seen on Randy Alcorn’s Eternal Perspectives

I recall his birth and the words that were reported to me later, “grey and floppy.”  Thank you, Father, that now he’s creamy blush and wriggly.  But then…  I remember when they waved him past my eyes after his surgical delivery.  I tell him now as I change him out of his spit-up covered clothes, “You had a golden glow.  I don’t go in for that aura stuff, and maybe it was the drugs they gave me, but you were golden.  I thought you might be a blonde or a redhead because seemed to radiate light.  Do I embellish now, almost six months after the fact?  I don’t know.  Maybe.  But you are a special child.  Imago Dei… and a sinner.”

We had a lovely day just me and my little family…

It was thanks to one gift of meat (MEAT!  did you know that you can give meat!  Special Delivery!)  we had a delicious meal that we would not otherwise have had because one little boy who shall remain nameless pitched a fit in the grocery store two days before Christmas when we were supposed to be buying Christmas dinner but instead had to talk through clenched teeth and bah humbug all over the place and then remorsefully ask forgiveness because Jesus is kind to me even when I’m grouchy and so of course I should be kind to my little loves even when they’re grouchy, and all this greatly hindered all grocery-buying intentions.

And then we got home and there was a styrofoam box on my front step.  I thought there might be a human head or something in it because that’s where my mind goes – sorry – but it was just good meat.  That styrofoam box even came with reuse suggestions but I don’t personally like what styrofoam does when it begins to fall apart and the smell is unappealing as well.  My husband suggested it gives off chemicals too.

Dear Husband had to go to work tonight because restaurant managers work on Christmas.  So do the waitresses and busboys and dishwashers and cooks and bartenders and barbacks and coat check girls.  It’s OK, we’re used to it.

I spent the time after the kids went to bed tidying, crocheting and watching A Christmas Carol on YouTube.  It was the version with Alastair Sim.  It was good, but the book was better.  :D  I crack me up.

Have I listed my grievances against blow up Christmas lawn decorations?  Well, for one thing, they are cheesy.  I’m sorry if you love them and I still like you if you do, but they are cheesy.  AND what is with the people who don’t inflate them until they get home from work?  All day long folks are passing by looking at a melted puddle of Tigger in a Santa hat.  Does no one else think this is sort of gruesome?  And finally, we have new neighbors this year whose blow up Christmas lawn decoration is a giant mooning Santa.  Really.  I’d have taken a picture but those people scare me a little and I want to try and avoid the paparazzi and Gene Simmons fight that would be sure to ensue.  Anyway, I suppose I should be grateful it wasn’t a mooning baby Jesus.

Starting tomorrow, the days will begin to get longer.  :)

I’ve been a mother long enough to be grateful that they sometimes sleep when they’re supposed to.  The baby has a trick of going to sleep at bedtime that amazes me every time he does it.  Of course when he doesn’t do it, I have the nerve to feel cheated.

All the work is done for the day and though I could manufacture some or get a jump on tomorrow, I think I’ll just enjoy this.  How rare this feeling is!  Today I worked at a reasonable pace, without frying myself and even found time for a small sewing project.  The kids and I had a pleasant afternoon reading time.  We enjoyed hot chocolate with smarshmallows in front of the tree with all the other lights off before bath and bed.

So this was a good day.  Not a perfect one.  I still had to choke back my temper and apologize for my tone and ask myself why I was getting upset over trivialities.  And it’s not lost on me that some of the reason today was so good was because I let my husband do some of the work.  He made lunch and tended the kids and was all round nice guy.  He’d probably do it everyday if I’d let him but my guilt and control freakishness would not allow that… but that’s another story for another day.

The Organizing Mommy is asking about our “blitzing” plans for the weekend.  Here are mine:

whiteboard to do list

3 bumps on a couch

and yes, the cushion on the left is on upside down.  Don’t ask.  And if you look closely, you can see that we were in the middle of painting the walls.

invitation to son's 5th birthday

I made these invitations myself because I didn’t like the ones with dogs in party hats that my husband brought home.  No offense to my canine readers.

the best way to clean up legos

neat and tidy containerized drawers

Have you read Confessions of a Happily Organized Family?

paper star chains on the Christmas tree

You should see the aluminum foil tree topper I made.

Fatboy Gets a Bath

Giving up facebook has alerted me to the facts that I am not as funny as I thought and that I have a serious addiction to knowing what other people think of me.  Blech to both of those.  It turns out that all the witty status updates that I’d been inflicting on all my “friends” aren’t so witty when written down in a moleskine for my amusement alone.  I don’t even care that the spirals on my ham don’t go all the way up, why would you?

Before I deactivated my account – deactivated because I think you have to sell a pinky toe in order to be able to actually cancel it – I let everyone know I’d be leaving and to please send me their contact information if they had any real desire to keep in touch.  I suppose one or two might simply have not been checking facebook that week, but really the turnout was about what I expected.  My real friends, people with whom I have a rapport, and a few nut cases, sent me their info.  The folks who had friended me to see if I’d gotten fat just kept quiet.  Good for them.  And good for me.

Happily, I’ve been filling up my hours just fine with laundry and dishes.  I’ve also been working on a new way to bathe the baby.

Fatboy Gets a Bath

I’m lying in bed with the baby in the basinet beside me and my two- and four-year-olds in sleeping bags on the floor.  They’re all sick and clingy and claiming to be frightened.  The oldest has been having halloween-related nightmares.  Lovely, I know.

So, I’m lying here wondering if I’ll have the energy after they fall asleep to clean up the play dough that’s all over the dining room and which I should have made them clean up before we went upstairs but didn’t because I was imagining an easy bedtime after which I’d have some quiet time and a quick clean-up all by myself, big laugh.  There’s still the dishwasher to unload and reload and laundry to switch and laundry to fold.  And never mind catching up on any “real” cleaning.

Wait, what’s that I hear?  Deep breathing?  From all three?  Miracles still happen then, huh?

Sorry, I’m so late with this.  I was away visiting family.  I’m not sure I’ll be able to write anything cohesive, but maybe I’ll just shoot for coherent.

In this chapter Pieper enumerates three “movements” which have attempted to keep man from becoming a mere cog in the machine of society.  Those movements are “art for art’s sake,” calling upon tradition – specifically educational tradition, and humanism.

After questioning whether these movements and ones like them are able to make a difference, he leaps into an examination of the “proletariat.”  I don’t quite get the transition or connection.  I mean, I do, a little, but not completely.  Perhaps after I’ve read some of the thoughts of my fellow readers I’ll have a better understanding of this.

Pieper puts forward the idea that the way to solve class struggle, is not to classify everyone as a worker, but rather to make it possible for everyone to be at leisure.  Even the worker needs a sabbath.  (Again, the worker needs a rest not so he can return to work stronger, but rather so that he can remain “human.”)  He needs both the opportunity for rest and the internal ability for it.

If I understand correctly, there are three reasons why a person may be incapable of leisure.  One is that a person has no material possessions of his own, no land, no property and so the only thing he can trade on is his work.  I think of the huge debt that many people have and how they are enslaved by it.

The second reason is government compulsion to constant work and constant productivity.

The third reason is the saddest in my opinion:  ”the inner poverty of the person.”  This is a person who is satisfied with just work and “meaningful action that is not work is no longer possible or even imaginable.”  Being satisfied with one’s work seems like such a good thing, yet being satisfied with ONLY work is just so dull and sad.

The remedies to these three hinderances to leisure, are property ownership purchased with earned wages, a limited government and “overcoming internal poverty.”  (How?)  I find it interesting that Pieper seems to be saying that a free market economy is necessary for the arts to flourish.  I am ignorant in this area.  Is this true?  Does history bear this out?

Work must be seen to serve a specific purpose, to supply a specific need.  It is a means to an end, not the end itself.  If work is all there is, a human becomes narrow.

What the others are saying about this chapter.