bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Silent is deadly.

    "People talk about racism and "reverse racism," but if you’re a white lady like me, what you get to see most is not incidents of probable racism against any particular person, but all those things white people say and do when they’re left unsupervised."

    –Jen Fitz, writing here at Sticking the Corners

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    "This is where the party ends."

    — They Might Be Giants, "Your Racist Friend" (Flood, 1990)

     

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    The following is not a question of equivalencies. It is a question of consistency.

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    Catholics who try to be faithful to the Church's teachings speak and write a great deal about sending messages with our actions.

    To make an example of current events: It's not a simple matter for Catholics to decide whether to attend a ceremony celebrating a sexual union (of any kind) that we know isn't a valid marriage. Even if everyone knows our beliefs — we aren't supposed to leave people confused in any way about what we stand for. We may not say a word; but our silent presence may be taken as assent and acceptance; in fact it is a kind of assent and acceptance.

    Conservative Catholics know this. Liberal Catholics know it too. We each of us, if we have integrity, behave accordingly, maybe with some internal struggle, to send the message we believe we should send, by providing or withholding our presence.

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    Silent presence happens in other contexts, too, where actors wish to promote a view of human nature that is patently opposed to the teaching of Christ.

    And by "contexts" I mean holiday dinners with relatives, meetings with co-workers, drinks with your buddies; and by "a view of human nature that is patently opposed to the teaching of Christ" I mean all sorts of notions that are contrary to human dignity.

    Notions that entire groups of people deserve blame for the actions of some of their members.

    Notions that individuals can be judged by the characteristics of a group.

    Notions that demeaning language — objectifying language — mocking language — language that fails to treat persons as individuals, individually redeemed by Christ, individual agents working toward their own salvation in the context of the world — is harmless if none of its targets are there to hear it.

    Are we sending a message that might confuse people into thinking that, because we are there, we agree? Are we endorsing this language without meaning to?

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    I have been the nice white lady standing uncomfortably — and yet silently — in the presence of another who is telling a story about Those Blacks, You Know How They Are. I have stayed in the meeting when the female speaker makes the crack about how a bunch of women will not be able to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time. I have done the thing where you don't laugh at the disgusting joke about gay people, or whomever — the thing where you remain silent, because it's polite and you have reasons not to cause a scene, and maybe the teller will notice that you don't, actually, think it's funny — but it is, in the end, the "thing" where you remain.

    Silently, but you remain.

    That too, my friends, is sending a message of acceptance. Acceptance of a seriously distorted view of human nature and of human dignity. Acceptance that is in no way reconcilable with the teaching of Christ.

    The teaching of Christ is the teaching that welcomes the stranger, the person who is different, frightening, repulsive.

    Welcoming the stranger is, as the nation learned to its grief in Charleston this week, not without personal risk.

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    I had a moment of clarity around Christmas, as often happens around the holidays, when I found myself in a Nice White People situation. The kind where a forceful, humorous personality, the life of the party, feels himself safe, among people who will not challenge him. He's just messing around, after all! It's just a joke! And in this case, the joke involved dehumanizing slurs directed at gay people.

    (But he has Democrat cred! Everyone knows he is a supporter of gay rights! Of same sex marriage and antidiscrimination statutes! … Nonetheless, I am here to tell you that on occasion such people will still, if they are among a safe crowd, tell crude and dehumanizing jokes. I don't understand it, but it is true.)

    I must have stood by silently a thousand times before, in this and other situations. It is not my job to set people on the right path. I may be opinionated, and I am free with my opinions on this blog, but I am not eloquent on the spot. I am reluctant to make trouble, at least when it comes to people that I have to get along with in the future for some reason.

    The difference this time is that in the circle, in the conversation, in the party, I was standing, a drink in my hand, right next to my two oldest sons.

    I heard the slur.

    I saw my teenaged son look away, down into his Coke.

    And in that moment — and hours later, too — I understood that I had been placed in a position where silently remaining was not acceptable, and that to silently remain would be a direct violation of my duty towards the young people in my family. The people I am charged with raising, and teaching.

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    This is where the party ends

    I can't stand here listening to you

    And your racist friend.

    I know politics bore you,

    But I feel like a hypocrite talking to you

    And your racist friend.

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    Like I said, I am not eloquent on the spot. So I didn't speak up, not then.

    But I let the expression of contempt and disgust play across my face. It was real, not faked. I don't have much of a poker face anyway.

    And I left the room. (Yeah, I know. My kids were still there in the room, with the joke hanging in the air like the smell of a fart.)

    And I did not look the speaker in the eye again. And he knew I was not looking him in the eye.

    + + +

    That night I dreamed I was driving a car on an empty road, and up ahead curious clouds roiled into the sky. I was studying them and wondering what they were, wondering if a thunderstorm was brewing, when — too late — I realized I was driving straight toward a towering cloud of volcanic ash, and it was pouring over the road in front of me, obliterating everything in its path. I swerved the car to the right, I felt my body thrown to the side by the force of the turn, and the wall of ash flooded over my car and into the windows, snaring the tires, dragging my car along with it, enclosing me in darkness, suffocating me.

    I woke up still suffocated.

    I got up out of the bed, leaving Mark sleeping beside the baby. I went downstairs and found my boys and I told them: Last night you heard some vile language about people who don't deserve to be talked about in that way. I want you to know that it wasn't right. No matter who says it, it isn't right for people to use language like that about other human beings.

    They listened to me with serious faces. "We know," they said.

    "I know you know," I said. "And I also want you to know that I didn't say anything about it last night because didn't know how to respond last night. But that I am going to respond now, and I am going to let that person know that I do not want him to talk that way where you kids can hear."

    And then I went upstairs and I wrote an email, and I hit Send.

    + + +

    It was the loveliest party that I ever attended

    If anything was broken, I'm sure it could be mended

    My head can't tolerate this bobbing and pretending

    Listening to some bullet-head and the madness that he's saying.

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    So it's like this. I am one of those people who has no sense of humor. I am unacceptably self-righteous. There is no getting around it.

    God give me the courage never to find that crap funny ever again. God give me the courage, if not to speak up, then to leave the room, again, and again, and again.

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    Sometimes, Nice White People get together and they say objectifying things that they think are harmless. I think they think they are harmless because everyone else in the room is also a Nice White Person. Or occasionally it is Nice Straight People. Sometimes it is A Bunch Of Great Guys. Occasionally it is women objectifying women, not always Those Other Women either, believe you me; I have been in these rooms.

    No one whose feelings might be hurt is there. Ergo hurt hasn't happened, right?

     This is wrong. Because

        (a) it normalizes the objectification of human beings,

        (b) it is always an offense against human beings because it is an offense against truth, and

        (c) sometimes the Nice White People who can hear are not, in fact, particularly nice. Sometimes they are disturbed people. Sometimes they are impressionable because they are young. Sometimes they are vulnerable. Sometimes they are vile racists who add what they hear to their experiences that tell them racism isn't so vile, that they are among friends even in their vile racism.

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    Serious Catholics know that silent presence sends a message of acceptance and assent. We know this!

    We know it is important not to confuse people about the truth.

    Can we just try not to leave them confused about all the truths as well? Like the truth that a human being is an entity to which the only appropriate response is love? And that dehumanizing use (as the butt of a joke, as a scapegoat, as an outlet for sexual urges, as a political point, as a means to an end) is never the right response?

    Why are we only worried about confusing people about part of the Christian message? Can we come up with a way to make it not at all confusing that we believe in charity towards all?

    Out through the kitchen, to the bedroom, to the hallway

    Your friend apologized, said he could see it my way

    He let the contents of the bottle do the thinking

    Can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding.

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    My heart is heavy this week. Pray for Charleston, and give thanks for people who welcome the stranger and who will go on welcoming the stranger, in everything they say and in everything they don't say.

     

     

     

    —–

    *Since this was first posted I elected to adjust slightly the wording in the paragraph about ceremonies, to reflect the fact that, while there's plenty of advice to be had out there, and maybe individual bishops have advised their faithful on it, I don't know of any explicit direction in Catholic doctrine stating what particular Catholics must do or not do with respect to social invitations, the circumstances of which can vary greatly.  It's not a matter to take lightly, but as far as I can tell, it remains a matter of conscience.  Everyone, however, appears to agree that the reason it is not to be taken lightly is because presence speaks.

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    1 comment on Silent is deadly.

  • Out with the old, in with the new.

    I'm writing a blog post this morning while I wait for the hot dog buns to rise; I want to bake them before I leave the house.  This morning, it's a trip to a playground until lunch time; lunch at home (hot dogs, coleslaw left over from dinner two days ago, and bell pepper soup left over from last night).  

    This afternoon,  I'm going to tackle my 2014-2015 school papers.   A slow-motion tackle, because I can't toss them until I've processed them somewhat.  

    My top priority is to compile a summary for each of the three subjects that I taught to H's and my 9th-graders, because they won't have a record that's good enough for college applications unless I do that, and I owe that to H's son (as well as to mine).  My second priority is to compile summaries for the other subjects that my 9th-grader did.  After that, I'll move to the subjects I taught to H's middle-school kids, and finally to the subjects that my younger kids did under my supervision.  As I close out each subject, I'm planning to order the materials I need for the same subject next year, and make room in the shelves and bins for those materials to land as they arrive.

    0617150953-00

    The binder in the foreground, with the child's painting of a flower on it, is — was — my Master Binder all last year.  I'll open it up, turn to the section on "9th Grade History," and pull all the papers out.  Then I'll grab all the emails in my "history work" section of my email folder, and all my daily record sheets, and sit down and write a summary of the year.  I'll compile that, along with copies of all of H's son's written assignments that I might have in my own possession (he's supposed to have saved many of them in his own notebook and on his Google Drive account, and she should be able to access those without my help), and send it on.  I expect this will be about three hours' work, some today, some tomorrow.

    Then I'll throw out the material I don't think I'll need any more.  I'll save some that might be helpful to me the next time I have a round of students studying Modern World History.

    I'll get on the horn, er, internet, to various homeschooling and/or office supply vendors and buy the materials I think I still need to buy for next year's American History work (for which, God help me, I'm designing the curriculum from scratch).

    And then I will do something similar with Latin and with Geometry.

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    Normally we have a preschool music class on Wednesdays, but the new session doesn't start till next week, so my calendar is emptier than usual.  Hence the playground visit.  Going to the park this morning is something I have to force myself to do.  All I want to do is sit in front of my computer and pound out curriculum plans and put more curriculum to bed.  

    Especially since we altered our screen time rules for the summer — in part so I would have plenty of morning time to crank out lesson plans — to be "I won't bug you till 2 p.m., but after 2 p.m. all screens are off, and by the way you aren't allowed to use Mom's computers at all."  And it's morning, and my playground visit will eat into everyone's precious screen time.

    But I need to at least pretend to be interested in encouraging play outside the house.  Now where did I put that sunscreen?  The hot dog buns are almost done.

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    3 comments on Out with the old, in with the new.

  • Still Kondo-ing.

    For inspirational purposes, I subscribed for a while to a Tumblr feed called Unfuck Your Habitat (frequently, for obvious reasons, abbreviated as UfYH.) It specializes in encouraging people to keep their living spaces livable through "twenty minutes at a time," "as much as you can handle" work.  Users frequently post before-and-after pictures on the Tumblr site to show what they accomplished in twenty minutes, or in a few "20/10s" (sessions of twenty minutes of work, ten minutes of rest).  It is popular among people who suffer from depression or other disabilities that make it hard to get up and do things like a day of thorough spring cleaning, or people whose habitats are so far gone that they don't know where to start.  

    It's also probably nice for a lot of folks that (unlike something like FlyLady) it isn't aimed squarely at an audience made up of, what used to be called, with no trace of irony, "housewives."

    The UfYH website has some helpful, systematic ideas and basic cleaning instructions, and there is also an iOS app (called, I believe, "Unfilth Your Habitat" to get around the obscenity rules at the Apple Store) and now an Android app with a few tools (timers, to-do lists) for the method.

    I bring this up because the other day on the UfYH Tumblr someone asked about the Marie Kondo method:

    Have you heard of Marie Kondo’s “KonMari” method of tidying/organizing? If so, what do you think? … I kind of have to call bullshit on her claim that none of her clients has ever regressed. Are they terrified of her? Does she select only clients who are unlikely to regress? Thoughts?

    Answer (emphases are mine):

    So, I get like at least a half dozen asks a day about Marie Kondo and The Life-Changing Art of Tidying Up, which up until now I’ve chosen not to address because, to be honest, I still haven’t finished reading the book…

    Broadly, I think there is no one system that is likely to work for everyone, UfYH definitely included. I think that if a system speaks to you and you agree with the principles behind it, you’re far less likely to regress back to your old ways. So I don’t think that’s bullshit, necessarily, that she has clients who don’t regress; she may just have clients for whom her system is the right fit.

    From what I can see, UfYH and KonMari differ in two major ways.

    First, she advocates “decluttering” (not a word I use, ever, really) [bearing notes:  KonMari's translator uses the term "discarding"] by category: so, all clothes, then all books, then all keepsakes, etc., and says that a “little-by-little” approach doesn’t work. Obviously, UfYH is based almost entirely around “little-by-little” and focuses on the fact that trying to go through all of your clothes in one shot can be completely overwhelming and itself an obstacle to getting organized. I think the people who find UfYH useful need a little-by-little approach so that they can get started, keep going, and eventually get to a point of maintenance, rather than crisis. 

    Second, KonMari advises you to only keep items that “spark joy” in you. While I think this is a great concept, I’m somewhat of a realist and a cynic and I know for a fact that my home will never be a carefully curated collection of items that only bring me joy, and I think lots of people live the way I do. I have items that are necessary, items that are useful, and items that I really need to have around, many of which do not “spark joy.” I believe wholeheartedly in paring down your belongings to what you really need or want, but I also think that there’s nothing wrong with you if you don’t have an emotional connection to your cooking utensils.

    Do I think the KonMari method is bad or wrong? Of course not. I think everyone should use what speaks to them and what is useful and applicable in their own lives. It’s a vastly different approach than mine, which is good, because people are complex, and what works for one won’t necessarily work for another. I think it’s great that her method works for so many people and has inspired so many to try to get their homes and messes under control. I want everyone to have a home they’re comfortable and happy in, no matter what journey they take to achieve that.

    A note on the joy-sparking thing:  With the help of a translator, Marie Kondo did an English-language IAmA on Reddit some time ago in which someone asked her

    What about keeping objects that don't spark joy but that I don't want to spend money or time replacing right now and which are still helpful – for example a computer, a mattress, a toothbrush, a frying pan, a suit, a blender, a coffee table? Should I keep these if they don't spark joy but I still use them regularly?

    She replied:

    So those things are helping you every day. Because you are using them.

    Even if they are not sparking joy, they are helping you every day. They are making your days go by – meaning, you have not realized that they are making you happy. They are sparking joy to you, subconsciously. So it's you, just not realizing that sparks joy for you. So you should convince yourself that they are sparking joy, and you should prioritize their status, because they are making your day, everyday. Then, gradually, you will start seeing some sparking joy concepts from those items.

    Be grateful for what you have, I think, is a more usual way of putting that in perpective.

    (The Reddit IAmA is not terribly long — 148 comments — and is well worth your time if you enjoyed Kondo's book.)

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    So, can you do it all at once or is that too big of a job and it's just going to make a big mess that will remain after you get distracted from it?

      Here are some points about the system that if you heed them will go a way toward solving the problem.

    (1) You're supposed to sort quickly.  Go with your gut, your first impression.  Don't pause to think too hard about each item.  Just pass it through your hands and ask yourself (let's say the item is a book) "Does this item make me happy when I see it on my shelf?"

    (2) If you have too many things in a category — and Kondo does not specify how many is "too many" or what limitation (space? attention? time?) makes the category too big — you are supposed to break the category down further.  For example, you are supposed to put all your books on the floor and sort them all at once  unless you have too many books to do this.  She suggests some categories of books, but only so that you can see the order in which to tackle categories ("general pleasure reading" comes first, reference books later).  It is clear that the only purpose of the categories is to deal with as many books as you can manage at once, and to deal with like books together.  

    So, for example, I dealt with all my personal "pleasure reading" at once, over the space of a few hours spread over a couple of days, using space in a spare room.  I went through my shelves, pulled out everything that counted as "reading for pleasure," and put it on the floor; then I sorted it into three piles:  

    • sparks joy in me personally when I see it just sitting on the shelf (the KonMari book criterion):  this pile, when complete, went back onto my bookshelves, in a section that I marked "complete" and didn't pull from again
    • to be considered later for whether it sparks joy in me as part of my homeschooling library: this pile was temporarily stored in a spare bedroom until it was time to consider the "homeschooling library" as a set
    • neither: these went right into boxes that I taped up as they became full

    But I could have broken "general pleasure reading" into smaller categories:  pop science and novels would have been the two largest categories, and those would have each fit on my dining room table, and I would have been forced to finish each category in one day by dinner time.  They are both kinds of pleasure reading, and so they compete with each other for my time and attention in one sense, but they please me for different reasons, and so I think novels and pop-sci could be considered separately as subcategories.

    It was pretty obvious to me that "homeschooling curricula" was its own category, and "books meant for the children to browse but which really belong to me" was also its own category.  I get the impression that you should break it into categories that are as large as you can handle – the benefit of small categories is that you can be done with a "session" more easily without it being a multi-day messy project, but the benefit of large categories is that it's easier to discard.

    (3) Can't stress this one enough.  Have plenty of boxes and tape (and some trash bags — some stuff will not be in good enough shape to donate) ready to go before you start.   Fill a box, seal it right away, get it out of your house ASAP.  Mine went to a fundraising garage sale.  

    No matter how you do it, it's a long-term project, but it really does break down into manageable pieces very well, and there's an order to it; this method gets you straight through the "But where do I START?" paralysis.  

    First:  Restrict yourself to discarding your own unloved stuff, not your other family members' stuff.

    Then, she says, start with clothes.  If you have too many clothes to pile them all on the floor at once, start with tops.  And so on.

    When clothes are done, move to books.  If you have too many books to pile them all on the floor at once, start with general pleasure reading, and so on.  I extrapolated from that to say:  If you have too many general pleasure reading books to deal with at once, start with one easy-to-define subcategory of pleasure reading (such as novels).  And so on.

    + + +

    I finished clothes, and I finished books, and now I'm about to discard "papers."  The timing is good because it's the end of a school year, and so I'm drowning in papers that I need to cull.  

    A very important note here is that "papers" does NOT include things that are kept for sentimental reasons.  Even if they happen to be made of paper, these — old love letters, photographs, children's dear little artworks, etc. — differ fundamentally from insurance policies, credit card statements, envelopes with important addresses on them, immunization records, tax forms, and the like.  Sentimental objects come last of all. When, having just finished "books," one gathers "papers" to discard them, sentimental paper-based objects are passed right over.

    I am starting this just as I get back from a weeklong vacation from the Internet, and so I decided to practice the paper-discarding technique on my email inbox first, while I gather papers together.  Kondo's rule is to discard every paper unless

    • it is currently in use, or 
    • it is needed for a limited period of time, or
    • it must be kept indefinitely.

    That is a funny way of putting it, but note the difference in the verbs.  It "is" in use, it "is needed" for a limited period of time, "it must be" kept indefinitely.  Note the absence of verbs like "want" or modifiers like "might."  When you turn it into asking yourself a question about whether to discard something, you wind up asking:

    • Must I keep this thing for I don't know how long?  (Yes to relatively few things.  The title to the house and car come to mind.  The children's birth certificates.  Contractual documents.  Tax records — technically only must be kept for a few years but that's pretty long.)
    • Do I need  this thing for a known period of time?  (Yes to a larger category of things.  The kids' immunization records, which I'll need only until the next doctor's appointment when I will get a new copy.  Standardized test results, which I need to compare from year to year but which will become moot as each child graduates high school.  Receipts for things that have not been delivered yet.  Forms I need to fill out.  Mail that I need to read.)
    • Am I using this thing?  A large category.  I think of it as, "If I didn't have this thing, would it mess up some project I'm currently working on?"  A lot of schoolwork-related papers belong in this category at any given time.  Right now I have a lot of scratch paper that I'm using to plan next school year, for instance.  And I have a pile of schoolwork for the high school kids that I want to summarize into a sort of "report" for my own records and for H's records.

     When it comes to storing papers, Kondo suggests only three files.  They are not quite the same as the three categories of "things not to throw away."  The three files are:

    (1) Needs to be dealt with

    (2) Contractual documents and other items that are infrequently accessed

    (3) Items that are more frequently accessed

    Yup:  that's how she puts it.  "Infrequently" and "more frequently."

    + + +

    Before I started going through my email box yesterday, I created three new folders:

    • 00 Deal With
    • 01 Save – Access
    • 02 Save – Infrequent

    (The numbers are there to defeat by brute force the email program's automatic file-alphabetizing feature.)

    I began going through my inbox with the goal of emptying it, sorting everything I don't delete into one of those  three top-level folders.

    Very quickly I realized that it would be helpful to have another top-level folder for the specific purpose of keeping email purchase receipts just until my Amazon, etc., orders arrive undamaged.  These are, technically, a kind of "Save – Access" document, but there are so many of them and they only need to be kept for a short time, that really they should be grouped together.  So I created a fourth folder:

    • 03 Orders – Purge

    and its name is a reminder that every so often it can be purged completely when I am not waiting for any orders to be delivered.

    It took me all day, but I got my inbox to empty.  I still have a gaggle of folders to go through with names like "Archive 2009" and "Rome Trip" and "History Schoolwork" — not that I really have to delete things, since my email folders are searchable and I have an unlimited-space account.  I could just move the whole file-tree into "02 Save- Infrequent."  It's more so that I can comb through them to find out, once and for all, if anything in there really ought to go into "Deal With."

    + + +

    So that's today's project.  Once I've finished that, I'll actually "deal with" the things in "00 Deal With." Some of this "dealing" will involve printing things:  turning email into Papers.  And then I'll begin tackling the first of the two boxes on my schoolroom counter, boxes which have been collecting a slow drift of papers for the last few weeks, boxes of papers:  one labeled "School Paper" and one labeled "Non-School Papers."

     

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    1 comment on Still Kondo-ing.

  • A kick in the pants.

    A few weeks ago, I was facing a weekend with Mark out of town, and I needed to clean out the guest room.

    Our house has a tiny fourth bedroom up in the attic; at some point, one of the children will likely use it as sleeping quarters, and ostensibly it is a room for guests. For years it has hosted nothing but out-of-season and recently outgrown clothes waiting to be sorted. When guests come, we sometimes sort them; often we stuff the piles somewhere else, such as in Mark’s shop, and then put them back later.

    I anticipate guests soon, and I kept going up to the attic, opening the door, looking at the piles (there was literally no floor space), and closing the door again. I needed a kick in the pants.

    So I got myself a copy of a book I had heard about some months before, Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. And it kicked me. Hard.

    + + +

    This is not a book review. This is more a report card, on myself. You can find other reviews of the book in many places, including a recent discussion by an economist of why Kondo’s method helps us combat certain irrational tendencies that make us hang on to stuff we don’t need. It’s less about organizing than it is about getting rid of stuff you don’t use or love, and then storing what you have.

    This is not the first time I’ve tried to discard belongings, but it’s the first time I ever tried the strategy of discarding by category. Usually, I have “cleaned out” my home location by location. Like this:

    PROBLEM: I need to put more books in this bookshelf and there’s no room

    SOLUTION ATTEMPT 1: Try to move some books to space on a a different bookshelf.

    SOLUTION ATTEMPT 2: Get rid of just enough books to make room for the moved books.

    I must have done this dozens of times since we moved into our house — “cleaned out” by discarding just enough things in an overfull location to make room for the new things I wanted to put there. I probably managed to get rid of anywhere from three books to maybe one whole box of books at a time this way. For a while I tried to impose on myself a “one book in, one book out” rule, but I never was able to stick to it.

    When I stopped discarding books by location, and instead did them by category — all at once — I boxed up nine “small” U-Haul boxes of books in the space of two weeks. And without any sense of regret about it. I found nine boxes’ worth of books on my shelves that I did not want to keep. They had been hiding in plain sight all that time. Some of them too damaged to use, some of them duplicates, some of them no good, some of them having served their purpose long ago.

    The undamaged ones are going on to a garage sale fundraiser this weekend, and may they find new life with someone else.

    + + +

    The idea is to discard by category, if you have enough books that doing them all at once is impractical. I went through every shelf, bag, box, and bin in my house looking for “pleasure reading” books, both fiction and nonfiction, and piled them on the floor in our game room. The mountain of books was knee high: sci-fi, classics, popular science, poetry anthologies, mysteries, humor, everything that I read because I enjoyed the subject matter. And then I sat on the floor with a donation box to my left and a clear floor space to my right, and sorted.

    The criterion is not “Did I enjoy this book?” It is not even really “Will I read this book in the future, or lend it to someone?”

    The criterion, as I understood it (this is not exactly how Kondo puts it) is, “Will the sight of this book on the shelf make me feel happy?” Because, of course, that is where our books spend 99% of their time. That is most of what we “do” with books: surround ourselves with them. An individual book should make me happy to be in its presence when it is closed and resting on my shelf. If not — if it only makes me happy while I am reading it — then I might as well give it away, and borrow it someday if I wish to read it again. For we don’t have to own a book to read it.

    Once I understood that, it was not at all hard to discard books. And with all the general-knowledge, pleasure-reading volumes spread out before me, picking them up one at a time, I could easily tell the difference between the books that I met as one meets an old friend, and the books that I didn’t.

    I passed through other categories: reference books and textbooks; self-help books; children’s picture books. I have accumulated a fairly large collection of theology volumes, and it was especially easy to distinguish the “keep” from the “get rid of” there; with theology either you read it once and you’ve gotten everything you are going to get out of it, or you read it once and you know you’ll turn to it again and again.

    I departed from Marie Kondo’s method in one respect. She says to handle each item only once. But as I went through each category, many books were diverted into a sort of recycle stream to be considered again under a different criterion: Even if I did not desire to keep this book around for me — did I want this book to be part of my homeschooling library, the set of books that I keep around precisely so there are plenty of different things for the children to read as part of their school days?

    I mean, I have never been able to get into Jane Austen. I have picked up and put down Emma and Pride and Prejudice countless times. I am probably never going to read either. They do not spark joy sitting on the shelf (rather, when I see them I am reminded of my failure to finish them). At least not for my own sake.

    But — as part of a library of volumes that I want to be available in my home for the readers who live there and visit there — I am happy to see them waiting for the right person to come along and pick them up. So they stayed.

    + + +

    There is a lot more space in my shelves now. I will be moving on to the next category — papers — starting today, at the same time as I put the old school year to bed and begin buying materials for the new one. It is good timing, and it feels like a fresh start, just in time for summer.

    —

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    5 comments on A kick in the pants.

  • Feedback on the Sunday night feeding paradigm.

    I wrote a few posts ago
     
    — augh!  I would love to say "a few days ago" but my blogging is so infrequent right now! —
     
    about our shift to eating prepared cold "party food" for Sunday dinners:  cheeses, crackers, cured meats, olives, cut veggies with dip, etc.   So that Sunday can be a day of rest for the cook, but Sunday dinner can still be a feast:

     At least two kinds of crackers… are set out in bowls, and sometimes a take-and-bake baguette is popped in the oven and sliced. Someone slices salami … someone arranges 2 or 3 kinds of cheese… If we have leftover deli meats of other kinds, those go out as well. (An alternative to the sausage-and-cheese platter: lox and cream cheese on cocktail rye. Mm.) We keep a small stock of jars and cans of fancy olives and preserves and spreads and pâtés and things… and one or two of those goes on the table. We cut up peppers and celery and carrots and radishes, and put them out for dipping, either with bought hummus or with good olive oil, salt, and pepper…. We open wine or beer, and the kids may have juice boxes or soda if they have some. It takes maybe 20 minutes to put on the table and is not hard to clean up.

    And it feels like Sunday.

    + + +
     
    Today I got some feedback from a reader named Jenny in New Orleans:
     
    [T]hank you so much for your recent "what we do about Sunday night dinner" post!!
     
    We live mere blocks from the in-laws, and our regular Sunday routine has been Mama-made brunch here after Mass, then over to the in-laws' house in the afternoon for playing-and-supper. As the in-laws are aging, they've decided to drop back to more like twice-a-month Sunday get-togethers (when everyone shows up, my MIL is cooking for 22 people!!).
     
    I totally  understand, and actually sort of prefer to have our Sundays to ourselves, but we were definitely languishing in the but what about supper area. We don't have the means to go out every week, but–like yours–my husband wasn't interested in me cooking a whole 'nother meal (especially since we do a fairly full brunch mid-day). And leftovers or sandwiches just weren't special enough.

    Well, after your post, we've seen the light!!

    Every Christmas, one of our kids' (girls: 8.5, 8.5, 7, 5, 3 months; boy: 2) favorite traditions is eating a "snacky supper" (read: you don't have to sit down, you can walk around, food is arranged in a buffet-type style on the table) while we decorate the tree on Christmas Eve.

    And now!! We're doing it on Sundays!!

    You're right–it strikes exactly the balance we were looking for between "special" and "easy". (I even put it out on paper plates because I've already run the dishwasher after brunch.) We've done cheese, crackers, fruit, deviled eggs, leftover tuna salad, ham chunks, chips-and-salsa, hot dog bites… it's awesome. Everyone loves it, it relieves the near-temptation to just go out, it's super-easy to clean up, and I can keep my eye out for crackers and such on sale at the store.

    And one of the best things, to me, is that it's allowing us to establish our own Special Sunday Routine Treat that will already be in place when the inevitable happens and going-to-grandma's on Sunday is done with. It's flexible and quick enough that we can accommodate the occasional Sunday afternoon outing–a pool party, a quick trip to the museum to catch the closing-today exhibit–and still do our "regular" Sunday Snacky Supper.

    So: thanks. It's a great idea, it works perfectly for us, and I'm really glad you mentioned it.

    Awesome!  

    Anybody else try it?

    —

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    2 comments on Feedback on the Sunday night feeding paradigm.

  • Fourteen-hour fasting.

    Every May and November I try to write about the long-term maintenance of the significant weight loss I achieved in 2008.

    (Care about numbers? I am 4'11" tall. From lifelong obesity, having had an all-time nonpregnant high of 160 lbs, I went in 6 months from 148 lbs to 108 lbs. After my subsequent pregnancy, I ended up at 113 and felt better there then I had at 108, so stayed. Since then I have had an additional pregnancy.)

    Longtime readers will remember that while that was going on, I blogged about almost nothing else, to the point that, for example, wildly popular paleo websites linked to me and called me a "weight loss blogger." I probably overdid it, but I can't be too sorry because the hyper-focus probably helped.

    May is disappearing fast, so here I am with my update.

    + + +

    My youngest is now nearly seventeen months old, still happily breastfeeding, and generally keeping us on our toes. I am feeling really good overall. I haven't run a 5K in a while, and have been swimming more often than running, mostly because swimming feels better and is easier to convince myself to do; but I am getting to the gym at a fairly reliable pace of twice per week.

    However: I am really, really frustrated by the non-budging of my postpartum bathroom scale.

    Is it just the difference of being four years older in this last pregnancy than I was in the pregnancy before that? Or is it from being four years farther removed from the felt experience of constant, successful self-denial in my 2008 weight loss, so that I forgot how to work hard? Or is it from having 25% more children vying for my limited attention than the last time around? Whatever: After my last pregnancy, the weight came off with very little effort, and fairly quickly. This time — it appears to be happening, but verrrrrrrry sloooooowly.

    Seventeen months postpartum, I am still 7-10 pounds above my prepregnancy weight, which (on my 4'11" frame) means I am still one full clothing size larger, which means that I have a bunch of clothes that I would really like to wear that I can't. The conflict: I am still, unnecessarily it would seem, living in the yoga pants that I bought at the beginning of pregnancy to bridge the gap until maternity clothes. Should I accept life in my current size, buy more clothes that fit me, and get rid of the ones that don't? Or should I keep on working at it, in the hope that little by little, enough flesh will slip away to allow me to wear my "real clothes" again?

    I don't look bad. I don't feel bad. But I don't want to buy a whole new wardrobe either. It feels like giving up.

    + + +

    One factor is certainly attention. The self-denial that I have found necessary to drop pounds — mostly, from sticking to small portions — is not difficult to endure; I am quite used to it by now. But the body has tricks to play. As odd as it may sound, I seem simply to forget my intentions, forget to account for food I have already eaten, forget that I meant not to snack or to have seconds, forget to arrange plates full of vegetables and to limit rice and tortillas and bread. To combat this, I should make a meal plan for each day, but it is hard to find the time; family life is so distracting right now. The only time I have ever had rapid success is when I prioritized eating self-control over all other family priorities, and I am unwilling to do that now.

    The best I've been able to do at this attention level, it seems, is to work on it when I remember, and hope that my efforts pay off over time.

    + + +

    I am trying a new experiment on myself right now, though, to shake things up a bit: what is called Intermittent Fasting, of the "14/10" variety. That is, I'm spending at least 14 hours of every day (including my sleeping hours, of course) not eating at all.

    Intermittent fasting (IF) is popular in a few circles right now — paleo and bodybuilding, for instance. I guess the idea is that dividing your day into a (longer) period of fasting and a (shorter) period of eating is somehow better for your blood sugar, even if you eat the same stuff in your eating window as you would have if you had spread it out over the whole day. As a practical matter, it presents a clear-cut rule that should reduce one's exposure to snacking opportunities, simply because there is a biggish block of the day where you have pre-decided that you won't eat. Besides the daily block of fasting that I am trying out, another flavor of IF is to periodically, perhaps twice a week, go 24 hours without eating (generally skipping dinner-lunch-breakfast so that every calendar day does have some food), and a third is to follow a more-frequent modified fast (very-low-calorie days intermixed with high-calorie days).

    I started by attempting 16-hour fasts, but very quickly switched to 14-hour ones — which some say is more appropriate for women, anyway. A typical fasting period would begin sometime after dinner — so, perhaps I would have my last bite around 8:30 p.m. — and last until a late breakfast, around 10:30. But sometimes, because I chose to have a snack around 10 p.m., I would not eat until lunchtime.

    As a lifelong believer in light but early breakfasts, I expected to have trouble getting used to the long delay before the break-fast. Indeed, I find I am pretty hungry when that first mealtime rolls around. But it isn't as bad as I feared. I typically drink coffee all morning anyway, and that hasn't changed, so my routine isn't all that different. It is the kind of thing that would happen to me sometimes when, interrupted by children or intent on the preparation for the day, I would forget to eat until later. That never caused me any great distress, other than a little light-headedness, and I find that doing it on purpose is no worse and often easier because of having planned for it.

    I find that each day naturally seems to fall into one of two patterns, depending on whether I can set my own meal schedule or whether I am around other people who are eating normally.

    If I set my own schedule, I eat a late breakfast at, say, 10:30 a.m.; a somewhat late lunch at about 2 p.m.; and dinner at the normal time or a bit later. Because the meals are closer together, it is not terribly hard to keep to a fairly light lunch and dinner (though I am still getting used to not inhaling a huge breakfast after the long fast).

    If I am around other people, it works better to break the fast with a small snack as soon as the 14 hours are up. Then it's a normal lunch and a normal dinner at the normal times.

    + + +

    Trying this out was a bit of a philosophical departure for me. Most of the time I try to focus on dietary disciplines that seem as if I'd like to adopt them as lifelong, or at least long-term, habits. And before I tried this, I definitely thought it would be something for the short-term. I just like breakfast too much to take it seriously! I justified the uncharacteristic "crash diet" approach by thinking that I just needed to shake things up for a few weeks, maybe break through the plateau that's dogging me.

    But now that I have tried it for several weeks, I find it … appealing, actually. I think I will keep going for a while and see what happens if I tweak it a bit here and there.

    Some reasons why I like it:

    • Bright-line clarity. I don't risk overthinking it. It is very simple: Notice what time I last eat before going to bed, and don't eat again for 14 hours.
    • No food restrictions. Except, of course, that it's easier to fast if you've eaten something that is not empty junk.
    • Flexibility: On average, of course, the eating window is 10 hours long. But in any given day, I can go ahead and have more food later into the evening; the tradeoff is a later breakfast. (How bad can it be? I doubt I will ever eat past 11 p.m., so the worst it can be is 1.) Sometimes that seems like a good tradeoff and sometimes it doesn't. I get to decide. Similarly, I get to decide when to have meals during the day. If for some reason I want to have an early breakfast — say 8 a.m. — all I have to do is stop eating at 6 p.m. after an early dinner the night before.
    • Less time to wait between daytime meals. This means — I hope — that I could be satisfied with a smaller portion size. When I decide to try that.
    • I am practicing a useful skill. Fasting for 14 hours is occasionally necessary. I am slowly learning that it will not kill me or make me crazy or unbearably irritable, but that I can do it without difficulty if I plan well (and carry that fast-breaking snack if I have to leave the house in the morning).

    I think I will keep this up for six weeks or so, and then maybe — if I can sustain the effort required to pay attention — start watching the total calorie count as well. I am not ready to give up on those non-yoga pants yet.

    —

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    8 comments on Fourteen-hour fasting.

  • In search of a kid-friendly vegetable soup: Tortilla-lime version.

    As part of my efforts to serve a first course at the start of our family dinners (see here, here, and here), I've been hunting for a vegetable soup that the kids will happily eat.  If only I could find one, I  thought, I could make gallons of it, freeze it, and have it ready to go as the first course for any dinner.  Or if it was well-liked enough, we could have it several days in one week.  

    Ideally, it wouldn't contain potatoes (which don't freeze well at all), and it would be meatless.  Even better if it would go together quickly and contain plenty of different vegetables.

    One possibility is minestrone, which most of the family loves, but we think of minestrone as a main dish; we pile Parmesan cheese on it and have it with a salad and crispy garlic pita chips.  So it can't be a first course without ruining the tradition, unless it's leftovers.  

    Another is tomato soup, but again, this soup already occupies a niche in our diet:  90% of the time, it is an equal partner with grilled cheese sandwiches.

    Carrot soup and butternut squash soup are classic ideas, but I think of them as autumn recipes, and don't much want them in the spring and summer.

    Last week I started trying new recipes.  My first soup attempt was an enormous pot of Alton Brown's garden vegetable soup, with the potatoes removed and extra carrots and corn added.  I don't know what happened to it, but everyone agreed it had a funny "soapy" taste.  Too many leeks?  Insufficiently rinsed pot?  I don't know.  I don't think I'll try to make it again.

    Today I tried to adapt a sopa de lima recipe to make a vegetarian version.  I started with a corn-cilantro stock that appears in a tortilla soup recipe in Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven, and then I followed an old cookbook recipe for chicken-tortilla-lime soup, replacing the chicken with extra vegetables.  I borrowed a page from the Colombian soup sancocho de gallo and saved time by cutting the corncobs for the stock into manageably small chunks that could be transferred to the soup; this saved the work of cutting the fresh corn off the cob to put kernels in the soup and the cobs in the stock.

    It was good, bright with citrus and not too spicy for the kids.  If I wanted it to be a main-dish meal, I'd introduce a can or two of cooked black beans or pinto beans, and pass a big bowl of chips.

    Here you go:

    Vegetarian Tortilla-Lime Soup

    For the stock:

    • 3 ears fresh corn, each cob shucked and cut crosswise into five or six chunks (still on the cob)
    • 1 bunch fresh cilantro, left whole
    • 2 bunches green onion (about 16 green onions), cut into 1-inch lengths
    • 8 cups water
    • 2 tsp salt, or to taste

    For the soup:

    • 1/4 cup olive oil
    • 1 large yellow onion, chopped
    • 1/4 cup (or more!) minced garlic
    • Finely minced jalapeño chile to taste — I used a couple of teaspoons, no seeds
    • 1-2 zucchini, cut into quarter-rounds
    • 1-2 carrots, peeled and diced
    • 1 can (15 oz) diced tomatoes with juice
    • 1 bunch fresh cilantro leaves, chopped
    • 6-8 Tbsp fresh lime juice (2-3 limes)
    • Salt and pepper to taste
    • Tortilla chips for a garnish
    • Paper-thin lime slices, cut into quarters, for garnish

    Combine stock ingredients in a large pot, bring to a boil, and simmer about 30 minutes while preparing the rest of the ingredients.  Strain the stock, reserving the corncob chunks (most or all of the onions and cilantro can be discarded).

    In a soup pot, warm the olive oil. Add the onion and sauté, stirring occasionally, until soft and translucent, about 10 minutes.  Add the garlic and jalapeño and cook for 1-2 minutes.  Add the stock and bring to a boil; reduce to medium-low. Add the carrots, tomatoes and zucchini, cover, and cook until the vegetables are tender, 20 minutes or so.

    A few minutes before serving, add the cilantro, lime juice, salt and pepper, and the reserved corncob chunks.  Taste and adjust seasoning.  

    Ladle into bowls (including at least one corncob chunk in each), top with lime slices and a few tortilla chips, and serve.

     

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    2 comments on In search of a kid-friendly vegetable soup: Tortilla-lime version.

  • The light at the end of the tunnel that is 2014–2015.

    Have we quite finished all of our work yet this year, the children and I?  Not quite.  I had planned to do a bit more.

    Once upon a time, we used to continue "doing school" in each subject until we'd finished the book, so to speak (except for math, which is never done… there is always another book around the corner, and we just keep chugging along… a little slower in the summer, perhaps).  

    This meant that we emerged gradually into the summer sunlight.  History book complete!  A few days later, perhaps the science curriculum would run out.  And so on until there was nothing left but the math books, so that the children would be rewarded for "I'm bored" all summer with "Well then!  Go do a math lesson.  It'll keep you sharp!"

    This year it isn't going to work that way.   We took a look at the calendar.  In a few weeks there's a week blocked off on the calendar for a family vacation.  Then a week that isn't blocked off — but H's family will already be gone on their  family vacation — and then a week where the boys are at scout camp — and then soon thereafter we'll go to Ohio to visit family — and then the boys will stay a little longer with Grandma and Grandpa — and then the boys go on the high-adventure Scout trip… and then we're going on a bike/camping trip with friends…

    They've all managed to defeat me by scheduling their summer to be full of valuable experiences that will prevent them from checking educational boxes!

    + + +

    What this means is that, like it or not, I have about three full weeks left in the school year (one of which has Memorial Day in it).  

    It is time for me to stop asking "how much longer will it take for me to finish all the stuff we are supposed to finish?"

    It is time for me to ask instead "what is the best use of our time in the last three weeks of the school year?"

    + + +

    Mark laughed and said, "You know, I've heard that once or twice there was a public-school teacher who had to stop for the year before she finished the last chapter of the book."

    + + +

    So, for example.  I've got five sessions left to work with the two high school boys on geometry.   But if I didn't have a time limit, I'd have 17 more sessions (why am I so behind?  Because last school year H and I had three babies between us).  However, by happy coincidence, there are exactly six lessons left in the book, and the second-to-last is much more important than the last one (it lays the foundations for understanding calculus by introducing the notion of building up volume formulas by constructing solids from a large number of very thin "slices"), so I'm going to spend one day on each of these lessons.  I won't get to do two chapter reviews, I won't get to do two chapter tests, I won't get to do a final exam, and I won't get to spend two sessions per lesson.  Oh well!  It will have to do.

    I had five weeks left in Modern World History, with the last week to be spent on a capstone timeline analysis.  The capstone week is probably the most important and so I'll keep it as the last week.  But I'll need to remove half the material from the rest of the course to reduce four weeks' assignments down to two.  Since they're trying to finish a course-long research paper at the same time, I'll probably do that by reducing the writing workload to almost nothing.

    I'm going to totally finish 9th-grade Latin though!  Woo hoo!  Two weeks of lessons left in the book!

    + + +

    The elementary schoolkids' work will just stop at one point.  My 9th-grader was put in charge of his own schedule for a few other subjects — Algebra II and Evolutionary Biology — and I'm going to let him live with the consequences of being just a little bit behind on those, meaning that he might need to schedule some time finishing up the books over the summer during the weeks he isn't at Scout camp.  I've checked — it isn't an onerous amount, and doing a little bit in the mornings here and there should be enough.   I am not in charge of that, though.  He is.

    Which means that… after three more weeks of work…

    … I'll be done.  

    And my last schoolday of the year will be a Thursday at H's house where we have dinner there and the elementary school kids will recite the poetry they memorized all year long.

    I just realized I will have a perfect use for the bottle of decent bubbly that Mark brought me at Valentine's Day.  I think I will struggle on until then, with the pop of that cork awaiting me in the light of summer.

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    1 comment on The light at the end of the tunnel that is 2014–2015.

  • Kindness and reasonableness: spread it, because it matters.

    On Mother's Day I received an email from my father-in-law and mother-in-law. It was addressed both to me and to my sister-in-law, who is married with one young child.

    It went like this:

    + + +

    [My name], [SIL's name]
     
    We just wanted to take a moment to express our warmest thanks to both of you for being such wonderful mothers. Our grandchildren are truly blessed to have you for their Mom.
     
    A big part of being a good Mom is showing your children what real love between a husband and wife, and within a family should be. We see that with both of you, and are forever grateful for the loving example you set.
     
    You know that we love you with all our hearts and always will. Thank you for being you, the wonderful women, wives and Moms that you are. We are so proud of both of you, and live with the joy of having you as a part of our wonderful family.
     
    Best wishes for the happiest of Mother's Day.
     
    With all our love and blessings,
     
    Mom & Dad

     

    + + +

    I paused and read this email over and over before I was ready to sit down and compose a reply thanking my in-laws for such kind words and for being the role models that they are to me.

    In one sense, a message like this is completely unremarkable. It is the kind of thing that they do and say for the people around them all the time. The two attributes that I admire most in Mark's parents, the ones I aspire to: they are kind, and they are reasonable. Everybody, I think, should try to be kind and reasonable. On top of that, they are people of faith. This is less a thing that people can "try" to be or can "aspire" to be; it's the sort of thing that comes to you as a gift. It is a thing to be thankful for and to appreciate. I do appreciate it.

    Perhaps it is a small thing, for a kind and reasonable and faithful person, to send such a message.

    It is not always a small thing to receive one.

    + + +

    Jen Fitz wrote an almost-entirely-unrelated blog post that I saw yesterday right before leaving for church, when I was feeling down about all the things on my list that I was not going to be able to get done. The post was aimed at pastors who felt they were preaching into a black hole. The line in her post that lifted my heart up was this:

    "Your stalwart troops aren’t uncrushable, like Wile E. Coyote. They need to hear the truth over and over again, because life in the world sucks the spirit dry."

    I thought: She is right.  I am not anxious today because there is something deeply and particularly wrong with me.  I am anxious today because like everyone in the world, life in it sucks my spirit dry now and again.   I need to hear the truth over and over, as a corrective to the false promises and threats that are taken in with the air we breathe.   And my heart was lifted because I was about to leave the house to be immersed in truth for just a little while, and I knew that it would do me some good.

    (The biggest falsehood our society tells is the utilitarian one: the idea that a person's worth is measured in production and consumption. I don't believe it anymore, but I fall for it sometimes still in small ways. "Success" and worth are not the same.)

    + + +

    Here is something you may not know about me:

    I have a relative who makes a point of telling me directly, when this relative gets a chance, that my children receive "horrible parenting."

    Those are not scare quotes. The words appeared in writing to me. I still have the communication in my possession and can double-check it. Pointing to a particular disapproved-of behavior the last time we were invited to visit: "Just another incident of horrible parenting."

    There was more. There has always been more.

    I grew up hearing — not from everyone in my life, but by one significant person — that I had no common sense.

    I grew up hearing that I was heartless and that my actions proved that I didn't care about other people.

    I grew up hearing, repeatedly, that I was full of shit.  

    This is not the only thing I heard, of course.  I got excellent grades. I won awards. I was offered scholarships. Those earned me praise. They were the only way I knew for a long time how to measure the worth of a person.

    + + +

    As I grew into adulthood and watched other people raising their children, married and began to have my own children, I came to understand how very unhinged from reality all those words were; how unhinged they still are.

    They must come from a place that is small and pinched, a place I cannot understand — a place I thank God I cannot understand, at least as long as it is not my vocation to provide care for someone who lives in such a prison.

    I understand that these are not words that have ever been meant to mean anything. There is not a reason behind them. They are meant to go out into the world to try to make a different reality, because people loving each other and being kind and reasonable somehow offends.

    Some people, they say, do not really want to be happy.

     

    + + +

    So I know that there isn't any there there. I do.

    And yet. It is good to be washed in the words of kind and reasonable people from time to time.

    I respect and love them — not because they say nice things to me that I want to hear, but because I see their lives of good work and reason. I see that they are honest in everything they do. I have reason to believe people of integrity. I have reason not to believe people whom I know not to be people of integrity.

    But none of this would be worth anything if people of integrity minded their own business and kept to themselves. To set the record straight, the kind and reasonable people have to testify.

    All this is to say:

    Tell the people you love that you love them, and tell them that you see and know and appreciate the fruits of their work, the fruits of their love. Tell the people you meet in passing that you see their good work and appreciate it. Tell people they make a difference, even a small difference, in a good way.

    It matters. It matters so much.

    You might think it's obvious (especially if you are kind and reasonable and you expect to see kindness and reasonableness everywhere).

    It isn't always obvious.

    You might think, "Other people surely tell them."

    Maybe. But not everyone finds it easy to speak kind words, because sometimes kind words are punished.

    If you have the gift of being kind and reasonable, spread it. Tell people. Say, "Good job. You are loved. You are worthy."

    Go out on a limb.

    It matters.

    Everything we say or do to someone else bears fruit, and we do not know the impact we have.

    Here are two quotes from Elisabeth Leseur, whom I've written about before:

    [N]eutrality is impossible where it is a question of doing the good… Every person is an incalculable force, bearing within her a little of the future. Until the end of time our words and actions will bear fruit, either good or bad; nothing that we have once given of ourselves is lost, but our words and works, passed on from one to another, will continue to do good or harm to later generations.

    This is why life is something sacred, and we ought not to pass through it thoughtlessly but to understand its value and use it so that when we have finished our lives we will have increased the amount of good in the world.

    and,

    The first thing to do is to try to become our best selves… And God will do the rest. Our effort, our sacrifices, our actions, even the most hidden, will not be lost.

     

    This is my absolute conviction: everything has a long-lasting and profound repercussion.

    This thought leaves little room for discouragement, but it does not permit laziness…. I am unable to despair of humanity.

    Despite all efforts by the Opposition, neither am I.

     

     

     

     

    —

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    3 comments on Kindness and reasonableness: spread it, because it matters.

  • Sunday dinner paradigm shift.

    Have I really not ever written a whole post about this? I can’t believe it. I must have put everything on Facebook. Well, going to do it now.

    + + +

    Sunday afternoons wipe me out. If we don’t have a planned family fun activity scheduled, I will often wander upstairs right after lunch, lie down for “just a few minutes,” and the next thing I know it is 4:30 and I feel like I have been run over by the special truck that comes on Sunday afternoons just to run me over.

    And then, of course, it is time to get dinner on the table.

    + + +

    I like being in charge of cooking. Really, I do; one of the things that makes our life so lovely is that I enjoy cooking, never really get tired of it; I achieve moments of flow in the kitchen, chopping and stirring; I love trying new recipes; I like eating, so it’s nice for me that (being the cook) I get to make whatever I feel like eating; I like choosing menus that will fit into our week. The only thing about it that isn’t much fun is trying to make the grocery list and menu plan when I am feeling rushed, because then I know I will make suboptimal or boring choices and that makes me less happy than everything being interesting and well-chosen, but it is still okay.

    Mark is capable in the kitchen if necessary and has his own little repertoire of things to make when for some reason I am unable to make dinner. Which is great. The kids like his stuff (chilaquiles, bacon-vegetable-tomato spaghetti sauce, the rarely seen lasagna) and so do I.

    + + +

    We used to use Sunday afternoons for Mark to catch up on household projects and for me to plan my school stuff for the week. Then a few years ago Mark had a sort of — I don’t know — head-of-household conversion experience and started working on remaking our Sundays to be more restful with more family fun time in them.

    This has been a slow change, but it has made a big difference. Saturdays are more busy now — I do my school planning in the afternoon on Saturdays, and often we have a big housecleaning binge from everyone — but Sunday afternoons are truly more fun and family-focused. We don’t clean the house, just the necessary dishwasher-loading and the like. We take walks sometimes, or naps while the kids do their own thing. I have learned to suppress my inner busy person and just enjoy hanging out, ignoring the sword of Damocles which is things I could be doing right now so that I could relax LATER even BETTER when the things are all done.

    Because you know what, the things are never done and if I am going to be restful I have to seize it from the jaws of things that are not yet done.

    + + +

    Sunday dinner was a sticking point, though. Because you have to eat, and making the dinner was my job.

    I remember once (I was pregnant, which is probably definitely relevant) walking into the messy kitchen about 3 pm and bursting into tears because Mark had been insisting that we all relax and have fun on Sunday because it was Sunday and as a result no one had cleaned up anything in the kitchen all day and now I had to MAKE DINNER in the MESSY KITCHEN and everybody got a day of rest but MEEEEEEEE and I don’t remember how that ended but I think takeout was involved.

    But it all changed soon after the 15-month-old was born almost a month early and just a couple of days before New Year’s Eve. We felt deprived of a party, so when I was just starting to sit at the table for dinner again — maybe 10 days postpartum — Mark went to the store to buy festive food. He remembered how after a previous birth, his parents had sent us a gift basket from the fancy grocery store, and he bought the kinds of things that were in that basket, and things that pregnant women are supposed to avoid these days. Lox, and several kinds of crackers, and good runny cheese. Cut vegetables with some kind of dip. And fancy salami, maybe proscuitto, and some sweet things too. Party food! We sat around the table, a brand-new family of seven, and devoured cheese and crackers. Probably there was good beer, or maybe some bubbly. It was great. Satisfying. Festive. Special.

    And — this is crucial — almost no work at all.

    It was sitting around that table with the new baby that we had the epiphany we had been waiting for. This was how Sunday dinner needed to be, for as long as we were busy raising young children. It was the solution to the puzzle that had eluded us for so long.

    Making food from scratch is not restful enough. Leftovers (at least on their own) are not feast-ive enough. But bought hors d’oeuvres — enough for everyone to get their fill — are both festive and easy! Problem solved!

    + + +

    Now Sunday dinner prep looks like this: At least two kinds of crackers (even if it’s just saltines and Triscuits) are set out in bowls, and sometimes a take-and-bake baguette is popped in the oven and sliced. Someone slices salami (or summer sausage); someone arranges 2 or 3 kinds of cheese, usually a mix of fairly inexpensive cheddars and goudas appreciated by the kids, with one good cheese appreciated by me. If we have leftover deli meats of other kinds, those go out as well. (An alternative to the sausage-and-cheese platter: lox and cream cheese on cocktail rye. Mm.) We keep a small stock of jars and cans of fancy olives and preserves and spreads and pâtés and things, which we add to whenever we happen to see something interesting while out and about, and one or two of those goes on the table. We cut up peppers and celery and carrots and radishes, and put them out for dipping, either with bought hummus or with good olive oil, salt, and pepper — a trick we learned in Rome. We open wine or beer, and the kids may have juice boxes or soda if they have some. It takes maybe 20 minutes to put on the table and is not hard to clean up.

    And it feels like Sunday.

    We call this kind of dinner “plate,” borrowing a word from the family of a friend. I think smorgasbord would be a better word, but plate has stuck.

    + + +

    We can’t keep the work at bay forever. After dinner on Sunday it’s back to the grindstone, cleaning up and prepping for the week. But I feel like we’ve finally hit the sweet spot.

    A lot of “wow this is the best solution ever to our problem” doesn’t stick. I post about my life-changing new idea with enthusiasm, my readers tell me I am a genius [polishes nails on lapel], and then after a month or a season or a new baby I give up, slink away, and never speak of my formerly great idea again.

    i have a feeling this one is robust enough to stick, at least as long as we can afford cheese and crackers.

    —

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    9 comments on Sunday dinner paradigm shift.

  • “He’s not himself.”

    This week the 15-month-old was sick, sick, sick. The illness began back around Easter, probably on April 3rd; lasted a bit more than a week; seemed to be over by Monday, April 13, lulling us into thinking we could safely resume our normal schedule; returned with a vengeance on Sunday the 19th and continued until just now.

    I think the little guy had rotavirus, because he had the classic symptoms (key among them the copious and foul, foul diarrhea) and none of the rest of us fell ill. Most people get this before age 6 and after that have immunity. The one-two punch took us by surprise; maybe he mostly shook it off, but not entirely, and we were just too quick to jump back into regular activities; or maybe the second wave, which did look a little different, was from an imbalance of gut flora. Who knows.

    It was H who suggested that it might be rotavirus, since her twins fell ill at the same time with the same symptoms — one much worse than the other, with my baby having it to a degree that fell between the two. We ended up cancelling a total of three co-schooling days (not in a row). I think we will be back in business on Monday.

    + + +

    So, of course I spent the week with a feverish, listless baby sprawled or curled in my lap, buried in towels and spare old sheets from the basket we keep high up in the linen closet, only for births and for mass gastrointestinal illness. The washer and dryer ran constantly. I changed my clothes three or four times a day. I lived on chicken soup from an enormous pot that I made on the first day of the second wave, when I worried we’d all become ill. I offered the baby store-brand, pediatric electrolyte solution.

    (A side note: Why, why, why must they put brightly colored dye in a drink that is meant to be given to vomiting toddlers?)

    I offered him lots of nursing, too, and stayed close by so he could always have access to me, with a few breaks to run to the drugstore or grocery. I slept with the baby on a stack of towels and diapers. Even though (thankfully) he mostly slept at night and didn’t throw up, I started awake at every cough, ready to leap into action. Tied-up garbage bags full of disposable diapers accumulated next to the changing table. The kids, not allowed to go to friends’ houses or activities lest they pass the bug on, festered and whined and eventually settled in front of video games, and I quit making them stop.

    + + +

    None of those are fun. They are miserable. But honestly, the worst part of it all is how the familiar little guy just… disappears, replaced by a limp changeling. Unable to use words yet, he cannot meet you on the verbal level and let you know that the “he” is still there, the mischievous, affectionate baby who knows you and whom you know. Eyes glassy, lids drooped, drifting in and out of a feverish doze; or arching his back and howling in pain and dismay. The only thing that remains is that he wants to cling and cling and cling to me; and that proves I am his mother and he is my baby.

    I find myself singing favorite songs, trying to catch his eye. Sometimes, sometimes, a little smile plays across his lips and the eyes dart to make contact, briefly, and there he is, for just an instant. And then the eyes close and he’s submerged again.

    The peculiar uneasiness of the ill baby not being “himself” is something that mostly passes by the time they are able to verbalize. Even though you might say “She’s just not herself this week,” a child old enough to talk has to be very ill indeed before her personality entirely disappears under her illness. That happened to Maryjane when she was seven and her appendix ruptured; the first couple of days after her emergency surgery, she drifted in and out of consciousness, heavily sedated, and she really was not available to us. That was hard, because we were terribly concerned about her — it would be several days before we would have confidence that the infection was clear — and we couldn’t really even ask her anything, or know that she understood what we told her.

    I cannot imagine what it is like for parents of children who suffer from chronic illnesses that rob them of access to their child’s personality, repeatedly or for longer. I know that many adults, too, face such a disappearance at the end of their lives, something I have not yet had to face closely.

    When it comes my turn, I hope that things can never get so bad as to destroy my faith that “himself” or “herself” really is present — somewhere submerged, sometimes permanently submerged, as long as breath remains in the body. Obscured, but still real.

    —

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  • The end of outsourcing childcare?

    My oldest is 14, nearly fifteen now, and he has grown capable and attentive to his younger siblings, and so Mark and I have been entrusting them to him for longer and longer periods over the past few months. I felt he had to get used to it gradually (maybe it was us who had to get used to it), so we started by taking the baby with us on walks to a coffeeshop for just an hour or two, leaving him to watch over the 11, 8, and 5yo; and then we took the 15mo baby with us while we went out to dinner; and then we started leaving the baby with him too.

    So far, so good, and the outings where we leave the baby have still been fairly short. Mostly they consist of Mark and I walking the half-mile to the busy street where there are a few restaurants, and grabbing a beer together. (My new passion is a Belgian sour paired with a big basket of hot french fries.)

    We pay him for these outings. I know that watching one’s younger siblings is in many families considered an ordinary chore of the sort that teens are supposed to just do, as one clears the table or takes out the garbage. Some “babysitting” has been like that; I have been occasionally dashing out during the schoolday, and for that there has been no transaction. “I have to go sign up for swim lessons at the Y before the deadline, I just got the baby down for a nap, listen for him,” I’ll call to the 14yo, who is curled up in the game room with his iPad writing an English paper or something, and he’ll nod and off I’ll go, myself, in the van with two booster seats and one car seat and several more un-boosted seats, and all of them (except mine) empty and quiet. And I come back as fast as I can, not because I am worried about anyone but because I know that the 14yo has a stack of schoolwork as high as my arm to do and I want to free him up to do it.

    That kind of thing — the quick dash to the store, made possible by the extra Big Person who has suddenly materialized in my home — feels like a clearing-the-table, take-out-the-garbage kind of task. But swinging my small bag over my shoulders and stepping out with Mark to (I can’t stop saying it, it’s still so amazing) go out to grab a beer on a weeknight is something extra, something that doesn’t technically have to happen to keep the house running but is only made slightly easier if the kids are temporarily watched by someone else. It is the kind of thing that we get babysitters for, and babysitters are paid. I, personally, honestly feel that Mark and I would be abusing our office as We-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed if we ordered the teenager to babysit without pay merely so we could grab a beer.

    (Unless there wasn’t any beer in our fridge and we needed to go buy some. Then it would be “dashing out for an essential errand” and would fall into the chores category with clearing the table and taking out the garbage.)

    The other reason we pay him is that he is old enough to be earning some money beyond the lemonade-stand kid stuff, and we haven’t yet made up our minds to make him go out and get a real job (what’s up with that kid? When I was fourteen years old I was itching to make some money I could call my own! Kids these days), and, well, this is an easy way for us to have him do it. And maybe learn some saving skills now that his own sweat is on the line.

    Mostly it appears that he is using his nouveau-riche status to become an aficionado of expensive bottled root beer, but I am biting my tongue for now. It’s his money.

    + + +

     

    So I don’t have a system for paying him or for figuring out how much to pay him or anything like that quite yet. The kid-who-is-old-enough-to-babysit kind of snuck up on us and we didn’t have time to think about it What I have been doing, as a stopgap measure — and I have told him, “This is a stopgap measure and we will figure out a more permanent payment thing soon” — is pay him a flat five dollars on each occasion that we run out for a beer, regardless of whether it’s for 45 minutes or two hours.

    Yes, it’s a pittance, but bear with me. Because the 14yo is inexperienced still, we have been keeping the occasions quite short, and we also have not been driving anywhere while he’s in charge. We’ve remained strictly in our own neighborhood, within sprinting distance (well, Mark could sprint there, anyway). We’re lucky that there are a couple of nice restaurants within the sprinting radius, but these outings still feel informal and short.

    Think of it as a training wage.

    Next week, however, I am sending him to take the famous Red Cross babysitter’s training. And after that, seeing as how he will possess a certification of sorts, we’re going to sit down with him and negotiate a real hourly rate. Yes, even though we are the parents, “negotiate” — one of the things that the Red Cross training is supposed to include is “how to decide how much to charge,” so I intend to make him apply that knowledge.

    The hourly rate I am willing to pay my own teenager will be less than the rate I would be willing to pay an outsourced teenager. Working from home is a perk, after all. I expect the pay demanded by outsourced teenagers to reflect the additional time and expense of traveling to and from my home and the inconveniences of not being totally free, for example, to grab a snack from the fridge whenever they want, or to work on their own projects around their house if the baby goes down for a nap and the 5yo is comfortably ensconced with a video.

    But the 14yo will, after that point, be doing real work for us, not just “let’s take a walk and give him some practice watching over the younger ones” kind of work, and so he’s going to be trading value for value.

    A couple things still have to be decided (beside the hourly rate itself).

    For one thing — I still have to talk to Mark about this — I suspect that our We-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed status will still come into play in that I think we will retain the authority to make him babysit for us sometimes (for pay) whether he wants to or not, taking into consideration whether he has lots of homework and the like. But we’ll pay him.

    For another thing, while the babysitting course includes basic first aid, there’s another level. He could take the full first aid/CPR course, for example. I think I would like to offer (during wage negotiations) to pay for that additional certification and promise a raise should he complete it. I would like to encourage him to do this just as a matter of course. Taking CPR is not only a useful skill, it also would open the door to getting lifeguard certification, something I have often thought should be a graduation requirement for my homeschool.

    + + +

    I feel flush with freedom, on the cusp of being able to go out for a date with Mark any time I want. Up till now we have been limited, not so much by the cost of a babysitter, but by a dearth of them. (Typically we have hired the babysitter to be in charge of everyone except our oldest, who has permission to do homework or read or whatever while we’re gone, but is supposed to be available to answer questions or fetch things the babysitter can’t find.)

    There is, it turns out, a limited supply of teenagers who are sufficiently older than my oldest child AND not someone who is a Friend’s Kid and therefore automatically bereft of perceived authority over my own children because they have played together in somebody’s backyard or basement. And those teenagers have a limited supply of time.

    I have gone so far as to contact the eligible teenagers well in advance and say “Do you want money? Whenever you want money, please tell me when YOU are free. Please. I want to give you my money. LET ME GIVE YOU MONEY.”

    After I had reserved the 14yo’s spot in the Red Cross class, I still had a couple of babysitter dates on the calendar, including last night and (next week) the evening after the 14yo was slated to ha
    ve completed the class. It seemed kind of silly, with him being so close to being able to take the place of the babysitter, to make him be babysat (after a fashion). So last night we took him, and the two next kids, with us, and left the two littles with the babysitter.

    We went to the indoor climbing gym for a few hours, and all climbed together, something that most definitely cannot be done with a baby in tow. It was the first time we’d climbed together since our trip to France in the fall.

    Mark and my daughter on the auto-belays.

     

    Look — I drew blood!

    Then the five of us went two doors down to a pizza place, and we all fit together in one high-backed booth. The three big children, not having been enjoned to entertain littler ones, talked a mile a minute, about the climbing and the pizza and the root beer, and about the week’s work, and what the baby did when, and the movies they hoped to see soon, and what they were reading in their schoolwork. We, not feeling we had to focus on each other with only a limited time to be in a restaurant, listened and laughed and drank pints of good draft beer.

    I put my arm around Mark and kissed him on the cheek and said, “This is fun. I have the babysitter scheduled again for next week — let’s do it again.” And so we will.

    And so I don’t think my days of outsourcing babysitter time are entirely over. And I am not at all sorry.

     

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