A Road Less Travelled

Yesterday I made the two dresses I was talking about and they came out so nicely. Samuel insisted that I wear the purple one today so I did. I felt so snuggly in my snoogely dress. I guess Crystal hadn’t slept well last night because Justice was in the swing downstairs when I got up. He was not pleased with the situation as it currently stood so I picked him up and started making breakfast. The children heard me moving around downstairs and all began clamoring to come down. I told them to get dressed. Arianna said she already had and then had changed into her ballerina costume. I told her to change back. Isaac said he didn’t have any clean pants that fit him and Samuel needed one of everything. They had clean clothes, but the clean clothes were very nicely folded and on the laundry room table at the time instead of being nicely folded and in their drawers. I took Justice up with me and found clothes for all of them. By this point my hand was going numb and I needed two hands so I put him back in his swing and listened to him scream. I was getting breakfast closer to being ready when the boys came down, dressed and in costume. They went out into the family room where Justice was screaming and started sword fighting. Arianna brought Noah down and the boys broke a glass. So I put the oatmeal on low and locked Noah in the kitchen while I cleaned up the broken glass. Justice was expressing his displeasure at being back in his swing at the top of his lungs and Noah was equaly perturbed by being kept in the kitchen. The children kept asking helpful questions like, “Are you done yet?”. Of course they needed to be sure I could hear them from the kitchen so they used this opportunity to demonstrate the fine lungs and vocal cords God gave them. I hollered back for Arianna to stir the oatmeal and finally cleaned up the glass and the water. I had the older kids set the table while I changed Noah’s diaper, got him dressed and listened to Justice scream. I served the oatmeal while Noah was flipping out about something so I made him sit down on a chair until I told him to get up. After I got everything ready for breakfast with the help of the older kids I told Noah to get up and I told Isaac to help Noah get in his chair. Noah refused to go with Isaac. I tried again and it was the same thing. It was weird. The best I can figure is that Noah isn’t used to Isaac picking him up and he just didn’t trust him not to drop him. He went with Arianna just fine. We all ate oatmeal and I got a couple annoying drips on me because I was once again down to one hand. The kids ate their oatmeal without any mishap and Noah ate his with his normal amount of messiness. This would not normally be a problem except that I was really thinking ahead and I had put Noah in clean clothes without a bib. So after breakfast I gave him a bath while Arianna held Justice and the boys cleared the table. It was a loud, hectic morning. I feel like it should have gone better because I was wearing my new, snoogely dress, but I guess sometimes even snoogely isn’t enough to stave off the madness.

Comments(2)

(Warning: This is one of those posts that I wrote because I am feeling bubbly and excited. I don’t know if any one who is not me will really care, but, you know, I don’t care. I’m going to post it anyway. Hahahahaha) Snoogely is a word. Spellcheck tried to change it to Snuggly which is close, but with a U instead of two O’s and two G’s when one would suffice and it doesn’t have a E when E’s are just cool. I am insisting that snoogely is a legitimate word. It has to be; I’ve been using it a lot tonight. See, I was talking with Raquel and a very lovely lady in our local church about clothing one Sunday and I was talking about how my very favorite dress was, and is, black. I find this to be unfortunate because I love color so much, but this dress is warm and snoogely and just happens to be black. So this lady said that she would get me some fabric to make a colorful snoogely dress for my birthday. She then couldn’t find any fabric she liked and she thought that my birthday was this month and she felt some time pressure and so last Sunday she gave me a card with a check in it to get fabric to make a colorful snoogely dress. Tonight I went out with a friend and we found the perfect fabric in the perfect color on sale. Yay!! I got cloth to make a purple dress and some cloth to make a green dress and oh, I am so excited. I expect to have two very colorful, very snoogely dresses soon. Hooray!

Comments(1)

Yesterday Arianna started the first Boxcar Children book. She read one chapter before breakfast and brought the book to the table so she could tell us about it. We served breakfast and we were eating and talking about something when, all of a sudden, Seth says, “Arianna!” She has her head down on the table and she’s reading the book in her lap. It was so funny. She didn’t get scolded for anything because we all understood. She was one chapter in and it had already hooked her. Arianna then decided that she wanted to try and read the entire book in one day. And she did. And today she read another Boxcar Children book in one day. She makes me so proud.

Comments(1)

Tomorrow we will be leaving to travel to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving. No, it doesn’t take a week and a half to get there. (Smart aleck.) We will be spending a week or thereabouts at my parents house, including Thanksgiving. Actually I think we’re all going to my aunt and uncle’s house for Thanksgiving. But since my parents will be there too, and the original plan was to go spend Thanksgiving with them… Anyway, you get the idea. I will in theory be able to write blog posts–and even post them–from my parents house. How often I actually will is another question. In the mean time, Gabrielle will still be here to amuse, inform, and generally entertain you. Happy week before Thanksgiving to you all, and to all a good night.

Comments(0)

Today I took homemade marshmallows to the fellowship dinner. That is, I claim I took marshmallows to the fellowship dinner. Gabrielle says they are quite good, but they are not marshmallows because marshmallows come from the store. Yes, I reply, marshmallows come from the store. That’s exactly why it’s so cool that I found out how to make them! There is nothing beyond my reach–I’ve made sandals out of duct tape, I’ve made lipstick out of a crayon, and now I have made my own marshmallows. It is true that they are marshmallow-like-substance rather than a true copy of storbought marshmallows. However, as they are also a confection of superior taste and quality, it seems to me that I have the true marshmallow of which the storebought variety is a mere imitation. To arms, all followers of the true marshmallow! Er…that is to say…I made marshmallows. They were pretty good, too.

Comments(4)

This isn’t really about the Burning Plum. Or maybe it is. It depends on how you look at it. Thinking about last night I realized something once again. I have friends. In the plural, even. And not just acquaintances who are called friends out of politeness.

Any conversation which involves me saying the words “deer spoor” or “Ny-Quil on ice cream” had better be a conversation with real friends.

Any night when I tell a story that’s only half finished, with my throat closing up from sheer nervousness, there had better be friends there to listen to it.

Any meal is a lot better when there are friends there.

I have friends. I can’t seem to find the words to explain why this is so mysterious to me. I just don’t understand how or why it happened. But somehow it did.

I have friends.

Comments(0)

Though I haven’t read all of these poems I liked most of what I did read, and they are by one of my favorite mystery authors. http://www.anglicanlibrary.org/sayers/catholictales/index.htm

Comments(0)

For most of my life I lived in a place where I could walk out the door into a front yard, and from the front yard to a moderately quiet road where I was unlikely to meet anyone. When I moved to Marquette Heights I thought of that as city life. I walked out the door to find rows of houses, and had to walk several blocks find a cornfield and a large patch of sky. Sometimes there would even be someone outside one of these houses, and they might speak to me–some outrageous statement such as “Good morning.” or “Hi.” In time I learned to deal with these stressful exchanges, and sometimes even found them pleasant. Now I live in the city. When I step out the door there’s very little buffer zone between me and the rest of the world. I immediately go to ‘yellow alert’ when I step onto the sidewalk, scanning the people I meet–and I always meet people–for possible threats. This is mostly because of martial arts training from my father. Oddly enough, I’ll probably settle in sooner with the scanning and analyzing than without it. I can differentiate between a dangerous situation and an awkward situation. When someone asks if I have cigarettes I don’t find it suspicious. It just makes me nervous. I like being able to walk to a thrift store and a grocery store, but so far I haven’t really enjoyed the actual process of walking there. I can see how I might in the future, but right now I don’t. I did meet a neighbor down the street on one of my walks. We had a lovely chat, and she wanted to know all about which rooms we painted and what colors we painted them. I actually enjoyed that talk. (How very odd that I had a conversation with someone I’d never met before and I enjoyed it in spite of finding it stressful…) I was amused more than anything else by the man walking down the street who said, “You going to grow that hair any longer? *********! That’s long!” For probably the first time in my life I was asked if I had a cigarette, and in my confusion I actually apologized for not having one. I take it back, maybe I do enjoy the walks. They have their good points and their amusing points. I can’t think of any really bad points. Except maybe walking across Sheridan at the corner of Main Street–that’s rather stressful. But I’m sure I’ll get used to that too. Then there’s the driving in the city. I drove to the Ben-Ezra’s house. It only took me ten minutes and I didn’t get lost because there are only three turns. I even doubled the number of turns by going around the block to be on the right side of the street, and I still didn’t get lost. Those are the good points to driving in the city. The bad parts of driving in the city all happened as I was trying to get out of the driveway. I backed out with a car parked on each side of the driveway and one parked directly across the street from the driveway. I was sure I would hit one of them, but in the end I finally eased all the way onto the street with a few inches clearance at each end of the van. That was when the van stalled. If it hadn’t been a quiet street I would have been amazingly stressed out at the point. I didn’t even stress out when the van didn’t start again, though after the third try I was much less calm. Then I realized that I hadn’t put the van back into park. Oops. Overall, I guess this is what I expected about the city. Good points. Bad points. Different from anything I could have predicted because I’ve never done this before. I can live with this.

Comments(1)

Now, I’ve seen all kinds of things turned into something romantic. I’ve heard of plumbing being romantic and mowing the lawn a sign of cherishing your wife, but today I saw one that I’ve haven’t seen before. Last night Seth copied some music from his laptop onto the home computer and this morning Crystal was trying to find it. She was having the hardest time locating the files and then she said, “Oh, there they are. He put them under my name. How sweet.” I just stared at her. What was sweet about this I couldn’t say, but she felt loved and cherished. I suppose that’s what matters.

Comments(0)

Have I ever told the tale of the Burning Plum? No? Well, the story of the Burning Plum started when Theresa was looking for a paint color to go in their new living room that would not clash with the fireplace tiles. The color she eventually decided upon is called Burnt Plum. We spend many long days painting and I wonder if the fumes got a little strong and we eventually decided that every home needed a burning plum and we asked what would happen if the plum went out? We got much sillier than that, but you don’t need to know all the details. Then someone, I don’t remember who, thought it would be great if we could get the Lansberrys a painting of a burning plum. I asked if I could have the paint swatch (Theresa didn’t think this was at all strange behavior for me), we sent it to my sister who recently took up painting and she sent us a painting of a burning plum. We put it in the Lansberry house while they were on their trip and when they came back they were most surprised. Theresa then told us that we were going to have a Burning Plum party in celebration of the new house, the perfect color and friendship. So last night we, they and some other people gathered and ate very good food and drank very excellent wine. We made fun of me for a slip of the tongue, discussed the relative methods of procurring more lasagna for Raquel, talked about deadlines and punctuation and I kept insisting that Raquel did not make marshmellows because marshmellows come from the store. The rest of the conversation was somewhat less normal. For dessert Theresa made a plum and cherry sauce to go over ice cream. She doused it in brandy and we all watched while she lit it on fire. I have never seen someone spoon fire into a bowl of ice cream. It was most cool and it never got old. Seth kept putting more brandy on his ice cream and lighting it on fire. The children thought flaming dessert was the highlight of the evening. After dessert we gathered in the Burnt Plum living room and told stories about burning plums. Raquel told a story about the Burning Plum that hung over a family’s dining room table and how, when the plum went out, the son had to rescue his father who was held prisoner by an evil wizard. Seth told three stories and one of them was even serious. I told a fairy tale about a prince who inherited a living castle from his father and how, because he was proud and arrogant, the burning plum that is the heart of every living home went out. He had to quest to find the perfect flame to rekindle the plum or his castle would die. James told a story that almost made everyone cry about a young man who’s home was dark until a young lady entered it and the plum in his chandelier began to burn. He told about the good times when the plum burnt strong and bright. He told about the sad times when a baby had died and how the plum almost went out. He told about the end of the man’s life and how he could see the light of the plum for what it was. It was love. Some of the children even told stories though they tended to mumble and their stories tended to wander. Maybe next year they’ll do better. Theresa told a tale that I can readily believe to be the definitive story of the Burning Plum. It was about the family Blessed and their home overlooking the Chasm of Insanity. It was about the friendship between the family Blessed and the family Laughter and about the goodness of the All Beautiful Creator. All in all it was a grand evening and I am looking forward to next year when we can do it again.

Comments(2)