Ordinary Time

It's been quite the last 48 hours. I'm tired. J. is even more tired. R. is tired. Probably my older children are tired from playing parent for two days. Two nights ago, Monday night, R. surprised us with a big seizure. There was nothing that would indicate one was coming. J. moved her into our room, hoping we would sleep. We did, fitfully, because she proceeded to have three more big seizures during the night. Tuesday morning she was a little dazed as is to be expected, and then had one more big seizure. I thought perhaps that was it, and had her sitting in a chair under a blanket to begin to recover. Of course, the five minutes I leave the room to go to the bathroom, R. starts in on her psychotic behavior, trying to throw anything within reach. I was called by children who were doing a great job of removing any potential projectiles. It looked as though life was heading south pretty quickly so I called J., admitted I had no margin, and then burst into sobs when he asked if...

Happiness is Books on the hold shelf Hot cups of tea Projects to knit Happiness is No piles of laundry Bills that are paid Time to just sit Happiness Is horses to play with ev'ry day And Happiness is Three hundred bales of hay

"And then it hit me. The Samaritan didn't need to change roads to encounter God. He was walking his road, minding his business, when God brought someone into his path. And then he had a choice: notice and do something, or ignore and move along." (p. 64) This quote is from a book I finished recently called Invited: The Power of Hospitality in an Age of Loneliness by Leslie Verner. I liked the book and recommend it, though it still plays into my vague angst about our house being barely large enough for the people who live here much less adding other people. But this isn't really about hospitality, the quote I began with just happened to be in a book about hospitality. Instead I've been chewing on the less than... gracious, Christian, humble, loving, encouraging, kind (you fill in the blank, they all fit)... comment from John MacArthur in regards to Beth Moore's ministry. If you've missed it, just search those two names and you'll immediately have mo...

Well, we'll see how far I get. If I hit publish and things seem as though I left mid-sentence, I probably did. J. is out of town for the weekend at a college improve group reunion. Whenever one of us leaves for a night or two, it is always dicey as to how R. is going to react. Currently, as I sit here typing, with everyone else tucked into bed, she is throwing toys down the hallway. We've already covered lying down while refusing to rest her head and screaming at me, so I'm just waiting to see what turn we take next. I really don't want to drive her to the ER, but I will because I now have a firm zero tolerance policy for all psychotic episodes.  H. went to her special needs youth group for the third time this evening. The first couple of times she was a bit confused as to what she was doing and why. This evening she came home absolutely raving about what a wonderful time she had and telling me about all the fun and crazy games she played. I am so stinking happy tha...

I have so many different ideas roiling around in my head, but not enough clarity of thought to actually begin to write about any one of them. There's the whole "Go home" statement by a high profile conservative Christian in regards to women in ministry. I'm feeling the need for (yet) another post about the importance of play and early learning skills for children regardless of their age. A post  dealing with sibling rivalry is taking up space in a corner of my brain. I could probably write another diatribe against video schooling and the importance of interacting with live teachers. And those are just the ones I can think of at the moment. It's busy inside my head, but not terribly coherent. So instead of something thoughtful and thought provoking, instead I'll share that my grain mill motor arrived back home today. I should amend that. A grain mill motor arrived today, but it was not the same one that I sent in for repairs. Instead, I received a brand new o...

You all know I love to read and talk about books and get recommendations for new books. So when I saw a notice on my Facebook account mentioning that I like might a certain group about women who read great books, I was intrigued. I thought what the heck, and clicked join. Well. I may have to leave the group. Not because the group is bad or disappointing, but because I have spent far too much time today looking up book titles that I didn't know about but sounded intriguing. I don't know about you, but I cannot not look at a picture of a stack of books and not want to know what each book is about. I am also extremely thankful for Amazon reviews, because reading them helps me to narrow my want to read book list down considerably. There are just some things I won't or can't read: too much violence, too depressing, anything having to do with the Holocaust (it will trigger nights of horrible nightmares... I've learned the hard way), or characters that are unlikeable. ...

Thank you for all of your prayers! My mother's surgery was successful and the surgeon was pleased. He was able to repair the perforation and also avoid a colostomy bag. The biggest concern right now is just pain management, so continued prayers for that would be greatly appreciated. We are still unsure for how long she will be in the hospital, but I know my mom is really, really hoping to be discharged to her home. She is a homebody and being away from home and her dogs for six weeks has been terribly difficult. Now I hope she can focus on getting better and be able to put all of this behind her. And I will start breathing again. And perhaps regain some of my patience which is a limited commodity in the best of times. If you had seen my little scene with R. tonight, you would have knocked me right off any pedestal you might have been tempted to put me on. I live with myself, so no pedestal in my mind. I just sometimes get the impression that other people think I am more saint-lik...

While we all enjoyed our fall break week last week, the down side is that the first day back to a regular schedule can be sketchy. In the great scheme of things, the morning actually went pretty well. Everyone did math, with a limited amount of kvetching, but everyone also acknowledged that it was difficult to start back again. As a bone, I said we would put off doing grammar until Wednesday. (Tomorrow is our co-op day.) There was much rejoicing. So we're back to our regular school schedule which we'll keep up until Thanksgiving week. Everyone (including myself) is feeling refreshed from the break, so it shouldn't be too difficult to make it to Thanksgiving. It's not actually that far, really. [Insert deep breathing over the things which will need to be done when it does arrive. There, I'm better.] But really, only part of my brain has been on school and children and house stuff. The other part of my brain has been on my mother. Tomorrow morning, she will be h...

Remember those crab apples I wrote about last week? How I was going to try turning them into crab apple jelly? Well, the whole adventure was a bust. First, I didn't have a chance to get the original bowl of crab apples that I had picked cooked. They sat on the kitchen counter for several days, getting less and less appetizing. Well, to humans at least; the fruit flies found them more and more irresistible. Into the garbage they went. Not quite ready to give up the whole enterprise, I took advantage of a beautiful afternoon to go pick some more and give it another try. I mean, the entire tree is covered in them. How terrific would it be to get a bunch of jelly from them? Picking them was the most successful part. Armed with a large bowl of crab apples, I set to work doing the next step. According to the recipe I was using, I was to take off the stem, cut off the blossom end, and cut them in half. First of all, have you ever tried to get a step off a crab apple? It cannot be do...

I'm not sure I'll have a lot to say this week, since I seem to have spent the majority of the week doing laundry. It's all caught up now... well, as caught up as it ever is. Let's say it is in a far more manageable state than it was at the beginning of the week. Well, that was true until about three hours ago when we discovered that R. had overflowed the toilet upstairs which led to all sorts of towels being used to clean it up. And the water started to come down through the dining room ceiling as well. Fun times, people.  And to make it even more fun, there seems to be some other water pipe drainage issues that J. will go down to the crawl space to investigate once he returns from the hardware store. I will admit to this all giving me a very unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach, mainly because I'm afraid it will turn into a very unpleasant feeling in my checkbook. R. is now only allowed to use the bathroom with an adult to supervise. Which is going to b...

Along with doing the grocery shopping today, I made a quick trip to the library and stopped in at a local thrift store. Can I just say how much I love libraries and thrift stores? I'm sure you all know that I love libraries, because, well, books. Many, many books that are free for the taking. It feels so positively frivolous to walk up and down the shelves of a library, and checking out books just because something about them caught my eye. Sometimes I end up loving these randomly chosen books, sometimes I start them and put them aside, and sometimes I don't ever end up reading them. But that's okay, because eventually they all go back to the library and a new stash is brought home. There are no oughts or shoulds, just the sheer joy of experimenting with all sorts of vastly different books. On the rare occasions when I'm in a book store looking to buy a book, I am almost frozen because the choice of what to buy feels so much more weighty. Which book do I decide to spe...

In our once a week writing workshops, one of the things we've been working on is ways to generate ideas about what to write. One of the techniques that everyone has enjoyed has been writing from a list. The idea being that a list is created about something, and then later, the student looks back and chooses one of those items to write more about. Here are my two lists for today. Things I do not Like 1. Waking up to the words, "Mommy, there is poop on the floor." 2. Driving 2 1/2 hours round trip for a ten minute orthodontist appointment. 3. Seeing a dear, older friend so significantly slowing down. 4. Doing seven loads of laundry in one day, and still having at least five more to do in order to catch up. 5. Children who put clean clothes down the laundry chute because they didn't put them away in the first place and couldn't tell which was which. (Though it should have been evident by the fact they were still folded.) 6. Mice in the house. 7. Cats who ...

We are on fall break this week. When I was doing the planning, I knew that K. had an orthodontist appointment on the 14th, and since it was in Chicago, I knew it was going to be a multi-hour extravaganza. I also knew from experience, that I would be ready for a short break about this time, too. Boy, was I right. We've managed to keep up with our schedule, but a fact that most non-homeschoolers don't know is that it is nearly impossible to keep up with house stuff while homeschooling. Even those of us who are pretty relaxed with our schedule find it challenging to do both homeschooling and house. There just isn't time. So that coupled with the fact that you are using your house all the time, adding to the chaos, makes it even more difficult. This is where I was at last Friday, but then I was gone all day Saturday, Sunday was busy getting ready for H.'s party, and yesterday I was gone all day again at K.'s orthodontist appointment and visiting a dear friend. Do yo...

Today is H.'s birthday, though we celebrated yesterday because everyone could be home. She chose cha ca for her birthday dinner, which is a Vietnamese dish with catfish, dill, and rice noodles. I added some dumplings because I know she loves those, and she chose pecan pie for dessert. A slightly odd combination, but it made her happy. For her birthday breakfast this morning she veered away from the traditional donuts and asked for cereal instead. Yes, cereal is such a rare commodity here that people ask for it for birthdays. Opening gifts I can't believe she is 17. Didn't we just bring her home? It sure feels like it. This is also the age I've been dreading just a little bit. It means that this year I get to work on meeting with a lawyer to figure out the process of gaining guardianship before she turns 18. I kind of hate that we have to go through all sorts of legal stuff just to continue to be effective parents to a child who clearly still needs to be ...

I spent the day with my two good friends, P. family mom and W. family mom. We decided that we needed some time away to catch up and just be together. The trouble is we live so far away from each now that either I'm driving for over two hours or they are. We tried something different today. We all ended up driving and met at a very cool knitting and spinning store . We spent a long time ogling the yarn and wool, wishing we had boatloads of time to make beautiful things, then all opted to go with the extremely simple, yet satisfying project of knitting a cowl with this amazing yarn made of a mix of alpaca fiber and silk . It is so soft. Truly it's one of the softest yarns I've ever held. So, we are now beginning our own little private knit-a-long. As I work on it I'll show you pictures. I also picked up some new roving to spin into yarn since I'm almost done with the blue that I'm working on. After our knitting excursion, we headed into town to lunch. Well, firs...

If you've been reading here for a few years, then you might remember the summer of compulsive canning as we waited for news that we would be allowed to bring R. and Y. home. I learned something about myself that summer. When stressed to a significant degree, I tend to combat it by letting loose my inner prepper (whom I usually keep well under wraps), and store up food for the coming disaster. It's like I move into hunter-gatherer-early homesteader mode, and my mind perceives the cause of significant stress as a threat to our food supply. I don't know why, it's not as though I have a history of hunger in my background. It's probably some genetic wiring coupled with a vastly over-active imagination. Whatever the cause, I deal with stress by stocking up on food. With that in mind, hear what I did the past two days. Yesterday, I went on a bit of a grocery shopping binge, stocking up on lots of different food and paper supplies. It was all things we could use and need...

Here are some tips I've picked up that I thought people would find helpful. 1. When using homegrown eggs, it is probably a good idea to crack them each into a small bowl before adding to your pan of corned beef hash. This will save you from ruining the corned beef hash by accidentally dropping a rotten egg into it. 2. Be sure to eat a decent lunch every day, otherwise when you do accidentally dump a rotten egg on your almost made dinner, you can move on and not have it become the end of the world. 2. Dried beet chips, like kale chips, are delicious and healthy(ish) salt and oil delivery system. I made a bunch today and children were fighting over them. Probably it is not the best choice to take to an appetizer and desert potluck. My children will be happy that there are more to fight over. 3. Some days it's okay to cry uncle, and let the children have a day off school so that you can make order out of chaos in the rest of the house. 4. Don't leave a frame of honey...

The other evening, J. and I sat down to watch "The Biggest Little Farm", a new documentary that is out. I enjoyed it, but have a few mixed feelings about it. I loved that the couple took two hundred acres of depleted, arid ground, and brought it back to life. I loved the interplay of the nature's systems at work. I loved the beautiful place they created. I loved the sheep. But I also felt as though it was a little disingenuous. While the couple did a lot of work, it wasn't just one pair of people at work. First, they had investors which allowed them to do a lot of major earth moving and building to get things going. (I am fully aware that my annoyance at this aspect is totally sour grapes on my part. I completely own it.) Second, they had a lot of volunteers (staff? it is unclear), helping on the farm. It's not quite the image of lone homesteaders creating a beautiful farm out of nothing that the trailer kind of makes it seem. Finally, there was the naivete. I...

I promised I would take a picture of some of the artwork that children have been making around here recently. First comes K., who has been doing some amazing free hand dinosaur drawings on his own. The other pieces of artwork comes from the art classes at our co-op. Here is H.'s (remember this is the child, who, 7 years ago could not draw and when she started could only copy what others had done): A painting by L. And the beginnings of a ladybug drawing by G.

Some days... okay, many days recently... by the end of them, I'm all out of energy and patience. I love my children, but some of them require pretty constant parenting. I'm done in. As in so much in life, it is not the actual task a child is trying to do, it is the emotional component that is so time consuming and exhausting. Learning fractions isn't so much about doing the math as it is learning to feel frustration. Doing long division word problems isn't so much about doing the math as it is allowing yourself to make a mistake. Learning the past tense of verbs isn't so much about learning grammar as it is learning to not escape into your own head whenever something seems too hard. Coming when your mother calls you is not about obedience but learning that it is safe to come when a parent calls you. Each of these kinds of scenarios require talking about what is really going on. And then, if there is still time, we can actually get to the task that triggere...

"Hospitality is not for the called or gifted. It's not for the gregarious extroverts with huge houses and overflowing bank accounts. And it's not for the people with angelic children, respectable roommates, or perfect marriages. Contrary to those spiritual gift tests that catalog hospitality as a special talent, nowhere in the Bible is it named as such. Instead, hospitality is a command (see Romans 12:13; 1 Peter 4:9). Hospitality is for everyone." (p. 114 from Invited: The Power of Hospitality in an Age of Loneliness by Leslie Verner) I used to be all about hospitality. When we lived in the Big Ugly House it was easy. I had a dining room which could seat my entire family plus the same number of guests. I had a kitchen which made it easy to prepare large amounts of food. I had a guest room and a guest bathroom separated from the other bedrooms which we used many, many times for both short and long stays of a wide variety of guests. We hosted international students...

Given how terribly rotten last Tuesday was, I was a little hesitant about this Tuesday. I wasn't 100% sure that R. wouldn't walk into the space that had such unpleasant memories from last week and melt down. Thankfully, she was fine, and everyone enjoyed their day at co-op. R. colored in her coloring book (a lot, which is a special treat) and played a bit with her Goldilocks and the Three Bears house play set that we brought. She was pretty tired when we got home, though. And as all parents know, an overly tired child can be very difficult to put to bed and actually have sleep. There were some dicey moments getting her into bed a little bit ago. Everyone else continues to enjoy their classes at co-op, and I continue to be very impressed with the families and the teachers. They have embraced my children, even the ones who can be a bit more challenging to teach. I keep meaning to take some pictures of some of the artwork that has been coming home. (Maybe I'll remember f...