a whole lot of mud, of course.

That is what I have been doing, I think. I have been taking care of mud. On the floors, on the coats, the snow boots, the insulated pants, the gloves, the… Well, I don’t mean to bore you. You are doing the same, no doubt. Just yesterday we were planning a little outing to Gabe’s sister’s house while he attended an Emergency Nurses Association meeting. The girls wanted to wear the new butterfly dresses. Rita’s got muddy before lunchtime when she took a little foray into the backyard. She ended up with a full scrub down in the tub, and I found a jumper with tulips on it for her. When it was time to load up the Suburban, the little girls took another (unauthorized) jaunt into the backyard. Addy fell, her dress and sweater became a ruin of brown smear and her face full of remorseful tears. When we got to my sister-in-law’s house, their over-eager puppy jumped up on everybody with muddy paws, so there we were again, but at least we tried.

I have been cleaning the mud on the dog here, too. She still has her crate in the basement to sleep. You know what dogs with silky medium length hair do when they come out of the wet, don’t you? “Oh, oh, oh,” said Jane. “Funny, funny Spot.” Only it isn’t funny when you are responsible to keep a semblance of order and cleanliness.

Speaking of the dog… Remember that research report that my son was laboring over? Well, she snitched it out of his desk and shredded it in an unguarded moment. That was a small earthquake in our household history! I did feel very sorry, seeing as he was on the third draft, with illustrations in his folder and everything neatly compiled, ready for the last draft. I felt so sorry that I told him he wouldn’t have to do it over, on one condition: he wasn’t allowed to storm about it anymore. That brought instant peace to the situation. We won’t have it to impress the evaluator this spring, but the dog ate it and that is that.

Another momentous occasion in recent local history was the felling of the backyard trees. A lot of our trees, both in the yard and the woods, are ash trees, and they are all dying. I am not so tree huggerish when I start seeing limbs falling after every storm and I see the leaves dropping already in July. Disgusting little ash borers. Gabe talked to different experts who all said the same thing. The ash trees will not recover. So. We cut them down. I mourn their 40 to 50 years of growth, all gone to smash in a five minute encounter with a chain saw. But. “You have to let them go, Sally Jane.” (And that quote is from Letting Swift River Go, not Dick and Jane. It is a great children’s story that deals with losses and changes.)

So the trees are down and what a tangle that made in the backyard! Rita built nests of sticks and blankets and lived out there for hours in the sunshine. She even got a little sun kissed on her nose. I washed all the blankets and little sleeping bags, and the next day she was at it again, only with a bigger stick pile to hold her off the ground better. I wish I had something she could hatch.

Gabe and the boys spent an entire day hauling firewood and brush out of the yard. While they were at it, the power line guy stopped in to talk about the trees and brush along the road, directly under the power lines. The last time they cleared that out I cried because that was my privacy fence. That was 12 years ago, and I guess I must have grown a bit since then, because I philosophically accepted the inevitable. “You have to let them go.” This one was a silver maple, leaning perilously toward the house in its declining years. I held my breath and prayed while he was sawing it down, but all went according to plan and the deck remained unsmashed.

And this is how the sky looks, so I am happy.

Just a few quick photos…

My girls and I took Mom out to Ohio to rendezvous with her Indiana sisters. We all partied at my sister’s (and her long-suffering husband’s ) house. Rachel had made such a beautiful cheesecake with raspberry filling.

My sister also planted and arranged this brilliant centerpiece. It was the coldest week of the year and the snow was flying, but we had a bit of green grass. There was a meal at Panera Bread. Let me tell you, these girls know how to have a good time. I won’t mention the uncanny ability that all the Miller girls have to talk and listen at the same time.

See, I told you it was fun. 🙂 And last, but not least, an afternoon tea at Rachel’s before we took our perilous ways east and west.

I apologize for the grainy cell phone pics. I just took them for the feel. (And for something to post before midnight tonight. 🙂

Be Mine, part 2

The first thing the girl had to admit was that her co-teacher had gotten past her defenses before she could figure out an appropriate course of action. It was a little hard for her to believe, because those things she used to say to her siblings… one of them was that she would not marry someone younger than her. Four years! It was even worse than she had anticipated it could be.

Oh, the irony. Because she had to admit that she liked him, as in really enjoyed spending time with him, hearing what he had to say and giving her opinions in turn. He was an exceptionally good listener. It was quite dangerous, because she found herself confiding ideas and thoughts that were actually sort of private.

She squirmed to think that he might catch on just how much she liked him, and feel pity for the desperate older girl. There was only one thing to do: retreat and rebuild her walls. She quit the casual conversations for a while, staying at her own desk, doing her checking. It was boring, but it worked. After about six weeks of this, they had fallen into the habit of easy camaraderie again. She wrote in her journal, “I doubt he is actually interested in me, because I am too old for him, but if I do marry, I want someone like Gabe.” It was as much as she would admit.

About this time, the upper grade teacher took the younger one out and gently suggested that he be careful not to make the girl teacher like him too much. He didn’t think it was fair to be such buddies and enjoy her company without any plan to pursue her further. That was when the younger teacher said, “What if I told you the feeling is mutual?” So right there in the coffee shop the beans were spilled between the two guys, but the girl had no idea what was going on.

At Bible school that spring she told a circle of her friends that she didn’t think her future husband was even on the horizon yet, because really, her co-teacher had treated her so respectfully that she couldn’t tell what he was thinking in the line of love. She couldn’t imagine that the age difference didn’t make her practically a spinster in his mind. He had a lot of dreams, things he wanted to do and places he wanted to go.

Just friends. That was the mantra she kept repeating to herself.

Be Mine

It’s the season of celebrating love, like it or not, in cheesy ways or thoughtful poems. You can take your pick. Recently I saw a tutorial for making the perfect bacon rose for your man. Excuse me while I laugh a little, because who ever thought of bacon and roses together? I just love the diversity of humanity.

Last night I watched a young man stagger out of Walmart with a gi-normous teddy bear. The older man with him asked in disbelief, “How much did you pay for that thing?” to which he replied a little glumly, “Forty bucks!” I sure hope his girl likes it.

I had a flashback to a younger me who declared to my brothers that if I ever have a boyfriend who gives me a teddy bear, I will not marry him. This was in the era of the journal that nearly killed me. 🙂 Fortunately Gabe gave me mugs and chocolates and handwritten letters and such like. I was sunk. Once he even brought me a used copy of an out-of-print book that I had wanted badly and he happened to see it in a library sale. That was worth about 10 Valentine’s teddies to me. Anyhow, here’s to individuality and thoughtful love. Me being me, I don’t mind getting roses at some time when nobody else has them 😛 but there are ladies who feel very neglected if they don’t get their dozen in February. A wise man knows these things about his woman. (Poor guys.)

I thought you all might enjoy a love story, one that nearly didn’t happen. Yes?

There was once a girl who decided that she wouldn’t get married for a very, very long time. She would put up high defenses and pour out her heart in teaching elementary students. Maybe by the time she was about thirty a total stranger would catch her eye. Or maybe her husband had died in infancy. Most of her immediate circle of friends had either gotten married or headed off to various posts of voluntary service by the time she was 23. Even her best friend brother had taken off to the mountains of North Carolina with her best girl friend. There was nothing to distract her, really.

The year that she had the first through third grade classroom, the school board had a sudden crisis of needing a teacher for the next grades. One of the board members had a nineteen year old son who really wanted to teach, and this was his chance. The girl teacher felt sorry for him, stepping in with so little time to prepare, so she helped him figure out the schedule and showed him around the school cubbies and store closets.

He showed a real aptitude for the job, a natural teacher, even though she thought he was really young. The students respected him, and because the school was small, their classrooms shared recess time. He did well with organizing playground time and she gladly let him go ahead with that. There was the matter of him getting a bigger paycheck, just because he was a guy. That irritated her a little, but otherwise, school went along just swimmingly.

There was an upper grade classroom, and that teacher had a girlfriend. Sometimes they all played Mille Bornes after school, leaving the checking for later. It was really a lot of fun. She had not expected to have such jolly times with her co-teachers, seeing as there were no other ladies on staff, but it turned out to be okay. There were many conversations about the students, about how to reach the needy ones and how to keep learning exciting, and does learning always have to be exciting, or should one just keep plowing through.

By midterms the girl realized that she had a very high respect for that co-teacher, that she valued his opinions much more than she ever would have expected. She was astounded. This was her kid brother’s friend. He was four years younger than she, and how in the world had he breached those high defenses that she had put up???

To be continued…

When the Cat’s Away

Our three older children went on a field trip today with the church school. It made for a very strange void for me. What to do with a whole day off school??? I thought I should really hit some projects that have been languishing for lack of a block of time. One of the things about homeschool that nobody told me is the obvious: there is no substitute. There are no off days. When you aren’t doing school, you are tearing around catching up with all the stuff you don’t get done on school days. It doesn’t always look very graceful. 😀

Last night my sister-in-law texted me about getting together so the children can play and we decided on a play place in Altoona called Slinky’s Action Zone. It was just me and the two smallest tots. They loved it! As it turned out, it was a free day. By the sheer numbers of little children bouncing off the stuff in the soft-play area, it would appear that a lot of people are feeling housebound. I had fun sitting and holding baby Chloe while the girls wore themselves out with their cousins.

This is what time-to-go-home faces look like. We attempted one group photo outside the door, under the giant Slinky. These nieces and nephew fit neatly into the gaps between our children. They could all be ours, 🙂 except Addy is only 6 months younger than Logan.

And I will definitely take little Chloe anytime!

I Can Do It Myself

My dad’s deck building business got a call recently from a highly educated professional woman who needed someone to come change a doorknob at her house. Even conceding that doorknobs can be very tricky things, you have to wonder if 8 or 10 years of higher education should not include the simple process of wielding a screw driver and reading directions.

Remember our washer deal, where the repairman gave us coupons for a new one, without even picking up a wrench or taking off a single part of the washer? My husband didn’t really have time to trouble shoot with the terribly boring repairman’s manual that was taped inside the washer frame, but he worked and worked at it, one computer panel at a time. After he replaced the transmission, there were still glitches, with it running perfectly sometimes and dropping the rinse cycles at other times, or refusing to spin, or even locking the lid and not opening it for 6 hours.

It was maddening. Our elderly neighbor had given us an enormous can of salted peanuts for Christmas. We stored them on the dryer so that Gabe could chew peanuts while he messed with that recalcitrant washer. He researched online a lot, while I, not unlike Job’s wife, kind of thought it was the computer and maybe we should give up. Just before he scraped the bottom of the peanuts can, Gabe replaced a simple little part that actually fixed all the problems. It was very, very gratifying.

I remembered this when the dishwasher started giving me grief, leaving many of the dishes on the top rack with a sandy, disgusting residue of food and detergent. I knew Gabe could probably fix it once he ever had a free weekend, but I decided to Little Red Hen it, with Youtube for my crutch. On Friday after the children were started on their lessons, I began to take it apart, one piece at a time. I found tutorials, and by lunchtime, I was down to the sump, digging my fingers gingerly in its bowels for anything that might be clogging it. Two toothpicks, about 7 popcorn kernels, a bunch of grapefruit seeds, some indescribable grey matter, and a shard of glass later, it was all cleared out. Alex helped me assemble it all and we loaded our dishes for a trial run that produced sparkling clean dishes! It was very, very gratifying.

It might be my imagination, but it seems to be louder than before. Think I should call the local deck builders about that?

Life is Like That

I feel like the train derailed on this blogging thing, and now I don’t know how to hitch it back up. Oh well, maybe I will just start with this past week, in which we had our thirteenth anniversary. We believe that the best thing we can do for our children is to have a vibrantly happy marriage. So we went trotting off without any children. Do you want to know how it felt?

It felt really, really strange. And it was so much fun. You could even say relaxing. Five children seems a bit much to drop on one person, so we left the girls with my parents and took the boys up north to be with Gabriel’s parents, which was close to our destination at Watkin’s Glen. We have never camped without the children, so this time we decided to go all minimalist. One kettle to boil water for hot drinks, some cheese sticks and power bars. Apples. Ramen noodles, just in case we got too hungry before we hit a restaurant. I am not kidding. And high quality chocolate, of course. A duffle bag for each of us and bedding to sleep in the conversion van we borrowed from my folks. That was it.

We hiked the Glen and biked all the trails at the campground, then needing a little something, we shared a grape pie sundae. A few hours later we went out for Chinese. This is something you don’t know before your tots come along… Very quickly they will take up your hands wherever you go, or else you will be clutching at them to hang onto them in parking lots and stores. Taking your children to a buffet style restaurant is so… involved. The luxury of just having each other for a few days is just that, a luxury, only one hand to hold, and it isn’t trying to run away!

We slept as long as we wanted, which means that when Gabe asked me if I was ever going to wake up and it was 10:30, I actually wanted to get up. Did I mention that we relaxed? I missed the children like everything. It was so odd to read and read by the campfire and nobody complained about being hungry. Campfire cooking is really fun, but it is also kind of exhausting, keeping ice in a cooler and washing greasy pans in lukewarm water, so this was a nice contrast. On the second day we traveled north along the Seneca Lake to the vineyards, stopping enroute for dessert and coffee at a funny little cafe, just because.

We picked 10 boxes of grapes to bring along home in just under 2 hours, then found the home of our friends, Nelson and Amy, who graciously served us a lovely supper and gave us a gorgeous guest room for the night.

The next morning it was time to collect the children in a 6 hour process that involved picking up the boys, stopping at an orchard and picking 3 bushels of apples, then coming on home for the girls. Life felt so do-able again, crazy schedules, complex responsibilities, needy people and all. It was good to get away, but it was even better to come back.

Remember the bit about the grapes and apples? There was no option but to don the apron and get to work. Half the grapes were for friends, but even so we steamed 58 quarts of juice. That should last a while. 🙂 While the steaming process was going on, I peeled a half bushel of apples for pie filling and to dry. It was a fun project, not one that I really had to do. By the end of the day, I was a little tired.

Early the next morning I lay in bed trying to decide if I had the stamina to make applesauce that day. It was a toss-up between wrapping up the canning all in one fell swoop or leaving it for another day when I wouldn’t feel like doing it either. I decided on the fell swoop, whatever that is. Alex got a day off school and we applesauced away. When the last batch was simmering on a cooker on the deck, I asked him to check on them while I ladled the sauce into jars. He thought they looked “almost ready”. By the time I checked on them, they were scorched into a brown mass on the bottom of the kettle.

It was the last rite of canning season… a hopelessly scorched kettle to scrub and soak and scrub and soak. I started in on it and quickly realized that this was the worst, horriblest scorched kettle ever. Google brought up a solution that turned on light bulbs in my head. I share this with you because I surely am not the only person who wants to throw kettles into the trash and slink away.

Just in case you ever have apples permanently stuck to your sauce pan, here is what you do: Pour peroxide into the kettle to about ½ inch depth. Sprinkle in a few teaspoons of baking soda and simmer it on low with the lid on for about 20 minutes. Touch the scorched spot with a wooden scraper and watch in delight as it lifts off the stainless steel bottom and floats gently upward.

Then you thank Jesus and pass the word along. Because nobody should spend hours scouring pans when they are dog tired from canning. Amen?

It is cold outside and the hot drinks are waiting. They are calling me to come play Settler’s. Cheerio!