The hard things...

Every day, I pull out my big three-ring notebook and help my children memorize poetry. Eli is memorizing a new translation of Psalm 50 and it is killing him. I don’t know this translation myself and I have to stare at the words otherwise they morph into one or another version or maybe just one that I am making up as I go. This is really hard. This translation is so similar but also so different and he keeps sliding into his old one, that one that he hears every day when his father reads the morning prayers which just happens to be the same as the one that lives in my head. So we work on it, just a few words at a time, every single day.

He really has to focus and so do I because I don’t know it and I just keep sliding into the one I actually can say. I kick everyone out of the room and I stare at these words as he sips his coffee and I can see the wheels turning in his head while the ones in my own head struggle to stay on track. He does not have to do this, he is not obligated, but he is doing it anyway. He whispers under his breath, “This is the hardest thing that I will ever do.” He is on to something here.

Just doing hard things is hard. This is something that is a such a mental workout that it feels like an exercise in futility, like watching Sysophis rolling his rock back up the hill every morning. Just like that but, only not, it is just a mental workout. It is not like Eli is climbing Mt Everest or anything, I am not his sherpa dragging myself up a mountain with him; it is just memory work. That is what makes it harder. We have a hard time doing the little hard things, the ones that are actually possible, the ones that show up in our daily lives, the ones that feel both so insurmountable that we cannot muster the strength to even consider doing it but also ones that feel so small that they aren’t worth doing. So, we don’t learn to do hard things. We learn to stop before we even start. I think that we should learn to the little hard things, and do lots of them, and to celebrate them. I am never going to climb Mt Everest but I just might memorize this prayer.

Why is he even doing this? Well, our religion has very scripted services and over thousands of years has developed a number of books that help us to say the right things and do the right things as we stand in the right places. Sometimes, it is easier to memorize pieces of these services to make it easier to do the other things, like hold lots of lit candles and gold plated pots of burning incense that we swing around. One of the publishers of these books is making some changes because of some weird modern day, first world problems, like copyright law. It’s easier for them to publish books if they own all the pieces inside so some of the translations are changing. My husband is adamantly opposed to this. He gets so upset and anxious and downright irritable at the thought of memorizing these little pieces over again using this new translation. He thinks it’s impossible. To him, he might as well be climbing Mt Everest and he is not alone. There is a large contingent of clergy like himself who also think they will never memorize these prayers. They don’t even try because it is just impossible.

Eli has his eyes on the future and he knows that if he does become clergy, like his father, then he will have a leg up if he already knows these translations. That is why, every day, he chips away at Mt Everest. He is starting with one prayer, just one, and only a few words at a time. One of these days, he will look down from the top with this prayer safely tucked into his pocket, ready to pull out at a moment’s notice, and then steel himself for the next mountain.

“This is the hardest thing I will ever do,” Eli tells me.

He might be right. I think the next one will be easier because he did this one first. That is why I sit at the table with him and sip my own coffee. Mt Everest, here we come.

Feeding as Prayer

Most of you won't have been to the retreat I spoke at last fall so I wanted to share this with you. Great Lent, like all fasting periods. is often a time of vulnerability for us. It is easy to feel small and weak and what we need to remember is that this is really what Christ asks us.

Ancient Faith Women’s Retreat

Antiochian Village, November 2018

Ora et Labora.

This is a Latin phrase which means, “Pray and Work”, as in a command to pray and to work. This phrase is meant to remind us that while we must live and move in the world, our home is actually Heaven and we should always direct our material work in that direction. It tends to conjure up images of monastics busy in sunlit fields and engaging God with the corners of their minds while their hands work.

Monks keeping bees.

Nuns hoeing gardens.

Birds, and sun, and wind, and rain.

It is a way to clothe our manual work for our material needs with the flesh of deeper spiritual wisdom thus connecting our physical selves with our spiritual selves. All too often though, we forget that all the tiny movements of our lives also qualify, especially those not found in sunlit corners. Things like cooking meals for our families become in our fantasies something like Babette’s Feast, we in the kitchen sampling the wine for the meal as the doves are delivered by a rosy-cheeked boy. Reality is rougher around the edges and, in my own life, finds me in the kitchen sampling the lentils on the stove while a recalcitrant preschooler cries over the color of her cup. Finding the manner in which I can pray without ceasing is a mental exercise of turning over those lentils and cups to God in a way that is fundamentally material and perhaps not obviously spiritual. It is not surprising that the way I consider this activity is through the lens of food.

Food is the center of my life. I buy it and cook it and serve it and write about it and talk about it with others. Without meaning to, I often end up reading books and watching movies with food as a major theme. It is how I engage the material world with my hands. It is often how I engage people since I end up offering to cook for people as a way of sharing myself with them. If I meet you someplace, I will invite you and your mother and her neighbor for dinner. I suppose this is why I have never been fond of the lesson of Mary and Martha in the Bible. Modern women, myself included, spend a great deal of time breaking down and unpacking the relationships between these sisters, to their brother Lazarus, theirs to Christ, and then even to ourselves individually and collectively. As much as we try,  in the end, we tend to learn nothing about anything, especially ourselves. Ultimately who these women were and are and what they mean for other women is complicated. Christianity often is.

Christ Himself sanctified our human experience and made it holy, or at least gave it the opportunity—the possibility of holiness, by living in the Flesh. He ate and drank and gave others food and drink, and even directed us to do the same. When we feed the least of His children, we feed Him. To purposefully engage the people of God with bread, stew, and wine seems to be the proper way of putting ora et labora in action since it is a literal fulfillment of the commandment of Christ to feed others. I think this is why there is some sting to the analysis of  Mary and Martha, at least for me. We still have the physical need for food and in following His command, she fed not just ordinary people but God in the flesh. Who greater to serve? I am a lesser Martha, busy shuffling in the kitchen and covering over my bare, uncomfortable humanness; looking for that blanket of spirituality. I want to find sanctity and holiness and I want to find it in the comfort I feel in cooking, to find hope poured over like chocolate ganache. I do not understand what God calls me to do let alone how. Like Martha, I cannot bring myself to not work, to not think, to not cook. My ill-used hands are clumsy and forget their wisdom until I put them to work doing the things that they know so well.

Chopping onions.

Slicing garlic.

Kneading dough.

I realize that I do not know how to serve God, all I know how to do is to make dinner. I can measure out my joy, my pain, and my grief and turn these into something that I can feed others, that I can nourish others with because I don’t want to keep these emotions inside myself. I can instead release them out into the world and cover other people’s material needs with my spiritual ones. The emptiness is at times palpable, the loss I feel when I don’t know the things to say or do or my fear that I won’t hear the voice of God, and so I feed others from the only well that I have. I make dinner.

Still lost, I am comforted when I think of the death and resurrection of Lazarus. Martha may not have understood how to stop and be still in the presence of the Son of the Living God but she knew who He was and was not afraid to speak to Him, to tell Him what she needed. When Lazarus died, she left Mary at home and went out to meet Christ and to expose her broken humanness to Him. In that moment, she chose the greater thing.  Perhaps this is all I need to remember, that all He asks is that I give to Him my own brokenness. I fail to choose the greater thing in many small moments, I cannot count them out with each lentil and each cup and each night that passes and I let them slip through my fingers. Perhaps all I can do is show myself to God to allow Him to cover over both my material and spiritual weaknesses with the strength of His love. Today I make dinner. Today I work so that one day I may learn to pray.

Why do we tell stories?

I use the word “Lieutenant” as the device password in my house. I figure that once you are old enough to spell it, you are old enough to be trusted to not turn on a device without permission. Until my children can understand the reasoning behind this, they just need to cooperate, even unwillingly. This is like other things in life, like the way that we can unpack the stories of our childhood better as adults while as children, we simply must accept them.

When I was growing up, I was surrounded by the stories that my grandparents told me. My father’s Mexican family told me stories about La Llorona, the weeping woman. She had killed her sons and tossed their broken bodies into the water. God punished her by not giving her rest until she finds all the pieces. My mother’s Cherokee family had different stories. They were not afraid of the water, they were afraid of fire. I never played with fire as a child because I knew that fire sleeps and is angry when he is woken. That is why a proper fire sometimes feels hard to start; he can be difficult to wake. When he does, he is so angry that he becomes violently destructive. Wake the fire but trap the fire and never let him get out. Don’t turn your back on him, fire burns.

My teens were filled with more stories because literacy mattered to my mother. We had a house filled with books, good ones. She bought all the classics and then some. Even if they were books that she had never read, if they were part of the great canon of literature, she filled the shelves with them. She signed us up for Great Books classes through school and bought piles of notebooks and pens and encouraged us to write so that we could make stories of our own.

I married young and my husband and I decided to be modern parents. We decided to do more of the latter and less of the former. I never felt that my childhood was frightening because of the stories but we were young and brilliant intellectuals and would do things the proper way, the correct way. Stories should be read and told and enjoyed but never used to control behavior. There would be no stories of La Llorona wandering in the dark, ready to attack children who are out alone when they should be home. We were different. We still had stories but we were less honest about what they were and how they were different. We still told the parables of Jesus but somehow failed to see how it was that He was teaching us.

I find myself rethinking some of this in light of the popular NPR story about the Inuits and their gentle method of parenting that is story based. I did not grow up Inuit and my family of origin did its fair share of yelling, as do I, but the storytelling intrigued me. If you have not read or listened to the story, you can find it HERE.

The older ladies who teach the Inuit parenting classes acknowledge that they were frightened by the stories as children but tell them anyway. A young child sometimes needs to trust the wisdom of those who care for him and admonishments to stay away from the ocean are less effective than scary stories. They have some pretty substantial evidence to support this belief. When we tell stories to our children, we are in good company. Greek Mythology and Biblical Parables are keen examples of abiding stories that shape us today.

Sometimes there is a concern that lying to children creates a sense of mistrust but I don’t think so. Children are more sophisticated than that. I also think that there is much to be said for organic and broad culturally derived stories. It is more like lying to invent cleaning monsters (as in the NPR story) than it is to tell the stories of your culture and your people but this gets tricky. A lot of Americans don’t have that history and that is a challenge. So what do you do? You can look to the stories that you do have. Recently I talked about stories with some of my teenaged children.

“What lessons does the story teach?” I asked my son when he asked if he could be allowed to watch a certain movie. He seemed confused because he did not think that this was a teaching sort of story but one that was purely for entertainment. I prompted him to think further.

“Every time we read a book or sing a song or watch a movie, the stories that they tell go on to live in our heads. They help us to understand the situations that we come across in our lives and even make decisions about how to react to those situations. We have to be careful about what stories we put in our heads because they create the framework on which we hang our thoughts. Is this a good story to put in your head? How will it help or hurt you?”

He was quiet for a minute before he told me that he did not think I would let him watch it. He was right, it was not going to be allowed. But rather than just forbidding the movie, I Iet him follow the logic of our analysis as parents. He saw where it would end, this would give him the wrong sort of framework. Starting this conversation gave us the chance to break down some of the movies that I have let them watch, ones which were popular but had good motives despite their entertainment value.

Stories do not need to be beautiful to be good. They can be full of the ugliest moments of the human experience but if they resolve properly, then they can be made beautiful. It is the triumph of the people in the darkest of stories that can help us to become stronger and better people. This is why we should not shy away from those stories.

Recently I watched the movie Signs with my teens, down the one barely thirteen. Why? Because God is real and life has meaning. It is okay to suffer and stumble but it is the getting up that counts. When they have those moments of doubt in their lives, and they will, they can recall a similar situation in a story they know. Perhaps this one? Maybe it will help them to see what they need to see when the things that matter are invisible.

Some of the saints’ stories fall into this category. The life of Saint Mary of Egypt is fraught with sin and misery and crippling mistakes. We go every year and listen to the whole story and there are moments when I cringe but the truth is that my kids will hear it and know that there is hope, there is a place to rebuild once we have faced our inner darkness. I want them to hear this story over and over and over again because when they face their own mistakes, I want them to run towards God like Mary and not towards death like Judas.

There is a reason that we tell stories and there is a reason that we listen to them. Piece by piece, story by story we build the framework where we hang our thoughts. Build the thoughts that we want to have and teach your children to do the same. Tell the stories.

Review of Piggy in Heaven...

My children had the chance to review the newest book from Melinda Johnson, Piggy in Heaven. This is a small little board book filled with bright, colorful images and simple, gentle language that belie its true depth. It is just a little board book but it also a very handy tool designed to help very small people deal with very big losses. This is a book about the death of a beloved pet guinea pig named Piggy, one that the author’s family once owned.

I believe that it is critical to teach children both to love and to grieve. If we are unable to one we will never be able to do the other and there are people, dreams, hopes, and even animals which deserve both. For many children, their formative years will be punctuated by death and learning how to live with it and through it is an important skill because all life is temporary. Nothing lives forever. Like all things that children must learn, grief is a part of the landscape of living.

In the story, Piggy finds perfect natural happiness with health and vigor and grass and daisies and even friends. Piggy is not alone. This is critical. Children see their pets needing themselves as much as they need their pets and the fear that the pet will miss the child can be upsetting. Piggy is happy which is as much as any child can ask.

Last night, I read this book to my children, all of them heaped around on the sofas, the two youngest in my lap. My eight-year-old, Sophia, liked the story so much that she immediately read it again to herself. She told me that she thinks this is an important book because kids will lose their pets at some point. They need to have this book so that they already have it when they lose their pet. She is not wrong.

My youngest, Claudia, is not yet six. For her this book was evocative. It reminded her of her cat’s death two Christmases ago. Sadly, it is pretty much her earliest memory. She struggles occasionally with remembering his death. We have a new young cat but it is not her elderly cat whose only goal in life was to lay close to Claudia and be stroked. I think it is worth mentioning that some children might find this a difficult book to read; not a bad read, just hard. That’s okay. It is important to work through these feelings so that we are prepared to work through even bigger ones down the road. Thinking about this book today, she is glad that she read it and still thinks it is a good book to read but wants other children to know that it is okay if it makes them cry. She is also not wrong. Sometimes kids need an opportunity to cry and if this book helps with that, then it is still helping.

The book is published by Paraclete Press and is available from their website HERE as well as other major retailers. I received a free advance copy of the book with no obligation to review or give a positive review. The thoughts expressed here are my own or those of my two youngest children. I wholeheartedly recommend this book and I am so glad that I had the opportunity to read this with my children.

Just how do you homeschool?

We are all caterpillars just crawling around
and eating leaves and sometimes changing.

Of all the questions that I have been asked over the years, the most common is this one. I think it is because often people really know well what the brick and mortar school looks like because it is the one that most of us know so well. There are a few systems at play but generally they all function in the same kind of way. Homeschooling is an entirely new game and it is hard to really figure out what each family is doing because each family does it differently and sometimes one family does it differently at different times.

The needs, challenges, resources, and strengths that we come into homeschooling with will change over time as we and our children change. Because there are lots of ways to go about this, about as many as there are homeschooling families, I want to give some more general guidance about homeschooling and household management based on what has worked well for my family. Later in this series, I will go more into how my family is currently schooling. This first post will deal with some specific tools in my kit that I use in order to keep track of the chaos on school days and my general approach to school. The second will talk about how I manage the other household affairs which is a real issue (find that post HERE). The third will deal specifically with how I school with my children’s specific program. All about us. Hopefully, it won't bore you.

Today is all about having a homeschool toolkit. I have a few systems that I have always consistently deployed to keep my head above water and before I get into the nitty-gritty, I want to talk about these.

1. School toys for the preschool gang. Always, always, always have some school toys that may only be used during school hours. We use train tracks, blocks, wooden puzzles, lace tracing cards, random playing cards, and even a cheap (like SUPER cheap) digital camera. These things can only come out during school hours only. I have two bins and they get switched out and they cannot have both out at the same time.

2. Baby jail and prison guard. I have used anything I could get my hands on the keep the active babies out of death’s grasp including walls built of furniture, wide laundry buckets, playpens, whatever. You need a safe place for baby to play when they want to explore a bit. I always kept a special basket of baby toys which only could only be used in desperate situations like a kid crying over math or my need to use the bathroom. We also have used a kitchen timer and cycled kids through a half hour of guard duty at a time. It keeps the younger set entertained with fresh new games all day and gives the older kids a chance for a break.

3. Just right books. Every kid needs a book that is easy enough to read that they don’t need help. Little ones can have an “I Spy” book. The point is to keep something on hand that will keep them occupied while they wait for you. If they get to a point where they cannot do any more work, but you aren’t available, have them do some penmanship and then open their just right book.

4. Post-It notes. I use loads of them. Tons. Each kid needs a stack of his own. When they get to a problem they can’t solve, a question that they have, they can write it down and move on. They give me the note and I get back to them when I can. When I need them to work on something or check it, I put a note on the cover of that book. When it is done, they give me the note for me to double check. Post-It notes glue all the little loose pieces of my life together. They sure as heck better not go out of business.

5. Get ready the night before. At-schoolers do things like pick out clothes the night before and pack lunches and school bags. In the case of homeschoolers and at-schoolers, knowing that no one has underwear is easier to deal with the night before than in the morning, so do it the night before. Have a breakfast plan so you aren’t panicked in the morning. Cereal is fine. In fact, cereal is freaking great if you are protecting your mental health by just making that plan. If you have a space dedicated to do school, do a quick pass through that area and remove the laundry baskets, coats, shoes, and whatever will slow you down in the morning. You are shipshape and ready for action, Captain.

6. Have a school plan for the kids done ahead of time. My favorite time to do this in the afternoon when we are wrapping up for the day. In fact, I have a scheduled time for it. Some people like to do it when their kids are in bed and they can do it uninterrupted. Both plans are good. The trick is that you need to do it before the kids are yelling at each other, the dog is barking out the window, and everyone needs to just get started. Take a comp notebook, write a list of their subjects and make a quick note about what to do. They can check it off when they are done and you don’t have to constantly be available to answer, “What next, Mom?”

7. Set boundaries. For ages, we had an outgoing answering machine message that said, “Hi, this is the Naasko Family. We are unavailable during school hours. Leave a message and we will call at lunch or at the end of the day.” I even made a sign for my door when we lived in a busy suburban neighborhood (it was on the back door since that was where the kids went to knock). If you are bad about the temptation that the cell phone might be, put it in a drawer for later. If the TV is the big draw, put the remotes in the same drawer. If your kids become distracted, you might need to lock out some sites on the computers. Don’t worry, it is not forever. Basically, you can set a timed lockout so that you can focus on the immediate task by using this Google extension called Stay Focusd. We use it on our computers and it works well. I have had to use it when I was procrastinating on book writing so it works for moms, too. 

8. Schedule two tidy ups a day. We do a quick run through the whole house and everybody has to be onboard, once in the morning and once in the evening. Set a timer for twenty minutes and make it a race. Make a list and they can be done when it’s done. Do like I do and make stay up television and device availability dependent on it. You can do it a lot of ways but do it.

9. Start each kid with their strongest subject every day. Make sure that you do not put off the hardest until the end of the day. I usually try to put it second, if possible. Start with a success and move onto something harder and switch back and forth as much as possible.

10. Give and get a hug. If you have a kiddo who is prone to meltdown over poor subjects, be available at that time. Be ready for it. Give the other kids a break at this time. If you feel like you are just firefighting and not getting anywhere with this kid and subject, stop beating yourself up right now and take a deep breath. Then reach over and hug that kid who is just falling apart. Rome was not built in a day so don’t think Trig mastery will happen overnight. Keep building, keep hugging, and keep on keeping on. Then find someone to give you a hug, you need it, too. Call me and I will send you a virtual hug.

Tomorrow I will have a post on how I incorporate laundry and other housework into our day. I will also talk about the different ways in which this has changed depending on the number of children I had at the time and their ages. You will still need to do dishes and cook meals and wash clothes while schooling kids, so this is ultimately important.

The third post will talk about my family specifically and be more of a slice of life. You will find out all about how we use St Raphael Online. I have children signing into their one-hour lessons staggered all day. We use Khan Academy for math and Rosetta Stone for language and all of these are computer based. We use a mix of computer-based learning and text-based for science. I have a limited amount of internet connectivity at a time and a limited number of devices so I have to careful to assign kids to their work based on this. As for spelling, grammar and composition, and poetry, these are the subjects that they do with me. To help me manage schooling nine children with one preschooler running around, I group the kids according to ability. I have four levels of spelling and two for grammar and slot to run through all the kids’ poems they are memorizing.

Looking for that household chores post? Find it HERE.

Starting small...

The little things really are the big things. We say it all the time but I think very few of us believe it because we certainly don’t act like it. We want every event to be like stills pulled from a movie where everyone is bathed in golden hour light and flower petals fall from the trees as we lay in the grass below. We start out any random Friday night and inside we are hoping just a little bit that it will the night of our lives, the one that we could never forget, and if it isn’t we are let down. I think this leads to a lot of disappointing moments in our lives where we are dissatisfied with ourselves, our family, our friends, and our lot in life.

I think there are a lot of things that contribute to this, things I admittedly indulge. Facebook and Instagram certainly don’t make it any easier. I can peek at the small luxuries of women who are both like me and totally not like me and feel like my life doesn’t measure up. I didn’t start this morning with a croissant on a charming antique plate with earl gray tea and imported French preserves all placed next to a novel with a beautiful cover and a bouquet of flowers. Truth be told, my morning started out with me in a rat’s nest bun and leggings as I slurped crappy coffee with almond milk from a chipped mug and a bowl of ramen in my lap and not even the really good kind. Like the desperate kind. More truth, not even that woman’s day actually started out like that because I am telling you right now that she totally composed that shot so we could see a carefully curated selection of her morning’s elements. What may or may not have been outside the frame of that iPhone shot, I will never know. All I can really be sure about is that nobody is sitting down to the breakfast and thinks, “Snap. This looks like an amazing shot. Lemme casually lay my novel down here and snap an IG.”

Life is real, like a lot of real. It is real hard. It is real messy. It is real loud. It is also real good. I think we need to not lose track of that. Life is legit good and probably because it is also hard and messy and loud. When we sit down to think about what our lives mean, too often we are looking for the big things that identify us and it’s unfortunate. If we take a few minutes to think about it, when we sit down and evaluate the lives of someone we loved who died, we don’t think about the big things. It all comes down to the tiny things, the smallest of things, the things that are really real.

Think about someone you lost but whom you loved deeply and profoundly. Do you list their job or college or the kind car they drove (unless it was something cool or quirky because that is something)? I am guessing that you are thinking about things like the way they smelled or the way they always mispronounced a word or maybe songs they sang. I know I do. My grandfather was a musician with long, beautiful fingers with deep nail beds and very, very round tips. My father and his siblings had these hands but I don’t and oddly, I really wish I did. It wouldn’t make my fingers work better or be more finger-like but I could look at them and think of him.

If you asked me at this moment, right now, to tell you something about my grandfather, I would tell you about making tortillas for him when I was a child. I used to make tortillas with grandmother and I would drop them onto her nasty, shedding green kitchen carpet and I would pick them up and keep rolling. After they were cooked, no one else would eat them but my grandfather. He would slather them with butter and ignore the dirt and lint and God only knows what else and eat them and he never failed to tell me that they were delicious. I will never forget that. I was probably five years old and making food that someone enjoyed and it literally changed my life, it set the course for me. It was a tiny little thing but it is also enormous and consuming. These moments are all we get, really. We just scoop up all these small moments and pile them together and they make up our lives and we can’t afford to let them roll away just because we are looking for the bigger thing somewhere else. These things are the big things because of their totality, where the whole is really far greater the sum of its parts.

As a mother I want my children to know this. I want them to look for the small things. The world will creep in with its antique plates and imported preserves and we need to push it back with rat nest buns and a little reality. We need to start with ourselves and looking at these little moments and seeing the beauty in them, even if it is hard to see at first. I don’t always feel like I am at my best. Honestly, I feel like I am just holding on for dear life, but that isn’t what my kids see. I am not sure what they do see but they are watching and they see something. When I die, God willing it is a long, long time from now, they will talk about the things that they remember. They will remember the little things and I can’t know from here what it will be, so I need to give them opportunities to find those little things.

One of the ways that we give them that time is to just be present and not fill every moment. Sometimes these things roll into the room when we move just past the point of boredom. It means not trying to constantly curate my life but let the kids see things that are me, like my rat nest bun. It means letting moments be small and beautiful and waiting to find out later what they were worth. When my grandfather ate those tortillas served on my play kitchen dishes, he had no idea what it would it mean. He was just there, in the moment, doing the little things. He could never have known it would be the most beautiful memory I have of him. There are a lot of ways that we can do this but the truth of the matter is that we won’t know what it all means for a long time.

Things of value are an investment, they take time and they need to develop, and they start small. The little things really are the big things. Just trust that.

Practice patience and not perfection...

Today I am annoyed with one of my children for a pretty small reason. I think that often we are annoyed with people that are ultimately small fry and this is a prime example. This child switched a load of laundry and I know, I know, he just grabbed the whole wad and tossed it into the dryer. I would separate each piece, shake it, and place it in the dryer and never forget to check for stain removal and be sure to hang or lay out all the appropriate items. Because laundry. He should have noticed the line dry only items.

If you know me, you know that I have two things about which I am super, super, embarrassingly neurotic about: 1) Food, 2) Laundry. If you don’t know me, well, now you know one of my salient characteristics. I will cry over food and laundry. I am stubbornly prideful about these things. The former is obvious and the latter, less so. Food is a great joy of mine. I love shopping for food, planning menus, cooking food, feeding other people, talking about food, eating food…food and food and more food. I sure you are not surprised by this. I write about food. The laundry thing might surprise you.

I care a great deal about properly done laundry. I want it sorted very specifically by color and washing temperature. I care about soaking and hand-washing and line drying or drying flat so the clothes last longer and wear well. Having an unfolded basket of laundry puts me on edge and I will get snappy and overwhelmed and drop everything to fold it. I am not like this about all things. For instance, I rarely mop. I sweep, I spot clean, and I ignore. Whatever. More time for laundry. My kids know that I will correct them if they don’t do it correctly and often I would rather do it myself than have it done badly. This means that I am more often than not struggling to keep up because I don’t let them do it. I make the perfect the enemy of the good. I have all kinds of good reasons for it. We don’t have a lot of money. We need these clothes to last. It won’t take me long. They could do other things. All these things sound rational but really they are a cover for pride.

Because I am prideful.

I have right now an opportunity to work on that pride. For Eastern Christians, Great Lent started yesterday. Clean Monday is usually quiet. We do okay. We do small little things with ease, like swap out half-and-half and instead choice almond milk. No big deal. The rubber meets the road when we have to do it again the next day, and the next, and the one after that. Then we start to get anxious and we start to complain. This is not going to be a post about how God is patient with us even when we struggle. He is, but that’s not what I am going to talk about. I am going to talk about our own patience.

I need to be more patient.

I didn’t yell at my son who switched the laundry but I was inwardly annoyed that he can never switch the laundry. He forgets to start one machine or the other or add soap or even do it at all but doesn’t remember that he didn’t. There is an enormous amount of babysitting when that kid is doing laundry. He means well and he is never intentionally disobedient. He just can’t do it. Sometimes I think he will never do it and this reminds me of something my mother-in-law said years ago when my husband and I were engaged.

She warned me he was passive aggressive and he had been so bad as an early teen, she had him stop washing dishes because he always broke at least one every single night. She took it personally. I hadn't seen anything like that so I asked him. He was so surprised. He had never intended to be so destructive; he was just a really clumsy child. It was never intentional. He did outgrow it and now a broken dish is a rare thing and I jokingly tease him that his mother warned me about him but it is a non-event. It’s small fry. Just like my laundry thing. My mother-in-law likes clean dishes and a clean sink and bleaches hers each night. Nothing else worries her as long as the dishes are done and her sink is sanitized, everything else fits in at the edges. She saw offense where there was none and to her credit she never let her son know it, she was very kind about it. I also see offense where there is none. It is just laundry. He will outgrow this but will I?

This Lent I will have lots of opportunities to do hard things (being vegan for seven weeks is freaking hard, guys) and I will have lots of opportunities to lose my cool. I need to practice patience. Patience with my children. Patience will people I meet. Patience with my laundry. Patience with myself. One of the things that I tell mothers is to practice patience and not perfection. When we make mistakes, start over. When we are upset with our kids, step back and cool off before getting back in the game. When someone is sharp with us, take a deep breath and realize that we might see offense where there is none, and give them the benefit of the doubt. Practice patience because nothing will ever be perfect. If I eat all the cheese in the deli case but I am patient, this Lent will be a success. I have no intention of doing that but really, that is what this season is about. I am going to start today with my laundry. Deep breath, people. I am going to have him start the next load.

Guiding children through Clean Week...

A lovely Facebook friend St. Seraphim Cathedral asked if I would write a couple of pieces for the church school families. I thought that it might help your families. This is the second of two pieces, the other may be found by clicking HERE.

We have been slowing stepping up towards its but it is nonetheless something of a shock when Great Lent finally arrives. The Church in her infinite wisdom slowly leads us into the most challenging of Fasts with a fast free week, a normal week, Cheesefare week, and then finally Clean Week. We should be ready but often we are like small children who have been warned that it is almost time to leave the playground and instead of being grateful for the time we have had, we start to feel just a little resentful that it is coming to an end. Clean Week is hard, there is no debating it. Not only is the spirit less than willing the body is more than weak. When we have children, we have to contend with their physical, psychological, and spiritual needs at this time and not only our own. Clean Week is the time to follow the Church’s advice and lead gently.

Show your children what is coming…

In our family, we will spend Sunday afternoon cleaning out our refrigerator, just like we always do. Things that can be frozen for Pascha will be and things that cannot will be eaten. When we move all the rich foods from the fridge and stock it with Lenten foods, it sets a tone. We wash all the shelves and drawers and even the outside so that we will be ready. Having a clean fridge filled a completely different set of contents is a physical reminder of what will begin.

Have a record keeping system for the weeks…

This is especially true for smaller children who don’t really understand calendars. My children have always liked the Lady Lent picture, the one with seven legs. We don’t do the salt dough or cookie one but that is because we have pets who might find them delicious. We stick with one printed out from an image on the internet and that is colored by the children. My children take turns taking the scissors and cutting off a leg at a time while they watch and wait for Pascha.

Give them something to look forward to…

Like I said before when I told you that you need a basic meal plan, you need to have a weekend plan. When the first weekend of Lent comes and it is more relaxed, then make it more relaxed. If you are pouring a glass of wine for dinner, make sure that the children have something special. In our family, we add seltzer water to juice for the children and let them sip from martini glasses. I have a large collection from the thrift store and a couple of plastic ones for the youngest. It’s special, and the children don’t get to do this very often so it gives them something to look forward to each week. We also make sure that we do a Sunday evening popcorn and movie night and we never forget to use lots and lots of olive oil and nutritional yeast. Your children need to a sense of relief from Lent, especially that first week, so make a plan for next week.

Build in some gentle dietary choices…

I know a lovely nun who jokingly refers to Clean Week as the “Insta-Cleanse” because the rapid and sudden shift from the diet of Cheesefare causes a little digestive upset. If your children are miserable from the diet of Clean Week, they will transfer their frustrations onto other elements of the Church and her practices. This is a dangerous practice. We have to find small ways of building in comfort, especially this week. Swap out whole grains for refined and polished grains and do not feel guilty. Believe you me, you are getting plenty of fiber this week already. A little less will be good for you! Provide white Lenten crackers, bagels, breads, and rice to have with our beans and lentils based dishes to make things a little easier. Also make sure that we have low fiber fruits like bananas, grapes, and melons. These make good snacks and help slow down the digestive system. You might want to avoid dried fruit this week and stick to fresh to reduce the fiber in your diet, reevaluate next week and see if your body is feeling ready for a little more fiber but go slowly, especially with small children.

Looking for other practical ideas?

• Jennifer at Illuminated Learning has a great poster that you can download and print, just warning you that it is a larger poster and will need to be printed at a shop. Find it HERE.
• Sylvia at OrthodoxMom wrote a wonderful Lenten study guide for mothers that I use and love. You can download and print the pages or you can load them onto a Kindle. Find it HERE.
• Jane, the children’s book editor at Ancient Faith, put together a wonderful list of books to use with your children over great Lent. Find it HERE.
• If you feel like you want something a little more in depth and you have the time and energy for it, this program by Annalisa is one my children have loved. I use it every summer as a substitute for Protestant Vacation Bible School for my own children. Find the book HERE.

Review of "In the Candle's Glow"...

Today I want to tell you about the new children's book from Ancient Faith, In the Candle's Glow. I have a love/hate relationship with children's literature. Often is is sappy and trite and has conflicting ideas. I am one of the few parents out there who have literally thrown away a copy of  The Rainbow Fish and not looked back. I think that proper children's books should be beautiful and thought provoking and well written. That doesn't mean I think that I think they need to talk over the heads of the children that they address but rather that they respect the developing person they are fast becoming without rushing it. It is a pretty tall order, I admit. But there are some books that so perfectly fit my rigid ideal of a book that they become fast favorites around here; ones that will stand the test of time and ones which I will not dread seeing my children pull off the shelf every night for eighty-seven in a row. This is one such book.

I have a great job. I get to think words and write them down and get paid for it. Because I have sold some of the words I have written down, it gives me the brilliant opportunity to read other words other people have written down. Sometimes books come in the mail and I get to read them solely because I have written words of my own. This is fantastic. Now, I don't get free copies of all the books that I want, but this was a free review copy given to me. I literally jumped at the chance because it is published by my publisher and I had the chance to see some of the art before the book was released. I knew as soon as I saw the cover, that I wanted that this book. I don't get a kick back and I am not being paid for my review. What I get is a free copy of the book to drool over.

French artist Amandine Wanert produced the gorgeous images in this book and there are really two present styles of art. There are bright, light, outdoor scenes of a charming nun, of bees flying through meadows, and of honeycomb caps. They are brightly colored without being gaudy, light without lacking substance. Then there are the richer scenes within the church. They are dark without being heavy, and serious without being severe, and so evocative. Before I knew what the book was about, the art drew me in, and it did the same for my children the day that it arrived. I watched as all my children squeezed onto the sofa to watch as one of the younger teens flipped through the book.

But the book isn't just a pretty face, Elizabeth Crispina Johnson has created an edifying and evocative story which unfolds page by page. The story is about both the journey of a candle and of a little girl. The story begins with the journey of the candle from the bees, to the hive, to the wax, to the nun who produced the candles the church. The little girl moves from playing outside to entering the church and lighting the candle to say her prayers. In the story, Felicia watches her prayers swirl around the candle's flame. She says more prayers and watches more prayers swirl around. Ultimately a slight breeze blows in from the window and extinguishes her candle and she says, "Amen," At that moment her prayers float up to Heaven with the tiny wisp of smoke. The book shows the prayers floating up to the icon of Christ the Teacher. It is so sweet and so innocent and such a pleasure to read to children.

This will be an excellent teaching tool for my family. I have a lot of children and I have found that lighting candles is a thrilling experience for them but teaching them that they are prayers is a critical aspect of participating in the services. Often my children need to be prompted and asked directly for whom or what they want to pray when they ask to light candles. We spend twenty dollars every weekend on candles (between Vigil and Liturgy) and I am pretty certain that many of those candles are lit by my four youngest, all girls, who simply want to stare at the glow in the darkness. I plan on reading this on Fridays and then packing it up for church for the littlest of my children. Toddlers and preschoolers, and sometime those slightly older, have a difficult time sitting still. They often need little books and things and I keep a church basket with saints books and other books appropriate for church as well as scarves for the girls and our family's commemoration book. Another item I keep in the basket is A Child's Guide to the Divine Liturgy. It features illustrations which help my non-readers know what is happening and understand the service structure along with brief explanations that are not so verbose that it keeps little heads turned downwards towards to the book rather than upwards at the service.

In the Candle's Glow is available from Ancient Faith HERE as well as other major retailers and perhaps even your own church book shop (if not, ask for it). It retails for $19.95. A Child's Guide to the Divine Liturgy is available HERE and if it's not in your church shop, ask for it. It also retails for $19.95. I received the former as a free review copy but the latter I paid for myself and I have two copies in my church basket. 

I am going to be talking about the books in church basket as well as the icon corner basket in my house, that is basket that I keep under the table in icon corner so that my children can read them at quiet times. If you Insta, and I love Insta, drop by and see photos of my kids reading these and other great books. You can find me HERE. If you don't Insta, you can scroll through all my photos from my blog without leaving the site. You can read all posts with reviews by clicking HERE.

What do you keep in your church basket?

What are your favorite books for your children?

Happy birthday, baby...

Jack and sneaky selfie with  my good camera.

Today  my son, Jack, turned twelve. He is the only one of my children born after my due date. The previous five all came early, the fifth came twenty-two days early. This means that about a month out from my due date, everyone expected me to have a baby. I would show up at church or at a home school function and I was giantly pregnant and somebody would stop, drop their jaw, and cry out, "Are you still pregnant?!?"

"No. This is a beach ball. I hid the baby in the car so I would not have to share him with any of you."

I laugh about it now but at the time, I cried so much! When my due date dawned, I literally sat up and cried because in six pregnancies, it was the only time I did not wake up on my due date without a baby in my arms. What seemed like an eternity to wait, is now a blink of an eye. I am sure someone said something like that to me at the time but I only heard the questions about labor and delivery.

Jack is my sneaky one. He is my squirrely one. He is the one who managed to climb up on top of our giant fridge and climb into the basket in which I was keeping all the girl scout cookies. He is the one who knows that my good camera is my good camera and nobody messes with it. Except him, because to Jack, rules are suggestions and if he breaks them in an awesome way, it should all work out in the end. He always has his natural charm to get him out of sticky situations. This boy is gonna be trouble.

He is also the one who had scrambled eggs for breakfast one morning, just before his first birthday, and went into anaphylactic shock. I watched the hives spread over his face and body and I called the doctor. I got him into the Suburban and and watched his lips start to swell. There was no way I was making it the office. I yelled out to my next door neighbor to call him (he is and was a friend) and tell him I was going to the hospital. I should have just called 911 but the hospital was right behind the house so fortunately, my poor decision didn't turn out too badly. As soon as I ran in (just throwing my keys at the E/R valet), they got him in and medicated. He looked freakish for about five days but recovered beautifully.

I remember thinking that I couldn't deal with that allergy. My oldest daughter was recovering from strokes caused by a blood clotting condition and she was on the mend. I didn't think I had the strength to do that. But I did. Motherhood is an incredible thing. We are driven by unfathomable depths of love and fueled by caffeine and sheer will we can do anything. Each beat of my heart is the sound of my body telling me and my children that I am not giving up, even when I want to.

I am profoundly grateful for every morning that I wake up next to my husband and with the houseful of children who are growing too quickly. Every day is they are a gift to me. Today, that one there is especially a gift to me. God is good, I am weak, but it all turns out in the end. Jack teaches me that daily.

Happy birthday, son. May God grant you many, many happy years.

No photos for the album...

Jack looking dramatically off towards the sunset.

I regularly worry about the fact that there are no photos of me but I don't worry about it enough to actually take photos. Instead I wring my hands over for a day or two and then go back to life.

There are a couple of reasons for this. The easier one to explain is that I like taking photos. I like them to look good. This makes getting photos of me from others is hard for me. Once one begins to study photography, then every image becomes one for analysis. When my kids take photos, I work very hard to be supportive and encouraging but inside I find myself noticing focus that is off or chopped limbs or uneven lighting. You should know that I never mention these things, instead I choose to focus on the finer elements of what they have done so that they are encouraged to continue. The whole positive reinforcement thing.

The second reason is that I hate photos of me. A lot of people do so I know that I am not alone in this but we hate them to varying degrees. I spent decades cutting myself out of photos and refusing to get into photos. I can count the number of times I have been photographed (since I was married) on my hands. I almost always, I have deleted or destroyed the photos. I do not even have photos of me at my children's baptisms. Really. I won't get in the photo. I know, it's stupid, but it is what I have done and there is no undoing it.

I nearly died six years ago when I nearly bled out after a surgical complication. I don't say that lightly and I do mean to write a book about that at some point. In fact, I hate it when people tell me that they have nearly died because they seldom know of what I speak. If you were not in intensive care on a ventilator, please do not tell you almost bled to death. If you felt faint or tired but were not sedated and intubated, you can't understand what I am talking about. But, I digress. My point is that my husband cautioned me later that there were no photos of me for my children. He worried that if I died, and because I was in intensive care and there was a potential for it, there would be no photos of me for my children. You would think that I might snap out of my vanity at that point and take some photos, but I didn't and I don't now. When I had to take publicity photos for my publisher, I cried about it. There were expertly done but I still hate looking at my own face and nothing that the enormously skilled and kind (so, so kind) photographer could have done or said would change that. It was my problem, not Molly's, which means I need to fix it. But I don't.

I did take those photos but I hate them; not because of the photos, but because they are of me. I love Molly's work (see her site HERE) and I love looking at the amazing photos she takes. I just can't stand looking at myself. Authors need to take photos for publishers who need to use them and they are used, so I just...look away. I don't look at those photos. I would rather hide behind my own camera and take my own photos of other people (which are certainly less amazing than Molly's) so that I do not have to be in other people's photos.

My older kids take it as a given that I am very rarely photographed and simply accept that there are no physical photos of me. If someone takes a photo and I am in it, it gets ripped up and goes in the garbage. I once threw away DOZENS of photos from one of the kids' baptism because a very kind person did not understand my "rules" about photos and took like a million of me. I tossed the lot and it meant that some beautiful moments are gone because she also gave me the negatives, which also went into the garbage. Another friend once had her daughter take photos and make a DVD of  scrolling baptism photos set to music. She was very young and not a very good photographer but loved the craft and was happy to do it. I was very upset because I could not edit the selection of photos but could only share the whole CD, with me in it. You know what happened? No one got a copy of it. I snapped it and tossed it. I am not sure  my husband even saw it once. I even deleted  almost all of the photos of me with my father and my ten day old youngest child because I thought I looked bad in them. The gravity of it might not register with you because you might not know that my father was in the final stages of his battle with cancer.

Stupid, I know. Believe me, I know. I regret it profoundly. Sometimes I cry over it but again, I never feel badly enough that I keep the photos of me. Every once in while, I will take a photo to prove that I can but it literally shakes me which is also stupid. Notice that I am writing a whole post about how I hate photos and I should be in them but I used a photo of one of my kids? I did not even put a photo of me in it. I can't bring myself to do it.

My husband occasionally gets cranky about it all, the older kids just let it go and never say anything because this is their normal, but my youngest notices. She was sitting in my lap while I edited photos and she noticed that we have none of me on this computer. Well, there is one and only one. It is the one I use on my blog. That's it. She asked to take a photo of me and I let her and I promised myself I would delete it later. I probably will even though I know I shouldn't. Then today, a lovely woman whom I follow on Instagram (follow me HERE but you won't see photos of me) posted a photo of herself in her farm kitchen. It was taken by her child who wanted to take a photo of her. It isn't perfect. She isn't dressed up. But she is in the moment. I can't do that. I am not that brave. I am just a little too broken. I know I should, though, and knowing is half the battle. Knowing doesn't mean there are photos for my children so it is probably less than half of the battle.

My resolution for this year was to have one photo a month of me with the kids. Just one. Know how many there are? One. That's it. I took a selfie with Claudia sleeping on my chest, I had my photos taken for my publisher and then there are two little iPhone shots that Claudia took yesterday and which I will probably delete. That's it in ten  months. I've had this resolution for years and there is an average of one single photo a year and none are printed which means my children who are not teens have probably never seen them because they are on Facebook. How sad is that?

I am not sure where I am going with this or how to wrap up this post because in the end I've had no epiphany and I have no photos. I have nothing to give my kids and no intention of actually taking any photos. I want to but I want more to not take them. So I won't. It's wrong and it's sad and I know it. But I also know that in a few days I will be done feeling badly about for a while and I'll just go back to normal. Well, my normal.