Note to Self

"Hyacinths to Feed thy Soul"

If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft,
And from thy slender store two loaves alone to thee are left,
Sell one, and with the dole
Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.

(Attributed to Gulistan of Moslih Eddin Saadi, some Mohammedan sheik who lived a really long time ago.)

A more practical sort might scoff at this idea, but I totally get it. We need beauty in our lives just as much as we need food and water. (Well, maybe not just as much, but pretty close.) Praise God for the beauty He has surrounded us with in nature! People's lives today stay on fast forward. No one has time to just be, to literally stop and smell the roses. We rush here, there, and everywhere and occasionally think about the lovely day, or the rainy day, or the cold or hot day. Our enjoyment of nature is stunted, limited to a mere consideration of the weather for practical purposes. If nothing else, step outside, or poke your head out of a window, and look up. Look at the blue of the sky, the clouds. Even if it's dreary out, notice the shades of gray in the sky. Have you ever thought about how lovely gray can be? The color gray gets a bum rap, I think. If you can't go outside, bring nature inside. Put some flowers in the window or on the table. Gather some interesting rocks or acorns in a bowl. Arrange some twigs in a lovely vase. Tie bows to the twigs! I'm getting a bit carried away.

My point is that I believe we all need to be reminded of the importance of purposefully incorporating beauty into our lives. Enjoying nature is one of the best ways I know to do just that. After all, God's canvas, His creation, sets the bar for all things beautiful.

Let Nature be Your Teacher

Another lovely, breezy, ordinary day. I intended to get up early to go pick blueberries yet again, but that so didn't happen. Staying up until 1:30 in the morning will do that to my early rising plans.

But, my handy hubby was up and at 'em early as usual. Today he built me a very nice and sturdy clothesline. (I should post a picture, but first I really should learn to upload pictures to the computer. One day, one day.)

Since he needed to wait for the cement to set around the clothesline posts, my husband volunteered to go with me and the girls to pick blueberries. So we loaded up and headed out to our friends' u-pick blueberry farm and picked about a gallon of blueberries. I've put up in the freezer the blueberries from our previous berry picking expeditions, but I needed some fresh ones for a recipe I wanted to try. It's a gelatin mold with fruit in it. I've never made one before, but I want to try this recipe because it doesn't look too difficult. It calls for strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries. We'll have to do without raspberries because they cost a stinkin' fortune at the grocery store, and we don't know anyone with a u-pick raspberry farm.

After picking blueberries, we made a stop at a cabin some friends of ours are remodeling. It's located in the woods overlooking a creek filled with lots of flat rocks and trickling water falls. It's a lovely, peaceful place and the girls went prepared to get wet. The cool water felt refreshing on our hot, dirty feet. Doodlebug and Little Munchkin loved it there. They were not ready to leave. I understood. There was something calming and centering about sitting there on the rocks, my feet in the water, watching my girls enjoying nature. I wasn't ready to leave either.

Knowing we would stop by, I brought my camera, but left it in the car. Though I could have easily retrieved it, I decided that this was one of those times that I wanted to be in the moment so I left the camera where it was. Instead, I took a mental snapshot of my two children as they climbed rocks, waded in the cool, muddy water, discovered raccoon tracks and sat by a little pool of tadpoles watching them swim about. I watched and listened and tried to answer their questions: "Are there bears around here?" "Do tadpoles turn into fish, too?" "Can a snake swim on the bottom of the water?" "Is there anything in the water that might hurt us?" "Will the little fish nibble my toes? Will it hurt?"

It makes me sad to think that there are many children who don't get the opportunity to really enjoy nature like we did today. We do not have rocky creek beds in our back yard to explore every day, but we are privileged to live in a lovely, woodsy, natural setting. Nature is all around us, and I encourage my kids to get out in it as much as possible. After reading Last Child in the Woods and For the Children's Sake, I am more convinced than before that it is critical for children to have opportunities to be outdoors. I believe it's possible, too, even for those who live in the middle of town though it may take a bit more effort to make it possible. I know because we used to live in an apartment in the city. For me, just being outside on a beautiful day is invigorating even if the terrain is characterized mostly by cement sidewalks and asphalt roads; but being outside on a beautiful day is positively exhilarating if I'm smack dab in the middle of nature, too.

Today was one of those days.

Where Has all my Summer Gone

As we approach the middle of July, I find myself already anticipating the upcoming school year. I tend to over plan my planning and in the process get not much done. It's a curse of mine.

Also, Doodlebug's birthday is the very last day of this month, and she is fully expecting a party with all of her little friends though I've tried to stem the tide of her rising expectations by telling her that I have not, in fact, agreed to any type of party as of yet.

I'm not sure why, but I tend to resist anything that involves me supervising more than my own two children. Play dates with a friend I can handle from time to time, but I'm not crazy about bunches of kids running in and out of my house noisily and chaotically. And even when they aren't noisy and chaotic, there is still added stress mainly because MY own two kids are constantly asking me if they and their friend can do this or that. "Just go play!" I want to scream, but I don't. Anyway, I guess I'm much too uptight to handle more than a few kids at a time. I'm genetically predisposed. Thanks, Dad.

Doodlebug's birthday being the last day of July, usually signals the beginning of the end of summer for me because school resumes a couple of weeks after that. As a homeschooler, of course, I can start whenever, but since Doodlebug is taking math at school first hour this school year (as she did the second half of last year), I'll have to start when everyone else does. But it's good. I need a set goal to work towards. It just means that my summer is quickly coming to and end.

I turned 38 this summer (well, technically late spring), and I'm finding that the older I get the more my life does feel like a vapor. (James 4:14)

An Ordinarily Extraordinary Day

Right now, atthisverymoment, I'm rather stiff and feel as if I've been on my feet all day which makes sense because I HAVE been on my feet all day. But, on the inside I feel alive and invigorated and not at all ready to go to sleep even though it is almost midnight.

Perhaps that is because I'm still riding the wave of satisfaction I feel at being rather domesticated and homey today. And, I don't mean simply cooking and cleaning because I DO do that daily. What I am referring to is more of an attitude of domesticity, of delighting in nurturing and caring for my family rather than simply seeing daily tasks as necessary evils.

Here's a run-down of my day:

First, I went out back to the jungle we call a garden and picked some ripe tomatoes and zucchini. I put the not-quite-ripe tomatoes in the kitchen window and the others I placed carefully and neatly in little rows on the counter top to await the boiling hot cauldron into which I planned to plunge them. More on that later.

Next, I'll confess I had myself a little computer time. There are four of us and one computer and no TV so the computer is used quite a bit and when I find it unoccupied I take advantage of it.

After catching up on blog reading, I piddled about doing laundry and sundry household tasks. Then I cooked lunch. After which, I got busy putting up some of our garden produce. I knew we would not eat up all of the zucchini we had so I shredded it and put it in Ziploc bags and froze to use in zucchini cake which I've never made, but I have a recipe for it and it looks to be sort of like carrot cake which I have made and quite enjoy.

Speaking of carrots, the girls picked some yesterday (oh how they do love to pull up carrots), and we made a carrot cake to take to church out of some of them, but there were plenty left. So I shredded those suckers and froze them, too.

Later, while the kids and their daddy went swimming, I mulled over what to do for dinner. Shockingly, inspiration hit quickly, and I got to work. We had green beans from our garden, baked beans, and a barbecue chicken recipe I found in my latest Simple and Delicious magazine. I think it was called Monterey barbecue chicken or something such as that.

The chicken was topped with barbecue sauce (of course), chopped green onions, tomatoes, a slice of bacon and some shredded cheddar cheese. And, I was thrilled to put this dish together using green onions and tomatoes from MY garden. Plus, we had the green beans from the garden, too. It IS exciting to grow one's own food especially when one has never done it before. Who knows, the novelty may be gone next year, but I don't think so.

Our delicious dinner was accompanied by yummy cheese biscuits which I made from scratch from a recipe in what must be Paula Dean's first cookbook ever.

And, and, I also made a blueberry crisp for dessert! With blueberries we picked ourselves! For free! Blueberries are quite expensive at the grocery store so when friends offered to let us pick blueberries from their bushes, I snatched up the nearest buckets I could find and set off to get enough to last a while because, guess what? I freeze them. And, do you know that frozen blueberries make tasty cool treats to eat by the handful right out of the freezer? They do. Yum!

After dinner, I set my cauldron, I mean kettle, on the stove to boil water for my tomatoes. After the water begins boiling rapidly, I will drop the tomatoes in for no more than a minute. After which, I will scoop them out and immediately plunge them into a bowl of ice cold water. Doing this causes the tomato skins to virtually slide off.

Doodlebug came along about this time and wanted to help so I told her what to do and let her go to it. She peeled the tomatoes, cut them up, squished the seeds out and put them into Ziploc bags. Then, she made tomato juice out of the leftover bits by squeezing it and running it through a sieve. There wasn't a lot of juice, but after Doodlebug got through with those tomatoes there wasn't anything left, but a little squished glob of tomato skins and seeds, and that went into the compost so nothing was wasted.

Really, my day was quite ordinary, but to me that was the beauty of it. It has taken my husband and me almost sixteen years to get where we are, but we are trying to live more deliberately. To find joy and satisfaction in growing some of our own food and freezing it. We are trying to stay closer to home and live a less hurried life and teach our children to do the same. Everyone is so hurried these days which is not necessarily the same as being busy. We were busy today, but not hurried.

Sure, I've had days like this in the past, but they were always scattered sparsely amid the hurried days, but now these unhurried, satisfyingly busy days are becoming more frequent. Oh, I know I'll have other hurried days in the future. They can't be entirely avoided, but my goal is to make them the exception rather than the rule.

Still Waters

"Intelligence is like a river--the deeper it is, the less noise it makes." Harold Hayden

I don't know who Harold Hayden is, but I found this quote in a booklet on an obscure shelf in a corner nook of my dad's kitchen. (Just try stringing together four prepositional phrases like that!)

The booklet is one of those collections of old timey wit and wisdom (and misspelled words). The title of which is "From the Dust of Time--Grandma's Remedie's (sic), Old Medical Remedie's (sic) For All Old Deseases (sic), 1880 Barber Shop and Beauty Shop Recipes, Sure Cures and Some not so Sure" by Dorothy Gaylean.

Ha! I just read the back of the book where the author addresses the spelling errors in the book. She says, "No, the spelling is not a joke. I can't spell worth a damn." I was one of those who did indeed think the spelling was a joke.

The book is full of what you might expect from something with such a title, and it amused me for a bit. However, scattered among the recipes for such things as blood purifiers, homemade cough drops and gunpowder are quotes such as the one at the top of this post.

That quote totally jumped off the page at me. (Notice I said "totally" not "literally.") There is another related quote that I remember a teacher from high school using. It was something like, "Better to keep your mouth shut and let others think you're a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

AND, come to think about it, there is a verse in Proverbs, I believe, that says, "In a multitude of words, there wanteth not sin."

I've known people who are not necessarily introverted, just a bit on the taciturn side. People who are usually taking in the conversation around them, but are not quick to jump into it and offer their opinion. They are quick to hear and slow to speak, but when they do speak, what they say is worth hearing. Just like still waters, they run deep and make little noise.

Talking too much is usually never a good thing. I've been there, done that and dug myself some pretty good holes.

I'd much rather be like still waters--deep and noiseless.

Reflections on the Title of my Blog

I toyed with renaming my new blog. Then my dad pointed out that one's thoughts and musings are much like little matryoshkas, nested one inside another. How true, I thought. You "open" one thought to explore it, another presents itself. You "open" that thought and then another one is there perhaps a bit smaller and more focused. Eventually you get to a sharply focused thought, and think "Aha! Revolutionary! Why did I not see it this clearly before?!"

But then! Then, when you finally sit down at the computer to blog about your revolutionary, insightful thought, it vanishes inside the bigger and bigger thoughts until that small, focused, beautiful thought is hidden; and then, much like the littlest matryoshka hidden inside all of the bigger ones, the details of your eureka moment become vague in your memory.

But it IS still there waiting for you to open it up again when you aren't sitting in front of the computer. Strange how the computer does that to a thought. But perhaps then, upon revisiting it, the details will etch themselves in your memory a little more until eventually you can paint a lovely word picture of your thought without having to "see" it because you will come to "feel" it instead.

So, I decided to stick with my blog name.

Raison d'Etre

Looking around my youngest daughter's room, my eyes came to rest on the little nesting doll, or matryoshka, that was sitting atop her toy stove. Aha! That would be what I would call my new blog.

Why? I wondered. The name seemed to fit, but why?

(Here's where I try to fit the title of my blog to the purpose because I didn't actually think that far ahead when grasping for a title.)

The purpose of this blog is manifold; however, because I am a mother of two daughters, my writing, I'm sure, will focus on them much of the time. They are the center of my world at present. But, I also hope to use this blog as a blank canvas on which to capture the lovely (and not so lovely) aspects of my everyday, ordinary life as I live it not just as a mother, but in all of my roles.

So, I was contemplating my blog title, which I happen to think is rather great. I've always been enamored with Russian nesting dolls, but never actually possessed one until I was in my twenties. I got it in Shipshewana, Indiana. It is supposed to be an authentic RUSSIAN nesting doll, not from China or anything. And I just love it. It is one of my very favorite things.

Funny how both my daughters are also quite fascinated with these little pieces of Russian culture. They both now have a small collection of nesting dolls, some of which are authentic and some are not. One IS from China. But if I remember the smidge of history I read on nesting dolls, the idea for them did indeed originate in China. But that is neither here nor there.

One of my favorite aspects of nesting dolls is, well, the way they nest. Some very large ones can have many, many little dolls inside them. Mine only has five pieces total, but that's enough. My girls especially love the littlest doll, of course, because of her miniature stature and cuteness. I do, too.

Perhaps I can draw the parallel that I am like the little matryoshka that sits on my living room shelf--composed at times, in pieces at times, multifaceted with many faces, yet a unified whole. Because my girls' intense interest in nesting dolls and the culture surrounding them, sort of sprung forth of their own accord, I think I also see them (the dolls that is) as representative of my girls' childhoods, a bit of their wonder and curiosity about the world and other cultures reflected in these little wooden dolls that they so adore, an emblem of unfettered, childish enthusiasm.