This happened at our dinner table this week.

The twelve-year-old wandered off. (Usually not a cause for concern – usually she would be in search of more water, or a condiment, or the bathroom.)

After a few minutes I said, “Where’s Samantha?”

Not in the kitchen. No one was sure where she had gone.

Shortly after this, she came back in the front door and sat back down at the table.

“Where did you go?” (Unspoken but implied: In the middle of dinner? Without saying anything?)

“I thought I heard a noise outside.”

“And you went to check on it alone? Without telling anyone where you were going?”

Dad: “You haven’t watched enough horror movies. You should NEVER go check out the noise alone.”

At this point, I was playing for drama – haha, she made the classic horror movie mistake. Then she said:

“It sounded like a zombie scream.”

Me (now not so much playing): “AND YOU WENT TO CHECK ON IT ALONE???”

Samantha: [embarassed giggle] “Yes?”

“You heard a zombie scream, didn’t tell anyone, went OUTSIDE to check on it, and left the door unlocked for them to come get the rest of us?!”

You can see where this is going. This is very nearly the actual transcript of our conversation, edited for length, clarity, and face-palms.

Clearly we have failed, among many other things, to impress on our children the importance of always behaving as if you are staring in a horror movie. Just in case, you know, you actually are.

Because while investigating strange happenings on your own makes for an interesting story, my goal is to keep all my kids’ brains intact for as long as possible.

Which is why maybe I won’t be “rotting their brains” by showing them any horror movies any time soon. But maybe it is time they read Frankenstein and Dracula. Or maybe at least Coraline.

I heard a homily recently centered around the idea of the “next right thing,” or “one small change.” When I got home and turned to the reflection book I’ve been praying with at night, I found this:

“The solution proposed in the Gospels is that of voluntary poverty and the works of mercy. It is the little way. It is within the power of all. Everybody can begin here and now…. We have the greatest weapons in the world, greater than any hydrogen or atom bomb, and they are the weapons of poverty and prayer, fasting and alms, the reckless spending of ourselves in God’s service and for his poor. Without poverty we will not have learned love, and love, at the end, is the measure by which we shall be judged.”

Dorothy Day, quoted in The Reckless Way of Love

Ouch. As usual, Dorothy Day shows me just how much growing I still have to do. Poverty? Our fridge is always full, and we just bought a new couch. I consistently fail at fasting. We’re so-so at alms. Prayer? I can say that I make an effort, but not that it’s always a whole-hearted one.

And after a few days re-reading Dorothy Day’s diaries (in the name of research) all these points have been driven home even further: she complains of so many people who wish “to do big things but not little ones.” ^[1]Jan. 25, 1946

Which brings me back to the “one small change” idea. Dorothy’s diaries show her repeatedly planning small sacrifices she could make: fasting from meat,^[2]June 18, 1950 practicing “joyful silence,”^[3]Feb 1944 not complaining about the radio.^[4]Feb. 24, 1953

I started small, too. First, I signed up to bring a meal to a friend who had a baby. And as for fasting, maybe I can start skipping my post-putting-Jacob-to-nap snack. Small things.

My week’s reading/research has also reminded me of the impact of doing the small things. As they were moving out of the Mott Street Catholic Worker house, Dorothy added up how many meals they had served to the hungry and homeless during the 14 years they had lived there. She came up with 2,555,000. Conservatively. ^[5]Nov. 27, 1950

Every day they cooked what they had, opened the doors, and fed people. Many days they felt like failures – the need was just too great. Yet over time their work added up to more than they could have hoped for.

What does the sacrifice of my one snack, day after day, week after week, add up to? Fortunately, that’s not the part I have to worry about. The math is up to God. He feeds the 5,000 with a few loaves and fishes. He makes our poverty and prayer, fasting and alms, however small, more efficacious than any work we might do on our own.

Dorothy again:

“Do what comes to hand. Whatsoever thy hand finds to do, do it with all thy might. After all, God is with us. It shows too much conceit to trust to ourselves, to be discouraged at what we ourselves can accomplish. It is lacking in faith in God to be discouraged. After all, we are going to proceed with his help. We offer him what we are going to do. If he wishes it to prosper, it will.”

Dorothy Day, House of Hospitality

“If he wishes it to prosper, it will.” One afternoon-snack-sized sacrifice at a time.

There is a chick living under my husband’s desk.

How it got there is a long story.

Two things happened a few of months ago: my brother-in-law asked if we wanted his friend’s silkie chickens (which turned out not to be the COVID pets she had been hoping for) and Samantha started collecting abandoned duck eggs from the pond, hoping she could get some of them to hatch. (Yes, they were truly abandoned. No nest raiding involved, I promise!)

We took the cute-in-a-scraggly-way teen-age silkies and added them to our flock. Urban homesteading at its best! Samantha started trying to engineer an incubator for the duck eggs.

When our neighbor heard about Samantha’s interest in ducks, she sent her husband up into the attic and then over to our house to deliver their old incubator. Weeks of anticipation followed.

We didn’t quite have the incubator figured out, so the duck experiment, sadly, ended up being nothing but a smelly mess and a lesson in partially-developed duckling anatomy. Samantha took it well and was very good about cleaning it all up. We considered where to store the incubator.

Meanwhile, we began to realize that two of the three silkie chickens were a little different. Bigger combs. A tendency to jump (like goombas, I kid you not) and fight. And finally, they crowed.

Our lovely hens were roosters.

This is an age-old tale, and we probably should have been more savvy. But just you wait, Henry Higgins, just you wait. It gets better.

I started looking for someone who would actually want silkie roosters, and was shocked to have quick success…but my friend wasn’t ready to take them just yet. So we waited, and hoped the neighbors didn’t mind the crowing too much.

Meanwhile, the roosters and hens did what roosters and hens will do: provided live Life Cycle lessons for anyone wandering through our backyard. So Samantha did some more research, and started absconding with our would-be breakfasts and starting them in the incubator.

The incubator is under my husband’s desk because, well, we have a small house. The footspace under the desk was (usually) unoccupied.

We ordered a new thermometer so the eggs would have a fighting chance. More weeks of anticipation. And Wednesday night, we started hearing peeping. Which, I now know, is what chicks do before they hatch.

Then we watched one of the eggs wiggle around for a while (it is really strange to watch). And right before breakfast today, while no one was looking, out the soggy little darling popped, to be rhapsodized by one and all. A black-and-gold Ameraucana/Silkie mix. I suggested naming him (Joseph) Pieper. I had to explain the joke to Samantha. (Given his coloring, maybe Drew Brees would be better…)

Samantha and her dad made a quick run for chick food and bedding, and she has spent the last two days fashioning a brooder out of detritus from the shed.

City dwellers that we are, we’re already at our legal limit for chickens, so the next project is finding someone interested in silkies, or Ameraucana/silkies, or Black Australorpe/silkies…you get the idea. This was not an organized breeding experiment. We’re holding out hope that the Ameraucana mix will lay tiny green eggs, but who knows!

(At this point in the writing, I had to take a break to watch chick #2 hatch.)

But as I was saying, none of this was planned. One little serendipity followed another, until we had a peeping, wriggling bunch of mutt chickens under my husband’s desk. I thought I had avoided this fate when we chose to live within the city limits…but Samantha has farming in her blood and she had other plans. We sat back and watched as she nurtured her little brood to life.

I’m sure Pieper and his new friend are grateful.

Update: In the time it took me to finish this post, two more chicks hatched. Craig’s desk is getting to be quite noisy.

Last week was recital week. Two of our daughters performed: one danced as a butterfly and a swan, the other portrayed water on the aerial silks. (“On the what?” you ask. It was something like this.)

It was a long week – the girls were at the theater part or all of the day Tuesday through Saturday – and we’re all tired. Honestly, I was dreading all the trips to the theater and all the disruption of our usual schedule that this week involves. So I was amazed at how many of the little dancers (who, to be fair, had a shorter schedule than we did) wanted recital week to keep going after the last performance.

The week was grueling, but that meant the girls were together for hours, working towards a common purpose, as well as just spending time together while waiting their turns on stage. It was a different dynamic than our sheltered homeschoolers are used to, but I think it was good for them. One taught her friend to knit; the other stepped up to help clean a big mess she didn’t make. All the girls worked hard, encouraged each other, and celebrated what they had made together. I have to give credit to the instructors, who made it a point to keep everyone positive, including giving younger girls “encouragement buddies” who left them kind notes during the week. That in particular meant a lot to my daughter.

Also, there were fewer squabbles in our house than any week I can remember recently. (It may catch up to us later, but it was sure nice while it lasted!)

The show itself was a beautiful mix of ballet, contemporary dance, and aerial arts. As always, the cute little ones stole the show, but the grace and skill the older students exhibited was impressive. And I have to say, it’s hard not to get excited about an art form that allows you to be both a mama penguin and the queen of the realm in the space of five minutes. Plus, there were dragons. Flying dragons. The silks quite literally add a whole new dimension to the show.

The weird part for me was that I’ve somehow become a resource mom to our friends who are newer to the program. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined myself being the one people came to for advice on how to make a ballet bun or what to do about stage makeup. It’s a far cry from my tennis and intramural flag football days.

And while I’m not quite ready to be a “backstage mom” (taming 4-year-olds is NOT my superpower) I’m settling into this dance mom thing. I can play chauffeur, man the bobby-pin station, and provide heat packs for sore feet. My girls seem to have found something they really love, ways to strengthen their bodies and their minds, and both give and receive joy and beauty.

I’ve always accepted the idea that creating art requires sacrifice. Until this week I had only applied that to myself – not my children. I understood that if I want to spend time writing, that meant sacrificing something else, whether it be recreational reading, or sewing, or house cleaning…or all three. This week our whole family, and all the families at our dance studio sacrificed so that our children could be part of something bigger – something that brought joy and beauty to our community (and even had a “moral to the story.”)

Recital week proved to me that my girls are ready to make sacrifices to bring beauty into the world. Last week that included their time, energy, and comfort, especially the comfort of their feet. Nothing earth-shattering, of course, but their willingness to put up with suffering and inconvenience for the sake of beauty gives me hope for the world they’re growing up into.

Here’s a little something for Mother’s Day. This happened in our house this week.

8:27 PM

3 year old to big sister: Hi.

Big sister: You should be in your bed.

3 year old: I not want to be in my bed.

Big sister: Go hug mom.

3 year old: I not want to hug mom. She make me go to my bed.

At least he’s honest, right?

Here’s to all the laughs motherhood brings, and to the dream of undisturbed sleep. Happy Mother’s Day!

It’s that time of year again: May Madness. Finals, graduations, recitals, Mother’s Day, and we have a birthday (7th) and wedding anniversary (16th) in our family to round it all out.

Needless to say, I’m hiding in my bedroom with books of poetry more than usual.

Still, it’s amazing to watch our kids blossom. They’re stepping out of their comfort zones, getting in front of crowds (or cameras) and sharing the gifts God has given them. I’m constantly in awe of the beauty they’re already bringing into the world.

And as much as I cringe at the thought of making small talk (or worse, housecleaning) of course it’s always good to celebrate family and new beginnings. I usually even enjoy it. Especially if there’s cake, which there will be.

But I also look forward to June, and the calm after the storm. Time for lounging and reading, playing board games, going for family walks in the evenings. Basking in the flowers and good things to eat coming from the garden.

It all comes back to the garden again, that little bit of refuge where things are slow and simple. Even in the face of army worms, slugs, and flea beetles, it’s a comfort to see these tiny seeds grow and produce twenty-, or fifty-, or a hundred-fold. Such bounty!

A talk I was listening to this week mentioned the quote, “One plants, another waters, but God gives the increase.” I feel that all the time right now as I watch our kids grow. There is no way I can take credit for their talents, or their kind hearts, or their humor. God is causing the increase in them daily, and it is my privilege and blessing to witness his goodness.

I was digging through old unpublished posts, in case there was something I had forgotten to finish up, and found this little jewel from 2018. If I were just disciplined enough to keep track of all the hilarious things my kids say when they’re “playing pretend!” I have no idea what the game was, but it included these quotes:

“Oh, no, I forgot my parents!”

“Wait, you can’t use a carseat for an altar.”

“You just knocked in the back of the church!” (as opposed to the front, apparently)

They almost feel like a writing prompt: write a story including all of these quotes…they were part of a story once, maybe they can be again!

Check out my latest post over at Mighty Is Her Call!

With the Wild Beasts

We’re in one of those times of upheaval: the three-year-old has decided he’s outgrown afternoon naps.

I hate to complain, since he has napped every day for three solid years. That’s nothing to yawn at. Still, I would really prefer he keep it up for another year…or three.

The problem is that this is a child who is never still when he is awake, and needs eyes on him at all times. And we had all planned our quiet work time – my writing, the girls’ focused school time – during Jacob’s nap.

So that time is now gone.

This is a dance I’ve done many times at this point in my parenting career. As soon as a child settles into a schedule, and I figure out how to make the best of that schedule, here comes a growth spurt…and we start again from scratch.

It’s always frustrating to have my schedule up-ended like this. I’m one of those people who doesn’t deal well with surprises. But I would have hoped after 14 years of this cycle I’d be used to it, or at least aware of it enough to deal with it promptly and creatively.

I guess I still need a couple more years of practice.

To my credit, I did recognize what was happening quickly. And I did (almost) immediately start to brainstorm a new routine which would still get me my writing time. But that didn’t stop me from ending up on the verge of tears as the noise of little people swirled around me during what was supposed to be my designated writing time.

So we’re experimenting with assigned toddler-watchers (while I hide in my bedroom), and I’m considering moving my writing time to after 9pm (ick) or searching out kid-friendly nature shows to function as sedatives (also ick) all while doing lots of deep breathing exercises.

Prayers and shipments of tea are welcome.

Some days it feels like our family’s mission in life is mostly to keep other people’s stuff out of the landfill.

In the last couple of weeks Craig refurbished (another) hand-me-down laptop and we laid a walkway made of brick salvaged from a demolition in our neighborhood. (I will be eternally grateful to the neighbors who helped us cart all those bricks home!) Nearly all of our clothes and furniture are second hand, as are the dishes, though I admit that I dream of someday purchasing myself a beautiful matching set when there are no little hands to help me break them.

We currently have a rescue dog, hand-me-down cats and garden plants, and second-hand chickens, some of which came complete with a coop.

I realized as I glanced around our bedroom that almost every item of furniture could be counted either as a hand-me-down or an heirloom. (I’ll leave you to decide which is which.) And without stretching our budget to include more “consumer goods” we have a full life, and a remarkably full house – so much so that I’m constantly hauling things off to Goodwill.

I’m not complaining – I’d rather be given a slightly-used pair of shoes for one of the kids than pay $50 for them and wonder what kind of sweat shop I’m supporting with my purchase. And it’s not like we don’t buy new things sometimes. Socks, for example, are best when fresh, in my opinion. It’s just hard to wrap my head around how there can be so much stuff in the world that we can fill our house to overflowing (almost) without ever buying anything new.

Also, as I look at the piles building up in the corners (again), it occurs to me that I need to accept that it’s probably not my job to keep things out of the landfill, especially things I didn’t buy in the first place, lest we all go the way of Hanta in Too Loud a Solitude. (Which you should read if you love darkly beautiful books about…books.)

In the meantime, I guess I’ll continue keeping our local thrift shops in business…