Ordinary Time

No, no one here has the chicken pox, though four of my children still need to catch them.  This is all about K. and his quirky four-year-old sense of humor.  Did you know the phrase 'chicken pox' is the funniest thing on the face of the earth?  No?  We didn't either until K. pointed it out to us.  Recently he has taken to randomly shouting it at the top of his lungs and laughing uproariously afterward.  It has gotten to the point where we all find the phrase ridiculously funny. And evidently his best friend, P3, shares K.'s sense of humor, because according to K. they have a running joke.  K. will often inform me or J. that, "I call P3 (though, of course he uses his real name) chicken pox and P3 calls me skinny pig!"  And then proceeds to laugh at the hilarity of it all.  Really K. and P3 are pretty cute when they think something is funny (and even when they don't).  Is Benetton still in business?  Do you think they need a couple ...

Remember that bit of string piecing I showed you last week?  Here is what I did with it:  slippers for P. for her birthday.  She loves them and they fit her pretty well, though I could have made them a bit bigger to give her some room to grow.  That's what happens when you can't have someone try them on.  As it was, I gave them to her unassembled because I didn't want to do all the handwork and then have them not fit.  I was impressed when she looked at all the parts and was able to guess 'slippers' without any hints.  They didn't really look like slippers at that point. Here is a shot of the underside.  I used wool felt for the bottom and blanket stitched it to the top.  I still need to add some fabric paint to the bottom to give it a bit of 'stick'.  They are pretty slippy. I was happy with how they turned out, though I would do somethings a bit differently.  They could be a bit stiffer, so some cardboard added inside the sole...

(This may seem a little jarring, on the heels of yesterday's post , and at first I wasn't going to do it.  But then I decided that it was the best approximation of my life that I could find... the ridiculous and the sublime next to each other all the time.) You, know Sisyphus, right?  The guy in the Greek myths who had to roll the boulder up the hill only to have it roll back down before he reached the top causing him to have to roll it back up again the next day?  I often feel like him when confronted with the job of doing laundry for 11 people.  It seems it is never ending and the hill is very steep. I have tried many laundry systems over the years, but had to reinvent how we did it every time our family grew.  I started out doing laundry just one day a week.  (Imagine!)  I loved it.  I could get enough done that people had clothes for the entire week and I only had to think about it once.  That lasted through the first couple of childre...

(With permission from my real life friend, Kim.) Selah Hope when she was less than one month old Yesterday we heard that the sweet baby you see in the picture above went home to live with Jesus.  She was 55 days old.  She is the adopted daughter of my friends, Kim and Ben .  (You can read the whole story of Selah on their blog.)  On the surface it is a tragic story; the loss of a child at such a young age.  But it is also a story of remarkable faith and love.  The story of Selah and Selah's adoption has much to teach all of us about the power of love that can be showered upon others because of the love of Jesus showered on us. And what does she have to teach us?  That all life is valuable and deserves to be cared for and loved.  Even life conceived under horrible circumstances.  Even life that would seem to be imperfect.  Even life that begins with a prognosis of death.  (And don't we all enter life with a prognosis of death... ...

The second part of yesterday's questions deal with different things... the attention and interest of a 6-7 year old child. I, of course, have several opinions about this, but first you need to know my bias. I tend to delay real academics to a much later age than most public schools. I believe that children will learn what they need faster and in a more organized fashion at a later age than if I try to push them too early. All that happens is that a child gets frustrated or they start to believe they are not very smart, or what learning actually occurs does not get filed in their brain in the best way possible. In the end, everyone learns to read and do arithmetic; we just spend an overall shorter time learning to do it. That being said, what I would tell the poster is this: If a six (or seven) year old is starting to complain about not wanting to do school work, I would listen to them. Children of that age are naturally curious and it is difficult to stop them from learning th...

(Just a note... I accidentally hit publish before this was done, so if it seemed unfinished to you the first time you read it, it was.  You may want to scroll down and see what you missed.) A reader posted this comment recently: If you're still taking suggestions... I recently plunged into homeschooling with my first-grader. I would love to know how you maintain motivation and discipline during schooling time (as in proper school behavior, not how-to's on spanking ;-)) and keep the littles (2 or 3 year olds) who desperately want to join in, amused, but not interfering. My 6 year old likes to goof off, mostly to avoid listening to a lesson being read - she can't read yet - I'm trying lots of patience, I don't want to become overbearing and make her hate schooling but we really need to work on focusing on the tasks at hand.   This is a question which I have received multiple times recently, so I thought I would answer her for everyone to read.    The fir...

Baby P. (on left) with her good friend A. (as babies, of course). Today P. turns 10.  She is a sweetheart, but definitely one of my children who could use subtitles.  Being a very private person, it is sometimes difficult to know exactly what is going on inside her head.  P.'s reading ability took a huge leap over the summer and now it is her very favorite thing to do, often spending hours a day with her nose buried in a good book.  She's a girl after my own heart.  I love you, P.! Our birthday traditions include a couple of things.  First, we have donuts for breakfast.  Then the birthday child gets to choose what we have for dinner and what dessert we will have.  P. has chosen to have tacos for dinner and a chocolate mayonnaise cake for dessert.  (Really they're good... the mayonnaise is used in place of egg and oil.  I'll include the recipe at the end of this  post.)  She, unlike the majority of people in our family, prefe...