Have just been jarringly awakened by the sound of Matt shouting out the window at a cat stalking a robin. Feel rather shattered. The anxiety increases. One of the eggs hatched yesterday. Kept freaking out at the children to get away from the nest. Don't want them in the house, of course, but don't want them outside either. As they say, there's never a good time to have children, or to have a yard full of children, or to have... Read more
Parents en route. House not clean. Bags not packed. Laundry not done. Panic level high. The most obvious course is to continue to lie here a bed, surfing the Internet and going back over all the lists twenty or thirty times. Maybe the lists will do themselves. Maybe I'll go upstairs and discover that I accidentally cleaned the children's rooms. Maybe the chairs aren't sticky after all. Anyway, blogging will probably continue light this week. One thing I'm slowly discovering,... Read more
One Oh my word, I have so much to do. Every time I think I have actually completed a task, fifty more crop up to take its place. Every time I clean the sunroom, seven neighborhood children, at least, come in and trash it when I'm not looking. Every time I sweep a floor, the little girls get a bin of water and start washing their feet and wrecking everything. Every time I pause and pull a weed, I see... Read more
It's going be that kind of day. The smoke alarm seems to be dying, and it had to start doing so in the very very early morning. There's a couple of kids who clearly have a cold. The dog decided to sleep on my back for a portion of the night. I didn't make it through the laundry yesterday, nor write as much as I was hoping. And now am sort of shattered already, so, um, wasn't really able to... Read more
I spent yesterday trying to write through the incredible loudness of many children playing in, nay trashing, my house. I was deeply frustrated by nightfall. One neighborhood child, in particular, thought it was really funny to keep ringing the door bell, running partly away, but then turning back and coming in and batting his long eye lashes and sweetly saying sorry and that he wouldn’t do it again, only to do it again like 30 seconds later. Then the little... Read more
It’s been quite several weeks, who even knows, since we began seriously eating lunch, I mean dinner, with the devotion and dedication any kind of routine change requires. I keep waiting, because of the nature of the universe, for the whole habit to devolve into chaos and trouble, but it hasn’t yet. In fact, it is really, next to Jesus, the true answer to all of our problems, or feels like it anyway. Not that Jesus is just there to... Read more
So, I’m writing a book. For weeks and months I’ve been thinking I ought to mention this Very Grand News but have had one huge insecurity. Well, obviously I’m totally insecure about everything, but this one overtook all the other ones. What if, after announcing it on the interwebs, I then peter out and all the words go away. I am not officially superstitious, being a Christian and all, but I am unofficially so. I have been super anxious that... Read more
The garden is packed with Robins, veritably jostling each other from sheer number, screeching loudly, probably at me, early in the mornings. I've never been much for birds because I never could see them. I would stare up into the dark depths of a tree and see nothing. But here, there's no way around them. They come up and stare at you with their gimlet eye, puffing out their chests and strutting. So anyway, we watched one of them, presumably... Read more
Mother's Day is Sunday, for those of you who have been lucky enough to escape the constant beat of the Internet to remind you every few minutes. Sorry to ruin it for you. Having once read this blog you will have no excuse. You will have to call your mother, or something. Don't hate me. Anyway, who's with me in joining up forces for the abolishment of all these kinds of small memorials. Can't we get rid of Mothers Day... Read more
We're trying to have flowering trees. Long long ago, in our foolish youth, when we lived in lovely Virginia, the spring came in this abundance of flowering trees and general beauty. The winter, being sort of mild, would suddenly melt away, and the whole place would just be flowers, everywhere. Kind of like Oregon, of which I will not speak lest I begin to weep. And, being young and dim in our understanding, we took all the flowering trees for... Read more
Preventing Grace
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