Aspiring Homemaker

New home, new blog

2009-09-21T14:30:00.002-04:00

Hello faithful readers . . .

When I decided to get back into blogging after our recent move I felt like I needed a bit of a fresh start. Find me writing again over at Life Together. Everything that is here is there and I'll keep this up, at least for awhile, to keep links working.

paying it forward

2009-07-25T21:47:00.002-04:00

My old friend Ginger used to live in DC just a few houses down from me. Since I can no longer be inspired by her creativity and energy in person I am an avid reader of her blog and I'm not ashamed to admit that I jumped at the chance to get a handmade item from her some time in the next year or so. I felt even less bad because I can definitely credit Ginger with directly inspiring me to finally learn to knit. Just a few days before she posted this blog chain I had gifted myself with a book and materials to begin knitting. This book was highly recommended by an accomplished knitter and though I'm excited about working through it I definitely don't need to keep all those projects for myself.

I'm not sure I even have three readers on this blog right now but if you want to play, here are the rules:

1. Be one of the first three bloggers to leave a comment on this post, which then entitles you to a handmade item from me.
2. Winners, you must post this on your blog, meaning that you will "Pay It Forward," creating a handmade gift for the first three to leave a comment on your post about your giveaway!
3. You have 365 days to make/ship your item. And, remember: It’s the spirit and the thought that count!
4. When you receive your gift, please feel free to blog about it, sharing appropriate linky love! If you are not one of the first three to comment on this post, you can still play along. Start your own "Pay It Forward" chain and encourage your blogging friends to do the same!

You'll probably get a knitted item from me but you never know what creative juices will begin to flow once I get the crafting bug.

Coming Home

2009-07-19T21:22:00.004-04:00

Ernest Hemingway wrote about Michigan from a Paris cafe. He said he could only write about his home from a distance. Like a Seurat painting or--to put a more modern spin on it?--an HD TV, the picture is only clear after obtaining a certain distance.

We've spent the last year living in Minnesota. I didn't blog much in Minnesota. It's not that I gave up blogging or that I was more busy than usual (sure, I had a baby, but there's always something), I just didn't get to it. I never felt that I had anything to say. It's not that we had a bad year--our time in Minnesota was lovely. We made some wonderful friends whom I will miss a great deal. We spent lots and lots of time with Eric's family and our kids had the incredible blessing of living very close to grandparents. We got to see parts of the country we hadn't explored before. Eric's home is the Midwest--he grew up in Madison and went to college in St. Paul where his family now lives. It was very, very good to gain more familiarity with my husband's home but I found myself, for the first time, missing mine.

I was struck, in part, by the intense loyalty to their home that I saw in people from Minnesota and Wisconsin. I used to joke that my husband's family had a religious devotion to Wisconsin but I found that his family was far from unique. I was even more flabbergasted once winter came: these people endure weeks of sub zero weather and, for some reason, do not move away once its warm enough to go outside.

Joking aside, the turning point in the year was, I think, our trip to New England in October. We had a friend's wedding and a 50th Wedding Anniversary party to attend so we went for ten days. I grew up in a very small New England town and it had been years since I'd been home in the fall which is a famously glorious time to be in that part of the country. There were many moments of nostalgia, to be sure, but there was also an acute sense of being home. My knowledge of being from somewhere was deepened. Just a few days into that trip Eric got laid off over the phone and our life felt completely upside down. Our time in Minnesota felt all-the-more temporary.

Shortly after that trip I got an e-mail invitation to my 10th High School Reunion. It was sort of out-of-nowhere and when I mentioned it to my mom she casually mentioned that she'd gotten some mail for me on the subject but had tossed it assuming I'd have no interest. Not too long ago she would have been right but I suddenly realized that I was pretty disappointed to miss seeing my high school classmates. I was intensely curious about what had become of them all.

Eric landed his full-time teaching position in the winter and we ended up spending the second half of our year in Minnesota preparing to leave. While we still enjoyed family, friends, and the sub-zero weather our hearts were already looking forward to what would become our home. My sister convinced me not too long ago to get on Facebook to keep in touch with our adult cousins and I was suddenly connected--for, really, the first time in over ten years--with people I'd grown up with. There they were, other people from that small New England town, living their lives. Some are married, some have kids. Many of them still live in our hometown or very close by. And here we are, about to move to the city that my children, very likely, will know as home when they are grown.

It seems likely that we are finally settling for good and I am so grateful for that. I am also grateful that we will be living close enough to my hometown to easily go back and visit Grandma for a long weekend. But we'll be far enough--just far enough--to step back from my home and see it and, I hope, reflect a bit on the importance of place and roots and community and belonging.

Starting school

2008-09-08T14:34:00.002-04:00

Hello loyal readers (and you are loyal indeed if my blog is still on your reading list after such a long break). I could write several posts, at least, on all the reasons I haven't posted all summer. Chiefly, we moved to Minnesota and that has taken a lot of time and energy. But more immediately, I don't have any idea where regular blogging can fit into my life right now. So I've had moments here and there when I could have written something but I never wanted to give the impression that I was "back to blogging" only to take off for three months again. What's the word for this kind of "all or nothing" personality of mine? It does not serve me well.

So I'm going to dive in here on one of the gazillion topics I've been wanting to write about lately and I'm going to start with the easy one: we started school.

Joseph will be four in October. I think, actually, that in most school districts he would not be eligible to start kindergarten until Fall of 2010 which is just incomprehensible to me. I have many, many unschooling and "Better Late than Early" tendencies and I struggled with how much--and how formally--to attack the whole school thing this year. In the end I decided that Joseph and I would both benefit tremendously from some structured time together each day. My crazy daughter has taken up most of my time and energy for the last two years and my laid-back son has really gotten the short end of the stick. Margaret still naps two hours every afternoon and Joseph almost never naps. Our routine is that I get Margaret to sleep after lunch, have an hour to nap myself or get some work done, and then spend an hour with Joseph who will have had an hour of quiet "rest time" on the futon by then.

I wanted to round out our new "school" focus with a reinstatement of our tea time tradition which was definitely set aside this summer. And I want some kind of semi-regular outing schedule for mornings. But one thing at a time.

I intended to start school the first Monday after Assumption but we had an out-of-town guest. Then I realized that things were still a total mess in our home and that I couldn't really be in school mode before Labor Day anyway. So I moved the start date to the day after Labor Day. But we were out-of-town that day. So we started on Wednesday last week and that was all the school we did last week.

But we did get in tea time every day. Tea time is a snack--usually a sweet one--with tea (herbal and diluted for the kids). I read about the saint for the day and then we dive into the refreshments while I read aloud from a chapter book. We got through quite a few last year and last week I started The Secret Garden.

Today was a fiasco schedule-wise. Margaret fell asleep at 10:30 this morning. But in an amazing feat of flexibility it actually ocurred to me to do school anyway. And in a last-minute inspiration I decided to use the material and activities I'd chosen for the year to work on one letter each week. So with no preparation at all we started right in on "A".

Our curriculum this year consists, so far, in nice paper, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, glue sticks, old magazines, and books. Basically we have an activity at the table and then we read together on the couch until Margaret wakes up. I'm still working on what it will mean to do one letter each week but today I drew an A, and Joseph traced it. Then I helped him think of something that started with "A" and he drew an apple--a really lovely apple, I might add. Then I let him draw his own picture of anything he liked with his new crayons while I worked on my own drawing. Margaret woke up then and we put away the nice art supplies and moved to the couch. Instead of finding an A book we read Tomie de Paola's book Mary, the Mother of God in honor of Mary's birthday today.

My "goals" for this year with Joseph are to improve his fine motor skills and solidify letter and number recognition. I have no idea how long that will take but that's the goal until we meet it and then we'll set a new one.

I do hope to be back here more often but I've only been able to write this much because my children have suddenly decided that raisins are the single best thing that has ever happened to them.

I'm still here

2008-06-21T14:19:00.002-04:00

I think.

It's been almost a month since I posted and in that time . . .

I have started a home business.
Eric has gotten a job.
In Minnesota.
We've been packing and preparing for a cross-country move.
We've discovered that we're expecting baby #3 next February.

Life is busy. Busy is good. I haven't had too much time for morning sickness--but I've had a bit of that. And I'm exhausted all the time. But I think busy is, overall, a good thing for me. I don't have as much time for wallowing in discouragement. I also don't have as much time for anything else--including this blog. We won't really be settled for another couple of months, unfortunately. We'll be hunting for a rental house for a couple weeks while we stay with Grandma. Then we have to move and unpack and, doubtless, spend hours and hours on the phone with someone in India trying to establish internet service. Once all that is taken care of I'll be back online. Until then, I'll post if I can. Happy summer, everyone!

Happy Birthday to me . . .

2008-05-23T08:46:00.002-04:00

Yesterday was my birthday, actually, and a lovely day it was. I'm twenty-eight. I don't have any weird hang-ups about my age. I remember in college that some classmates were moaning about how old they felt when the turned 22 or 23. I have had the opposite problem of being the youngest mom in my neighborhood by a good decade. But I still don't feel old and now I know lots more moms closer to my age so I'm pretty much fine with 28.

We took a breakfast picnic to a lovely island in the Potomac yesterday morning. This island is on the small side with a few trails scattered about. In the center there is a Theodore Roosevelt monument with fountains and huge statues and it feels like something out of Tolkien. There's lots of wildlife and if it weren't for the airplanes overhead on the approach to Reagan you would never know you were so close to a city.

Our dinner was fried fish. Eric's birthday was in March and for his birthday dinner he requested fried fish. I agreed--it was his birthday--but dreaded both the eating and the cooking. I'm not good at frying stuff and I've never had fried fish I liked. I did, however, have a good recipe and the results were amazing. I liked it so much, in fact, that we decided to do the same thing for my birthday. Mostly I'd completely failed to plan any food at all for dinner and fried fish is pretty easy to do in a pinch if someone is available to run out to the fish market. Eric was available to do this so fish it was.

For dessert I made a strawberry tart. I'm allergic to most kinds of fruit but I can eat berries and I've been wanting this dessert for the last week. Its from my favorite cookbook, of course, and the crust is a shortbread. I made a custardy vanilla cream to go over the crust and then just sliced plain strawberries on to the top. I tried to arrange the strawberries in some artistic way even though I assembled the dessert only about ten minutes before eating it. I wanted a nice picture and I need to work on my food presentation skills. In the end I just sort of crammed the sliced strawberries anywhere they'd fit. I asked Eric to get two cartons of berries and only used one but in his birthday zeal he bought me a container of mascarpone, knowing my love for high-fat dairy products. I might think of another yummy dessert using that because it would be wrong to just dip the berries in the mascarpone and eat them all that way. Right?

After dinner we watched the first half of a movie of the life of St. Rita of Casica whose feast day happened to be yesterday as well. We really enjoyed the first half and I'll post a review once we finish the movie this weekend.

Happy Friday!

Me and My Dishwasher

2008-05-20T06:07:00.001-04:00

My dishwasher is working again. Just after Christmas it tanked: the fill cycle kept repeating itself without ever doing any washing or draining in between. It wouldn't shut off, either. I finally just gave it up for lost and Eric and I each spent some time sucking water out of it and then I irresponsibly forgot all about it. I bought myself a drying rack and a drip pan and in the intervening months I think I've actually gotten a lot better at keeping up with the dishes.

Around the same time the dishwasher broke an awful odor overtook our kitchen. It was a distinctive rotten-lettuce smell and it seemed to be coming from the refrigerator though I always had a nagging suspicion that it was dishwasher related. After a few weeks of horrible stinkiness Eric and I took an evening and emptied the refrigerator. All the food was inspected and wiped down. The shelves and drawers were removed and washed. Everything was neatly replaced. The smell persisted. Our ice took on the smell and was too gross to use. Our cheese and butter took on the smell. And I kept thinking, I hope that the smell isn't really, somehow, the dishwasher. Every once in awhile I'd open the unused dishwasher and see a roach scurrying away. We didn't bother complaining to our landlord about the dishwasher because Eric is convinced that we are going to lose our entire security deposit because so many things in our apartment are broken. Our apartment is beautiful but it was renovated on-the-cheap. The cabinets are falling apart, the plaster crumbles if you stare at it for too long, and mold grows on our walls because the original brick walls can no longer breathe properly. The dishwasher really seemed to be the least of anyone's worries.

I'm embarrassed to admit that we put up with the fridge smell for a couple of months until a couple of weeks ago we got the brilliant idea that maybe the smell was emanating from our jar of homemade fermented garlic. That might seem like a no-brainer to an outside observer but we had smelled the garlic lots of times and it didn't smell a bit like the rotten-lettuce odor that had overtaken our apartment. We pitched the garlic and sanitized our garbage disposal and the smell disappeared. My mom was due to arrive the next day so it was with intense relief that I found myself living in an odor-free apartment again.

We started in on several days of torrential rains that day and by the next afternoon a new odor had arisen. This one was much, much worse than the rotten lettuce smell. What could it be? My mother is as sensitive to smells as I am and confirmed that the smell was quite foul, indeed. Oh, no, I thought. It is the dishwasher. I'd meant for weeks and weeks to scrub it out with baking soda and vinegar and dry it thoroughly and I'd been putting it off because I'm afraid of meeting roaches and now it was going to be awful. I was trying to come up with a creative and not overly-manipulative way to talk Eric into doing it for me when he casually suggested that I run the dishwasher just to see . . .

It worked like a charm and, oh, did it stink. I ran two consecutive sanitizing cycles and had a sparkling clean appliance again. And the smell persisted.
We decided by the end of the weekend that an animal had sought refuge from the days of steady rain by crawling into our wall and had then died in our wall. That's what it smells like. It's been a little over a week and the odor is finally gone and I can finally write this without convulsing in disgust.

As for my new dishwasher, well, I have mixed feelings. I'm not really sure if my improved dishwashing habits are the result of a method that works better for me or just a more improved character. I used the dishwasher for the first time last night and it saved me a lot of time and stress. I'm such an all-or-nothing person. Maybe this will be good for me.

Bits and Pieces

2008-05-19T06:09:00.000-04:00

I think I mentioned a few posts back that yard saling is a waste of my time. For the most part I guess I still agree with that. I have a tendency to discover a need for things I find at dirt-cheap prices and if I set out on a yard-saling trip with needs in mind I am sure not to find them. It’s too bad because there are really a lot of yard sales in my neighborhood (despite the almost total lack of yards—we should make like Brooklyn and call them stoop sales). On a typical Saturday an intrepid yard-saler could easily hit four or five sales on foot around here. But in my efforts to spend less money and reduce clutter in our house I’ve mostly avoided them this season. Our immediate neighborhood isn’t big on yard sales, anyway, so it’s a bit of a hike just to get to yard sale territory.

This past weekend our parish held its annual, enormous yard sale to which we donated a large box of lovely toys—I’m so glad all that stuff is out of here. I sort of intended to go but then got to enjoying my lazy Saturday morning. By the time I decided to check it out there was only one hour left and on my way out the door I noticed that a house on the next corner had a sale going on. I wandered over with low expectations and was just about to leave when the home owner mentioned the books on the porch. I browsed a bit and all my frugal, decluttering vows disappeared. I called Eric who was home with sleeping children and started reading him titles. I boxed up fantastic, hardback books—some we’d been looking for for a long time and paid. I ran back home and sent Eric to pick them up and I think he found five or six more in the process. It’s hard to resist books at yard sale prices. Never mind that we have absolutely no place to put these books. Our shelves became officially full when Eric cleaned out his dissertation office on campus. In fact, there was already an unshelved stack of theology titles on his “desk” in the back room. We cull our library pretty regularly but this is a recurring problem for us.

By the time I got to the parish yard sale there were a mere thirty minutes remaining. The selection was dwindling but the prices had dropped to $1/bag—anything you could cram in a plastic grocery sack cost $1. I snagged a CD and three books, including a lovely illustrated guide to trains and an illustrated King Arthur which Joseph has already spent a good deal of time devouring. I also got these two jars.

I never seem to have enough glass jars around even when I save nice-sized ones from the store. I buy in bulk pretty much anything that can be bought in bulk and it all needs a place to go. We bought a whole lot of glass storage jars when we moved here and discovered all the critter problems.

And can I just interject, because I don’t brag enough about my husband, that Eric installed this shelf on a brick wall many months ago and it still hasn’t fallen down. He even decided to put those jars up himself while I was out and it still makes me happy every time I walk into my kitchen. They are just cheap IKEA jars but I like them and these two at the yard sale are part of the same set so I picked them up. The smaller one is providing a home for some of my coconut. My coconut stash is sort of an example of bulk-buying gone bad: I got fourteen pounds of the stuff a long time ago. I’ve been storing it in the chest freezer which does not motivate me to use it any faster. But now it finally has a jar even if the jar itself has yet to find a home. The tall jar is tinted blue and is too tall for any of my cupboards. I was a little worried about the blue, actually, because I don’t like to see my food through colored glass. I don’t even like blue freezer bags. But I filled it with granola and the blue seems a bit muted once there is food inside.

Its granola season again. I buy oatmeal in bulk, too. Usually 25 to 50 pounds at a time. Eric was highly skeptical the first time I bought that much oatmeal but we really do get through it. We eat oatmeal hot quite often all through the winter and every day during Lent. Then when the weather heats up I switch to making granola. I love cold cereal, I confess, but I’m firmly convinced that breakfast cereal is completely useless as a source of nutrition. When I’m pregnant a bowl of crunchy cereal drowning in cold milk is about the only thing that staves off morning sickness so I resolved to find a way to make myself yummy, crunchy cereal before I’m pregnant again. I have a high ideal of soaking all our grains a la Weston Price but I’m very bad at following through on my ideals. This winter I remembered about half the time to soak our oatmeal overnight. I had a recipe last summer for soaked granola that was, frankly, a major pain. I burned the first batch I made in this kitchen (love gas stovetops, hate gas ovens) and gave up for the season. As I was ramping up for granola making again Eric gently announced that he does not like my granola. He generally loves the food I make so I wasn’t offended but I decided to set out to improve my granola this year. I’m sort of tweaking one thing at a time and, so far, I haven’t tried a soaked batch. I’ve learned to only cook the oats and then add everything else in afterwards. And I’ve learned to use a combination of wet and dry sweetener and some salt. The batch in the jar right now is oats cooked with coconut oil, raw honey, sucanat, salt, and vanilla. After cooking I added cocount, almonds, crystallized ginger, and dried pinapple. Very yummy. Maybe I’ll give soaking another try with the next batch. Anyone out there have a fantastic granola recipe?

Ember Days

2008-05-18T13:46:00.000-04:00

I just noted that I haven't posted much in a couple of weeks. If you are wondering why you need merely follow the link on the post before this one and then re-read this old post. Much as we are both really and truly glad and relieved and all that about the successful defense it is all a bit anti-climactic. The darn thing is just never really done. There were a few minor corrections and then the long, angry session with Microsoft Word during which I gently reminded my husband that he was using a borrowed laptop and was not at liberty to throw it across the room. Then there's the long meeting with the Provost's secretary where you get asked questions like, "Did you even read the Dissertation Handbook?" Then there's the printing of the darn thing on expensive, archival paper. Then there is the final deposit. Then you really are done. Unless your director is really pushing you to publish it as a book this summer. And, of course, he's still job hunting. And there was no graduation. We went to a graduation party for a good friend last night and learned that there isn't even a ceremony for summer graduation. You just get a diploma in the mail. Ah, well. We postponed our trip to the Midwest and we've both spent the last two weeks looking for job openings, writing application letters and generally driving each other crazy. I think we're going to return to our old routine tomorrow wherein Eric leaves each morning and goes somewhere else to work and I will return to doing things like running my household and posting on blogs.

We've just come off our first ever observation of the Ember Days. The Ember Days are an old liturgical custom that went out in the sixties along with a lot of other stuff when the liturgical calendar was revised. The Ember Days are three days of prayer and fasting at the start of Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. The days are actually determined by the liturgical calendar but most years they fall quite close to the actual starts of the seasons. This year was an exception with Easter coming so early. The Ember Days are the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday following the first Sunday in Lent, Pentecost Sunday, Triumph of the Cross (September 14th), and St. Lucy's Day (December 13th). The Ember Days are typically seen as ways to sanctify each season, pray for the agricultural events of the coming season, and ordain priests. They aren't celebrated very widely anymore.

The fasting issue is a bit odd in conjunction with the modern calendar. In our old Catholic dictionary a fast is described as one full meal in the afternoon along with a few ounces of bread at breakfast and 8-10 ounces of food at lunch. Not too rigorous. Only those aged 21-59 were required to fast and even those were exempt in case of illness, the need to do very hard work, pregnancy, etc. But even that sort of a fast is really difficult for me and in the old calendar (according to this same dictionary) every day in Lent was a fast day. Fridays, additionally, were days of abstinence, meaning that no meat could be eaten. In the new calendar the only fast days in the whole year are Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Abstinence from meat is required on Fridays during Lent.

Combining that new practice with the old practice of the Ember Days means, then, that the Ember Days end up being far more rigorous than Lent and I wonder if we'll find ourselves revisiting our Lenten practices next year. I struggled a lot with fasting this past Lent even though the rules are easy and it was only two days. I haven't fasted in years because of pregnancy and breastfeeding. The Ember Days were hard, too. I'm glad that the three days are broken up. We observed the one meal and two snacks rule on Wednesday and Friday and used leftover Lenten soup for our one meal so that even that was light and penitential. We broke the fast with Saturday's Lord's Day supper which, this week, was a graduation party.

It was a great experience. I do well in voluntary situations. I'm not exactly proud of that but I chafe against the "rule" of fasting during Lent even though I see a lot of benefit in following imposed rules. The voluntary observance of the Ember Days was quite motivating for me. And I did it. I don't think I even cheated on Wednesday when I gave the kids oatmeal cookies for tea time. I drank my water and read their story and survived until dinner time. It was instructive, too, to see how little food was required when I was mindful about it. I have pretty big blood sugar problems and I tend to either not eat or eat too much simple sugar and then crash. I don't often feel hungry I just start yelling at people. I've "coped" with this over the last couple years by sort of developing an "I have this sickness" mentality and just eating all the time in an effort to maintain balance but all I've really maintained is my postpartum weight. On fast days I knew that my quantity of food would be limited so I was more careful about what I ate and I took extra care to not give in to hunger and take it out on the kids during the day. I hope that more frequent times of fasting and prayer can help me with a better attitude towards food.

I'm hoping that we'll gradually find other traditions to associate with the Ember Days--special prayers, special foods, seasonal activities or crafts. And I'm looking forward to how this will impact our next Lent.

And there was much rejoicing . . .

2008-05-06T10:47:00.000-04:00

What we're excited about today . . .

Tuesday

2008-04-29T21:05:00.000-04:00

Our good friend Brett joins us for breakfast every Tuesday morning. He was originally a college friend of mine who became a friend of my husband after we all moved to DC. Eric was his sponsor two Easters ago when Brett was received into the Church and our kids consider him a member of the family. I suppose I better not gush too much because I finally cracked and gave Brett the address of this blog. He lives a few blocks away and stops here for breakfast at 7:30 on his way to work for a member of Congress. I love hosting breakfast for friends and this morning we enjoyed overnight baked French toast and fresh fruit. I love that our friend can make it here on a weekday and still get to work at a responsible hour because he can commute on his bike.

After breakfast our family set off for a religious house in our neighborhood. There are at least two communities of consecrated women in our neighborhood and one of them hosts a regular "Mom's morning" for mothers of small children to come and relax with other adult women while the kids play. The women help out entertaining the kids and, in theory, we moms can slip off to the chapel for some quiet prayer. Margaret is finally getting independent enough for me to avail myself of that opportunity more often but I love just being with these holy women and it's always a relaxing time. Eric walked with us this morning and we both tried to answer Joseph's endless questions about the different trees, birds, and flowers he was seeing on our walk. I have always loved the gardens in our row house neighborhood. They average twenty-five square feet, I would guess and it's all the "yard" most people have. It's kind of silly to tend a plot of grass in that small a space so most everyone turns the whole space into a garden and since all these gardens are right up on the street we can examine them carefully without invading anyone's private property. It's all cultivated, so it's not quite like a nature walk but it's a darn good way to get all of us interested in species identification. We all felt triumphant the other day when, after noting a pretty bird on a walk, we found it in Audubon's and discovered that it was a Mockingbird.

Eric dropped us off at our destination and continued on to do a bit of work at the library and then attend noon Mass before picking us up again. We eat lunch together as part of our "Mom's morning" and normally the kids are so worn out that we head straight home for a nap. But today was Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry's. We are ice cream snobs and try to avoid brands that use things like carrageenan and we'd rather eat our candy bars and ice cream separately. And I have a friend who was treated very rudely by Ben of Ben & Jerry's at a political rally. I promised her I'd join in her small boycott of the brand. But I'm not one to turn down free ice cream so we go every year to get a free cone. There are two Ben & Jerry's shops in our neighborhood but we walked to the one more on the way home where we were very embarrassed to be ushered to the head of the line on account of Joseph's wheelchair.

It is nine blocks from that ice cream shop to our apartment and for the second time in three days Margaret decided that she wanted to walk every step of the way herself. We've got her pretty well trained to hang on to the stroller or someone's hand when we're out and about. It's a bit excruciating to traverse nine blocks at toddler speed--especially when your three-year old is wanting to wheel at breakneck speed over bumpy sidewalks--but I'd rather my kids walk than get chauffered everywhere in their strollers so we indulge Margaret when we're not in a hurry. We took a shortcut through an alley and explored an upset nest of very hungry caterpillars, one of which met a sad end underneath Margaret's shoe.

By the time we got home I had just enough time to get Margaret to sleep before going to my monthly co-op delivery. A bunch of moms in my neighborhood have worked together for a few years to get regular deliveries of bulk foods. It's sort of like Whole Foods meets Costco but it comes via semi-truck to someone's yard and we get good volume discounts if our group orders enough. It's mostly stay-at-home moms who are involved because the schedule requires flexible daytime availability. Today was my last delivery serving as a bookkeeper and it was fun visiting with my friends while Eric stayed home with the napping kids. The co-op site is walking distance but I always drive so that I'm able to bring home my sacks of oatmeal and flour.

I got home as the kids were waking and took care of odds and ends for a few minutes. Eric left to walk to his weekly Holy Hour at our parish and I made a pizza for dinner. I wanted to walk with the kids to meet Eric at the church but I haven't figured out how to push a wheelchair while carrying Margaret and a pizza so we decided to drive. There is a park next to our church and we all sat on a bench there and people watched while we ate our pizza. Lots of dog walkers were out and one dog owner and fellow wheelchair driver let Joseph feed treats to her cute dogs. We got back home a bit later than we normally start bedtime and the kids fell asleep quickly so I'm here, typing away, while Eric is out walking and praying a Rosary.

I've had friends say they don't feel like they can accomplish much in one day while living in the city. I've always found the opposite to be true and I thought today was illustrative. We got lots of exercise, spent lots of time outdoors, saw lots of friends, accomplished errands, spent good time with the kids, and kept on top of house work and prayer. It was a great day.

Summer wardrobe

2008-04-26T09:50:00.000-04:00

Here it is. I meant to include Margaret's sandals in the picture, too. I've finally discovered something that makes girls easier to raise than boys: their wardrobes have fewer pieces. I know the possibilities for accessories are endless but those sorts of things are optional. I did not set out to outfit my daughter exclusively in dresses but this summer I found myself needing to buy her entire wardrobe myself whereas we have always relied mostly on hand-me-downs and gifts for the kids' clothes. I spent all winter griping about ill-fitting pants for little girls and I doubt that shorts are any better. Even if we didn't cloth diaper many of the styles for babies are ridiculously tight fitting. I kept reaching for dresses even in cold weather just so Margaret could move her legs freely. Then my radical clothing purge got me thinking in terms of simplicity. Each article of clothing needs to be folded individually, put away individually, and is a potential piece of clutter needing to be picked up individually. Eric always dresses the kids in the morning and struggles with needing to match tops and bottoms. Dresses are a single piece of clothing requiring nothing to match in the summertime. Summers last for about six months in DC so for half the year Margaret's entire wardrobe is five dresses and a pair of sandals. We reserve the nicest dress for Sunday. Easy, right?

It's not a perfect system. People do give us stuff sometimes. We have a sixth two-piece outfit that was a gift. We also have a formal dress that is too fancy to wear every Sunday--also a gift. There is also a cardigan for the occasional chill, two pairs of pajamas, and a bathing suit. And someone else just gave us a generous bequest of shoes so that Margaret now has regular sandals and snazzy, waterproof shoes as well. And Joseph's wardrobe is still a mess.

I don't know if dresses will work as well in the winter. Part of the attraction for me is that one dress costs less than a top and bottom separately. But the addition of tights in the winter might negate the cost savings and I'm not sure daily dresses are really practical in cold and snow. But I'm keeping my eye out this summer for sales on long-sleeve play dresses.

English Muffin Challenge Day

2008-04-24T09:49:00.000-04:00

Since Robyn beat me to the punch of making homemade bagels we decided to challenge each other to make something else on our baked breakfast list and yesterday was the day for English Muffins. Robyn even managed to make English Muffins and blog about them on the same day. I didn't even have time to make them and clean up afterwards on the same day.

I was pleased to discover that English Muffins actually do have English origins (at least, according to Wikipedia). I had sort of assumed that they were something akin to French Fries. In England, of course, they don't call them English Muffins and it sounds like this type of baked good was sort of on the decline until Americans started eating them like crazy but at least I can feel that I've made something marginally authentic. My recipe came from The Tassajara Bread Book which is one of my favorite cookbooks. It automatically falls open to the recipe for cream scones but almost everything I bake comes from this book: our Christmas pecan rolls, our Easter bread, our "company" coffee cake, our birthday chocolate cake, my favorite yogurt cake. I could go on and on and I haven't even mentioned the actual bread recipes in the first half of the book. This book is the reason I have never been able to cut wheat and sugar out of my diet.

The muffins were a huge hit and there are actually none left now. Between yesterday's breakfast, yesterday's lunch in the car, and today's breakfast we polished off a full dozen. I think I'm going to make them again for our friend Brett. Though the recipes don't call for overnight preparation I find that I can make yeasted breakfast doughs the night before, punch them down and refrigerate. I can then shape the dough and let it rise while the oven heats and I've turned a big breakfast project into something manageable for a normal morning.

We ate our lunchtime muffins in the car en route to a job interview for Eric. It went well on his end and my task while he was on campus was to poke around the area to try to generate some excitement about moving there in the event a job is actually offered. I was somewhat successful. We passed a lot of farms. Joseph votes for living on a farm and I didn't have the heart to tell him that wheelchairs and cow fields aren't that good a combination. We found a good-sized town not too far from the school so we'll just see what happens. Please keep us in your prayers these next couple of weeks as that school makes a decision and as we're hoping to hear from another.

Darn Blogger won't let me upload pictures but I'm going to post anyway and come back with pictures later.

Popcorn

2008-04-19T15:53:00.001-04:00

One of the easiest ways to declutter in the kitchen is to look for items that serve only one purpose. Some single purpose tools are valuable: I do own a garlic press because I often cook with large amounts of garlic and I find it more satisfying to press the garlic into the recipe. We have, on the other hand, survived without an ice cream scoop for several years and we eat a lot of ice cream in this house. The garlic press is a point of dispute because I could just chop the garlic with the same knife I'm using for everything else. Come to think of it, that garlic press might be toast next time I go through the kitchen. A better example in our house would probably be our ice cream maker. It only makes ice cream but there is no other way to make ice cream and given the amount of ice cream we consume I'd rather make it myself.

Last time we did a major kitchen purge I did get rid of our hot-air popper. We like popcorn but I knew that I could make it in a pan and that darned popper took up a lot of space. I tried making popcorn in my dutch oven several times but the results were less than satisfactory. The pan is pretty heavy with a lid on and the metal handles were too hot to hold without pot holders. And there were always lots of unpopped seeds left in the pan (this always happened with the hot air popper, too).

I recently had the idea to try making popcorn in my wok and I'm no longer tempted to buy a hot air popper. The wok is lighter than my dutch oven and has two wooden handles that stay cool to the touch. The large, domed lid keeps in all the popped corn and the heat distribution allows for all the seeds to pop. I often get every single seed popped and I've never had more than five left in the pan. I pop four or five tablespoons of seeds in two tablespoons of oil on medium heat for the whole family. It takes about five minutes to pop the whole pan once the popping starts and the pan must be gently shaken while the corn is popping. When we are feeling especially piggy I dump the corn into the serving bowl and cook four tablespoons of butter, four tablespoons of brown sugar, four tablespoons of maple syrup, and a few dashes of salt together. Stir the mixture constantly until it boils and then continue cooking and stirring for 2-3 minutes. Remove the pan from the flame and stir the popcorn back in. We enjoyed a large bowl of caramel popcorn and a movie last night after the kids went to bed unexpectedly early.

About our day yesterday

2008-04-18T10:51:00.000-04:00

Memorable.

Two spots of loveliness

2008-04-13T13:23:00.000-04:00

Our Lord's Day dinners are going really well. We love the simple liturgy that we devised the first week and we've really stuck to it. We've often tried to include friends in our Saturday evening meals and we've been happy to show them our new tradition. I haven't always come up with an extra-special meal to serve. Last night was refried beans with fixin's. I make this sort of meal all the time but something about all those bowls on the table makes things feel festive.

I also recently put my domed cake plate to daily use. We almost always have some baked goods around and I've always put them in a ziploc bag on the counter. It doesn't look very nice and things get crumbled when stored that way. And the mice are happy to chew through the plastic bag if there is anything sweet inside. I brought down the cake plate and I now have a beautiful, mouse-proof way to store our food and preserve its structural integrity all at once.

Suburban Shopping Adventure

2008-04-12T13:07:00.000-04:00

I had a couple of Big Box Store errands to run yesterday. Two items I'd ordered online needed returning and it was cheaper to bring them back to the store than to ship them. I also had a gift card from Christmas to a store I never shop at because there aren't any in DC or in the close suburbs. I decided to combine the two errands figuring that surely in the vast suburban expanse that surrounds Washington I'd find a town that had both of these stores. And I did. While I'm at it, I thought, in a deluded moment of pre-coffee inspiration, I'll finish off Margaret's summer wardrobe (Joseph never seems to need clothes--why is that?).
So we set off. If I could have done these errands in my city I would have, especially if I could have done them on foot. But two of the stores were determined for me. I had some discretion on where to shop for Margaret (though I hoped to use my gift card for her) but there are, sadly, few realistic options in town. Our neighborhood--defined broadly--has exactly one store that sells children's clothing. The clothes there cost more than I care to spend on myself at my most extravagant. If I were an entrepreneur I would open a consignment shop here for children's clothing. My neighbors have bags of clothes to spare. Some just give them away for free on our neighborhood e-mail list but even the prospect of free clothes is not enough to entice me to spend time on another list serve. Plenty of families have "yard" sales and I did score four sweaters for a dollar once last year but that was one lucky day out of a whole season of yard saling. I don't have that kind of time. So I couldn't shop locally but, how hard could it be? She only needed a few things.
City driving no longer bothers me. I think what gets to a lot of people is that there are so many option--so many ways you could turn. My extended family really don't like to come see us. They like us just fine but they always get lost here and they have trouble parking. I wrote a post once addressing this topic and it was well-liked. Growing up I seldom went into cities but we drove through them all the time. The freeway systems through East Coast cities are fast-moving and complicated. There are lots of merges and splits and exits on both sides of the road. I don't blame people for not liking to drive in that setting but I really don't think you can blame cities for that. Cities--many of them--are designed on a grid. New England cities aren't (so what does my family have to complain about!) and, yes, Washington has those pesky avenues that do not follow any system. But, for heaven's sake, just go to the next intersection--a mere one block away--and look at the number and/or letter signs to get your bearings. Or ask directions because there is almost certainly someone else out in a city. The suburbs, in my experience, are a different story. You can go for miles in the wrong direction --first because there aren't enough cross streets to alert you and second because there is no place to turn around. I know there are exceptions but this has happened to me more than once. I know, too, that I'm really complaining, again, about the highways and not the neighborhoods but the highways exist to get suburbanites into the cities for work. The highway system and suburban development do feed into one another but if there were no suburbs there would be a heck of a lot fewer highways.

I actually didn't get lost on yesterday's foray into suburbia. I stopped for coffee at a nice Starbucks. It lacked the atmosphere of the ones in town but at least it was easy to find a seat. I returned my online purchases without incident and moved on to the gift card store. This store was on Cherry Hill Drive or something. It was hilly, but the cherries were scarce. This annoys me about suburbs. I see developments with names like "Quail Run" or "Babbling Brook Village" and it's cute but, let's be honest, the quail left when the bulldozers arrived, and if the brook is still babbling the sound is drowned out by the roar of the traffic on the six-lane road required to get all those development-dwellers to work.
By the time I arrive at the gift card store I'm feeling a little on edge and a bit depressed by my surroundings. The kids are bored and its hot and there are too many rules and the stores are HUGE so if Joseph takes off he can really get far and I'm not even going to think about letting Margaret out of the shopping cart. She is not impressed with this arrangement and I was forced to camp out in the shoe department for awhile nursing my huge toddler in an attempt to avoid complete meltdown. I did manage to spend the gift card on sandals for Margaret and sunglasses for me. The sandals are pushing it for me in the cute department and they light up but at least Dora wasn't on them. But I'd still failed to complete Margaret's summer clothing supply and another, cheaper department store beckoned from the other end of the strip mall. Some of the newer suburban shopping centers are doing a decent job with a design that encourages customers to walk between even the big stores. This typically requires underground parking. I was not, however, at one of these centers so we got back in the car to get through the maze of parking lots. This is what really puts the kids over the edge on these trips. If we're on foot I can often do a couple errands in one shot or, if I only can fit in one because of the slower pace, it doesn't feel like time and energy wasted because we've at least gotten out doors and had a good walk. But gas prices being what they are and traffic being what it is I can't bear to get all the way to outer suburbia and come home with items left on my list. These big department stores try to have it all but you can't have it all.

So we're in and out of the car, in and out of shopping carts, loading and unloading a heavy wheelchair, going from cool store to hot car over and over. We were cranky but, darn it, Margaret needed those clothes. I threw (well, not really) both kids in the back of the shopping cart at the our last destination and zoomed to the toddler clothes section. I was optimistic because when I'd last been in this store they'd had several racks of just what I was looking for. I guess they had just what everyone was looking for because they were sold out. Okay. Fine. Margaret was attempting to dive onto the floor, taking Joseph's head with her, anyway. Back out to the car. Back onto the freeway. I put both kids down for a nap as soon as we got home. Then I went on to Amazon and completed Margaret's summer wardrobe in about ten minutes for less than I'd probably spent on gas that morning.

Thursday Afternoon

2008-04-06T13:05:00.000-04:00

Just to be fair, because I know I'm usually sort of a zealot in this area, I'll start with one of our less-enjoyable experiences of city life.

Eric was out on a college visit with his little brother Thursday afternoon when I noticed a police car pull up in front of our apartment. There is nothing unusual about a police visit in our neighborhood. We are, rather, quite excited whenever we see that MPD logo, ever hoping that the drug dealers are finally going to get busted. Two bored-looking women emerged from the car and wandered off down the block. A bit later I noticed that the car had been joined by an ambulance. That piqued my interest just a bit more and when the fire lieutenant arrived I had a really hard time focusing on dinner preparation and began to hover in my front window. A few women arrived who looked like social workers--no uniforms, but professional dress. By this time I'd figured out that the excitement, such as it was, was focused in my building. My building is fifteen units divided among three sections. The cops were busy in a section that does not communicate with mine. One of the social workers came back out, retrieved a few hospital face masks from her car, and went back in. Hmmm. Several minutes later the entire party--cops, fire lieutenant, and social workers came out to the sidewalk and milled around.

Then the real excitement began. Over the next ten minutes we were joined by two more ambulances, two more police cars, two bike patrol cops, a couple more social services types and at least three fire trucks. This is only what I could see from my window. Our street was closed. The young, burly-looking firemen climbed out of their trucks and started donning white haz-mat suits, complete with those masks that make you look like a giant bug.

This is where I started to get a bit nervous. Criminals I already know about, heart attacks are sad but pretty self-contained, it seemed clear that there was no fire burning next door, but why the need for haz-mat suits? We mostly know, at least by sight, everyone who lives in our building. There are a few residents we know well enough to wave hello and comment on the weather when we pass in the street. The other residents we know the best (and that not very well) are a young, newlywed couple who live in the section the police were busy in. At the height of all the chaos out on the street Thursday the wife of that couple came home from work. They tried to stop her from getting home but she managed to get through just as I went out to the street to invite her in.

Shortly after that at least one person was brought out and taken away by ambulance and Eric came home just as the haz-mat guys were getting sprayed down with a fire hose. Then they all went home. Eric had tried, on his way in, to get one of the firemen to divulge some information but they weren't forthcoming. I wondered a few times as I craned my neck out the bay windows trying to take in the street or listened hard trying to catch some of the conversation if it wasn't a bit perverse to take such a lively interest in what appeared to be some kind of crisis. I used to get really mad at "rubber-necking" at freeway accidents. Eric pointed out once that it's a bit callous to just drive by a horrific traffic accident as if you don't care. It's annoying to get stuck in traffic but all that traffic slow-down is probably a fitting show of respect in the case of a car accident. I felt the same way about what happened on my street. Every door on my block was filled with someone watching our building to see what was happening. I might even have gone outside if not for the kids. The haz-mat suits gave me concern for my own well-being but, before that, I was wondering about the other residents of that part of the building. Had something happened to the young couple? Maybe the reclusive old woman on the first floor had died and finally been discovered? These people aren't friends of mine but we live in close proximity and share the same frustrations about the mice in our building, and the loud rap music in the summer, and the Maryland drivers who take our parking spaces.

We called the young couple in our building later to get the scoop. We aren't really friends with this couple but we know them well enough that we can call when a haz-mat team has invaded our building. They only knew what had happened because they'd badgered the fire department over the phone for awhile. The condo association is evicting a resident (not the young couple or the recluse) and the police, I think, had gone to serve notice. Upon arrival they found four people living in squalor. We only know a few of the ways in which the apartment was "squalid" and I'll let your imagination fill in what kinds of conditions required six firemen in haz-mat suits. Our neighbor was pretty shaken to realize that such a close neighbor had been living this way--though he hadn't been entirely ignorant of the problem. The residents will be finally evicted within the month, we hear. This particular tenant likes to sit on the corner of our back patio, drunk, and talk loudly to his buddy while smoking at exactly the time I'm putting Margaret to bed so part of me is glad to be rid of that problem. But it is sobering, in a healthy sort of way, to have some exposure to the sadness and poverty of the human condition.

City Life

2008-04-05T12:10:00.000-04:00

I have a lot of conversations about living in the city. There was the recent thread at 4Real which I finally quit because it was taking up way too much of my time, but I also get into this topic with a lot of friends in real life or via e-mail. Robyn asked me once why I feel so passionately about convincing people about city living. A lot feeds my desire to share this life with others.

I've found that people make a lot of assumptions about city life. I'm sure that many of these assumptions are based on actual observations about some cities. I think a lot of the assumptions are based on television and movies as well. I'm not a big consumer of television or movies but, from what I've seen, these media tend to portray extremes of city life. A few assumptions I have heard over the years that are not true of me or my neighborhood:
I am extroverted.
I love to shop.
My neighborhood is dangerous and I am, therefore, exceptionally brave.
I have a large wardrobe.
I am politically liberal.
I feel called to minister in an exceptional way to the poor.
I don't know my neighbors and they don't know each other.
I don't like nature.

And so on. Some assumptions about city living are true of my neighborhood and they just don't bother me. It is noisy here--our front window is about six feet from the street. It is "dirty" in the city, I guess. Our neighborhood is particularly bad with litter but this is not the norm. Country living seems dirtier to me. That might be just a personality thing. It is crowded. Houses in my neighborhood are attached together and there are plenty of apartment buildings and condominiums. We are the only renters in a condo building and our apartment is basically the first floor of a row-house. There are drug dealers in front of my building, people do get mugged in my neighborhood and there are even shootings not too far from me. I have never been asked to buy drugs, I have never been mugged, and I have never heard gun shots. We would not live here if we felt that our family was in danger.

I think cities are misunderstood and have thus been largely abandoned and neglected by those most able to effect change: families. I've decided to start an occasional series of posts aiming to simply show you city life. Maybe I'll include commentary on why something seems good or bad to me or why something about my city is succeeding or failing, but mostly I just want to show you our urban way of living. I'll try to share honestly. I'll try to share things that seem to particularly illustrate what is urban about our life. I will certainly be glad to share about a topic of particular interest to readers if you leave me a comment. There will not be any particular schedule for these posts because I can't commit to blogging in that way but I'll try to be regular--I have a lot to share.

And with that I'll close. I had intended to post my first installment now but I've been interrupted many times by a little girl who has now fallen asleep. I need to start dinner, among other things, but I may be back later.

Humongous

2008-03-30T23:25:00.001-04:00

My brother-in-law (age 17) arrived from Minnesota very late last night. His parents thoughtfully flew him into the airport farthest from our house and Eric went to get him. He thought I should have a snack waiting for Ben when he got here. He mentioned this after we'd polished off the pan of brownies I'd already made over the weekend. Fortunately I love to bake, especially when I know I'll have the help of a hungry teenager to eat it all. Eric wanted blonde brownies but my recipe called for one tablespoon of vanilla which was one tablespoon more than I had. Every month when my co-op catalog comes in the mail I look to see if the warehouse serving us has started carrying quart-sized bottles of vanilla extract. I don't know how we get through that stuff so fast.

I did have two entire packages of cream cheese so I went to a recipe website and searched for recipes using cream cheese and chocolate, but not vanilla extract, and came up with Humongous Cookies.

The title of the cookie reminded me of something small that happened in college. I majored in music, but after a couple years of the grueling demands of that program I needed a change and I started pursuing courses in history and politics and using long-neglected regions of my brain again. One of the first classes I took during this time was Constitutional Law. It was taught by a professor I adored, but the class really had a reputation. It was taught in the round and the professor called on students at random to brief cases and we were on the spot for a good amount of time when called upon. Discussion was abundant and we were required to make pretty stiff arguments. My favorite gaffe from a classmate was when he said, "It just seems to me that this case deals with more of a local problem," when we were discussing Lucas v. The South Carolina Coastal Council a case which impacted pretty much the entire East Coast.

My favorite personal gaffe came during a time of heated discussion. I have no idea what case we were debating but I had a moment to interject my carefully considered opinion and began, "This is a humongous . . ." I stopped. I turned red. I'd just used the word "humongous." In retrospect I doubt that anyone would have noticed or cared, but there I was: the inexperienced music major trying to prove that she could do Constitutional Law with the politics majors. I decided to recover by stopping my argument entirely and saying, "I can't believe I just used the word humongous." Everyone laughed and we all moved on. I got an A in the class. I didn't go to law school. And I've avoided the word humongous ever since.

In the end there weren't any other recipes to satisfy the requirements of me, the baker, and my blonde-brownie craving husband so I made the cookies. They weren't bad. They are called humongous because you press the dough into two cake pans and then cut it into wedges to serve. I probably would call this recipe chocolate-chip cookie cake. They're tasty but the texture bugs me. Too cakey for brownies, too chewy for cake. But they got us through the opening rounds of "Where should Ben go to college?" He's here because we live near his current top-choice school and we're glad for the opportunity to influence his thinking in this decision.

Thinking about all sorts of things

2008-03-29T11:36:00.000-04:00

I've been doing a good bit of writing this past week but not much of it has made it here, unfortunately. If you've really missed me, you can peruse this thread at 4Real where I think I contributed enough material to fill several blog posts.

What has me thinking even more--and on weightier matters--is Sally's recent post on the clash of vocations. It surprised me, actually, that the post inspired so much thought on my part. I never would have said before this week that I felt a "clash of vocations" in my life. For the first three years of our marriage I did work. I was a librarian and then a Residential Life Director for Washington, DC, interns. Both of these occupations earned much-needed money for our family while Eric chipped away at a Ph.D but neither job was a second vocation. I was a librarian only to kill time until I could start being an RD--a job which would then allow me to be a stay-at-home Mom. The RD job was part-time, all from home, and my co-workers graciously put up with Joseph's presence at staff meetings. Ideal. Once Margaret came along it was too much and Eric gave it a go for a year but now we're living like grown-ups, paying rent, and desperately job-hunting.

Despite past employment I have for some time seen my primary, and really my sole vocation, as that of wife and mother. This really drove my college professors nuts. One wanted me to get a Ph.D. Several thought I should go to law school. All thought I was throwing away all my gifts by wanting to be "just a mom." I do not have a single regret and I'm not posting here to defend the vocation of motherhood. But, for the record, I think it is completely possible to be one hundred percent fulfilled and satisfied by a life devoted entirely to one's family. I adore my children and I hope we have lots more but I have been wondering of late whether this "just a mom" thing is enough for me.

I suppose where I'm feeling the lack is in the exercise of my intellectual powers. Not to suggest that I'm more "powerful" than average in this area but I know something is lying dormant in there. It would also be nice to contribute economically to the well-being of my family. It turns out I'm not the only adult in the family who thinks that would be nice. And given that our preferred places to live rank pretty high on the cost-of-living scales it wouldn't be so bad to have a little extra coming in.

But then I consider, also, that I have pretty high ideals in how to parent my children and how to be available to them. And I want to support my husband's vocation. And, um, it would be nice if that huge pile of laundry were folded on a regular basis. How to balance it all? I feel on the one hand too busy to take on mere work just to earn money and on the other hand like not all of me is being challenged and utilized in the way I currently live my life. I would certainly just get "some job" if I had to in order for our family to survive but we're not there, yet, and I'm certain that "some job" would not satisfy the lack I'm feeling.

I wonder if taking a stab at doing something in a disciplined way would seep into other ares of my life to positive effect. It's tempting for me, prone to despair as I am, to give it all up and refuse to do anything until I learn to get the laundry folded every single day. I just need to work and work at that and when I get it, then I can move on. I'm not convinced that this is the best approach, though because of two recent breakthroughs around here.

The first was actually in Eric's life. He's been cranking really hard on this dissertation. He sprinted for weeks to get all the writing done and then the extra little bits of work and revisions that came after were threatening to overwhelm and, I daresay, he was teetering on the edge of burnout. In my classic, hands-off way I sat him down and made him give me a list of all the things he ideally wanted to accomplish in a week from dissertation work to prayer time to time with the kids. Then I made him a schedule and--surprise!--it all fit. In a normal week Eric does have time to get everything done and still do all the things that make his life worth living. It was a revelation for both of us and he is able to leave for work on Saturday morning knowing that he only needs to put in a certain number of hours before coming back home to tend to other things including taking Margaret out for a walk so I can make our Lord's Day dinner in relative peace. I really, really wish I could do this for myself but I'm not sure that housework and children can be scheduled as rigidly. But I'm thinking about it.

I also had a big revelation during Holy Week about the dishes. Some of you are really going to laugh at me but I don't care. I'm terrible about doing the dishes. I too easily come up with an excuse to leave them overnight and then wake to them in the morning. The sight of the dishes in the sink and on the counter when we get home from Mass completely destroys my morning. I get angry and tense and often yell at my family and slam cupboard doors and such. It's very bad. One morning I said, "I dread coming home to our apartment." I'd never said that before and, thus, never really realized it before. In the back of my mind I knew that the messy kitchen would be waiting for me and all the way home from Mass my agitation would increase. Sometime during Holy Week, without realizing it, I made the cognitive leap from my morning stress to my evening activity. I finally realized that it was totally worth it to sacrifice my limited free time in exchange for waking up to a clean kitchen. The dishes have, for the most part, gotten clean every night since.

Parenting my children and maintaining my home are the most important aspects of living my vocation and I have a long way to go in these areas. But I can't simply exert my will and try extra hard and magically create lovely children and a beautiful home. I can keep slowly cultivating good habits and slowly I will grow in maturity and virtue.

In the meantime, what can I do to feel more balanced? I have always nurtured hopes of being a writer. I've never called myself a writer because mostly I'm not and I've never been published anywhere of note. Eric and I will occasionally come up with an idea for a New York Times bestseller to be written "someday" in our copious free time. There's the hope, too, that getting published could help with that economic contribution thing I mentioned earlier.

But, well, I can't be a writer if I don't write. On the day when Eric and I realize that we actually have time to write that paradigm-shifting book of ours, I'm not going to be much use if I haven't been working at the writing craft. Next time I see someone looking for articles on a topic I know something about I'm probably not going to have time to whip up something from scratch and another opportunity will be lost.

I love to write. I may never publish anything but it's a satisfying hobby for me, at least. I have stacks of journals--mostly of the navel-gazing, sentimental, whiny, and immature genre but recent entries have been more substantial. I've got a couple blogs. My homemaking aspirations really only serve as a loose framework within which to practice writing about life. I'm tentatively considering adding "writer" as a facet of my vocation and committing to working at it in some way every day: blogging, journaling, working on drafts of essays or articles. Maybe it will "pay off" in concrete terms one day and maybe not but I do hope that some project that brings me outside myself will give me more energy and focus for all that is going on inside my life in the day-to-day.

Wondering what we've been up to this weekend?

2008-03-16T11:13:00.000-04:00

The Kids' Blog won the coin toss for where to post.

Tackling the Toys

2008-03-14T11:53:00.001-04:00

The next victims in my decluttering rampage were the kids' toys. I don't really have a sense for how our toy collection compares to that of similar families but I felt like things were getting out of control. I last organized and purged toys before Christmas and there are things that have been sitting on a shelf out of the kids' reach ever since. They haven't been missed.

It's hard to purge toys. I always wonder if I'm unfairly inflicting my own sense of aesthetic on my poor, deprived children. Certainly I want my children to have occupation and plenty of fodder for the imagination. I also want to beware of getting rid of something useful or valuable just because it isn't a hit with my current children. A few years ago I almost got rid of a set of four, large squishy blocks. They are different colors and covered with baby-stimulating decorations. Joseph was never interested in them. But along came Margaret who could actually sit up on her own at about the age you would like blocks such as these. She did love them. I'm glad I kept those. I'm debating now about our Brio trains. Margaret is a typical girl and isn't all that interested in "things that go." Joseph loves trains but can't work with tracks because he can't maneuver around them without knocking them over. These are nice trains but should I really hang on to them for a possible future boy? I'm having the same issue with our lovely wooden blocks. The kids like things that stick together.

I began the process by making a list of all the toys we own. It's not a very scientific list. Some toys were lumped into one category, "stuffed animals," while other items were listed singly, "plastic shovel." The list contained 58 items. Yikes. That's way more than necessary for two small children in a tiny apartment who mostly spend their time looking at books, squishing playdough, and banging mixing bowls. I marked things for elimination giving priority to well-made, wooden toys that maximized creativity and then consulted with Eric. I was able to empty Joseph's room just before naptime and sort things with Margaret's help. So far, no one has noticed any difference other than different organization.

In the end we eliminated twenty items from our list including many things that were made up of lots of small parts (big contributors to clutter!). The Brio trains stayed but the blocks are on probation. Purging toys also allowed me--no surprise here--to make some nice organizational changes. The pictures in this post show all of our toys with the exception of two puzzles, a magna-doodle, and some bath toys. Those items are stored in different places for particular reasons. Also not pictured is a wooden xylophone. The xylophone is pretty nice instrument that we would love for Joseph to use but we want it out of reach for Margaret. We can now put the xylophone on a shelf in Joseph's room where he can see it and ask for it but Margaret can't reach it. We still have a lot of stuffed animals but they no longer overflow the doll cradle. This cradle is something I want to keep for our girls and holding stuffed animals is actually a good way to hang on to it for now. Otherwise the toys all fit in or on these lovely IKEA end tables (which are quite popular, apparently, as their price recently doubled). Eric had been using one of these for dissertation purposes and now that the dissertation is done (!!!!!!!) I snatched it back for toy storage. We are finally going to get rid of the ugly end table that was in our living room. The IKEA table is probably not as high-quality but it looks nice, it's more functional, and it opens up the living room by a few inches. And this gained us an extra bookshelf. No complaints there!

I may have finally run out of things to declutter but we'll see. I feel a lot lighter but my possessions may begin to drive me crazy again in a few months.

Visual Peace

2008-03-11T05:57:00.000-04:00

One big storage hurdle I have yet to overcome is where to put my craft stuff. I dream of a craft room. It doesn't even have to be a whole room. I'd settle for a walk-in closet, or any closet. All it needs is just enough space to leave an in-progress project and some way of closing it off to small children. There is no craft room in our current apartment, obviously. If our neighborhood were just a little nicer we would put our chest freezer on our back patio and turn the back room into a craft area for me, but, anyway . . .

Most of my craft stuff is packed into boxes and tightly crammed into the closet in Joseph's room. But since I actually do crafty stuff from time to time things have migrated out into the main room. The sewing machine had a permanent spot on a visually prominent surface. When I first put it there we thought is was sort of charming and domestic. But, you know, it's not like I have a vintage treadle machine. It's just a pink and white Brother and once I stuffed a pedal wrapped in a cord under the arm and piled other sewing and cross-stitch paraphernalia around it the charm appeal wore off fast.

After paring down the kids' clothes I had a bit more closet space and an extra storage bin. We have a beautiful hinged wooden box from Eric's grandfather and it had been crammed full of fabric. I emptied all that fabric into the plastic bin and tucked it away. The box was just the right size for my sewing machine, my craft books, and my cross-stitch projects. There's even plenty of wiggle room to tuck in fabric for an upcoming project. The box is beautiful and was already taking up space in the main room. I put our wooden chess set and magazine basket on top of it and turned the lid opening against the wall to discourage Margaret from getting into it.

After a bit of tidying up I was left with chest of drawers with nothing on it but a potted plant and a small statue that I love (and, previously couldn't see!). I immediately wondered what I should put in that space. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that I loved having that "stuff-free" surface in the main room. That chest of drawers is centered in the room and is one of the first things you notice upon entering the room. And now it's a point of visual peace in a room otherwise filled with bookshelves. We have a lovely book stand from when Eric was reading for his comprehensive exams and I asked Eric to bring that out so we would have a place for sheet music. He added an open dictionary which I initially protested, but now I think it's really fun. We both are apt to wander over and teach ourselves a new word or look up something we're not sure about. Anything to build vocabulary is fine by me! And we are both musicians who now have a place for music. Setting up a collapsible music stand is enough of a hurdle for me to keep my flute locked up most of the time. Plus I don't think kids do well around anything that can be described as "collapsible."

All in all, a fantastic improvement. This decluttering thing is really addictive. Every time I achieve a new victory I think I've gone as far as I can. But once I'm used to the new standard I think, "More! I want more!" (or is that Less!). In the last week I've also given away a garbage bag of adult clothes and cleared out a large stack of books. The book purge gave me enough space to house all our CDs on the same shelf. I also got $25 in credit at our favorite used book store. Nice.

Decluttering just like everyone else

2008-03-10T17:13:00.001-04:00

I wonder if the decluttering bug hits everyone this time of year. After a long winter of being cooped up in our messy little houses we just want to get rid of everything. I guess I've got the bug just like everyone else. The decluttering bug is so widespread, in fact, that I'm not even going to try to link to everyone who has been blogging about. And I know that a whole lot of moms have realized that they can't declutter and blog so they're doing the former. It is so freeing. I finally got a new camera yesterday so I'm newly motivated to blog about my homemaking.

The latest spate of purging involved the kids' clothes. Thing were getting out of hand and that with only two children and four years of clothes collection under my belt. I remember when I was pregnant with Margaret that I was really hoping for another boy so that I wouldn't have to store two sets of clothes! I'm pretty glad to have a girl, as it turns out, and I've finally managed it so that the clothes for both kids take up the same amount of space as the clothes for only Joseph used to. It was really, really time to reorganize the clothes storage bins, anyway. The seasons are changing just as Margaret is getting into the next size and I was sick of kicking aside piles of too-small pink onesies every time I tried to close the closet door.

I thought long and hard about how many clothes we really need and I realized something: I do laundry every day. I usually wash two loads each day, in fact, because we use cloth diapers and all cloth in the kitchen. I do not need two weeks worth of clothes for all the kids. I decided that five outfits for each size/season/gender was reasonable. It allows for variety, sickness, a missed day of laundry, whatever. So I went through every size and kept the best five tops and five bottoms for each size/season/gender. A dress replaced a top and bottom (one of many reasons I love putting Margaret in dresses). I also kept one "Sunday" outfit for each group. My kids dress pretty well every day. We don't do sweatpants or sweatshirts, here. We go out almost every day besides trying to get to Daily Mass and I like all of us to look neat and respectable. The only bin that got more than five outfits per gender was the newborn bin. I kept more like ten each for that size because newborns go through a lot of clothes in a day.

I additionally kept some kind of cardigan or sweater for each size and all the socks we currently own. I'm not sure what to do about socks, yet, but I've been thinking for a long time about doing one color per size to simplify. We can't afford to implement this across the board right now so I've just put each size in its own gallon-size ziploc. I'll revisit socks when I need to buy new ones for Joseph next fall. Shoes got their own bin but we don't have very many as Joseph doesn't wear out shoes.

Our winter coats and seasonal accessories also have their own bin though I think we might not fit everything back in after this winter. I'll have to think about that.

When I was all done (and, amazingly, this project only took a couple hours, even with Margaret's help) I was able to make one bin for each size and put four sets of clothes in each: boy summer, boy winter, girl summer, and girl winter. My sizes go in six-month increments up to 24 months and then go one year at a time. I didn't even get very big bins. I think they are the 14-gallon Rubbermaids. I would say they are on the small side of medium in terms of size. I suppose I'll need bigger bins for bigger kids but I'm feeling really good about my storage situation, now. I was able to donate two large bags of clothes to the inpatients at the hospital where Joseph is treated.

Okay, time to make dinner . . . More later on what I was able to do after this project was completed.

Homeschooling

2008-03-08T20:27:00.000-05:00

The homeschooling world is all abuzz this week over a recent ruling by the California Court of Appeals. The court was responding to a confidential juvenile proceeding and the case involved child abuse. Legal battles are still being fought but as the ruling stands now, it sounds like all children in California will need to be taught by credentialed teachers in the future. We're having pretty similar troubles in DC right now. There was a tragic case earlier this year of four children found dead in their home. It's a long, complicated story but one of the reasons these kids slipped through the cracks was that they weren't attending school. The mother had withdrawn them to "homeschool" them. The District, previously one of the most homeschool-friendly "states", is responding with a set of regulations including home visits to observe parents instructing their children.

These cases remind me a bit of the articles on co-sleeping that come out once a year or so. The newspaper reports that there is a growing or hidden trend of parents sleeping with their children and then goes on to list all the reasons this is a bad idea. The example always given is of a mother under the influence of drugs or alcohol who has rolled on top of her infant in the night. What's the problem? It must be co-sleeping.

It is nothing short of tragic when children are abused by their parents or, worse, when they die from neglect or at the hands of a mentally-ill parent. But the problem is not that these children were homeschooling or sharing a bed with their parents. What shall we discourage next? I would bet it's pretty dangerous for a six-month old to be bathed by a drunk parent. Should we discourage the bathing of small children?

Many of my closest friends are teachers or have been teachers in public schools. They are, without exception, wonderful teachers. I have asked all of them if their education degree has been helpful to them in the classroom and almost all of them agree that their teacher training was helpful only in the area of classroom management. (I should note that all of the teachers in my sample teach elementary school. My argument may become less true with older children.) This is great. I would hope any single person left with the charge of twenty to thirty five-year olds has had training in classroom management. But home-educating parents do not need to practice classroom management. There might be similar skills required in managing a transition from one activity to another, or redirecting a stressed-out child but these are skills necessary for a parent long before a child reaches school age.

The attentions of even the most excellent teacher are no substitute for the love of the most distant, ignorant, or uneducated parent. There are extreme examples, to be sure. But if a parent is abusive, addicted, or mentally ill the problem will still be there after school. Remember, kids live with their parents.

I don't have an easy answer for the problem of how to keep kids in those sorts of situations from being injured or killed. I don't think there is an easy answer. It is unfortunate that the state of California and the District of Columbia seem to be reacting strongly against a tangential issue to these cases. The State wants to protect these kids but as my husband is fond of saying, "The State can't love you." Change needs to come at the cultural level, not from top-down government intervention and cultural change is a long, slow road. Few, I'm afraid, have the energy to travel it.

Parenting the Three-year Old

2008-03-07T21:04:00.000-05:00

I commented over at 3 Peas today that I think two is a stressful age for the child whereas age three is more stressful for the parents. I only have a sample of one, thus far, but this has certainly been our experience. Two was challenging but our overriding thought at the end of that year was that Joseph just seemed pretty stressed out the whole time. Now that he's three, well, there's still a good bit of stress but he's so much smarter.

Joseph spoke very well by his second birthday. He was a late enough talker that he was once recommended for speech therapy but once he started he was speaking full paragraphs within weeks. So by his third birthday we were used to the constant prattle of a little toddler but the prattle didn't demand all that much of us. He'd talk and talk and on our good parenting days we'd try to engage the talk but he was happy to just talk on his own and look at books and play with toys. Then he turned three. If Joseph started saying "no" on his second birthday, he started asking questions on his third.

"Mama, what is that big yellow thing?"
That's a bulldozer, Joseph. You know what a bulldozer is.
"Mama, what does a bulldozer buld?"
Dirt.
"Mama, what happens if a bulldozer doesn't buld dirt?"
uhhh . . . then it's not bulding dirt?
"Mama, what happens if a bulldozer does buld dirt?"

And on and on. All day long. Don't get me wrong. I adore my son. He is very bright and wonderful and I'm so glad that he's curious about his world. I guess I just thought he would ask questions with answers. And that's the thing of it. Children, I think, thrive on order. Not schedules, necessarily, but order. Margaret knows that we put on pajamas and then brush her teeth and that the toothbrush goes back in the toothbrush dish and then we turn off the light and then we go to bed. She gets the order of bedtime. She's the master of the micro-order these days. Joseph is concerned with order on a more macro level these days. We've found that physical therapists love light-up toys that teach "cause and effect." Push a button and . . . a song! Yaayy! My new rule of thumb for these toys is that if the relationship is simple enough that a toy can do it, you don't need the toy. Where's the toy to teach that when you throw down a basket of books it causes a disordered mess that detracts from the well-being of the entire family? Where's the toy that teaches that eating all your oatmeal at breakfast gives you more energy for your morning fun? There aren't toys for these things. They must be learned very slowly and patiently by the child and the parents suffer right along with all the consequences, natural and imposed.

Joseph is so very aware of his abilities (and, increasingly, his disabilities) that I'm needing to develop actual activities for him. He wants to be an artist (take out the paints!) or a cook (playdough!) or a hunter (hide all the animals and get out the braces and walker). He needs not only the small little routines and rituals but a larger framework for his days and weeks. He needs reading time, and creative time, outdoor time, Mommy time and Daddy time, meals, sleep, baths, time with friends, and time to just be. For the first three years of Joseph's life, and so far in Margaret's, I felt like any shortcomings in our day-to-day life were more or less covered by a parenting style that I think is pretty darn good. But now Joseph notices the lack and he reacts. He remembers things. He's so verbal and so smart but not really rational, yet. I can't explain myself away to him even though he can call me out when I'm neglecting him.

I used to always think that I was prepared to parent children, I just didn't know what to do with babies. That was before I had kids, though, and babies turned out to be not so scary and mysterious after all. I think I've done okay so far in that department. But what about this child growing up so fast before me?

I guess I'll have to talk about the weather

2008-03-06T14:23:00.000-05:00

I am often heard saying, "The best thing about living in Washington is . . ." There are many things I love about this city--and many things I don't--but here is another for the list: March and April. Where I grew up March was still winter and April was all a tease. But here in Washington March and April almost (almost) make up for the weather the rest of the year. I know that I really shouldn't complain about the weather here because, in truth, I haven't lived in very many places. I suppose there is something to dislike about the weather pretty much anywhere (although I have one friend from San Francisco who would beg to differ). I do know that if I hear one more time, "The thing about X-Ville is, if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes and it'll change!" I will scream.

Anyway, back to my local weather. Summers here begin in May and last until October and they are pretty hot and very, very humid. The kind of humidity that saps your will to live. One summer Eric and I just got on the Metro and rode around because the train cars have air-conditioning. Then our winter comes in November and lasts until February. Winters here are very lame. We got about four inches of snow this year on four separate occasions so, doing the math, I guess that meant the federal government shut down four times this winter. Another gem of a Washington weather anecdote: Eric and I used to work in the same building at his university and arrived for work one rainy, winter morning to find the place closed up. The lone guardian of the front door said, "You didn't hear? Classes were canceled due to the weather." It was raining! Anyway, unlike my northern brethren, we are not buried in snow here. Nor are we suffering from sub-zero weather for the fourteenth week in a row. It rarely dips below twenty, here. So I shouldn't whine, but I've been cold this winter. I used to always think I was a winter person. Winter is so cozy: sweaters, bathrobes, heaps of blankets, fires, cocoa. Right. We kept our thermostat at 63 during the day and turned off the heat at night. We have no carpets. I realized this winter that I have been pretty spoiled in years past. I don't like being cold.

So by the time March arrives in our fair city we've had ten months of rotten weather. This week dawned gloriously. We met some friends at the National Arboretum and sat on blankets in a meadow and basked in the seventy-degree sunshine. Joseph's eczema almost cleared up from one day of outdoor play. The trees are all in bud. In a week or two the flowers will start. Practically every tree in this city flowers during March and April. It's amazing. We have failed, five years in a row, to see the famed cherry blossoms, but it almost doesn't matter because everything is blooming. I'm sure that, come July, I'm going to be hoping that Eric pulls off a last-minute job in Saskatchewan or something but for now, welcome spring!

Let us purify the dialect of the tribe

2008-02-25T11:17:00.001-05:00

The title for this post was not born out of my own imagination. I've been working my way through The Night is Far Spent: A Treasury of Thomas Howard. This author figured fairly prominently in my conversion, or reversion, if your prefer. He taught English literature at my college but "resigned" after he converted to Catholicism. This was in 1985, I believe, but the way folks talked about it I had long thought it must have happened the year before I got to the school--which was 1998. Anyway, he lived in the neighborhood and was friendly enough with the college that he returned to give a talk on "The Church of Rome in the Body of Christ" at the end of my junior year. He set about answering long simmering questions that I hadn't really had the time to articulate for myself, yet. It was that talk, more than anything, that set me irrevocably on the road back to the Church. I was privileged to get to know Mr. Howard very slightly later at parish events.

Thomas Howard is a serious anglophile. Many of the essays in this book were lectures given at Oxford. I've completed the first section "Things Literary and Literary Men" and almost the last essay is "Let us Purify the Dialect of the Tribe," a quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Howard makes the case in this essay for loving language, particularly as a writer. Certainly, Howard himself is a lover of language. My one criticism of this collection of essays thus far is that it's just a bit much. When writing at book length, Tom Howard manages to temper himself a bit knowing that his reader must get through several hundred pages. In essay, article, or speech length he tries to cram himself and his love of language into just ten or twelve pages. The essays need to be read one at a time. But it is lovely. I've loved Howard's use of the English language since I first read his On Being Catholic and I'm struggling to be encouraged, rather than discouraged, as I read him now. I don't exactly want to write just like Thomas Howard, but I hope to have the same tools at my disposal: the English language. From literary references, to the most appropriate vocabulary choices, to correct use of commas. Part of the reason I don't blog more often is that I don't have the time to do justice to most of the ideas in my head.

On the whole, though, I am encouraged when I read really good writing and this essay on language has stuck with me. I remember fondly one summer in college when I was living in the dorms and became friends with someone I barely knew while classes were in session. Together we worked hard at eliminating "like" from our conversation. We were very nearly successful. I don't talk like an airhead anymore. But there's nothing like living with a three-year old to bring one's linguistic deficiencies to the foreground. Joseph has applied the adjective "stupid" to most everything in his environment over the last week or so. Joseph is above-average in the language department--everyone says so--and he often comes out with things that are the obvious result of having had quality literature read aloud to him for hours and hours out of every week (and sometimes of a single day--we're on the fourth book of the Chronicles of Narnia already). But stupid? It's just not that creative an adjective. Some things are stupid but I hope that my children are able to come up with a more descriptive word than "stupid" when they aren't satisfied with something. I guess it's up to me. I may not write often enough or well enough to purify the dialect of the masses but I suppose I can take a crack at my own tribe.

Starting again

2008-02-19T20:22:00.001-05:00

One nice thing about Lent being so long is that it's almost never too late to begin again. I usually find myself needing to do this five or six times over the course of the forty days no matter what I give up. This year I was so hopeful about my schedule plan because it seemed doable. And what good is penance if you can't do it? I wrote out a rough copy in my notebook and decided to try it out for the first half-week of Lent before typing it neatly and placing it in my planning notebook. I told myself I would follow this schedule to the letter unless my husband or the children needed me or I was too sick to get out of bed.

Ha. Never say unless. I don't really get sick all that often and the annual cold that comes around sometime late winter is enough to whine about but it certainly doesn't keep me in bed. My most recent ailment didn't keep me in bed, either, but it would have if I hadn't had children. I was sick like this once before and I spent a couple of weeks in bed that time. I won't give you all the gory details but I will tell you that mold makes me very, very sick. If I'm completely stressed out it exacerbates the effects of the mold. We've cleaned up more mold than I care to think about in the last week or so and I've been working on reducing stress in my life. I'm feeling well enough to blog, so I figure I'm well enough to give another go at my Lenten schedule. It's providential, I think, that I chose this particular discipline for Lent because I think the schedule will really aid in my recovery. It's balanced and generous but covers all the necessary chores and points of responsibility in my life. Just over a month until Easter. Plenty of time to grow in holiness.

Patron Saints

2008-02-17T15:05:00.000-05:00

Those of you who use Google Reader to keep up with blogs have probably noticed that they are in the business of recommending reading material if your list of subscriptions fails to deliver. Ironic given that my whole reason for using a feed reader in the first place is to avoid blog surfing. But given that many of my favorites have taken Lent off, my box has come up empty more than once and I find myself drifting over to the friendly green box. The recommended blogs are uncannily suited to my tastes and interests--Google is so creepy--and I have to say that I'm glad that I spent awhile with Margaret in Minnesota because she directed her readers to a delightful online ministry.

The Patron Saint of the Year Ministry offers to match you with a saint for the year if you send an e-mail. This is an old custom practiced, apparently, by St. Faustina in her religious community. A bin is maintained of, well, not ALL the saints but as many as can be found, I suppose, and a name is chosen by lot at the start of the year. I think it's a lovely custom but I can understand how maintaining such a bin might be cumbersome for an individual family. Marianne happily solves this problem by drawing our saint on our behalf.

If you've seen my sidebar you already know that my patron for the year is St. Raymond Penafort. I had an immediate connection to St. Raymond. He was an early Dominican friar and the third master general of the order. We are close to the Dominicans here in Washington and knew of him though he is a bit obscure, generally. He was a canon lawyer, a bishop, and is a patron of all things connected to childbirth (we'll see if that comes in handy this year).

Our family is especially intrigued by this "random" selection process because I e-mailed Eric after receiving my patron and suggested that he acquire one for himself as well. The saint who chose him was St. Peter Nolasco. Never heard of him? I had. I'd just barely finished reading up on my patron when Eric e-mailed me to tell me his so I knew that St. Peter Nolasco was known for his friendship with St. Raymond Pennafort. They founded the Mercedarians who were in the business of redeeming Christians held captive by the Muslims. Interesting. We will look forward to seeing where these two saints take us this year.

Really, I didn't give up blogging for Lent

2008-02-13T14:17:00.001-05:00

I just can't decide what to write about because the only news I have is that I'm sick. Sick. Sick. Sick. It's sort of tempting to write about being sick because I think my case is sort of interesting but, really, I have so little energy that I can't really stand here at the computer for very long and I can't really think all that clearly. I know. Pathetic.

Ironic, too. I was all set with my schedule for Lent and it worked great for two days but since Friday morning I haven't done anything that wasn't absolutely necessary. Of course the trick to doing nothing that isn't necessary is doing just enough so that nothing does become necessary.

Anyway, I thought I should check in. Perhaps I'll have something more intelligent to say soon.

This sums it up

2008-02-05T14:54:00.000-05:00

Thank to Sally at Fine Old Famly for pointing me to this lovely essay on the contemplative vocation of the mother. This sums up, better than I could, what I'm going for with my Lenten discipline.

When I told Eric I was going to make a schedule for Lent he said, "So, basically, you're going to be a responsible adult for Lent?" He was mostly kidding, I think. I still maintain that many responsible adults live without a strict schedule. They simply have enough virtue to do what needs to be done. But where virtue fails, rules are required. I definitely need a rule this Lent.

Preparing for Lent

2008-02-02T21:30:00.001-05:00

by eating up all the delicious things in my refrigerator. Tonight: pizza with onions, mushrooms, prosciutto, roasted red peppers, and goat cheese. Plus red wine. I'm so glad I made enough for leftovers . . .

Thinking about Lent

2008-02-01T12:42:00.000-05:00

We are just drowning in rain here. The kind of a day when you want to snuggle on your flat futon with both your kids under the White Witch's cloak* and read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe all the way to the end with a big mug of steaming coffee. Joseph was all about this plan and, fortunately, Eric didn't need his coffee thermos today so I had the steaming beverage on hand. We were interrupted, however, by Jorge, the best orthopedic equipment technician ever. Then it was lunch and now rest time and the rain is coming down harder than ever so I'll blog over my lunch (pancakes--isn't what you eat for lunch on a rainy day?) and watch the cars go by out our bay windows.

*I just realized that I'm confusing two different conversations. I remarked somewhere else recently that Joseph is really enjoying his first trip through Narnia but that the one thing he wanted to re-enact after reading the first few chapters was snuggling under the White Witch's cloak in which I was honored with the role of Witch and our lovely blue afghan became the cloak. I think Margaret must have been the dwarf in this scenario and, come to think of it, Joseph was the pre-conversion Edmund so none of us fared too well.

I've been thinking about Lent for a long time. I kept making January a week short in my mind, thereby bumping up Ash Wednesday considerably which is a funny thing to do in a year when Lent comes almost as early as it possibly can. I like to set my sights high when it comes to penitential practices during Lent because, after all, isn't Lent all about assured discouragement, dashed hopes, and finding out that you aren't any more holy during these forty days than the rest of the year? Fasting is a major challenge for me and I know there are many opinions on fasting for pregnant and nursing moms but I'm not sure I can really call myself pregnant or nursing this year. Margaret, after all, does nibble at food from time to time. But she does still nurse quite a bit which helps explain the not pregnant part and I don't know how to factor that in to my fasting decisions in light of how hard it was for me to fast back in my single days.

Fasting on Good Friday and Ash Wednesday and abstaining from meat on all Fridays during Lent are all that the Church requires of us but it is common to take on extra penitential practices during Lent to help us in overcoming sin and preparing for the great feast of Easter. Our family tries to adopt a spirit of sacrifice during Lent, mostly with regard to food. This year we will be eating the fruits of Soup Week each night. Desserts are out as well (though we'll have them for Eric's birthday and the Solemnity of St. Joseph). I always try to add something in the form of extra prayer--this year I'd been giving some thought to more of the Divine Office.

But what to give up? I'm nosy about this topic with others and perhaps I shouldn't be because it is rather personal. Two categories of "penance" I've seen come up often don't sit well with me. The first is the "my life is already hard" category. This is where I wonder if I'm generous enough about penance when pregnant. After all, I think, I'm already pregnant. I'm throwing up every five minutes and falling over tired every other minute and I can only stomach hot-fudge sundaes. Do I really have to give up something for Lent, too? Well, yes, I think I do. I don't think having a normally hard life excuses one from growing in virtue though a bit more creativity is probably required in the particulars of penitential practice. The other thing that bugs me is the temptation to give up vices. Of course vices should be shed. I can think of many in my case. What if I gave up nagging my husband for Lent? He'd probably like that. It might even be sacrificial in so far as it would be really difficult to give up nagging. But a penance, I think, should be the giving up of something that is inherently good. The Lord wants our best, our first fruits, in sacrifice. We should be conquering vice all year. Lent is the time to find something good in our life, something we really love and really enjoy, but that is ultimately not necessary and offer it up to the Lord. Sacrificing coffee or chocolate or ice cream sundaes comes to mind here.

All that said, I'm betting that my readers will have differing opinions on the legitimacy of my penance this Lent: I'm going to make a schedule. I kept thinking about all the different things I could add or remove from my life for Lent and I realized that they were all going to be sacrifices of time: more time in prayer, less time on the computer, less time crafting, more time doing the dishes. None of my ideas was working for me as a stand-alone sacrifice and I hit on the idea of making a schedule.

I'm not sure what I think about the relative virtue and vice of having a schedule as opposed to just "going with the flow" (or "flying by the seat of one's pants" as it more often is around here). Some may disagree (and I would be interested in your thoughts) that a schedule is necessary and an objective good and therefore not a valid penance because I should be working on it year-round. But I suspect that the need for a schedule is more a personality thing. Some people thrive on more rigid schedules and some people thrive on spontaneity or a loose rhythm. If you are the latter and you have the virtue to do what needs to be when it needs doing this can be a great way to live. I am not so virtuous but I keep telling myself that "I'm not a schedule person" because every time I've tried a schedule I've failed because it's been, well, hard.

So I'm going to make a schedule and stick to it (with much help from the Lord) for forty days. By Easter I hope to at least have learned something about myself and schedules. This approach will also have the result of increasing my prayer time (because I'll schedule it) decreasing my computer time (because I'll schedule it) and simplifying life a great deal, I hope. Free time will also be scheduled--no worries.

Given the realities of life with small children I don't think I'll be able to pull off anything too rigid. I plan to take time this weekend to write down the things that must happen at a certain time each day and then peg lists to those times. I'll likely end up with a morning list, an afternoon list, and an evening list. The lists will be the tasks that need doing in the order I should do them with free time for anything leftover. We'll see how things shake out as I put this down on paper over the next few days.

What are you giving up for Lent?

Soup Week II

2008-02-01T11:17:00.000-05:00

Two more from Moosewood. This first one was an unexpected hit. I avoided the recipe for years until one night it was the only thing that matched the ingredients I had on hand. It's been a big favorite ever since. I think I have as many lentil soup recipes as I have cookbooks--and maybe a few more besides. This one is my hands-down favorite. I like to sprinkle it with parmesean.

White Bean and Black Olive Soup from Moosewood Cookbook

2 T olive oil
1 heaping cup chopped onion
1 stalk celery, diced
1 medium carrot, diced
1 1/2 t. salt
1 t. oregano or marjoram
1 1/2 t. basil
1 small zucchini, diced
1 small bell pepper, diced
3-4 cloves garlic, crushed
fresh black pepper
4 c. water
3 oz. tomato paste
1/4 dry red wine
2 c. cooked white pea beans
1 c. sliced kalamata olives
1 T fresh lemon juice

Heat the olive oil in a kettle. Add onion, celery, carrot, salt, and herbs. Saute over medium heat 8 to 10 minutes, or until the vegetables are just tender.

Add zucchini, bell pepper, and garlic. Saute five minutes more. Grind in some black pepper.

Combine water and tomato paste. Add to vegetables, along with the remaining ingredients. Cover and simmer over low heat for about fifteen minutes. Serve hot, topped with fresh parsley and diced fresh tomato.

Lentil Soup from Moosewood Cookbook

3 c. dry lentils
7 c. water
2 t. salt
6-8 cloves garlic, crushed
2 c. chopped onion
2 stalks celery, chopped
2 medium carrots, sliced or diced
1 t. basil
1/2 t. thyme
1/2 t. oregano
lots of freshly ground black pepper
2-3 medium tomaotes (I usually make this in the winter and use a can of tomatoes)
red wine vinegar to drizzle on top

Place lentils, water, and salt in a kettle. Bring to a boil, lower heat to the slowest possible simmer, and cook quietly, partially covered, for 20 to 30 minutes.

Add vegetables (except tomatoes), herbs, and black pepper. Partially cover and let simmer peacefully another 20 to 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add tomaotes (scald, peel and juice if you are using fresh tomatoes). Cook five minutes more.

Serve hot with a drizzle of vinegar (or fresh parmesean).

Soup Week I

2008-01-31T20:42:00.000-05:00

My husband gave me the idea for soup week one evening as were enjoying a soup dinner that had been pulled from the freezer, "Could you just cook a whole bunch of soups in one week and stock the freezer with them?" Well, yes, I could. The more I thought about it, the more the idea appealed to me. Planning and cooking a bunch of soups all at once would save time in prepping and cleaning, would use ingredients most efficiently and would allow me to justify an out-of-the way trip to an Asian market where produce is sold at fantastic prices. I planned a week of cooking two double batches of soup each day. I estimated that this would provide forty meals for our family with enough for Eric's lunches here and there as well. I would have carried out this plan in December but at the time our freezers were crammed full of other bulk buying projects and I had no space for forty ziploc bags full of soup.

I kept putting off the project until it came time to think about Lent. We always try to simplify our food during Lent and this soup week project was going to net enough to have soup every night during Lent. I don't think I will be able to neatly fit the cooking and blogging into one week because I have to shop strategically. I'd also like to give you the recipes I'm using but I don't have time to type ten at once. I'll get two at a time up on the blog until I'm done.

As I said, all recipes will be doubled which we find yield enough for four meals for our family of four. I'll let the soup cool in the pot and then bag enough for one meal in a gallon-size ziploc bag. The bags will freeze flat and take up much less freezer space. To thaw I pull them out of the freezer in the morning and lay them on the counter. Since they are all meatless they won't spoil this way. About half an hour before dinner I dump the soup into a saucepan and heat for dinner. We'll have homemade sourdough with our soup each night. If the soup is low in protein we may make cheese sandwiches. Our Saturday Lord's Day meal will be something other than soup each week and Sunday supper will be either soup or Saturday leftovers. We also won't have soup on Eric's birthday or the Solemnity of St. Joseph. So, off we go . . .

Tomato Soup from Moosewood Cookbook
1 T olive oil
1 T butter
1 1/2 c. minced onion
3-4 cloves garlic, minced or crushed
1/2 t. salt
1 t. dill
lots of freshly ground black pepper
1 28 oz. can crushed concentrated tomatoes
2 c. water
1 T honey
1 T sour cream
2 fresh tomatoes, diced

Heat olive oil and butter in a kettle. Add onion, garlic, salt, dill and black pepper. Stir over medium heat for about 5 to 8 minutes, or until the onions are translucent.

Add canned tomatoes, water and honey. Cover and simmer over low heat for 20 to 30 minutes.

About five minutes before serving, whisk in sour cream and stir in diced fresh tomatoes. Serve hot topped with yogurt, fresh basil, fresh parsley, scallions or chives.

Gypsy Soup from Moosewood Cookbook
2 medium-sized ripe tomatoes
2 T olive oil
2 c. chopped onion
3 medium cloves garlic, crushed
1 stalk celery, minced
2 c. peeled, diced sweet potato
1 t. salt
2 t. milk paprika
1 t. turmeric
1 t. basil
dash of cinnamon
dash of cayenne
1 bay leaf
3 c. water
1 medium bell pepper, diced
1 1/2 cups cooked chickpeas

Scald and peel the tomatoes. Squeeze out the juice and seeds and chop the remaining pulp.

Heat the olive oil in a kettle. Add onion, garlic, celery, and sweet potato, and saute over medium heat for about 5 minutes. Add salt and saute 5 minutes more. Add seasonings and water, cover, and simmer for about 15 minutes.

Add tomato pulp, bell pepper, and chickpeas. Cover and simmer for about 10 more minutes, or until all the vegetables are as tender as you like them. Taste to adjust seasonings and serve.

(Incidentally, if you are not familiar with the Moosewood Cookbook, it's really fantastic. It was one of the first cookbooks I'd ever used and it taught me a lot about food. Many of my recipes come from this book or one of its spinoffs.)

Price book

2008-01-30T21:21:00.000-05:00

I think I've mentioned before my love for the Tightwad Gazette. Eric found this for me at a used book store and we leave it around pretty much all the time for inspiration and encouragement. I love that this book doesn't really tell you that you have to live a certain way. Rather, she encourages you to set a goal and look for ways to reduce spending so you can increase your savings to reach that goal. For most people it is easier to save more than to earn more. She further says that the most important things you can do are the little things that happen every day. She reasons, correctly, I think, that you seldom have an opportunity to save $100 but every day you have many opportunities to save a few pennies. And those pennies add up. Developing the habit of saving money in small ways also trains you in frugality so that when the bigger opportunities to save come up you don't feel like you are missing out when you choose a much less expensive option.

I doubt that Amy Dacyczyn invented the price book concept, but it is a centerpiece of her lifestyle and one that I recently adopted. It's simple, really. Make a chart of all the food you buy and all the stores you could reasonably shop at. Then record prices. I used to think that I just "knew" where things were the cheapest. When I made my pricebook I found that my instincts were correct in some cases and not in others. When a friend recently introduced me to her neighborhood food co-op I was able to take the price list and quickly find the things on it that were a better deal than what I was currently paying. I don't happen to shop any place that has sales but if you use regular supermarkets you can note the dates of good sales on the price book. You might notice that peanut butter is on sale every six weeks so you buy a six-week supply then. You might notice that butter bottoms out twice a year and decide to stock the freezer.

Sometimes driving around to a bunch of different stores each week can negate any financial savings. I get my food from seven different places. Three are food co-ops where we place monthly orders. Two of those are in my neighborhood and are a great way to see my friends. The third is in a good friend's neighborhood and its a great excuse to see her. The other four places are stores. I use Trader Joe's for regular shopping. I use an Asian market for produce when I'm buying enough produce to make the extra trip worth it. I use Safeway when I need white vinegar, chocolate chips, or ice cream. That's the store in our neighborhood so it gets hit up when we run out of something last minute. I also go on occasion to The Glut (motto: still cheap, still funky). That used to be my main store but I've found almost everything there for better prices. I'm a little sad about that, actually, because I always liked shopping there and wondering if they could tell how conservative I was just by looking at me. They have the best prices on supplements, so I go there when we're sick or I'm pregnant.

The planner

2008-01-28T16:27:00.000-05:00

I should be reading to Joseph but he's looking at books and singing the Gloria and I sort of don't have the heart to interrupt him. Failing the read-aloud time I should be making him his new fleece "take-a-nap bag" but Margaret is sleeping on my back and I have felt so very aware lately of her fleeting smallness and babyness that I just don't have the heart to desnuggle her and banish her to the bedroom. Besides, that would probably wake her up and Margaret needs all the sleep she can get--so would you if you did what she does while awake.

So, due to the overwhelming demand (though I'm pretty sure Robyn doesn't actually care about my planner per se but just doesn't want me to get into another anti-blog funk) I'm going to write about my planner.

For those of you who just can't get enough of this sort of thing, there was a recent Simply Lovely Fair devoted to the topic of planning. I was actually pretty excited about that blog fair but when I started to skim the entries I realized that these moms are in a different universe with regard to planning. At the time of that blog fair I did not even have a planner because I knew, on some level, that a planner would ask me, by its mere presence, to actually be responsible. And once I had a planner I'd have to stop shopping for planners and where's the fun in that? But don't feel bad if you just love to plan and love even more to read about other people and their plan-making because, really, enough people love it to inspire this blog fair.

I used to be a digital planner person. I had a nifty iPaq that did lots of things I'd never heard of and it was really fun and got me through a lot of boring meetings back in my going-to-meeting days. When my husband took over the job requiring meeting attendance I gave him the iPaq and I think I did buy myself a little paper calendar then but it didn't get used very faithfully. My life really isn't all that complicated. Then Eric read Getting Things Done by David Allan last summer and we both were able to more or less adopt a new system for getting things done and staying organized. Though I've never really implemented the system as fully as I'd like, I think I've tried it enough to know that it works for me. There are planner sites where you can buy your own planner forms based on David Allan's book but, really, my life isn't all that complicated. Someday I may write "David Allan for Moms" where I note things like, "A mom's inbox needs to be the size of a laundry basket," and other such tips.

Anyway . . . after much more debate than the matter deserved I settled on a Catholic Woman's Daily Planner. I like supporting a fellow home-schooling mom and I like the format of this planner. A two-page spread for each week with room for notes each day and a two-page spread for each month. I really wanted my calendar to include feast days and daily Mass readings and I briefly considered doing it all myself on the computer but I'm not very good at that sort of thing and I finally decided to let someone do it for me. This planner has some fun extras like the Holy Father's prayer intentions, nice quotes from the Church Fathers, liturgical information, common prayers. But it doesn't have a lot of typical planner stuff that I don't need like a map of timezones and a list of birthstones. I sprang for the menu planning pages because I'd been making my own on little scraps of paper anyway and I thought having a year's worth of menu plans in one spot would be an interesting study. Each page has a tear-off column for the grocery list--a feature I also needed.

I got a hole-punched version of the planner because I wanted to incorporate the inbox/list-making approach in David Allan's book but I wanted it to be infinitely flexible and customizable. This task proved difficult. It is really hard to find three-ring notebooks to fit 5.5 x 8.5 paper. I had a homemade recipe book this size and the recipes never got used so I dumped them and refilled the book. I got some gridded paper from the Day Timer company and some post-it index tabs to place on the pages. I also included a zip pouch to hold extra tabs, the Sacred Planner Pen, and a calculator when I get around to buying one.

How do I use it? The monthly calendar pages are used for month-at-a-glance questions, "What day of the week is Christmas?" and also to record when something last happened. For example I have noted in January when I last went to confession and when we changed the hallway lightbulbs (that is a separate, long story).

The weekly pages are used to record appointments. Anything that happens less often than every day qualifies as an appointment for me. I don't know why it is that in college, when I had a very busy life, I could keep track of everything in my head and now I can't. I really don't want to believe that being a mom makes one stupider but sometimes I start to wonder . . . In the notes section for each day I write any task that has to be done that day but not at any particular time.

I menu plan for a week at at time, make a shopping list as I go, go shopping and then see how much longer than a week I can make everything last. It's a lot of fun. I'm looking at going at least four days over this time around which should get us to Ash Wednesday.

My tabs are for my various lists and records. Right now I have the following sections:
Projects: where I have a list of, well, projects. Basically anything that requires more than one step to complete.
Next Actions: where I list the next step--and only the next step--for every project on my list.
Computer: anything I want to write about, research, order online.
Letters: people I need or want to write to.
Shopping: anything that needs to be bought other than groceries (when I run out of a staple grocery item it gets written down immediately on the next shopping list.
CHUC: one of my food co-ops.
Quail Cove: another food co-op.
Budget: this is a tool for encouragement where I record any decision or new find that saves money.
NFP: the extensive CCL chart was a bit much for our needs these days so I just make basic notes here to keep an eye on my "cycles."

Each of these sections is currently only a two-page spread so the tabs might seem excessive but it makes it all much more user-friendly. I can add or delete sections any time I want. This planner only works for me if is open in my new permanent planner station at all times. Every time a plan is made it gets written down. Every time I think of something that needs attention I write it down. I need to keep things out of my head and get them down on paper. Then I can look at that paper as much as I need to in order to make it all happen--but I don't need to keep reminding myself to order brown sugar this month.

Cure for the common cold

2008-01-27T14:32:00.000-05:00

Thyme, sage, and fresh ginger.

If this gives you an excuse to use your beautiful new teapot, so much the better.

Kitchen Makeover

2008-01-26T21:03:00.000-05:00

I don't know how many square feet our apartment is, but not very many. Under a thousand door-to-door and much less if you count actual, usable living space (MUCH less if you don't count the hallway, but I'm warming up to the idea of the bowling alley being useful). This place, really, is about the same size as our old place but the design is completely different. I'm finding that the clutter gets to me more here but also that there is much more room for creativity in how I deal with it all. I've never lived in a big house, so I can't support this claim, but it does seem that living small does lend itself to more creativity and innovation.

We are almost certainly moving out of here in five months so it would be tempting for me to think in temporary terms about all the little things I love and hate about this place. But I actually enjoy figuring out the best way to live in this space and I think it's probably good practice for the next stop on our journey. Anyway, after living in this apartment for a year I will never again be able to say, "There's just no other way to arrange things." There is always another way. There is always space to be found. I can't believe how much space I've found in this tiny place and how many times a small change has had huge results. If we owned this apartment and had money to put in to it, there are many other things we could do to improve our situation. As it is, I thought I'd share the small discoveries I've made in my kitchen.

The kitchen is my favorite part of this place. It is purely accident that this apartment came with a beautiful kitchen. This was the only ground-floor apartment with hard floors in our price range. We would have moved in pretty much regardless of the kitchen. But--it is beautiful. This is a 100-year old building and the apartment was very shoddily renovated about three years ago. The kitchen doesn't stand up to close scrutiny, but it does look nice. I would absolutely pay for granite counter tops in the future, if we could afford it. They are wonderful and functional. Can't say the same for stainless steel, but a black refrigerator would be just as nice. What this kitchen lacks in space it makes up for in design. Everything is at hand and I can see the rest of the living space while I work. I reorganized all the cabinets during our recent total closet overhaul and this week tackled the countertops.

So, left to right, first I made a baking center. I thought "centers" were only for large kitchens, but it works in this one, too. This counter is used for kneading dough and staging ingredients for supper and, lately, drying dishes. But it formerly housed a wine rack and a blender. I pulled the stand mixer out of its corner, making it much easier to use, re-hung my measuring cups--I love the look of them on the wall--and got myself a lot more counter space. The other regular residents of this counter are the bread in the bag, the sourdough starter in the jar, and our coffee equipment. I need to get a collapsible dish rack for this counter soon because the dishwasher below it is on an extended vacation . . . The wine rack has been moved to the top of the refrigerator which is a much better place. I think it's sort of in poor taste to have a wine rack on such prominent display.

Next, I cleverly got a picture of my Kitchen Madonna, Our Lady of Lourdes, without showing you the sinkful of dirty dishes below it. Eric got me this image for some May occasion (there are three in this house) a few years ago. I wanted something to help me do the dishes. He wanted to remind me that St. Bernadette was just a simple girl out doing her duty to her family (collecting firewood) when Our Lady appeared to her. I love that. We also spent part of our honeymoon in Lourdes. The top of the image is not dark--we just have a very low cabinet overhang. The one thing I would wish for my kitchen is a window in this spot--but this icon almost makes up for it.

This corner did not, at first, seem useful. But it's much easier to stand here and chop vegetables than it looks and I can get to the sink with one hand and the stove with the other. The blender does not get used daily in the winter so it got buried in that deep corner. The basket of root veggies and canister of utensils were on the far side of the stove but got moved over here. I finally hung my cutting board and trivet--to nice effect, I think. I love that blue and green trivet but it never gets used and this is the first time I've ever nicely hung it. It does not at all match the kitchen but it makes me happy and someday I might have a kitchen where it does match. This corner is more crowded than it was but the space wasn't being used, anyway, so it doesn't matter.

Finally, the impetus for all this reorganization was my desire to have a permanent planner station. I finally got myself a planner when I realized that I was putting it off so that I could then put off everything else in my life. But it is completely useless to me if it is not at hand pretty much every second. I can do a separate post on the planner itself if any readers of this blog are into that sort of thing--just speak up . . . This counter has been the root veggie storage/general dumping ground. I decided not to entirely fight that. I left Eric's mail sorter on the counter so that papers for him can still be stuffed in there. They stay more or less neat and he can go through them at his leisure. Other than my planner I have a few odds and ends that I like to have nearby: chapstick, lotion, vitamins. I got out St. Josemaria weeks ago and since this new setup I'm remembering to pick it up several times each day to read a point for meditation. Other than that the open space on the counter is fair game for dumping with the understanding, in my mind at least, that an item is only there until the next time I walk by on my way to the bedrooms and bathroom. So far, so good.

Kale

2008-01-25T20:53:00.000-05:00

I was reflecting recently on the evolution of my food tastes and cooking skills. The occasion was a Saturday evening meal with a menu of Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic, Sauteed Broccoli with Garlic and Garlic-Roasted Red Potatoes. I remembered, during that meal, the time when Robyn, newly married and hosting her single friends for burritos asked me to peel the garlic for the guacamole. I had no idea what to do with the cloves of garlic in front of me. I had always thought that garlic was a powder.

The first time Eric and I ever cooked together was in my apartment during my DC internship. He surveyed my meager ingredient offerings and said, "Okay. Where's your olive oil?" I trudged around to the other intern apartments asking skeptically for olive oil. I'd never really heard of that, either.

The first meal I cooked for Eric by myself was an unqualified disaster. I served black beans and rice. I think I prepared some rice-in-a-bag and heated up a can of beans. I made a salad of iceberg lettuce with tomatoes and cucumbers. I think I even had ranch dressing. I can't believe he married me.

I've come a long, long way since then. They year we were engaged I bought myself a cookbook and made almost everything in it for Eric and his roommates. That, to my mind, is the best way to learn how to cook. I learned one cook's methods really well and it left me with the freedom to improvise. I use cookbooks maybe a third of the time, now, and I only follow recipes exactly when making something for the first time. Eric is an excellent cook but he only exercises his abilities on holidays when he has usually had major menu input as well. We have had very few real fights but the first was over kitchen supremacy right at the point when my abilities started to surpass his. I've been in charge of the kitchen ever since.

We are not vegetarians, but most of my family think we are. They tend to latch on to ideas very securely so when I casually mentioned, during our first year of marriage, that we were eating mostly vegetarian (code for"we can't afford meat right now) we became committed meat-haters in their minds. Plus everything we serve is foreign: all the courses in one dish? Flavor? Soup? Garlic? Olive oil? In fact we are die-hard carnivores but we are very picky about the quality and source of our animal products and we don't often have the chance to seize on meat-buying opportunities.

I've been trying out new recipes the last couple weeks and making a real effort to make things interesting before we dive into our All Soup Lent (about which, more later). Last night I made the Spinach-Rice Casserole from Moosewood except that we had some kale on hand so I substituted kale for half the spinach. It was really, really good. My husband especially loved the kale.

Now, here is something I do not understand. What is the deal with kale? I feel like kale is the trendy food right now that everyone has to love even though it's gross. What is likable about a tough, chewy, curly green leaf? I know it's the healthiest food on the planet so I'm not opposed to including it in our diet, particularly when it's buried under a thick coating of rice, eggs, milk, feta cheese and red pepper but why do I have to like it? I see "Eat More Kale" bumper stickers whenever I shop at our food co-op. Friends react in horror when I offer them the kale out of our farm share. What am I missing? Am I buying the wrong vegetable? Am I cooking it incorrectly? I have never known anyone to passionately love any other green vegetable. Someone educate me before I make another casserole with all spinach.

Speaking of home loveliness

2008-01-17T14:52:00.001-05:00

I have a futon dilemma.

In our old apartment we had two "couches". One was a futon which was housed in the "study" and used as a guest bed (much to the dismay of our guests). As futons go, it's pretty nice, but it's still a futon. The other couch was the "bird couch" which matched the wallpaper in the nursing home it came from. We got a slipcover for it but that made it sort of a wash because the slipcover was not fitted and could not be kept neat. When we moved to this smaller place one couch had to go and the bird couch got the axe.

Neither of us loves that a futon is such a prominent part of our living space. I've had it arranged with a beautiful quilt across the back and cushions on the sides. But it's a futon. It's completely uncomfortable. Only very tall guests can sit on it and have their feet touch the floor. Sitting curled up at one end as you might do on a cozy winter evening with a book is completely out of the question because the seating surface is a sharp downward slope. We have two chairs in the room and those are our first choice for places to sit.

Margaret recently baptized the futon with a full mug of hot coffee so we put it in "bed" mode, stripped the cover and left it to sort of air out, reshape, etc. We were thinking we'd rotate the mattress and replace the cover in a day or two and put the thing back up to "sofa" mode.

The thing is, we don't want to. Bed mode is better in almost every way. It's suddenly comfortable because we can sit on a flat surface and lean against the big cushions. We can sprawl on our stomachs and read at night. The kids have a raised, soft surface for wrestling (nice in a place with hard floors). It's good for Joseph's trunk muscles that he has to sit with no back support and now he can see out our bay windows to our fairly lively street scene--whereas before the high back of the futon blocked his view.

My only concern is that now we not only have a futon in our living room but a bed as well. Is this kind of wierd? Are we contributing to the downfall of civilization and the erosion of manners and hospitality by leaving a bed in our living room? Are we going to have to quickly get the futon into sofa mode whenever a guest arrives? I need help from fellow homemakers, here.

(By the way, the pile in the picture above is Joseph pretending that he is driving an elevator cage a la Allen Say's Tea With Milk).

I do wish my husband would blog more . . .

2008-01-10T20:58:00.000-05:00

But I guess someone has to finish that dissertation.

In case I don't get back here after laundry and dishes, here's a piece from the more thoughtful half.

Reviving a lost art

2008-01-08T22:29:00.000-05:00

I went to the post office yesterday and asked for a roll of stamps. The clerk gave me a funny look and said, "A roll?" I confirmed my order and she ventured into a back room to fetch me a roll of stamps from the closet. "You don't sell many rolls?" I asked. "No," she said, "You know . . . the internet."

People don't send enough mail to make a roll of stamps worth buying any more. So sad.

My first resolution in the area of etiquette is to write more social correspondence. Christmas is a great time to get excited about this idea because we've received lots of gifts and been hosted at lots of houses so I started with thank-you notes. I then went through our backlog of Christmas cards that the post office finally delivered and ventured to write brief notes to people who still didn't have our new address. Then I opened a card from an old friend who has, miraculously, kept me on her Christmas mailing list and saw that she'd had a new baby. Last year I would have thought, "How nice!" This year I wrote her a congratulations note and updated her about our lives.

I'm hoping to move on to real letters next but, honestly, I'm afraid that people will think I'm weird. Maybe I should just be upfront and tell people that I'm trying to revive the lost art of letter-writing. I'm afraid, though, of setting my sights too high. I barely have time to eke out a typed blog entry most days.

Then again, the kids don't seem to clamor for my attention quite so much when I'm sitting at the table with pen and paper as when I'm standing at the desk, staring at a screen. There is just something humanizing about paper. Eric just got his first issue of a newspaper subscription this morning and was reflecting this evening how much nicer it was to start his day with a paper rather than an online news briefing. My father-in-law got the new Amazon electronic book reader for Christmas. It's an impressive little gadget but I just don't see myself giving up the satisfying heft of a good book, the quick flipping back to check a detail or re-read a favorite passage. And what would we do with all the extra square footage in our apartment?

It's funny how much I look forward to the mail each day. Nothing ever really comes. Even our junk mail is so scant that some days we don't even get mail. I remember my mom looking forward to the mail each day, too. Why is it? I think I'm always harboring a completely unreasonable hope that someone will have sent me a letter.

Eric and I began our courtship the day before I moved from Boston to Washington. Prior to that day we had met, in person, only four times. We had exchanged letters weekly for an entire summer and we continued to write to each other--two or three times each week--for four months. We've had the good fortune since then never to have been separated long enough to need to write letters but I so treasure the shoebox of letters I have from him.

Besides the romance of letters, I'm starting to see how using the postal service to correspond is generally more civilizing. So often I write an e-mail and get annoyed when there is not an immediate reply. I know the message has arrived the moment I click "Send." E-mail and telephone bumps into someone's day and demands a quick response. Letters arrive at a set time each day and invite consideration and respect. So why do I feel like I'm really imposing on people if I write a letter? Part of the reason Eric and I began our relationship with letters is that a real, hand-written letter is a gift. We wanted to think enough of the other to take the time to create these gifts on a regular basis.

Well, I'm not going anywhere in particular with this at the moment. I mostly want to get the conversation going, if only with myself, about etiquette. Etiquette (much of which involves written correspondence) is commonly seen as something imposed by the rich or snobby on the poor and/or ignorant. My thesis this year is that etiquette is none of these things but is, in fact, a fundamental part of human relations and is abandoned at our peril. I've been reading Miss Manners' book lately and I'm struck with her notion that most failing marriages need help from someone like her rather than a psychologist. An interesting argument. At the very least, I think we have a responsibility to know the rules before we break them.

We did something crazy

2008-01-05T21:46:00.001-05:00

We stole a Christmas tree off the sidewalk.

Just before we left for our New England Christmas Tour we decided that our own family would have a small Christmas celebration for Epiphany. Last year we made a snap decision that Christmas in our house would be celebrated throughout the twelve days. Watching our easily-overwhelmed two-year old struggle through stacks of gifts was too much for us. We opened a few Christmas morning and continued to open one or two a day thereafter. Even then, we only lasted until New Year's. Our family helped us out this year by staggering parties and gift shipments so that we have received something almost every day of Christmas this year. We've even managed to come up with one gift for each of us. We're not really compulsory gift-givers around here. We've never given the kids anything ourselves because they are inundated by everyone else. Some years Eric and I have gifts for each other and some years we don't. This year it would have been painfully obvious if anyone had been left out but, fortunately, we had ideas. Margaret will be getting her doll. I'm fully prepared to have it tossed aside and forgotten for the next year or so but Eric is more hopeful. Joseph will be getting a violin! We are so excited about this. Joseph has been talking about playing the violin almost every day for months and months. He turns most of his toys into pretend violins. He can identify the violin (and many other instruments) by sound on the radio. I don't think we'll start all of our kids on instruments at age three, but there is so much Joseph can't do. We wanted to get him going with music. Eric has been dithering about it for weeks but today he went out and rented two violins: one for himself and one for Joseph. A teeny, tiny 1/16 size instrument that might still be too big. I hope it goes well.

Anyway, on and on I go about gifts when all I really meant to do was talk about our tree. We didn't think we were going to have a tree this year. Usually we put one up on the 24th and take it down on the 6th and since we were gone more than half that time it didn't really occur to us. Plus, you can't buy trees on January 2. No. You can't buy them. But you can troll the sidewalks looking for nice rejects from all those secular lame-os who ditch their trees early. We were kidding when we suggested this idea to ourselves several weeks ago but yesterday, out for a walk, we spied a nice green little tree out in front of an apartment building. Most of our neighborhood is ditching trees that have been filling cathedral ceiling living rooms since November 14th so they look bad, but this little one was still green. We put it up in a jiffy, filled it with both strings of lights and hung our small collection of ornaments.

I can't tell you how happy this little tree is making me. Sure, we saw trees in our travels, but not as many as we should have and none of them were our tree. My parents always made our tree magical when I was a kid. It went up on Christmas Eve and Santa decorated it in the night so that on Christmas morning the beauty of the tree almost dulled the spectacle of the gift mound underneath.

Part of me hated to miss the tree this year because I wanted to savor that look of astonished awe that only a one-year-old can have upon beholding the family Christmas tree. Margaret, however, is not one for astonished awe (hence the mental preparation for dolly rejection). Joseph is more than making up for it, though. He loves the tree almost as much as I do.

Interior Life

2008-01-04T14:54:00.000-05:00

I'll start here since it's the most important of my New Year projects and the most vague.

I've spent the last year learning about and trying to improve the practical aspects of my vocation. I call the year a complete success not because I am suddenly the world's best wife, mother, and homemaker but because I kept the theme of "vocation" as a consistent background for most of the year. This blog is one of the fruits of that theme as is a marginally more well-ordered home. I have a long way to go in terms of living up to my own homemaking ideals but I think it's depressing to keep at something in such a focused way so I'm moving on and I trust that, as in high school math, some of the lessons of the last year will start to click sometime this summer.

So--interior life. This last year was a mostly practical project: figuring out how to order and accomplish all the little tasks of my life. Great strides were made but now I see myself running up against the monotony of it all. I'm at home with two small children. Someone asked me this Christmas what I do besides take care of my kids. Fighting back snarkiness I replied, "I do a lot of laundry. I cook dinner. I pick up a lot of toys . . ." I also read a lot of picture books, do a lot of dishes, cook breakfast and lunch, and, well, I don't think I have any readers who aren't familiar with my job description so I'll stop there. It's a wonderful, beautiful vocation. I don't have any hangups about it. I don't wish I were working. I don't wish I could earn money from home. I don't wish I'd finished my master's degree. I don't wish I'd waited longer to get married. I have no regrets about the life I am living. In my moments of reason and consolation, when I can step back and look at the big picture I can think wonderful thoughts and look forward to a glorious future full of children, grandchildren, home education, housekeeping routines. The works. I love it. I have no problem with the big picture "this is worth it" stuff.

My trouble is in the moment. It's 5:30. Dinner just got started. Both kids are screaming. I'm having a blood sugar crash. The pile of dirty dishes are preventing me from washing the lettuce leaves. I just remembered that my co-op order was due last night and that Eric needed to eat by 5:45 this evening because of a meeting. That's where I fail. I yell at the kids, think mean thoughts about my husband and completely despair. It all just seems like one damn thing after another.

Earlier in the day I survey the wreckage of the moment and think, "I'll just see if any of my favorite bloggers have posted in the last fifteen minutes." I escape from the craziness instead of embracing it. A confessor said to me recently, "You are acting like a person at a cocktail party who, instead of focusing on the person she is with is constantly looking over her shoulder to see if anyone better has come into the room. Except you are doing it to God. He's here in the midst of it all and you are missing it." (Don't you all wish you had my confessor?)

He was right. In the moment to moment living of my vocation I don't have much of a well from which to draw when the frustration and stress and despair threaten to overwhelm me--and they threaten almost every day! I don't have much of an interior life.

This next year I want to work slowly on developing an interior life. A constant awareness of God's presence. An attitude of gratitude. An acceptance and offering up of suffering. An ongoing dialogue with the Lord because no one better is coming to our cocktail party.

I don't have the year mapped out in its entirety. That approach doesn't work for me. But I have thought through the first few steps.

First, I want to work on cultivating gratitude. My goal is to make seven Acts of Gratitude throughout the day. I don't have a formal, written Act for this purpose. I try to incline my heart towards God and thank him for something specific. I need to connect these Acts to different points in my day and right now I'm working towards: upon waking, before my first sip of coffee, after Margaret goes down for a nap, noon, at teatime, after Margaret falls asleep at night, and before I fall asleep at night. Right now I'm hitting about two of these each day but I'm hoping that as the habit develops in one spot it will help out the other spots. This is my main goal for January.

I also have a few books lined up. The first will be Robert Sokolowski's The God of Faith and Reason. Eric has been privileged to take every class offered by Sokolowski during his time here in Washington and I'm looking forward to sharing in his wisdom. Next I'll read Story of a Soul for the third or fourth time. I never fail to take something new from St. Therese. Eric tentatively suggested Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind but I haven't decided about that, yet. I've also taken Josemaria's The Way off our shelf and I'm experimenting with just leaving it out to pick up whenever I have a minute. We have all three of his collected thoughts in one volume--so that's about 3000 points for meditation. Eric has used this as spiritual reading, but I'd rather have the points season my day throughout the year. We'll see if I can stay faithful to actually picking up the book.

So there is the beginning of my spiritual project for the year. I don't know what success will look like. Ideally, I'll be a saint but, more practically, I will be more aware of each little thing in my day and try to more consciously do it all for the love of Jesus. But, really, if I'm still thinking about interior life ten months from now, I will count the year a success.

Fresh starts, goals, resolutions . . .

2008-01-03T11:56:00.000-05:00

I have a hard time with the resolutions, fresh starts, and decluttering bonanzas that start on January 1. I still want to be in Christmas mode. Ist't it still Christmas? That's a funny question, actually. We had a good friend here this morning, a recent convert, who was asking us to explain Christmas. There is the Feast of the Nativity, of course, on December 25. Then every day until January 1 (the Feast of Mary, Mother of God) is a solemnity within the Octave of Christmas--so every day is Christmas, liturgically. But then from Mary, Mother of God to Epiphany we're still in the "Twelve Days" of Christmas and some cultures don't even celebrate Christmas until January 6th, anyway. Epiphany is further complicated by the American bishops transferring it to a Sunday so that we celebrate it anywhere from January 2-8. Confused, yet? And THEN it's still the Christmas season until the Baptism of the Lord which is the Sunday after Epiphany, except when we skip that feast because Epiphany is celebrated after January 6. This time of year is when all the liturgical junkies get their kicks.

I would really rather think about New Year's with the start of Ordinary Time. I feel like we're still waiting for Christmas around here. It was very lovely to see our families this year but we weren't able to do really any of the things that have come to signify Christmas for us. We're planning a small Epiphany celebration and thinking about prospects for long term traditions if we end up moving to Texas or something.

But 2008 arrived despite my grumblings about Christmas in our culture and I have given some thought to goals and resolutions and such. I hope to write at a bit more length on each of these very soon but here is my summary, just to get myself started.

Each year I take a word or phrase as a theme for the year to help organize my prayer, spiritual reading and journaling/blogging. Last year was "vocation" and I'm quite happy with the "results." This year my theme is "interior life." More later--probably more than you care to hear, but this blog is about me, after all.

In addition I've decided to identify some projects to work on myself and inflict on my family. I don't really want to call these goals or resolutions because I can't identify any measurable end result. These are things I want to work on, learn about, and try to improve. Warning: they sound shallow at first but I'll defend them later. Three projects: etiquette, personal style and appearance, beauty in the home.

Let the gifting begin . . .

2007-12-21T20:36:00.001-05:00

The gifting has already begun, in fact. We try to wait until Christmas before giving anything ourselves, but a few have bestowed lovely offerings on us and our children already and I do think it polite to open a gift when the giver is present. My dad, who likes to play up the scrooge thing but is a very generous giver, doesn't believe in surprises and shipped us a couple of boxes from Amazon as well. Our kids get so overwhelmed by all the gift opening that I opened the Amazon packages early, removed an item or two that would be meaningful to unwrap and shelved the rest of the items for a rainy day. I even shelved my own gift in anticipation of our long car trip tomorrow.

Speaking of which, I really shouldn't be blogging this evening because we're leaving in the morning for a trip that will encompass twelve days, five abodes, and about thirty-five of our closest relatives and friends. All this visiting during this, our leanest year yet, stretched my gift-giving muscles a bit. I wish I could say that I took a handmade pledge and that I just love handcrafting gifts for people, but I really don't. I'm not crafty and I get frustrated very easily. But, I think I'll call this year a success in that department, anyway, and if the recipients are duly pleased, I may ramp up my efforts next year with some advanced planning.

My gourmet spice mixes were easy enough to mix once I got my bulk order in from the co-op. Robyn was here this week and managed to show even me how to make nice looking labels for the tops of the canning jars. She came well-armed with tools and supplies and I think the results are great. Even Eric was pleased. Each of nine family members will receive four mixes.

Other than those nine family members our gift list is pretty short but I did manage to get together a hefty box of cookies and fudge for a dear friend--a priest whose parishoners really should take better care of him.

Our immediate family has decided to have our own small celebration for Epiphany and exchange gifts then. This saves a good deal of time in wrapping things for Eric and Margaret tonight. I also don't feel as guilty about not even having a gift for Joseph, yet. And I'll have time to finish Margaret's doll.

This is the project that might really sell me on handcrafts. I more or less made up this pattern, the hair, and the stuffing material. I've never made a doll (or anything else) before, but I love how this has turned out. Here she sits, posing with the piece of fabric that will one day turn into a dress for her. The hair is not sewn down and Joseph is quite disturbed at the lack of face, but I think I'll have plenty of time to finish it between the end of our trip and Epiphany and I think the kids will benefit from having their gifts spread out a bit. It is really hard to make this lovable little thing, though, and not be able to bestow it immediately on my lovable little daughter.

I doubt that I'll blog before the New Year. A blessed Advent and Merry Christmas to you all!

I better have something to blog about today

2007-12-17T10:07:00.000-05:00

because tomorrow the founder and one-time president of the Lyndon Institute branch of the Future Homemakers of America is coming to stay at my house for a few days. Just because she is bringing her son (nickname: "Havoc") is no excuse to shirk. I'm pretty sure Margaret can give him a run for his money. Joseph's favorite question these days (while laughing hysterically), "Mommy, is Margie wreaking havoc again?"

Better get to work.

Let the bragging begin . . .

2007-12-14T20:51:00.000-05:00

I have doubts that anyone is really that interested in my closets, especially since I don't have a camera to illustrate the amazing transformation our apartment has undergone in the last two days. But I know from many years of living with myself that one of these days I will contemplate some afternoon project--writing a full-length novel, for example--and doubt my ability to be that productive. So this trumpeting of accomplishments is really for my own future memory-jogging.

Yesterday I reorganized all my kitchen cabinets and "found" an entire shelf. I filled this with all the canned goods from the "pantry" closet near the front door. Coincidentally, we also discovered that that kitchen cabinet was falling off the wall. Eric called our landlord who implied that maybe it was our fault that the cupboard was falling down because we were, um, storing food in it. He also suggested that maybe we could just consult with friends and fix it ourselves. Why are we renting, again? Eric did fix it himself, actually.

Today I completely emptied everything else from the front closet, found new spots for it all, cleaned that closet and refilled it with a double stroller, a guitar, a yoga mat, an ironing board, and a basket of winter accessories, all of which were cluttering our main living space. Then I went to the laundry closet, pulled everything out of it, pulled out the bookcase serving as shelving in there, cleaned out the closet, put the pantry shelves in the empty closet, refilled the closet (it holds more, now) and dragged the empty bookcase down to Joseph's room. I put the empty bookcase in an under-utilized corner and filled it with fiction books from the other rooms of the house. I used the new empty spots that formerly held works of fiction to shelve all the double-stacked books in the living room. Then I reorganized all of Joseph's toys.

Basically I found an entire closet and an entire bookshelf today and put them to excellent use. And I did all this between 2:00 and 6:00 and had a 14-month old on my back almost the entire time.

I have discovered an important thing about myself. Rest is not all that restorative for me. So often I finish some tiny project, like changing a diaper, and think, "Now I deserve a break!" I usually read a blog or write an e-mail. Sometimes I look at a book or magazine. But I never feel rested after my "break." My breaks do not refresh me; they do not renew my energy for the further tasks at hand. Work refreshes me. I conceived of this huge project just a couple of nights ago. Several minor problems that had been lurking on the periphery of my brain suddenly coalesced into a complete solution. Eric was skeptical and he had every right to be. Usually I approach projects like this one step at a time. But chipping away at closet reorganization one step at at time would have created so much sustained chaos that I would have gone crazy and given up and felt depressed. Instead I just worked. I never stopped moving this afternoon. I feel tired, to be sure, but I haven't felt this good about life in months.

I have some idea of trying to adapt this new insight to smaller things. After all, I only have so many closets. Sometimes I don't need a break, I just need an accomplishment. A mother's life is full of repetition and maintenance. There is joy to be found there, and much meat for reflection, but it can get wearying and sometimes I need a little shot in the arm of accomplishment. I'm going to try looking at my running to-do list from now on when I need a "break" because there is usually something there that can be finished in five minutes or less and that's what I really need most of the time.

Lest you think . .

2007-12-14T15:17:00.000-05:00

That I went on retreat permanently. I am back. It was wonderful. The last night of my retreat I had a vision. A vision for a total apartment closet-reorganization project. This was the sort of project that promised so many dramatic improvements to our living situation that I had to act on it immediately. So I've been busy doing that and our camera is broken so I have no motivation to blog because I can't even show you the closet projects. I will take up bragging, I mean writing, again soon.

Mixed blessings . . .

2007-12-03T21:29:00.000-05:00

I was on my way out this evening. Alone. My first evening out with no kids in 14 months. Margaret was asleep and Eric has built up a strong track record the last couple of weeks getting her back to sleep peacefully at that 10:00 waking. I was about five minutes from my destination when the cell phone rang. Margaret was awake and inconsolable. I came back home. Part of me, really, wanted to cry. I was headed to a fantastic book group with a great group of Catholic women and we were planning to discuss one of my absolute favorite books, Brideshead Revisited. At least the promise of the book group gave me a good excuse to read this for the third time. But the other part of me felt good coming back home and snuggling in with my traumatized daughter. I don't know quite why she is so very attached to me but she is. I'm her mother and she wants her mother and I really adore this little girl. I'm even starting to feel sad at how fast she's growing up. There won't be too many more snuggly nights in the grand scheme of things.

We've had quite a rough start to Advent. I haven't written in a few days because I couldn't figure out what and how to write. Sorry to be vague. Please pray for our family and our parish. In the meantime, I'm going on retreat!

Before I had kids I was very blessed to be able to make an annual retreat. I was able to go twice to a house of cloistered nuns in the city. It was completely wonderful and I really miss those sisters. The beauty of a two or three day individual retreat is the descent into silence. You arrive at this house of silence and its all very novel and enchanting. Maybe the whole first day is like this. Then the second day arrives and you are still alone and it is still silent (these particular sisters did pray in the chapel seven times a day and had Mass, but still). Sometime late in that second day you crash and I think I think I might have cried once or twice at that point. Then you get over it and embrace the silence and then the blessings start to flow. Then the retreat ends and you need to go back to the noisy world outside. But that occasional descent into silence is so valuable.

That sort of retreat is impossible for most parents. I certainly can't leave Margaret and I'm not sure I want to leave Joseph for three days. I make a Holy Hour every week but it's all too short. This year I felt like I really needed something approximating a retreat. Eric and I talked about it and I asked for ideas at 4Real and someone suggested to me a novena of Holy Hours.

A novena, for my non-Catholic readers, is nine days of prayer for a particular intention or to cultivate a particular devotion. The original novena was the nine days prayer of the Apostles between Ascension and Pentecost. You can find a novena for almost any saint, now, and traditionally, a novena is said for the nine days preceding the feast day of the saint you are honoring. Many families are saying a novena now to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception (feast day this Saturday). I will be making my novena of holy hours for Our Lady of Guadalupe. Mary, under this title, has been very good to our family. Every time we have had a grave request we have said a 54 Day Novena (which is just six novenas in a row) to Our Lady of Guadalupe. We intended to start this 27 days before the feast for Eric's job hunt but, ironically, he was away at interviews and we forgot. In place of that we are praying the "novena" to St. Andrew until Christmas fifteen times a day. I will follow the custom of the other 4Real bloggers and put the prayer in my sidebar. It is quite beautiful and makes for a lovely Advent devotion even if you don't have a special petition on your heart.

Anyway, Our Lady of Guadalupe has given us a couple of children and a couple of good jobs so far, so I wanted to honor her in my retreat. The Madonna House near our parish is allowing me to use their chapel for one hour each evening starting tomorrow for an hour of silence and prayer. It is my hope that doing this nightly for nine nights will help me approach that descent into silence that I so miss. I don't have a particular plan for the time. I will take my journal, as usual, to help focus my prayer and I am really looking forward to it.

I wanted to do something for all the other 23 hours of my day to remind me that I am "on retreat." Fasting came to mind immediately but that isn't really a workable option. I would just be punishing my family. I need to eat about six times a day just to function (I am still providing almost all the nourishment for a certain hungry little girl). I've decided to do something much more difficult: fast from the computer. I still need to use my e-mail for a bit of household business, but no blogs, no forums. I think this sort of a fast will really promote the peaceful, reflective, family-centered atmosphere I'm trying to create this Advent.

So, remember me in your prayers these nine days. I certainly intend to offer some prayer time for my friends, those I know in person, and those who have been a source of encouragement to me in the online community.

A blessed Advent to you all!

Homemade Gifts for the Not-so-crafty

2007-11-29T21:49:00.000-05:00

There was a conversation over at 4Real today about gift-giving to large families. It seems I have it pretty easy in my family. Most years we don't even see very many folks and Eric's side of the family includes several people who every year claim they are "going very simple" this time around. That never really turns out to be the case especially when it comes to our children who are the only little ones for the time being. In any case, I do see it as permission to keep things simple ourselves which this year is much appreciated.

It is very challenging to find gifts to purchase that are both inexpensive and meaningful. Unless, as is the case with my husband, you are a lover of used books or other second-hand goods. Giving homemade gifts seems like the best route. Homemade gifts show the giver that you appreciate them enough to invest in a thoughtful gift but they do not require a lot of expense (usually) and can help foster a simpler attitude towards Christmas gift-giving. I am not at all crafty and I am wary of giving gifts that ask to be displayed in someone's home. I was waffling on the idea of food gifts until I got a Harry and David catalog in the mail. There are whole industries devoted to food gifts: I guess people like them. I'm a pretty good baker, but baked goods are abundant this time of year. In my search for something original, simple, elegant and healthier-than-average I hit on the idea of "gourmet" spice mixes. I've pulled them from the pages of The Grassfed Gourmet by Shannon Hayes, which is an excellent cookbook. Before I received it as a gift last Christmas our family thought we just didn't like grassfed meats. Every recipe in this book is delightful and I've gotten profuse compliments every time I've served food prepared with these rubs. There are about a dozen spice rub recipes in the book. These four were chosen for variety and because they are a good mix of traditional and adventurous. I'm planning to make enough for about 12 half-cup gifts. I'm able to buy bulk spices at a good price and, before packaging, these will come in at $3.00 per set of four mixes.

Barbecue Spice Rub (pork, beef, chicken)
1/2 c. chili powder
3 T ground black pepper
4 T sugar
3 T coarse salt
2 T paprika

Cumin-Cinnamon Rub (our favorite on beef steaks)
1 1/2 T chili powder
1 1/2 T ground cumin
1 T ground coriander
1 1/2 T coarse salt
1 t. sugar
1 t. ground pepper
1 1/2 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. cayenne

Garlic-Herb Rub (pork, lamb,veal, venison, goat, beef)
1 T dried thyme
1 T dried rosemary
2 T dried oregano
1 t. ground fennel
2 t. garlic powder
1 1/2 T coarse salt
2 t. ground pepper

Moroccan Spice Rub (pork, lamb)
2 T ground nutmeg
1 T coarse salt
1 T ground ginger
2 t. ground pepper
2 t. ground mace
1 t. ground cinnamon
2 t. ground allspice

Happy gift-giving all!

My series on making my house fair is at an end, I'm afraid. My sister is coming into town tomorrow for some Christmas shopping (ironic given that I don't have any to do!). It's been a good, motivating week, and I'm looking forward to acquiring some much-needed desk organization materials on Saturday so I can get to the bottom of The Basket.

Prove me right!

2007-11-29T13:01:00.000-05:00

I broke my own blog-reading rules today and followed a link that I knew would be distracting over at Simcha's blog.

This organization, Free Rice is running a vocabulary game that allows the player to donate rice for every correctly answered question. The rice is donated through the UN World Food Program. Normally, I wouldn't be wild about supporting anything that is filtered through the UN and you may feel the same and, therefore, don't want to play this game.

If you're still with me . . . this site intrigues me for a few reasons. First, Simcha claims that they tried to set up as a non-profit and found the process too cumbersome so they set up this for-profit but they don't keep any of their earnings. I think that's ingenious. They've created a fun game that is also educational and is designed to only really work if a human plays it. They've built in levels to keep us motivated to play. I love for-profit thinking!

I was irked to read in the FAQs, however, a subtle implication that homemakers would need lower-level vocabulary words (maybe I'm just paranoid). Anyway, I have long had a theory that homemakers, particularly homeschooling, blogging homemakers are of above-average intelligence. So, if you aren't adverse to supporting the UN, play the game for a few minutes and let me know what your highest level is. I'm not ashamed to say that after donating about 600 grains of rice I had only gotten to level 44. Simcha says she's gotten to 48 which Free Rice says is about the highest most people get (the absolute highest is 50).

Making my house fair: Day Three

2007-11-28T21:16:00.000-05:00

I'm really on a roll. This is great. This was the whole point of my blog in the first place--to motivate me in my vocation. I'm glad that I've finally hit on a theme that is both specific enough to focus me and general enough to allow for creativity. (Thanks, Robyn!)

I cleaned off the "dresser". This piece of furniture is a wooden filing cabinet we picked up at a yard sale just before we moved. It was a smart buy in that we needed the extra storage but not so smart in that we didn't have our new apartment settled and space here is a bit tight. It's not sturdy enough to hold files but it does serve us well. The top drawer is my collection of kitchen linens--a collection I wish were much larger but my tastes run on the expensive side in that department. The middle drawer is for bulk spice storage and the bottom drawer is one of those "miscellaneous" areas that could probably be cleaned out and put to better use. I want the top to be an uncluttered display area but things always get dumped there. I'm not entirely happy with it but the extra clutter, at least, is gone. I have always meant to make a cover for my sewing machine. If I ever get some of my projects completed I could put it in a cabinet with my other sewing stuff. The fruit bowl is our table centerpiece but is always getting moved. The little statue which may not be visible in the picture is a reproduction of my favorite statue from the National Shrine here in DC--the Flight Into Egypt. The picture above is us greeting Pope John Paul II about a week after our wedding. It got lots of comments when we worked in a dorm full of Evangelical college students.

The desk is also clear but the debris is not yet sorted. The problem remains of where to put everything. I gave it some thought and did some web-surfing today and I think I'm going to purchase an open file crate and two baskets. The file crate will go next to the printer and the baskets on the shelf below. The baskets are for storing stationery and other desk supplies which, amazingly, my children have no interest in pulling down--at least not yet. I may write more someday about the file system once I make sure that it actually works!

I have a can of stain for this desk. I hate the light-colored unfinished wood and the dorm-room look of it all but this is what we could do, for now. We recently moved the computer to standing height to discourage us both from lingering too long. It has mostly worked. In any case, I now nurse Margaret with a book instead of in front of the computer. The books on the top two shelves are nothing in particular--just what fits. Our book sorting project is still a work in progress.

I also managed to get the kitchen entirely clean this evening.

Tomorrow:
the top of my dresser--another favorite dump site
the bookshelves--not entirely resorting them but removing things that aren't books and thinning out a few double-stacked sections.

Making my house fair: Day Two

2007-11-27T22:02:00.001-05:00

I don't want to say this day wasn't a success just because I didn't exactly accomplish my goals. I admit that I walked up to my desk a few times today and had absolutely no idea how to begin. It is still a wreck and I thought about taking a before picture but our camera is dead, which fact became yet another reason to avoid clearing my desk. But, really, I know what I need to do. Everything needs to be swept into my my "inbox." I've done it before with the thought to blog about my amazing organizational system. That's why I have a picture of it. But that blog post never appeared because I still haven't gotten to the bottom of that basket filling event and my organizational system is looking less amazing as a result. The method involves taking items one at a time from the basket and acting on it decisively. Trouble is, most of the things in that basket have no place or their place is within easy reach of a certain one-year old so they all end up back on my desk anyway. I'll keep at it tomorrow.

My day, however, was not a failure. I did clean out the kitchen freezer to great effect. My bulk soup project is going to have to wait until we eat some of the stuff currently taking up room in our freezers. I did create a lot more room in this smaller freezer but what our freezer has in size it makes up for in poor design. The newly-created elbow room for my ice cream is only serving to keep the items from falling out every time I open the door.

I also did a lot of work on Christmas presents. For a variety of reasons I wanted to go all-homemade this year. The obvious way for me to accomplish that is by giving food since I'm not really crafty. I settled, finally, on "gourmet" spice rub blends since my co-op has a great deal on bulk spices. I'm giving everyone a half cup or so of four different rubs for a total cost of about 3.50 per recipient--before packaging. Which leads me to a question for my faithful, creative readers. How to package these? I want the packaging to be reasonably airtight and label-able. I don't mind giving reusable containers and making that sort of part of the gift and I'm thinking of these jars. (Which, incidentally, I'm buying for my own spices the minute we have a place to nicely store such things). How would you label these? Any better ideas for packaging?

Not a bad day considering we had a breakfast guest, we were out for the morning through lunch and Margaret clung to me desperately all afternoon before taking an hour to fall asleep this evening. And neither kid napped.

So, tomorrow:

The desk. Really.
The top of "the dresser" in our living room. We don't know what to call this piece of furniture but it's top surface is the perfect dumping height.

Making my house fair: Day One

2007-11-26T22:09:00.000-05:00

I actually did it. Maybe I am a goal-oriented worker.

By dinnertime all the laundry was washed, folded and put away. And it was a lot of laundry. I was counting on a good two hours this evening to get the freezers organized and all the other evening chores done. I forgot, of course, that Eric switched his weekly Holy Hour to Monday night from 6-7. I was trying out a new recipe this evening and it took longer than usual. The kids had tandem meltdowns at 6:15 and I decided to put Margaret to bed since she's usually ready by 6:30 anyway. At 6:45 I took up dinner once again. At 7:00 Margaret woke up--very unusual for her--and she stayed up until she heard her Daddy come home half an hour later. She adores her father lately, so bedtime was over. We didn't finish eating until well after 8:00 and I took Margaret back to bed. She nursed for awhile and then threw up all over me. A few times. Also very unusual. By 9:00 she was back asleep and, undeterred, I decided to tackle the chest freezer despite being ninety minutes behind schedule. Tasks never take as long as I think they will (unless that task is preparing a meal).

I love having this freezer. It saves time and money in several ways but the only way to make it work is to have an accurate inventory. There is just no way to remember everything in there and use it without a list. We had an inventory going for a long time but since we moved this summer we've used the "hope and rummage" method. It's now absolutely full and that method is really failing me. Just at the point that every last item was on the floor and written on my clipboard (and my back was breaking) Margaret woke up again. After settling her I repacked the freezer, really hoping to find more space in there for a bulk cooking project next week. No luck.

The good news is that I unearthed a half gallon of Breyer's chocolate ice cream and that break to nurse Margaret tempered it to the perfect scooping temperature. And, because not only did I do all the laundry and inventory the freezer but also made bread and yogurt and planned a big bulk cooking week, I thought I'd have some.

The kitchen is a mess but that wasn't on my list today, was it? Well--Margaret doesn't usually end her days by drenching me in, well, whatever . . . I'll get to the dishes tomorrow. Might as well let the mice party one more night.

Eric very wisely suggested that my pre-Advent cleaning spree focus less on deep cleaning and more on organizational problems. I think that's wise, so with that in mind

Tomorrow's goals:
inventory the kitchen freezer and try to make it neater
reclaim my desk

Is all this exciting for anyone else?

The Loveliness of Preparing to Prepare

2007-11-26T12:22:00.000-05:00

I confess: the reason I wanted to host this Loveliness Fair is that I am in love with liturgical year ideas as are many of the women in the 4Real community who are the main participants in these fairs. I figured this fair would be a bonanza of liturgical year ideas and I didn't want to miss any of them. I'm an obsessive planner and this was to be an oh-so-indulgent blog post.

Many good ideas arrived in my inbox but also several timely reminders not to overdo, not to seek perfection, and not to let Advent get away from us in the mad dash towards Christmas. With that in mind . . .

I'm a huge fan of the O Antiphons--said with Evening Prayer from December 17-24 each year. As we get to that part of our family prayer life each year I dream about various beautiful ways to include them in our home during Advent. The biggest reason I haven't done anything is that I can never decide if my O Antiphon tribute should be done in English or Latin. Sally at Fine Old Famly offers what she planned to do last year and what she ended up doing and it all sounds beautiful. And, I hope Sally doesn't mind if I point you to some of her more recent posts on making her home "fair as she is able."

If reading about ornaments and O Antiphon houses gets you in a crafty mood, do stop by and visit the ever-creative-and-organized Dawn at By Sun and Candlelight. I'm terribly envious of Dawn's window and I'm thinking, perhaps, of dressing up our roman-shade decked windows with cards this year. Marianne at Learning to Love is also trying to keep herself organized by sharing her list of Advent plans. I'm looking forward to teaching my kids Christmas carols on musical instruments some day, too! If you're like me and your crafting skills are a bit lacking and you are on a budget, Cay at Cajun Cottage Under the Oaks has a few ideas to consider.

Prone to discouragement as I am--especially in the face of the highly organized--I am very glad to see that Elizabeth at Real Learning is sharing some of her non-blog Advent and Christmas writings with us. Elizabeth's writing never fails to inspire and encourage me. If you are feeling overwhelmed as you face the season this is the place to go. Do make sure to click through to read Elizabeth's story of last year's Christmas tree. Cay also offers a timely reminder from John Greenleaf Whittier to look to others this Advent and Christmas.

For my part, I always hope to get the more mundane side of prepare done before Advent arrives. Every year I hope to do a major housecleaning leading up to the first Sunday of Advent. Our family tries very hard to save Christmas for Christmas. The tree goes up the 23rd and is decorated Christmas Eve. I'll bake but we try not to eat the goodies until Christmas. Gifts are saved until Christmas morning, of course, and the opening is stretched out until New Year's, at least. I want Advent to be a time of quiet, reflection, extra prayer, and snuggling close as a family. It sounds like Cheryl at My Thoughtful Spot shares these desires and is planning to follow the advice of her family to snuggle together this Advent.

There are lots and lots of great Advent ideas out there in the blogosphere and at 4Real. It's tempting for me, I know, to rush around trying to fill up the season for my three-year old who is really ready for a bit of structure. I actually considered making (this week) a Jesse Tree quilt complete with a few dozen cloth symbols and an equal number of buttons and buttonholes to affix them. Then I remembered how burned out and snippy and not very reflective/prayerful/quiet/snuggly that would be. Maybe next year. If I start in January. Go look at all the great ideas out there, but remember to pray, hold your family close, and await the Christ Child in peace.

God Bless!

Here's another contribution that came in from Ruth at Just Another Day in Paradise. She has lots of great ideas for celebrating Advent and the feasts in December. Lots of links just in her post!

Making my house fair

2007-11-25T20:11:00.000-05:00

People, look East, the time is near
Of the crowning of the year.
Make your house as fair as you're able,
Trim the hearth, and set the table.
People, look east, and sing today:
Love, the Guest, is on the way.

Stars, keep the watch, when night is dim.
One more light the bowl shall brim.
Shining beyond the frosty weather,
Bright as the sun and moon together.
People, look east, and sing today:
Love, the Star, is on the way.

Angels, announce, with shouts of mirth
Him Who brings new life to earth.
Set ev'ry peak and valley humming
With the word, "The Lord is coming!"
People, look east, and sing today:
Love, the Lord, is on the way.

Back in my Anglican days I was in a church choir. I probably didn't really deserve to be in this choir but the director thought I really added something. I really can't sing all that well but maybe I've got one of those nice blendy choir voices? In any case, it was sure a lot of fun. My last Lessons and Carols service included the above piece. I absolutely loved it and was glad that we used it as the post-communion piece one Sunday AND that my conducting class for my music degree used it as one of our study pieces. Between church choir and conducting class I sang that piece well over a hundred times in the space of about four weeks and I never tired of it. Oddly, I've never really heard it since, but I've been thinking all the last week about the spirit of preparation embodied in this hymn. Two of my favorite bloggers have referenced it recently, so I guess it isn't entirely unknown (check back tomorrow for said bloggers in the Loveliness Fair).

Every year I want to make Lent a time of intense spring cleaning and the week between Christ the King and Advent a smaller fall cleaning. I have thus far utterly failed but I'm not giving up! Just because normal household upkeep defies my on a daily basis is no reason not to attempt huge projects. Part of my recent blog resurrection was the hope that I could use this forum as a self-motivational tool, so here it goes.

Tomorrow's goals: the back room. We call it the study though not much of that sort of thing goes on back there. It's also the laundry room and contains our chest freezer. It's a wreck and there aren't that many ways I can fix it but here is my to-do list:

Laundry, laundry, and more laundry. The hanging everything to dry method is okay but slower and I need to rethink my laundry routine. For tomorrow, everything is going straight to the dryer so that I can get back on top of the laundry mountain and get everything put away. I also need to do other work in there which would be impossible with a full clothesline.

Inventory the chest freezer. Which is full. At least it's nice and cold back there (no heat here, yet, at 63 degrees).

Sweep the floors.

Water the plant.

Fill up the few empty bookshelves with some of the double-stacked books from the front room.

If you really care about my housekeeping, check back tomorrow night for a report and for Tuesday's ambitious goals.

Scamming

2007-11-23T21:10:00.000-05:00

Do yourself a favor and stop by the kids' blog to hear about our minor adventure this afternoon. It could save you nineteen dollars . . .

My husband doesn't believe me . . .

2007-11-23T17:09:00.000-05:00

. . . but some critter is trying to gain access to my kitchen. The noise is behind the refrigerator. It's too irregular to be of mechanical origin and there are no unaccounted-for humans. Nor is anyone doing work in the gap between our building and the next (which gap is behind the refrigerator). I'm mentioning it here because the noise is so loud and so persistent that I'm starting to think things like, "I hope that's a mouse." If I'm still here when Eric the Vanquisher comes home from conquering the library, there will be some applicance moving. Robyn, I hope you aren't sending me the rejects from the Department of Mouse Housing?

So, trying to calm down (I love rodents, have I mentioned that?) I thought I'd share our delightful Thanksgiving meal with you. Eric and I started cooking together at 4:00 and sat down to eat at 7:00. During that time we prepared a rabbit, roasted root veggies, brussels sprouts, homemade cranberry sauce, and oyster stuffing from scratch. We also got most of the way through a bottle of wine, reorganized my spice drawer and researched family games online. And the kids were mostly awake for all of this. Thanksgiving does not have to be a day-long stressful event.

The food was amazing. Rabbit tastes exactly like turkey, it turns out, and one rabbit is a much more sensible amount of food for four than one turkey. Oyster stuffing was . . . fishy, but good, and reminiscent of Eric's grandmother. The veggies were delightful--we discovered parsnips this year. The brussels sprouts were shredded and sauteed with bacon and garlic. There's never enough. The cranberry sauce was heavenly. I wish there were so much more of it. I cooked the cranberries down with orange juice, red wine, sugar, cinnamon and cloves. I accidentally doubled the cinnamon which was fine. Cranberries can hold up their own flavor under a lot of cinnamon and all that spice gave it a bit of heat. Wonderful. I'm going to make it again to go over vanilla ice cream.

I took a picture of the whole table, but Eric thought a plated meal looked prettier, so there it is. We have these Orchardware cherry dishes we bought while engaged at a yard sale from a little old lady who had owned them almost fifty years and teared up as we carried them away. We have used them twice including last night and every time we move I think of getting rid of them. We'll see. I love interesting china but I hate clutter and too many possessions. It's a constant battle around here--especially with the books.

Our day was lovely as, I hope, was yours.

If you must go to the grocery store the day before Thanksgiving . . .

2007-11-21T14:05:00.001-05:00

. . . I do hope you have a Trader Joe's nearby.

Our family once again dropped the ball on Thanksgiving plans. Responsible folks put in their farm-fresh turkey orders weeks ago and shopped the root veggie sales last week. We planned our meal last night over soup.

We're not big turkey fans and it's just going to be us this year. Eric wants a meal that feels seasonal and authentic so we're having rabbit. I've never had rabbit before. I'll be sure to let you know how it goes.

Anyway, the rabbit will be procured elsewhere but the rest of the shopping had to be done. The day before Thanksgiving. With two children. Who were tired. I didn't want to go. I figured the store would be full of frantic shoppers all of whom would be pestering the overworked, harried employees for items they can't find because they are planning overly ambitious dishes that they make once a year, at best.

I was partly right. I usually shop on Saturday mornings and the store was MUCH more crowded today. There were a lot of husbands there, and several college kids with mom. For some reason college kids think that if classes aren't in session it's okay to appear at the grocery store in your slippers. I helped one bewildered husband locate sundried tomatoes. I was feeling magnanimous because the employee-customer ratio at Trader Joe's was about 1:2. They were all busy restocking pumpkins, highlighting their favorite wines and moving people through the checkout lines. And they were all happy. One girl, sporting a sunflower headband, offered us all biscotti and then scurried off the to the back room to find me hazelnuts. They didn't have any but I didn't even care because I can't remember the last time I got such prompt service at a grocery store.

My sleepy little boy was an angel and patiently waited through the entire shopping trip to sweetly and politely ask the clerk for a balloon. She obliged--how could she deny such a polite request from a three-year-old? When I commented on the cheerful mood at the packed store she suggested that maybe things wouldn't be so nice for the evening crew. No worries, there. I noticed at the sample table that champagne tasting is on the menu at the store this afternoon. Do you think that's for the customers or the employees?

Two extremes

2007-11-20T13:05:00.000-05:00

Eric was away at a conference last weekend and I spent three days with no one to help out with the kids. It was pretty challenging. Last time Eric went away I felt really empowered at the end of the weekend. I was amazed at how competent I could be when left entirely to myself. This time I realized how very much I depend on my husband. I'm so blessed to be married to someone who invests as much time in his kids as my husband. As soon as Eric got home my dad and his wife came to visit for two days. We went from two kids and one adult to two kids and four adults. The grandparents were all too happy to play with the kids pretty much non-stop and I felt totally at a loss for activity. So I did what any reasonable person would have done in my place: I made fudge.

It's not as impressive as it sounds. I have made a traditional fudge many times and it is always delightful. Eric loves fudge (as do I) and we usually end up making a big block of it "for gifts" and leave it out on the cutting board "waiting for packaging" and we slowly shave it away over the course of the day until we are so stuffed with fudge that we never want to eat again. To make matters worse, and in spite of my generally excellent candy-making skills, I was using my mom's recipe. Main ingredient: marshmallow fluff. That's just not right. I've had a big food conversion since the last time I used that recipe and I now try to stick to ingredients that are actual food rather than a concoction of chemicals. All that to say that I still don't make real fudge because a friend gave me the recipe for the above-pictured pieces of heaven last year and I don't think we can ever go back:

1 1/2 c. coconut oil
1 1/2 c. rapadura
1 c. cocoa powder
1 t. vanilla
1/2 t. salt

Melt the coconut oil very slowly (maybe even in a bowl set in a bowl of hot water). Pulverize the rapadura in a blender and then add all the other ingredients and blend until combined. Pour the mixture into any dish (a pie plate is a good size for this recipe) and let it cool.

The consistency is different from real fudge--it will get quite hard when cold and melt quickly at body temperature--but the taste is amazing. AND this stuff is, arguably, pretty healthy. Good coconut oil is expensive and hard to find but Weston Price folks such as ourselves could give you a whole thesis on the health benefits of coconut oil. Rapadura is unrefined, evaporated cane juice. Also expensive and hard to find. I get them both at a good price through a co-op. Lots of healthy fat and unrefined sugar. It's enough to make you want to gobble the whole pan in one sitting.

I guess I needed a confidence boost this weekend because when my dad mentioned that they LOVED this fudge last Christmas I decided to make them a bag for their trip north for Thanksgiving. We kept some for ourselves, of course.

Happy Feast Day . . .

2007-11-16T22:55:00.001-05:00

To the girl who kept me from writing the post I was going to write this evening.

To the girl who makes me smile every day.

To the girl who makes me want lots more daughters.

To the girl who inspires me every day to make a home where she can learn to grow into a beautiful capable woman.

St. Margaret of Scotland, Pray for us!

Why didn't I think of this in the summer?

2007-11-15T20:37:00.000-05:00

Another reason the dad in our family shouldn't work from home: if he does, I'll ask him to hang a clothesline. My husband and I are both enthusiasts so when I say, "Do you think that rope in the car could be used for an indoor clothesline?" Eric immediately finds something that will work even better and installs it for me. We don't really have the neighborhood for a clothesline outdoors and we don't have much space indoors. I bought a collapsible drying rack when we first moved here but it never really took. It was just too easy to lift the stuff out of the washer and throw it in the dryer.

Now that I've got our laundry routine down I'm turning our recent frugal fanaticism on the dryer. We don't know how much it costs to run our dryer. One friend of mine who lives in the same neighborhood and has similar amounts and types of laundry as me (i.e. she also washes diapers) recently bought a dryer and her electric bill went up fifty percent in one month. Yikes.

I gave the drying rack a shot again last week. I hung our diapers on them. Twenty-four hours later they were still wet and we were out of diapers so I had to throw them all in the dryer. Even if they had dried, I don't want to put stiff, sandpapery diapers on my sweet little children, so I think I'll stick to machine drying the diapers. Ditto towels. Call me a wimp but we're not even heating the place, yet. I really want a soft towel when I get out of the shower.

I really, really want to use the dryer less. My motivations are similar to our bun freezing experiment: I want to save money and maybe do a good turn for the planet while I'm at it. So, today we hung a line diagonally across the small back room where the washing machine is located. It's long enough that if I use hangers I can fit a lot on it and we think it will hold a fair amount of weight.

I've been successfully navigating two laundry days each week for awhile, now, and our wardrobe is designed with this schedule in mind. The kids and I have exactly enough clothes to get between laundry days (Eric seems to get a lot of hand-me-downs). This drying method will take a lot longer--maybe a day or two--so I'm going to have to alter my laundry schedule to accommodate it, but I think I'll give it a go for a month. We'll see how our electric bill likes it and how our wardrobes deal with it. Even if I only hang the clothes that are normally hung on hangers, that's probably four less loads of laundry going through the dryer each week.

My first blog carnival

2007-11-14T18:33:00.000-05:00

Back when I was a committed, enthusiastic blogger I agreed to host an autumn loveliness fair.

I wasn't sure, for awhile, if I'd be around to follow through, but my blogging revival has been fun and encouraging and I really don't want to miss out on seeing the contributions to this fair from the amazing women in the 4Real community.

But you don't have to a 4Real member to contribute! A blog carnival is a collection of ideas and links to posts on other blogs. If you have thoughts on "Preparing to Prepare" (Advent being a season of preparation for the Nativity of Our Lord) send me a link via e-mail or in a comment to this post. Check back here on Monday, November 26 for some great ideas for your own Advent celebrations.

Freezing our buns

2007-11-14T17:28:00.000-05:00

Elizabeth at Real Learning alerted me to the Freeze Yer Buns challenge this winter. Our family does many things that are considered "green" but the environment is seldom our primary motivator. This challenge is a classic example. This winter is the first winter we'll be paying for heat. Utilities have been included in our last two apartments but here we pay gas and electric. We kept the AC off as much as possible this summer and when it was on we tried to use it to kill the humidity and not refrigerate the place. Most of the time it was off or set to 82 degrees.

Eric and I are both much better at being cold than being hot so the winter should not prove to be such a thermostat challenge. So far we haven't turned on the heat. The lowest temp has been 63 degrees first thing in the morning. I can raise the temperature in the main room of the apartment two degrees just by baking a loaf of bread. Our plan is to keep the heat off until we are too cold and then bump things up one degree and leave it there. We are fortunate to have gas heat, but every little bit helps and this should help our utility bills this winter. And, hey, if we reduce our carbon footprint while we're at it, so much the better.

We're considering alternative methods of keeping warm, but since our main goal this winter is to save money, there is a limit to what we can buy before it would cost less just to turn on the heat. There is the argument, I suppose, that long underwear and extra blankets last for years. We also have the children to consider. Margaret sleeps with us but refuses blankets during naptime or the few hours before we join her in bed. I'll let you know when we finally turn on the heat. In the meantime--how do you stay warm in the winter?

Bookcase Overhaul

2007-11-13T14:10:00.001-05:00

I took this picture a couple months ago as part of the "virtual tour" of our new place for friends and family. I really love this bookcase. We got it free from a neighbor. We've never been sure if it's "shabby chic" or just shabby. This bookcase is really the focal point of our living room and one evening I realized that it was driving me nuts.

The top is supposed to be some kind of liturgical display area but it was sort of a mess with things piled on the two side shelves as well. The small shelf on top was crammed full of encyclicals because they fit there. The other shelves had many books tipped on their sides because the shelves are all short. The two bottom shelves were full of kids books but the large picture books on the bottom stuck way out and were mostly on their sides as well.

It's taken a pretty long time to chip away at all the things that were bothering me about this bookcase. Mostly we've been slowly re-organizing our home library. We originally put the books in alphabetical order by author without regard to genre. As time permits, we've been collecting categories and shelving them where they logically belong, and where they fit. We're not done with this project, but we've made good progress. At least this red bookcase no longer contains large books tipped sideways. I neatened up the two side shelves (the sippi cup is an occasional addition) and cleaned the encyclicals off the top shelf. In its place are our prayer materials: liturgies, family Bible, extra candles, Rosary cards. The very top has a simple frame displaying the liturgically appropriate Rosary card (Sermon on the Mount for Ordinary Time) and our prayer candles. I'm really excited about these candles. We just got the holder a couple days ago. They are simple and they match! We change the tapers according to season (so we have green ones out now) and light them for Morning and Evening Prayer and the large white one is our new Lord's Day candle, eagerly awaiting its debut this Saturday evening.

I left the board books on one of the shelves and moved the picture books back to Joseph's room. I put a basket on the coffee table opposite this bookcase containing several current favorites. There are two baskets for toy storage on the bookcase now and an additional few toys under the coffee table. I plan to rotate the living room toys slowly. I was so pleased to see Joseph able to wheel right up to his new book basket and pick one out to read this morning. And he can put the book away when he's done.

I'm even more pleased to see how just a few small changes can make my living room a much nicer place for everyone in the family.

Baking Soda Magic

2007-11-12T14:28:00.001-05:00

There is no way you can appreciate this picture but I'm including it anyway. I was washing up our few Sunday dishes yesterday and, as I finished, I sort of idly wiped out the sink. Then I wondered: could I get the sink cleaner?

I'm not a putterer when it comes to clean. Mess paralyzes me and I have a very all-or-nothing attitude. I need to do a total clean of one small area at a time. When it comes to the kitchen this means that I either scrub the sink clean and then move the mess on either side through the clean sink and into the dishwasher or onto a drying surface, or I pile everything into the sink, clean both counters and wash the dishes from there. I love starting from a clean sink. It's a tiny oasis of peace in the midst of kitchen chaos.

When we moved into this apartment I thought, "What a pretty kitchen! Too bad the sink is sort of brown." It did not occur to me that maybe the apartment came standard with a less-than-clean sink. I've just been sighing over my brown sink for four months. I scrubbed at it for awhile yesterday to no avail, thinking, "I need a good abrasive . . .". Now, I have a whole book devoted almost exclusively to how to clean your house with baking soda but I've never actually tried it. One tablespoon later and I had this bright, shiny marvel in the middle of my kitchen. Eric says the glare hurts his eyes. It's amazing. I've felt so happy every time I used the kitchen today.

If the cold, gray November is getting you down, get out the baking soda and scrub your sink.

Sunday Begins

2007-11-11T07:42:00.000-05:00

When I was engaged I took a course called "Theology of the Domestic Church." It was a leftover from my brief attempt at acquiring a masters degree. I abandoned the attempt when I realized that I'd rather live marriage and family than have abstract discussion about it, but there was one professor I really loved and I audited this course of his just before I got married. I remember very little of the content but the course alternately left me feeling completely inadequate as a future home maker or overly idealistic about what Catholic family life could look like. I haven't changed much.

We're always trying to live our faith more fully around here. Our most recent resolution is to make a bit more of Sunday. This has been challenging because I find that the pressure of creating a formal "Sunday dinner" around a later morning Mass and family time leaves me feeling not a bit like I've had a Sabbath. I usually want to order out or have leftovers on Sundays. Our solution is to make Saturday night the big meal. After all, Sunday begins at sundown the night before, right? Conveniently, we are often entertaining friends Saturday evening. If Saturday dinner is the big meal of the week I'm not cooking a big "entertainment" meal Saturday and a big "Sunday dinner" on Sunday. Less work for me.

I do really love to cook but dinner is a challenge. I think I make delicious, but simple fare most nights of the week but I do want to bump things up a notch for Saturday night. Yesterday was our first go at our new routine.

We did have some good friends coming with their two young children. I set the table nicely in advance and served a first course of wild rice salad with poached raisins and pine nuts. The second course was pumpkin, potato, leek soup with corn bread. Dessert was provided by our guests (and might have been the best part of the meal).

We sat down together to plated salads and Eric read the prologue to John's Gospel. At the appropriate moment I lit green candles (we hope to get large Lord's Day candles in liturgically appropriate colors soon). The last couple verses of the prologue will be said responsorily. Eric then moved immediately to the Epistle for Sunday and the Gospel for Sunday and we closed with grace. We think wine will typically be a part of the Saturday meal, but we're still considering this from a budgetary standpoint.

We kept the candle lit until we were ready to leave the table at which point we brought the candles into the living room and immediately said first Vespers of Sunday from the Liturgy of the Hours. We try to say Vespers every night and it is usually a bit chaotic. Our friends were familiar with the liturgy and their older daughter set a good example for my kids. Amazingly, all four kids sat more or less quietly for the duration of Vespers. We then extinguished the candles and had dessert.

I'm pretty amazed at how well it all went. We plan to keep this "liturgy" for several weeks and then tweak it if necessary. This format feels suitably reverent, repetitious, and liturgical for our purposes. I think the use of candles is the key. The kids are totally fascinated by the flames and they stand as a visual reminder: this is the Lord's Day. Keeping the candles lit until the end of Vespers reminds us to pray Vespers before dispersing for the night.

I'm really excited at this new tradition and I'll report back as it develops.

The Grand Re-opening

2007-11-09T13:25:00.000-05:00

I haven't posted in awhile. You might have noticed. I've been feeling pretty ambivalent about this blog, lately. I've been feeling pretty ambivalent about a lot of things lately. I can't really put my finger on it. Nothing is wrong, exactly, there's just a general lack of focus in my life. I'm really good at coming up with extreme solutions to vague problems and one of the things I came up with this last month was to delete my blog (again) and give up on most other internet activities. Our family briefly considered getting rid of home internet service all together but decided against it.

In the end I decided not to delete my blog but to write an "On Hold" post and leave it alone for awhile. I never got around to writing that post but I have done a good bit of thinking and here I am, blogging again, hoping this hobby can be a small part of putting things together.

There are many sorts of blogs out there. I already write about my dear children but I want a place to write about all the other stuff in my life that my family really doesn't care to read about. This blog, at least for my part, needs a clearer focus. I also need this blog to be a tool for encouragement and accountability. More than anything I want to create a beautiful, welcoming, well-ordered home for my family. I want to live this vocation God has given me as perfectly as possible.

I'm a mess. Partly I mean that the dishes aren't done but mostly I mean that I feel all jumbled and disordered inside. There are many things I do quite well and I need to be reminded of that. If I blog about those things I can remind a few others while I'm at it. But I am also prone to despair. I bite off more than I can chew and I want to make everything perfect all at once. I need to take small steps forward.

So, an experiment. Robyn challenged me to write every day for one week. I'm going to further refine the challenge. I'm going to try to write every day for one week on one thing I've done towards becoming a better homemaker. If the exercise is encouraging and motivating I will continue. I define homemaking very broadly and I will still be an urban-dwelling Catholic through all of this. But I need a focus. I need a project. So, here I go . . .

(Oh, and pardon the "dust". I'll be fiddling with the template as time permits as well.)

The thwarted urbanite

2007-10-05T13:28:00.000-04:00

Today I received, in the mail, our Disability Parking Placard. I did a little happy dance. The District government here is so unpredictable. The card was only requested a week or so ago. It took them a full year to send us a ridiculous baby card for Margaret including a friendly reminder to begin immunizing by two months. Please.

Why, you might ask, does a committed urban-dweller such as myself do a happy dance when her parking permit arrives in the mail? Let me explain. I need to convince myself, too.

We've got this wheelchair for Joseph. It's really, really wonderful. He can zip around in it really well. He's at eye-level with other kids his age. He behaves in a more age-appropriate way (including by misbehaving). This chair is a huge blessing to our family and we want Joseph to use it as much as possible. Sometimes we still confine him a bit: he really can't handle all the stimulation of Target, for example. The store is just too big so he rides in the shopping cart and Margaret goes on my back. Trader Joe's is no problem. I can let Joseph be pretty independent and he can keep up just fine. We always want the chair at our destination.

The trouble is that the chair is rotten for traveling. We live in an old neighborhood with lots of brick sidewalks, lots of bumps, lots of hills, and unpredictable curb edges. The Metro is five long blocks away for a kid in a wheelchair. We have a regular routine of going to the library on Wednesday mornings. The past several times we've gone I've put Margaret on my back (which she just barely tolerates), thrown a heavy bag full of books over one shoulder and tried to push Joseph with the too-low stroller handles over all the bumps and around all the curbs. Once on the train I have a split second to drop the books and set Joseph's brakes so he doesn't go flying through the train car. If someone actually offers a seat, that helps. If Margaret doesn't communicate right then (via biting) that she's sick of the backpack, that's also good.

We arrive in Chinatown exhausted and annoyed with each other. I've usually dealt with this by self-medicating at Starbucks. This makes the trip cost about six dollars (if I get a scone to split with Joseph, too).

This week it looked like rain and I thought, could I, possibly, drive to Chinatown? We're already in the car on Wednesday mornings, anyway, because we drive to campus for Mass and drop off Eric at the library. I was skeptical but thought, worst case I'd just get frazzled by the downtown traffic and drive back home.

It was wonderful. It took only a few minutes to get to Chinatown. There was parking everywhere. Once parked, we had lots of energy left so I very patiently helped Joseph into his wheelchair and let him wheel on the nice, even, wide downtown sidewalks at his own pace. Margaret was still on my back, but I could probably put her in the stroller next time. Joseph needs so little help. The parking meters are a bit expensive BUT if you have a handicapped plate you get four hours for free. And, my nerves aren't totally shot, so I don't absolutely have to go to Starbucks. I could even bring my own mug from home. I've now reduced our $6.00 outing to about $.40 in gas.

I felt really conflicted about all of this later in the day. I don't want to drive everywhere. I love city living mostly because I like to walk. I would happily vote for local policies that made our city less car-friendly. I wondered for awhile if I was just being lazy. What would I do if Joseph weren't in a wheelchair? Would I still want to drive. I don't think so. The Metro here is really great and a lot of fun. I'd put both kids and all the library books in our fantastic double stroller and take the Metro to the library. I'd do that now except that then Joseph is totally stuck in the stroller once we get there. It's not very dignifying for a three-year-old to crawl around on his tummy in a public place.

Sadly, my ideals do not always hold up to practical experience. I could persevere with the Margaret-biting-in-the-backpack model, but that type of outing frustrates everyone and leaves me feeling worn out and sore at the end of the day and thinking, "HOW will I ever be able to handle another child?" I don't want to be thinking things like that. I still load the kids into the double stroller for long walks through our neighborhood as much as I can. It's good exercise for me and fun for them just to observe from the stroller. It is hard, though, not to be able to more fully live the life that I'm always preaching to everyone else!

My Buddhist Cookbooks

2007-10-04T07:49:00.000-04:00

My favorite cookbook (you can tell because it is no longer in one piece) is The Tassajara Bread Book by Edward Espe Brown. Ed Brown is a Buddhist, a Zen priest. I don't really know anything about Buddhism. I do think his California Buddhism might look quite different from Eastern Buddhism but, you know, it's definitely not Catholic. Another favorite cookbook is Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings by the same author. This one is a collection of recipes and essays interspersed. The recipes are good but I like the book for the essays. A short disclaimer before I continue: everything I know about Buddhism and Zen mediation comes from these two books. If any real Buddhists are reading this, I would be most interested in hearing your thoughts.

The first essay in Tomato Blessings is "When You Wash the Rice, Wash the Rice." Be present to the rice. Notice how your hands are moving. Notice how the water is running. Notice the nourishment you will give to your family. Do this simple thing very well. Another essay, "The Sincerity of Battered Teapots," encourages respect for things: "Carry one thing with two hands rather than two things with one hand." But reflects on the authenticity and vulnerability of the teapots not treated this way. And, at the end, one of my favorites, "Eating Just One Potato Chip." Slowing done and eating one potato chip with awareness you discover the truth: potato chips are gross.

Ed Brown's bread book is similar. He encourages making bread with your whole body, "When I cook, another body comes alive . . . A body alive to flavors and fragrance, a body ready to touch and be touched, a body which eats with eyes as well as mouth . . . Hands awaken, boundless with their own knowledge, picking up, handling, putting down." I'm really cherry-picking, here. It's difficult to briefly summarize two books that have had such a profound influence on my life in the kitchen and beyond. These books have taught me to cook. Brown's style is very casual. The instructions are not always very precise because he doesn't want you fretting over how much onion to put in the soup. Put in enough onion and be done with it. I've gotten over a lot of perfectionist hangups reading these books. I've come to think about other chored differently, as well. It's not always easy but sometimes I do remember to think, "When you fold the diapers, fold the diapers."

Does all of this sound a bit loopy? Are you concerned that I'm losing touch with my Catholic faith? I'm not too worried. The comforting thing about believing in absolute truth is that you can wander afield a bit without fear. Because you know Truth you can look for truths in all sorts of places. To be honest, it's also handy to be married to a theologian. I can check my thinking with Eric anytime I want. (And, in case you were wondering, the bread book was a Christmas present from him the year we were engaged and the other book was his before we were married.)

These two cookbooks give great importance to some of the most simple and fundamental aspects of life. Baking bread, sharing a meal. Fasting and feasting. These cookbooks have challenged me to slow down and work with care and reflection. If these were books about prayer they would be teaching "recollection." As I've said before, these daily, simple tasks are my vocation. God wants me to do them well. St. Therese of Lisieux, whose feast day we just celebrated, was a great champion of holiness in small things. To do the small things well is to be on the path to holiness. I suppose I could just read Story of a Soul and not worry about my Buddhist cookbooks, but I think the Lord knows that I need to be taught the same basic concepts over and over again in lots of different ways. I've read Story of a Soul three times, which is about how many times I've read the essays in Tomato Blessings.

Buddhist reflections are not sufficient. The life of faith requires more. But I do think I can read these essays and feel no qualms about deriving encouragement from them. My life is more Catholic than Buddhist and I read Edward Espe Brown through the lens of Truth.

Rhythm

2007-09-28T14:58:00.000-04:00

I've been participating in and following several conversations at the 4Real Forums about Waldorf-inspired education. I haven't read any original Waldorf materials, yet, and I would not, sight unseen, recommend Waldorf materials. From what I've seen, there is a lot in Waldorf that needs to be "sifted out" if a Catholic family wants to use it. I have also seen a lot that I think is a great fit for our family. Again, I'm taking all of this secondhand, so I'm not sure to what extent I'm even adopting a Waldorf idea.

Waldorf makes much of "rhythm." At first I thought that this might just be a crunchy way to say "schedule" but, even so, I was really attracted to the language of "rhythm." I think I like thinking of rhythm with a "parts to whole" mentality. Our family is already familiar with the rhythm of the seasons and the liturgical year. We start with Advent and move through Christmas, Lent, Easter, the feasts of Ordinary Time and back to Advent again. The seasons of nature come full-circle each year: full bloom, death, hibernation, and new life again in the Spring. I really want to take this big-picture idea of rhythm and apply it to my week and my day. I'm still working out the details but something like: rise, pray, eat, read together, do an activity/get out of the house, process creatively, eat, rest and repeat it all in condensed form after naptime.

I do believe that the essentials in my day do need a bit of a schedule and a routine. I need to go to bed and rise at basically the same time every day in order to get enough sleep. Dinner and lunch need to be served at the same time every day so the kids can get enough sleep. Chores need to be assigned to particular times and done in a certain way simply so that they get done and the habit of getting them done is cultivated. My prayer needs to be given priority each day and we make an effort to schedule Daily Mass. Beyond these essentials, I have been unable to create and follow a workable schedule for myself or the kids. I really, really love books like A Mother's Rule of Life, but I am just not programmed that way.

I think I've finally realized that I thrive on order but not on a schedule. I need my day to make sense to me and make sense to my family. I need the day to allow for the flourishing of everyone in our family. But I don't need every hour scripted. I like that the idea of rhythm allows me to say: we need an activity this morning but it's raining so let's just build with legos; we need a quite, decompressing activity but we're all going stir-crazy so let's go for a quiet walk and look for squirrels; we should do something creative but we drew with crayons all day yesterday so we'll turn on some music now.

Even though I'm not really homeschooling, yet, I already see that my tendencies are running in a very "unschooling" way. I love the flexibility, the freedom, and the room for creativity. But I also see that this approach gives in to one of my bigger parenting weaknesses: underparenting. I'm a pretty passive parent. This can be a good thing. Too many kids are overparented. But I do want to be involved and I want to parent. Children need boundaries and a guide. I hope that thinking about our planning as cultivating a rhythm will give us the right balance between order and flexibility.

Our Family Physician

2007-09-22T17:35:00.000-04:00

When I began this blog I thought I would be posting often on political topics. I haven't at all, as it turns out. Each time I go to write something I feel like I'm just not quite informed enough to say something intelligent. But the one topic that is really making my blood boil this election cycle is health care. We are big health-care consumers in this household, so it's something we've been able to think about quite a lot. Red Cardigan gives an excellent overview of some of the problems plaguing our modern system. To encourage Red, I thought I'd highlight one sign of hope: our family physician.

Our family doctor is, first of all, a family doctor. I certainly believe in specialized medicine and we see many specialists but for run-of-the-mill medical problems, it's much more important to the quality of care that the physician know the patient. I have never personally needed to see our family doctor, but I have taken both of my kids in on several occasions. When I do go to him for some malady, he will already have an established relationship with me

Our doctor is in solo practice and has no staff. He doesn't have any partners, any nurses, any receptionists or any billers. When we need to see this doctor we call or e-mail him, and schedule the appointment with him personally. He always knows who is waiting to see him because he makes all his appointments. I once had to wait five minutes in his waiting room but otherwise we've always gone in on time. Our entire 30- or 60-minute appointment is spent with our actual doctor. We don't answer a dozen questions from a nurse only to spend half of our precious five minutes with the doctor answering all the same questions again. Our doctor weighs babies, gives them their shots and even replaces their cloth diapers after an exam.

Our doctor does not work with any insurance companies. He provides standard "diagnosis" forms for the convenience of his patients who wish to file for reimbursement. He also encourages Health Savings Accounts. Because he does not work with insurance companies he can charge a fair hourly rate instead of an exorbitant rate that is then "negotiated" with a third-party. Our doctor does the negotiating with his patients directly. He does not refuse patients because they can't pay but will work with them to find an acceptable financial arrangement. Because he does all his own billing, he knows exactly what the visit is costing his patient. He knows, for example, that each vaccine costs $30 and that administering five in one day might be a financial burden (as well as a physical burden on the health of the baby).

There are a lot of other things we love about our doctor that have less to do with the current state of health care, but that still buck the current trends of the medical establishment. He trusts the judgment of parents: he asks parents to make informed decisions about vaccinations and he doesn't insist on endless well baby visits. He responds to e-mail and often offers simple solutions and advice this way. And, because his second-floor office does not have an elevator, he has often met me at my car and walked me back out again so he could carry one of my kids.

This is an unusual doctor. There should be more like him. If healthcare in this country become increasingly privatized, I think others will follow his model of practice. If healthcare becomes nationalized, I'm afraid this doctor might be forced to find another line of work--or radically change the way he deals with his patients.

Dad Working from Home

2007-09-20T12:07:00.000-04:00

I was at a party recently and met another mom. We were comparing notes the way you do when you've just met someone and she asked what my husband does. I replied that he was writing his dissertation and mostly worked from home. Her reply was unusual,
"Oh, I can't imagine! I have a hard enough time organizing my own life!"
I think this woman and I are going to become friends.

Most people, when they hear about our family's arrangement think that we are so lucky. Mom and Dad are both home. We're never lacking for "couple time," we both see lots of the kids. Eric is able to babysit and otherwise arrange his schedule to make my life with the kids easier. We know several families trying to find a line of work for the husband that allows him to be at home. This life, to them, seems ideal. I don't doubt that there are some families out there who successfully have Dad at home to the greater happiness of all. But our family is not one of them.

Eric and I certainly see our marriage and our family as our mutual vocation. We wouldn't have married each other if we didn't think so. We adore each other and the children. We've found, however, that all these relationships work better when Eric and I maintain our separate work, our separate spheres.

Eric's vocation includes the roles of husband, father, scholar, writer, teacher. My vocation includes the roles of wife, mother and household manager. Throughout our relatively short marriage, we have found over and over that the spouse and parent roles work better all around when we are most fully engaging our other respective roles. When Eric works from home all day he is tempted to talk to me, play with the kids, see to other chores around the house. When he's around me I feel as if someone has invaded my work space. I don't need or want his advice on when to wash the futon cover, but I tend to ask him about it if he's there and he, of course, responds.

Small moments of stress or disorganization on the part of one of us always affects the other negatively. It's one thing for me to debrief with my husband at the end of the day and get his insight into a discipline problem I'm having. It's quite another for him to witness, first-hand, each and every blowup with the kids. I find that each stress point in my day is magnified into an event if Eric is there when it happens. If I'm on my own, I don't wallow in it, I just deal and move on. In the evening, when I tell Eric about my day, everything is put into better perspective when I can't even remember what the kids did that made me so annoyed.

When Eric is home I let him solve problems for me. Again, this isn't such a big deal when a problem is big enough that I am still thinking about it at the end of the day. Then it is appropriate that Eric and I discuss it and come up with a solution. But when I let Eric solve my small problems day after day I start to wonder if I'm even capable of being a stay-at-home mom. When he's not around and I have to figure things out on my own, I feel competent and capable (but tired) at the end of the day.

We're recently adjusted our schedule so that Eric can work at the library on campus three days each week. The benefits have been tremendous. The whole family feels busier but happier and more productive. The academic life is one of constantly changing and irregular schedules, so I expect that we'll have to relearn this lesson over and over again. But now we're appreciating each other more, spending better time with the kids, and taking more ownership over our separate tasks.

The Pest Man Cometh

2007-09-13T14:10:00.000-04:00

Monday afternoon, Joseph's physical therapist showed up early. I had just started the pre-therapy cleaning blitz wherein I frantically remove layers of toys, clothes, food, couch cushions, and orthopedic equipment from the floor and sweep so that Joseph has a bit of room to work. As I answered the door I said, half jokingly, "Oh, no! You're early! I haven't cleaned up, yet." "No problem," she said, "Some of the houses I go to have roaches."

I laughed nervously. Minutes before her arrival I'd grabbed Margaret as she gleefully tried to catch a roach she found under the kitchen sink. The therapist killed another one before the hour was out.

We've battled mice, too. After trapping four or five we hadn't seen any mouse evidence for awhile but then last week saw signs of a mouse revival. I discovered droppings in the usual kitchen area, the bedroom, the laundry room, the linen drawers. Also, oddly, the spice drawer. I buy my spices in bulk and they are all sealed inside metallic or plastic bags. Did you know that mice will chew through both of these things to get cocoa powder, parsley, and baking soda. That's right. Baking soda.

We don't really understand our landlord. He owns this building with fifteen units, about half of which are vacant. Some (like ours) are renovated, others aren't. Some individual units have been sold, but we're renting. It's an odd situation and he's pretty laid back. But he did assign someone to deal with the pest problem which, apparently, is building-wide. I wanted to affirm this unusual show of concern for the us tenants.

I'm a big fan of non-toxic living. I read this fantastic book last winter and I have tried to adopt a chemical-free lifestyle ever since. Plus, I have small children. One of them eats everything she finds. I was not excited when the exterminator arrived. He had boxes of poison and bags of traps and spray cans of stuff. He wanted to spray all the baseboards, put poison behind every appliance and line the closets with glue traps. (He also wants our landlord to close all the dog-sized holes in our walls, but I'm not holding my breath.) I protested. He tried not to laugh at me. My husband played the diplomat and in the end we got a little poison, a little spraying, and some glue traps to place at our own discretion. My husband, coincidentally, installed a sound-emitting mouse deterrent the same day.

I hate roaches and mice. I really, really, hate them. They increase my stress level so much. But there must be a better way. All these chemicals feel so temporary. The poison will get eaten, the spray will dissipate and all the little critters will come back (unless that high-pitched sound emitter works as well as it says it will). I'm not the neatest housekeeper, but I was a REALLY bad housekeeper in our old place and we never had a single pest. What's up? Are we all supposed to peacefully co-exist? My husband calls it rustic urban living. If I liked rustic, I wouldn't be living here!

Lard

2007-09-12T16:17:00.000-04:00

Cooking with lard is another activity recommended by the Weston Price Foundation. I have to admit, I've never really had much of a desire to cook with lard. But I have had a desire to make awesome pie crust and I've been told more than once that good pie crust requires lard. Our Amish farmer sells lard, but I never remember to order it from him. We were at our local farmer's market recently buying cheese and I noticed that the cheese man also sold lard. I asked the little girl helping him for a quart of lard and she gave me a blank look. Apparently lard wasn't flying out of the refrigerated truck that Saturday. I was also getting scrapple and pudding (scrapple without the cornmeal) for my husband, so I should be glad she didn't just shoo me away. The actual farmer came to my rescue and fetched the food out of his truck for me.

I tried some pie crust with the lard a couple weeks ago. It was pretty underwhelming, but not bad. I love to cook and I love to perfect recipes, especially baked goods. Scones were my last project and I think I make pretty awesome scones, now. The new project: pie crust. Today I'm making a quiche for dinner, so I decided to double the crust recipe and make some cinnamon raisin tarts for tea time. Today, the internal temperature of our apartment dropped below eighty for the first time this summer, and I feel like fall is coming. We're celebrating with cinnamon.

Why, you might ask, do my tarts look like blobs? Partly because I have crummy photography skills, but also because my daughter was shrieking at the top of her longs for the duration of the tart exercise. Also because I really lack food presentation skills. Maybe after I've conquered pie crust I'll make presentation and arrangement my next culinary project. If Mrs. T every gets a camera, maybe I can get some tips from her.

Monday Kitchen Extravaganza

2007-09-10T19:46:00.001-04:00

I've been trying to adopt--not a schedule, exactly--but sort of a rhythm to my days and weeks. I had this down pretty well, once upon a time, but things have really been in flux since we moved (three months ago). We've been spending a lot of mornings, and some late afternoons out of the house, which has been great for beating the heat and not getting on each other's nerves, but it hasn't been so great for getting things done--especially kitchen things.

I'm thinking about making Mondays my kitchen day. I want to get us set up for the week. We're big fans of on Weston A. Price, so we do a lot of soaking and fermenting. A lot of our food takes several days to prepare. Although, I usually end up cheating because I don't plan ahead. I hope that if I take Monday to get things rolling, I can feel more on top of food all week. Today, which was the first day I even thought to do this, I managed to:

--Soak pinto beans in water and whey, bag them into two-cup portions, and put them in the freezer. They'll now cook up in 30 minutes and they've already been soaked.

--Start chickpeas soaking to be bagged and frozen tomorrow.

--Make one gallon of yogurt.

--Make vanilla ice cream from the cream we skimmed ourselves off the grass-fed raw milk we get from our awesome Amish farmer. I started some chocolate to make tomorrow once the ice cream freezer has a chance to get cold enough again.

--Soak almonds in saltwater all day to dry out overnight in the oven.

--Skin chickpeas for making hummus this evening (I know it's really anal to skin the chickpeas, but the hummus comes out so much better that way--even the kids helped!)

--Make oatmeal cookies. Okay, that's not a WAP thing at all. We just needed a teatime treat and it sounded good.

I was able to do all of this mostly because I didn't have to make dinner. We had weekend leftovers. I do hope that making sourdough bread can be a typical Monday activity. I might also be able to get in a soup or two to go in the freezer for quick dinners this winter. I won't always have nuts or beans to soak, so I'll have more space for other cooking.

Now that Margaret is finally sleeping, I better clean up from all this cooking . . .

Small things

2007-09-06T21:07:00.000-04:00

A neighboring parish has a Holy Hour with Benediction every Thursday and my husband is kind enough to drop me off and take the kids for a walk each week so I can get some quiet prayer time. (For my non-Catholic readers, a Holy Hour is when the Eucharist is placed in a monstrance on the altar. Since Catholics believe that Jesus is really present in the Eucharist, this is a special time to worship Jesus. Some churches have this form of adoration available all the time, others for just one hour each week. Many churches, unfortunately, do not provide any time for adoration.) A Holy Hour with Benediction is one of my absolute favorite liturgical events. I'm so glad we've found a time to fit this into my life regularly.

I wish I could say that my time before the Blessed Sacrament was a time of deep, mystical, contemplation, but it wasn't. That did happen once but, too often, I end up staring numbly off into space. It's awfully hard to recollect oneself when the time just before prayer was taken up with getting unhappy children packed up just about at bedtime. Today, actually, was a really good time of prayer, though I didn't realize it until the end. I use a journal when I pray before the Blessed Sacrament because it's the only way I can stay even a little focused. Today my journal was going something like this:

"Dear Lord, I just can't get the dishes done and I need to get some winter clothes and I should make those cushion covers and Joseph really needs more of a schedule and I wonder if Margaret is napping enough and maybe doing the dishes should come before yoga each night and maybe I should pray more and maybe Eric would like me to stop nagging him all the time and I wonder what I planned for dinner this weekend."

I'm paraphrasing a bit, but I think you get the idea.

I reflected on this a bit. Does God really want me to use this precious hour each week to talk about the dishes? I mean, I pray other times, too, but this is a really special time. Shouldn't I be working myself into a mystical frenzy?

But, here I am Lord. I come to do your will. I'm confident that I chose the right vocation and this is it: dishes, husband, kids, prayer, groceries. To do the will of God I need only do all those things well. It's an awful lot of little things.

I'm a big fan of the Tightwad Gazzette. When it's author, Amy Dacyczyn, was asked why she emphasized practices, like reusing ziploc bags, that saved only pennies. She answered that most people have very few opportunities to save $100 or $1000 dollars in one shot, but most people have many opportunities every day to save a few pennies and the savings add up. I think about that every time I turn off a light or wash out a plastic bag and this evening I thought about applying it to the spiritual life. We don't often have a chance to battle cancer, or die for the faith, but each day we are given many opportunities to do small things exceedingly well for the love of God.

I can bring my dishes and groceries and whining kids before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and know that He does, indeed, want me to bring my vocation and its challenges before Him. God's grace is even sufficient for couch cushions.

Where have all the manners gone . . .

2007-09-04T20:09:00.004-04:00

One of the things I love about coffee shops is the cafe culture. Actually, this is one reason why our family has no problem with Starbucks--it created cafe culture in America. If it weren't for Starbucks, the little, local coffee shops would not be pulling in business--especially the ones in rundown urban neighborhoods like ours. We are total suckers for new coffee shops. A couple weeks ago we were on our way to the hospital and noticed a new one en route. We stopped for lunch on our way back and were pleased to see that the next neighborhood over from us is enjoying a nice revival--complete with its own coffee shop. One of the "locals" noticed our cute daughter and engaged us in conversation for half an hour. It was great. The laid-back cafe atmosphere invites opportunities like this because, really, if you were too busy to chat you probably wouldn't be at the coffee shop in the first place.

Our own local place is really, really fantastic. It has the best coffee I have ever tasted. It's almost worth drinking other coffee the rest of the week so that on our regular Tuesday afternoon "date" to the coffee shop we can enjoy our drinks all the more. Almost worth it--we've started buying our beans there. The owner can't afford to live in our neighborhood (it's gentrifying so fast) but he is committed to engaging the people who live here. His coffee is less-expensive than almost any other place I know and he often provides meeting space to civic leaders. He knows our family well and always gives us an iced fruit tea on the house for Joseph.

While we were there last week our little boy wheeled up to a customer and said, "Hey! What's your name?" The guy's name was Bryant and we chatted for awhile with him about our mutual neighborhood enthusiasm. Since there is otherwise nothing to draw outsiders to the street where this cafe sits, the customers are almost always neighborhood folks. We saw that same guy today and we might almost call him a casual friend, now. That's the best of cafe culture--forming relationships, slowing down your day, engaging people.

There was another customer at the table behind us who didn't quite get it. She sat there with her laptop (not, in itself, such a bad thing) and her cell phone. The phone rang--loudly--several times during the hour we were there. One of those times she proceeded to have a long, detailed conversation about a recent Tarot reading she'd had during which she was advised to proceed with an adoption as a single mother. I'm sorry, ma'am, but we really don't care to know about it. But we couldn't help but know about it. Everyone in the cafe now knows about it. I now know more about that woman than about Bryant whom we've talked to twice. But there isn't any relationship and she never engaged us.

This is why I agonize over the role of technology in my life. I was waiting in line at the store recently behind a woman who seemed perfectly sensible but who spent her entire time in line and the whole of her transaction yammering into her phone. The woman at the Customer Service desk might have been an ATM machine for all the consideration she got. No wonder store clerks get snippy and rude. They have non-interactions with people all day long.

Our family attended a wedding earlier this summer in Montauk, NY, which is the south fork of Long Island. The traffic out there made us decide that nothing in Montauk could justify the hours of crawling through the Hamptons. Montauk, and the towns leading up to it, are big weekend spots for New Yorkers trying to "get away from it all." It seems, though, that they aren't able to get away from it all. Every establishment in Montauk bore a large sign announcing that customers on cell phones would not be served. Bravo, Montauk!

I suppose it's just a cultural lag. I don't think the woman in front of me in the store or the woman at the cafe were trying to be rude. They looked like lovely people otherwise. There was yet another woman at the coffee shop today who stepped out to the sidewalk to take a call. Apparently, cell phone use does not automatically equate with rude behavior.

Manners must be taught. Sadly, our culture no longer seems to teach polite behavior through natural selection. Perhaps more places will have a problem as extreme as Montauk's and be inspired to drastic measures in the same way. And perhaps the message will trickle down a little. For now, at least Joseph knows to put his napkin on his lap as soon as he sits down at the table.

Urban homeschooling

2007-08-31T21:47:00.000-04:00

I used to think that city-living would be sort of an obvious ideal for homeschooling families. That was before I had any kids. Now that I have two kids (neither of them school age) and am oh-so-much-wiser, I still think that city-living is a fantastic way to homeschool.

Now that Joseph has his wheelchair and Margaret is getting to the "I must climb without ceasing" stage, I also see why moms like yards and playgrounds. Kids need to burn off steam. In the city, with young kids, this means that I have to take them somewhere. If I had a yard I could just let them play while I washed dishes at the kitchen sink, or something. But, I don't have a yard. Not that I'm complaining--I hate yardwork and yards are not very wheelchair-friendly.

Getting the kids out of the apartment could be seen as a burden on me, but I've slowly realized that I need to get out, too. We live, basically, in one room all day. That's too close, especially when one child is in wheeled devices. I need a change of scenery. I'm a better mom when I have stimulation and diversion and the kids aren't dependent on me for ninety percent of their entertainment.

Fortunately, I live in a great city. Washington has its problems, certainly, but one of the greatest benefits is its small size. Anyone who lives in the city is close to the action. We get to Mass each morning, but many days I consider whether to go on an "outing". These are some of my options on a typical day, for an almost three-year-old boy (Margaret usually snoozes on these adventures):

the grocery store
a park with a fountain
a coffee shop near a construction site
the library
the bookstore (like the library, but with coffee!)
Chinatown to see the noodle man
the Postal Museum
the Natural History Museum
the reflecting pool to see the ducks
Union Station to watch the trains
any destination involving a Metro ride
a walk through the neighborhood to do odd errands

And this doesn't include seasonal activities, special events, and things that are only appreciated by older children. It would be crazy not to take advantage of all this on a regular basis, especially when the museums here are all free. These places are packed with school kids on the weekend!

My kids are young, now, so there is no worry about fitting in lessons or the "scope and sequence" requirements of a curriculum. But, what about five years from now when I might have four or five kids and three of them would be real school age? We hope to still live in a city with many of these same opportunities. Do we leave it all alone in order to stay in and do lessons? I've heard veteran moms say that too many outings can be deadly to the pace of schooling. And the little ones need naps.

Perhaps I'm veering into unschooling territory, here, but I think my approach will be about what it is now. I'm prepared to reevaluate as our family grows and I get a better sense of things, but this is, really, one of the main reasons I so want my children to be raised in a city. They are hit in the face with education as soon as they walk out the door. As interests and individual projects develop there are museums and opportunities within minutes of our home. Mobility is one of the great benefits of urban life and I hope that our children are independently mobile long before they are old enough to drive a car. How could I give my daughter an art textbook when the National Gallery is a short bus ride away?

We don't, actually, have all that much choice about where we will live long-term (academia seems to have a lot in common with the military, sometimes). Perhaps I will one day have a yard and a learning room. For now, I'm going to give myself permission to take a lot more "field trips" with my kids.

My contribution to the skirt wars

2007-08-30T09:53:00.000-04:00

It's a hot topic of debate among Catholic women: Should we wear skirts all the time or just on Sunday?

I've been thinking (and, indeed, praying) about my take on the whole debate for some time. There are women I admire and respect on both sides of the issue. I've heard arguments about modesty, femininity, Marian imitation, and cultural revolution--all on both sides. I've read so much on this topic, that I'm afraid I won't be able to link back to all the women who have influenced my thought. For this, I apologize. Had I known that I would have a blog when I started reading this debate, I might have been more diligent about saving links to posts.

When I consider how to dress I ask myself several questions: Is it modest? Is it feminine? Is it appropriate to the occasion?

Modesty is a very difficult area to judge. Some think skirts are always more modest because they disguise the curves of a woman's body. Some think pants are more modest because they can't fly up in a revealing way. Some believe that a modest woman always covers her elbows, while others are okay with sleeveless shirts. Some would never be seen in a bathing suit while others think a tankini can work just fine. I think modest clothing is different for different body types and different situations. But, if anyone ever asked me for a rule of thumb as an aid to discerning modesty I think I would say that any clothing that communicates something about your underwear is probably immodest. If your skirt is so short that your underwear, or lack thereof, is noticeable, then the skirt is immodest. If your pants are so tight that the brand of your underwear is readable, that is immodest. If your shirt sleeves expose undergarment straps, or if your top makes it obvious that you aren't wearing any undergarments, that's usually immodest.

I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule and I invite readers to submit some, because I'd really like to refine my thinking in this area. Even as I write, I can think of two different brides I have seen in strapless gowns. One bride was decidedly more modest than the other.

The question of femininity is next. I really believe that women should dress like women. I don't have a "rule of thumb" worked out for this, yet. I do think part of this is not wearing your husband's clothes (I've known this to happen with pregnant women). Certainly, this also means that skirts and dresses should have a certain pride of place in a woman's wardrobe because these articles are still distinctively feminine dress. I might even go so far as to say that "unisex" clothing should be avoided as much as possible (by men and women). Jeans and t-shirts are casual clothing. They look fine on a construction site, but I wouldn't mind if these things became a bit less of a cultural uniform. I also think women should take an honest look at what is flattering on their body type and, perhaps, seek out some good outside advice. I'm fortunate that my husband seems to have a pretty good eye for this kind of thing. I look rather hideous in sleeveless tops and even most short-sleeved tops. When the weather allows, I try to stick to 3/4 length sleeves because I think this is the most flattering for me. I have a friend who looks great in sleeveless tops and never seems immodest.

Finally, my last question: Is it appropriate? This question addresses a lot of smaller points. Women should dress appropriate to their vocation and age. I don't want moms in habits or nuns in slacks. Women should dress according to the occasion. A cocktail party for your husband's workplace and Sunday Mass require very different clothing choices. Coaching your daughter's soccer team and grocery shopping require different clothing choices.

I wear skirts as much as possible. Sometimes a skirt doesn't seem appropriate to the occasion, but most of my non-skirt days are the result of a small wardrobe. I can't afford to replace pants with skirts when my wardrobe is large parts gifts and hand-me-downs. I don't think that skirts are always more modest, always more feminine, and always more appropriate. I do think that our culture has swung too far along the clothing spectrum in the direction of casual. So, when a skirt and a pair of pants seem equally appropriate and are both available, I will usually pick the skirt. I'm so glad to live in one of the only cities in the U.S. (so says my father-in-law) where suits are the norm for the work week and ball gowns are seen at the opera. I am always so sad to see khakis and polos at Sunday Mass on the men who wear suits all week to Daily Mass. Never mind what some of the other folks are wearing (I really don't need to know which kids have soccer games after Mass). I'd like to see less people wearing work-out clothes on airplanes, and I hope my husband doesn't have to deal with students wearing their pajamas to final exams.

Some women feel called to practice "extreme modesty" to counteract the culture. I guess you could say that I feel called to hold the line on "dressing up." When I appear in public, I want to put my best foot forward. I think that, especially as the mom (someday, I hope) of several children, the last thing I want to show strangers is a worn, bedraggled woman. It's a sign of respect for the others in your environment to be neatly, and nicely dressed. The way I dress affects my attitude towards myself and my work, as well. I don't dust in high heels, but right after Margaret was born I was wearing sweats all the time. Eventually I realized that I felt more depressed when I dressed like a slob.

I've gone on a bit more than I intended, but I may revisit this topic in the future. Please challenge me with your thoughts on the subject!

If you like what I have to say . . .

2007-08-27T16:28:00.003-04:00

. . . check out my husband, who says it even better.

My inner nut

2007-08-27T11:25:00.000-04:00

Robyn had an interesting post yesterday about the city providing anonymity for those who like to let out their inner nut. It got me thinking. I'm an introvert, too, but I absolutely love city life. The busier the better. We live in an urban neighborhood, but it's not super-dense. Compared to New York, it's like a quaint little town (without the quaint). I love taking the kids to Chinatown here in DC. It's not very "China" but it is a lively, bustling neighborhood. People crowd the streets at all hours of the day because there are lots of apartments, lots of businesses, a Metro stop, and some of the city's best restaurants. Plus, it has the library and the noodle man for the kids and a Starbucks for me.

DC is small enough that, unlike Robyn, it is somewhat possible for me to run into someone I know in our Chinatown. But, usually I don't, and Robyn helped me realize that the reason I love Chinatown is that, surrounded by all those people, I am reasonably alone there. In my neighborhood I feel compelled to be a bit social when I encounter people. In Chinatown there are so many people that no one feels like being social--and it's okay.

Robyn's post also made me wonder something else about urban neighborhood dynamics. When she got caught in a rainstorm twenty blocks from home the streets emptied out except for her. She threw a raincover on her stroller and ran. I wondered--where did everyone else go? Why weren't they all twenty blocks from home? I have no idea what Robyn was doing (maybe she'll tell us) but I would bet that all those other people were on the same block as home, or work, or their friend's work, or a shop they knew well and could take refuge in, or a cafe they liked. I know Robyn's neighborhood well and it is a dense, mixed-use area where many of the residents have lived for generations. I wonder how anonymous it actually is once you've lived there a long time. City neighborhoods can seem big and scary when you are the stranger, but it's amazing how quickly you get to know the other faces out on the street.

That's the way to do cities--find a small area you like and get to really know it. Suburbs are anonymous--everyone hides in their cars and their houses (gross generalization, I know, but I can't link back to the post I wrote on this topic a couple weeks ago). When residents of a city try to make it like a suburb by driving everywhere, demanding space for parking, hiking to the suburbs for convenient one-stop shopping, then city neighborhoods remain anonymous, too. Unfortunately, there are very few cities where this kind of urban ideal exists. I hope that changes.

But, even then, I don't have an inner nut waiting to get out.

The new neighborhood

2007-08-24T20:11:00.001-04:00

This is a repost of one that was lost when I deleted the old blog. It provides good background information for topics I hope to address in the future, so I've reposted it. Unfortunately, it's the only post I still had in Word.

According to some definitions we still live on Capitol Hill. The local mother’s group, the local paper, and most realtors all call our address “The Hill.” Others call this area “North Capitol Hill” or, best of all, “SoFlo.” (The ad for our apartment read: “New York feel in a DC Victorian.” I’ll tell you one thing this place doesn’t feel like: New York.) The historic name for our neighborhood is “Old City” or “Near Northeast.” Until Union Station was built the area was full of Irish immigrants living in tenements and dying of typhoid. The new train station destroyed that neighborhood pretty effectively.

Later, the area became one of the premier black neighborhoods in the city. The main thoroughfare, H Street, was once the third-largest commercial stretch in town. In the late fifties and early sixties H Street started to decline due to a drop in the population of the area. The H Street bridge was put in during that time, cutting the neighborhood off from downtown and preventing building for a three-block stretch. In 1968 when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered, riots swept through the city. Days of looting and arson decimated our neighborhood and several others. Some of those areas have recovered but, forty years later, H Street is still lagging a bit. Forty years.

Our family very consciously decided to live in this “transitional” neighborhood. We’ve actually moved in just as gentrification is starting to hit and things aren’t as affordable as they were a year or two ago. Our apartment is beautiful but the other buidings on our side of the block are pretty dilapidated. Across the street are a halfway house (we think) and a couple of vacant properties next to a large schoolyard. The corner is a seedy liquor store. Stretched between the seedy store and a large, historic burned-out building are several more dilapidated properties. The backside of the block is actually pretty nice once you get past the weedy lot behind the burned-out building. Our block is pretty typical. We’ve taken several different routes to church over the last couple weeks and seen the same pattern on block after block north of H Street.

There are encouraging signs of life, too. A big developer is putting in an enormous luxury condo building at one end of H Street. The best coffee shop ever is doing a brisk business despite being one of the only operating commercial entities for blocks. Since we’ve moved in, we’ve seen two vacant lots near us begin rehabilitation. A high-end farmer’s market has managed to pull off a second summer. The new condos, the farmer’s market, and the coffee shop are all wonderful. They’re also full of rich, white people (and temporarily poor white people, like us). The local population and the local culture here are very distinctively black. There’s a lot about that culture that seems pretty downtrodden and depressed at the moment, but there is a certain vibrancy and richness to the history of the black community in this neighborhood. The money is pouring in fast to this section of town and I wonder how many of the local, long-time residents can afford to keep up.

If we were settling in Washington long-term, we would definitely try to buy in this neighborhood. In the meantime, we’re excited to see how things develop over the next year, but I always wonder as we push our fancy double stroller down the street past our new neighbors, “Are we part of the problem?”

Am I a homschooler, yet?

2007-08-21T20:24:00.000-04:00

I read my first book on homeschooling when I was engaged. I read my second book on homeschooling right after that. I read a whole bunch more last summer. My oldest will be three in October. I feel a bit funny calling myself a homeschooler (or I am the home educator in this scenario). Even if I wanted to send Joseph to school, he won't be three in time to go to preschool here. But, in this city, all three-year olds go to school, so I've gotten lots and lots of questions about my school plans for Joseph and, I have to say, it's been pretty fun to start calling ourselves a homeschooling family.

It hit me a month or two ago that I would have a three-year old this Fall and I had a moment of panic. Should I sign him up for stuff? Should he have more structured activities? Should I start keeping logs? The loves-to-plan part of me wanted to organize, plan, evaluate, do, do, do. The other homeschool blogs are all buzzing with curriculum plans and learning room photos. I wanted to join in the fun.

Then I went to a tiny fraction of the Real Learning conference and heard part of Elizabeth's talk which, I think, was entitled, "Don't Make This Harder Than It Already Is." The part I heard cautioned all of us moms against striving too hard for unattainable perfection. Margaret started crying then and I didn't hear the rest. Then I read this on Elizabeth's blog and I've been smiling and dreaming ever since.

Red Cardigan asked us to post today about what kind of homeschoolers we are. If you'll bear with me, I'll describe what I'd like to be. Those of you with small kids can dream and idealize along with me and maybe those of you with older kids can have a good chuckle at my expense (it's okay--I'm still young, and I've had a good day).

The books I've read about home education have run the gamut from hardcore Classical to radical unschooling. I've read about complete, pre-packaged curriculums done at reproduction school desks and I've read about kids who spend their days breeding rabbits.

Classical education bothers me because it seems to focus more on the destination than the journey. Unschooling bothers me because there are beautiful ideas I want to introduce to my children. I believe in active parenting, and I believe that a good teacher can be an invaluable guide. Pre-packaged curricula seems far too restrictive, but I do think that, at least occasionally, kids should be gently made to do things they aren't super excited about.

As I've said before, Elizabeth Foss's Real Learning has influenced my thinking and dreaming more than anything else. I think the idea that most resonated with me was, "Children are educated by their intimacies." We hope, first of all, to have a large family. I think that human relationships are probably the single most important educational tool out there so we'll do our best to have plenty of those in-house. Whenever people ask us why we want to homeschool we answer first, "Socialization." This really throws people off--but we do think children are best socialized in the context of a large family.

Second, we hope to have a lively life of family prayer, living the liturgy, and contact with the sacraments. We have, so far, not given up on our goals of Daily Mass, Morning and Evening prayer from the Divine Office, individual Rosaries, and spiritual reading. We have begun to establish beautiful (I think) liturgical traditions shaped by feast days and seasons with our daily teatime as a chance to engage the liturgical year in some small way each day.

Third, and this is the most challenging, we are trying to build a beautiful and ordered home environment. Household management (chores, if you will) are important as is the arranging of rooms and furniture to suit the individual and communal needs of our family. We hope to always live in a city, which means space will probably always be at a premium. I don't aspire to the luxury of a learning room and, even if we did have the space, I'm not sure I'd want one. I'd rather have books in every room of the house with a few nooks and corners for solitary pursuits. We don't have a television and don't ever plan to. I think a television often shapes the layout of a room more than it should. Our couch and chairs now are arranged for conversation and family prayer. I hope to always have a large kitchen so children can be in and out, involved and at the periphery.

I want excellent literature to be the mainstay of our day--books read aloud and to ourselves; creative projects and explorations inspired by the subjects found in those books. If we're fortunate enough to live in a history-rich area, frequent road trips with Dad to explore would certainly be in order. And nature study--more on this in the future--but certainly I want my children to be critically interacting with the world around them.

So, for this year . . . indulge Joseph's love of reading aloud as much as possible. Break out the drawing paper and crayons while Margaret naps. Let him crack the eggs and mix the pancakes on Sunday morning. Continue with catechism chats and prayers at bedtime (Dad's department these days.)

I am excited for this year. The world is opening up in a big way to my little boy and I am grateful to be with him as he begins to explore it.

Good news

2007-08-20T14:50:00.001-04:00

That is, if you are a fan of my blog.

I've decided to keep going. Many thanks to those of you who left encouraging comments after last week's deletion episode. I spend the remainder of that week with Roby n. It's nice to have a friend who knows you better than you know yourself. We had many good talks and I returned home feeling refreshed and ready to tackle my life again--mouse droppings and all.

My husband and I try to have a virtue-based approach to life. That is, we eliminate rules whenever possible. Rules are needed where virtue has failed.

In the case of blogging, I have determined that writing and reading blogs can be a beneficial activity for me and my family. The virtue I need to cultivate in relation to blogging is temperance, or moderation. I need to discern, each time I go to my computer, whether or not the time is right for me to publish a new post or log into Google Reader. Deleting my blog because I've failed to be temperate is no way to cultivate virtue. Rules are tricky too. I don't want to say, "I will only blog at 2:00 each day," only to find that at 1:00 both kids are peacefully napping. I have made one rule: No writing or reading of blogs on the weekend, except for the kids' blog (sadly neglected of late) which I will make a priority of each weekend because my family really does appreciate it.

With that, I set off anew on my blogging adventure. I think I hear the kids waking up . . .

I did something rash

2007-08-13T14:54:00.000-04:00

I deleted my blog.

We had a rough few days around here. Margaret had a nasty virus. I tried to go to the Real Learning conference and spent the entire time with a screaming baby in the back room. We finally left before lunch after hearing part of one talk. I was feeling frustrated with my husband because he was spending a lot of time on the computer. Then I started to think the computer was taking over our lives, or that maybe we needed two computers so that we could blog simultaneously and visit afterwards.

So I pushed the big, black, "Delete This Blog" button. Then I deleted my google account and all of my google reader subscriptions. I thought that this was a well-considered, prayer-directed move. I thought I would feel peace and freedom. But I just felt a bit nauseous. This morning, over breakfast, I told my husband and he was pretty upset. I didn't expect that.

He made a good argument in favor of blogging: I like it. It's a great creative outlet for me. I love to write and a blog gives me a place to practice. I've done some of my best writing since high school on this blog. At my best, I go through my day giving more careful consideration to all my actions because I'm always wondering what I can write next. I love the blogging community and the 4Real community. The tiny taste of the conference last weekend showed me what a healthy, online community can be. Most, if not all, of the speakers are bloggers as well who give lots of encouragement and practical help to other moms. My husband thinks I actually have something worth saying. I've always said that blogging helps my vocation.

On the other hand . . . I definitely use the computer as an escape. Not a retreat--a place to go for refreshment and renewal so that I can go back to the rest of my life with energy--an escape. When the kids get on my nerves, I click over to Google Reader and look at someone else's kids for awhile. I tune out the kids and their annoying behavior gets worse. I could blog when they are in bed, of course. But that's when my husband is writing on his blog and I don't feel like further cutting into our time together to write on mine. It's not that I don't believe in hobbies but most of my other hobbies are much more inclusive of my children. I don't think my kids are going to learn much by watching me zone out in the blogosphere.

Then there's the element of pride. I want people to notice me. I want people to think I have the coolest blog ever. I want to really have something profound to say. I used to journal, but I stopped because I was too whiny and introspective. I thought blogging helped me to overcome that because I know that I have an audience. But, when I know I have an audience I feel pressure to POST SOMETHING! People are waiting! My fans adore my thoughts!

And, after all this, I think, "It's just a blog! Get over it!"

So, I have resurrected my blog--sort of. All the old posts are gone, sadly. The template is very close to what I had except that the lovely Sedes Sapientia image is distorted. I'll have to work on that. I'm going to think about this for a bit and, in the meantime, if you care to offer your thoughts on the value of blogging, balancing blogging (or other hobbies) with life, or anything else helpful, I would be most appreciative.