Announcing Anna Jane F.

Anna Jane was born on Monday, October 30th at 12:36 am. She weighed 8 lbs and measured 21 inches long. She latched on fifteen minutes after birth and has been going strong since. Birth story to follow in a few days; in some ways, it was totally different than John's!

38 weeks, 3 days

I had been warned that having your first early is tough because you get antsy earlier with subsequent babies! John was born at 38w2d - which was yesterday - so now I feel like I'm post-term. Argh.

Raising boys

Since when was jumping off slides considered an extreme case of ADHD?

I thought that was healthy boyhood behavior. Goodness, I'm surprised all little boys aren't drugged if that is considered extreme.

My brother is eight years younger than me and we've been blessed (?) with a record of his growth - yearly casts due to his adventures. Whether it was climbing trees or trying to go down a fireman pole without hands (oops), Geoff managed to make frequent trips to the emergency room.

Once again, from "Future Men", on faith and boys: "Say a boy breaks a chair because he was jumping on it from the bunk bed. Unbelief sees the cost of replacing the chair. Faith sees aggressiveness and courage, both of which obviously need to be directed and disciplined."

And, from the cover: "When Theodore Roosevelt taught Sunday school for a time, a boy showed up one Sunday with a black eye. He admitted he had been fighting and on a Sunday too! He told the future president that a bigger boy ahd been pinching his sister, so he fought him. TR told him that he had done perfectly right and gave him a dollar. The stodgy vestrymen thought this was a bit much, and so they let their exuberant Sunday school teacher go. What a loss. Unbelief cannot look past surfaces. Unbelief squashes, faith teaches. Faith takes a boy aside and tells him that this part of what he did was good, while that other part of what he did got in the way. 'And this is how to do it better next time.'"

The clean kitchen, con't

Five or six weeks ago, someone linked to this article. As I read it, I became angry at the author. I thought, "She's confused cause and effect! My dishes are dirty *because* I cook at home! Dirty dishes cause wealth!" I vented to Dan, who listened nicely but didn't say anything.

Now, over a month later, I concede. She is right. Our kitchen has been clean (except for yesterday's high chair tray incident) since my foot healed and we haven't eaten out once. I use about twice as many dishes each time I cook because all my dishes are always clean. Having everything available means that preparation times are less and no longer stressful. I never have to clean out the sink to fill a pot with water and the proper pot is always available.

In the past, we have eaten out once every three to four weeks. We would decide to eat out on the spur of the moment (because I was too tired to cook) and pay big bucks because we were eating out at dinner time.

Now, we haven't eaten out since the day after we returned home from our trip (when I sprained my foot on the way to the grocdery store). We can decide to eat out at lunchtime (when it is much cheaper) and research the restaurant beforehand so as to avoid lousy meals.

Finishing

Laziness may start tasks, but it doesn't finish them.

"A lazy man does not roast his prey, but the precious possession of a man is diligence." Proverbs 12:27. It isn't that the lazy man doesn't hunt, but that he doesn't follow through and cook the goose!

As I've worked on my chair covers, many admonitions have come to mind "Measure carefully, cut once" and "A stitch in time saves nine" are two of the most common ones. I have been applying these to other areas of my life, too. Dishes that are done immediately after a meal take a lot less time to clean than ones that have been sitting out for 24 hours. Try cleaning a tomato sauce pan the minute the sauce is done cooking - it is practically no work at all! Try cleaning it the next day and you'll be scrubbing and soaking for twenty minutes.

Today John gave me a good object lesson of these handy prinicples I've been espousing. I didn't clean off his tray immediately after lunch but just put it on the table after cleaning up everything else. We got distracted and it sat around on the table. A while later, I sat down to drink a glass of milk at the table and John began playing with his toy car on the table. He had some trouble reaching it as it drifted towards the wall and climbed onto a chair, accidentally upsetting his tray with its rice. Had I cleaned up the tray immediately, the job would have been done in thirty seconds. Waiting meant I had to clean the scattered rice off the floor as well as the tray.

John helped - I told him why this work was harder, what we could have done to prevent it, and he gathered the sausage bits and put them in the garbage.

Time for me to go follow through on my chair covers! I'm about 70% done. I think ten more concentrated hours should be enough to finish them.

I'm raising a man...

...not loading the dishwasher.

Doug Wilson addresses this in his book, "Future Men." I can't find the quote, but here's the paraphrase.

Townspeople noticed that a wealthy farmer's sons were working in his corn field. Surprised, a man asked him why he made his sons labor in the field. "Friend," he replied, "I'm not raising corn, I am raising men."

In the same spirit, when John began loading our silverware into the dishwasher a few weeks ago, I was excited. I'm raising a man! He's learning to work and take on responsibility!

John takes longer to load the dishwasher than I do and now that loading silverware is established as his "job", it sometimes takes work to help him remember. He's learning to load plates (using a garage sale stash of Corelle we keep in the pantry), and, as a result, we frequently have random Corelle plates throughout the dishwasher. When I load the dishwahser now I explain what I'm doing and why and am kept accountable by John - I can't simply skip cleaning the kitchen because I'm tired because that would model inconsistency to the little one to whom I'm trying to teach consistency.

So, as we load and reload the same dish for the third time ("Concave side towards the center." "Be gentle to the plate when you put it in.") I remember that I stayed home to raise a man, not to load the dishwasher.

Yummy Kale "Chips"

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Wash and tear kale into smallish pieces.

Get a little vegetable oil on it.

Sprinkle salt on it (I like more rather than less).

Bake for 10-12 minutes.

These are better than potato chips! And oh so easy. I think I'll try this on bok choy tomorrow. We're getting *tons* of greens again in our CSA share.

Speaking of CSA shares, when I got my blood work done in early August, everything (including blood iron levels) had improved since the beginning of my pregnancy and I had an awesome glycemic response. I hadn't actively worked on improving anything, but the midwives told me to continue whatever I was doing. Maybe that's what happens when you drastically increase your weekly intake of vegetables because someone else decides how many you "need."