FundyNutter

If I were the kind of person who recognized patterns easily–oh wait! I am. Thank you ASVAB, for that early insight into character–I would notice that like my first summer blogging, there seems to be a quiet lull in the late summer months.

It has a little something to do with the summer sunshine, the icecream and laughing children. It has a little to do with a riot of church activity. And it has a lot to do with my favorite new toy. It’s called a Ground Hound and it pops dandilions. And after you pop them out of the ground you can shoot them across the way into the bucket. Amazing. Delightful. Hours of summer fun.

I want to get a few more so we can have dandelion popping races and games. And because there is no way I am giving you a turn on mine.

The only sad thing about my favorite new toy is that if it works as well as it has so far, I won’t get to use it nearly as much next summer.

Hasta la vista weeds.

But I’ll be back blogging more, as sure as the sun is set to stop shining here in about two months.

I read two great books this weekend.

The first was a little novella called The Uncommon Reader by Allan Bennett.  His writing creds are obvious. He writes effortlessly, charmingly, and with all the ease and grace of a man who has written well his whole life. It is funny, light and makes you want to read more.

The second was All Shall be Well;And all Shall be Well; And all Manner of Things Shall be Well by Tod Wodicka. This book had a scope as big as its title but came in at a mere 265 pages.  I picked it up because it had a beautiful cover and I checked it out because it sounded like a sort of Douglas Addams meets Ken Follet experience.  Except it wasn’t. It was an amazingly beautiful rendering of the life of a sad family who was torn apart by cancer, genius, alcoholism, and genocide.  The lead character is a medieval reenactor on a visit to Europe with his friend the tall, stunning lawyer.

The author is my age. It’s his first novel. I think to myself, that crazy mix of parts should have made a terrible novel by a young person. Except for the one quality that held it all together. Wodicka thoroughly believed in his characters–loved them, handled them carefully, let them act honestly.

The other thing I loved about Wodicka’s novel is he never slumped into the easy world of sex to tell his story. Amazing since sex was a fairly key player in the plot, the story sort of hinged on it.  And yet he refused to write an untoword scene, even when his character was languishing in a Czekoslavokian whorehouse.

That was my weekend reading. I am going to reward myself for next week’s labors at vacation bible school with another book binge.  Any reccomendations?

This was a week for Daniel, if ever their was one.  He would love to live on a piece of property somewhere beautiful so people could gather around us and our fire with their instruments and Jam and the little women can keep the ice cream coming.

It’s a charming dream except for the part where I dread company. My stress escalates to the point of physical manifestation and has me moaning on the coach drowning in aspirin.

I didn’t think of this past week as his anniversary present, and yet, this was how our week went.

Tuesday: our friends Seth and Charity and their three sons came over for dinner.

Wednesday: we had evangelism training at a nearbye church where an old friend made tentative plans with Daniel for a big to-to.

Thursday:our friends Matt and Angela and their two kids came over for an ice cream date

Friday: anniversary dinner out (Little Italy’s downtown with a lovely walk to Ice Cream Renaissance)

Saturday: Norah’s fourth birthday party with seven little girl guests and a handful of their mommies.

When I added up the sheer volume of ice cream consumed and that we had two friends get together’s in one week, (plus a kiddie party!) I realized why I spent so much of Saturday evening curled up in a ball on the sofa nursing my stressed out self.

We have been married seven years today.  And we are getting more alike, burnishing each other through constant contact, reflecting each others more glowing qualities.

The planning, cleaning and anticiaption of events was hard on me, but I was surprised at how much pleasure I got out of just being together with our friends and their families.

I’ve developed a little lactose intolerance in the last seven years, so I could have done with a wee bit less icecream, but all in all, I’m glad we had such a Daniel-ish week.

I hope next time we can have the fire and the jam session too.

We had to color a picture of Laplanders from Norway, because the children of the world coloring page book didn’t have Sweden. It wasn’t a problem though, since it was a good opportunity to show the kids where all of the Scandanavian countries are.  And conveniently last week on Globe Trecker a grouchy American hung out with Laplanders. So now the kids know about teepees in the snow, and herding reindeer with snowmobiles.

But that was just to keep them busy while everyone showed up for class. As soon as we were all full up we led the kids through our London Bridges-esque security screener and checked their pasports.

Then they sat in their chairs, I mean in the airplane, and we got down to business.  It’s a long flight and we wanted to avoid blood clots so they had to do some wiggling. Specifically we sang Huvud akslar hmm hmm hmm…um, it appears I already forgot how head and shoulders goes en Svenska. But that’s okay, because it sounded funny to them at the time and they liked it.

As this is a church activity we moved things right along to a more spiritual place. We did a little singing about God’s creation. We sang about the wee little froggies that have no tails. Sma Groderna e lustiga et sa.  That was a pretty big hit. It led naturally into a conversation about bi-lingualism and how animals speak differently in Sweden. I had them crawling around on the floor nuff nuffing like pigs in a wink. It was great.

Before class was over we fed them balls of butter, chocolate, and sugar with a dash of coffee-my personal favorite sweetie of Sweden.  And we played a little Kub. You know, the thousand year old viking game where you throw sticks at blocks.  If you’ve never taught twenty-five kids between five and eleven how to throw sticks across the fellowship hall, then you are totally missing out.

In the middle of story time I was charged with telling the kids a little something that could change their lives forever. Which of course, is why I was there in the first place.

In our children of the world series we are teaching the kids about all the people God loves and a little about missionaries. So why did I teach them about a place with plenty of churches, SundaySchools, thousands of years of Christian history and all of that?

The easy answer is it is one of the few places I have been.

The better answer is that everyone needs God. Sweden used to have a system of State church. Born in Sweden? Born a Christian. Praise the Lord, this has recently been changed.

I told the kids that for a long long time if you were born in Sweden you could just say “I’m a Christian. I was born that way!” and then I asked them if you can really be born saved.  And then we looked together in the Bible.

We went to that beautiful, simple, old standard in Paulus brev till Romarnas.  Romans 10:9.  Not by doing good stuff, as some kids suggested. Not by obeying your parents.  The only way to get saved is this, as always:

“…If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you shall be saved. ”

There is nothing simpler in the world.  All it takes is handing yourself over wholly to Him (that of course, is what having a Lord in your life means.) And you’ve got to believe the Gospel truth and let God know.

I’d teach Sweden again and again since it leads so perfectly to the heart of Salvation.

Please don’t consider this a complaint. It is an honest query.

As I just mentioned, one way to keep a grocery bill low is to limit the convenience foods most often eaten as snacks. (It’s helpful for cutting back on calories too.) I tend to buy one package of convenient snacks on grocery day. A sort of apology to the kids for making them suffer with me at the store.  Yesterday we had the devils own Pop Tarts.

But the thing with pre-schoolers and toddlers is, they have regularly scheduled snacks. At our house snack time is during Elmo’s world and when Lucy gets up from her afternoon nap.

After about 23 days in a row of banana’s in the morning, the girls eventually protest and beg for something else.  Similarly, they hate it when I give then the lunch leftovers in the afternoon.

I don’t love doing that either. I prefer to use snack time as an opportunity to balance out their nutrition.  I like to give them oatmeal and milk for breakfast, banana for snack, quesadillas and vegtables for lunch, carrots and cookies (or other sweet treat because I love them) in the afternoon and then the classic meat, carb, veggie dinner.

I bought a copy of Better Homes and Gardens July edition. It had an article about snacks in it. It told me to give them a variety of healthy foods.  It said to look for food that had no artificial ingredients or transfatty acids. The author of the article said a great way to give your kids a burst of afternoon energy was to pair their afterschool veggie snack with…Lays Potato Chips: All Natural and with No Trans-Fats.

I think it used the brand name Lays two hundred and seven times.  I think the PR lady at Lays wrote the article.

I get the whole healthy, no transfats, no artificial ingredients no high fructose corn syrup. I make my own cookies, after all.  But have they never heard the words “empty calories” before?

Because with all of that fat fresh from the canola tree (yeah yeah, I know fresh from the seeds of the rape plant) potato chips are very high in calories and void of any nutritian.

So then.  Better Homes and Gardens was no help.

My friend Brooke sent me an awesome recipe for granola bars which I am going to make this weekend.  I think they would be a good thing to keep in the freezer for snack times.

Today the girls are parked in front of the tv with peanut butter spoons and grapes. (We are out of bananas.) But afternoon is coming quickly and I am going to have to come up with yet another snack.

Somebody help!

It needs a good tooting, and only I (or my friend Rachel) could really do it justice.

The Columbian newspaper has featured two articles in the last two weeks about living on the cheap, healthy, green and single income.

The first article was about being cheap and living on a single income. It featured a CPA who owns her own business and has a stay at home daddy.  They have two kids.  How do they manage?  Well, for starters, they sold their Californian home and moved to a very upperclass area of Vancouver where homes start around $350,000.  I give them Kudos for the big sacrifice of moving.  That is a world rocking thing to do.  However. It is people like that who created our $350,000 overpriced homes in the first place. But that is a digression.

They put 20% down because Cali homes are even more overpriced than PNW homes are. They made sacrifices like buying exercise equipment instead of keeping their gym memberships.   Woo hoo.

Enough of that family. Clearly I think that they aren’t doing anything special enough to get the front page of the Columbian.

The second article was about a mom who is my age. She has a family of four, though only her three year old daughter was mentioned.  So I am guess the other kiddo is a babe in arms.

She is a stay at home mommy.  She gardens for her summer veggie needs. She buys her groceries from local farmers. She buys grain and grinds it.  She buys milk and churns it. She bakes her own bread and spreads her own butter on it. First thought–Yumm!! I do  respect her for all of that work and how healthy it is. But remember, the article is being sold as a Cheap Living peice, with a side note of green.  The author wrote all about this mother’s great sacrifices and countercultural lifestyle choices because they were saving her so much money.

The mother in question also offered us her best piece of advice.  She said people spend too much money on groceries because they try to fix all sorts of different foods, Asian one night, Mexican the next, etc.  I too have complained about that.  Sometimes it just seems like moms are expected to know how to cook everything under the sun without the benefit of a culinary education. (Hey! No complaining!) She said the best way to counter act that kind of waste is to pick one style of food and make it over and over again.

I’ll repeat some important facts: She’s feeding two adults and one three year old.

Let’s have a drumroll for our cheap friend.

Her grand grocery total? $250 for the month.

Thassright.

This news article came on the heals of my great month of victory. I had been spending too much money on groceries. For example, one recent month saw me spend $500 on groceries.  I can’t actually afford that so Daniel and I went back to the cash system two months ago.

This month I had a great victory over my grocery bill. It made the lady in the newspaper sound like an amatuere.

For comparison, I did not grind any wheat or churn any butter–though, I do think that sounds fun and delicious.  But I did make five loaves of bread instead of buying it. And I made ten dozen cookies.  (For the Big Appreciation Event.)  I fixed chicken with Indonesian peanut sauce, burritos, spaghetti with homemade marinara, and stir fry with hoisin sauce, amongst other more American fare..  The Peanut Sauce was my favorite.

The other lady wants us to eat the same food to save lots of money. I want to get very good at making a variety of food so we won’t get bored eating at home, which would send us off to restaurants.

Important facts about us: I am feeding two adults, a girl who is turning 4 in two weeks and a two year old.

drum roll for me please.

My total grocery bill this month:

$175

The only thing is, shopping at Winco and watching the price per ounce on the tags, only buying what you need for the two weeks, keeping an empty refrigerator, not having any snack foods on hand other than carrot sticks, homemade bread, apples, and banana’s isn’t really front page news.   It ’s just living within my means.

From yesterday’s Bible reading:

“Do everything without complaining and arguing so that no one can criticize you. Live clean, innocent lives as children of God, shining like bright lights in a world full of crooked and perverse people.”  Phillipians 2: 14 & 15

I can see the value of clean living–or, conversely I can see the damage that dirty living causes.  Foul language, rotten attitudes, gettin’ inta fights, none of that is any good for community.  And the more contentious part of the non-believing world is always waiting with baited breath for just that kind of stuff so they can throw the hypocrite bomb at the church. It’s more than bad press, it really turns people off of God.

But complaining?  Even when the kids get me up three times in the night? At 1:30, 2:30 and 5:30-”Now now, Traci. Without complaining!”

but…what about when the dishes are piled so high that they topple over and break but there is a kid with poopy pants who needs to be changed at the same ti-”without complaining!”

but! What about when they throw tantrums in public and-”without complaining!”

BUT But but but what about how kids ages 2 and 3 are dreadfully boring and playing ponies with them all day long actually robs your brain of oxyg-”WITHOUT COMPLAINING!”

without complaining?

But but but but but

if I have to live without complaining, whatever will I blog about?!

(and if I can’t argue either, what is the point of logging into Netzero at all?)

I believe Daniel had an hours sleep last night. He may have gotten a little more at the funeral home. Since he eta was 4:30 am, he decided to stay there and crash on the pews for a while, rather than driving the extra hour home and back.

THe 4:30 am eta came on the heals of an all night on call evening.  Some highlights of the evening where when the worlds worst hospital insisted Daniel take a deceased person to the funeral home at 11:30 pm only to discover after he got delivered her safely that the tissue and eye donation people hadn’t had their turn yet.  Stupid hospital.

Another highlight was when the world’s worst answering service called Daniel three times (8pm, 10:30 pm and 1am) to tell him that he did not need to come pick up a different body. A call that needed to be made? I think not.  And of course that was followed immediately by the 2 am call that asked “Where on earth are you Daniel? We (at the hospital) told the family you would have their loved one at the funeral home by dinner time.” yeah…the idiots at the call center gave Daniel the wrong message 3 times. And why…why could this beloved person not stay overnight at the hospital morgue? What on earth was the hospital thinking offering an afterhours pick up they hadn’t confimred?

Daniel’s boss is on vacation this week. So, in the great tradition of funeral service, his all nighter is followed by an all-dayer, no comp time anywhere to be seen.

But this all brings me to the point of the van.

Have you ever been sitting in traffic in the dead of the night, maybe stopped at a light next to a Ford astrovan or windstar with smoked windows? Did you look over and see a man driving by himself? Perhaps you dismissed it as a midnight milk run. Perhaps you wondered and wondered and couldn’t come up with a good reason for a family van to be out at all hours.

Well, last night at least, on behalf of just one funeral home (out of dozens in our metro area) three such vans were running around carrying various parts of people to their final destinations.  And I imagine, there were others on behalf of other funeral homes doing the same thing.

Personally, I plan on passing away during a morning nap in my late 90’s.  It may be less mysterious but it sure is nicer on the funeral director’s wife.

Anything from Spoiled Chef to Bunco counts as one of these, since the purpose is to throw Norah off the track. I don’t want her to know that we will be laughing and playing games and eating a lot of sugar, you know?

And yet yesterday, it was mostly true. There was a bag of M & M’s involved and a box full of my homemade chocolate chip oatmeal cookies, but the events were literally meetings, and at least one of them had lots of boring talk.

I was so angst filled, bitter and irritated earlier this year. I had been basically begged to take over the chair position of the missions commitee and then told, when I grudgingly accepted, that I couldn’t. It was weird, confusing, and annoying. I didn’t want the job anymore than anyone else on the committee, but I was willing.  And then, when the idea was run by the elders (which technically it doesn’t need to be) they said, “ummm…no. Not Traci.”

I looked for and seemed to find a pattern of disappointement at our chuch, where I disappointed leadership and vice versa.  Wise, kind people from church told me I was being silly, that our Pastor invests in us and everyone, at some point or other, has had a “talking to.” Well, anyway. I was missing what should have been obvious in that situation.

First obvious point: I didn’t want the job and the Elders didnt’ want me to have it, so apparantly God didn’t want me to have it either.

Second obvious point: When God has a servant willing to do stuff that needs to get done, he uses them.

Which all brings me back to yesterday’s boring mommy and daddy talk meetings.

At the Sunday School meeting I was welcomed whole heartedly as the Children’s Ministry Director (a co-leader with my dear friend Rachel.) I have a vision of what ought to be done and now have full reign to function as the Teambuilder/Encourager.

I probably wouldn’t have felt like I had time to do it if I was slogging through  mission budget and meeting minutes every month.

And then, at the Business Meeting our church approved the begining of a Spanish ministry.

I speak Spanish.  (I have a long way to go to improve, but still. I speak Spanish.)  Daniel and I have both been personally invited to join the leadership team for the Spanish ministry.

I have about a thousand reasons I said no, the first being I want to focus on the Sunday School work. Also, I am very opinionated and talkative–not the best qualities for a smoothly running leadership team.  So long as someone (Daniel, I hope) joins the team, planning can get done and they can delegate grunt work to me. I am happy por asistir servicios espanol, and do grunt work. But I don’t want to hinder the planning with my opinionated chit chat.

So it turns out I have plenty of work to do, plenty of responsibility and the folks who decide things at church trust me plenty well after all.

Which brings us to our Lord, as it ought to. He said, after all, “Why worry about tomorrow? Today has enough worries of its own.”

I intend to stop worrying about why or why not something is or is not going to happen in the future. There is plenty enough to occupy me right now.

Most of my days are made up of: Cleaning (house, garden, children), cooking, fixing, reading, going insane.  Things that seem like great big insane things to a person with such a limited scope of activity likely seem mundane to the rest of the world.

Yesterday I moved three beds, four dressers, a couch and a big tv.  I moved all of the flotsum and jetsum that accumulates under said furniture as well. Somtimes I get a bee in my bonnet and move my furniture around for aesthetics or cleaning.  This time I was rearranging my whole life.  In italics.

Our house is a ranch with addition. The addition is a huge master suite with access to the deck and huge bathroom…well, bathroom, laundry room combo. When I shut myself up in our bedroom I can feel like I live in a giant house.  I don’t. The original footprint of the house was about 1000 square feet, so all of the rooms, barring our love nest, are pretty small.

A couple of years ago I read an article in a homes magazine about a family that turned their master suite into the family room, because it was so big and comfy.  “Lunatics!” I thought.

And yet, that is what I did yesterday. My girls share a room, because they want to. So I shoved them and all their stuff into the small bedroom. Then I shoved me and all of my stuff into the medium bedroom. Then I put the tv and couch (which Daniel made and I had to unmake a little bit to get through the door) in the master bedroom.

Our den which, two decades ago, used to be the masterbedroom, is a pass-through room to the now-family room.  It has the computer and boxes of jumbled toys in it right now.

I like the new family room.  On the one hand, it is much bigger then the old den.  On the other hand, in this era of the great room, it is still sort of smallish for a family room.  I like all of the sunshine that the two big windows and the slider door give that room. It is nice to share that with the kids and the tv.

On the other hand I think I hate loosing the master bathroom.  I haven’t showered yet, but I am going to have to bring my clothes with me into the bathroom. Bah.  And, since the largest room in the house and the largest bathroom in the house are now public spaces, I will have to keep them both clean. Double Bah.

It feels counter cultural though. Like I’ve done something big and unamerican. After all, don’t we move and move and move until we finally have that magnificent home which boasts a master suite with a reading nook, a spa-like bathroom, and direct patio access? What kind of person trades all of that for a pink 12 x 9 foot rectangle with balloons on the ceiling?

I told myself I would keep it like this until the end of summer…give it a real shot. Make today’s backache from moving all of that furniture by myself worth something.

The best I can offer now though (as I anticipate the first inconvenient shower) is, “We’ll see.”