Just catching up

This letter is free for you to read, but costs me precious brain cells to write. I do use my own brain cells, though precious few of them appear to be left. I write this letter for humans, not robots, so it will arrive in your inbox at human paced intervals. All words and photos are my own, unless attributed properly, and any typos you find are proof of a real human person doing the work.

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This morning I extricated a milk frother from my daughter’s hair.

Yes, like the type that you use to make a nice foam before you add milk to coffee. This tool is largely irrelevant in our household since my coffee is black like my soul, but nevertheless, it lives on in our silverware drawer, languishing through its counts on fingers third move since we got it.

Apparently, the origin story for this disaster was that one of the boys thought he’d use the frother as a belly scratcher, and then the other boy thought he’d wave it like a (sword? magic wand?) above everyone’s head, in the annoying way that only boys of a certain age can. He did not account for the absolute travesty of his sister’s hair rapidly being whirred up like so many frothy curls. She was, understandably, perturbed. I was, understandably, somewhere between incredulous and other things. This little escapade was not on my Bingo card for today, but neither was, “babysit a downer cow and cry”, or “wonder why the baby doesn’t believe in napping”, or “settle into your 13th living space in the span of 12 years”

Later this same morning, my son informed me that “the reason we weren’t singing very well is because we were so distracted by the squirrels!” This adds to my theory that boys are basically border collies, because I actually don’t know for sure who was more fixated on watching the squirrel out the window.

If you’d like to feel completely scrambled, I suggest moving houses directly after Christmas on short notice. We didn’t plan to do this. It wasn’t an emergency, it was just one of those opportunities that suddenly became obvious and then needed to be acted upon quickly. The short version is that my husband woke up the Sunday before Christmas and asked, “What do you think?” and then I said, “Yea, that makes sense” and then we talked to the other people involved and they thought it made sense too, so here we are. We moved with very little ceremony and the aid of our Beverly Hillbilly moving accoutrements into a new living situation about 1/4 mile away from the old one. The animals will stay where they are, the kids ride bikes to do chores and everyone is adjusting.

Moving, being moving, has included such things as a broken dishwasher (rats! literally chewed a hole in the hose), sick kids, maintenance concerns, and the general chaos of eight people’s earthly belongings being shuffled from one place to the other.

I am resisting the urge to declare that everything in my life is awful and I’m also a horrible person, that homeschool will never feel normal, that I’m failing my children in every.single.area. of my life, and that I’ll never be able to find my shoes again.

I am told that no one likes moving and I do not have a pathological issue if I find it stressful. I continue to repeat, “In times of desolation do not make a change”… I will not run for the hills just yet.

Meanwhile, the amaryllis on my table is blooming. It is beautiful. It started opening up last week, and each day it’s a little more spectacular. It likes its new home just fine, and when I look at it I feel a whisper of hope… maybe I can bloom too.

Then I remember that the amaryllis is blooming in a pot, and wonder if that means this house is a temporary container for my temporal belongings. This could be taken very literally, or extrapolated to mean all that, “This world is not our home” stuff. I mean, how temporary this is probably depends on when Jesus comes back and all that, which you know, if you read the news — I mostly don’t — could be any day now depending on your precise eschatological leanings.

Before we get too deep into January induced existential angst, let’s move on to a children’s book.

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Children’s Literature Corner:

One good thing about moving is that you get to reorganize your bookshelves and all the poor categorizations you made the first go round can be somewhat corrected. There are just books that don’t belong with other books, and I like to try to group things in a way that makes at least some sense. We now have an entire shelf devoted to animal focused middle grade fiction¹, which is as it should be. Even with all that, I couldn’t find the book I wanted to share this week, so as I made another cup of tea because I was cold, I thought of a book that I first found a few years ago at the library, Boxes for Katje by Candace Fleming, illustrated by Stacey Dressen-McQueen. This is the story of a young girl in post WWII Holland, and her pen pal friendship with an American friend. Katje’s village of Olst is struggling, and a Children’s Aid society box that begins as a small treat and a letter eventually ends with one town supporting another small town, oceans apart. It is a story of people seeing other people. So often we forget that we didn’t really do anything to not be the starving people in a war torn country. We could be those people still. If we live in relative plenty how do we remember the people who don’t? This book reminds me to be grateful for cabbages and potatoes, and to not take my sugar and chocolate for granted. It is filled with joyful illustrations of people who share the nothing they have, and still plant tulip bulbs. It’s based on a true story, and part of the note in the back of the book reads,

My mother’s box found its way to a Dutch family whose oldest daughter was named Katje. It was Katje’s father who wrote back, asking if my mother could spare a box of powdered milk for the baby, or a bag of sugar, or perhaps a few cans of meat. The pressing needs of Katje’s family tore at my mother’s heart. What began with one woman and one small box grew into a churchwide effort to support Katje’s family through the hard winter. Sugar, powdered milk, coats — all this and more traveled across the Atlantic in a steady flow from Indiana to Holland. Katje’s family survived. And when conditions in Holland began to improve, they sent a box to their American friends — a box of tulip bulbs, bulbs that my mother and others planted all over town.

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Lately:

brightly blooming, growing calves, doggie is confused, birthday book, amaryllis buds, morning sun, hillbilly moving, sunsets

Listening: This episode, “Permission to Not Be Great” was a good pep talk, but I also appreciated, “Ways to Be a Better Problem Solver”. I also enjoyed this interview with Sarah Mackenzie and Laura Vanderkam. Her book, Tranquility by Tuesday, was one of the few time management resources I’ve found genuinely helpful, and it made me think I should try to re-visit it in the next couple months.

Reading: For somewhat obvious reasons I have been reading almost nothing. I feel so out of sorts and I’m trying not to be in a mood about the incongruity of moving right when I’m wanting get back to routine. There is no routine, because I can’t find my dang shoes. I’m sure it’s better than it feels, but the little things like forgetting which drawer you put the kitchen implements in take up brain power. We did find a space to set up the pop up infrared sauna, so it can actually stay up. Hooray! My goal is to stack some reading time with that and see if it helps me on multiple levels. I have started making a list of books I’d like to read or re-read this year. The James Herriot books are at the top of the list because I love them, but also because I think that they might have some genuinely helpful diagnostic knowledge in them. I am almost through Reed of God, but I can’t read it too fast because there’s a lot packed in there!

Farm: I mean, if you need to cry, or your kids need to cry, just get some animals. We sent some animals off to the butcher, so the people had some feelings about that. I’m also struck by how much animals wreck the illusion that you’re in control. That’s actually what came to my mind reading this essay that Haley Baumeister wrote for Mere Orthodoxy. Our first round of calving has been humbling and heartbreaking, but also amazing to watch. I know cows are not humans, but to be honest, I sometimes think farmers have thought through some of these ethics more than doctors. There might be somewhat less of a God complex at least.

Thinking: It’s the time of year where I’m cautiously thinking about where we’re headed next year. I am curious — if you’ve homeschooled through middle school and high school, and especially if you’ve done so while also having younger children at home — I’d love to hear your wisdom. What do you wish you’d done more of? What do you wish you’d done less of? Obviously these questions are very particular to any given family and must be discerned that way, but there may be themes that emerge. Ruth Gaskovski Heather @ To Sow a Seed Lane Scott Dixie Dillon Lane Tsh Oxenreider Denise Trull Leila Marie Lawler … I’m sure there are others, so feel free to re-stack and tag if you know someone who can contribute wisdom. I, and perhaps many of my readers who are in similar stages, would appreciate principles more than specifics. I’ve heard multiple iterations of the suggestion to sort of stay in the middle, and let the older children move up independently (does a homeschool mom really just teach K-6 on repeat?). What opportunities outside the home have been the most fruitful? Nothing you say shall be taken as gospel truth, and realism is encouraged. Tell it to us young idealists!

That’s all I’ve got time for today. I hope you’re finding spots of beauty in your January, and remember: do not make sweeping generalizations about life when the whole house is sick, you’ve just moved, or you haven’t been able to go outside for more than three days. If all three of those things were true last week, you’ve got to wait at least two more weeks to make a value judgment on your life ;)

1. Marguerite Henry, Jim Kjellgaard, Sterling North etc…