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the steady.
This weekend Kevin and the kids worked on creating a compost pile. And I worked nearby re-painting an old pair of homemade shutters. My mother crafted them decades ago. (How can I be so old that I can accurately use the word “decades” to describe my own life?) And for some reason those two things made me miss our moms. Mine and Kevin’s. The mothers we can no longer call on the phone to share the story of simple Saturday projects outside with the family. I still have a long list of “why’s?” for God. And when it hits me, when it trips me in the middle of…
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the early stages of a TLC television program
There must be something about the style of parenting that Kevin and I employ at this house. I don’t know exactly where to point the finger. But it appears that with our last two children, we are creating hoarders. Finn has spent four years obsessed with carrying things. Piles of things. Little things. Soft things. Unimportant things. Stashed in homemade bags. Loaded into her metal grocery cart. (Perhaps the grocery cart purchase only added fuel to the fire.) And now her teeny tiny brother is following her lead. The kid hoards everything. He’s not even that particular about his stash – the rules seem to be simple. 1. The items…
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it takes a little convincing
Our church has recently begun an event for women called Refresh. It was held a few weeks ago. I had to be convinced to attend the meeting. Not really because I didn’t want to go. That wasn’t it. I’d had it on my calendar for the last three months. I did want to go. However. The day hadn’t gone as planned. I didn’t think school would take quite as long as it did that day. I wanted to finish a project I’d been trying to finish for two months – the bed skirt. (Still not really completed correctly, in fact.) Then life handed me an excuse because Kevin was returning…
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An Open Letter to Disney Writers
Dear Disney Teen and Tween Show Writers, Stupidity isn’t cute. Creating characters who pretend to be morons to attract the opposite sex is degrading. Being ignorant is not funny. Laugh tracks are unbearable. A television show should not make me feel as if I am losing brain cells whilst merely walking through a room during an episode of said TV show. Remember the commercial from the 1980’s? The one with the frying pan and the sizzling egg? “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?” That’s what your currently popular series are like. Why are twelve-year-olds and sixteen-year-olds revealing more skin than a baby getting its…
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Outdoor Hour Challenge. VII.
We’re about to wrap up our “getting started” segment of our Outdoor Hour Challenge. (We are on Number 9 of the 10 steps to getting started!) And that really makes me happy! It’s not that I haven’t enjoyed the first ten steps to get us started. I have. It’s just that I subscribe to the newsletters for the website and each week super appealing outdoor ideas come across my screen and I want to to do them instead. But this form of discipline, of patience, is something that is lacking in my life and in our homeschool routine so sticking to the plan is pretty vital practice for me right…
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Love
Love. It just isn’t the one big thing. That giant gift with the fat price tag doesn’t earn you a free pass. I can’t buy my children a really cool game for the Wii one Saturday night and then not speak to them all week. And when they wonder where dinner is on Tuesday evening I just point to the Wii game. That’s ludicrous. I can’t read Piper six chapters of a novel when she’s four and then never pick up another book until she’s eight. “What? Another reading of ‘Guess How Much I love You?’ Nah. I read you six chapters last year.” That’s crazy talk. I’m learning that…
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Craft Projects? Go!
I didn’t wait long. I just couldn’t. After I conquered the stars, I just had to jump right in. I grabbed a favorite quote from my pinterest board labeled “words on the walls” and gathered what supplies I had on hand. (By the way, why aren’t the pinterest boards in alphabetical order? Wouldn’t that make more sense?) Anyway. I gathered a piece of foam core we had in the craft closet, red burlap left over from creating a poorly designed but basically usable bed skirt and some cute ribbon. And glue and scrapbook paper and this crazy spray fixative I found on our shelf that works really well but smells…
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the stars.
The stars were holding me back. No, that’s not some artsy poetic beginning to a deep blog post. The stars were literally delaying my progress. A basket of assorted stars. Probably twenty of them. Maybe more. Small. Medium. Blue. Red. Rustic. Metal. Tin. Sitting on the red bench in our hall since the day we moved in. I’d been telling myself since that day that I was not allowed to begin any new projects until those stars had been displayed. Every last one of them. I’d work on a few here and there. Before breakfast. After nap. The kids would see me wandering around – hammer in hand, nail in…
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and I hope it’s always true . . .
I wore this headband this weekend. My six-year-old son made it for me a few weeks ago when I was sick. It’s crafted from a waistband of a pair of bear-print pajama pants that he outgrew. And I didn’t stay home all day. I actually left the house. Ran errands. And it was both an easy decision and a hard one. But this is what I decided. The message to my son that he matters, that the works of his hands are precious to me, that message matters more to me than what strangers may think of my fashion sense. I mess up. All the time. But my hope is…
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Outdoor Hour Challenge. VI.
This week, it was cold. And a few things delayed the prompt beginning of our walk for our weekly Outdoor Hour Challenge. (A filthy wretched poop in a swimmie. Not because we’d been swimming, but because Fox saw the swimmie had Nemo on it and asked to wear it. And I was thinking no farther ahead than that moment so I consented.) I actually didn’t feel like trekking out. It was a hard sell this week – to me. But although delayed and sort of half heartily, I put on gloves, a scarf and a huge sweater and headed out of doors. The pressure of children knowing our schedule and…
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Wilde Words.
Maybe it’s because he’s my baby. Or maybe it’s because he’s legitimately adorable. (That’s the one I’m going with.) But lately it seems that Otto has become the golden child at our house or something. There isn’t a human being residing under this green-shingled roof that is not completely in love with the two-year-old who stomps up the steps in hand-me-down black cowboy boots while wearing plaid leg warmers on his arms. Remember how he was pretty much a completely non-verbal family member? (The only one of his kind, as a matter of fact.) And remember how I decided to not be worried because I knew it would all work…
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pointing at myself.
I have sixty-eight drafts resting in the unknown regions of my blog’s set-up pages. There are so many ideas I want to write about, explore and share but sometimes I just type out the words but never press “publish”. I am finding it more and more difficult every day to balance the type of mother to a teenage daughter that I wish I could be with the type of mother to a teenage daughter that I actually am being. This is unbelievably hard work. We have been in the beginning stages of forming a new Shepherding Group with some fellow church-attenders. It’s been a desire of mine and Kevin’s for…
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Outdoor Hour Challenge. V.
We’re up to lesson number seven in our Outdoor Hour Challenge. Despite the picture that may imply otherwise, the kids are still completely engaged. And – equally exciting – are coming to expect this Nature Walk as part of our Tuesday routine. This week we took our stroll through the woods surrounding our house. We practiced being quiet and listening. We looked for signs of birds. We spotted another bird’s nest and witnessed quite a few birds enjoying our new feeder. And then we headed in with a handful of items for our collecting mantle – a pair of pine cones and some conjoined acorn lids. Our assignment was to begin…
