No, there is no picture. (Well, because the picture you would get for this post is my ginger beer fermenting on my counter. At the moment it just looks like a jar of suspicious, murky tan liquid. But the recipie promises I will have ginger beer in a mere two weeks.)
I have this feeling I am a bad preschool mom. Here is my confession: I hate cut and paste crafts. You know the ones I mean? The ones that involve cutting things to bits to glue them to other things? A cotton balls? And glitter? The craft pages, for instance, that Miss Boo does in Sunday School, rapidly loses interest in, and then the pages shed glittery cotton all over my house for the next week until I can master my guilt over throwing the thing away.
So here's the thing. I am probably being uptight and Prussian about this, but it seems to me that if you are going to let the kids fiddle with something, and if you're going to have to supervise them anyway (scissors and glue, anyone?), why not teach them something USEFUL?
Like a craft that won't be a dust catcher/maker. I mean like a ball they can play with or paganish noisemakers or something.
No, I haven't taught Miss Boo to sew yet, but I am starting to consider it, thinking about the fact that little girls of three were sewing and knitting in colonial times. And also because whenever I get out my mending, she pesters the living daylights out of me to hold the thread.
Which brings me to my Proposal. See, I don't like Ladies' Craft Night any better than the glittery Sunday School papers. To me a dried flower arrangement has all the same problems, only eucalyptus-scented; scrapbooking to me is just expensive glittery Sunday School papers. So here is my Proposal, which I am putting on my blog only to keep myself from getting crazy enough to actually propose this to my ladies' Bible study group (which would promptly put me at the head of any such effort):
1. Why not get together and learn to do useful things?
It would work like this: I know how to mend a variety of things, including socks, how to knit, crochet, weave, spin, make bread, make pickles, and pin on a cloth diaper. But I could use some help learning how to work my pressure canner, figuring out my sewing machine, and getting my pie crust to stay in one piece from board to pie plate. So why not swap?
It could go on and on. Maybe there is an older lady in the church who braids rugs--or makes knives, heck, we aren't sexist--or knows how to kill pigweed, or keeps ducks... maybe there is a younger lady who knows all about herbs for pregnancy, or how to make whole grain pancakes that aren't the consistency of hockey pucks.
Do you see how this works?
2. Then just keep it going--at canning time, get all the ladies together in the church kitchen and have a little inservice on canning. (Sign waivers if you have to.) And cleaning, for that matter. Do you know how many people my age don't know how to scrub a floor? I'm not kidding.
This all came about because, in case Warren Buffet is reading this blog and hasn't heard, hard times are here and rapidly getting harder. It seems supremely silly to me to be wasting time, effort, and money on something as transient as scrapbooking. (Please don't hate me if you love scrapbooking--to each her own--but how can you really love something so fiddly?) It's a matter of priorities. Perhaps back before we had our first stock market crash of the decade, we could justify scrapbooking to ourselves. But now we have to examine what we do, everything we do, and see if it's useful or...well, stupid.
Say you want to buy a book (a pastime I am all for). Should you buy a novel you will read once, a novel you will read many times, or a practical manual that will tell you how to garden/mend/cook? It might be either the second or third, but it won't be the first. And probably before you buy any books, you should try to check them out of the library and see if they are worth owning.
You want to keep your hands busy with a craft? Well, would you rather spend twelve hours putting together a photo album that no one but you and your grandma will appreciate (especially considering you can do so much with photo arranging on the computer), or twelve hours knitting a pair of socks you can wear for the next five years? For that matter, if you committed twelve hours (not all at once, an hour an evening, say), you could memorize a lot of Scripture, or learn to make really good bread, or take the time to use shoe-goo and leather conditioner and fix up your shoes instead of spending $40 on a new pair.
Priorities, baby. I'm getting Miss Boo her own little sewing basket fitted out tomorrow, I think. Now if I can just find a blunt needle and some loose-woven fabric.
Maybe I'll talk to them Bible study ladies after all...
Breanna
No comments:
Post a Comment