Last Friday I posted a memory I had about being with my mother in Italy when I was 14. I looked and looked through my parent's photo albums to find a picture of my mother and me to include. I discovered that there are hardly any pictures at all of my mom during my teen years.

We've been "snowed in" southern-style all weekend. Southern-style simply means that we got 3 inches of snow with a layer of ice on top- literal icing.

I'm tired, fuzzy brained and somewhat random. I wasn't going to do Thankful Thursday this week because it's been a long week- a week made longer by my 2 year old's stomach virus.

I've had a baby or toddler in tow for basically 18 years straight now. Even though all my children have learned to sit quietly in church services pretty quickly, services with small ones is not exactly restful or conducive to deep personal "spiritual" participation.

Imagine a relatively quiet house. I am hiding in the dining room enjoying the last cookie and a cup of tea. My brain slips away...

My mother and my 14 year old self were walking along, arms linked, when we got lost in Florence, Italy. We ended up on a back street populated only by 3 men lounging in a doorway.

Saturday my 17 year old had 6 friends over to shoot a "short". This brought the under-18 population at my home to 13. Smack in the middle of their shoot my new dishwasher was delivered.

Dealing- as in with stress. Dealing with things I cannot change. Sometimes dealing with merely my own unlovely stupidity.

In my experience every time a toddler experiences a developmental leap, it is accompanied by a less desirable behavioral lapse. For instance, a toddler figures out how to jump with two feet at the same time and then has nightmares for a night or two. Or, when a toddler figures out how to climb a slide and slide down without help he suddenly wets the bed during nap time- or falls apart at dinner time for a day or two.

Do you know what your children are doing?- My teen age son and his younger brother had an interesting afternoon shooting and animating this clip. After my three year old watched the clip his comment was, "Can I play with that too?"


Easily entertained: I got a new coffee pot for christmas. The on switch is an old-fashioned shiny metal toggle switch. Yes, toggle switch. We keep making coffee just to get to switch the toggle on. Good thing it makes great coffee. Good thing my husband has had to work all night several nights this week anyway.

The main difference I have noticed between boy toddlers and girl toddlers is that my girls always said, "Play with me," and my boys always say, "Watch this". That and the fact that everything boy toddlers play requires spitty sounding sound effects.


I love Friday Night Leftovers. Poke around see if there is anything else interesting out there.

In "A Wrinkle In Time" Madeleine L'Engle brings up a very minor subplot exploring the idea of how the physical properties of our world require us to have certain senses; and how the design of our senses and physical bodies require our world to have certain properties.

As a child this always intrigued me.  It also made me wonder why God bothered to create such an intricate world with so many possibilities for sensory pleasure. My only guess is that God did so because God is Creative- literally of course.

I'm glad He is and that He did.  I thought I'd list my personal top 13, guilt free, rated "G", sensory-rich pleasures.

1. The sound of my knitting needles clicking along when a knitting project is going well. (Alas, not a recent sound.)
2. The sound of piano, when my children are playing from their heart and not just to get practice time finished.  
3. The soft sighs of my babies when they are sleeping peacefully.
4. The sound of any family member when they laugh a full out honest-to-goodness belly-laugh.
5. The taste explosion that happens when I bite into a piece of home made fudge. (Home made, as in made at someone else's home; I make terrible fudge.)
6. The feel of a hot coffee mug pressed against my forehead when I have a morning sinus headache.
7. The feel of my toddler's chubby arms around my neck when he hugs me tight, and then the feel of his little hand when he pats my shoulder.
8. The feel of fine wool roving as I draft and spin it into yarn.
9. The sight of my 2 year old, last January, as an injection of D-25 turned him a healthy pink almost instantly; and the sound of the E.R. doctors and nurses cheering. (I've never adored the color pink so much so as at that moment.)
10. The way my hand fits with my husband's hand when we go strolling the neighborhood.
11. The smell of cinnamon rolls baking on a rainy, chilly day.
12. The way it feels to swing as high as I can on the city park swings and then lean back so far that my hair drags in the mulch. (I love to do this. I do not love to watch my children do this.)
13. The sight and smell of my climbing roses every May.

I don't have a dog, but if I did I would have kicked it yesterday.  It was one of those days.

I woke up late and didn't get to work-out.  Somehow, over the weekend plus Monday my house fell apart.  I have no idea how or even where I was when it happened- I must have been vacationing in Tahiti.  I just wish I could remember Tahiti.

Husband had no socks.  I had no clean dish towels, etc., etc.  The 5 loaf fail-proof bread recipe didn't rise properly, and I realized several things I had promised different people that I would get done- that I had forgotten to do.  Worst of all, I was just plain crabby.

Basically a Fail Day of small fails.

I'm so glad that my resolutions for this year didn't include: working out everyday, being eternally cheerful, keeping a spotless house or being successful with paperwork and promises.  That would have made my Fail Day into a Fail Year.

This morning I started the day with a toddler truncated work-out, smelly shop-vac cleaning out my broken dishwasher, and toasting yesterday's mutant bread.

But... even if I have been up for 3 hours before I remember this verse, it's a wonderful promise:

Half dressed and hiding.


















It's a lot of work assembling this:





















When the snow drifts are, ummm... 3 millimeters deep.















Warming up inside; spoon vs. sword vs. broom

1. garage fridge
2. garage door (note, 16 yo driver and the garage door cannot exist in the same place at the same time)
3. water heater
4. coffee maker, and wheat grinder
5. washing machine (Any idea how $$ washing for a family of 9 at the laundromat is?)
6. front right stove element
7. kid's P.C. 
8. toilet (umm, tell your 2 year old not to flush pencils)
9. vacuum cleaner (What madman thought up wall to wall carpeting?)
10. leather ottoman
11. Husband's production laptop (Warning: going through hospital security with your laptop when you are exhausted can cause clumsiness. Those terrazzo floors are very hard.)
12. 4 car tires (o.k. should have seen that coming, but didn't)
13. house refrigerator

I grew up in a playful, usually happy, and always competitive family.  Case in point:

Every night we ate dinner together at the table.  All 6 of us.  Every night, after a dinner full of boisterous conversation, everyone but my father would push back from the table and begin clearing the dishes.  Every night, one member of the family would be designated the losing owner of the "pig plate".


Let me explain, the "pig plate" was the plate onto which the scraps from other family member's plates were scraped.  Nothing more.  It didn't mean you had to do the dishes alone, it didn't mean you had eaten too much or too sloppily.  It just meant that you had lost. 


"Pig Plate, Pig Plate, Susan has the Pig Plate," is a chant I can still hear being laughingly/teasingly/annoyingly sung on the nights I lost.


Why did we have competitive table clearing? What was so awful about having your empty plate used for clearing? What criterion was used to determine the evening's pig plate owner?


No idea, then or now.  But it was fun, and even my Dad didn't like losing.  

I want my children to grow up in a playful home.  I hope that someday, as adults, they will be working quietly on a mundane task when a stray memory of their growing-up triggers a smile.

Anyone else have weird, playful family traditions?

The first day back.  Real life.
Holiday over.

Robe on. Smile.

Awoken by babies who don't dread the day.
Let's play.

Jeans on. Smile

Mind clicking, pancakes flipping.
Teens dozing.

Apron on. Smile.

Table set. Kids bleary, over 3 feet tall
 serve themselves.

Coffee poured. Smile.

Sodium Chloride/Sodium Bicarbonate Nasal rinse in a jar,
Someone mistakes it for syrup.

Head back.  Laugh and Laugh.

Holiday over. Real life.
Smile.

A few years ago I met my 5 year old son outside his Sunday School class.  He was walking slowly, looking intently at a class hand-out. "Mom," he asked in a troubled voice, "Which is cooler, who would you want to be?"

In a glance I saw his dilemma.

 On the left side of the hand-out was a picture of a handsome, muscled and caped hero.  The hero was staring bravely into the distance ready to fly off and save someone.  The hero had been circled in pencil but the circle had been erased.

On the right side of the paper stood an anorexic bearded man wearing a dress with a beauty pageant sash- light blue of course.  This fellow was looking down in a wimpy, depressed sort of way.  He appeared ready to hide at the first sign of danger.  He was circled too, but not erased.

Fast forward to yesterday; a slim book surfaced on my desk called "Your God Is Too Small" by J.B. Phillips.  A section entitled, "Unreal Gods: The Meek and Mild" reminded me of the super hero hand-out episode.   In the book Phillips complains that we teach a mild, bloodless Jesus, who is, "a bit of a nonentity"  He writes, "We can hardly be surprised if children feel fairly soon that they have outgrown the "tender shepherd" and find their heros elsewhere."

Back to the hand-out.  What a perfect illustration of Phillips' point.  My son was scandalized when I confessed I'd much rather be the hero with the cape. He admitted that he had gotten the answer wrong too.

Wrong? It was a great opportunity to talk about Christ with the bull whip clearing out the temple, Christ in control of a wild storm at sea.  Christ the super hero who saved all humanity, for all time.  What's cooler than that?

A few years ago I realized that I wasted a lot of time feeling weighed down by various unfinished knitting projects.  I freed all yarn from any project I no longer wanted. It didn't matter how close to finished.  I was ruthless, Mistress of my yarn.

Of course yarn is tricky, it conspired against me.   My spinning guild gave me a gorgeous sheland/angora blend as a baby shower gift.  I spent months spinning it to a perfect lace-weight.  I spent untold hours designing a lace sweater with a complex hand-drawn chart and top down pattern.  I sat by my son's hospital bed knitting swatches during two different crisis.

Can you sense the sentimental background/amunition this yarn began to amass against me?  My life changed with the advent of a son's illness.  I no longer had the same amount of time, or quality of sleep; yet this project  mocked me, depressed me, told me I had failed.  Somehow I lost sight of the fact that knitting is a hobby, i.e. something I do because I enjoy it.

So last night I enlisted a callous hit team of two daughters to frog with me.  Our training mission- an entrelac blanket of lesser emotional baggage.

Languid pose aside...


Look at that grim determination- or possibly boredom.


Today, the first day of the New Year, I will send my hit team, my frog team, after the lace sweater.  Freedom will ring for the shetland/angora handspun yarn.

This year my finished projects may be fewer and simpler, but I will frog back to enjoyment to be Mistress of my yarn once again.