The Reality of the Season.

Don't mind me, just popping into my OWN blog for the first time in a month and a half.  I'm trying, people, I'm trying.

First off, I deserve some kind of medal of amazingness for having finished my Christmas shopping.  I'll have to take pictures of what everyone is getting or something; I'll just do it in my free time.  HHAAHAHAHAHAHAhhhaahahaha.  Snort.  Seriously, though, I think everyone will be happy.  And by everyone I mean, of course, my immediate family, since the thought of doing anything beyond the house fills me with dread and despair.  We didn't take a Christmas photo, we didn't buy or send cards, we didn't get anything in the mail in time for the grandparents, we haven't purchased a turkey yet, unlike in previous years I have not researched and decided on a lavish menu for Christmas day or made homemade gifts for people...

What I have done is this:  I have talked a lot about Christmas to the children.  I've read them Santa's Favorite Story and bought a $2 Spiderman advent calendar and went out and cut down a white pine and put lights on it.  I've unearthed stockings for the children to use and I have redecorated the tree approximately a billion times after the toddlers have touched it.  I have set up a nativity scene and I have found wrapping paper in the closet and I have purchased presents that, I think, will be a success with a 3 year old and a 1 year old.

The remainder of the days before Christmas will be spent wrapping and trying to find things to eat on Christmas morning.  If I have the energy I'm hoping to decorate a 'Santa's Cookie Plate' and bake cookies with Samuel.  That's the extent of my interesting craft goals.

If this all sounds kind of lame, well, that's because it is.  This third pregnancy has hit me like a tonne of bricks; I'm exhausted, and I'm still battling nausea.  I am 12 weeks and 5 days along, and people keep telling me variations on the theme of 'Soon you'll be feeling wonderful again!' which is a LIE and also a BIG FAT LIE because after vomiting convulsively with Clara until the bitter end I know all to well that this could last for another six months.  Although God help us all if that's the case.

Almost as soon as that little positive appeared on the test I've been planning one thing and one thing only - simplifying my life so that the essentials get done.  When I was so ill that the only thing I was serving for meals was fruit and crackers, this was pretty much a pipe dream, but now that I'm a little better I'm trying harder to make changes around the house that theoretically are going to, I don't know, make things easier.  I need easy.

A Long Boring Explanation of My Reading Patterns

This is one of those posts that really, unless you're interested in the hows and whys of my reading 'cycles' you can certainly skip and I won't be insulted.  Thanks for stopping by all the same.

Before college I was obsessed with reading.  I remember reading Somerset Maugham for a grade school book report.  And Postern Of Fate.  I probably was the bane of my English teacher's existence.  My first romance was Jane Eyre, which I read with a box of tissues on my bed, sobbing.  I made my way alphabetically through the stacks in the school libraries, heck I STARTED the library club, a good way to avoid kickball during recess.

And therefore it made perfect sense to me to take English literature classes in college, and I ended up majoring in English.  Which was good, don't get me wrong.  I'll never be able to forget the Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Lovelace...I can't get rid of my Chaucer or my Arden Complete Shakespeare...I still have the New English Translation of the Bible I bought for $18 second hand - my first *real* Bible, complete with this strange thing called an Apocrypha...it's all fresh as the day it happened.

But I also got completely and totally burned out with reading.

After college I started working in a little indie bookstore in my hometown.  I believe I was there for about 4 years, and I did find some new authors, but for the most part I immersed myself in young adult and children's literature.  Sometimes I would try and get into something 'fluffy' (Diana Gabaldon, anyone?) but I just didn't have the stamina for it.  Books came out, great books, books I heard amazing things about, and I couldn't do it, I couldn't read them.

Eventually it got to the point where it wasn't so much that I didn't have the energy so much as I'd gotten lazy. Reading takes muscles, and I didn't have them - I was reading weak.

It was about 4 years after I started at that bookstore that I decided to go back to school, and that necessitated a move, and THAT meant a new job, this one also at a little indie bookstore.  This bookstore specialized in children's books, and I read tonnes of them.  And you know, there are some great authors out there who write fantastic books - but I knew that they weren't challenging me.

Enter the child-bearing years.  Four long years of vomiting, nursing and dragging recalcitrant offspring to the library in order to try and find/borrow a book for them, and then a few weeks later to return it late and pay the fees.

So here I am, now, smack dab in the difficult toddler years with two babies and a third on the way.  And if you think I have time for reading then you just come on over here and do my laundry for me.  But for the first time in a long while I was unhappy with every old five-times-re-read book on my shelves and I needed something else to read.  Which meant that yesterday I went to the library and did something I haven't done in almost a decade...I wandered up and down the adult fiction section looking for a 'good book'.  I found four, and I'm doing my best to read them, to get 'back into the game'.  I'm so far out of the game I'm in another park; I couldn't tell you who's won ANY prize in the past five years with the exception of Alice Munro.  Who's short stories I didn't like.

I'll let you know how it goes.

I can't eat. My child is not sleeping. World's boringest shopping.

I think that ultimately I'm an easy person to please; I don't need nor do I expect grand gestures of almost any type at all, in fact most things that would fall into a category where 'gesture' is an appropriate label would be pretty much guaranteed to make me such in my breath through my teeth in silent disapproval and discomfort.  Imagine how fun I am at parties.  No, really, go ahead.

But actually, once I started thinking about it I'm really not all that easy to please.  And I'm thinking here about a topic that is pretty much guaranteed to garner some sucking-in-of-breath all it's own (although not my breath, clearly).  I detest my laundry so much it's almost a physical CLOUD of unhappiness descending over me.  And probably the biggest part of that contempt revolves around how STAINED everything seems to be ALL THE TIME.  It's as though my family, as soon as they're out of my line of sight, roll in tomato sauce and scrambled eggs and baby poo and then deposit the clothes around the house for me to find.  No one is immune to this.  Although to be 100% fair I will admit that I am the biggest producer of what appears to be grease stains on the fronts of shirts.  I don't know why this is since as far as I know I don't have any sort of difficulty eating.  I do have quite long hair so perhaps my HAIR is dipping into my food and then touching my clothes?  Okay, that thought is making me queasy.

***

Samuel has just recently stopped napping regularly and it makes me pretty darn sad and depressed that my guaranteed afternoon quiet time is disappearing.  I want him to sleep for two hours in the middle of the afternoon forever.  And the truth is that I CAN still get a good nap out of him but only if I exhaust him in the morning and these days I'm just not up for that.  Plus when he naps he wakes up in a terrible mood that sometimes lasts for an hour or more and drags everyone down with him.  And he's also up way past when I personally think 3.5 year olds should be awake - think 9 pm or later.  Since I would also like to go to bed at 9 pm and have child free time before I do so - this is not okay.  Not. Okay.  All of that is to say that I think naps are going to have to be cut for Samuel and a firmer hand used around the bedtime arrangements.  I've added it to my 'things to do before the baby arrives' list.

***

Also on that list is buying car seats.  Again.  Good Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.  Car seats are pretty much right up there with snow tires and white cotton underpants and pasta on my list of Most Boringest Things To Buy Ever.  "Oh, now THIS car seat goes to THIS weight limit and reclines at THIS angle and comes in Blue Sunrise Burst pattern, but then THIS car seat reclines at the better angle but only comes in Orange Surprise pattern.  Wait, Orange Surprise is out of stock you say?  Well, drat, okay then THIS...."  AGGGGHHHH.  If I had my way I would walk into a store, choose three identical seats that were upholstered in whatever hid vomit the best, and put them in my car and drive away.  The only factors I am interested in are price and utility.  However, the world being fallen as it is, I'm not so lucky.  We have a Pontiac Grand Am and soon to be three children to stuff into the back seat of it, so I need 'special' (read: expensive) seats.  Seats that are significantly more narrow that a standard car seat.  With not-narrow price tags.  Ugh.

***

I'm pregnant. I'm terrible at keeping my temper. Nothing is dead under my porch.

So, in case you follow me entirely via this particular medium and not, say, on Facebook or...well, however else people communicate these days, I shall share our Big Exciting News.  I'm pregnant.  Samuel is 3 years, 7 months, Clara is 18 months and as far as one can know these sorts of things, I'm early in my first trimester. Feel free to comment along the lines of "Oh my, won't you have your hands full!" "Wow!  You're certainly having them close together!" Etc. etc. I will warn you, however, in the interests of giving you a head start, that this time around I am Very Moody.  I'm also Quite Opinionated, and I articulate myself well in print.  Just a friendly reminder.

***

In other news, we had a visiting youth group here from a church about 5 hours away.  Among the other things they accomplished was putting up new lattice under my back porch.  The back porch hadn't been entirely cleaned out underneath though, and so there's a big black garbage bag I see sticking juuust out from the lattice and it's annoying me.  I can ignore the dropped clothespins and what have you but that bag is beyond my abilities.  What's worse is that it seems to have something in it.  So I can't PULL it out of the latticework.  And besides, my imagination tells me, what if it's a HEAD or something?  Or a DEAD ANIMAL.  Good heavens.  And then we'd have the police here and...I do realize how awful it is that I clearly would have preferred that the teenage children visiting from another church discover the imaginary horrors underneath my porch.

***

Do you find that your children often receive gifts that they are very excited about and you are not?  It seems to happen to us a lot, and I'd be interested to know how others handle it.  Handle it in a reasonable and not antagonistic way, that is.  I'm not interested in comments that go along the lines of "I tell everyone exactly what I want them to give my children and refuse all other things" because that sort of advice would neither work with our situation nor my personality.  From what I've been able to figure out my difficulties mainly arise from two points.

First, and probably more prevalent, is that I have ideas about what children need and I don't tend to deviate from those ideas easily.  I'm attempting to think of a non-condemning type example of this.  Okay, can we agree on clothing as a possible no-one-will-think-I'm-talking-about-them example?  I think Clara has too many pairs of pants when I can't fit them into her designated pants drawer.  I realize this is arbitrary and I don't care, that's not the purpose of this example.  The point is that I have made a guideline because I believe that a guideline is necessary and right in this particular situation.  The convenient but at the same time unfortunate result of this sort of thinking is that I have just what I need, but that I do not want/need more of any particular thing.

Secondly, we live in what I think is an adequate sized house for our family, but which, if we were to poll people, would turn out to be on the small size across the general population.  The main issue with the house is the almost complete lack of storage, and the last thing I want is More Things.  Even More Things that are pretty and useful.

***

I haven't experienced my usual pregnancy cravings, but I have found myself thoroughly revolted by almost all foods at one point or another so far.  This has progressed way beyond what I remember from any of my previous pregnancies.  This evening, while attempting to choke down a gorgeous meal cooked to perfection by my husband, which I could barely touch let alone look at, I offered to make nothing but Thai food for the next several weeks/months because it seems very non-repellent to me.  I would be willing to extend to Vietnamese food as well, but not, as requested by David, to Indian.

***

A show was advertised on tv this evening that recalls the emotional lives of parrots and is called Parrot Confidential.  It's situations like this that leave me struggling not to mock.

What I Wore Sunday - Back in the Action!

It's been a long time (Months!  MONTHS!) since I wrote a What I Wore Sunday post and linked up with the FLAP ladies.

Since my last WIWS post I've moved to a new town, in a new province, in a new climate with my husband in a brand new job in a new field of work.  So, it's been a little hectic!  I knew I wanted to link up again, though, and today seemed like as good a day as any, although my outfit was/is pretty mediocre all around.

So here I am in the leather skirt I wore to church.  Ahem.  You've all seen this top before, nothing new there. Tights are from Walmart, shoes are dark grey kitten heels from somewhere lost in the mists of time, and the cardi is the last maternity item I own; kept solely because I don't have another one to replace it with.  The skirt is part of a massive (for me, at least) shopping trip that included the purchase of, I believe FOUR items of clothing.  It's from Reitmans.  There you have it!

31 Days of House To Home

Let me tell you about our day.

It's Sunday.  I woke up at around 6:30 when the sky hadn't even started to lighten and David was bringing me a happy baby to nurse in what seemed to be the middle of the night.  Afterwards, working on the borrowed time of having children placed back in their beds when dawn is right around the corner, I had a quick shower and got through about a paragraph of Bible study before everyone was up.  We had oatmeal for breakfast and let Daddy sleep in for a little while longer.

The craziness of the morning 'everyone needs to wear clothing' rush wasn't too bad today.  And then Clara went back to bed fully dressed and Samuel watched cartoons and David went off to prepare in the church.  I puttered around putting supper in the crockpot and checking Facebook.

Church started at 10:30, and we were all there early to greet people and finish last minute tasks.  After the service we visited and had sandwiches and then we all trickled back to the house eventually.  Clara went to sleep, Samuel went to play quietly in his room, David closed his eyes in our bedroom and I passed out on the sofa.  We slept for almost two hours as a family.  When we woke up it was to the smell of a hot crock pot supper.  We sat down and ate together, and then I called various family members to wish them a happy Thanksgiving weekend.  Samuel and I headed out for a long hike in the late afternoon.  We gathered plants and apples for a pie and seeds for our garden and came home tired and cold.

The children had a hot bubble bath and then took their fuzzy pajama clad little selves to bed with hot water bottles and many quilts.  David and I sat up for a while longer eating banana bread and watching tv before we headed to bed to read and sleep.

I'm telling you about such a simple, boring sort of day because it's indicative of Sabbath; a rest in the midst of life.  It's not an ordinary day, filled with grocery shopping and elaborate cooking and cleaning tasks.  I didn't do laundry, I didn't (other than a pot of oatmeal in the morning and putting food in the slow cooker) do any cooking.  I didn't clean a thing.  No, that's not true, I washed a few pots and wiped the table and counters.  But you get the idea.  It was a rest from the week.  The whole family slept, we ate simple food, we went for a walk and talked to each other.  We went to bed earlier and read.

We're hoping to start the Sabbath as a tradition more and more in our house - rest from the every day.  It's an excellent tradition to have.

31 Days of House To Home

It's Day 11 already!  And Day 11 is a great day to get up on my soapbox and preach a little about something I get Very Frustrated about on a regular basis.  It's soap.  I get really, really frustrated about soap.  Here's the deal, friends:

This is soap.  This is what soap does.  In case you don't want to go click on those links I'll give you a brief outline.  Soap, when used for cleaning something, be it a body or a plate or a floor or your socks, works by suspending bacteria, germs, oils, dirt particles etc. and allowing them to be washed away.  Antibacterial soaps kill bacteria (which actually isn't always a good thing) and non-antibacterial soaps simply liberate the bacteria from the surface of the item so that you can rinse it off.

Basically - soap cleans stuff.  This isn't rocket science.  Some soap is rough, some soap is gentle, some soap has a nice smell, etc. but it all boils down to a substance that cleans.

This begs the question, and please pardon me if it seems overly simplistic, but if soap cleans things - why do we have to use, say, toxic scouring powder on our bathrooms?  Or fume-laden chemicals that actually require you to wear gloves when you use them, on our kitchens?  In a room where you prepare food that you're going to eat?

If you're planning on performing surgery on your table, fine and dandy, use a chemical or something to clean it.  Or, I don't know, I can't really think of a situation where it would be applicable to use something else...maybe if everyone had an antibiotic resistant virus and you needed to disinfect the house?  Good, excellent, go buy something revolting and spray it everywhere.  But to wipe down the bathroom every week?

Keep your soap.

31 Days of House To Home

Celebrate the seasons!

I realized tonight as I was sitting in our neighbour's backyard in the dark, alternately watching the children run wild with sparklers and glow sticks and at the hypnotic glow and crackle of the bonfire in front of me, that celebrating and rejoicing in the change of seasons can come around in just such simple ways.  A few I thought of were:

Stepping outside to breathe the Spring air.
Taking pictures of shoots coming out of the ground.
A first rhubarb recipe of the season.
Buying tulips in season and pressing the petals.
Cleaning the chimneys and windows and whatever else gets especially dirty over the winter.
Circling the 'first days' on the calendar.  First day of farmer's market!
The start of new things.  Why have resolutions in January?  Have them start on the first day of Spring!
Wearing light colours, buying white shoes, doing something light with your hair.
Spending an entire hour thinking about sunscreen and making it a fun outing to buy what you've selected.
A visit to the tree nursery.
The local chip stop is open!  Eat them with tiny red forks while standing outside.
Carefully packing away sweaters.
The trimming of hedges, the sharpening of push mower blades.
The starting days of sports team
Going to a farm, going anywhere, really
The last day of school!
Making an event of the day the local pool opens.
A tinkle of the ice cream cart
Hot days spent in the shade.
Teaching the children to make paper fans
Sitting in the evening outside in the yard with your feet in the kiddie pool
Sprinklers
Sidewalk chalk
Summer dresses made from old flowered sheets
Big floppy hats
The beach in all it's glory
having neighbours over for a barbecue
Fireworks
Camping in the back yard
Bathing the dog outside with the hose
Cleaning the eaves troughs
Fireflies
Listening to the lightening storms
Back to school sales
Exclamations over how much everyone has grown
Visits to family
Buying lots of cards for birthdays to come
Family photos
The first day of school
New shoes
All new supplies.
The first day of a new planner or journal
Crafts with leaves
Carving pumpkins
The delicious anticipation of 'what to be for Hallowe'en'!
Bonfires
Being out after dark
Shorter days.
The night you turn on the furnace
Cold weather foods, crock pots and slow meals
Buying candles and lanterns for blackouts
Counting the stars, watching for meteors
The fall storms
Planning Christmas cards
Present buying trips
Making wrapping paper
The big mailing out!
Guests
Velvet tree skirts, hot chocolate and decorations
Buying a poinsettia
Reading stories
The fireplace
Stockings
Christmas morning
Packing gifts for the less fortunate
The long trip of the wise kings to see the Christ Child
Epiphany cake
Winter birthdays
I Love Yous and candy and special Valentine's dates
Games around the kitchen table
Snowmen!
Feeding the birds
Toboggan rides
Grey and cloudy skies
Seed catalogues
The careful planning of gardens
Watching the produce slowly change in the grocery store
Using up the last of the fall harvest
Lenten reflection
Holy week
Easter morning
New clothes
Chocolate, egg hunts
The first day of Spring
Lengthening days
Setting the clocks forward
Spring babies
Green shoots
Life

Another Day

7:30am - Both of the children slept in and David and I are incredibly grateful for the extra rest.  Samuel comes into our room to wake us up and snuggle for a little bit.  As soon as I send him back to his own bedroom I hear Clara waking up...I guess that's the end of sleep for us.

8:15am - David has gotten up, dressed, and made a pot of porridge for breakfast after settling Samuel in front of cartoons for a bit.  I nurse Clara, change her diaper, and then we all meet around the table to eat.

9:30am - David is off to work.  I tell him lunch will be at 11:30. Samuel is allowed to finish watching Rescue Heroes and then turns off the television for the morning.

9:45am - Change another diaper, get Clara and myself dressed.  Begin the first 15 minute argument with Samuel over putting on his own socks, which he's learning how to do.  Drag him away from destroying my bed, drag him away from annoying his sister.  Send him to his room for time out.  After hearing screaming from the bedroom march in there to drag Clara away from him and, in a stroke of mean Mama genius, simply pop the flippin' red balloon everyone is fighting over.  Lots and lots of tears.  Head back into the room for round two of arguing over whether Samuel can put on his own socks.  A full 30 minutes after he started, the child is finally dressed.

Earlier this week we were given a garbage bag full of clothing for the children - I toss all of the barrettes and hair things in a tub of soapy water to wash.  Wash out the diaper pail.

10:00am - Keeping facebook on all day and am checking it obsessively as I wait for news of my dear friend's baby's birth.

Take out a chicken pot pie I made earlier this week from the freezer to thaw for lunch and a turkey breast to thaw for supper.  Make my bed and start shoveling the endless piles of crap toys and books that the children drag into our room day after day.  Samuel is my 'runner' and brings everything back to it's home base.  Sometimes I sound like a Russian naval officer.  Make my bed and tidy the master bedroom.

10:15am - The children occupy themselves by slowly destroying everything I clean up.  Toss Samuel outside to play in the backyard and change another diaper.  Set Clara at the table with some cashews in little cups to pour and play.  Put the dishes in to soak and start a load of laundry.  Right - I've run out of detergent; add a squirt of dish soap to the wash instead. Clean the cat box, change the kitchen garbage, hang out the wet bedding from the washer on the line.  Samuel is sulking outside because he wants to come in. Tidy up the deck and tell him he's out of luck.

10:30am - The cashews and cups have lost their appeal - I got a full 15 minutes out of them.  Let Clara loose again.  Sigh in disgust over the children's bedrooms as I make their beds.

10:45am - Nurse Clara.  Yell at Samuel to get off the deck and stop looking in the windows to get inside and go play in the sandbox Right. Now.  Jot off a quick email while nursing to David's alma mater who want to put us in the newsletter.

There's a moment of silence.  I refuse to go see what my children are doing.  Finish a cup of tea I started a few hours ago.  Wash the breakfast dishes and wipe down the table; preheat the oven and put the pot pie in to warm up.  Clara is taking apart a rubber repair kit and Samuel finally gets to come inside and wash his hands.  Check facebook and see that my friend has made it to the hospital and is 3cm already!

11:00am - Set the table for lunch, remind Samuel to go and Wash. His. Hands.  Seriously, what is wrong with this child's listening skills today?  Put on a double batch of bread dough to rise and dig through the fridge for some sort of salad-type food to serve with our pot pie.  All I can come up with is a very sad looking cucumber, which I slice up and put on the table with some dressing.  Drag Clara away from the hot oven, away from the table, away from the water...againagainagain.

Leave the kitchen for 8.2 seconds and when I come back Clara is in the process of emptying the salt and pepper shakers.

11:30am - Turn the pot pie up.  Hang the next load of wet laundry out and change another bum.  My house is a wreck.  David comes home and we sit down for lunch and over the din of insane offspring we attempt to recount our mornings and plan our afternoons.

Noon - David takes charge of cleaning up Clara and getting her down for her nap while I clear the table and send Samuel to the bathroom and then to bed.  Everyone gets quiet quickly.  David heads out to the garage to see if the car is ready to be picked up yet and I obsessively check facebook again for baby updates.

He gets back to tell me that although the garage has had our car for FOUR days, they apparently haven't even looked at it yet.  Ridiculous.

12:15pm - David goes to lie down for 45 minutes and I get dressed for nursing home visitation and pack my cross stitch bag to take with me.

5:15pm - Finally home from five hours of visitation and errands.  Dropped off the library books, went to the grocery store in the next town over, sat with the elderly at the home and sang hymns, and then kept another parishioner company.

5:00pm - Make up the gravy for the turkey, boil some yellow beans and get everyone to the table.

6:00pm -   The children refuse to eat anything but cheese and pickles and eventually consent to a little bit of actual supper.  Clara is in bed.  I read Samuel a few stories, nurse him and get him in the bath to splash about for a bit while I check facebook.  My friend is at 6cm!

And now I'm tired of recording a long and stressful day...I can't even make it until bedtime.

31 Days of House To Home

I really pulled out all the stops at the kitchen table this past week.  We made our favourite spicy Italian sausage stew; I tried a new recipe for chicken pot pie; I gathered together the disparate ingredients necessary to pull off the cranberry apple sausage stuffing that we could eat by the pound; I broke the rules of not trying a new dish when you have company and gave Laura Calder's Spinach Gratin a try...it was a glorious, very not-low-fat, completely fantastic week of too much food.

I mentioned before in this series that food is an area that I'm trying to be relaxed about spending money in.  And it naturally progresses, when you serve food to people, that they're going to have opinions about the food you've given them.  My children could eat a large block of cheese but won't touch beans.  Clara would devour as many beets, broccoli florets and pieces of pepperoni I was willing to feed her; Samuel asks for pizza constantly, and likes pasta with tomato sauce, but only touches eggs very gingerly.  David wants hearty food, even in the heat of summer; he's happiest when I set down a steak and kidney pie, homemade biscuits, a roasted chicken with yorkshire pudding and gravy.

I have almost entirely given up on trying to 'stretch' anyone's palate.  I see the value in doing it if the group you were serving consisted of people who would only eat cold cereal and cheetos, but my family (oh happy day!) has enough meals that they can all agree on that I think "Oh, who cares that they won't eat my homemade macaroni and cheese?  Who cares that they don't want peanut butter sandwiches?  What does it really matter that salmon is a battle?"  I've made peace (mostly) with the fact that my family has ideas about what they want to eat.  And preferences can be wonderful, as well; in fact I'm embracing their preferences because I hope that serving favourite foods results in them having happy table memories where they can say in the future "My mother used to make the best bread..."

I want to build their palates, but not at the expense of happiness.

31 Days of House To Home

My inlaws left today and I'm a little sad about it all - they were incredibly helpful and loving and my children are crazy about them...but they live eight hours away from us, and we live a pastor's schedule (which, by the way, only appears to be flexible on the outside and is really very very weird and confined) and so our chances to be with each other are limited.  Still, I'm happy it's only eight hours now instead of the twelve that used to separate us.

Having them leave, and with them my only chance for frequent help with the dishes and extra story-telling for the children, was a downer, I'm not gonna lie.  But there's a lot of stuff in every family's life that's hard - the arrivals and departures, the daily stresses and the chores and whatever.  It's hard, this life thing.  And yet, there's a lesson to learn in all of that; there's something to take away from it that helps you in the making of a home:

Taking Joy In The Journey

I'm really not the best person to give any sort of insight into this, since I'm so new at it myself, but ultimately I think that gratitude, faith, loving gestures; these all equal a better life, a happier life.  I think that finding joy somehow in the ordinary, in the long days, that's the answer to a lot of our questions.  I hope I get better at it.

31 Days of House To Home

So in my last post I told you one of the two most revolutionary ideas I ever had about keeping house; I need to spend money on filling my kitchen with lots of delicious, quality food because it makes my family healthier, my days easier and my house significantly less stressful.

Now the second idea is this

Daily needs should not be treated as a crisis.

I found this idea in one of my favourite books (remember when I mentioned gathering resources around you to help you in creating a home?) and it's resonated with me for a while now.  Every morning your family will wake up and they will put on clothes.  This isn't a surprise; we do it every day, and so having clothes to put on that are clean and functional and appropriate and easily located should not be a crisis for us.  Likewise, however you need to accomplish having food available for everyone to eat needs to be a priority.

It's wonderful to organize our sock drawers, to sweep our front steps and wash all the curtains but if the babies are in diapers because there are no clean clothes to put them in, if teeth need to be brushed and there is no toothpaste, well, then we need to look again at how we're managing.

31 Days of House To Home

The next two days I'm going to focus on probably two of the BIGGEST ideas that have changed the way I think about my personal response to making a home - and tonight it's all about food.

Well, truly, it's half about food and half about priorities.  You see, once upon a time I would have done just about anything to save money.  And don't get me wrong, I still love to save money, but I've realized that there are some things in every household that are the 'breaking points'.  For us, that's food.  If I spend the money to stock our house with lots of well-loved foods, ensuring that we never have a frantic 'everyone is hungry and what am I feeding them?' moment then the rest of life just seems to be that much less worrisome.

For me, this pretty much translates into lots of meat in the freezer, cheese, milk, all the spices I need to make our favourite meals, fruit for quick and healthy snacks and a few convenience foods in the cupboards.  I can pop out to pick up shampoo; I can wait a few days (or weeks) without q-tips if I have to, but when 5 o'clock rolls around and I have two shrieking children clinging to my legs I better have a meal at my fingertips and not, for example, just be starting on a lengthy process of making my own tortillas.

31 Days Of House To Home

After style preferences, the thing I've noticed that differentiates one person's home from another's is their approach to needs and wants.  They needed that big leather sofa.  They wanted that second hand shelf in the kitchen.  They wanted the thrift store curtains.  They wanted the pricey cookware.  They needed the candles for when the electricity goes out.  They needed the computer.

Each family is going to make completely different judgement calls on these things - even we take different stances from one house to another, or from one child to the next.  The point is that when you look through your house (or consider bringing something else into it) asking yourself "Want?  Or Need?" can be invaluable.

Do I want the sofa?  No, I probably need the sofa.  But do I need the BEST sofa?  Well, you know what?  Maybe you do need the best sofa.  Maybe you have a bunch of children and they're very tough on furniture and you have three huge dogs and you've been saving for a good sofa and by george you are going to buy a good sofa.  And maybe you don't.

Keeping the house from turning into a resting place for all sorts of random flotsam and jetsam is a lot of trial and error, but it's worth it.

31 Days Of House To Home

David tells a story that goes something like this...

There was once an elderly Jewish couple with many children and they all lived in a one room house.  The man and his wife were so crowded and unhappy in their little house that they went to their rabbi to ask him what to do.  The rabbi said "Go and get a horse and move it into the house with you."  So the couple went and they bought a horse.  After a week the house was even worse than it was before so they went back to the rabbi. "Bring a cow into the house, too." he said.  The couple took his advice, moved in a cow, and after a week the house was awful and they couldn't stand it.  They went back to the rabbi again and he said "Go get a pig and move that in."  Back the couple went and moved a pig into the house.  After a week they went back to the rabbi and said "This is awful.  The house is terrible.  What do we do?"  The rabbi said "Now you're ready for the solution.  Move all the animals out."

Do you see where I'm going with this?

My house is small.  I mean quite small.  Small enough that I can hear Samuel turn over in his bed at the other end of the house.  Small enough that we need one smoke detector.  We have no basement, no attic; my bathroom linens are stored in the kitchen cabinets; my washer and dryer are in the entry way.  When I say small, I mean small.  But do you know what makes it seem big and spacious?  When something leaves.

I figure I rarely really need more space, what I really need is less stuff.  And so every once in a while I get rid of something big, or even something little.  I wander around the house with a garbage bag and suddenly there's room!  Light!  Air!

Space!

31 Days of House To Home

So there I was yesterday telling you to reach out, reach out, reach OUT people!  Reach for ideas that you don't have, be willing to ask for what you need from people who have done it all before you; don't be shy about it!

But that's only Part A, really, the more I think about it.

Because you don't just want to randomly grab ideas all the time; you'll get overwhelmed.  You'll be thinking "I need to do stuff with my insane children.  I need to.  I'll go look at Pinterest.  Ohmyword Pinterest has, like, ten gazillion ideas of things to do with string.  There's a pin that describes 82 ways to scent your homemade playdough.  There are apparently 5 substances I can make with flour and oil that my children can mold into shapes.  I'm overwhelmed."

And who wouldn't be, honey; who wouldn't be?

So Part B is going to have to be collecting a group of resources around you that you can rely on to take you from clueless to, I don't know, less clueless.  I have mine, and I'm pretty sure you've got yours already if you think about it.  The magazines you turn to when you need a recipe.  The websites you think about when everything in your house is boring and you want to throw it all away and buy new stuff.  Put those resources aside because they're the ones that are going to be your safe place to gather good, solid, YOU oriented ideas when you need them.

Seven Quick Takes

1.  One of the benefits of having a blog where you open up your head on a regular basis and let complete strangers poke around inside looking for something interesting is that everything in life tends to present itself as a possible Thing To Write About.  Or at least that's the explanation I'm giving for why, when cleaning out my picture files this week, I discovered folders devoted to pictures I'd taken of cacti that dated to 2008, of assorted meals spanning the last four years, and of a step by step photo montage entitled How To Descale Your Kettle.

2.  I was stuck for bath reading the other day and pulled out some books I had ordered on a whim a few years back, Mary Ostyn's A Sane Woman's Guide To Raising A Large Family and Meagan Francis' Table For Eight: Raising A Large Family In A Small Family World.  And then I went on with my life and the children destroyed the bathroom and in the process moved my books all around the house.  It just didn't occur to me to put them away on the shelf again until I realized that my inlaws had been visiting for almost a week and what must they think??  Books about giant families scattered everywhere!

3.  I've bitten the bullet this year and started making Christmas lists for the grandparents.  It started with the realization that we now live in the world's least storage friendly house and I couldn't handle one more big, noisy toy that needed it's own special bed/shelf/accessories, but I'll admit, it quickly has turned into an avenue in which I can be controlling and obsessive and make lots of lists.  I'm trying to figure out how much information is too much information.  For example, can I say "Clara needs mittens and socks but other than that is set for clothing"?  Can I then add "Please no television cartoon characters on anything"?  Is that taking it too far?

4.  Duck Dynasty - Love?  Indifferent?  I'm astounded by the beards, myself.

5.  I'm in the market for a daytimer/organizer/planner type thing.  I'm not sure why I don't have one now, except to say that if I had one I likely would have written 'Get New Planner' in there somewhere and would now currently have one.  So there you have it.  Instead here I am in September October trying daily to remember my own phone number, when the children last ate, and if I've showered.

6.  If I had a planner I could also write a list in it of all the stuff that sorta-but-not-really works around the house.  For example, my washing machine, which has been hooked up (praise the Lord!) but with the valve thingies the wrong way.  Or maybe it's the hoses that are the wrong way.  Regardless, hot water comes out of the cold water tap.  Or at least hot water comes out of the washer when the machine is set to cold.  Is this making sense?  Anyway, from my limited understanding of such matter it seems that what needs to happen is the hoses need to be switched, except that to do this seems to involve super human strength and a wrench that I do not currently own.  So I just keep washing my clothes on the Hot/Cold cycle, which is actually Cold/Hot.  Oh my word.

7.  Do you know what my inlaws did?  They went off for a night by themselves and when they came back they brought me a tonne of food for the freezer.  Chicken breasts, a Butterball turkey breast, a lot of cheese.  It was so exciting!  Especially since my plan for the evening meal last night was 'pray'; I'd spent the entire afternoon doing visitation at the nursing home and frankly people were going to eat rice and sausages from the day before.  Everyone should be thankful that someone saved the day.

Linking up with Jentastic - go check her out!

31 Days of House To Home

If there is one piece of advice that 30-something Amy could give to 20-something Amy it would be this:

"Baby, stop trying to reinvent the wheel.  You think no one's ever served supper before?  Made a bed?  Entertained a house bound hysterical toddler for eight hours?"

I just get into these moods where all of a sudden the way I used to do dishes is clearly the worst way in the universe and I need to make a new way, a better way, a faster, more efficient, prettier way.  And if there's anything I've learned in the years since setting up my own household it's that there's nothing new under the sun; if I've thought of it, then someone else has as well.  And they've probably got a blog on it, too, and a Pinterest page with nice pictures.

This minor revelation has maybe led to a bit too much time looking online at other people's living rooms, but it's also brought me to a place where I am completely okay with going online or delving into my library or calling on a group of friends to come up with an answer to whatever question I have.

To help work together on a project too big for one person.

For craft ideas.

For meals, for anything really that I just don't have the answer to myself.

I really think that being willing to reach out and say "I don't know, but do you?" is pretty much the most important thing we can learn in making a home.  After all, we aren't all experts at everything.

31 Days of...

Over at The Complete Guide To Imperfect Housekeeping, Kelly has just started a series on 31 Days of Simple Hospitality, and I'm so excited about it that honestly my first thought was:

OOOOOOOOO!

Followed closely by: I want to do something too!

And so I give you 31 Days of House To Home!  We moved into our new house about four weeks ago now and there is still a laundry basket of slippers, air conditioner parts and Ziploc bags beside my desk, so obvi we're not going to be talking Martha Stewart type anything, don't worry your head over that.  But I am such a huge fan of making a home, just Making. A. Home.  However that works for you.  And I get upset from the top of my unruly hair to the tips of my unpolished toes whenever someone thinks that has to be perfect.  It doesn't.  Oh dear ones, it truly doesn't.

I hope you'll be inspired, of course; that's one of the reasons I drag myself away from the never ending excitement of washing diapers and baking bread and trying really hard not to yell when I step on Legos to hobble to this ancient computer and type something for you all to read.  Because I hope there's something worth reading in it.  Also it took me over half an hour to figure out how to type that caption in Paint, so have mercy on me.

There are some topics I'm just itching to tackle, and then there are some spots where I'm a little...vacant.  And so you just feel free to comment or what have you with what YOU want to think about along with me, and I will squeeze those in, too.

Aren't you as excited as I am!?

Yada

My in-laws are visiting us for the next little while, so I might be a little absent from the blog.  Not that that's anything all that different from the usual deal around here - I'm not the best blogger, let's face it.

We spent the day in the city attending the kickoff for Operation Christmas Child (our church is the collection centre for our area) and I was reminded yet again why I should never attempt to take my children anywhere ever.  They ate food like crazy; an embarrassing amount of food.  They cried loudly during touching moments.  They played the drums on the church drum set and had to go to the bathroom and sobbed in the car because even though they had just said they didn't want to go into the grocery store with me they wanted to and I left without them.  

It was all very tiring.  And they're going to wake up soon and require water and changes of pajamas and comforting and so I had better go to sleep.

Dishcloths

I just had to share this picture; I haven't had a chance to do very much in the way of knitting the past few weeks months but as soon as we arrived here I made these for the new kitchen.

I know they're a bit spring coloured for this cool weather we're having now, but I'm loving new dishcloths all the same.  I made them smaller and tighter this time than I usually do and they're working so much better.

Looking Back Over Autumns Past

I was looking back over pictures of recent Falls, and I just find it so odd every year to see how our lives have changed, in some cases drastically.  I picked out some of my favourites taken outside over the past few years.

In Fall of 2010 we had a 6 month old and lived in rural New Brunswick, mostly overwhelmed with the challenges and joys of being fairly new parents, and completely blown away that two very average people could create the most handsome and intelligent baby either of us had ever seen.

A year later Samuel looks so very much older...

...and I was expecting Clara as well.

Fall of 2012 meant a move from the apartment we'd lived in for years and into a house better than anything we could have ever dreamed of.  It was also our first Fall with Clara, who was about 5 months.

Did you notice both babies are wearing the same hat?

And now here we are, in Fall 2013.  We're in a new town, the children are older, but life, well, life is busy and crazy and wonderful and weird.

They're so big.  Wow.

Linked up to Cari's Theme Thursday.

Nursing Home Visits, Books and Child Free Time. Hurrah.

Practically everyone I know could give me a run down on the 'abnormal normal' in their neighbourhood; the things that are just commonplace where you live, but probably are not generally standard in the greater society.  For me, here, I'm starting to see what our own brand of abnormal normal is - and it looks a lot like children.  Big families are everywhere, and I'm not just talking about the substantial Mennonite population, although them too.  I was doing a bit of visitation today at a nursing home one town over and everyone I spoke to seemed to have a substantial number of children.  Seven, eight, nine...with my two I was in the minority.  There's a family with four children who go to our church, another with five.  The family of nine is in the next town over, although I was told that one man remembers a family of twenty-four not too far from here!  Twenty four!  I just think it's so interesting that having a big family here is really quite normal.

Oh, but back to the nursing home visit; it went so well!  I was there to see the wife of an elderly congregant, and I have to admit I was a little nervous since it was my first, you know, official sort of duty - but everything was great.  On the way there I even had a chance to pop into the fabric and yarn store in the town and take a quick look around for curtain fabric for Samuel's room; I don't know if I'm just being overly optimistic or what. In fact, before you get any strange Mother Theresa like visions of me gliding gently around the nursing home ministering to people let me clear that up for you:

1)  I got to leave my children for FOUR HOURS with their father and talk to other adults.
2) Other adults who gave me chocolate to 'give to my children' (pshaw.  right.)
3) Other adults who were happy to see me, did not pull my hair or make me take them to the washroom or ask me for food.

I'm going back next week.

I did start a Christmas gift list for the children for my parents, which I'm pretty happy about - really at this stage of the game I think we need to be intentional about gifts because the parsonage has NO (I'm talking almost ZERO) storage space and I cannot stand for one more big noisy toy.  I'm hoping everyone feels an overwhelming desire to purchase books.

Driver's License

Most of life with small children is akin to running a marathon through pudding, and so when good and uplifting news comes along it's all just such a nice change.  Like this morning, when my husband passed his driver's test and in so doing tossed our family into the modern world.  We've resisted it for a long time. but here we are anyway.

And when David came home from the city he brought with him the next two colours of embroidery floss I need for my stitching.  I know, not as exciting; he also brought home strawberries that the children devoured.

Tomorrow I've got to manage to cram everything into the morning because come 1pm I'm off to visit at the nursing home - wish me luck.

Goodnight, all.

Autumn

Despite what the days might show you, with their occasional warmth and humidity, autumn is coming; I know this because the Northern nights are getting cool.  Cool enough at first for me to open the boxes marked 'Fall Clothing For Children', and then cool enough to tuck the aforementioned children into bed with, in Samuel's case, a giant ancient plaid sleeping bag of David's that he's fallen in love with, and in Clara's case a yellow wool blanket and a quilt that once graced my own crib, and both of them with hot water bottles.  Finally I broke down the other night, gritted my teeth and turned on the furnace.

David was cleaning the cat box at the time and said he was amazed to hear the vent beside him leap into life.

This is also when I discovered that I had placed our mattress and boxspring directly over the vent in the bedroom and would have to rearrange all of the furniture.

And last night, to my disgust, while I was about the turn on the heat I discovered that an earwig had beaten me to it and was curled up (and completely inaccessible) inside the thermostat.

And yet I was expecting differences in the climate, moving from a temperate place to one more northern and cold; what I wasn't expecting was developing allergies.  I am constantly scratching my eyes, sneezing and putting into use my extensive collection of lovely handkerchiefs.  It's all very upsetting; fall is my favorite season, and here I am wheezing through it.  I'm still not sure what it is that I'm reacting to here that didn't exist where we used to live!

The first update.

It's been 15 days since my last post...and I'm sorry.  Wouldn't it have been nice to freak out alongside me for the whole awful, awful journey here?  Oh you would have just loved that, I can tell.  But it was not to be, and that's just fine because it wasn't nice, and it wasn't pretty, and it will have to be a story for another day because I can't handle re-living it right now.

So instead, let's start with 'and so they arrived.'  We got here.  Our stuff got here.  The cats and the children all got here and we were home.

The House

It's small, but not unimaginably so.  The main problem is that there is pretty much no storage space anywhere - no basement, no big closets, no linen closet, no coat storage....the result is that my linens are in the kitchen cupboards and the winter coats are currently in S's room.

The Yard

It's H.U.G.E.  Amazingly so.  There's a big, big front yard with trees and grass, then a side yard, then a back yard with a deck that is almost the size of our living room, plus a fire pit and lots of lawn, then there's MORE grass off to the other side of the house that also includes a big sand box and lots of huge climbing rocks and a beautiful hedge of lilac bushes and apple trees.

The Church

The church is well-sized for the congregation.  It's your typical little white steepled country church with wooden pews and a big hall for shared meals.  David's office is in the church and it's filled with bookshelves. It's all very nicely proportioned.

The People

I will say, in all honesty, that I never expected such a warm and loving welcome as we found here.  The congregation has been exceptionally understanding, kind, sweet-tempered, funny and real to a tired family of four with sore feet, whirling heads and sleep deprivation.  They have fed us like it's going out of style.  I'm not kidding.  In the week and a half since we've arrived I have received two shopping bags full of apples, three jars of apple butter, a tray of sticky buns, a large box of peaches, a bag of green beans, three cucumbers, a zucchini the size of my calf, a lemon meringue pie, a tray of bacon beans, a large amount of smoked ham, a margarine container of cut up vegetables, a tomato and cucumber salad, scalloped potatoes, a 10lb bag of potatoes, and have been given a huge lasagna dinner with fresh baked bread and salad.  And that's not including everything they stocked the house with before we arrived, including toiletries, milk, bacon, bread, eggs etc. Oh, and giftcards to restaurants.  We've eaten out already.

The Town

The phrase 'don't blink or you'll miss it' might have been invented to describe this little town.  What it lacks in size it more than makes up for in simply stunning scenery, though.  We're right on the banks of a gorgeous lake, the clouds are unlike anything I've ever seen before, the stars are incredibly bright, the trees..oh my heavens the trees and the hills...the vistas are just...it's breathtaking.

What We've Done...

The children and I discovered that there's a playgroup in town and last Friday we packed up and went to it.  I've only ever been to one other playgroup before so I didn't have a lot to compare it to - but this one was totally different from what I'm used to.  Also, it was packed, although the other mothers assured me that this is not common.

We all went to the local library to get cards and check out our first batch of books.  You know you're bookworms when your dishes aren't all unpacked but you've got a local library card...

Last weekend was the big fall fair for the area and I almost talked myself into getting a chicken.  I didn't, but I allllmost did.

Alright, now to bed.  The first week we were here we were in bed so early every night that the sky was still light.  Now I'm averaging about 9pm on a good night.

Monday!

Monday, you've never been so hated and so looked forward to at the same time.

The moving truck arrives tomorrow, along with our friend Rob, who will be driving it.  Sadly the two don't arrive TOGETHER necessarily, and so there's a lot of finagling going on with that.  But you can hear about it all tomorrow.  Tomorrow.  Not today.  Because today has been specially set aside for impossible tasks.

ONE!

I'm getting rid of our food.today, not that there's a lot left of it.  We have enough flour left for one more meal of pancakes, and the pound of bacon in the fridge along with whatever is left on the ham bone constitutes all of our meat.  The children are snacking on nothing but dried figs and saltines from here on out and a solitary carton of vegetable soup along with the contents of my crisper drawers will be a soup for supper tonight.  The condiments are gone, the pantry is gone...

David stopped me on the stairs and said "Um...are we not going to need this stuff for meals for the next few days?"  What meals?  What next few days?  It's Monday, I have pancakes and bacon for one meal, soup for another, and then it's Tuesday.  The children will eat applesauce and grapes and whatever I can scrounge up for breakfast, and then lunch will be providentially provided by our friend Anna, and supper is chicken sandwiches at Burger King.  And then it's Wednesday and the truck leaves and feeding two grown men isn't my problem anymore.  And none of these meals will require apple cider vinegar or cheesecake mixes or any of the other foods I'm getting rid of right now.

This is all we're taking with us food wise.

TWO!

I'm spray painting two of our dining room chairs.  They're a temporary solution to our chair problem, which is that we don't have any!  A table, yes, and two lovely chairs...and four people.  So these wooden folding ones will have to do for the foreseeable future.  Usually when I say something like that we end up using the item for years because we can't afford to replace it, but I truly hope that isn't the case this time.

THREE!

Thank heavens for friends!

Some of the best things I've seen/read on the Intergoogleweb and in print this week.

** Your minister isn't a machine.  This article that should be required reading for all pastors...and their congregations.

** Anne Kennedy's blog about being a conservative Anglican priest and homeschooling her six children is a breathe of fresh air.

** The Japanese Giant Salamander in this picture is both incredibly strange and really, really fascinating.  And here's a BBC article that is worth reading.

** How to spray paint a vinyl chair in bold and fantastic stripes!

** I really want to know if this portable outlet that you stick to your window to utilize solar power would be worth getting everyone on my list for Christmas.

What I Wore Sunday - The Last Day At Church

Today was our very last Sunday at our church here in small town New Brunswick.  It's been our spiritual home, off and on, for four years, and we'll miss it, especially since what they offer us - a great Sunday School program for Samuel that he adores attending, a safe nursery staffed with loving workers who dote on Clara, and uplifting music, fulfilling sermons, interesting small groups and tonnes of activities, a chance for David and I to sit alone in a pew and be together for an hour - isn't going to be present for a long time in our new church.

In case you're just tuning in, this week we're moving to a very tiny town in Northern Ontario for David to pastor a church.  It's exciting, and it's what we want, but the challenges are very real.  And one of those is going to simply be that we will never again be a family in the pews.

Anyway - here's what I wore, yet another fall transition outfit.

I bought this belted satin shirt second hand, and I was really nervous about wearing it because of how bright and 'look at meeeeee!' it seemed.  I also discovered that satin attracts water marks like a big fat rock gathers big fat moss.  But I gave it a shot this Sunday and I think I'm happy I did.

Check out the FLAP link up for more outfit inspiration.

I'm hoping (trying not to add another stress on myself, but hoping) to blog something every day this week.  With pictures.  Seeing as that's practically impossible for me on a normal week, let alone one where we're packing a truck with all of our belongings including the computer and moving over 2000 km away and where I'll be living in someone else's house for three days, I'm going to take it easy on myself if I don't make it.

My Empty Fridge

 The freezer is empty, the cupboards are almost bare, and this was the fridge a few days ago - it's even emptier now.  We are the proud owners of a limited assortment of condiments, really.  And some eggs.

Tonight I'm cooking that big cabbagey looking creature in the bottom there with some bacon I picked up at the butcher's.  And I have 1 solitary onion in the drawer, which I will sauté with the eggplant and some oil and the last of the Greek seasoning in the cupboard.  And we're going to buy a big roast of pork which will hopefully last us a few days before we're reduced to nothing but take-out pizza.

Anxiety To The Tune Of Happy Squealing Children

Sitting in the destroyed dining room (why do children need to wear so very MUCH of their suppers?) contemplating the equally topsy turvy kitchen, the partially cleaned bathroom, and the two page long list of things to get done.  Trying not the panic.  Not succeeding.

I can hear optimistic sounds from my husband upstairs attempting to book the final airline ticket.  This is so encouraging since the last few times he's been on the phone with them there has been a lot of glaring and much casual frustration and storming about.  He's had a rough day, poor guy.

Just went upstairs and David is still on the phone.  Uggghhhhaaaaaahhhhhh...this is the last big thing we have to do today!  Not that we had the amazing list crossing off morning I had hoped for.  We made it to David's appointment and to mine, but then missed another one.  We bought food for tonight but not food as in 'groceries'.  We didn't Go Grocery Shopping.  We did make it to the bank, but we didn't get a chance to pick up the new cat carrier.  It's all been so touch and go.

And now I have a list a mile long for tomorrow.  It's not as long as it was the first time I wrote it out, and then got canola oil all over it so I couldn't cross anything off, but it's still pretty long.  There are 33 items on it; 15 of those alone are people I have to somehow get in touch with some one reason or another...can you watch my child/help me pack a truck/tell me where I can sign up for a family doctor/tell me if you want my table?

Well, Apparently All Is Well on the booking of tickets front.  David has claimed victory and has gone off to fall asleep in the bathtub listening to sermons.  I feel palpable relief.

The Anniversary Gift

So here we are, the last Big Day of work this week.  I mean, don't get me wrong, Friday and Saturday will have their fair share of packing and general crazy, but today is the day filled with everything under the sun that seems to need immediate attention.  To combat this, here's a little bit of beautiful in the midst of it all. This is the tea set that David bought me for our anniversary this year.

It was the colours that drew me to it, and the simplicity of the design.  And when I was surprised with it I started to think about whether I'd be able to add to it over the years, and quickly discovered how expensive that would be.  But I'm thrilled that I have a two-person set right now.

Everything Piled On Thursday...Poor Old Thursday

I thought we'd be able to spread out the week a bit more, but it's looking more and more as though Thursday is going to be the next Big Day Of All The Things.

David's appointment

My doctor's appointment, inconveniently moved up a day

The insurance appointment, inconveniently moved up a day

Grocery shopping

Picking up the cat carrier

While we're at that end of town, Another Errand

Buying R's plane ticket and sending it to him 

There cannot be another thing in there, please Lord.

David is currently out with both children completing his To Do list.  Lucky man, he gets to then go to the library all by his onesome and write essays while I get to convince said children that they really want to eat things that come out of cans for lunch, specifically beans and peas, both of which are disgusting and surely a sign of the apocalypse.

It's Insane That We've Gotten This Far

Only two days into The Week Before We Move and heaven help us all but we're in Full On Moving over here.  It's exhausting being emotionally 'on' all of the time for an introvert like me.  Yesterday I discovered that I had spent almost seven hours tending a bonfire in the backyard simply as a Way To Get Away From My Family.

I'm going to sit here, at an ungodly hour of pre-dawn, having freshly consumed two leftover pancakes and a tepid cup of tea, because I was woken up an hour ago by a small child who had wet the bed.  He is happily dry and asleep on clean sheets while his mother is decidedly NOT.  And I'm going to cultivate a glow of productivity and write out what we have we accomplished so far (only through the grace of God by this point).

Happily, we have been the recipients of that most wonderful event - Obviously Answered Prayer.  When determining how much our plane tickets were going to cost we mistakenly assumed that entering the number of travelers would result in an estimate that included all of us.  This was not the case, apparently.  And so we ended up with an actual price that was double what we had previously counted on.  There was, I'm not going to lie, a moment of chaos.  And then David and I prayed that God would be Very Obvious and Quite Clear and Really Show Us What He Wanted.  And lo and behold, he did.  Our truck rental company, it seems, would give us money off the rental if we agreed to drop off the vehicle in a larger city that was only slightly out of our way.

That amount came to $390.  The flight bookings agent calculated that if we were willing to push back the flight time until Saturday, the price would only be $389.99.  It was wonderful.  David spent part of the day in the city paying for the truck, finishing bookings and what have you.  Apparently they need to bring in the trailer we need from wherever it is that they have these things.  And then the rest of the day was spent purchasing airline tickets and paying for them and the printing off of the tickets.  Those two large tasks done, we moved on to burning off old stuff in the fire pit, as I mentioned, and eating supper, which was a very odd concoction consisting of onions, mushrooms, garlic, apple sausage, kale, two kinds of lentils, wild rice and broth with sour cream stirred in at the end.

Today is going to consist on my side entirely, I think, of packing.  My intention is to continue with the closets and dressers, and to bag up the clothes being donated and then to begin on the toys.  David will be running errands and making phone calls.  We need to set up an account with the new vet, see about the local public health office to arrange Clara's innoculations, attempt to register with a new family doctor, figure out if we need a transit permit for towing the car, print off a form, return embroidery floss to a neighbour, donate several large bags of books to the library, return a paper shredder, transfer David's ministry license and make an appt. to patch the left front tire.  Those will be his tasks, followed likely by a long trip to the library to work on his schoolwork.  Supper is something to do with three very small steaks in the fridge, probably with beets, and hopefully including pasta if we have any left.  The cupboards might as well belong to Mrs. Hubbard.

Tomorrow is Thursday and we'll be buying the plane ticket for our friend R. to come out and drive the truck, picking up a second cat carrier, arranging with the post office to forward our mail and David has an appointment.  We'll also need to get together our team of helpers to pack the truck on this end and unload it at the parsonage, buy cat litter, children's gravol for the trip and no doubt more groceries, and I have two phone calls that must be made.

Friday all we have so far is a final doctor's appointment for me, a trip to the insurance agency, another to the bank, packing packing packing...

I have no sweet clue what will be left to do on Saturday.  Likely clean like a fiend.  And then Saturday night some friends are bidding me goodbye and I get to escape the craziness.

And then Sunday we rest.

A Timely Quote

Anne Kennedy, talking about cleaning out her basement...

"I imagine this is like heaven. As we come into the presence of the Almighty we find we are Finally Rid of that nagging desire to gossip, that nasty feeling we've lugged around toward so and so who never understood who we really were anyway, the immense frustrating pile of imperfection and ingratitude and other junk that we knew we wanted to get rid of but never got to it because there was never any deadline. Well, my deadline is Saturday, and if Jesus comes back that day, I'll only have to leave behind a quarter of the stuff I currently posses. So, come Lord Jesus, or, if you'd like to wait a little longer, that will probably be ok too." - An Undercurrent Of Hostility

Exactly.  Because I am a fallible human being, so far from perfection, and although we can all hope Jesus is working on me (in fact, we can trust in it) there's a heck of a way to go.  He's infinitely patient, though.  And now to go dismantle my dining room table.