Duplo Engineering

Beet and Walnut Hummus

Bad picture of good food

Clothing Purge

The Great Household Reorganization Project has gone well, albeit unblogged. I went through my clothes and now everything fits neatly in my drawers - not that it will every get put away like this again.

I've realized the big problem in my wardrobe is shirts. I have so many rarely-worn shirts, and even the ones I do wear regularly, I don't like that much. Your average shirt these days seems way too clingy and just not-flattering to a women who has had a couple of babies, not to mention too low-cut for my comfort. I used to wear polo shirts all the time, not sure why I stopped, but a quick google suggests that no one wears polo shirts any more. Hm, well, dealing with this problem can be postponed until the baby is here.

To mend

Also, all my cold-weather sleepwear is really ugly. Do cute flannel PJs exist?

To Goodwill

From the Library

Shaker Lane by Alice and Martin Provensen

Driving around Pepacton Reservoir in the Catskills on our recent trip, we saw signs marking the "Former Site of Arena" and the "Former Site of Shaverton," two of the four towns that were destroyed to build the reservoir. This stirred vague memories, and I came home from our first trip back to the library with Shaker Lane by the wonderful Alice and Martin Provensen. 

The book recounts the rise and fall of a small village not far from the Provensens' own home in upstate New York.  It is an unsentimental story about place and loss and life going on. 

Great Household Reorganization Project of 2012!

Nesting urges are kicking in, I guess, but also just the frustrations of trying to keep the house tidy and clean when there is too much stuff floating around without homes. Peg Bracken advice to the random housekeeper is to "act immediately on whatever housewifely impulses come your way," so here we go.

Aims:

• Declutter/purge
• Assign everything homes
• Address inadequacies in our furnishings (need more seating in living room, like, yesterday)
• Better prepared environment for the kiddos
• Finally unpack and hang our pictures and artwork

Starting in the master bedroom because it needs the least work and will give me a quick and easy feeling of accomplishment and productivity. The main tasks here are to sort through my clothes and tidy the closets, add some decorations and a crucifix, as well as give it a decent cleaning. I also think I want to move the chest with the linens into the guest room and bring the kids' clothes dresser in here, in which case I need to sort through their clothes and do the big seasonal switch. If I get super-ambitious, maybe even add a Montessori-style self-care corner? 

Housekeeping and the Little Flower

I started reading Heather King's Shirt of Flame: A Year with St. Thérèse of Lisieux yesterday, her feast day. It's a wonderful book on St. Thérèse, but I was particularly pleased to be reminded that "unaccustomed to housework of any kind--she'd hardly known how to fix her own hair or to make a bed before entering the convent--Thérèse was never particularly adept at sweeping, needlework, or any of her assigned chores." So there's the one thing I have in common with the Little Flower.

Kids Crafts

Despite liking to do handicrafts myself, I'm not much of a crafty mom. But sometimes I get my act together and the kids get to glue beans on construction paper.

Alabama Chanin Bandana

This was SO FUN to stitch.

I am definitely hooked and planning my next, bigger project.

Also, a couple of interesting clothing-related items via Alabama Chanin I want to file away for further thought and also when I'm back in a stable size:

Seam Allowance: make 25% of your own clothing
Project 333: reduce your wardrobe to 33 items

Elsewhere

I wrote a little thing about how to be a localist anywhere. Here's my favorite line, if I do say so myself:

But to say therefore that it doesn’t matter who cleans a toilet looks at the matter strictly from the toilet’s perspective.

There and Back Again

After 2600 miles, stops in five states, a conference, a wedding, and a visit with dear friends, we are home. Whew.

From the Library

MotherStyles by Janet P. Penley

I am kind of a temperament nerd, so when I happened across this parenting book based on Myers-Briggs types, it came right off the shelf. Honestly, I didn't expect too much when I started to skim it that evening, but I found myself reading half of it aloud to Bob. I love that the goal of this books is not to present a particular ideal of motherhood, but to give you tools to understand your mothering personality and the strengths and weaknesses that are particular to you. The descriptions of the INTP's "struggles" had Bob and I cracking up: "noise and confusion of family life" and "routines."You don't say?

Mothering, like the rest of life, is largely about making choices - we all know we can't do it all, but how do you decide what to do? The insight I have gained from learning more about temperament has really helped me think more clearly about what kind of choices make sense for our family, to stop striving for things I'm unlikely to ever be able to pull of well, but also how to better take care of things that I have to that do not come terribly naturally to me.

Careers and Vocations

Bob and I loved this piece from Leah Libresco this morning:

Today, many of the most high-status jobs for the well-educated make a virtue of intensity and commitment. Investment banking boasts 80-hour work weeks; Teach for America’s emotional crucible results in a high burnout rate; and jobs in the political sector spawn articles like Anne-Marie Slaughter’s cri de coeur. Have a Type A personality? These jobs are ready to push you to (or past) your limit, and isn’t that what excellence is all about? 

There’s a word for people who turn over their entire waking life to one cause, and willingly sacrifice the possibility of a family for the opportunity to serve: monks (or, more archaically, oblates). Just like the driven twenty-somethings of Rosin’s article, monks and nuns have made a commitment so total that it precludes marriage. But in the case of vowed religious, the form of their service is meant to be elevating, not just useful. I seldom hear people claim that spreadsheets are good for the soul. Even for people doing high intensity work for the public good (the teachers, the social workers, the public interest lawyers, etc.), the form of their work may still be deadening...

He and I had a somewhat different take on this - Bob was, first, slightly miffed as he had come up with the same comparison a few years ago in a conversation about "work/life balance" with his former boss (and TFA alum!), but mainly his reaction was that it's time for people (ie. his co-workers) to be honest about these choices and sacrifices and quit whining!

My reaction came from having dropped out of a profession and seeing the equal confusion that surrounds motherhood. Not only do we confuse careers with vocations, but we confuse vocations with careers. Careers are about productivity, specialization, and achievement. But vocations are about faithfulness, particularity, and suffering.

Building Nestboxes

Finally!

Starting

Our summer ended with a crazy, wonderful, exhausting rush of out-of-town company, including Joseph's godmother, Lucy's godparents and their five incredible children, and Bob's brother and his Peace Corps volunteer sister, on vacation from Guatemala for a couple of weeks. There was also a couple of overnight stays in Memphis in there to accompany Papa on his work trips (and finally go to the Fire Museum).

Our calendar is pretty calm for the next month, and the weather has been positively, delightfully autumnal, so tomorrow we begin not-preschool.



I am really trying to ease in to this by sticking, at first, to the activity that comes easiest to me - reading. Also, since I have to cook dinner regardless, I've planned very simple meals that Joseph can help prepare. Assuming we get into a good grove, we may add some other structured-ish activities: pre-writing exercises, math manipulatives, nature walks, handicrafts and the like.

Joseph also had his first catechism class today before Mass. He announced very solemnly this morning as he was getting dressed that he would need to bring his notebook with him to class, so we sent him along with the beautifully covered notebook his aunt had brought him from Guatemala. I haven't seen the notes he took yet.

Books!

While in Louisville for the CiRCE conference, my uncle took us to his favorite bookstore in town, Half Price Books, We pulled ourselves away after about two hours and too many books, even though we hadn't even browsed several of our favorite sections. The score I was most excited about was this from the clearance shelf:

We had just listened to Ken Myers' interview with Peter Reinhart from shortly after this book came out. A flawless hard cover copy for two bucks? Struan, here I come.

Recipe Organization

I recently reorganized all of my countless recipe clippings, sticking them in page protectors in binders.

I also culled a great, great many of them, only keeping those with ingredients I actually keep on hand and that have relatively simple preparations (good bye, Martha Stewart-23-step-recipes-within-recipes!).

Somehow I still have about half a dozen granola recipes, though. 

Simplifying

I'm always reading on blogs stuff that people try out once or twice and then want to tell you how awesomely life changing it is. Are they still doing it a month or two later? Who knows? They'll never tell.

I've been making our own laundry soap for about eight months, using the classic borax, washing soda, fels naptha recipe. It's worked just fine, but this week, I bought liquid laundry detergent again.


There are many things I'd like to DIY, more than I will ever have time to. It turns out that laundry soap is nowhere near the top of that list.

CiRCE 2012

Part of our summer travels this year included attending the Circe conference in Louisville (where we also got to visit with some much-loved extended family). I got the impression that a lot of people go to Circe for the discussions of the "big picture," and I certainly enjoyed those conversations as well. However - and I guess this is just my introvert self showing, as I spend too much time in my own head contemplating life, the universe, and everything as it is - I found myself most enjoying the more practical talks I attended, probably because I have a hard time getting down to implementation on my own. Two sessions I attended in particular renewed my Charlotte Mason enthusiasm.

Fall Creek Falls

The first was a talk by Dr. Paula Flint, founder of a school in Arlington, TX. Hearing Dr. Flint describe how Charlotte Mason methods have facilitated their full-inclusion model at her school was incredibly exciting and really affirmed my increasing conviction that CM methods could be the key to bringing a classical curriculum to the low-income population (which generally has quite varied academic needs) we hope to serve with our own school some day. I like so much about her school's mission statement:

"The mission of the Flint Academy is to provide an education in the classical tradition for all students regardless of their learning needs, integrated with a Christian worldview, having the Scriptures at the center, and presented in a family oriented, nurturing environment."

Rock Island State Park

The second session was Cindy Rollins' Morning Time talk. I need to renew my commitment to only listen to advice from homeschooling moms who have actually graduated a few kids! Their perspective is so much healthier than a lot of what I can/do waste my time reading on the interwebs. Cindy's talk inspired me to add a few more things to my not-preschool plans for the year. These plans have us starting in mid-August, and I hope to post some of them by then for some kind of accountability (more practically, I'm also sharing them with Bob). Also, I am totally stealing Cindy's line that "morning time is for when you are in prison and the rats are eating your toes."

What's been eating your garden?

Beet Greens Pesto

A while back, we had a family from our parish over for brunch, and I decided to make these baked egg-stuffed tomatoes. But I was also making marinated beets from the garden, and, having just read Tamar Adler, decided to use the beet tops to make the pesto for the tomatoes.

I also threw in the beet stems, which made the pesto kind of stringy - fortunately, this wasn't too noticeable in the tomatoes, which were pretty delicious. I did wind up with lots of leftover pesto, some of which went with pasta, where the stringiness was more apparent. Meh.

The rest I smeared on a steak prior to broiling. THAT was good.

Indigo Bunting

One advantage of our weedy front "herb garden" is the amazing birds it attracts. I spent way too much time trying, but this was the best picture I ever got of what apparently may be an Indigo Bunting.

Notice the lettuce gone to seed on the right

Vacation

I think you've gotten your vacation just right when you are as happy to come home as you were to leave.

Preschool?

While the questions about when Joseph would be starting school initially slowed down when we moved to Tennessee, they are starting up again now that he is a (tall?) four-year old. I have no interest in starting "formal academics" this fall--or probably next fall, honestly. But I have been thinking yet again if the start of a new school year shouldn't be a time for me to try yet again to add a little more structure to our daily life.

This is the game where you dig a giant hole and put all the dirt from it down your shirt

I've learned that when I fail to make changes I want to make it is often partially because they are way way too big. Some people thrive on that kind of immediate and dramatic challenge -- not throwing anything away for a whole year! not eating anything grown more than three houses away for a whole year! not wearing pants for a whole year! -- but I am emphatically not one of them. Tiny, tiny, impossibly small baby steps all the way. So I'm keeping my plans as small and as simple as possible, focusing on growth in virtue, living the liturgical year and reading the thousand good books.

What, you've never played that game? You are missing out

Carrot and Beet Slaw

Looking for things to do with beets besides pickling them, I snagged this recipe for a carrot-beet salad from a friend's pinterest board. We liked it okay - I think the vague association with mayonnaise prevents Bob from really enjoying any slaw-type thing - except for Lucy, who LOVED IT.

It sure was pretty.

Herb Garden

The folks who lived in this house previously had a lovely herb garden out front. Which we have let get horrifically weedy.

There are FOUR types of mint out there threatening to take over, and Bob hates mint, so I think it all just needs to go. If it will go.

The cilantro and curly parsley survived the mild winter and are going to seed. The flat parsley didn't make it, alas.

I added some sage and dill earlier this spring.

There are also several volunteer tomatoes and some kind of red Romaine lettuce. And lavender, which is lovely, and fennel. But it is all out of control. I need a plan!

Supper Notebook

Margo's supper notebook changed my life.

I've always geeked out over meal planning, but keeping an annotated list of what we actually ended up eating immediately appealed to my historically-inclined brain. This, I realized, could be the basis for planning based on something! On trends and patterns that would reveal themselves once documented!

Since then, I have extended the principle to other areas, and journaling has become one of my most basic tools for household organization. I decided to start this blog as a part of that approach. An abstract plan for the future is one thing. But to know what you've actually done or not managed to do? That is a source of understanding.

Why Garden

Every gardening book you read seems to proclaim the glory of a homegrown tomato as the reason to grow your own vegetables. Fair enough. But, heavens, why didn't anyone tell me how good a fresh carrot smells?

Four!

Birthday boy requested a chocolate AND vanilla cake

From the Library

An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

by Tamar Adler

I like this so much that I bought it, despite my current self-imposed ban on cookbook purchases. But anyway, it really is less a cookbook than a guide to thinking about food with limits, a way of cooking and eating that acknowledges necessity and is guided by it, rather than whim or will. If Wendell Berry wrote a cookbook, it would surely look something like this. This piece gives a great feel for what Adler is up to.

Cover Crops

With our spring garden petering out, I've been thinking about cover crops to put in their place. Harvey Ussery, of course, has a great overview of cover crops, but I've also gone back through Anna's archives to read about her experience with cover crops.

Last salad

I don't know yet whether I am going to want to replant these areas come fall. We have plenty of space that is going unused elsewhere this year, so why not focus on improving the former spring garden for next year? In any case, buckwheat can buy me some time while I decide.

Practical Life

Joseph helped me with the laundry.