Stepping off the Chili Soup

My Blogging instructor says I should fiddle with my theme today, try some others, see if I like them better. I have a seasonal theme called Sunny Day or some such, which I picked because it was bright blue and cheerful on the summer setting. Every once in a while I remember to change it when the seasons change, but I did notice that there are still falling leaves at the bottom right now. I never will be a savvy blogger with all the bells and whistles, making money off publishing my ideas. Well, never say never.

Recently I have been made aware that the ad bar at the bottom of my posts is displaying some distinctly bottom-feeder ads, to “help defray the cost of a free blog”. I never see them, so I cannot complain without a screen shot to prove my complaint to the higher ups who are defraying costs. If you see an offensive ad, please message me or send me a screen shot at the email address on my About page. Maybe I will just need to shell out the bucks to remove all ads.

Still, as the people who have to look at the theme, what do you say? You ought to have a voice here, don’t you think? How much does it matter to you how a blog looks? My personal preference is for little clutter and nothing blinky. I love beautiful photos and clean lines but I like artsy stuff too. If you open the site one day and woah! everything looks funny, it’s just me messing in the back somewhere, finding my “voice”. No, wait. The voice is the way you convey ideas in blogese. I will be looking for the right ambience.

Meanwhile, would you like to know what I should be doing? I should be feeding my chicks their breakfast. We need to be very quiet this morning since Gabe got home from his shift at 4AM. Cold cereal is quiet. Yay! The children are used to the drill. They drift into the living room sleepily, pick up books and whisper because anything more gets a fast and loud, “Shhh,” from Mama.

After the silent cheerios crunching, (seriously, I struggle so much with annoyance at the noises of people eating cereal) it’s downstairs to do school. I need to write out Gregory’s assignments for the next week. Usually I do them 5 days at a time and a week goes faster than you can believe. We started this system of assignments written down in a notebook by the day, where they have to show me a completed row of checkmarks at the end of the day before they may move to the next one. This has helped a lot with missing homework. It’s all homework around here, but I mean science questions not answered, English paragraphs not written, quizzes not done. (It happens.)

On my kitchen counter I have ingredients for a big pot of chili for lunch. Gabe’s parents plan to stop in and he will be awake by then. I really should be chopping an onion about now, as well as making sure the coffee cake gets baked in my oven that is slowly letting me down by taking longer and longer to preheat. If I want to get it done by lunchtime, I had better go turn on the oven.

I have a lot of steps to get in today, too. Gabe got both of us those personal fitness trainer wristbands that sync to an app on your phone. We are counting steps and trying to be more active. It’s February, you know, and not particularly fun to go outside here in PA. I walk around my house a lot, though, just picking up stuff on the floor and keeping an eye on things in general. Haha. Yesterday I logged over 8,000 steps which is about 4 miles. I didn’t think that was too bad for a SAHM! Still, it’s not fair to compare, because Gabe did over 12,000 and passed me up while I was either sitting in church or sleeping. Olivia suggested that I go to the bathroom really often during the meeting last night at church. 🙂

Gotta jog along!

Blogging 101, Assignment 1

It was with a bit of trepidation that I signed up for these assignments from WordPress, seeing as I usually only write when the phrases start scrolling through my head. Sometimes it’s the middle of the night and sometimes it is while I am on a solo walk that I get inspiration. A bit of discipline is a great thing though, so I will introduce myself to the world today, along with my blogging goals, as I have been instructed. 🙂

As a little girl skipping to the Amish school where my formal education started, I had no aspirations to be a writer. I just wanted to learn to read those letters that fascinated and scared the wits out of me whenever I looked at a book without pictures. I was fairly certain that reading would be too hard for me. Fortunately for all of us, we had an amazing teacher who pulled out our strengths. Even though she had about 30 students in four grades, she noticed us individually and managed to pull us all together in a joyous quest for knowledge. Once I could decipher the puzzling groups of letters in the books about Reuben and Rachel, I galloped along reading everything I could lay my hands on, including cereal boxes and shampoo bottles. Literacy was for me a portal with endless vistas to explore.

It has been about 30 years since the Amish school days, but I still think of myself as a learner. We are all apprentices of life, whether we like it or not. I have failed a lot of exams in my life, but I get to do them over until I pass. There are plenty of activities for my hands to do and unending conundrums for my head to figure out just here in my little house with my family.

My husband is my best friend and my encourager. When we got married 14 years ago, we didn’t know much, but we did know that whatever comes, we are in it together. I stand by him and he stands by me. Don’t try to get between us or we will raise our hackles and fight. We are blessed with five children, ranging in age from 4 to 13. Those life exams I referred to are mostly courtesy of the children. 🙂

Some may think the life of a stay-at-home mom to be impossibly restricting, and I have to admit, it is harder than I ever imagined. While my children are smallish I am “keeping” our home. I mean that both in the Biblical sense of a woman who stays at home and in the contemporary sense of someone such as a zoo keeper who keeps the habitat pleasant and cares for the animals. I consider this my life work, worthy of all my consideration.

Part of that consideration is homeschooling our children. Some days I love it and some days I hate it, but it does work really well with our lifestyle. My husband is an RN with odd 12 and 8 hour shifts and mandatory weekends as well. Our school days are flexible and vacations are always off-peak season so we can stay a family unit. Speaking generally, we like learning about stuff together. Research reports are a little “meh” says my oldest son. My personal enthusiasm for practicing the writing craft has not yet translated to my children.

I process life through writing. When I started blogging eight years ago, it was mainly to stay in touch with distant family members. Then I realized that I really liked having this record of our lives and the developments in them. Eventually it sort of became a record of God’s work in my heart, and now my blogging is a mash of all of the above.

One night I needed a new title, since my first blog “Living and Learning” was not working out. I sat at the computer, sorting through the innards of my shiny new WordPress site and got an idea. There was a bookcase of children’s books right beside me. What better way to give a nod to my insatiable love of books than to play with a title? “Make Way for Ducklings!” I thought. Alas, every variation of the title was already taken. How about “Mrs. Tiggywinkle”? Nah. She was too prickly. I wanted something easy to remember, which is how I came to “Wocket In My Pocket”. Thank you, Dr. Seuss. I like that wockets are anything. We have wockets everywhere around here. Lots of them are fun to write about.

I chose my tagline “looking for the unexpected in the mundane” because that is what I do. It takes conscious effort not to settle down among the clods in the mind-numbing mundaneness of laundry piles and sticky floors. I am trying to dust off the ordinary and find the shiny bits in life.

Nobody was more astounded than I was when I started to get loyal readers. It is the best part of blogging: getting feedback, hearing that what I wrote connected with someone else, feeling that putting my heart out there may have cheered another person on. Blogging is scary enough that I have considered quitting altogether many times. But here I am, still getting up early or staying up late to try to string words together in a compelling way. Thank-you for reading.

Top 5 Reasons Why We Camp in State Parks

I know you all want to hear about our winter camping adventure. Here it is, February, so I can finally tell you about it. I have been saving it up. Actually, I have been doing laundry and washing road salt off Rubbermaid totes and spending three days in the company of a whiny stomach bug. Also I have been teaching cursive E and hosting company and reading aloud every day. I have been learning to stop abusing the ellipses. I badly wanted to insert one there, but Grammarly rapped my knuckles.

When I told my friend Amy that we are going camping in January, she said, “That’s not vacation!” I think she may have been referring to the facilities, or lack of them. Here is why we camp in state parks despite that objection, in 5 handy-dandy reasons:

We get rejuvenated in nature. I ask no better form of relaxation than a stroll on a well-maintained, well-marked trail through unspoiled woods. This is something Gabe and I want to pass on to our children: “Alone with God” and all that. Stuff doesn’t scream so loudly, troubles tend to assume more manageable proportions, there is no wi-fi and little cell service, and if you go during off-peak seasons there are no other people.
We appreciate camping cabins. Tents are fine for some seasons, but actual bunks with mattresses, hooks to hang up jackets, shelves for each child’s treasures are fine for other seasons. I don’t sneeze about electric heaters either, and light switches to hit when things go bump. At one time I would have sneered at the poshness of it, but I have opened my mind a bit. The lack of plumbing tends to off set the poshness anyway.
We like affordable things. We just have to face it, the beach is too far away from central Pennsylvania for us to trot there every time we feel like it. (Also, people don’t walk around naked in state parks, a small consideration, surely.) On this recent trip, we spent less than $400 on fuel and lodging for 7 people (3 nights) and it was built to accommodate 12. That is not including the tote full of special foods to cook on sticks (just kidding, we had a stove and fridge) and the tote full of fun activities for middle of January camping, of course.
We value learning about things, any things, all things. State parks have calendars crammed full of educational and low-budget fun. Many of their programs are free, paid by our hard-earned tax dollars, of course. The activities were a little sparse in mid-winter, but there was a snowshoeing class and a large ice rink cleared on the ice for skating. There was geo-caching all around the park, even though the caches were hard to find under snow. But the great thing? Those vacation days totally count as school days because we learned stuff while we were just hanging out with each other.
We like being around nice people. By that I mean family-friendly people who understand that a little boy hatcheting firewood is as natural as breathing. I cannot remember ever meeting a creepy person or even an especially grouchy person at a state park and I watch for them ever since I read The Shack. I did see in the news that a criminal was hiding out in a local campground, but people ratted on him. Apparently all the fresh air and exercise keep campers alert and they look out for each other. 🙂

There you have it, my nice, attention grabbing title and a list. Is there anything you would like to add?

There is also this image, poached off the internet, of the dam at Parker Dam State Park, although when we were there the water was quite frozen and the entire 20 acre lake would have been fine for skating.

Dam_at_Parker_Dam_State_Park

See you tomorrow!

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.

June Recap

Wow. Two whole posts in June so far. I have missed this creative outlet, but not enough to stop washing lettuce and picking daisies. I want a whole year of May and June sometime. Oh wait, that would be heaven, yes? So I will get it someday. Minus the weeds, but flooded with berries.

Speaking of berries, I promised some people a recipe. Every time I make strawberry jam, I feel shocked at the quantities of sugar. It just seems wrong to use more sugar than berries. Technically that should be labelled “sugar jam” in the freezer. One day a few years ago I got to chatting with my favorite greenhouse ladies over in the Cove. (The same ones who served me rhubarb punch this spring… What can I say, we like each other.) The one with 8 children told me she was making strawberry jam that morning, and when she got back into the house her children had eaten most of it with spoons. She seemed very jolly about it, but my eyes must have betrayed my shock, because she hastily reassured me, “It’s the kind with hardly any sugar! Have you tried that?”

I hadn’t even heard of it, so she filled me in.

Crush or chop berries in the blender until you have 4 cups.

Mix 1 cup sugar with 1/2 cup thermoflo, (the bulk food variation of clearjel that is formulated for canning and freezing)

Mix all together in saucepan and cook until thickened. I always add a splash of lemon juice as well.

It sounded too easy not to try, so I went home and did it. My children love it! I think that is mainly because nobody polices how much jam they put on their toast when they are eating “Kid Jam”. I took this jam along to the school hot lunch. One of the boys sheepishly admitted to eating six bread rolls, just for the jam. And he wanted the recipe. That was the first time ever that a 7th grade boy asked me how I made something. 😀 Gabe doesn’t care for the texture, almost like a very thick strawberry danish, but I use it to sweeten his Greek yogurt in his lunch, and for that it is great. So I usually try to make normal jam too, for him. We go through a lot of kid jam in a year though. This year we bought cheap berries at Aldi’s for the jam, since we would be cooking them anyway. It isn’t as bright red as usual, but here you are, visual proof in the form of grainy cell phone photos:

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Now that berry season is almost over, I helpfully give you the recipe for Kid Jam. Maybe you can try it on the overflow berries at the supermarket, too.

In the past few weeks so many things have happened that could distress one. The White House spotlighted in rainbow colors, ISIS atrocities, church people mown down with a gun in prayer meeting. More locally, my parents’ neighbor was tied down to a chair with wire ties by a person desperate for drugs. She sat there in her house, alone, for 2 days before her daughter found her. And now the news that my cousins’ Amish grandpa was brutally murdered in his home and his wife beaten severely.

The world is going mad. People are crazy, hopeless, dangerous. I hate the news.

God gave me this in Psalm 33:8-11, 20-22.

Let all the earth fear the Lord;
let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him!
For he spoke, and it came to be;
he commanded, and it stood firm.

The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing;
he frustrates the plans of the peoples.

The counsel of the Lord stands forever,
the plans of his heart to all generations.

Our soul waits for the Lord;
    he is our help and our shield.
For our heart is glad in him,
    because we trust in his holy name.
Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us,
    even as we hope in you.

We just sang “Shout for Joy” in choir this spring, so this Psalm means more to me than before. I read it and hear the music in my soul. That part about the plans of His heart for all generations, that is the intimate hand of God over the unwitting, stubborn people of all nations. He hasn’t lost track of anybody, even the ones who seem to have lost their minds. My hope is in the steadfast love of the Lord!

I wish I could see the big picture, like, what? is going on here? But since I can’t, I rest in the assurance that God always has the final word.

What’s Up

So I wrote the purse post nine days ago, left it for some finishing touches, came back this morning and it is gone. I forgot to save it. In the meantime, my husband took some paid time off and had ten. consecutive. days. at. home. I say this for all of you kind souls who pity me on the weekends that he has to work: there are perks to the job. 🙂 We filled and filled and filled our quality time love tanks. Wouldn’t it be nice to have overflow tanks to save up for those mandatory call-in days out ahead?

I have been doing random normal things like

pulling weeds and mulching
convincing my boys that civilized people sleep with sheets on the mattress
washing pond water stained swimming clothes every day
arbitrating arguments about who has the whitest armpits
deep cleaning my boys’ bedroom (whimper)
pulling ticks off little people (Tick Twister, folks. That’s what you want.)
finishing up my scholars’ portfolios and report cards for evaluations
chopping rhubarb and washing fresh lettuce
baking the perfect asparagus quiche
wearing flip flops
singing in choir programs every weekend
sewing replacement button eyes onto the most beloved stuffed puppy
being mad at the dog for destroying three! pairs of crocs in one day
cleaning and painting a house for my brother-in-law’s family to move into
learning how to use a French press
praying for a quiet heart

That is what happened to the purse post. Time for another go at it. Next time. 🙂 Thanks for being so sweet about my very erratic schedule.

Wind in my Sails

It was a Monday morning after a really crazy weekend, this past Monday was. I had been away for two days, came home in time for church, fellowship meal and a Sunday afternoon where I did nothing more constructive than work on a puzzle.

Monday morning was an ocean of things to do, but Gabe was home, so it was less intimidating than it could have been. We hauled hampers full of laundry downstairs so that I could work on that while I wrote out the boys’ assignments for the week. I had to check the work they did while I was gone, so it took all forenoon, with Olivia trotting down to ask questions about her school every quarter hour or so. The little girls cleared the clean dishes out of the dishwasher, but they are no good at loading, so the stack of dirty dishes remained on the counter until lunchtime.

There were leftovers in the fridge, thankfully, but I felt like I was swimming in molasses when it came to making actual progress. Gabe had a lot of errands to run and work at his desk. The house was a wreck.

Then the mail came, and in it was a fat package from a friend that I know mostly from cyberspace. It contained a lovely, cheerful bag “for putting things in” and a note of equal cheer.

It lifted me right out of the sticky swimming and put me into a boat with wind in my sails.

(image source)

Thank you, Carol!

For My Mom

She turned 60 this week, but I was in the middle of a love story on her birthday, so today I will write my tribute to her.

My mom was the first Beautiful Woman in my life. My earliest memory from infancy on included her being there for me, for all of us. There was a very scary time, once, when I was a short person, lost in a sea of skirts after a special meeting at church. I looked and looked for her, and finally found that island of safety, clinging tightly to her hand.

To me, that is the analogy of what my mom was for us. There. Every day she showed up, even when she was sick. We never questioned this right of our childhood. In today’s world, women are often encouraged to request “Me Time”. My mom and many of the women in her generation did not ever seem to think of Me Time. The thought of going out for a spa treatment was as foreign to them as lumps in the mashed potatoes.

My mom celebrated us individually with funny anecdotes written in our baby books and lots of storytelling over the years. Childhood was rich with chocolate chip cookies and milk after school, favorite meals on our birthdays, and buttered popcorn with nutritional yeast flakes on Sunday nights. Mom put up with Friday night campouts in the living room many times, getting up early the next morning to cook sausage gravy and biscuits while we lazed under the covers and read.

When we wanted to embroider a sampler or decorate a cake, she showed us how, then let us make our messes while we worked on our skills. My mom gave us confidence to try things, and she insisted on perseverance with hard tasks. So what if we lived in the woods and had more leaf raking to do every fall than seemed humanly possible. Mom went out there and raked up mountainous piles with us, after which we would have an enormous bonfire and use the metal rakes to stage our own pyrotechnics show. It probably wasn’t the safest, but nothing bad ever happened. In the summertime we played in the creek daily as soon as our chores were done. It must have made a prodigious pile of extra laundry, but I can’t remember her complaining. She just taught us how to run the washer.

I am grateful now for the way Mom persisted in teaching us things we didn’t want to learn. Like washing dishes clean. I hear myself repeating her words to my children: If you do it often enough, you will learn to like it!

I grew up with the secure knowledge that disobedience most surely resulted in consequences. Sometimes we children planned our mischief to coincide with phone calls, and Mom would hang up, dole out the appropriate discipline, and call her friend back. It couldn’t have been convenient, but she wasn’t a mom because it was convenient. Have you ever had your tongue scrubbed with soap for telling a lie? I have. Once. It wasn’t fun for Mom, but she valued our souls too much to wink at sin. When there was trouble at school, my mom made us face up to the bad choices we had made. She personally drove us to the home of whoever we had wronged to make apologies. I am betting that wasn’t much fun for her either.

My mom didn’t get beauty magazines and spend hours plucking and dying and painting herself. She didn’t wear stylish clothes or worry overmuch about decorating her house in the latest fashions. She would be the first to tell you that she was not perfect. We knew that. She got discouraged and frustrated and wondered if we would ever learn. Sometimes she apologized for things she said to us when she actually had a right to say them. We also knew what she did when upsetting things happened. She went to her room and prayed.

My mom displayed faithfulness to us, and she pointed us to the great faithfulness of God. For that, I nominate her as my first Beautiful Woman.

Tomorrow: photo post on Mom’s party with her sisters and nieces. 🙂

Normal: Usual, Regular, Average

When I wrote my friend Naomi a few years ago, telling her that I think we are so far from normal that we will never get there again, she replied something like this: “Normal is over-rated anyway.”

Last night I had a conversation with another friend who knows that feeling. Her parting text was, “Keep calm.” I replied, “And Carry On.” Then I thought about it for a long time after I should have been sleeping.

(photo source)

We like to be comfortably like other people, at least most of the time. We don’t especially enjoy looking odd, making decisions that raise eyebrows, or having to live differently from our particular herd. I have a lot of theories about why this is, especially in Mennonite church settings, but that is much too complicated. Let’s just pretend you are in a situation that is not normal. What can you expect to take away from this?

You can expect to learn compassion. There is nothing like immersion in a situation for sudden epiphanies. “Ohhh. So that is how it feels…?” You will always be able to connect with others in your particular brand of abnormal.
You will learn to think carefully about your choices. It is not possibly to skate along easily when the wind is against you and the sun is not shining warm on your back.
You learn to be vulnerable and accessible (human). Somewhere along the line, everyone hits a spot where they are needy and have to admit it. “Umm, I need help here. I am stuck in this mud, and I need your strength to help me get out.”
You learn not to take simple, ordinary, everyday stuff for granted. Living with the strain of life on the edge helps you to appreciate this moment of sitting on the couch, having tea with a loved one.
You will begin to feel the confidence that you can stretch much farther and accomplish more than you thought. Because you are not too afraid to try.
Best of all, you will learn about grace. You will feel it from other people, and you will start to think more graciously about everyone else you meet. You will experience endless supply from God and know for real that it cannot be exhausted.

Don’t panic when life hurtles you out of normal. It is just a setting on your dryer anyway. (Thanks, Patsy Clairmont.)

Airy Plans

My last post sounds a little dull to me. I did stuff in the last month. I just can’t quite… remember what. If I were to go back through my little one sentence diary, in which I recorded something every day, I would probably be reminded of how we filled the days. But that is in the bedroom and I am sitting on the couch, so we will let January slide into the past.

Today I recalled that I wrote a post every day last February, and, on a whim, decided to try it again. I am not promising anything, but it helps me to be motivated when I have semi-goals, at least. The lethargy will dissipate with the first sign of spring, I know, but for now, I need outside motivation. I haven’t even bought a 2015 planner yet. My husband did buy me a nifty new phone with my own calendar on it to sync with his calendar, but it is much more satisfying to ink out a list than to touch a little checkmark on a screen.

Here is how it happens: when I write “defrost freezer” on my whiteboard, it needs to get crossed off; if I just think about it, it bugs me too much and I quickly let the thought slip away to a more convenient time. Admittedly, I have been avoiding making lists because then I am obligated to do something about them. There is some scrapple in my freezer right now that has become so iced in I can’t budge it. What a shame.

I am dubbing February “declutter house and write every day month”. It collects and collects, the stuff that smothers and drives me batty. Last year, in August I think it was, I suddenly noticed a pine cone on top of a book shelf. It had been there since Christmas. I had even dusted under it a few times. I don’t want that to happen again.

Here is to a new month, with a little fire under it. 🙂