This is Blaire, captured via iPhone throwing her first drama queen tantrum. She was full of angst about not getting to eat the wormy pear she snagged outside. The good news is that Blaire has a Daddy who loves her, so she won’t be doing much more of this. Limited time release and all that. Of course she will be doing a great many more things for years to come, but sufficient unto the day is the trouble thereof!
Many of us come from backgrounds of rigid discipline and high expectations. Others of us may not have ever experienced house rule, and have no idea how to set them up for our children. It is easy for us to be in one ditch or the other – either all law and no grace, or all “grace” and no law. But the point is really to be somewhere in the middle. How do we do this?
Continue reading ‘Ungraceful Parenting’
The weather is changing, revealing that there are not any clothes for the kids. For reals. None. Turns out kids grow three or four inches of leg over the summer. The clothes that we have been wearing have no life left. They should all simply be destroyed, and we should start over. We are trying. I ran to Old Navy on the first cold day and discovered that they have no children’s clothes right now. Ack. So I ended up grabbing a bunch of cheap t-shirts at WalMart for the girls and did an assortment of appliqués on them. I’m hoping these buy us a little time!
I also finished knitting a little sweater for my niece Zoe, a marvelous little person whom we just got to meet this weekend. She looks quite nice in it, although it is hard to tell what she thinks of it!
“To the traveler’s eyes, the motel is dead and useless, a roadside tragedy, like the remains of some unfortunate animal in a ditch – glimpsed, mourned, and forgotten before the next bend in the road. But to the lean boy with the dark skin and the black hair struggling in the thick brush behind the pool, the motel is alive, and it is home.”
I know I am biased. I just am. Can’t help it. When your brother writes a great book, people just expect you to like it. And I do. But I like it more than that. I like it so much that I am willing to tell you all that you absolutely need this book. Get it! Don’t live another minute without it!
The thing that I love about Nate’s books (all of them) is his sense of place. He writes stories that are mysterious, exciting, and provoking, but they all occur here. In our very own backyards. In our very own country. With our very own people.
This isn’t an accident. Continue reading ‘Get in to Ashtown’
Horrible quality picture, I know. And yet. It just sums Blaire up so well. I especially like how this action shot captured her chubby little arm in the midst of a full throttle Cheerio toss that went down only this morning. I was sweeping in the kitchen at the time. It isn’t for no reason that “Busy” is the nick-name that stuck to this one. She answers to it too. If you can’t find her, just yell “Busy! Where are you?” and she will come right out of whichever bathroom she was in, and tell you cheerfully (and indecipherably) all about splashing in the potty. “Good news! The door to the bathroom was open again! ”
I have never had a child get so committed to potty splashing. The fact that we have three bathrooms now adds to it. I think also the fact that two three -year-olds are in and out of said three bathrooms all day. Add to that the fact that Blaire is apparently part mountain goat: scaling tables, laundry piles, and chairs in no time. She could be on any floor at any time, getting into any potties. She’s fast, that one.
We all know that women are pretty much the worst at getting tangled up in heated, personally charged arguments about things (things being pretty much everything pertaining to children). Someone comes along to say that breastfeeding is the way the truth and the life, and people start throwing stink bombs. Someone barges through saying that epidurals are the only answer to the problem of pain, and before you know it, churchwomen will be driving cars with “Ban Sally from Mothering” bumper stickers. Some poor woman makes a comment at a baby shower about how she is scheduling her baby’s feedings to try to get more sleep, and women will begin making pointed comments about baby wearing and co-sleeping, and when the next la leche league meeting is. People start using words that are too big for the situations and start alienating Christian sisters over whatever they have decided is a monumental issue.
But here is the real big issue: Christians are not allowed to have hot button issues which they use to stir up trouble. Sure, you may care about things. Yes, you should have reasons for why you are doing what you are doing.
Continue reading ‘On Women, Divisiveness, and Hobby Horses’
Lately life has seemed so very slow and so very wild at the same time. It is almost like we have found a way to putter around in a huge foggy cloud of intensity. Lovely summery days, with a background of tons to do. We’ve been doing swimming lessons and getting ear infections. We’ve been trying to clean the house, while magically bombing it out. The children are doing great, growing into new needs, new discipline problems, new hilarious plans and games. I love this life, even if I can’t keep up with it.
Yesterday while I was working on the laundry downstairs, the kids hauled the play table up the stairs, flipped it over, and launched Lina down the stairs riding on it. I think they were all surprised by the speed of her descent, and I was a little surprised that I had not noticed them warming up for this. They were certain that they could control the next ride better. I was certain that there should not be a next ride.
I have had a great many days in a row where I can’t tell what I did at the end of the day. I am pretty sure I did something. I didn’t sit down that I can remember. These are the kind of days when my husband tells me that I was being fruitful, even if it doesn’t look productive. A fruit tree doesn’t move things from an in-basket to an out-basket all day. It is not in the business of ticking off boxes on a to-do list. Sometimes the business of being fruitful is standing in the rain, holding on to your branches in a wind storm, or simply providing shade. Every day is not an apple harvest day. Every day is part of a process, part of a journey towards fruit. Your whole life is part of a fruit bearing work, but today was just a wind storm.
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