Dogs Love Babies

Can you guess why?

Hmm. It's a mystery.

Cheers,

Breanna

My Cabbage Babies Are Here!

No, not the weird dolls with funny noses. Actual cabbage seedlings, poking their heads up in the flats where I planted them, obediently following package directions to "sow them indoors" x number of weeks before the last frost date. What can I say, I'm all about following directions, even when there's a blizzard outside. It's exciting to see my little cabbage babies doing what they're supposed to. They're very cute.

(I did have a Cabbage Patch doll when I was little that my grandmother made me. Her name was, intuitively enough, Cabby. She died many deaths but is, I think, still kicking around somewhere at my parents's house. I'll have to dig her out for Miss Boo, who is all about babies these days.)

Ah, the many joys of housekeeping. I read a comment on a blog yesterday to the effect of, "I just was home for 4 days recovering from surgery and I thought I was going to go nuts! How can you be home all day and stand it?"

This came after I'd had what I'd characterize as a Really Good Day-- the kind of day where you feel good and get all your work done in a good time, get 3 good meals for the family, and go to bed with the dishes washed. (All this with makeup on, no less.) One of the days where I love my job. I had them while I was working as a nurse, too, about as frequently.

That perspective is, I think, the secret; of course the woman home from surgery was going to go nuts because she was... home from surgery. You can't do anything while you're ill but lay on the couch and watch daytime TV, which is enough to drive anyone to tequila and yelling at inanimate objects. When you're a housewife, you have a job to do. To those who work outside the home and only manage to do the bare necessities when they are home, it must seem like there's not enough work at home to occupy a day. I'm a pretty organized person, but I never get everything done that I'd like to get done and I'm never not busy at home. (I force myself to take breaks, now that I'm carrying around a watermelon under my shirt.)

Think about this--there are nine million things you can do as a housekeeper to make your house more comfortable, frugal, run better, etc. While it's important to pick a point to say "enough is enough" so that you have a stopping point each day, there IS a job description of sorts.* And keeping house IS a job.

I finally put it this way to the Husband, and I think a light bulb came on in his head: A woman feels about her house the way a man feels about his job. If it's not what she thinks it ought to be, she feels like she's failing the same way that a man feels when he thinks he's failing at work. The kicker being that this applies for most women even if they also have a paying job--like it or not, people still think of the house as the woman's thing.

I think that's the real reason a lot of women say it drives them crazy to be home too long-- they begin to notice the things about their house that they really don't like, and they don't have enough time to do anything about it. They may want clean, pressed shirts and fresh baked bread, but when you get home at 6pm and have to be at work the next day at 8am, what are you really going to do about that? Aside from hope that someday you get a big enough raise to hire a housekeeper? (See, I told you it was a real job.)

I'm not judging anybody else's situation, just being grateful for my own. I'm having another one of those days where I like what I do. :)

Cheers,

Breanna

*The job description is:
1) Everybody needs clean clothes.
2) Everybody needs to eat dinner.
3) Nobody should get typhoid from the bathroom.

Everything else is gravy. :)

Naptime in the Big Girl Bed

The Big Girl Bed makes even naps more fun. ...although Miss Boo looks so tiny in the bed that she looks like a doll.

See? (Do you notice Lambie, dead on the floor under the bed? Lambie had a hard night the other night and has been exhausted ever since being smothered under Miss Boo all night.)

I was going to write a nice profound post with a quote from my devotional book that was impactful for me this morning, but blogger ate my post three times so I decided it wasn't meant to be.

In summary: don't get discouraged with dark times and impatient enough to take a deliverance which isn't of the Lord. It won't work and it'll just make things worse. Be content to sit in the dark and wait on Him, and He'll deliver you when it's right.

The imagery made me remember Frodo in Shelob's lair. We may be having a global depression with a crew of happy idiots running things, but things could always get worse; at least there aren't any giant spiders living in my laundry room. :) (And Congress, with all their flaws, aren't quite as crazy as the last Steward of Gondor, either.)

Cheers,

Breanna

Puffy

Did you ever know someone who was 1) utterly good-hearted and 2) utterly tactless? Well, I do, bless her heart; and on Sunday she approached me to ask how I was doing because I was "getting puffy and flushed around the face." Turns out she was worried I might have toxemia.

I know this lady and I dearly love her spirit, so I smiled and reassured her that I just tend to get puffy at the end of pregnancy, nothing to worry about and my blood pressure is fine. May I offer a suggestion, however?

Don't tell a pregnant lady, particularly one who's eight months pregnant, that she looks puffy. She knows.

Cheers,

Puffy Lady

The Carnage

You thought eating in the high chair couldn't get any messier than mac n' cheese. You thought wrong-- you forgot about... SPAGHETTI AND YOGURT!

The horror.

Especially since we are now insisting on feeding everything to ourselves. Sometimes we decide it's easier to drink our yogurt, which is why after this meal we had to have a complete bath. We even had yogurt in our eyelashes.

In other news, Miss Boo's grandparents came up last weekend and brought a twin bed, which we outfitted with a siderail and some pretty striped sheets. I am happy to report that the Big Girl Bed is a hit, to the point that Miss Boo would rather sit on it and play with her toys than sit in the toybox, which is saying something. She can also stand on it and see out her window, which is exciting, especially since we've become obsessed with birds over the last few days and she can see them sitting in the trees outside. It's also much, much nicer for Mama to be able to come and sit beside Miss Boo on the bed to get her back to sleep in the middle of the night than to lean awkwardly over a crib or try to stay awake in a rocking chair.

Boychild continues to try to punch his way out of the womb. The fact that he has made little progress does not seem to discourage him. He is most active about 2am, which seems to bode ill for my future sleeping. I'm trying to enjoy Miss Boo's relatively quiet nights here for a few weeks before I'm up every 1.5 hours again, feeding a little man who seems like he's going to be a hungry one.

We have quite a bit of snow here, and a row of lovely icicles on the garage, but we are keeping warm and cozy. Hope all ya'll are too.

Cheers,

Breanna

We're Snowed In

...but still here. :) I will post some cute Miss Boo pics tomorrow, and give a report on the Big Girl Bed that we acquired this weekend, which is working out awesomely (praise God!). But right now, it's snowing and there's a desperate need in the house for chocolate chip cookies.

Cheers,

Breanna

Lent for Protestants

Being Protestant (and pregnant) I haven't been fasting in particular for Lent. However, as Holy Week and Pesach get closer I have been thinking, weirdly, about Judas.

There are a couple of schools of thought about Judas. One is that Judas betrayed Christ on purpose, knowing full well what he was doing, possibly laughing in his sleeve about the fact that he made thirty pieces of silver on the deal. The other is that Judas's thought process was something like this: "Christ is supposed to be the King and Messiah but He's messing it up with this suffering servant garbage. I will therefore hand Him over to the chief priests and the scribes and force His hand. He will have to call down power from heaven and take His rightful place."

People object to the first idea on the practical basis that thirty pieces of silver wasn't really enough money to be betraying a Friend; it would be like selling out someone you love for a hundred bucks. People object to the second because the Bible is fairly clear that Judas was not saved, and this line of thinking seems to make him into a mistaken saint, instead of a judged sinner.

I think we can understand Judas's motivation a little better if we add to the statement in the second theory "...and it won't hurt anything that I'll be in on the ground floor of the new government, and I can remind Christ that I was the one who saw to it that He came to power."

See, Judas's problem was that he didn't understand anything of Christ's true interests. We tend to identify more with Peter or even Paul than we do Judas, but it might behoove us to think about his characteristics. Judas was involved with ministry--did the buying for the apostles and Christ. He helped himself to the moneybox, too, and saw nothing wrong with using the ministry for personal gain, but that's not a unique thing in religious circles, now is it? He justified attempting to manipulate the Lord as simply doing what he was pretty sure the Lord wanted done anyway. His big blind spot? For Judas, the Kingdom of Heaven was only relevant in how it could make Judas's life better. His last act, in the face of the dramatic implosion of all his plans, was the ultimate selfishness of hanging himself rather than repenting.

Judas was selfish, but not more selfish than any of us. It is sobering to think about all the times we might have been tempted to use ministry for personal gain, whether that be monetary, emotional, or social. It's doubly sobering to think about the ways we try to manipulate God. I'm not talking about praying for something in an attempt to determine whether or not this is God's will for your life, I'm talking about the times when we know what we want and try to bend all prayer and all advice to make it happen. We tend to minimize these sins, but when you think about Judas it takes away some excuses.

If you look at disobedience and greed under their proper name of betrayal, it sort of gives you a whole 'nother thing to repent of this Lenten time, doesn't it?

Peace,

Breanna