Tag: housekeeping

The Daily Yarn: January 21

The baby commandeered this past week with three appointments. He turned around in the correct direction (please stay that way, youngling!), and we’re all so happy about that.

Baby’s Christmas Sweater

I began his Christmas sweater because I needed a mental break on one of the days when a new math skill was just evading one of my kids. Don’t look too closely; it’s been a while since I’ve done any “serious” knitting.

Nesting

This weekend, my husband helped me do some serious nesting/rearranging. Together, we solved about eight household “problems,” but our house is still in full-on recovery mode from all of our industrious “fixing.”

If you ask the kids, the baby can come at any time. They are so anxious to meet their little plaything/friend, but some are beginning to have some amount of anxiety about me being in the hospital potentially for the French stay of 4 days. I’m ready for us to all just to be able to hunker down for a bit. And I wouldn’t mind having my spine back again.

Speaking of baby, his blanket should be all finished by this weekend. Stay tuned for the big reveal!

A gift of yarn & a new project

A lovely friend sent me a bunch of yarn in the mail. As we say in our family, “my love bucket is so full!” The next day, I began a bit of a bobble blanket to use on one of our chairs that needs recovering. I anticipate that this will be a really swift project due to the smaller size and chunkier yarn. It only needs to be big enough to hide the major wear and tear on the chair until I can do some upholstery work.

trying to plan things better

Because I always bite off more than I can chew at the last minute, I created a calendar for all of my projects for the year. Don’t worry! I left some room for flexibility and fun. I’m a pretty ambitious person (with a lot of ideas!!!) However, I am choosing to not be caught making projects for all of the at-risk young men we work with in December this year. (It’s going to be hats for the young men this year, by the way, since some may still be living in the same housing situation…)

yet another crocheter in the family

I taught my oldest how to chain, single crochet, and double crochet this week. He caught on so quickly, although the moment I snapped this photo he was mid-mistake. (Isn’t that how it always goes?) He is flying through this experience and is genuinely loving it. Knitting was not the same. He spent about two hours today crocheting what will be a small blanket for one of his stuffed animals.

I read a pretty bit of a quote by Maya Angelou today: ” A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer…it sings because it has a song.”

I hope that today finds you singing the song you were made to sing.

With Great Love: Work That Honors

One of Mother Teresa’s favorite mottos was “Do small things with great love.” There are about three or four iterations of this particular motto, but all with that refrain of doing small things with great love.

Isn’t that what making the world more beautiful is about? We can’t just swipe a huge oil pastel brush over the ugliness in the world to paint a sunrise or a sunset in its place, or a “happy little cloud” like Bob Ross. That’s not how it works. Because the world is cursed with sin and sadness, it will always remain present. But in our own small acts of redemptive defiance, we can resist the darkness. We can’t erase it, but we can plant a garden. Or we can make a pie. Or we can fold laundry. And in doing those little things with great love, we redeem and cultivate.

A few nights ago, I was up in the middle of the night. I’m a bit of an insomniac, to begin with, but pregnancy emphasizes that. And I was worried about a few different things. So I began reading poetry. At 3 a.m. (Please tell me that someone else, somewhere in the world, does this?)

I turned to Wendell Berry because his poetry has been so soothing to me in the last few years and in particular, his book This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems.

Teach me work that honors thy work,
the true economies of goods and words,
to make my arts compatible
with the songs of the local birds.


Teach me patience beyond work –
and, beyond patience, the blest
Sabbath of thy unresting love
which lights all things and gives rest.

Wendell Berry

And this became a prayer for me. Work that honors God’s work. Small things done with great love. They’re both so interwoven that it’s difficult to see where one leaves off and the other picks up.

This past month has been one huge march, placing one foot in front of another. November is always our family’s most busy and haphazard month, with birthdays and Thanksgiving and trying to intentionally get things done so that December can be a restful season of Advent. But each of the kids has demanded attention in different ways.

I often notice that when some of my children want attention, they’ll pick up a handicraft and ask me to help work with them on it. It’s usually not well-timed or convenient. But it is a ministry. It is heart work. And it is teaching my kids that love is available and that love becomes available when needed. I’m teaching my kids about prayer and how the Father always is ready to listen to them. It’s nothing earth-shattering. It’s saying yes in a moment when my flesh and to-do list long to say no.

It’s also teaching the kids to fight for beauty in their own way. It’s teaching them that they have the agency to choose colors and designs in their own projects. They have creative license. But at the same time, their handicrafts are bound by the rules/laws of that particular craft, material, and gravity. It’s teaching them to take pride in their work and the joy of making for others. It’s giving them a way to do little things with great love.

One step at a time. One stitch at a time. One moment at a time.

Little things.

My Symphony: Dirty Dishes and Copious Amounts of Scarves

To live content with small means.
To seek elegance rather than luxury,
    and refinement rather than fashion.
To be worthy not respectable,
    and wealthy not rich.
To study hard, think quietly, talk gently,
    act frankly, to listen to stars, birds, babes,
    and sages with open heart, to bear all cheerfully,
    do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never.
In a word, to let the spiritual,
    unbidden and unconscious,
    grow up through the common.
This is to be my symphony.

William Henry Channing

I’ve been going through all of my social media sites lately and culling quite a bit. You see, I have the unfortunate habit of clicking “save for later” or whatever the equivalent is on each site. So I’ve amassed an insurmountable heap of digital content that I will never get through, nor would I ever want to try. Things that may have interested me five years ago hold less sheen and shimmer now.

But what I do enjoy is that I’m a word hoarder. I have journals filled completely with little scraps of beauty that I find in books or quotes from songs or sermons or what have you. In the culling process for all of these digital articles, I’m finding a treasure trove of words that I’ve collected on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest as well. (Like the poem above.) So I’m working on gathering them all together in one place, so I can read them on days when I need a good word.

Life has been less beauty-filled and more grin and bear it around here. We’ve had plumbing difficulties which lead to a lot of laundry from the sopping up of plumbing messes. And dishes piling up because everything is slow to get a fix for here in France. And I haven’t washed dishes in three days except for a couple of desperation rounds washed in the bathtub. So my cooking is all off-kilter as well because I’m trying to create as little dish disaster as possible.

It’s a hot mess. But it’s real life.

Also, we’ve been trying to evaluate one of our kids for a learning disorder. It appears that he may not have this particular learning disorder but that he struggles immensely and needs extra help in a certain area.

And some of the kids have had just genuinely angry days. My husband worked a Long Week last week; he’s working a shorter week this week. But the kids have not adjusted to the spontaneity of their Daddy’s schedule after years of predictability and availability. And sometimes that comes out in anger.

So I’ve been lax on my projects. But today I managed to pick some up for a few hours while listening to kids reading to each other or watching kids do some independent portions of their homeschool.

I’m nearly finished with this hurdler stitch scarf. I still have the mustard/gold baby blanket on a crochet hook, but as he’s not due till February, I need to prioritize winter and Christmas gifts first.

So I began this linen stitch scarf for one of twenty-odd scarves I’m going to attempt to make in the next two months. (I have ambitions that are overly high sometimes… I’m aware of this.) We work with 13 to 15 teenage boys who have completely heartbreaking stories, and I’d like to make them each a scarf for Christmas if I can. At the very least, the kids are going to be making them a Christmas cookie/goodie care package, but I’d love to include scarves, as many of them are frequently cold due to not being from this climate.

So yes, you’ll be seeing a lot of scarves here. Hopefully some fun color combinations. There are also a few odd family Christmas gifts that I need to make up as well. I don’t think I’m going to get to my own kids’ slippers that I have good intentions about. But as I’ve just made several of them scarves and made large blankets for all of them, I think we’re good for a teensy while. They’ll be getting cardigans for Christmas anyway. (Sadly, not handmade, but at least it’s something.) What’s that old joke about the cobbler’s children never having any shoes?

Making Tomorrow a More Beautiful Place

This morning found me waking up in a funk. I mean, nearly every morning does. I am genuinely Not a Morning Person. But when I’m pregnant and the baby inside of me hates me from the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 a.m., I’m even more Not a Morning Person.

So the kids had peanut butter and jelly on baguettes for breakfast this morning. Just saying.

After a cup of tea and two hours of sheer survival, I started to feel guilty for just gritting my teeth to get through the day. I wanted to make the day more beautiful. So I began. I washed several loads of laundry, changed several sheets and washed them because it was windy and the sheets would actually dry outside today.

As I was cleaning up the aftermath of the peanut butter and jelly breakfast, I thought to myself “Well, this is nice. Laundry is done. Dishes are washing. But how can I fix tomorrow morning? How can I make tomorrow a more beautiful place to be before it’s even begun?”

Several of the kids were wanting to help, so I decided to do a bit of a deep clean of the kitchen. They organized my storage containers and glass jars, and I began a few pots of veggie broth for soup this week. We found our gratitude journal (embarrassed grimace at having lost it for a while under a sack of leeks) and began writing things we were grateful for.

I sat down and realized that deep cleaning the kitchen, while useful, didn’t really solve my problem of tomorrow morning. So I decided to make up breakfasts for the next three days for Michael and the kids. I made up four batches of raspberry pancakes. (In my defense, I thought the bag of berries in the freezer was a multi-berry mix from our smoothies. But it wasn’t. So raspberry pancakes it is. )

(and pizza sauce for our supper tonight…)

I also made a batch of blueberry muffins. These two items should cover breakfast for the next three days for Michael and the kids. If all-day-sickness allows, I’ll usually eat a few scrambled eggs for breakfast, but that’s typically all I can handle. So these breakfasts, while scrumptious looking, will not be for me.

I found that looking ahead to helping tomorrow helped me to gain more energy and task momentum throughout the day. Instead of staring at the pancakes, waiting, I would try to find little tasks like washing a window or hanging three pieces of laundry or straightening the bathroom sink that could be done in the 1-minute before I’d have to flip the pancakes. It became a game. I’d ask myself “What is one thing that I can do this moment to make the world more beautiful?”

And sometimes that meant stopping a sibling bicker-fest. Keeping it real here.

After we put the kids to bed tonight, I rearranged the master bedroom with my husband’s help. We don’t have any furniture for when the baby comes, but at least I can get our bed positioned on the correct wall. That way, we’ll be able to fit a chair, changing table, and pack n’ play for the baby to sleep in.

I’m loving this piece of art by Van Gogh and can’t decide if I’m going to hang a print of it in my room near where I’ll have my nursing chair or in my daughter’s room near her dollies.

I can’t claim that any of these tasks will make me more cheerful tomorrow morning. Because it will–in fact–be another morning. But at least I’ve done my best to make tomorrow a more beautiful place.