A couple of months ago an acquaintance asked me, "Where do you worship?" Without stopping to think, because stopping to think isn't something I tend to do, I accidentally answered with the truth: "Mostly in the Salt Lake park." She did look a little startled for a moment, but to give her credit, not shocked. With a little more conversation, it was easy to understand how she could understand, because she's also not a fan of the traditional institutional church experience, but also at least as much in love with Jesus as I am. I love making those connections.
I could make a much, much longer story out of it all (in fact, I did, and then deleted it--it was way too much), but the short version is that as of about two and a half years ago, I have not been a "regular attender" of a particular congregation, nor of any congregation at all. The first half year or so, I had all three of the little girls home with me Sunday mornings, and we often went to the playground with our friend Sue. Come to think of it, I'm not sure why that kind of dwindled away! Probably it started getting too hot or too cold or Sue was away or we were, and we never got back in the habit. That's okay--doing things just because they're a habit is one of the things I rebel against. Which doesn't mean I wouldn't like to go to the playground again some Sunday morning!
In the meantime, however, Katie (7 3/4) eventually started going to the house church with Jörn and the boys most Sundays, and now Helen (4 1/2) usually does as well, so just Elisabeth (2 3/4)and I are home. (Marie has been attending a different church for just over two years, was baptized there last year, for the last several months has been part of the music team, and last week participated in a membership class and will soon join as an official member.) So I started taking advantage of that time to clean the girls' room. I put on music and dance and sing and put stuff away and throw stuff away and Elisabeth and I have a great time, and once a week for a few hours, the girls' room looks almost decent. I should maybe occasionally put on music at other times, though, because not too long ago when Elisabeth saw me with the tape recorder, she said, "Are you going to listen to music and dance and clean up this horrible mess?" My habit of not thinking before I speak can especially come back to bite me with toddlers in the house...
So with all of that background...it's funny (to me, anyway) that I've "been to church" for the last five Sundays in a row. Five different churches, in three different countries, I might add.
Five weeks ago we were in Costa Rica and Jörn, Helen, Elisabeth, and I went to mass at the Catholic church near where my host family lives. (Mami and my sisters were at a seminar/retreat all day, and Papi and my brothers stayed home with the other children.) The sermon (um...I think it's called something else in a Catholic church, but I can't remember what in English...) was quite good, what I can remember of it, but between interpreting for Jörn and trying to keep Helen and Elisabeth quiet, I didn't get more than half of it. There was some amazing music and without any good explanation for it, taking communion was important to me and I was glad we had gone.
Four weeks ago we were in Germany and the children and I went to our "home church", the International Baptist Church of Düsseldorf. (Jörn was at a conference in Duisburg.) I seem to remember liking the sermon, but can't remember what it was about, but the best part was chatting with people after the service. Oh yeah, and it was my birthday...which meant that I got to (had to...) go up to the front and have everyone sing "happy birthday" to me. It was pretty funny, actually, because the last time my birthday was on a Sunday was 2002, and for some reason, I wasn't in church on that Sunday. I got jokingly "accused" of skipping it just because it was my birthday, and then when we moved to Cyprus four years ago, the same person teased me that we were leaving just to avoid that...and now that we don't live there, I WAS there for my birthday!
Three weeks ago I went to the house church because we had visitors (a mission team from Germany) and to get them all there, I had to help drive, so went ahead and stayed. We got there around 10:45 and at 2:45 they finally started getting lunch ready. Just one of the reasons I haven't been going there for over two years.
Two weeks ago the team was still there, but I couldn't take the house church two weeks in a row, and besides, Jacob just joined the Larnaka Inter-Church Youth Band (playing djembe) and they were playing at Marie's church, Larnaka Community Church. By taking all three little girls with me, Jörn had enough room in the car he was driving to take Lukas and the team, and after LCC, I drove Jacob, Katie, and Helen over to the house church, and several hours later, picked them up again.
Last week was Easter Sunday in the Western church. (Orthodox Easter this year isn't until May 5th.) Some of the non-Orthodox churches celebrate Western Easter, some Eastern, some both, and some neither. I did think about going to LCC's sunrise service, but it didn't start until 7:30, an hour after sunrise, and to have our annual family breakfast together I needed to be home again from my walk by then anyway. I left the house at 5:50 (very glad that we'd gone onto Daylight Savings Time in that night, because even though my body might have felt like it was 4:50, seeing the number 5 instead of 4 made it easier psychologically) and by the time is was just barely starting to get light, I was at the aqueduct. I climbed up on it and sat there for about half an hour, watching the sunrise and singing all my favorite Easter songs and taking photos. Yes, it was worship, and yes, it was wonderful, and not less so for being what I do every single morning. (Okay, I don't usually climb up on the aqueduct, but being out in the Salt Lake park in the morning makes it impossible for me NOT to worship.) I was home by 7:15 and just barely got breakfast on the table by 8:45, and that only because other people helped set the table. At 9:20 Marie and I left, so that she could get to LCC for band practice at 9:30 and I could go to St. Helena's, the Anglican church, also at 9:30. Which, when they say it starts at 9:30, they mean 9:30...so I was the last person in before they started and got just about the last seat, but at least it was next to the only four people I knew there! (Maybe they actually saved it for me? I didn't ask...) I could write a lot more about the service, but it would get a bit too much into with whom I was upset and whether I felt like I should be taking communion or not and how sometimes a liturgical service feels like a prison and is sometimes freeing and was both that day, so I think I'll just leave it there. If you need to know, go ahead and ask--maybe I'll get brave enough to write another post on that topic. Anyway, when I got home at 10:45, Jörn was able to leave for the house church with four children, and Elisabeth and I put on music and danced and cleaned the living room. At 12:30 we went over to Sue and Richard's house for Easter lunch with them and two other couples, and I did mean to come home again before our whole family was due to arrive there at 4:00...but didn't notice the time until 3:45, so we stayed. :-)
I'd been meaning to put in photos from the sunrise, but it's already very late and this post is much longer than I'd intended it to be, and I know from experience that if I save it in drafts meaning to add photos later, I'll never post it, so that's it for now. (Edited to add: yes, I posted photos. :-) But if you clicked on the link above, where I said I watched the sunrise, you already saw them.)
Friday, April 5, 2013
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
More walking and new shoes
Within a few days of moving into this house just over four years ago, I went for an early morning walk in the Salt Lake park, taking six-month-old Helen with me in the Ergo carrier. I thought I'd go regularly, but I didn't, and don't really know why I didn't. I enjoyed every walk I took, but only took two or three a YEAR my first three years here. Last year in April I got new shoes and went a few times, and as of May 18th, started walking every single day, with extremely few exceptions. Those shoes I bought a year ago were my first tennis shoes in at least ten years, but they are very near the end of their useful life, so while in Germany last month, I bought another pair of tennis shoes, and started wearing them last week. So here is an ever-so-exciting photo of both pairs of shoes:
The pair on the left is (obviously, I hope!) the new pair, worn three or four days by the time I thought of taking a photo. Most days I get a stone or two caught in the tread--something that is impossible with the old pair now. No blisters or sore hips or anything negative with either pair: the first pair were cheap ones from Aldi, the second cheap ones from Deichmann! The old ones are still actually quite comfortable, but little rocks keep getting in through holes around my toes (can't see them in the photo), which on the packed-sand/dirt path is rather impractical.
Monday, April 1, 2013
April surprise
Jörn and Lukas drove to the skip at Makenzy Beach this afternoon to dispose of an old broken armchair we had. (Is "skip" understandable in American English? If not, well, it's a huge metal container that can be carried on a truck and is used for garbage of all sorts, and there are actually four of these things there, Jörn just informed me. Oh, I think they might be called dumpsters? Something like that, anyway...) Not many people call our home phone, so when the phone rang, I wasn't surprised that it was Jörn, and since Jörn and Lukas were there at a huge rubbish heap (garbage pile...), I wasn't surprised in any case that they were calling, and wondered what they wanted to bring home THIS time. I was at least glad that they were asking, for a change.
They brought home a kitten.
She was on a pile of stuff, underneath what might have been the rack from an oven. Another man there saw the kitten first and moved the rack and picked the kitten up, and asked Jörn and Lukas if they wanted a kitten. Jörn at least didn't say no, and he's the one who called me to ask what I thought. Okay, so maybe I wasn't thrilled, but I HAVE been toying with the idea of getting a cat for awhile, and there was no way I could tell them to just leave the kitten there!
I don't know how old she is, of course, but I'm guessing three or four weeks. Her eyes are well open and she's quite alert, and she can walk fairly well, although she wobbles a bit. She's totally not afraid of people or of loud noises (and all the people in this house are generators of loud noises), and is cuddly and friendly, so I don't think she could possibly be a feral cat, but she's also definitely too young to be voluntarily away from her mother, and wasn't close enough to any buildings to have possibly walked there herself. It seems impossible to believe that somebody just dumped her there, but I don't know how else she could have gotten there.
While I was on the phone with a friend asking for advice, Jörn and Lukas tried to give her some water from a saucer. Lukas said she lapped some, but Jörn didn't see it, and she certainly didn't seem to know how to lap milk later on.
Joan said she should probably have kitten formula, but of course, today is a public holiday (Cyprus Independence Day), so everything is closed. I Googled "homemade kitten formula" and found an amazing number of recipes, most of which called for all sorts of things that I didn't have in the house and couldn't buy with closed shops and wouldn't know if I could buy even with open shops. However, one recipe was doable: 1 cup of milk, 2 egg yolks, and 1 teaspoon of salad oil. We even had milk, which we don't usually have, because I was going to make hot chocolate for breakfast yesterday, but didn't end up doing so, which is another topic and was going to be what I was going to post, but the kitten is more interesting. To me, anyway.
So I mixed this up (actually only half, since that was already a lot more than the kitten could possibly eat), and attempted to feed it to the kitten. I didn't have an eye dropper, exactly, but the syringe-ish sort of thing that comes with children's Nurofen (which we don't have any of, and that was going to be the topic of another blogpost, but kittens are still more interesting) sort of worked. It doesn't have a tapered tip, though, and the kitten was having a hard time dealing with the wide, flat tip, from which she couldn't suck. While I was doing this, one friend responded to me on gmail chat and another to me on Facebook, saying that condensed milk (or evaporated milk, and now I don't remember which one is which language--Germans call it coffee milk, and what it IS is evaporated milk: no sugar or anything else added, just water taken out) would work for a couple of days. We even have some, but oh well, I'd already mixed up this other formula. Despite some of my children trying to convince me to express some of MY milk, but I informed them that there was no reason to think that human milk would be any more appropriate for a baby cat than cow milk would be, and nope, that wasn't happening.
No photos of feeding the kitten, since Jörn had taken the camera with him when he took Helen to Antidote (drama class, and that would be another cool blogpost topic!), but here's a nice one of a happy kitty with about 15 milliliters of formula in her tummy.
Lukas, by the way, is still claiming that this is HIS kitten, but I'm not happy with that. No matter whose we call it, she's going to be mainly my responsibility, and I'd rather just take care of her than remind Lukas a million times to do so.
When Katie cuddled her, she went right to sleep, but just as I was about to take a photo, some little sister came running in and shouted, which made the kitten slightly wiggle and open her eyes just as I took the photo.
She went right back to sleep, though.
She also very much liked sleeping on Marie.
And here she's sleeping on Marie's lap, covering her eyes.
Last photo for today, and not a great one: we put her in a box, with a towel underneath and and old t-shirt, and a black cat cuddly toy, of which the kitten approves. She sniffed all over, then curled up half under the toy cat.
They brought home a kitten.
She was on a pile of stuff, underneath what might have been the rack from an oven. Another man there saw the kitten first and moved the rack and picked the kitten up, and asked Jörn and Lukas if they wanted a kitten. Jörn at least didn't say no, and he's the one who called me to ask what I thought. Okay, so maybe I wasn't thrilled, but I HAVE been toying with the idea of getting a cat for awhile, and there was no way I could tell them to just leave the kitten there!
I don't know how old she is, of course, but I'm guessing three or four weeks. Her eyes are well open and she's quite alert, and she can walk fairly well, although she wobbles a bit. She's totally not afraid of people or of loud noises (and all the people in this house are generators of loud noises), and is cuddly and friendly, so I don't think she could possibly be a feral cat, but she's also definitely too young to be voluntarily away from her mother, and wasn't close enough to any buildings to have possibly walked there herself. It seems impossible to believe that somebody just dumped her there, but I don't know how else she could have gotten there.
While I was on the phone with a friend asking for advice, Jörn and Lukas tried to give her some water from a saucer. Lukas said she lapped some, but Jörn didn't see it, and she certainly didn't seem to know how to lap milk later on.
So I mixed this up (actually only half, since that was already a lot more than the kitten could possibly eat), and attempted to feed it to the kitten. I didn't have an eye dropper, exactly, but the syringe-ish sort of thing that comes with children's Nurofen (which we don't have any of, and that was going to be the topic of another blogpost, but kittens are still more interesting) sort of worked. It doesn't have a tapered tip, though, and the kitten was having a hard time dealing with the wide, flat tip, from which she couldn't suck. While I was doing this, one friend responded to me on gmail chat and another to me on Facebook, saying that condensed milk (or evaporated milk, and now I don't remember which one is which language--Germans call it coffee milk, and what it IS is evaporated milk: no sugar or anything else added, just water taken out) would work for a couple of days. We even have some, but oh well, I'd already mixed up this other formula. Despite some of my children trying to convince me to express some of MY milk, but I informed them that there was no reason to think that human milk would be any more appropriate for a baby cat than cow milk would be, and nope, that wasn't happening.
No photos of feeding the kitten, since Jörn had taken the camera with him when he took Helen to Antidote (drama class, and that would be another cool blogpost topic!), but here's a nice one of a happy kitty with about 15 milliliters of formula in her tummy.
When Katie cuddled her, she went right to sleep, but just as I was about to take a photo, some little sister came running in and shouted, which made the kitten slightly wiggle and open her eyes just as I took the photo.
She went right back to sleep, though.
She also very much liked sleeping on Marie.
And here she's sleeping on Marie's lap, covering her eyes.
Last photo for today, and not a great one: we put her in a box, with a towel underneath and and old t-shirt, and a black cat cuddly toy, of which the kitten approves. She sniffed all over, then curled up half under the toy cat.
And the biggest miracle: we all agreed on a name without too much trouble! Nobody except Lukas liked a single one of Lukas's suggestions (Buckbeak is the only one I remember, but the others weren't any better), nobody except Marie liked Marie's suggestion (Minerva), nobody including myself liked any of mine, not that I remember what they were, until I suggested Makenzy, after the place where she was found. We thought about M.B. for Makenzy Beach, thinking about the fact that my mother has a dog named K.B. after King's Beach, but we stuck with just plain Makenzy. We might change the spelling, though--not even the various signs around town and on maps and in ads agree on the spelling.
So we have a cat. And now I'm going to have to go warm up some formula and try to feed her before I go to bed. Our friend Sue sent over a kitten feeding bottle, which works a little better than what I was using, but most successful is letting her suck the milk off of my fingers. I hope I don't have to do that in the night...I'm not at all good at actually standing up and being coherent before I'm ready to get up. Watch this space...
Saturday, January 12, 2013
My day described by the contents of my pocket
It's been pretty cold lately, "cold" meaning that yesterday and the day before there was a very thin layer of ice on the puddles early in the morning and people had to scrape ice off of their windshields. At an official elevation of two meters above the Mediterranean Sea, that's cold...and we don't have heating and the house is very badly (or probably not at all) insulated. It even snowed in quite a few parts of Cyprus yesterday, but with totally clear skies over Larnaka, there wasn't a chance here. I've lost the thermometer, but last year in January I did measure the temperature inside the house at 10 degrees Celcius, 50 degrees Fahrenheit. That's not at all too cold to be outside and active, but it's pretty cold to be sitting around in the house.
So...this means that we're wearing lots of layers. (Well, some of us are...some of the children are STILL usually barefoot...) And it means that I have my thick hooded sweatshirt on most of the time. (It really needs to be washed, but I can't bear to do without it for the several days it would need to dry...) And this sweatshirt has a pocket on the front. And I empty the pocket every night before putting Elisabeth to bed, because otherwise, everything will fall out when I lie down. And last night it was a rather large pile of stuff and it occurred to me that it pretty much showed my day.
My cell phone: this wasn't actually still with the pile of stuff this morning, because before I went to bed I put it on the piano in the living room, because this morning I planned to walk with Sue, and whichever of us gets up texts the other one to say we're up, and I don't want it to wake me up if I happen to be asleep. And it doesn't even normally live in my pocket, but was there because I took it with me when I picked up Marie and Jacob from their boat cleaning job a little after 6:00 yesterday evening, so that Marie wouldn't be any later than she already was for band practice and to bring Jacob home so he could finish putting together his magazine, The Onymous, before going to Youth Group at 7:00.
Two combs: I'd been combing the hair of some child or other with one of them when the doorbell rang, so put it in my pocket. At the door was a little girl, definitely not older than nine or ten, collecting sponserships for a walk she was doing with her school. I didn't understand everything, so I don't know what they're actually raising money for, but when a child is brave enough to go up to a stranger's door and try to sell something, I will virtually always contribute. The other comb Elisabeth had been using to comb my hair, and at some point, I couldn't take it anymore and confiscated the comb.
Five folded up drawings on various sizes of paper: all gifts from Elisabeth, some of which she gave me by saying, "Which hand?" while holding only one hand behind her back, and some of which she gave me after asking me to close my eyes and then putting them into my hands.
Eyeglass repair kit: Jörn needed me to change the batteries on a little machine he uses for accessing our German bank account (he holds it up to the computer screen--I have NO idea how this thing works and I actually find it kind of eery!), and the only screwdriver small enough was the one with my eyeglass repair kit.
Seven writing utensils: I was using the permanent marker while doing laundry (adding dots to articles of clothing that had moved from Katie to Helen and from Helen to Elisabeth), and also used it to put Xs on the chart we started this week to try to reduce the yelling in this house. That's a whole 'nother story...but it IS encouraging that ALL of us had fewer Xs the second day than the first. The pink whiteboard marker was for marking off Katie's and Lukas's schoolwork on the laminated lists that are hanging up. Two black ball point pens are mine, which I'd rather keep in the pocket on my Bible but people keep taking, so they've been living in my pocket lately. One Jacob gave me, and one I bought myself. I mostly use them to write down what books the children have read or to write the date on math pages, as I've been very bad at keeping my journal lately and do virtually all other writing on the computer, but when I do want to write something, black ball point is my preference. And I wrote January 14th on every math page yesterday, then when on the phone with Jörn later, asked him if he noticed the date, since we moved to Cyprus on January 14th four years ago. He thought that was interesting, then said, "Wait a minute--today isn't the 14th!" We took awhile discussing it, then finally agreed that it was the 12th, and would have been my grandma's 95th birthday and tried to remember if my brother-in-law's birthday is also the 12th, or just sometime close. I got off the phone and told Marie about the conversation and how silly I'd been, to which she responded that we (Jörn and I) were BOTH silly, as it was the 11th. Oh. Moving along...one blue ball point pen was Jörn's and he took it back last night, and another blue ball point pen is probably Jacob's, but I haven't asked him. The broken pencil with Elisabeth's name on it got broken because it was on the trampoline while they were jumping, and she wants me to glue it.
A nail file: I really have no idea how that got into my pocket, but since it was there, I filed my nails while waiting for Marie and Jacob to finish at the boat.
A sewing tape meaure: Our small trampoline had been out of action for several months because one of the six legs was missing, but Lukas found the leg in the bushes (?!?!) a couple of days ago, so I put it back on the trampoline and returned the trampoline to the living room. Well, actually, I put it out on the front porch at some point yesterday because of all of the fighting over it. But before that happened, I measured it because I want to make a new cover for around the edge. I think I probably do have enough denim to make a rectangle 290 centimeters by 28 centimeters, but whether I actually get around to cutting up all of the old jeans and sewing them together is another question.
A bracelet: actually, this wasn't in my pocket anymore when I emptied the pocket, but it had been earlier in the day and was with the pile of stuff this morning when I decided to write this oh-so-fascinating post. I made it a couple of months ago, with beads to represent each of my children.
A ten-gram container of lanolin: I used to HATE it when my mother put lanolin on any complaint we might have, but I have since had to admit that it's pretty cool stuff. I've been trying to remember to put it on some sore spots on the back of Helen's head, so have been carrying it around to do that.
A red pencil sharpener with "Mommy" written on it in three places: pencil sharpeners disappear around here, and both of the last two Christmases, I gave one EACH to Jörn, Marie, Jacob, and myself.
An eraser: they disappear too, and also get replenished at Christmas. This one doesn't happen to have a name on it, so that automatically makes it mine.
Two bookmarkers: one of them was given to me by my parents many, many years ago, and was in my pocket because I finished reading the book it had been in, but I can't remember what book. The other is one that was in a package of stuff that we received a couple of days ago from an eight-year-old friend in Germany sent to us, and Elisabeth had been folding it so I took it away from her and put it in my pocket.
And finally...one sheep: I put away the Christmas stuff a few days ago, including all the parts I could find of all the nativity scenes. This particular sheep, plastic and about a centimeter long, is from the set that I let the children play with in the doll house. Elisabeth was looking for her shoes under the couch and shouted "A-reka--a sheep!" and pulled it out. She's been calling out "a-reka" (eureka, obviously) when finding things quite a lot in the last several days--I have no idea where she learned that, but have been enjoying it!
So...this means that we're wearing lots of layers. (Well, some of us are...some of the children are STILL usually barefoot...) And it means that I have my thick hooded sweatshirt on most of the time. (It really needs to be washed, but I can't bear to do without it for the several days it would need to dry...) And this sweatshirt has a pocket on the front. And I empty the pocket every night before putting Elisabeth to bed, because otherwise, everything will fall out when I lie down. And last night it was a rather large pile of stuff and it occurred to me that it pretty much showed my day.
My cell phone: this wasn't actually still with the pile of stuff this morning, because before I went to bed I put it on the piano in the living room, because this morning I planned to walk with Sue, and whichever of us gets up texts the other one to say we're up, and I don't want it to wake me up if I happen to be asleep. And it doesn't even normally live in my pocket, but was there because I took it with me when I picked up Marie and Jacob from their boat cleaning job a little after 6:00 yesterday evening, so that Marie wouldn't be any later than she already was for band practice and to bring Jacob home so he could finish putting together his magazine, The Onymous, before going to Youth Group at 7:00.
Two combs: I'd been combing the hair of some child or other with one of them when the doorbell rang, so put it in my pocket. At the door was a little girl, definitely not older than nine or ten, collecting sponserships for a walk she was doing with her school. I didn't understand everything, so I don't know what they're actually raising money for, but when a child is brave enough to go up to a stranger's door and try to sell something, I will virtually always contribute. The other comb Elisabeth had been using to comb my hair, and at some point, I couldn't take it anymore and confiscated the comb.
Five folded up drawings on various sizes of paper: all gifts from Elisabeth, some of which she gave me by saying, "Which hand?" while holding only one hand behind her back, and some of which she gave me after asking me to close my eyes and then putting them into my hands.
Eyeglass repair kit: Jörn needed me to change the batteries on a little machine he uses for accessing our German bank account (he holds it up to the computer screen--I have NO idea how this thing works and I actually find it kind of eery!), and the only screwdriver small enough was the one with my eyeglass repair kit.
Seven writing utensils: I was using the permanent marker while doing laundry (adding dots to articles of clothing that had moved from Katie to Helen and from Helen to Elisabeth), and also used it to put Xs on the chart we started this week to try to reduce the yelling in this house. That's a whole 'nother story...but it IS encouraging that ALL of us had fewer Xs the second day than the first. The pink whiteboard marker was for marking off Katie's and Lukas's schoolwork on the laminated lists that are hanging up. Two black ball point pens are mine, which I'd rather keep in the pocket on my Bible but people keep taking, so they've been living in my pocket lately. One Jacob gave me, and one I bought myself. I mostly use them to write down what books the children have read or to write the date on math pages, as I've been very bad at keeping my journal lately and do virtually all other writing on the computer, but when I do want to write something, black ball point is my preference. And I wrote January 14th on every math page yesterday, then when on the phone with Jörn later, asked him if he noticed the date, since we moved to Cyprus on January 14th four years ago. He thought that was interesting, then said, "Wait a minute--today isn't the 14th!" We took awhile discussing it, then finally agreed that it was the 12th, and would have been my grandma's 95th birthday and tried to remember if my brother-in-law's birthday is also the 12th, or just sometime close. I got off the phone and told Marie about the conversation and how silly I'd been, to which she responded that we (Jörn and I) were BOTH silly, as it was the 11th. Oh. Moving along...one blue ball point pen was Jörn's and he took it back last night, and another blue ball point pen is probably Jacob's, but I haven't asked him. The broken pencil with Elisabeth's name on it got broken because it was on the trampoline while they were jumping, and she wants me to glue it.
A nail file: I really have no idea how that got into my pocket, but since it was there, I filed my nails while waiting for Marie and Jacob to finish at the boat.
A sewing tape meaure: Our small trampoline had been out of action for several months because one of the six legs was missing, but Lukas found the leg in the bushes (?!?!) a couple of days ago, so I put it back on the trampoline and returned the trampoline to the living room. Well, actually, I put it out on the front porch at some point yesterday because of all of the fighting over it. But before that happened, I measured it because I want to make a new cover for around the edge. I think I probably do have enough denim to make a rectangle 290 centimeters by 28 centimeters, but whether I actually get around to cutting up all of the old jeans and sewing them together is another question.
A bracelet: actually, this wasn't in my pocket anymore when I emptied the pocket, but it had been earlier in the day and was with the pile of stuff this morning when I decided to write this oh-so-fascinating post. I made it a couple of months ago, with beads to represent each of my children.
A ten-gram container of lanolin: I used to HATE it when my mother put lanolin on any complaint we might have, but I have since had to admit that it's pretty cool stuff. I've been trying to remember to put it on some sore spots on the back of Helen's head, so have been carrying it around to do that.
A red pencil sharpener with "Mommy" written on it in three places: pencil sharpeners disappear around here, and both of the last two Christmases, I gave one EACH to Jörn, Marie, Jacob, and myself.
An eraser: they disappear too, and also get replenished at Christmas. This one doesn't happen to have a name on it, so that automatically makes it mine.
Two bookmarkers: one of them was given to me by my parents many, many years ago, and was in my pocket because I finished reading the book it had been in, but I can't remember what book. The other is one that was in a package of stuff that we received a couple of days ago from an eight-year-old friend in Germany sent to us, and Elisabeth had been folding it so I took it away from her and put it in my pocket.
And finally...one sheep: I put away the Christmas stuff a few days ago, including all the parts I could find of all the nativity scenes. This particular sheep, plastic and about a centimeter long, is from the set that I let the children play with in the doll house. Elisabeth was looking for her shoes under the couch and shouted "A-reka--a sheep!" and pulled it out. She's been calling out "a-reka" (eureka, obviously) when finding things quite a lot in the last several days--I have no idea where she learned that, but have been enjoying it!
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Why avoid energizing joy?!
Last year my friend Sue told me about something a friend of hers had posted on Facebook at the beginning of the year. I copied it into a "sticky note" on my computer desktop (sticky notes are really cool--they look like Post-it Notes all over my computer screen, which means that I see them first thing when I turn on the computer) and have read it over and over again all year. A few weeks ago I finally asked if I could use the quotation in a blogpost, and she said sure, and that she didn't originate it anyway, so I don't need to attribute it to her. If someone knows the origin of the quotation, feel free to tell me. Anyway, here it is:
Before rushing head-long into 2012, ask yourself these questions:
what energised me most in 2011?;
what brought me most joy?;
what did I avoid doing despite knowing I needed to do it?"
When I read this the first time, I thought of it as three separate questions, none of them too difficult to answer. However, in conversation with Sue, we discussed the possibility of answers that would answer all three in one go. That sounded impossible to me at first. Why on earth would I AVOID doing something that not only did I know I needed to do, but which energized (sorry, although the quotation is British I remain American ;-P ) me and brought me joy?!? Interestingly, when thinking about this in the last couple of weeks, I could only remember having mentioned writing and playing the piano, both of are pretty weak. For one thing, I couldn't (still can't) claim that either one "needed" to be done, but considering that I'm energized and joyful after doing so, and therefore in a considerably better mood than before, they are definitely beneficial activities both for myself and my family.
However, I then looked back to find out what else I'd said...and discovered that at first, I couldn't think of anything that had brought me joy at all (2011 was NOT a good year, for many reasons), much less anything that answered all three questions. Finally I came up with was "walking," never a mention of writing or playing the piano! Walking/exercising is certainly a more obviously logical answer, I think, and even though it took me until the middle of May to really get started with that, I couldn't be more pleased with how it's been going. About ten kilometers today to start the new year, definitely energizing me and bringing me joy, but no longer being avoided! At the beginning of last year I did walk a few times with Sue on a Saturday, but I wasn't ever motivated to go by myself. Now I'm walking or jogging every day, Sue going with me three days a week.
I did come up with one more thing in that conversation: spending one-on-one quality time with my children. Almost every time it happens, with any one of the six, it's wonderful. Taking just one of them grocery shopping, or just one of them being home with me, or just one coming along in the car during a short errand, or one coming with me on my morning walk--it's just plain cool. But it doesn't happen automatically all that often, and I don't make anywhere near enough effort to MAKE it happen. I have plenty of reasons (like, to start with, five other children...), but really, if something is important enough, time can be found. My husband has been taking each one of the older five children out once every two weeks for one-on-one time, and they all look forward to that special Papa-time very much, plus he does often take one or two along during other errands and shopping. (Note: my husband does the VAST majority of the grocery shopping, so that isn't actually much of an opportunity for me to take one child...) So this is something that could be worked on, for sure.
So then after that I came up with "writing" and "playing the piano", and did do something about both of those during most of the year. Piano playing petered out in the summer because it just isn't fun to play the piano when sweat is dripping down my whole body and even my finger-tips are slippery, and I've only picked it up again a bit in the last month or so. I'd say I've almost gotten back to the level I had when I was around 11 or 12, and I'm kind of okay with that.
As for writing...that wasn't something I had said to anyone at all except my journal, so I was very surprised when Sue invited me to the writers' group that she was a part of (and now leads, incidentally). It seemed an impossible thought to be able to go, not on a convenient day for me with the children and my husband's work schedule, but I was certainly intrigued. And then yet another acquaintance, not someone I knew well at all, asked me totally out of the blue if I'd be interested in the writers' group. Sue and I have exchanged e-mails for years and I borrow books all the time and she reads this blog, so it maybe wasn't totally unreasonable for to have figured out some of my "secrets", but this other lady didn't know any of that and I still actually have no idea at all why she invited me. And then Sue's husband, Richard, offered to occupy (code for "babysit") Lukas, the one child I can't leave at home without an adult, so I could go the writers' group...and I started going to that in February and haven't missed a single gathering. I'm really not sure how much my enjoyment of it has to do with writing and how much just with the fact that it's an outing with only adults, something that still makes me giddy with excitement!
Summary of this ramble: before rushing head-long into 2013, I have carefully considered what in 2012 brought me the most joy AND energized me AND I avoided doing, at least before 2012. My conclusions are that I'm doing well with walking, not too badly with writing and playing the piano (both activities being entirely and selfishly for ME, so don't expect any books or concerts--I'm not very good, just love doing them), and definitely need to make more of an effort to spend one-on-one time with each of the children.
However, I then looked back to find out what else I'd said...and discovered that at first, I couldn't think of anything that had brought me joy at all (2011 was NOT a good year, for many reasons), much less anything that answered all three questions. Finally I came up with was "walking," never a mention of writing or playing the piano! Walking/exercising is certainly a more obviously logical answer, I think, and even though it took me until the middle of May to really get started with that, I couldn't be more pleased with how it's been going. About ten kilometers today to start the new year, definitely energizing me and bringing me joy, but no longer being avoided! At the beginning of last year I did walk a few times with Sue on a Saturday, but I wasn't ever motivated to go by myself. Now I'm walking or jogging every day, Sue going with me three days a week.
I did come up with one more thing in that conversation: spending one-on-one quality time with my children. Almost every time it happens, with any one of the six, it's wonderful. Taking just one of them grocery shopping, or just one of them being home with me, or just one coming along in the car during a short errand, or one coming with me on my morning walk--it's just plain cool. But it doesn't happen automatically all that often, and I don't make anywhere near enough effort to MAKE it happen. I have plenty of reasons (like, to start with, five other children...), but really, if something is important enough, time can be found. My husband has been taking each one of the older five children out once every two weeks for one-on-one time, and they all look forward to that special Papa-time very much, plus he does often take one or two along during other errands and shopping. (Note: my husband does the VAST majority of the grocery shopping, so that isn't actually much of an opportunity for me to take one child...) So this is something that could be worked on, for sure.
So then after that I came up with "writing" and "playing the piano", and did do something about both of those during most of the year. Piano playing petered out in the summer because it just isn't fun to play the piano when sweat is dripping down my whole body and even my finger-tips are slippery, and I've only picked it up again a bit in the last month or so. I'd say I've almost gotten back to the level I had when I was around 11 or 12, and I'm kind of okay with that.
As for writing...that wasn't something I had said to anyone at all except my journal, so I was very surprised when Sue invited me to the writers' group that she was a part of (and now leads, incidentally). It seemed an impossible thought to be able to go, not on a convenient day for me with the children and my husband's work schedule, but I was certainly intrigued. And then yet another acquaintance, not someone I knew well at all, asked me totally out of the blue if I'd be interested in the writers' group. Sue and I have exchanged e-mails for years and I borrow books all the time and she reads this blog, so it maybe wasn't totally unreasonable for to have figured out some of my "secrets", but this other lady didn't know any of that and I still actually have no idea at all why she invited me. And then Sue's husband, Richard, offered to occupy (code for "babysit") Lukas, the one child I can't leave at home without an adult, so I could go the writers' group...and I started going to that in February and haven't missed a single gathering. I'm really not sure how much my enjoyment of it has to do with writing and how much just with the fact that it's an outing with only adults, something that still makes me giddy with excitement!
Summary of this ramble: before rushing head-long into 2013, I have carefully considered what in 2012 brought me the most joy AND energized me AND I avoided doing, at least before 2012. My conclusions are that I'm doing well with walking, not too badly with writing and playing the piano (both activities being entirely and selfishly for ME, so don't expect any books or concerts--I'm not very good, just love doing them), and definitely need to make more of an effort to spend one-on-one time with each of the children.
Monday, December 3, 2012
Meeting goals that I didn't even know I had
These two photos have something in common: they both represent things that a year ago I would have said would never, ever have anything at all to do with me. I did two things last month that were scary and exhilarating and totally unexpected and now I'm going to brag about them, so now is probably a good time to stop reading.
The tennis shoes ("tennies", "trainers", "sneakers", "takkies", "athletic shoes", and who know how many other words there might be...) were bought by me, for me, when we were in Germany in April, and are the first tennies I've owned in at least ten years, which is why when Lukas saw me wearing them, two months before he turned ten, he told me I looked like Grandma. (A compliment to me, not to my mother, who is 20 years older than I am but considerably more active and fit and has run three marathons in the last few years. She probably goes through more pairs of tennis shoes in a year than I have in my entire life so far.) In addition to buying these tennies, I actually started wearing them when we got back home to Cyprus. I went out walking in the Salt Lake park near our house two or three times at the end of April and beginning of May, and as of May 18th, have been out every single day since, except for 11 days in July/August when I was in Germany, one day in September when I overslept, and two days in October while my husband was out of town. Some mornings I've gotten a late start and only had time for two or three kilometers, but most mornings I go at least four and often eight kilometers (plus the 300ish meters each way to and from the trail), since the nature path along part of the Salt Lake is four kilometers long.
Aaaanyway, when I first started walking, it not only took me 45 minutes to go four kilometers, my heartbeat got up to 200 beats per minute while walking and I was worn out for the day. That kind of scared me--I knew I was out of shape, but not that I was THAT out of shape. Happily, that did change pretty quickly, so that within just a couple of weeks I was having to make an effort to walk fast enough to even get it up to 120. (No, I don't know what my ideal target heartrate would be, and Google wasn't much help, either. But I do know that 200 is way, way too high.)
Within less than a month I'd actually started jogging a tiny bit, just a few hundred meters at a time. That was the first thing that I thought I would never, ever do, and then in the middle of August (AUGUST! In CYPRUS!!) I jogged the entire eight kilometers without stopping. At a speed that would make real runners chuckle with amusement, but I was pleased. And then on November 4th, I participated in the 16th Annual Larnaka International Run, a free six-kilometer race along the sea front. While I thought of it as a "fun run", it was quickly obvious that I was the only person there not really taking it seriously. I had three goals for the run, and met them all: to complete it all, to jog the whole way, and to do it in under 42 minutes. The winners were finished in about 20 minutes, and the judges and timers had long since disappeared by the time I finished at 40 minutes 35 and a half seconds (according to the stopwatch on my cell phone), but I was thrilled. (In fact, I was giddy and hyper and totally crazy with excitement, and I love my friends who instead of laughing at me, cheered me on and laughed WITH me. It was so cool.) So, that was the long version of what the photo of my muddy tennis shoes represents.
The other photo, downloaded from the NaNoWriMo site, is because Marie and I participated in National Novel Writing Month this year. The goal is to write a complete work of fiction of at least 50,000 words during the month of November, and I really don't know what made me sign up (well, I could partly blame a Facebook/internet/homeschooling friend of mine--you know who you are, D MG!), much less then actually TELL anyone about it, and then Marie signed up, and my friend Sue, and Marie's friend Charis, and...we DID IT! On Saturday, December 1st, the four of us went out for ice cream to celebrate over 200,000 words in 30 days, very pleased with ourselves. I've always loved writing, but rarely even manage to actually finish even short stories, and had never attempted anything like this before. My story (I really can't bring myself to call it a "book", much less a "novel") is fairly silly and not very coherent, but it was a ton of fun writing it. And that is the short version of why I only blogged once in November.
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Excuses
It's been almost two months since I blogged, but as far as I know, all but one of the handful of people who read this are with me on Facebook anyway, where I keep linking to my friend Sue's blog because she so often has photos of us or writes about something we've done together. At the moment she's participating in a challenge to blog every day this month and has already mentioned me in several of the first 10 posts, and others covered what I would have written as well, so I just linked them, as well as previous ones. For example: dehydrating fruit. Sue bought a dehydrator, talked about it on Facebook, a friend of hers commented that she had one just like it but didn't want it, I gave a throw-away comment that if she was really giving it away I would like it, and the next thing I knew, I had a practically new dehydrator, given to me by someone I didn't even know! On October 30th Sue blogged about hers, complete with photos, so although I didn't dry exactly the same things (mostly plums, apples, and bananas here, plus fruit leather), I figure her post covered my experience pretty well, too. She also writes about the weather (rain is VERY exciting here!), which is of course the same for us as we're only about 500 meters away, and walking on the Salt Lake path, which she does three days a week with me. Here's one post that covers both.
So my number one and favorite excuse for not blogging is that most of what I would blog about is covered anyway. :-) (No, that does NOT mean that it's Sue's fault!!)
Next, I figure a post is more interesting if there are photos, and half the time when I think of it, the photos I want aren't yet in the computer and I don't know where the camera is. (Or I do know where the camera is, and it's not accessible, such as being in Germany with my husband, as it was for ten days recently.)
Another good excuse is that life is just a little teeny tiny bit busy around here. I'm not all that slow of a typist, and it's taken me over half an hour to write this already, because of getting up to answer the phone, listening to Lukas, getting Helen to stop throwing blocks, etc.
And my best excuse this month is that there's quite a lot of extra writing going on at the moment, which I might blog about later. Or might not.
I think I had some more excuses (all variations on a theme: I am lazy), but I have to go pick up Marie now. I could put this in drafts, of course, but then it likely won't get posted until December or later, so here goes. Oh, and if people remind me, I might blog (with photos, even!) about haircuts.
By the way, DeeDee in UK, I did look for you at FB under your real name, but didn't find you. If you're there and want to find me, I'm under my real name! :-)
So my number one and favorite excuse for not blogging is that most of what I would blog about is covered anyway. :-) (No, that does NOT mean that it's Sue's fault!!)
Next, I figure a post is more interesting if there are photos, and half the time when I think of it, the photos I want aren't yet in the computer and I don't know where the camera is. (Or I do know where the camera is, and it's not accessible, such as being in Germany with my husband, as it was for ten days recently.)
Another good excuse is that life is just a little teeny tiny bit busy around here. I'm not all that slow of a typist, and it's taken me over half an hour to write this already, because of getting up to answer the phone, listening to Lukas, getting Helen to stop throwing blocks, etc.
And my best excuse this month is that there's quite a lot of extra writing going on at the moment, which I might blog about later. Or might not.
I think I had some more excuses (all variations on a theme: I am lazy), but I have to go pick up Marie now. I could put this in drafts, of course, but then it likely won't get posted until December or later, so here goes. Oh, and if people remind me, I might blog (with photos, even!) about haircuts.
By the way, DeeDee in UK, I did look for you at FB under your real name, but didn't find you. If you're there and want to find me, I'm under my real name! :-)
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