Busy Days, Busy Nights

Ready, sing along with me: "...where would I be without my woman?"

Sorry.  I blame the Bee Gees thing on Baba.

This is not, as you might think, a set of dining room chairs under a collection of blankets and old window sheers.  No, no.  This is a Princess House.

Inside is  a Princess Bed, made of all the throw pillows.

See?  Princess Bed.  I had already been up five hours at 9am the other day when this was constructed, so I was pretty much in the mode of "sure, I'll build whatever for you, as long as nobody bleeds and nothing is permanently destroyed".

He wants to hold the camera.  Badly.  And is almost frustrated enough to speak English to convince me, but not quite.  English is soooo duuuuuuummb.  (Seriously, I think that's what's behind this "talking with our lips closed" thing.  He just thinks the way everyone else talks sounds stupid.  And is a bit irritated with the Bigs in his life for harping on it so much.)

This is after we cleaned the living room.  We're building robots here.

This is our reading corner, which I think I took a picture of to prove that we have one.

See?  With books and everything.  We use it sometimes, too.  In spite of the low-sleep, and therefore high-cartoon, week we have had.

Yes, a picture of potty chairs.  Because when Mama has the camera, kids get ideas about compositions for her.  Buddy, by the way, has mastered the art of Standing Up To Go Potty Like Daddy.  Which was the only way I could get him to decide that going potty on the potty chair was preferable to just making Mama change your wet pants.

Miss Boo:  "Mama, I tried to build a robot, but I just built a sandwich."

She gets inventive, hyper, and irritable when she's tired.  Guess how I feel about inventiveness lately.  I don't want kids who have no imagination--we work to cultivate imagination--but imagination is a two-edged sword.  Not only can you scare yourself more effectively if you have a good imagination ("Mama! there's lobsters!") but it enables you to think of really creative ways to be naughty.

We spent this day picking things up (me) and flinging things around (them).  At least we weren't peeing in cupboards or writing on walls.

Because...yeah.  Both of those things had happened the previous day.

Her: Take my picture!  Take my picture! Take my picture!

Me: Stand still!

Her: Mama, I'm not still, I'm three.

Me: I know you're three.  The camera can't see you unless you stop moving around so much.

Her: Can I see my picture?

Now the other pictures were a few days ago.  This is today.  I realized I hadn't included any pictures of Littleman standing up (I think?).  Anyway, here's one of him standing at the window looking outside, his favorite thing lately.

He crawls at roughly 40mph.  Usually he's going for this window, the bathroom (because he likes to pull himself up on the side of the tub and because it is verboten) or the fireplace (because it is also verboten).  We're torn between being proud of his ability and the sudden need to babyproof the floor again.

Because yeah, we're still in the stage when anything--rattle, teething ring, clump of dog hair, sister's hair tie--goes in our mouth.

He crawls so much, so fast, that he doesn't realize he's hungry until he's STARVING.  Then he starts yelling at me because I'm not already feeding him.  And this is skipping over the fact that he's decided he needs to eat real food in the high chair when everyone else is eating at the table.  And the fact that he doesn't believe that Mama should hold the spoonful of rice cereal.  He thinks he can feed himself.  What does he look like, a baby or something?

High times in this house, lately.  But we are all surviving, and surprisingly happily.  How have YOU all been doing?

Cheers,

Breanna

Momiform

No, I'm not talking about some new kind of bacteria.  I was trying to cleverly combine "uniform" and "mom".  In other words, this is yet another blog taking on the question of what moms should wear at home.

Only I think I'm going to come to a different conclusion than most.  First of all, let's be clear--I'm in favor of neat and clean and good-smelling.  I'm even in favor of the "dress professionally" school of thought, mostly.  I like to see mommies in crisp cotton camp shirts and pretty khaki capris, or something similar.  (Although I think one lady I read who advocated wearing a suit jacket around the house was over the top.)  I think you ought to dress in a way that lifts your self-esteem.  If that means collared shirts, more power to you.

But what I wanted to examine was why it is the "uniform of mommies", i.e., yoga pants or jeans and a t-shirt, elicits such universal disdain.  Before you reply, "isn't it obvious? because it's sloppy!" I want you to think for a moment.

See I used to work in a hospital, and I also worked in a physician's office.  Doctors typically wear business clothes with a white coat.  Actually in teaching hospitals you'll notice the white coat differs depending on whether the doctor in question is full-fledged or still...er, a fledgling.  The coats are not designed to be flattering, they're a symbol and they were originally functional, to protect the doctor's clothes.  (Now they put paper gowns over their white coats if they think they're going to get splattered.)

But when docs are in surgery, they wear scrubs, shoe covers, and a poofy hat.  Scrubs are way sloppier than any sweats I've ever seen, but nobody calls a surgeon sloppy--although surgeons frequently traipse around the hospital still in their scrubs.  They assume, quite correctly, that s/he is wearing the garments that are most practical for surgery, which is after all very messy.

I suggest that jeans and a t-shirt are in fact the clothes that are most practical for dealing, for 12 hours or more, with the solo care of small smeary children and their environment.  Seeing a mom at the grocery store with three kids under age three, in jeans and a t-shirt, really should elicit no more scorn that seeing a surgeon on his dinner break in the hospital cafeteria still in scrubs.

But it does, and the fact that I made the surgeon in the paragraph above a guy without thinking about it might have something to do with it.  See, in our society it's assumed that men dress pretty much practically and to show people what they do.  Policemen have uniforms (and hats), doctors have coats, businessmen have suits.  Women are supposed to be ornamental.

This isn't a feminist rant.  I actually think there are some deep things tied up with the idea of women being ornamental, and I think on some level it's good for us to be ornamental.  But surely we shouldn't be *only* ornamental.  At some point--as a nurse on a medical floor, an EMT, or a mom raising kids--practicality and symbolism enter the equation.

I think that the Momiform elicits scorn in our society because it is, in fact, a very practical outfit and also it's a potent symbol, though not ornamental.  We identify the woman who wears it as a housewife, and therefore we look down on her--not because of anything inherently stupid in a pair of clean jeans and an unwrinkled t-shirt, but because we don't, as a society, think housewives and stay-at-home moms are very smart.


Some people blame Betty Friedan, who famously said in The Feminine Mystique that housework was "peculiarly suited to the abilities of feeble-minded girls".  But the scorn existed long before Friedan, who, I think, merely articulated what a lot of people already thought.  Just watch movies from the 1950s, the so-called heyday of the stay-at-home housewife--the lady of the house is usually portrayed as super-competent and very pretty but not very bright, as evidenced by her inability to balance a checkbook, drive a car, or manage her children.  It goes back at least to pre-WWI America, where the suffrage movement also occasionally advocated for things like communal kitchens, so that women would be free of the brain-mushifying drudgery of cooking.  (That some people like cooking was, apparently, unimportant.  Or maybe they were supposed to work in the communal kitchen, I don't know.)  Before we scorned sweatpants we scorned the "wrapper", which as near as I can tell from reading old books was the Edwardian equivalent of a bathrobe.

Now, do I advocate going to the store in your jammies, with uncombed hair and unbrushed teeth?  No.  You should get dressed like a grownup.  And you should probably, for the sake of feeling attractive, try to go for the yoga pants over sweatpants and the fitted, un-faded t-shirt over the wrinkly, faded one you got for free one day for buying a double pack of Doritos.  This is a matter of making yourself aesthetically pleasing and supporting your self-esteem.  I mean, of course take a shower.  Be moderately ornamental.  I support neat and clean.

But I don't think that in order to be taken seriously Mommy should have to imitate Assistant Vice President.  Raising children is an important job and it comes with a uniform, something as practical and symbolic as a pair of scrubs.  If we can respect a surgeon we see in his scrubs--we assume he's between cases, harried and worried about the good of humanity, don't we?--then surely we can respect a mom in yoga pants, hurriedly grabbing Pedialyte and infant tyelenol in the store.

There.  That's my rant for today.

Cheers,

Breanna

Tossing a Sop

Or at least, a baby picture.  I don't have a substance-packed post for you, so here's your sop:

(Admit it.  You only read this blog for the pictures anyway.)

Here is Miss Boo, looking deceptively angelic.  

Deceptively, in that she is actually very very human and so am I.  I mean, of course I have good kids.  It just seems like there's a lot of them lately.  Which makes me wonder how people with five or six or eight or, for heaven's sake, nineteen, do it.  All I can think of is that three or four is sort of max difficulty in number of kids-- two kids and you can still do one-on-one care when your husband is home, and five and up and by sheer laws of nature usually the oldest is at least five by the time the youngest comes along, and potty-trained.

I hope.  Because otherwise, I'm a wuss of epic proportions.

They don't look like they're capable of strafing through the house like the Luftwaffe and reducing everything to a state of anarchy (and potty) in a matter of minutes do they?

Right now I have surrendered my principles and we are watching a Veggie Tales DVD, because I don't have the mental free space to wrestle with kids who want to read two different books at the same time.  (Buddy has discovered that there is such a thing as gender, and has promptly rejected anything he feels is feminine.  Like, for instance, any book his sister picks.)

To relax I've been rereading my copy of The Complete Tightwad Gazette.  It's always heartening to me to remember some things--like homemade cocoa mix is easy (not that we need it yet here), and that as frugal as we are we don't do near everything we could.  I'm planning to step it up a bit going forward, not just because the Husband and I have been eyeing the global economic situation askance, but because the Husband's car has emphysema.  Or its air conditioner is broken.  Or something.

Anyway, the guys at the garage can't figure out what's wrong with it and they don't want to charge us a lot of money to replace the compressor.  They keep looking at it and replacing fluids and not charging us, which is kind of them, but we kind of just want the a/c to work again.  It's not safe to not have an a/c in Texas in August.

Being mindful that cars tend to keep going bad once they start going bad, and desirous to pay for the next vehicle in cash, we're saving.  (I've got my eye--pun intended--on Lasik for me next year, too.)  So, with that in mind, Tightwad Gazette-style strategies look like a bargain.  Eat off-brand toasted oaties now, get new car and fixed vision next year?  Deal.

With that in mind, I'll be featuring some money-saving tips as we head toward next year.

My favorite self-figured-out tips today?

1. Sometimes it's cheaper to serve (medium) eggs and (homemade bread) toast for breakfast than it is to serve cold cereal, even store-brand cold cereal.  And the eggs don't leave you hungry again at 10am.

2. Homemade laundry detergent really does work, bizarrely.

My favorite Tightwad Gazette tips?

1. Homemade cocoa mix: 1/3 cup powdered milk, 1 teaspoon cocoa powder, 1 teaspoon sugar, mix, add cold water, mix again, microwave.

2. The "cut the amount you use in half and see if it works" experiment.  Because of this I use half the liquid dishsoap, laundry soap, toothpaste, and many other things.  But not half the dishwasher detergent.  As far as I can tell there's no way to save on that stuff--the bargain brands don't clean anything, and skimping on the amount of Cascade doesn't clean anything either.  Hm.

Cheers,

Breanna

Sunday and Forgiveness

I have a prayer book.

Not this prayer book.  This one belonged to Lorenzo de Medici.

Weird for a Protestant, huh?  But it is a Protestant prayer book at least--Anglican.  I like it for both keeping my daily prayers from becoming rote, because the book has you change up parts of the prayer each day and each week.  And I also like it for those times when I'm too sick at heart to find words to pray, but I need prayer like I need breath.

I don't use it every day--the pages are as fine as tissue-paper, making it pretty un-baby-friendly--but I use it frequently enough to justify calling it a favorite resource.  But there's another resource I use every day, because I don't have to open it.  A different prayer book, if you like.

John Michael Talbot has some great songs that are simply liturgy put to classical guitar music.  They're old now, so old it cost me $40 to buy his sheet music collection (when, on the back of the used book that I got, it says clearly that the book originally cost $2.35).  But I like them--I find myself singing them through the day, when otherwise my prayers tend to get interrupted by one crisis or another.

It's easier, for some reason, to sing the Apostle's Creed, for instance, than it is to say it.  And it certainly helps me remember it.  (No, there's nothing magic about the Creed.  But it's a handy way to sum up Christianity if you happen to be talking to someone who doesn't know what Christianity is about.)  And there are lines in "Communion Song" that take my breath way, namely--

Christ has died

Christ has risen

Christ will come again

Dying, He destroys our dying

And rising He brings new life again

Come Lord Jesus!  Come again!

But the song that inspired me to write this post, which you will read Sunday morning, is called "We Shall Stand Forgiven."  The words of the song are a confession of guilt, but the title should clue you in to what Talbot wanted to emphasize.

I tried to find a Youtube version of the song, but apparently the only one has weird commune pictures on it and they won't allow it to be embedded, anyway.  So here's the link to Amazon so you can sample the MP3.

And here's the lyrics.

I confess to God, the Almighty

And to you, my brothers and my sisters

I have sinned through my own fault in my thoughts and in my words

In the deeds that I've done, and in what I have failed to do,

I have sinned, I have sinned, I have sinned.

Now I ask you all of my brothers and my sisters to pray for me.

Will you pray for me? Unto the Lord.

Lord, have mercy.  Christ, have mercy.  Lord, have mercy upon us all.

Forgive us, Oh Lord--

Forgive us, Oh Lord--

And we shall stand forgiven.

This song helps me a lot, both because it's beautiful and calming and because it gives you something to DO with the sense of frustration and failure that comes from, yet again, realizing that you have forgotten a lesson you thought the Lord had finished teaching you.  Sing!

You admit it, first of all-- "I have sinned."  And then you ask for help--"Will you pray for me?"  Talbot's music lifts the phrase into an eloquent but desperate cry.  And then the song hammers it home:

Forgive us, oh Lord, and we shall stand forgiven.  If He forgives us, than we are really forgiven, and there's no sense in living as though we aren't.

That's been in my mind these last few days, so maybe you were meant to take the thought into the presence of the Lord this morning.  If you're His, you stand forgiven.  What will you do with that knowledge?

Cheers,

Breanna

A Busy Week

You wonder why we haven't been posting here lately?  I'll tell you.

Well, apart from books coming out and the attendant "networking" one must do.  The print version is available, by the way.

It feels weird to see stuff I wrote in an actual book.

But the real reason we haven't been blogging is that we haven't been napping.  At all.  For a week.

So maybe you can help us out.  Maybe you all could pray that we can start napping again?

Because I think naps would help us all to desist from things like scribbling with crayons on the coffee table, picking up our baby brother, barking "because that's what doggies do" while Mama is on the phone, and playing piano when the baby is napping.  (The baby naps.  I can still trick him into falling asleep by feeding him.  The other two are wily.)

We get hyper when we're tired.  Thus the blurry pictures.  She's yelling "take my picture! take my picture! I wanna see! take my picture!" in this shot.

Meanwhile we have started eating rice cereal with our 2 big teeth. We're not sure at all what we think of it.  It makes him gassy and then Mama has to stay awake at night patting him until he remembers he can burp or until the impacted toot works itself out.  You know, in between the times that Mama has to get up to change kids who are sleeping so hard (because of not napping) that they need to be changed in the night.  Which makes them sleep fitfully for the rest of the night, and wake up early.  Upon which they need Mama to wake up early.  And then they get hyper, because of being tired, because of being up early.  So they don't nap.

"I'm a superhero!  Super R!"  (Her current fave is a guy named Super Why who uses the power of reading to save storybook characters, only she thinks he's named Super Y.  Thus, she is Super R.)

"I wanna taste the camera.  GIMME!"

He is in gimme mode about everything these days--Mama's hair, Mama's shirt, the Legos, the books, the silverware...

So, in conclusion: we have been tired and hyper at the same time, and we would like to stop it.  We are soliciting your help before the throne of grace.  Pray that the kids would nap, or if they don't, that I would be able to control my nerves and my temper to be Gentle, Kind Mom, instead of Ranting Crazy Mom.  Nobody likes Ranting Crazy Mom, and she doesn't cook well either.

Cheers,

Breanna

Babies, Pantries, Record Heat, Cats Dating Dogs, Riots, Pandemonium!

Or something like that.  The DJIA fell more than 500 points, gold (which you can't eat) is being sold for $1,700 an ounce, and oil prices have fallen but we won't wind up paying any less for gasoline.

Meantime, I published a book.  Just saying in passing, at $2.99 it's sure cheaper than a movie ticket...

With publishing one, of course I had to instantly start getting ready for the next, which will be a novel.

A fantasy novel, but writing about kind-of medieval settings requires research, or you end up doing stupid things, like giving peasants glass dishes.

Besides, the Gies are just good writers.

Hm, and now I have to figure out the sanitation for my big fantasy city.  Sure it has floating lights above its spires, but what do they do with the sewage?  These are the questions you may not know a writer has to tackle.  And the sick thing is I probably won't even include this in the book, but I have to know.

Happily ignorant of jumping executives, the price of gasoline, and the fact that their Mama is getting paid for writing fiction, the boys are figuring out leg wrestling.

I AM being gentle, Mama.  I swear.

My feet? On the baby? How did those get there?

My first instinct, when I saw the stock market plunging and heard that the US Government now can't finance a car,  was to take some cash out of the bank to have in the safe at the house in case of bank failures.  Then I thought to myself, remembering what's happened in the past to marks and rubles, "forget cash, I'm buying some extra beans".  Because, yeah.  I'm weird like that.

So have some pantry pictures, both to prove to you that I do not have a perfect pantry and to distract you while I talk to you about the sovereignty of God.  As in, He was not surprised by what the stock market is doing.

He's always the One who provides for us, anyway.  Having a stable or an unstable stock market does not affect His ability to provide, nor does it indicate that He doesn't love us, is less than good, or is less than powerful.  Everything you know to be true about Him is still true, you just have to think about it now.

Because I mean, this is a full pantry, but how long would it really last if things went kerfulffle and the Husband couldn't get paid for a while?  Not too long, Bub.  But God says that He'll handle that for me.  So I do the best I can to be wise with the resources He gives me--and advance warning, pantry space, and fluid cash to buy canned goods count as resources--and then I trust Him.  Because He knows what He's doing.

In the end it's much easier to trust Him.  In the ironic, yes-and-no way that doing what He asks is always easier--it's easier because it's what we're designed to do.  It's harder because we really, really want to think that we're in charge of things, that we control our own destiny.  So we, in a perverse way, actually LIKE working ourselves into a foam trying to bend reality to be the way we want it to be.  Trusting God for our weight, our happiness, and our provision seems too easy.

It's also too hard.  It makes us think in ways we don't want to.  Trusting God for our happiness means that we see the temptation to dwell on hurts and grievances, or simply discomforts, as what it is: a temptation.  That means we don't have the luxury of just randomly wallowing around in our thoughts.  We have to decide "I'm not going to think that way"

and think about something else, instead.  Trusting God for our provision means that we don't have the luxury of letting ourselves worry about money, or whether we'll eat, or whether we'll keep our jobs.  We have to decide

"God is big enough for that"

and think about something else.  And, incidentally, keep tithing.

Trusting God means trusting God.  Not trusting Him AND our safety net, not trusting Him AND our good steady job, not trusting Him AND our pantry full of food.  Trusting Him.

See what I mean?  Easy and hard.

Be responsible, but don't get the illusion that this is what makes you okay.

Because it isn't.

Okay, got the message?  I knew you would, and probably long before my dang pantry pictures were done.  But now that you have strengthened yourself in the Lord, take a peek at your bank account and see whether you can't go and get yourself $50-$100 in extra, non-perishable groceries.  Get stuff you like and will eat anyway.  (Mandarin oranges are always a big hit here, and canned carrots for some reason.)  Don't buy a lot of frozen stuff--it's summer here and we have power outages anyway because of people needing the AC on all the time.  Don't buy things in huge sacks that will just get weevils, unless you have the right containers to store it.  Don't. Panic.  You're not in charge, remember?  And God loves you.

You might--since I'm just a writer I don't know the future--be happy one day that you bought $100 worth of groceries when it was $100, instead of $500 because of inflation.  It has happened all over the world, and America is not immune.  Don't. Panic.  People have lived through this a lot ever since Roman times, and God is in charge.

Get food, some multivitamins (I like the gummies) and stuff you'd hate to be without like toilet paper and toothpaste.  See my sidebar for links to handy lists, but really you're not trying for a 3-month supply here, just a cushion.

If you have more than $100, expand your list.  But don't be foolish: remember, God is in charge of your provision.  You are just being wise with what He's given you.

Remember, you're not going to be afraid.  You're not going to buy gold, cigarettes, and booze because you think we're going to go all Mad Max.  We're not.  (The booze might be nice for other reasons, but prioritize your spending.)  You can't eat gold.

Now, go shopping.  Be smart.  Trust God.

Cheers,

Breanna

Teachable Moments

Miss Boo: I want to go with you.  I want to go in the store.

Me: I know, but we have to pay the gas station lady first.

Miss Boo: Why?

Me: Because we bought gasoline and we have to pay for it.  We have to wait for her because there's only her at the whole gas station and she's very busy.

Miss Boo: But I want to go in the store! (eyeing the gas station attendant askance)

Me: We have to be patient with her.  She's very busy, and being grumpy to her won't help her go any faster, it will just make her sad.  We have to patient and kind.

At this point I realize that I've been hurrying my kids along all day. *facepalm*

Then I came home to read, in Educating the Wholehearted Child by Sally and Clay Clarkson, about the quality of graciousness, i.e. dispensing grace.  And it occurred to me that the essence of grace is compassion--compassion feeds grace and grace feeds compassion.

If you have compassion for someone, you will be able to extend them grace much more easily.  And once you've extended someone grace, you feel more compassion for them.  It's nice how the Lord makes that work out.

I wasn't upset with the gas station lady because I felt compassion for her.  Other people were being rude, disregarding instructions, and deciding to do stupid stuff like, after she'd rung something up, saying "oh, and add a Pepsi".  I've worked behind a cash register before, and I could empathize.  On the other hand, I was tempted to get (okay, let's admit it, I got, although I tried to rein it back) upset with my kids because I wasn't empathizing with them.  They've been cooped up for days in 105F weather, which must make disassembling the couch look appealing.

So I asked Miss Boo to forgive me for "talking grumpy", which she very sweetly did.  And for the rest of the day I hope I can be as gracious to my kids as they are to me--with the enabling of the Gracious Lord.

What, you didn't think the teachable moment was for the kids, did you?

Cheers,

Breanna