Thanks-giving

I feel like writing in ALL CAPS this morning.  I’m resisting, mostly.

I can’t help but notice we’ve turned a day of gratitude and contentment with what we have into part of the prelude to the biggest MORE-fest ever.  Kinda skipped over the Thanks part and went straight for the Giving.  Or Gimme.

Right now the kids are watching a cute PBS Christmas show with Curious George.  The focus so far?  Making a Christmas list out of a catalog and finding gifts for other people.  Maybe I should be happy they’re emphasizing giving.  But really, do we need to give more stuff at Christmas, in this culture of Way More Than Enough?

Part of it could be the idea of giving thanks.  To whom are we giving the thanks?  Our natural inclination is to ignore God whenever possible.  And who else do you say thank-you to for things that, according to the American dream, you worked so hard to get in the first place?

I hope to teach my kids to be happy with Just Enough.  And to figure out what that means.  I know I tend toward the Just A Little Bit More Will Be Enough, myself.  So that one is a challenge!

Be Thankful.

My Boy is Eight!

Gannon’s wish was to visit the National Guard Armory in our town.  He and Acadia and I biked there after lunch.

My first baby This young man was able to wear some of the soldiers’ body armor.  Gannon asked what it was made of.  The man started to explain in general terms.  Then Gannon asked, “Is it kevlar?”  (It was, in part.)  The man looked surprised that he knew that word.  The look appeared on his face a few more times during the visit.

Gannon got to sit in the cab of the trucks while the man (I wish I could remember his name) told us all about what things did what.  I would tell you here, but of course I don’t remember things like that.  Pretty much everything had initials.  I do remember that this particular truck carried a water purification system that was worth $300,000 and was capable of supplying the entire city of Boston with clean water.  Thirteen gallons per day per person.  See, I do remember some things.

Then we went to the playground, where the kids did all sorts of things and told me to watch.

“Are you really watching, Mom?”

This is why Acadia likes long hair.

“You’re supposed to sit right on the swing!”

“Okay, see, it’s easy.  You reach waaay up and grab on really tight.”

“Then you jump and PULL yourself up onto the seat.”

“And then you’re on the swing.  See?  Now you try it.”

“WWHHHEEEEE!!”   “Cadia!  Not like that!”

Oh well.  It’s all good.

I asked them to sit on the table so I could get a picture of them together.  Of course Acadia immediately throws her arms around her beloved brother.  Gannon pretends not to notice.

At first, anyway.

This is the best one I got of these two goofballs.  It only deteriorated from here.

“Gannon!  That tickles!”

“What? What tickles?”

“Oh, you mean this?  This tickles?  You mean when I do this?”

Gannon got done with the camera.  Acadia, however, could go on for hours.

But I thought we should probably call it quits.  When you start getting the roof-of-the-mouth shots, you’re pretty much out of good material.

Time for Chai

My current favorite recipe for chai:

1. A good mug, having a smallish surface area so the drink doesn’t cool off too fast.
2. Celestial Seasonings India Spice Chai, 1 bag.
3. boiling water
4. powdered milk, 4 heaping teaspoons (Fat free, yet creamy! Woot!)
5. granulated sugar, 2 heaping teaspoons (Dude, if it’s not sweet, it’s not chai)
6. a timer set for 4 minutes

Steep the tea for 4 minutes or a few seconds longer.  DO NOT SQUEEZE THE BAG.  Remove the bag.  Add milk and sugar, stirring.  Drink and relax.  If you’re really fortunate, you will enjoy the entire cup before it cools.  If your kids interrupt you with things like, “Gannon rode my bike and the chain came off,” or “Will you please call the national guard now,” do not despair.  This is yummy iced as well.

By the way, those are examples of two actual interruptions I have had during this very cup of chai, which I am now sipping.

Suggested Field Trips

We have a running list of places we think would be worthwhile visiting for school.  Here’s our current list.  Acadia just asked me to add the last one.

1. bank
2. post office
3. King Arthur Flour
4. petting zoo
5. veterinarian
6. fire station
7. pizza shop
8. Disney World

Me: Disney World?

She: Yeah, we could just go there and stay only one week, then come back.

Me: Honey, Disney World is very expensive.  I’m not sure we could do that as a field trip.

She: Well, we could save up.

Acadia only wants to go to Disney because her friend is there right now, on a trip courtesy of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.  I’m hoping her desire will wane once her little friend comes back.  Yeah right.

Five Year Olds in Conversation

Some things I heard just now as Acadia did some stamp art with a neighborhood boy:

J: You are my very best friend in the whole wide world.

A: Wow, thanks!  Now I have two best friends in the whole wide world!  You AND Jayda!

and

A: Party favors are so fabulous that I could just cry out for joy!

and

J: Yours is fabulous.  Mine is gonna be fabulous too.

A: Yours already IS fabulous!

Kindergarteners are fun to have around.  Every household should have at least one.

Scary Stuff

Newton Was Here.

We are a geeky family.  I admit this freely.  In fact, I find great joy in the fact.  One evidence for our geeky-ness is our family’s TV time.  We watch NOVA together.  And we like it.  Well, we like it most of the time.  Last night though, things weren’t so happy.  NOVA is getting a little sensational with their science, I must say.  Black holes are cool, amazing things, and yeah, it’s neat to think that in the middle of the Milky Way galaxy is one of these things.  But really, do we need to be told that at the center of our home galaxy lies a ravenous monster, seemingly fasting of late, but which will wake up hungry and ready to devour everything around it??  And oh, a few years ago it showed signs of awakening and if it does…  can you say spaghettification??

It freaked the kids out.  Sobs were heard.  Some parents mess their kids up by letting them watch Jaws, or some Stephen King film.  We go for the more heady stuff.  NOVA.  Freaked. Them. Out.

My own fears are a little different.  What I am scared of right now is not that the gravity on my feet will be greater than the gravity on my head, thus elongating my body till it snaps in two, then snapping each of those pieces in two, etc.  Nope, not keeping me up at night.  What scares me more is this.  I had some notecards printed up, with some photos that I took, with the intention of selling them to people.  The freaky thing is WHAT IF PEOPLE DON’T LIKE THEM?  What if I’m the only one who likes them, and other people have just been saying nice things about my photos all this time so they wouldn’t have to see me cry, and they aren’t really willing to shell out any hard cash for them, of course??  *GULP*

It’s enough to give a person nightmares.  This person, at least.

It’s for what I think is a good cause (our adoption process), but what if no one thinks that IS a good cause?  What do we think we’re doing, trying to become parents of another child? Look at the two we’ve already messed up!  We make them watch NOVA, for Pete’s sake.  Practically abusive.

Yeah, I have people issues.  But Christ is enough for even me.  And black-hole-fearing children.  And the parents who giggle about their fears.  Later, I mean, after they’re asleep.  Oh come on, you would too, and you know it. 

Luna Lovegood and Violet Heaslip: Separated at Birth?

Harry Potter and Word Girl don’t have too much in common. But you have to admit, these two characters bear a resemblance to each other.

Happy Birthday, #8!

Today is the birthday of my favorite baseball player ever, Gary Carter.  He played in the best World Series I ever cared about, the 1986 series that pitted the Mets against the Red Sox.  In his honor, here’s the story of my brief baseball fandom.

My brother Josh was (and is) an avid Boston Red Sox fan. I didn’t really care too much about baseball, except that I liked to play wiffle ball with Josh and the neighbor kids and Major League Baseball on our Nintendo NES.  But, being a sister, I took to the idea of being a fan of a different team than my brother.  Just out of the blue, I picked the New York Mets.  My best friend Erin also chose the Mets, while her brother Matt was into the Red Sox.  So it was pretty much perfect, until I discovered that our teams would never actually play each other.  There went the fun of rooting against my brother, right?

Basically that season I picked a couple of favorite players, Gary Carter (catcher) and Lenny Dykstra (outfield).  Both of them had great seasons.  I kind of stopped liking Lenny though.  His personal life was too controversial for me.  Also, putting his name on a t-shirt just seemed kind of … out there.

Then I discovered the little section of the paper that listed the teams in the 2 leagues, east and west divisions.  I followed them religiously, and they eventually led to the playoffs, which led to the World Series!  Imagine that, our two teams were going to play after all!  I was elated.  So was Josh,although possibly for different reasons.

I don’t remember much of the series (thus proving that I was and am not an actual fan, but rather a mere dabbler), except the whole Bill Buckner debaucle.  Gary Carter, I can now read, performed admirably.  I was proud of my Gary Carter card collection, which I still have in those plastic card pages you put in 3-ring binders.

After the series, Erin and I had some serious ammunition against our brothers.  That was a great fall and winter in that respect.  The next year, neither of our teams made the series, and Erin and I jumped off the Mets ship.  I decided to pick the Oakland A’s and follow that team.  I can’t remember why that particular team allured me.  It may have been something to do with Jose Canseco and Mark McGuire, who were slamming baseballs as The Bash Brothers or something like that.  Plus, the A’s now had Don Baylor, who had been on the Red Sox in 1986, so ha HA!

Then the A’s won the World Series against the Dodgers.  Wow!  I was some kind of a baseball oracle, choosing which team would win when I knew nothing at all about baseball! I was awesome.

And what was Gary Carter doing in 1988?  Umm, I have no idea.  Checking the wiki, I see he was still on the Mets.

1989.  The A’s won again!  Rock on!  (This was the year of the earthquake in Candlestick Park at the beginning of game 3, remember?)

Then, 1990.  Alas poor A’s.  This was also the year I had my first real boyfriend (all the previous ones had been imaginary?), causing me to lose my interest in baseball and in taunting my little brother.

So that’s my baseball story.  Happy birthday, Mr. Carter!  And thanks for not, you know, having DUIs and assault charges and stuff.  Or obvious steroid use.  We love you for that.  And you’ll always be a Met in my eyes, if only for the fact that I followed baseball for those few years. 

Any historical errors in this post are here because I have a bad memory and I never knew much to begin with.

More Thoughtful [Worship]

Brian says my last post was rambly. This is true. I felt it emphasized my need for organization, as provided by such resources as the book I mentioned. But I can be thoughtful too. Maybe. Especially when it involves posting lengthy quotes by other authors who have spent way more time than I have thinking about things.

Here is one on the nature of worship that we read in Cries of the Heart, by Ravi Zacharias (p. 186):

So much corruption of worship is seen in our time that if one were to write out a biblical or systematic theology on the basis of what we observe in worship, God would be seen as one great mindless bundle of contradictions whose sole reason for existence is to to bring some sort of physical bounce into our lives.  Unless worship regains integrity, both in our personal lives and then in a community of believers, the cries of the heart will never find their rest, and God’s outstretched hand will not meet ours.

I would disagree with, or perhaps more finely tone, one point here, that at times such integrity must be practiced/modeled in the congregation before individuals within the community will regain it.  As church leaders, it’s our responsibility to teach deep, true worship.  (Intimidated yet, song leader?)

I want my worship to have deep roots, so that when the winds of the storms of this world blow hard against my life, I will remain as “a tree planted by streams of water, which bears its fruit in its season and whose leaf does not wither.” (Psalm 1)

Summer’s Almost Over!

It’s August; do you know where your homeschool plans are?

I just got the book Managers of Their Homes, by Steve and Teri Maxwell.  I hope it changes how I do school, keep house, blog, scrapbook, fix dinner, exercise, eat, and sleep.  As you can see, I have some issues I am working on.

I know what I want to do for school this year.  Mostly.  I plan on getting some tips and ideas from some of the moms at The Homeschool Lounge.  I like the setup over there.  Friendly and organized.  Which is, ironically, also how I would describe my homeschooling friend Jill, who knows nothing of The Homeschool Lounge because she only got a computer like a year ago, and all the information there would send her into a fit.  But I love her anyway.  I can say all sorts of things about her because she doesn’t read blogs or facebook. She barely reads email more than once a month, probably. See, watch this:

The reason Jill can live on her husband’s salary is because he is so cheap he makes her cut up paper plates so they only have to use two for the whole family.

This isn’t true, technically.  But I digress.  What was I talking about?  Oh yeah.

I need some structure, some direction.  My hubby, the former project manager, has offered many times to help me get organized.  I told him I needed to see proof that he could do this, like samples of his work.  How do I know if he’s any good at it? Just because an Ivy League college pays him for it, I’m supposed to accept his bid, sight unseen?  No proof was offered, and so I turned to the Maxwells.  Now hopefully this year will be different.

By posting this, I am making myself eligible for MANY FABULOUS PRIZES, such as a Rainbow Resource Center $50 gift card, a Doorposts chart, and trendy items from HomeschoolBoutique!!