She Laughs at the Days

Some times a child asks when you are ever going to make breakfast before you notice that it's almost 11am. Those might be the same times when you are fighting off a cold and spent a lot of the night woken by a baby doing the same. You may have been staring half blind at things for a few hours, not even remembering routines. This would be a perfect time to announce that instead of breakfast we will have brunch!

Then you make it an event, do it in grand style with scrambled eggs, toast with jam, brew some sun tea and make some tea biscuits for that mid afternoon hungry that will hit, because you've skipped lunch, calling it brunch instead, which is brilliant, there will be fewer dishes to clean up.

Sometimes you don't get to morning prayers until noon, and math waits until the sun is high in the sky.



Some times you only just now remember that you should hang some laundry to dry, and fold what is hanging.

And sometimes you don't remember that you are still in the clothes …

My husband is the kind of man who allows you to feel the full force of his displeasure by steadfastly not saying what he is thinking and instead working his jaw and clearing his throat over and over again. He is doing this as he drives to a friendly dinner at our pastor's house while I sit silent in the passenger seat telling myself pretty much everything he is thinking. He has good reason.

The fridge had already put our marriage in jeopardy once. A gift from a kind couple at church it was meant to replace the teensy apartment sized one I picked up for $30 the day before Independence Day from a guy who had momentarily dropped the price in order to pick up some quick cash so he could show his girlfriend a good time. He even delivered. But it was little.

A friend told me, after a visit, that we could have the extra fridge in their garage. It wasn't pretty, and it wouldn't fit the space exactly, but it was big enough to actually hold all the perishables we go through in a wee…

1. I wanted to share with you my BIL's most recent post. On the Enigma of Hell, and Bakersfield He currently lives in Uganda and works with a few organizations there. Here's a snippet. "The question I'm more interested in is how, in light of all the restoration, rebirth, adoption, validation, new life, healing, deliverance, good news, etc. throughout scripture, does "not going to Hell" become the big sales pitch? It's like using pictures of Detroit to convince people Fiji is a worthwhile destination."

2. I really liked reading this article about Challenge House. Basically people move into really impoverished neighborhoods with the goal of engaging and building community with the people living there and finding out how to help. They've established a non-profit to help buy houses to use. This is one of my dreams, with the addition of a house for expecting mothers.

3.I've discovered Pinterest. It could be I'm using it wrong, but for me…

"We were just thinking about you!" they all exclaimed as I rounded the corner toward the green where we used to spend so much of our time. "I called and left you a message just about 20 minutes ago. We were all outside and saying how much it was just like old times, but we missed you. and here you are!"

We revisited old haunts yesterday. The Boy's orthodontist is back near where we used to live right next to the library, with it's big children's section painted like an African savanna, and the street where the farmer's market is. Every time we're at the orthodontist go they beg to visit and I'm usually in too much of a rush. It used to be a weekly ritual, visiting the library and then the farmer's market every Tuesday. It's one we miss. This time I purposely scheduled his appointment so we would have time after.

We spent the day of solstice reading and then wandering in the heat, buying strawberries and local honey, munching kettle …

A response to  Ann Voskamp's post of the same title.


When I first see her life, married to a piece of earth, in a house built with their own hands, and guided by the rhythms of the changing seasons I want to plant roots and tie myself to a piece of land as well. My heart is in the Canadian prairies and my soul longs for a place to call home to settle in, to grow old.

I want my children to know a single place that they can always go back to, that doesn't change, like the farm my grandparents still live on, the house my uncle built there where he and his wife have lived every year of their married life, raised sons and daughters now moved out, married, moved on.

I'd never wanted that before. Blessed with place in abundance I moved out, and moved on. I moved 9 times my first year of marriage, purposely tying myself to a man who wouldn't be tied to one place instead. We've never really settled anywhere long, all in search of a life worth living and a place to serve.

It&#…

I'm rolling out the pastry for great grandpa's pie and thinking of the little time that is left and the choice between being late and finishing and she is curled on the stool next to me coloring at the wrapping for his present.

"I'm done mama," she chirps. "Is it beautiful?"

I pull from my reverie to see that the pencil scribbles I've been hearing were all over the cover of the book we are giving him, coloring in the white, covering the words, and my words come spilling out sharp and unkind.

"What are you doing coloring on a book? Don't you know not to color on a book. It is not beautiful. You've wrecked it."

She lays head down, hides it in her arms as I pound away at the dough, more easily molded than the little broken heart beside me. It is the Girl who first shows mercy, running over to erase the evidence as Little continues to weep quietly into her sleeve.

It is, I think, the first time I have ever spoken so harshly to her and …

I had only read about 2 other blogs when I started this one back in 2006. One was a crazy humor sort of style that Aaron really liked called enraged baboon, and the other was written by my friend Rae of Journey Mama. I started it because I had some silly things to say about breasts, specifically, a form of making peace with the ones I was dealt and it seemed that a blog was the type of forum to use for random silliness. (I still get more random google traffic from that first post than any other since then by the way. Something about how I mention Halle Berry on Oprah and the word breasts in the same paragraph. It's a mystery to me why that would bring so many searches. Apparently there are people out there who really liked that episode of Oprah?)

I had no idea in 2006 that there was a blogging community. I had no idea that I would meet people over the internet that I feel just as close to as my real life friends. I didn't even know that was possible.

But this community changed…

You stand there in your bouncer, legs astride as though you are walking and I wonder, when did those legs get so long little boy? When did you get tall enough to reach over the coffee table and sweep everything off of it in a single motion? When did you start to crawl so fast that gates are needed everywhere and nothing is safe?



It seems like yesterday you were barely sitting on your own and maybe 2 days ago that you were a tiny newborn snuggled in my arms and why does time have to go so relentlessly in a single direction never stopping, never pausing to give me just a moment longer to smell your downy head and hold you close as a newborn.



You have 2 teeth, you are working on 2 more. You jump like you are on a mission and you tear things of of shelves and pile them on the floor.

You blow raspberries all the time and your shirts are constantly wet from drool.



Your square head and straight hair sticking up as you squint at me in the sunshine reminds me of every picture of my little bro…

He's been reading the Chronicles of Narnia in his spare time, 3 books at least in the last week, which makes me all kinds of proud to have a reader around. He's almost finished the last book when he asks, as we sit at the dinner table, "Are there any more books, like about all the other worlds in the pools that Digory and Polly didn't jump into in the wood?. I think that would be cool if there were more books about other places."

"Maybe there will be a new one coming out?"

That's when I tell them that C.S. Lewis is dead.

"Maybe one of his kids could write another one," the Girl wonders.

Aaron and I exchange looks, "Perhaps," I say. "But that didn't work out so well for Tolkien."

"What do you mean?" The Boy asks.

"Oh, when Tolkien died his son published some stories that he found that his dad had written but never published. It was called the Silmarillion, it was a history of middle earth, but it wasn&…

It's almost too late for this link up but I had pictures to show you so... Ever feel like you've been working all day and nothing got done? Yeah, that was Thursday for us too.

Pretty


The Girl made these all by herself with crocheted yarn and buttons. She also did the presentation for a gift for auntie Ana. The careful observer will note the pretty cardboard she found is a cut up 6 pack.


There are fields and fields of daisies heaped up everywhere there's dirt here.

Happy


These are all letters and drawings from kids at the Charis Home for their pen pals. They just came today and are so sweet.



Funny


Poor kid was tuckered out. Crawling and eating everything you find is hard work.

Real



My living room right now. It doesn't show the train tracks scattered everywhere behind.


This was a very pretty hydrangea once until I forgot to water it. It's not dead... yet. It may come back If I'm kind to it

Apparently, in several circles there is a great debate raging over whether or not women should wear skirts or pants. Seriously.

This week I've read several different posts from different bloggers, Catholics, Protestants, conservative homeschoolers of both traditions, (surprise) and others are of the opinion that modesty and sincere faith in God require that a woman only wear skirts because pants are immodest.

In that vein I've also read several posts discussing modesty in general. I've already gone on at length about my thoughts regarding modesty in this post. Modesty Protects? But allow me to belabor the point just a little bit more, since everyone else still is.

First can we please just all agree that what is modest and what is not is an entirely arbitrary line that is drawn differently in every culture, subculture and country. To insist any differently, or that your view of what is or isn't modest is the only correct one, is borderline xenophobic, and definitely eth…

The last thing I was expecting when I walked into Walmart was to buy a swimsuit. Return a pair of shoes, perhaps a new package of underwear, some floss picks, maybe, but definitely not a swimsuit engineered with the older woman in mind.

Yet there it was, in all it's floral glory, hanging there on the end display and I WAS going swimming the next day...

It's always been a struggle for me to find swimwear that offers the right kind of support in the right places on the kind of budget that I have to work with. I generally end up wearing a nylon sport bra underneath a swim tank I bought off a clearance rack somewhere and running shorts. In fact, that has been my swim ensemble for several years now. Every so often I try wearing different swim top but however cute it is, it fails to do a good enough job of corralling the girls as I keep toddlers afloat in the pool and feed them snacks and chase them down. I always go back to the sport bra ensemble, which leads to really bad tan lin…

So yesterday I was doing what I normally do at the end of the month, visiting the bank and then the RiteAid down the street from it to wire money to Thailand for The Charis Home.

I wish I could say it's the best part of the month but it's not. This particular RiteAid, chosen entirely for it's location, close to the bank, on the way to my MIL's house and open later than any of the other ones, has the slowest, worst customer service I have ever encountered. Even when they aren't understaffed, which is often, I end up waiting at the customer service desk for at least 10 minutes before they even acknowledge my existence, even if I stare meaningfully at them as they chat in the middle of the aisle right in front of me.

The floor manager is taciturn, defensive, downright rude and usually distracted by any booty hanging out at the ice cream counter. I wish I was exaggerating.

So I sat there, fuming at the wait again and resolved that this would be my last ever visit to t…