1. So, when I'm thinking of slacking off on my running or just getting tired of sticking with it, all I have to do is read my friend Graham's blog about Mavis Lindgren, the 70-year-old woman who ran multiple marathons, and then I am inspired/shamed into getting out the door instead of staying in bed. I'm (relatively) young and I've got two healthy legs. If Mavis can do it, surely I can.

2. My brand new, shiny, front-loading washer arrived on Wednesday. So far, so good. At this point, I don't really have much to say about it: the clothes seem to be getting washed just fine, but I thought my old one did a perfectly fine job too (until the day it spewed water all over the laundry room floor). So far the biggest attraction with this new one is the clear window in the door on the front. You can stand in front of it and watch the clothes while they get spun around. My children find this endlessly entertaining.

3. Speaking of entertaining, Beth tried out for the talent show at school this week. Her talent, which she decided upon herself: telling jokes. Her father is so proud. She didn't appear nervous at all for her audition, although she told me later that she was, and even when she accidentally told a joke that was not one of the repertoire she had rehearsed, she kept her cool and improvised a punch line on the spot. I was totally impressed. I mean, OK, I might be a little biased, but I thought she was awesome. We'll find out next week if she actually gets to be in the show or not.

4. Another exciting upcoming event: a field trip to a butterfly garden on Monday. Both Beth and I are super-excited. This will be Beth's first field trip ever, and my first field trip as a mommy chaperone. The last field trip I remember going on was my senior year of high school, when my class went to the county courthouse as part of a civics lesson. I think the butterfly garden will be way cooler.

5. If you've got kids and you live in the mid-valley, you should join us over at Pet Day at OSU tomorrow. My vet student friend Meg is involved in putting it on, and apparently they've got pony rides, petting zoos, dog agility contests, and all kinds of other fun animal-oriented stuff.

6. My husband's coming home tonight! Thank goodness. Now I'll finally have someone to tell me when it's bedtime again.

7. Evie picked out a Sesame Street CD from the library this week that I've got to admit, I kind of enjoy. A lot of kids' music makes you want to gag after the first time or two that you've listened to it, but "Elmopalooza"....is really not that bad. My girls' favorites are "Nearly Missed," which is very peppy and makes them all jump and dance; "I Don't Want to Live on the Moon," a sweet, peaceful tune featuring Shawn Colvin; and "I Love Trash." They go back and listen to the beginning of "Trash," with its loud rock intro and classic vocal howling by Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, over and over. "This is such a rockin' song!" Beth says, and hits repeat. Since I can't say I'd ever exposed them to Aerosmith before, I had no idea they'd be such fans. But right now, Elmopalooza is totally rocking our living room.

Let me tell you a little secret.

Sometimes I get kind of excited when my husband says he's going out of town for business. It's not that I don't love that guy--he's a really amazing fellow, and if you met him, you would love him too. He's that kind of guy. But I also relish the chance to be alone--to do whatever I want, to have complete control of the TV remote, to not worry about the look he might give me if I decide to eat some dinner leftovers straight out of the fridge at 10 o'clock at night. Alone time is kind of freeing that way.

So when he's gone, I immediately start making plans for the glorious things I will do with all this free time I think I'm going to have: make curtains! Work on my novel! Get in a hot bath and read for hours! Clean out the closet! Exercise every day and miraculously lose 5 pounds while he's gone so he'll be impressed with how fabulous I look when he comes back!

As evening approaches, I'm excited about my plans. And then it's dinner time and the kids are tired and whiny and then they all need baths and stories and tooth-brushing and bedtime songs, and the next thing you know it's 8 p.m. (if I'm lucky and it's not even later) and I'm exhausted. I sit around for awhile, looking at a magazine or reading Facebook updates, and then I finally rouse myself from my stupor and decide to get cracking on all these awesome projects I have planned.

I think things through: I could do A (curtains), B (novel), C (bath), D (closet), or E (exercise). Instead I either choose option F: attempt all of the above...or option G: do none of the above and pour a glass of white wine and watch TV instead.

In either scenario, I accomplish nothing meaningful on ANY of my projects and...since there's no one around to tell me to go bed...I stay up past midnight and when the kids are rising and shining at 6:30, Mom is still lying in bed, grouchy and tired.

Repeat a couple nights in a row, and Mom gets really grouchy and tired. And still none of my projects are even close to complete. It's like without another grown-up in the house, I completely lose all sense of perspective on what is reasonable to accomplish in a single day, and how much sleep I really need in order to function. I like to think that if I really did live alone, instead of just playing at it every now and then when he has to travel for work, I'd figure out some way to get into a groove and not be such an all-or-nothing maniac. But so far, I haven't figured that out yet.

To my credit, so far this week, I've managed to keep the house running fairly smoothly, and I did actually take a hot bath and read a couple times, and I've gotten caught up on all the new episodes of Glee. Curtains and closet-cleaning and all the other grand plans I had? Not looking so good. Well, I've got a couple more days till he gets home. Maybe I'll manage to get them done. All of them! Tonight!

Or maybe not.

Sometimes I have a hard time saying I'm a Christian.

Go ahead and gasp. Shudder and quote Luke 9:26.

The word Christian is a word with baggage. It's a word with 2,000 years of history, not all of it pleasant. And, more often than not, it's a word that gets tossed around like a grenade in today's political and cultural landscape. "We live in a Christian nation." "We need to get back to Christian values." "He's from a good, Christian family." In conservative circles, slapping the "Christian" label on something is the ticket to gaining acceptance and approval, regardless of whether or not the issue in question (the right to own an AK-47, for instance?) is ever, anywhere, mentioned or hinted at in the Bible.

The most nationally recognized "Christian" figures in the U.S. today are folks like Sarah Palin and Pat Robertson. People who say divisive things with little substance. Christians today are so often defined by what they're against: anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-Obama, anti-whatever the cause of the moment is.

I cringe every time I hear of a conservative public figure saying something stupid, every time I hear a Christian make a casually ignorant comment about gays or Muslims or Jews or any other group that it's still kind of okay to label or stereotype within the Christian community. Being a Christian doesn't necessarily mean that I'm right-wing, or Republican, or that I think Obama is leading the country straight to hell. I'm not saying conservatives are the only people who say inflammatory things--idiocy is not confined to any one political persuasion--but it doesn't bother me if some other person acts like an imbecile, because I don't feel like I'm linked to it, the way I do when it's a Christian saying something dumb.

I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. It's hip, among young believers these days, to not even call yourself a Christian. "I'm a Christ-follower." "I believe in Jesus, but I'm not religious." These phrases have the advantage of distancing oneself from all the overtones that go along with the word Christian, but they have the disadvantage of being overly earnest and trendy and also devoid of true substance.

Of course, summing up your religious beliefs in a word, a phrase, a label, is impossible. No one can express the totality of their deepest thoughts about morality and justice, love and divinity, in one pithy statement. Not even if it's "love God, love others," another popular catchphrase for church-goers today.

But the whole problem with getting rid of the Christian label is that it's dishonest, and fundamentally selfish. Because that's what it all comes down to, in the end. Self. The Christian label makes me cringe because I imagine that if new acquaintances meet me and then learn that I am a Christian, they'll assume that I'm like them. Those people. The ignorant, loud-mouthed, angry ones. "I'm a Christian, but I'm not that kind of Christian," I want to say. Because I worry about what other people think of me, even when I shouldn't.

If I claim to be a Christian--and I do--that means that I am associating myself with a group of people who all believe that a Jewish man who lived 2,000 years ago was telling the truth when he claimed to be God. This group of people has grown and changed and morphed over the centuries it's been in existence; there are Christians all across the world whose lives, I'm guessing, all look very different, and yet they claim to all worship the same God. Although we may rightly condemn the atrocities that have been carried out in the name of Christ over the years, and we may voice our disagreement with believers whose words disgrace the name of Christ, but we can't just slap a new label on ourselves and pretend that we're part of some other religion entirely, some group with no history to drag around behind us. If I'm serious about what I believe, I need to know what it is that I'm a part of. Live it. Acknowledge it. Claim it, good and bad.

So. I'll go ahead and admit it. My name is Jen. And I'm a Christian.

When I was growing up, I thought gardening and preserving food were pursuits most suited for old ladies in calico dresses. Kneading bread and making jam ranked right up there with threshing wheat, when it came to activities I would ever picture myself engaging in. I never took a home-ec class in school, because I had more interesting things with which to fulfill my elective options. In high school and college, when my friends and I pictured our futures, the words "pressure canner" and "compost pile" never once came up in our discussions. They were not at all a part of what I pictured the life of a modern woman would include.

Flash forward 10 years to today, where I just spent an entire morning with the other women in my MOPS group listening to a fellow young woman dressed up in very hip argyle tights and turquoise jewelry teach us about food preserving. I never would have imagined that at age 29, my peers and I would be intrigued by an hour of discussion on pectin and pressure gauges, but there we were--a dozen intelligent, informed, capable women, all nodding our heads and taking notes and sharing our home-canning adventures.



This outburst of interest in home-grown, home-cooked, home-preserved food isn't just something that stay-at-home moms with too much time on their hands are obsessed with either. I have childless friends who work all day and come home at night to garden, who hit the farmer's market every weekend to get the best produce and then come home and cook delicious meals. Look at Molly Wizenberg. She's a 30ish food blogger who has degrees in biology, French, and anthropology, but has now made a career out of writing about food full time. She's young, she's educated, she's urban--and she's all about home cooking. Her new book (which I haven't read yet) is called A Homemade Life, and it's a best-seller.

I think that title says it all. We live in such an ephemeral, digital world. We communicate with our friends and families through e-mails and texts and Facebook messages. Our family photographs are all on the computer screen. So much of what we see and hear and buy is slick, mass-produced, and perfect.

It's in reaction to that, I believe, that my generation is reaching out for that homemade life. There are other reasons, too--we're all conscious of being green, these days, aren't we?--and something you made or grew yourself, or purchased from a local farmer, is supposedly better for the world than something grown in Mexico and shipped across the continent and purchased from a national chain grocer. I also think that the homemade revival has something to do with nostalgia, with a certain amount of reaching out for childhood memories and comfort.

But when it comes down to it, I think the main reason the women (and men) of my generation find ourselves putting on our grandmothers' aprons is the craving for something real. The dirt on your fingers when you plant a seed. The smell of bread baking in the kitchen. The tomatoes that maybe aren't as big and plump and red as the ones at the grocery store, but that taste so sweet because you grew them yourself. Look at the crafting revival, the growth of Etsy, the fascination with everything from vintage clothes to hand-made soap. My generation loves our digital music, our streaming video, our highspeed Internet, but we also love things that can't be manufactured or mass-produced or imitated. We want the real stuff. We want the homemade life.

It's April, and today the rain is pouring down outside and the little seedlings in my garden are poking their tiny green shoots out of the soil, and I'm watching them with affection every day. I've got my canning pot on the shelf and empty jars in my cupboard. I can't wait to start picking and slicing and cooking again.

I'm a modern woman. Just watch me grow.

My almost-2-year-old won't stop eating my hummus.

The other girls won't go anywhere near that brownish goop, but Evie...every time I try to dip a pita chip or a wheat thin, she's right there at my side, wordlessly holding out her own cracker, waiting for me to dip hers as well, so that she can lick every bit of hummus off of it and say "Mmmmmm."

And every single night at dinner she calls out, in her chipper little voice, "Couscous, please! More couscous!" She does this regardless of whether or not we are actually having couscous for dinner.

Evie gobbles up salmon, while the other girls regard eating any type of fish as pretty much the worst thing I could ever ask them to do.

She's the only one of the kids who likes pears as much as I do, and she'll even eat them with slices of good cheese, like I do (as opposed to the other girls, who refuse any cheese that doesn't come straight from the bright orange cheddar package).

All these things I can handle.

But if she starts going after my coffee, I'm going to have to put her a strict chicken-nuggets-and-ketchup-only diet to try to re-kid-ify her palate. After all, a mom can only be expected to share so much.

1. Is the crying a gender thing? That's what Rebekah asked, in reference to the post wherein I complained about my kids' crying all the time, and then confessed that I too resort to tears when I am upset. However, having had limited experience with small boys--I've never had any brothers or sons--I don't know. I can say that my girls tend to tears frequently, not just because of sadness but also frustration, anger, and sometimes, I suspect, just to get my attention. Do boys do this too? Is it merely a toddler/preschool age thing? Or do they naturally express their negative feelings in some other way--yelling, hitting, or stoicly stuffing their emotions in the tradition of stereotypical masculinity?

I don't know. But I'd be interested to hear from moms of sons.

2. About the reason for my own tears: our washing machine broke. And there was water all over my laundry room floor and all over my kitchen. And there was seemingly nothing that could be done to fix it, right then and there at 10 o'clock at night. And, upon closer examination the next day, the verdict was the same: it's a goner. It was a very frustrating situation.

3. Also, I don't know about you, but I do not frequently move my washer and dryer and clean under them. This means that when the laundry room flooded, it wasn't just with water. It was with dirty water out of the washing machine, coupled with all the dust and dirt and accumulated nastiness underneath the washer and dryer, which combined to create a foul-smelling greyish sludge all over the floor. It was gross. And depressing.

4. Now I feel compelled to move my refrigerator and scrub behind it so I can have some peace of mind about what may or may not be lurking back there.

5. So...now I'm washing machine shopping. And getting a ton of conflicting information! Are front loaders all they are cracked up to be? Or am I opening myself up to the possibility of a washer that grows mold? Are high-efficiency top loaders good, or are they going to break down frequently? Any recommendations are welcome.

6. Also, we had to replace the fuel pump on our truck last week. Now the washing machine. Good-bye, savings account. It was nice to know you.

7. Actually, I'm exaggerating. This will not leave us destitute, which is truly a blessing. There have been times in the past when money WAS super tight, when a commonplace household disaster like this would have left us broke, and when two within a week of each other would have been a total calamity. Right now it's a big inconvenience, but we are carrying on just fine. That's what savings accounts are for. And hey--we got that washing machine for free to begin with. I won a contest that I didn't even know my mom had entered me in. Five years of free washing machine use, and it waits to die until a time when we can actually afford to replace it with brand-new, energy efficient one. Not a bad deal. Not a bad deal at all. No tears from me today.


More quick takes at Conversion Diary.

Sometimes I feel like if I have to hear anybody cry one more time--one wail, one sob, even one half-hearted sniffle--I am going to just lose it. I'm surrounded by little people who cry just as easily and as frequently and as gosh-darn loudly as they laugh. They cry over a lost shoe, a refusal to share, a dropped cup. Sometimes they literally cry over spilt milk.

And every time there's a cry, my radar goes off--what's wrong? Who needs me? Who's hurt? Frequently, after listening for a moment, I decide that it's just a sibling spat, some momentary frustration that I choose not to intervene in, and I manually turn my mental sensors back down to low. And sure enough, it ends as quickly as it started, and all is well. But then five minutes later, there's a wail, a shriek, a cry again, and until I've determined what's going on, everything flashes back up to red-alert status whether I want it to or not.

It's exhausting.

At times I want to throw them all in the dungeon just for the offense of daring to cry in my presence. I want to put big "No Crying Allowed" signs all over the house and plug my ears and hum to myself whenever I hear anything even coming close to a cry.

And then it's the end of the day and the washing machine leaks and I get mad and what do you think I do? Do I take my own good advice that I've been dishing out all day? Do I take a deep breath and put myself in control of my emotions, instead of letting my emotions control me?

No. I cry.

There's nothing new to say here today. I have said it before, and I think I'll continue to say it, over and over again, every time she grows, achieves, commits, or changes. But it's startling to me, each and every time. I get so caught up in the toast crumbs and the shoelaces that the actual accumulation of age passes me by. The years have seemed short, indeed. And sometimes I barely notice them going by.

Because once again I'm saying to myself: Wow, my baby's growing up.

It's the little things, one after the other after the other, that are marking this transition from Baby to Toddler to Girl. Mostly, her own consciousness of the change; and not just the consciousness of it, but the thoughtful seeking out of Big Kid status.

"I don't play dress-up much anymore," she says, with a sigh. "Or Polly Pockets. Those are really for littler kids." (Though it doesn't stop her from playing with either one of these things within days of that statement.)

"Gosh, I really must look older than I am," she says happily, after a visitor guesses her age at 6. (A full four months before her actual sixth birthday!)

"Oh, I just love holding babies," she coos. "Liking babies is really a big girl thing to do." (And I wonder if she actually does like babies--I think she does--or if it's just a purposeful putting on the of big-girl persona, a mimicking of the teenage cousins and babysitters and family friends that she knows.)

"Mama..." She comes up to me with a frown creasing her forehead. "What are some bigger kid things to do?" (And I want to shake her and tell her she's crazy for wanting to cast off her childhood so quickly--at the ripe old age of 5--but instead I remember all my childhood longings to be bigger, to be better, to be cooler, and we discuss soccer and painting and other activities that are still enjoyable but acceptably mature in her eyes).

She's not a baby anymore. She's clawing her way into Big Girl, no matter what her mother may think about it.

When you see me out and about with my cute hat on, it's probably because I haven't washed my hair. Don't worry, I do shower most days. It just doesn't always happen BEFORE I have to have all the kids dressed and out the door.

Yes, I do let my children scream as loudly as they want to when they're playing in the back yard. Because if I didn't, they'd be screaming that loudly in here next to me, and I can't handle that.

Maybe someday I will successfully train my kids to pick up after themselves. Until then, our house is going to be the one with bicycles in the driveway, dolls buried in the flowerbeds, and windows with crayon artwork taped to them.

This one's for you, stupid teenagers who play in the schoolyard in the evenings: fences are not soundproof. Just because you can't see the people who live in the houses on the other side of the fence doesn't mean we (and our small children) can't all hear you yelling profanities at each other. Also, stop littering. It makes me mad.

I try to keep my daughters from picking the dandelions out of other people's yards and blowing the seeds every which way, thus further spreading the weeds...but I don't always succeed. And they're convinced that dandelions have magical wishing power, and that MORE dandelions = a good thing. And I haven't had the heart to crush their delusion. I'm sorry.

A Tulip Garden


Guarded within the old red wall's embrace,

Marshalled like soldiers in gay company,

The tulips stand arrayed. Here infantry

Wheels out into the sunlight. What bold grace

Sets off their tunics, white with crimson lace!

Here are platoons of gold-frocked cavalry,

With scarlet sabres tossing in the eye

Of purple batteries, every gun in place.

Forward they come, with flaunting colours spread,

With torches burning, stepping out in time

To some quick, unheard march. Our ears are dead,

We cannot catch the tune. In pantomime

Parades that army. With our utmost powers

We hear the wind stream through a bed of flowers.

--by Amy Lowell

There are things I would like to accomplish. I have some goals for this, my 30th year of life. And there are particular steps I have to take to make these things happen. Like run a certain amount of miles each week. Like write a certain amount of words each day. Like learn to shake off rejection and keep submitting my writing for publication.

I know that the payoff, in the end, of achieving these goals will be big. Beyond big. Glorious, even. But in the short term, there's a lot of sticking-to-it. A lot of discipline. A lot of getting out of bed early when I'd rather sleep, writing when I'd really rather be watching TV or dinking around on Facebook.

I know I'll be happier with myself if, a year from now, I can look back and say that I did my best to meet my goals. A lot happier than if I have to look back and say, "Well, I got busy, and I got tired, and I got bored, and I just never really got around to it." It's reminding myself of that, on a daily basis, that gets hard.

It was nearing bedtime when Beth approached me.

"Can I put Evie in her pajamas?" she asked.

I considered for a moment.

"Sure, you can give it a try," I said.

Beth managed to get Evie's clothes off by herself. Then Evie realized that she had nothing on but a diaper and the pure joy of it set in. She took off, diaper drooping dangerously around her bottom, shrieking in glee.

"We've got a runaway baby!" Beth screeched.

I retrieved the runaway, changed her diaper, and set her on the floor for her big sisters to try again. By this time Lucy had joined the party, and Evie was beaming from ear to ear at being the object of both of her big sisters' full attention. And this time I shut the door to keep the runaway baby in.

I listened, though, to what sounded like a rodeo going on in there, punctuated by giggles, squeals, and comments like the following:

"I wish we had a rope to tie her up!"

"You hang onto that leg."

"This is harder than I thought!"

At the end of 10 minutes or so, all three of them were slightly out of breath and panting, but...Evie did have her pajamas on. And I had 10 minutes to sit down and read while they were all occupied doing a chore that I usually have to do myself.

Would it be bad of me to assign the big sisters pajama duty every night?

As promised, here's another adventure from our vacation in Grenada that I never got around to posting about last year.

It was hot in the back of the bus, and squishy. The two Southern girls to my left were attempting to lead everyone in a sing-a-long, and in front of me the two Kenyan guys seemed to be trying to hit on the Swedish girl. We all swayed together as the Grenadian driver navigated yet another hairpin turn on the dark, narrow road to Gouyave.

Meg leaned over from the seat in front and told me, "This guy is a great driver. I always hire him. Except when you look at his eyes, I think he might actually be going blind. I don't know how he drives."

Comforting. Very comforting.

Meg had assured us that Fish Friday was a Grenadian tradition--something a visitor shouldn't miss out on. Every single week, apparently, the little fishing town of Gouyave (prounced Gwahv, like the first syllabyle of the word "guava") holds a celebration, a little festival of thanks for the successful return of the fishing fleet yet again.

But Gouyave was on the other side of the island from St. George's, where Meg lived and went to school, and to get there she'd hired this bus. Which was now hurtling through an uncharacteristically rainy night in Grenada, filled up with friends and classmates and few random medical students who climbed on at the last minute. The thing about St. George's University is that it is a truly international school, and we were on the bus with people from across the United States, Canada, Africa and Europe. And, somehow, people from all these different continents all knew the words to "In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle." And they sang them. Loudly. While the driver twisted his way through the darkness on a road that seemed to be going to nowhere.

Also, I really had to pee.

But finally, the semi-blind driver stopped the bus on a wet, rainy cobblestone street in a tiny little town. It was dark, and I did not see any festival. Or bathroom.

Meg and the others who had been there before seemed to think we were in the right place, though, so we followed them down the street, passing one closed shop and sketchy-looking bar after the other, until finally we turned down a little alley.

And then there it was. Fish Friday. Little booths lined the alley and snaked around the corner, full of locals serving up their best fare. It wasn't that much to look at, honestly, but it smelled divine. The rain was pattering down steadily by now, but it didn't seem to matter much to the tourists and locals who wandered down the street, stopping at a booth here, a booth there, ordering the local specialties.

Meg took us straight to a booth that she swore had the best fish cakes in the world, and she was not exaggerating. Fresh-caught ocean fish (I have no idea what kind), chopped up and made into a little hamburger-size cake, battered and deep-fried. Served inbetween two home-made biscuits, also fried. Mmmm. Frying may be the worst thing in the world you can do for your arteries, but you have to admit: it makes food taste good.

While I got my food, Eric and Meg moved around to the other side of the booth, where one of the workers was serving the local beer, Carib, in little plastic cups. I heard Meg gasp, "What happened to your arm?" and craned my neck to see what she was talking about. Sure enough, the girl getting the drinks had a large, open wound all the way across her arm. The girl just smiled and calmly explained that she'd burned it on the deep fat fryer the week before. That was why she was just doing the drinks tonight.

We all smiled back and thanked her and tried very hard to forget that story as we gobbled down delicious food that had surely been cooked on that very same fryer just minutes before.

The bathrooms were a little wooden shack behind the one tiny covered area the site had. The toilet did flush, and I was grateful for that. I went in, did what I needed to do, and tried not to look around too closely.

We made our way down the line of booths, stopping here and there to sample things that caught our eye. Fish cakes, fried fish, egg rolls, meatballs, locally made beer and rum. We mingled with tourists from Europe and students from St. George's. And all the time, the rain came down, harder and harder, soaking everything and everybody, but everyone just laughed about it, in a can-you-believe-this-is-happening? kind of way. And why not? By the end of the night we were a mess, but it was warm rain, warm and messy and fun.

Kind of like the fishcakes. Kind of like Grenada in general. Was everything tidy and bright and antiseptically clean, like the plastic-coated shopping malls and grocery stores in America? Nope. In America we don't have sheep tied up in the street or cows wandering free. We buy our food sealed in hygenic little packets and throw away pounds after packaging after each meal. Grenada was warm and welcoming, adventuresome and unexpected.

I tried to make fish cakes at home when we got back, but I didn't fry my biscuits and I didn't bring my fish in from the ocean that day, and eating them in our nice, dry house, off of china plates at our nice clean dining room table, with forks and knives, just wasn't the same. They were not as good as the Fish Friday fish cakes. Not even close to being as good, not at all.

It's 52 degrees right now in Albany. The wind is rushing by my window, pushing dark grey clouds over the sky.

However, according to Weather.com, it's 82 degrees in Grenada.

Ah, Grenada. The little Carribean island Eric and I visited last year when our good friend Meg was living down there. We had a fantabulous time, and I never did share all of our stories from the trip.

In an effort to recall a little bit of the sunshine and magic and fun we had on that vacation almost exactly one year ago, today I'm leaving you with a few photos that I never posted last year, and tomorrow... I'll tell you all about Fish Friday.




Maybe if I close my eyes and slather on some sunscreen, the scent will transport me back there, and I can pretend I'm on the beach, and Eric is lying next to me, and I have no responsibilities, and pretty soon we'll be eating fish and plantains and drinking more rum punch for dinner. Oh, and passionfruit smoothies. I'd like a passionfruit smoothie for dessert.

A girl can dream, can't she?

I have written before about Evie's extreme, Linus-like attachment to the soft, snuggly blanket my friend from New Zealand made for her. Her love for blankie is one of the things she feels most strongly about in the world--and she is a girl who feels strongly about a lot of things. You don't mess with Evie's blankie. You just don't.

So it's particularly hard when you run into a conundrum like this:

Evie is sick => Evie has puked all over blankie => blankie must be washed.

However...

Evie feels bad => Evie needs comfort => blankie is the one and only thing that will comfort her in such a time of distress.

Oh, it was a sad day yesterday.

And thus I give you a song, in Evie's honor. To be sung to the tune of Tammy Wynette's classic country ballad, "Stand By Your Man."

Hold Your Blankie Tight

Sometimes it's hard to be a toddler
Giving all your love to just one quilt
You'll have sick days
And he'll get puke stained
Why mom must wash him, you don't understand

But if you love him
You'll still hug him
Until mom pulls him from your hand
And if you love him
Oh, scream and cry for him
'Cause after all, it's just a piece of cloth

Hold your blankie tight
Give him two arms to snuggle
And refuse all other blankets
When you are sick and tired

Hold your blankie tight
And tell your mom you need him
Keep screaming as hard as you can
Hold your blankie tight

Hold your blankie tight
Even when mom says it's yucky
Keep screaming until you get it back
Hold your blankie tight

After a week with a sick kiddo, a busy holiday weekend, and then a day of the flu myself, let's just say that my house does not look pretty.

I went to war on it this morning, stripping beds of their germy sheets and scrubbing all manner of surfaces with lemony-scented disinfectant. (Paradox: I despise cleaning, but I adore the *smell* of clean things. Maybe I just need to buy some Mr. Clean-scented perfume and call it good?)

In the midst of my cleaning frenzy, I even got around to doing the often neglected windowsill above my kitchen sink. This windowsill, positioned as it is where small hands are unable to reach anything I leave perched on it, has become my household repository for Possibly Important but Unidentified Items.

Just look at this stuff.


We've got:
1. Little Rubber Wheel
2. Black Plastic Clippie
3. Teeny-Tiny Screw and Spring
4. Little Yellow Knob
and
5. Metal Axle/Cog thing

With the exception of Little Yellow Knob (which I need to try to re-attach to the end of Beth's umbrella before she pokes someone's eye out with the uncovered metal spike), I have no idea what any of these things are.

But don't they look like they are part of something? Like they are critical to the functioning of some item? I mean, obviously they came from somewhere. I don't think I have a Random Watchamacallit Fairy dropping stray thingamajigs around my house. Once upon a time, these things obviously were attached to...something. If only I knew what they were!

One could argue that since these mysterious parts have been living on my windowsill for who knows how long, and everything in my house seems to be functioning just fine without them, it's probably okay to throw them away. But I'm afraid.

I'm scared to throw them out, because if I do, regardless of how many weeks or months the stray items have been living on my kitchen windowsill, then suddenly that will be the day that I will ask Eric to repair some household appliance, and he'll say, "Well, it's missing a tiny screw," and I'll say, "Oh, shoot! I used to have a teeny-tiny screw, but I threw it out because I didn't know what it belonged to!" And then this important household appliance will be broken forever, and whatever shall I do?

Am I the only one with a shelf or a drawer (don't even get me started on my junk drawer) that is collecting random but possibly important items? Or do all these strange objects congregate at my house and my house alone?

It's Easter this weekend, and in an effort to remind my kids that there is more to the holiday than chocolate bunnies and painted eggs, I've been reading to them out of a Bible storybook about the events leading up to the crucifixion and resurrection. It being Good Friday, today we got as far as laying Jesus in the tomb. I asked them what they thought would happen next in the story...what event might take place on Sunday morning.

"Oh, I know! He comes alive again!" Beth said. "AND, on Sunday morning we get Easter baskets!"

She paused a moment.

"But why?" she said.

And that's what it always come down to, as I navigate this life of faith and motherhood. Why, mommy? What do Easter baskets have to do with Jesus? Why do we do the things we do? As different holidays come along throughout the year, how do we celebrate the cultural and the spiritual, even when they don't necessarily overlap?

I mean, okay, eggs can be a symbol of new life, like the new life Jesus gives believers, and Easter baskets are gifts, like the gift of new life, and that's the Christian rationale behind the tradition, and so that's what I told her. But it was sort of a cheesy explanation, I thought. I felt cheesy, anyway. Because there's actually a lot about Easter that's a blending of the cultural and the spiritual, the significant and the simply fun. The very name of the celebration comes from the name of a pagan goddess who was celebrated at the vernal equinox. And so just like Christians took the winter solstice celebration and conveniently combined it with Christ's birth, they took the existing spring equinox celebration and combined it with the resurrection.

I know some people who completely swear off all secular influences in their holidays, for this very reason. No egg hunts or bunnies or chocolate. Some folks even call it "Resurrection Sunday" instead of Easter, so as to avoid any mingling of the Christian with the pagan. I know other believers who avoid holiday celebrations altogether, reasoning that there's very little benefit and a lot of worldy, commercialized crap about them.

But the faith that we have didn't come to us in a pure, neat, untangled line. Our beliefs, our practices, the very words we use in church come to us mixed in with thousands of years of church history and culture. People in different times, on different continents, in different languages, have all made their mark on the church.

We don't live our lives in a box, pushed off and separate from the culture that surrounds us. And our holidays aren't wrapped in bubble wrap either. We call it Easter. Because that's its name. The meaning that it has is the meaning we choose to give it. And to us, the word Easter refers to the celebration of Jesus' resurrection, no matter where the word might have come from. Because regardless of the origins of the word or the motivations of the church fathers when they adopted it, that's what it is now.

Sometimes I think we Christians feel this pressure to sprinkle spirituality dust over everything we do--as though unless there's a religious reason for it, we ought to abstain. But some things we do just for fun, and that's okay too. We dye eggs because someone a long time ago decided they symbolized life and it was an Eastery thing to do. And we give Easter baskets to our kids because giving and receiving gifts makes us happy.

And chocolate bunnies? We eat chocolate because it tastes good, dang it. And sometimes, that's enough.

I never do April Fool's Day. I'm just not clever enough to go around thinking of pranks. I seem to recall one time in my childhood when it was very important to me that I play a trick on people, and mom let me go to school with a sling on my arm (or was it my ankle?) and I pretended I had hurt myself. And then after I told people the truth, that I was really fine after all and it was all just *great big joke* I said, "April Fool's!" But they just kind of stared at me for a minute and then said, "Oh," and then walked away.

It was not quite the dramatic moment I had hoped for. Nor was it very funny.

And other kinds of pranks--where you're really getting a laugh at someone else's expense--mostly seem mean to me. Of course, if I did have some horribly irritating co-worker, and if I thought I wouldn't get caught, I just might put their stapler in jello.


But today, I have just one thing to share:




Tulips on my table!

No fooling.