The Lovebox

Here's the thing about family traditions: a few of them are their very own living, breathing, organism, crawling into existence from some primordial soup without any intelligent design on your part. They just happen. Like the way my dad calls us on our birthdays each year and says, with a breath of fresh originality, the following: "Well, thank the Lord He's given you another year." It's like clockwork. If he misses a year, part of Antarctica slides into the Waddell Sea.

But most family traditions require some effort. Some effort, some creativity, sometimes when you least feel like calling things not being as being.

Take last weekend, for example. I wanted to do something for the kids in celebration of February being sort of the Month of Love. But at the same time, I have this Japan class I'm teaching and have to prepare for each week, I have a big article deadline coming up, etc. My brain felt sluggish, lazy, inert. Creativity lay gasping and blue-lipped on the floor.

But a little voice in my head reminded me that traditions, which both anchor and adorn a cozy home, are worth a bit of exertion. So I just got out a shoebox. I knew the annual AAH Valentine's Party wasn't going to happen for us this year, as tempting as it was to reunite with old friends. The kids would have loved it, but cranking out sixty valentines plus a box by Tuesday morning just ... well, pardon the pun, but ... wasn't in the cards.

But a shoebox, we can do.

And with a pile of paper scraps and a bottle of Mod Podge, the girls and I went to work. Their enthusiasm knew no bounds, and we finished our Love Box as The Professor and the Boy watched the second half of the Super Bowl. (Meh. No Patriots. Who cares.)

Here's the result. Note! Let us all repeat the Cardinal Rule of Crafting with Children: Forget the vision, people. It's all about process ... and letting go.

The idea is that for the rest of the month, or until the zeal wanes to its embers, we leave little notes for each other inside the box, to be opened at dinnertime. A pad of pink paper lies at the ready. Here was last night's harvest:

There were some shining eyes and secret smiles warming our dinner table, I can guarantee you that.

And we beheld the work of our hands, and it was very good.

P.S. We're also memorizing the famous passage that defines the true nature of love from 1 Corinthians chapter 13. Check it out here.

Three Links

I ran across these sites over the weekend, and since I was always taught to share, thought I'd pass them along like a good, socially advanced, little preschooler.

Alice at Savory Sweet Life ran a weeklong series on feeding your family on a tight budget, something she practiced scrupulously for Hunger Action Week. She fed herself, her husband, and her two kids for $122, which frankly kind of knocks my socks off. I love Alice, ever since she taught me, virtually, how to make my own frappucino (TM) at home.

And speaking of living on a budget, check out PearBudget, a site that helps you build a monthly budget and then stick to it by entering your receipts. That latter step is my nemesis, and why I tend to fail at accurate budgeting, but I! am! determined! to give this a good shot. PearBudget makes it so easy. Besides, what's not to love about a [non-bruised, non-mushy] pear?

Got kids who like computer games? At Cool Math for Kids, they can play all sorts of games that promise to make math fun -- puzzles and the like. Ian successfully test-drove this yesterday.

Happy Tuesday!

If couches could talk ...

Friday's Finest is a new meme hosted by Steff & Justine from A Bookful of Thoughts.

Rules:
~Post a quote that really stuck to you after reading it in a book.
~Make sure it isn't a spoiler!
~If you'd like, expand on what you think it means and why you chose it.

"Now, the old sofa was a regular patriarch of a sofa -- long, broad, well-cushioned, and low; a trifle shabby, as well it might be, for the girls had slept and sprawled on it as babies, fished over the back, rode on the arms, and had menageries under it as children, and rested tired heads, dreamed dreams, and listened to tender talk on it as young women. They all loved it, for it was a family refuge, and on corner had always been Jo's favorite lounging-place." -- Little Women

I found my twenty-something-year-old copy of this book tucked away in a blanket chest at my parents' house during my visit last weekend, and reread all 561 pages. I'm not sure whether I loved it properly as a girl, but as a mother, who hopes for my children to always find home a place of roots and wings, I loved it all the more. The "little women" aren't angels (well, perhaps except for Beth), but real girls who struggle to reconcile their desire to break out of relative poverty into a more affluent existence with the real contentment of their simple life.

Do you have a piece of furniture in your childhood home like that? Do you have one now that's helping your children build memories? My parents still own the armchair that we refer to as "Peter's chair," for the way my brother would stumble down against his will every morning and before joining us at the breakfast table, take a few minutes in the armchair to make himself fully human again.

Just like my son now does, nestled in our own red armchair, morning by morning ...

Thankful Thursday

Tonight I'm taking my cue from my friend cJoy (not sure if it's OK to link to her) and copping an attitude of gratitude. Just read somewhere yesterday that it's a great way to combat seasonal depression, but that's not why I'm doing this. I'm just thankful today for:

1. A son who offers to help me clean up the milk I so klutzily spilled and then, when I later make a point to thank him, says carelessly, "Yeah ... it was the right thing to do." Once in a while, we parents need those little road markers that say, "You're on the right path!"

2. A daughter who declares to a full house tonight, "I want to be a mom when I grow up ... and nothing but a mom. Just like YOU [jabs the air imperiously in my direction]!"

3. A morning begun by watching two faces turned toward each other on one pillow, smiling sleepily and whispering the day's opening thoughts. Yesterday I reminisced to a friend about how three-year-old Ian informed me one day that he wanted the seven-month-old Eliza to "not come out of your belly, Mom. I want her to go back." How far they've come.

4. Friends who fill our house every Thursday night -- sometimes two, sometimes ten -- with music, fellowship, appetites, and a way of drawing my mind away from its self-centered concerns and my hands toward the dish-filled sink. Basically, God in human forms.

5. The mountain of laundry awaiting folding -- it means we have clothes to wear. Holey socks and all.

6. A husband who helps me prepare for the Japan class I'm teaching at co-op in the morning, doing the grunt work I request of him when he'd rather be reading a Patrick O'Brien book.

7. Friends from said co-op who so generously stepped up last week to teach the last fifteen minutes of my class, supervise my kids, and express their care and sympathy during my family emergency last Friday. This is definitely an above-and-beyond sort of group.

8. LOST. If you'll excuse me, I need to go email my brother with a few crackpot theories on the heels of this week's season premiere.

And to make a miniature Japanese garden.

Sounds like tomorrow morning, I'll be thankful for ...

9. Coffee.

Project Life

A few weeks ago, I posted about finishing up Project 365 for 2009 and then starting anew for 2010. Well, guess what arrived via UPS last week?

My brand new, gorgeous, Project Life by Becky Higgins kit! I'm swingin' from the chandeliers!

(It might be a good idea to actually START on the project instead of just ogling it.)

In putting the final touches on my 2009 family album, in which nearly every day has a photo and an accompanying short journaling card, I felt a joy rush coming on. Had I stuck to traditional scrapbooking, making lush two-page layouts for every series of photos I had, I'd be woefully behind and mired in discouragement. Y'all, I homeschool. I have constant laundry. The do-list, it never quite empties. I needed a solution that fit into my actual life.

Here's my title page for 2009:

It was so freeing not just to record the "biggies" in our life, the built-in stories: vacations, birthdays, etc. Now I could tell the tiny stories that make up all the many days in between -- the moments I used to think I'd remember forever ... before my powers of memory liquefied and slipped out through all that breastmilk.

Honestly, some days I'd just photograph what we were having for dinner. I like to think that in the future, my children and grandchildren might find amusing these threads that wove the tapestry of our everyday life.

And it wasn't TOO onerous to write a couple of sentences about each day. But then, I like to write. Babble, even. Perhaps you've noticed.

I love scrapbooking, even this very simplified version, because unlike some other aspects of the mothering life, the rewards are tangible and immediate. And then there's the double kickback of watching my kids leaf through the album and giggle or reminisce (just as they do with my fancier albums). Ian's gotten to the point of asking me periodically, "Mom, don't you need to work on your scrapbooking?"

Sure, honey, could you cook dinner and pay the bills for me?

So I'm stoked, pumped, charged, to start back up again. Here's today's Picture of the Day, as further proof that there's always a story in the details:

This morning's coffee table tableau: Green hairbrush I've owned since high school, issue of Good Housekeeping being culled by girls for collage materials, Family Album 2009, marker, Pokémon cards (o help!), vintage book of games, Star Wars encyclopedia borrowed from the library, guest book, dregs of Rooibos Chai tea, copies of Transform!: How Everyday Things Are Made and Lives of the Presidents: Fame, Shame (and What the Neighbors Thought).

P.S. If you'd like to join me, the kit comes in paper or digital form (see here for details on digital). Of course, you can use any old album you want. I'm just a sucker for all things pretty and organized.

Portrait of An American Boy

Just when you think you have your kids figured out, you come home to a printed list like this on the kitchen counter.

Ian’s list of things to do

Bow [archery] practice

Form [taekwondo] practice

Lie in room and shoot darts at various objects

Snitch pieces of food

Play with oscar

See if can go 2 friend’s house or vice versa

Play with legos

Jump on Oscar’s trampoline

Read

Draw

Play on computer

Rig booby traps

Play with Knex/Zoobs

Listen to audio book

Play on Wii [Editor's Note: Might be tough since we don't currently own one.]

Have nerf war with dad/friends

Go on tire swing

Play with eliza/caroline

Outing

Hide and seek

Tag

Watch TV

Listen to ipod

Take nap

Study pets

Play Crazyball

Invent things

Build things

Chores

Spy on neighbors

Watch clouds outside

Dig hole outside

Dig in Oscar’s house’s hole

Disappear/go camp out somewhere weird

Look for bugs/snakes

Go to Shoal Creek

I can't decide whether my favorite is "lie in room and shoot darts at various objects" or "snitch pieces of food." Or maybe it's "disappear."

And I can hardly contain my astonishment at not finding "scour and disinfect toilet" or "polish silver 'til gleaming" on this list. Maybe that piece of paper just got jammed in the printer?

Rest in peace

Unexpectedly, I find myself in Boston, or a 'burb thereof, this Monday morning. In brief, after complications from back surgery ten days ago, my mom came home, but checked back into the hospital with chest pains on Thursday.

Fact: Chest pains aren't something you really mess around with. They're actually a great way to scare your grown kids!

Opinion: My baby sister, age 22, caregiver-in-chief around here, needed a little break. Not that she said so, plugger that she is. I'm the big sister, and I just know these things.

So here I am, while the Professor and some helpful friends have been minding the fort. Now, when I arrived Friday night, thanks to a last-minute deal on Hotwire, my mom was back home, up and around, and relatively energetic. I'll be painfully honest with you. The thought flitted through my head: Did I really need to cobble together care for my kids and come all the way up here? Do they really NEED me? Did I overreact?

I had a little chat with my Good Shepherd, and He faithfully reminded me that I didn't come here out of a need to be needed. That kind of desire may serve my self, but it just exerts pressure on everyone else. I decided to take the spirit of Mary rather than Martha, and just be present and available, doing exactly what He had for me here and nothing more or less. No Superwoman capes required.

There's rest and peace in that kind of surrender. I've been re-reading Little Women. Visiting with my brother and sister-in-law, youngest sister, and other friends who come by. Reading aloud to my mom while she rests. Talking with my dad while I help him eat. Stopping by the consignment shop in town because, like a dope, I forgot to pack any other jeans than the ones I wore on the plane. Praying. Being NOT in a rush. NOT giving anyone instructions. Listening. Drinking copious amounts of Good Earth tea. Freezing my toes. Talking to my crew on the phone. Looking forward to kissing some little faces in less than 24 hours.

It's all good.