A Picture Worth A Thousand Words

Tonight I was searching around for the perfect photo to put as a header on my blog. I like to make seasonal changes and I like to use my own photos. It was challenging because it has to be able to fit in a very narrow frame. As I was meandering through the last 40 years in photos, and I am NOT making this up, I was struck with how blessed I am. It was sort of like watching my life go before me, only I wasn’t scared I was going to die. With the birth of each of my children I experienced a surge of love that goes beyond explaining.  Here is one of my favorite photos. For me, it captures a very special time in my life when my children were all still little and needed me. It was one of the few where I could manage to get them to wear matching outfits without them rolling their eyes. In fact, this photo was entirely before anyone had rolled theirs eyes in this house and that is exactly my point.

Happy New Year

I know it’s happy new year but I’m not feeling too happy at the moment. I guess I’m feeling a bit guilty about that as I already had my one down post a couple of weeks ago. Every time I look at my Christmas letter I feel a bit uncomfortable. It’s not that any bit of it wasn’t completely true, it’s just that well…we’ve not been getting along very well. We couldn’t even all manage to go out together for our celebration of the New Year. It sort of makes me feel like if I’m going to paint such a rosy picture of our family I should also include the true bits about when we can’t stand each other as well,not that I have to do this but I’m such a painfully honest person.

Have you ever wished you had a family counselor who you could call on at any time to just jump in and help you work out your issues? I have. I just finished reading an excellent and amazing book called Writing to Change the World by one of my favorite authors, Mary Pipher. She also happens to be the author of the best selling Reviving Ophelia which has been one of the most influential books I have read. I would love to meet this woman one day. She just makes so much sense and she thinks like I do or maybe I think like she does. She also happens to be a therapist and sometimes I wish I had her as a friend. Oh well.

I know we are all at fault for our foibles and as the parents and supposed grown ups in charge, Tony and I should be more capable at the getting along stuff but we seem to be on the same level as the children at times with petty squabbles over the most unbelievably stupid things. I know I’m not the only person on the planet who struggles with this stuff because my neighbor and good friend came to me with almost the same exact problems the other day. When I listened to her problems I thought, Oh my gosh we are going through almost the same stuff.

I think our problem is that we don’t know how to behave well with lots of time off. I think we look so forward to all this time off our normal work schedules, yes, even us homeschool moms work, but when faced with each other with differing expectations we snip at each other and pick until we are all a bunch of cranks. We stay up late at night, spend too much time in front of screens, eat too much junk and don’t take care to think about others. I got very selfish with my time over the last week because I was burned out from Christmas, isn’t that ironic. It always amazes me how that happens no matter how hard I try to relax.

In my efforts to take some time off I think I upset everyone with just wanting to vegetate on the couch with a book, well okay, several books. When the girls pestered to be taken somewhere, I said no and pointed to their father who huffed and puffed but did take them out. He also wanted to vegetate, not with books but with his painting. I let the house go until in a mad state of threatening and shouting I mustered the troops to clean it up. Boy was that ugly(in truth I guess I was ugly) but the job got done and the decorations were all put away and the piles got put away,the floor got cleaned, the magazines from last year got given away and the car is full of stuff for the thrift store. I’m not recommending this method and I don’t mean this as a joke, people are more important than clean houses but sometimes things get to the point where I go a little crazy until things get put back in their place.

So here’s hoping we can all take better care of each other with me as an example and probably as we go back to our routines we will be happier and really begin to feel a happy new year. I will start off my new year tomorrow by helping my good friend and neighbor who goes in to give birth to her fourth daughter. I will have her three girls here. Her third daughter is just a wee one, so I’ll be caring for a baby tomorrow, just one. We will all be on our toes while she is here. Tony asked me if I forgot how to change a diaper, I don’t think soooo.

God bless and Happy New Year!

Mimi

Merry Christmas 2007!

Greetings Friends and Family,

All of us  here at home wish you all a warm and healthy holiday season. We are counting our blessings and hope you all are too. All of the girls are growing and changing so much it’s really hard to fathom sometimes. I’m grieving the loss of their babyhood but enjoying the growing sense of independence we all have. They are all still involved in music, scouts, and church activities and of course our homeschooling. We all get up early to work out at the YMCA and all the girls are enrolled in the 100 mile swim club so hopefully by next year they will all have completed their goals.

Anna and Mia are on the church youth council and Mia is an acolyte at church. Anna went to her first formal dance held in May at the Great Wolf Lodge and just happened to win a pass for six for a one night stay in a family suite.
We enjoyed our stay so much that we returned to celebrate Jenna’s 11^th birthday.

In February I participated in the Epiphany Program, an ecumenical Christian ministry for incarcerated youths. I continue to volunteer in jail once a month and long to get more involved. Volunteerism is very important to us. We all spent many hours running the local nature center. Anna spent two full weeks volunteering this summer as a camp counselor and with an organization that uses high school aged youth and adult chaperones, to renovate homes of low income, disabled and elderly families. Mia went for a weekend and also worked in three digit temperatures cleaning up
someone’s house and yard.  Mia kept us busy with some more broken bones, four of her fingers this time. Fortunately
they all healed up good as new.

In June the girls and I joined Nancy’s family at Virginia Beach for a wonderful time. This was an eventful trip for us as we camped in a tent for the first time and two of the three nights there we endured torrential thunderstorms and heavy winds and swarms of mosquitoes. In July we enjoyed a month long visit from my cousin’s daughter Celestine. She joined us in our normal summertime activities and got to visit with extended family and do some traveling in Virginia including our trip to the Great Wolf Lodge.

September brought our cross country trip which is documented with full details and photos right here. We did a giant figure eight of the US traveling 5,541 miles. It was the trip of a life time and we can’t wait to travel again. Special thanks to all who put us up, for without you we wouldn’t have been able to afford it. We also did some great camping while traveling and got to see sights we will never forget. Thanks to Sue in Wilmington, Rita in Detroit, Marny in St.  Charles, the Bowles in Tulsa, the Stevens in Albuquerque, and Cathi and Aaron in Denver.

Just after our return in October, Tony packed it in and went to England where he celebrated his mother’s 80^th birthday. From what we heard and saw in photos a wonderful time was had by all. We all would have loved to have gone but airfare alone is truly prohibitive. In closing, we wish you all the best for this upcoming year and if you are near give us a call and stop by.

Baking and Party Time

I feel like posting some photos so I think I’ll just show some of the pretty stuff we’ve been cookin’ up here at the Butternut Girls School which is what we call our little homeschool.  These fine items were prepared by my dear Anna and me. We had a lovely time baking and creating away but it might have been better if we had not started at 7 pm and finished at 11 pm but oh well, we still had fun and made some money for charity in the process.

I belong to a fantastic group at church; we call ourselves the Fellowship Class because well, we love to fellowship, which includes eating and talking with some praying, lots of laughing and some good old fashioned hugging thrown in when needed. Once a year we have a Christmas party and do a gift exchange. Instead of the exchange this year we did a silent auction bringing gifts and auctioning them off all the proceeds to go to charity. Not wanting to go out a buy a useless item to be later discarded I thought I’d make some cookies and that way folks could bid whatever they wanted and a few dollars would go to charity. Here’s what we made to auction off.

Mia my socially conscious budding little feminist, animal rights activist 13 year old decided that we should donate our proceeds to the Heifer Project. I totally agreed with her but told her it would not be my decision that she should stand up before the group and plea her cause. So she wrote a little speech which she gave with passion. She requested $120 because she wanted to buy a pig. The group was moved and Mia got her pig, or I should say someone somewhere will get a pig. I’m proud of her and happy that a piggie will make  life a little better in some corner of the world. One of the rules for the Heifer Project is that the recipients must give one of the animal’s offspring to someone else. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

The Land of Plenty

Living in the literal “land of plenty” can be at the best times disconcerting. We have so much and yet we have so little. I know it sounds trite and overused but things don’t make people happy and man do we have lots of things to fill our emptiness. I do admit that at times I wonder what it would be like to be very wealthy, to fly first class, to shop in the best stores with careless abandon or to never have to worry about whether or not the income is going to pay all the bills but most of the time I feel positively rich.

Having traveled to numerous very poor places I have not been able to forget the poverty I saw there. I saw and tasted and felt the anguish of the poor who could not even provide the basics for their children. Children who die daily because they can not get simple antibiotics which are so readily available elsewhere. It is enough to make one feel totally helpless. I never take a hot shower for granted. I thank God each time the heavy flow of hot, really hot water, showers down on me. I remember the tiny children with bloated bellies full of parasites and empty of food, naked but for a few scraps of clothes. I remember the people offering me as a guest more than they could afford their own children and how I stealthily passed the food on to the children as the parents were not looking. I gave away what I could to them, most of what I brought with me but I was easily able to buy what I needed when I returned home, they were not. I was amazed at what so many survive on enduring hard physical labor every single day of their lives. These people, in this case the native people of Guatemala, do not have weight issues, unless it is being underweight while a good bit of the developed world struggles not to eat ourselves to death.

Yet I saw real joy, laughter and happiness in the midst of their suffering.  Families enjoyed time with each other and enjoyed simple pleasures of visiting their neighbors and looking forward to the time of their city’s patron saint celebration or some other celebration of which they have quite a few. Something is missing, I think in our land of plenty. It is something internal. We have lost our way so to speak. Though we fill our lives with more and more of the products which we are told will make us sexier, slimmer, more macho or whatever we are supposed to want to be we are no more happy but pretty miserable. With the advent of technology and science we are supposed to be so advanced and yet we are no more happy than when we were living in much simpler conditions. There is no real way to go back, we have opened up Pandora’s Box for better or worse and yet do we have to go back?

This post has sort of taken on a life of its own I meant it to be about how stressful Christmas time can be but this is what came out. I’m fearing that this post is going to make me sound holier than thou and totally depressed and I am neither.I am generally a very happy and hopeful person but sometimes and often at this time of the year I sink down some.

I am not an ascetic, nor do I think I should be. I live in the material world every day. I long for gadgets to make my life more interesting and less difficult and I love the technology that I am able to use and yet I do feel the discord of living in the land of plenty while so many are empty inside. I struggle that I am worrying about what to buy my children so they can be happy at Christmas time when I know that what will really make them happy is nothing they will find under that Christmas tree but something they will find deep within. Yet,  just like all loving parents I would feel useless if I did not buy them the things they want and of course the things they need. It seems a paradox to me and one of the reasons I get down at this time of the year.

Remember to give lots of hugs and kisses and pats on the back, give out lots of compliments even if you have to stretch the truth a bit. Go visit your neighbor who never gets out, babysit for the mom who’s tearing her hair out because she never gets a break. Give of yourself this Christmas as Jelly says and you will give a real gift, one more valuable than anything you can buy at the store. Have a very merry time of it and God bless you all.

Mimi

Where did the year go?

This year has come and gone such a flurry that my head is spinning. I wish I had some cute, funny or witty post to publish but I don’t really. Life goes round in a series of ups and downs though this year did have some very special moments. I wonder what 2007 will bring? I hope and pray for big things like world peace. 

I get discouraged but then I remember that even one person, like me, can make small differences and they add up to big things. I will do my best to be a peaceful loving person and spread this where I go, starting right here at home. Sometimes the starting out part can be a challenge in itself. What I mean is it’s easier to talk about world peace rather than work on getting along with your family members day in and day out.

We have all learned things this year. I am amazed at what my kids learn in a day, never mind a year but I am also amazed at what I can learn when my mind and heart are open and searching. The key of course is to remain open. Frankly, it’s much easier to go around like a turtle hidden in a shell.  I seem to find people all over town who have closed up long ago. These are people of all ages  who have closed up for all different reasons, perhaps a broken heart or fear to loose what they might already be hanging on to by a thread. I really can’t be sure but I do meet them wherever I go. Then I find folks like Stan who is 89 and about as open as a book. He will act as if whatever thing you have to share with him is the most interesting thing he has heard that day. I bet he’s still learning things all the time. I hope to remain childlike until the day I die. It is never too late to learn something new.

I usually don’t make new years resolutions but I do like to reflect on the past year and think about how I can improve the new year. This year I will try not to get lost in the activities I am involved in so that I ignore the people involved. Sometimes I focus so much on getting the external details together in my busy, busy life that I don’t stop to pay attention to my kids. I’ll try as I have been to spend less time running from pillar to post. I’ll try to balance my life as best I can. I will also make an effort to laugh more, especially at myself.

So I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas and got to spend some nice time with family and friends. Do have a Happy New Year and don’t make too many resolutions you can’t or won’t keep. Start small and work up from there. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

Mimi

Never a Dull Moment

Life with four kids is always an adventure. Recently, while performing a fashion show of her latest thrift store finds, Mia broke her foot.  Who would have thought… This is the child who climbs trees, rides a bike, swims, jumps from dangerous locations and lives on the edge. Even the orthopedist said that breaking a foot on the “catwalk” was a first. Life with a wild child on crutches stinks but we’re muddling through. Thank God she is nimble and able bodied other than not being able to walk on her foot for six to eight weeks. She is getting lots of help from her older sister who seems to be mature enough to sympathize with her.

Only hours after Mia got her first cast I went away for four days to a powerful spiritual retreat. This retreat is called The Walk to Emmaus. Words could not even begin to describe what I went through there so I won’t even try and describe it.  I hope my actions will just speak for me. I was able to drop some pretty heavy baggage I’ve been dragging around for a long time.

Just as it seemed we were getting into our routine again Anna and Mia and I packed it in and joined 70 or so teenagers for the annual youth retreat our church participates in. I have gone with them for the last three years and have really enjoyed the experience. It is very unusual for me to be gone for one weekend, never mind two so it was an unusual month. Our speaker was great this year and we all were having a great time. I was all tucked in bed with my cabin of giggling sixth grade girls on Saturday night when the youth directors came to me and said I needed to check out my daughter who was covered in hives, including her nose which was swollen and red. Sooo…. to make a long story short I did not end up going to sleep but taking her and Mia (who managed the retreat on crutches) home. We arrived around 1 am but the good news was the hives were gone by the next day.

We had just begun recovering from our weekend retreat and exciting return home when it was time to begin preparing for Thanksgiving. We were having the family to our house and so I was providing the turkey and ham plus there was just a lot of cooking, cleaning and preparation to work out. We had a wonderful time with our family and really ate well. I sort of wish we could slow down some but looking at the calendar it’s go, go, go from here on out. I will make some time to slow down because it’s important but probably not as much as I’d like. I’m sure one day when the kids are gone I’ll long for the days of business, maybe not but I suspect so. On to Christmas now!

 

Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day Proclamation – 1870

by Julia Ward Howe

Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

I feel women can change the world
and I also feel we are somehow coming in to a new age for women. I hate to use
the words “finding ourselves” because it is so trite but it does seem
to fit. We left the home and entered the work place, some have come home,
others are still working outside the home with a variety of options that were
not previously available. I think many found they couldn’t really “have it
all”, some ended up with double the work when they left home. They had two
jobs one at work and one at home. What we’ve found is there are always
compromises no matter what choices we make. At least we have the choices now,
we in the US, I should say, women in many parts of the world are still treated as chattel.
I’m praying that their day soon will come!

I feel the US is ready for
a female president and I might even vote for a woman of another political party
just to give her a chance. Seems to me like Hillary and Condi would make a
great race and apparently I’m not the only one. Would you vote for either? I’m
going to let the cat out of the bag and say I think I’d rather have Condi but and
I know I’ll get some rotten tomatoes, I’d also vote for Hillary.

I guess I would call myself a
feminist but I’m not the kind of person one can fit easily into a box. I’m sort
of an oxymoron with the emphasis on the moron part ; I would call myself a
conservative feminist. Although I have a college degree I decided to stay home
and raise my own kids. I appreciate the opportunities I had and my daughters
will have but in the end it was becoming a mother that liberated me and made me
happiest of all. It was the first time I was really happy. When I mentioned
this in my first job as a school teacher my liberated male teacher friend
scoffed loudly and clucked his tongue, what would he know about being a mother
and why shouldn’t I express my true feelings.

I noticed when I looked at all the
photos of me after giving birth I am smiling big smiles though I felt like I’d
been run over by a truck. Personally I think becoming a
mother opens up a new part of our hearts and enables us to feel things never
imagined. I actually think it makes us understand God on a deeper level, if
indeed we are children of God, made in his image. For me it was a step of growth
I wasn’t really expecting. I matured rapidly as I became a mother. I would
guess that most mothers would give their lives for any of their children
without much thought. Becoming a mother is also the chance to experience what it truly means to be beloved.

Families certainly are critical in
the development and nurturing of children and Dads can make awesome stay at
home parents but I still think a mother’s love is special and it has been that
way forever, since humans have walked the earth. Mothers tend to have a special
ability to know what’s going on in their children’s lives. Do you remember
being in trouble as kid and not being able to keep it from your mother. Mine
would always find out or be able to read me like a book. I know when my kids
are upset and often know exactly why while my husband may be scratching his
head thinking that everything is fine.

What an amazing plan nature had for
birthing and raising babies. Ordinary
and everyday mothers just seem to do miraculous things on a regular basis
without a second thought. They remain sleepless for months and sometimes years,
give their physical bodies over for almost a year, feed their babies from milk
their bodies produce and are so linked to their child in the beginning the baby
doesn’t even distinguish itself as separate. I’m sure that every mother that
reads this has stayed up with a sick child worrying and ready to do anything
necessary to help. Mothers hear their child’s cry and can respond even before
the child fully wakes up. I feel certain that any one of us would walk directly into a
burning building to save our child.

I don’t think mothers are better
than fathers but we have a different role. Finding our place in our families is
what makes us happiest. In my travels around the world I have found the
happiest people are sometimes the poorest and they are the people who have very
clear family roles. This does not mean the mom cooks, cleans and drives the
carpool, it means that she nurtures and serves her family, not that I’m any
model of this mind but at least it’s a goal.

So let’s hear it for mothers on
their special day. Happy Mother’s Day.

Mimi