Ordinary Time

Last night, J. and I went to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in their Land of Hope and Dreams concert. This was a huge bucket item list for J., and was made possible thanks to TM and JH buying him the tickets. I got to go because it's not as much fun to go to a concert by yourself.  I enjoyed the concert and was glad I was able to go. I need to also say that I did not fall asleep. My children will be relieved to hear that. I also need to explain that statement even though I will not be able to use the story as one of my ultimate 'two truths and a lie' statements. You see, in my early 20's, before J. and I were married, we, along with my future sister-in-law, went to see the Violent Femmes and Elvis Costello. I never got to Elvis Costello because I fell asleep during the Violent Femmes. True story. I'm very good at sleeping. I don't think I've been to a concert since until last night. You can now understand my children's concern that there mig...

You know that I am always going on and on about the importance of reading to your children. I am 100% certain that this one thing alone builds a scaffolding for later learning that cannot be replicated in other ways. Still, I am always happy to come across articles and research supporting the benefits of reading out loud to children. In this particular article, the research suggests that it also supports social skills .  What I found interesting was the fact that there were benefits whether or not parents stopped to ask questions about the content. I'm not sure if these questions were to confirm comprehension or ask leading (or perhaps not leading) questions regarding the plot. It still confirmed my suspicion that children are capable of gaining a great amount of benefit just from listening. I think sometimes parents make things too complicated when really they just need to read the story.  Another study I would love to see done involved reading to older children... even high ...

I've been doing things, really. I have all 900+ ends threaded on the loom. I have drafted and made a skirt and T-shirt, and am now working on drafting a pattern for a peasant blouse. There are over 600 hexagons sitting in a bag waiting for me to start playing around with them to see how they'll fit together in a quilt. I have a sweater cast on knitting needles. And for none of these things do I have pictures to of which to share with you.  Here is what I do have. The beginnings of my real hardanger project.  And Timmy the sheep who I sheared yesterday.  I was able to completely shear Timmy in less time than it took to only halfway shear Fred. My hunches were correct. Fred's wool is so thick, stretchy, and full of lanolin that he is really hard to shear. Plus, his wool is black and his skin is black. For anyone who has knitted with black yarn, you know exactly how difficult it is to see what you're doing. I also sheared Timmy in a different way so that I had better angle...

As a parent to adopted children of color, I have learned that listening to the voices of adoptees and to the voices of Asians has helped me understand what my children may experience. Sometimes it is hard because what those voices tell us isn't always what we want to hear. We like to be the good guys in the story, but we also need to hear where we (or the majority culture) has fallen short. It is humbling, but necessary in order for me to be the best parent I can to my children.  This is also true for people with disabilities. I feel fortunate that I had a friend with another mom when I had two young children. This friend also happened to use a wheelchair due to childhood polio and was a disability advocate. I learned a lot from her and I am grateful for both her friendship and my education. I also know now that I should not have put the onus of education my clueless self on her, but should have also worked to educate myself. But you don't know what you don't know.  Which b...

Today the plan was to get the rest of the sheep sheared, or technically rooed because we didn't think any shears would be involved. Well, the best laid plans and all that. We decided to start with Fred because he is the biggest and I knew he has the thickest wool, so it seemed wise to start with him.  As of this afternoon, we now have one and a half sheep sheared. I think the wiser course of action would have been to practice some more with the smaller sheep and save Fred for last. I remember last year the shearer being really surprised at how difficult it was to shear Fred, so I knew it wouldn't be a walk in the park. But good gravy that sheep has incredible think, sproingy, and greasy wool! By the end of both mine and Fred's patience, I was able to trim the blanket (the wool on his back and sides that I will save to process), and had started on the britch which didn't need to be quite so careful with because it was going to go to the garden for mulch. But we were both...

I spent some time talking with an adult child today who needed to vent about trying to use AI to do a task at work. I won't go into the why's because that's not my story, but I am fully up for listening to venting about AI, so was all in. I'm not even going to try to explain what this child was working on because I only vaguely understand it, but there were a couple of things that stood out from our conversation and I haven't been able to get them out of my head since.  The bottom line as I see it, is that AI is really nothing more than a sassy teen who is smarter than is good for them, but hates to work harder than necessary. Why do I say this? Well, if you give Frederick or Charles or Pierre or whatever name the not-human-but-plays-one-on-the-internet set of connections has been named, if you give it instructions that are too long, Pierre (as we'll call it for simplicity's sake) will do the instructions, but the output will be wrong. When you asked Pierre ...

It seems there is a new homeschooling group around that people need to be aware of.... even if you are not a homeschooler. And that would be you need to know about it and not in a good way. I'm not going to link to it. If you want to do your own research, Google can find it for you. And I'm all about doing your own research.  So this particular group is The Homeschool Freedom Directory. It wants to gather a list of businesses and professionals who are willing to sign their pledge to get on their list. Which you then pay a fee for them to do direct marketing to their audience. The website uses phrases such as "connecting homeschoolers with businesses who support their values" and "wanting to bring the homeschool community together and make it stronger."  There seemed to be a few code words in there, so I looked at the pledge. First, it is very faith based. Clue number one that these weren't my people. And if you haven't been around the blog for very l...

I had dinner with a friend tonight which was lovely, but also means I have no energy to write anything of substance. So enjoy my small gardening accomplishment from today. Now just 60+ feet of garden to go. 

Let's talk about what is normal in parenting children with a trauma history. And just to remind you, all adoption involves trauma. Yes, even infant adoption. Ready?  It is normal for the child to have an immature regulatory system. Things that children with stable backgrounds weather easily are difficult.  It is normal for this regulatory system to be dysregulated much of the time. It is normal for a perpetually dysregulated child to melt down or rage over what seem to be trivial things. It is normal for the child to be non-compliant. It is normal for the child to lie and steal.  It is normal for the child to be functional in settings which don't involve the parents. It is normal for children to be more dysregulated after being functional in the non-home setting.  It is normal for the child to act both younger than their chronological age and also more sophisticated.  Please note that I did not say all children who have experienced trauma will behave like this. ...

Yesterday J. and I were each busy doing various things so R. took herself off to her room. I was aware of her digging around in the bin of Duplos. I didn't think anything of it, as she'll often dig around looking for one of the few favorite figures that she likes to carry around. What I wasn't expecting was when she came into the studio to show me what she had built.  This, in case you can't tell, is a house (zoo?) with different rooms for her favorite Duplo animals. I think perhaps I was speechless for a moment and then double checked that this was her own creation. I was probably speechless again for a moment.  While R. is very good at entertaining herself, she has about five different activities that she enjoys and will play with for hours. I try very hard to get her to switch things up throughout the day, but it is really just a theme and variation. We have never seen her choose to build something without direct instruction and support. I honestly didn't think t...

Spring means the stinging nettles start growing. Since we have a lot of stinging nettle around here, it makes sense to make use of the free food. Plus, they are really, really good for you. G. offered to do the cooking if I did the harvesting. I own gloves, so I was more than happy to agree. We decided to try nettle ravioli with nettle pasta and nettle filling.  The nettle patch after I harvested a lot of nettle because I didn't think to take a before picture. They need to be blanched before using them because the heat removes the sting. And like so many greens, what looks like a lot to start with becomes not quite enough after cooking.  G. making the ravioli with the nettle pasta dough. I had G. use semolina flour instead of the white flour the recipe called for.  The finished ravioli. They are boiled and then have a garlic and butter sauce put on them.  The inside. They were filled with a combination of nettles, marscapone cheese, and cooked potatoes. While they we...

It has been a busy week around here. I had three different fiber classes at Fine Line this week. They were interesting; I'm glad I was able to take them; I'm really glad I don't have three every week. To keep this ship running smoothly, I really need to be home more. The portable sheep fencing is working well. We've (well, J. and G.) have already moved it once. The sheep love having access to grass.  I think the wool break in the sheep that haven't been sheared is now to a point where we can roo them. I think we'll try Fred tomorrow. L. has started training for her job as a deck hand on a boat on the Fox River. Today was CPR and first aid training.  G. and Y. are still on the hunt for summer jobs. J. received a very, very nice early birthday present from TM and JH of tickets to see Bruce Springsteen in concert. J. was left a little speechless.  On top of having three classes which had me out of the house this week, I also had a Girl Scout troop here all afternoo...

Let's talk about expectations. I'm going to discuss them in terms of parenting, but if you are not a parent, I think it will be pretty easy to transfer the message into your life as well. This is because the simple message is that it is our expectations that get us into trouble and make us unhappy much of the time. Actually, to be precise, that would be our unmet expectations. I communicate with a lot of parents and frustration and feeling frustrated is often reported as a significant problem. This frustration often takes the form of anger or yelling. When people picture what they think they will be like as parents, being the angry yelling type rarely is imagined. I've lost track of the number of times I have heard a parent say, "I never thought I would be a yeller." It's not how parents really want to be, yet they still find themselves doing it. What's going on? Let's just get one false explanation out of the way. It's not because they are bad par...

K. has been taking pictures the past couple of days. 

I'm pretty sure that not a single one of you who read my Fiber Monday posts stops and thinks to themselves, "Gee, it's a shame that E. doesn't have enough projects to fill her time. Maybe she should learn something new." But yes, the woman who has at least eight different projects she is working on concurrently, did indeed sign up for a class to learn something new. At least this skill doesn't require large pieces of specialized equipment.  My Monday post is late tonight because I was in a class to learn hardanger, which is a Norwegian form of cutwork embroidery. I had actually done some years and years ago, but couldn't really remember much about it. Here is my first practice piece that I came home with tonight.  I put it on the green book so you could better see where the cutwork was.  Here's a closer picture.  Next week we'll start on a small project using the skills we learned tonight.  I have visions of weaving some linen yardage, drafting a p...

I spent a couple of hours this afternoon binge reading the final third of the book Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. I really, really needed to see how it ended. And now I want everyone else to read it so I have a group of people to process it with.  I put the book on hold several months ago when I first read about it on a list of books being published this year. It is about a social media influencer who creates content about homemaking and raising her family who suddenly finds herself in the pioneer West. I won't post any spoilers, but I will say it is shelved under fiction and not fantasy or science fiction.  The author does a pretty decent job skewering of influencers and their followers, patriarchy, conservative Christianity, conservative homeschooling, preppers, conspiracy theorists, the "manosphere", and  politicians. It is a book filled with people who are so afraid that they won't do things right, that they aren't important, that someone will find out they ...

Tonight was our church's monthly inclusive game night, so I don't have much energy left to write much of anything. I thought instead that I would go back through some of my reading lists and suggest books I don't hear recommended very often. This is possibly because they are older, but that just means it should be easy to find at the library. So if you're looking for interesting books, here you go.  Possession by A. S. Byatt    This is in my top five favorite books. It's a dual timeline (from when that was unique) literary mystery. Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury and Aly Suki      This is narrative non-fiction that would be almost unbelievable if it was fiction. Pompeii by Robert Harris       Actually anything by Robert Harris if you enjoy historical fiction... really well done historical fiction. I was on the edge of my seat reading this even though I know the volcano erupts. T...

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 ...