Ordinary Time

It's April, the weather might actually be getting warm and I'm thinking about all the spring and summer activities I'm doing. I went from nothing on the calendar to quite a bit on the calendar. The title pretty much sums up what I'll be doing.  First up is May 2 when I'll be at the Fiber and Fabric Craft Festival which is being held in the Chicago area. I'll be demonstrating both weaving and flat pattern drafting at Fine Line Creative Arts Center' s booth. The festival is kind of a big deal in the sewing/crafting world and I'm pretty excited. If you're going, stop by to say hi.  Next, on the weekend of May 15, I'll be flying to New Hampshire to attend the Horses and Healing Symposium where my friends from Athena and AAHEP are the keynote speakers. So, not only do I get to attend an interesting conference, I get to catch-up with friends whom I haven't seen in person for a while.  The next weekend, on the 23rd, I'll be demonstrating weavi...

I've written a lot over the years about homemaking and choosing to stay home to raise and homeschool my children instead of taking a paid job outside the home. For the most part these are older posts, written before social media influencers were even conceived of, much less being such a societal force. And they were definitely written before the whole trad wife thing. Sometimes when I notice older posts are being viewed, I'll go back and read them to see what I said. Sometimes current me needs to chime in, particularly on parenting posts, to explain I know more now and don't listen to clueless younger me.  Recently, I've been seeing those older homemaking posts having a lot more views than is typical. I'm thinking current me needs to go and add some disclaimers lest anyone mistake my writings as being in support of patriarchy and the less than healthy trad wife thing. Because I'm this my thinking hasn't changed, but how I might now go about wording it would ...

All 17 of us yesterday on Easter Technically, the anniversary was yesterday, but it was Easter and all, so we're talking about it today. Twenty years is kind of a milestone for a blog. There seem to be very few left and is definitely older technology. I knew this anniversary was coming up, so I've been doing a lot of thinking about how our life has changed over the past twenty years. When we (and by we I mean J., because I didn't think I wrote well) wrote our first post , we did so only with the intent to keep friends and family updated on our adoption of TM. It's what adoptive families did back then. We had no thoughts past that. And here we are.  This blog has chronicled the life of our family. There have been births, adoptions, and deaths. It has celebrated birthdays and successes and weddings, it has mourned losses, it has followed us into the pit of despair more than once, and followed us as we climbed out of that pit as we became better people and better parents. ...

On Friday, all hope died it seemed. A man some saw as a fulfillment to the promise of a savior was brutally murdered by the religious rulers aided by a brutal government for being a rebel and a threat to the status quo. Because he loved with abandon and everyone regardless of status or gender or worthiness.  On Saturday his followers hid because they were afraid for their lives, and what else do you do when all your hope is killed?  But God. Evil cannot overcome good. It can flourish for a bit, but that isn't the end of the story. Jesus couldn't be contained by death and that changes everything. His first words to Mary were, "Do not be afraid." He tells us to not be afraid. Keep loving others with abandon. Loving them, feeding them, caring for them, insisting on justice for them.  Take your mustard seed of hope and do what you can. Evil will not win. Do not be afraid. There is hope.

A good number of people in our family had read Project Hail Mary and were looking forward to the movie. J. had the day off from work, so we had an extremely rare family movie afternoon to see it. I usually am not a big fan of the movie versions of books that I like. (Some I won't ever go see because I love the books too much to have someone else's idea of the characters overlap my own. Anne of Green Gables is definitely in that category.) So it was with a little trepidation and a fairly low expectation of the whole thing that I went.  And the verdict? I think it was really very good and they stuck to the book as much as possible. There were a few little changes, but some were out of necessity because it is impossible to fit everything from a book into a movie, even a movie that is two and a half hours long. I was most concerned with what they would do with Rocky, but I think Rocky turned out well in the film. Even the family members who hadn't read the book enjoyed it. R. a...

I think it must be a very tough season for families right now based on the number of conversations I've had with quite a few parents. Some families are really struggling right now. When I communicate with them, I can tell they're struggling and feeling scared and probably more than a little hopeless as well. I've been in that spot more than once and it is not a comfortable place to be. I get it. But having been in that spot, I've learned a few things. I learned them the extremely hard way, but I learned them all the same. This is about one of those hard lessons that can be difficult to communicate with parents.  Desperate parents are desperate for a reason. Their child (or children) is struggling, and that struggle often comes out as less than desirable behaviors. Constantly navigating hard or scary behaviors can throw the entire family into chaos. Everyone is on edge, probably fatigued, grumpy, angry, and usually scared out of their wits, though that emotion isn't ...