When everything changes

Bad blogger. Bad, bad, neglectful blogger. Shame on me.

Ah, but where to start. I'll have to stick to the short version, because the long version would simply be too, well, long.

First, we've moved halfway across the country. We're back in northern Manitoba, the same tiny little town my husband and I met and grew up in. Quite the experience, being back here again – but that would be the long version. Suffice it to say that the boy is loving having his "gampa", "gamma", and four aunties around to give him lots of attention, and we're loving the big beautiful house we're renting for the same price as our little condo back in the city. Oh, and we've dug up and are ready to plant our very first vegetable garden.

Second, and the reason for the move, I've returned (temporarily) to work full time while my husband becomes a full-time SAHD. I say temporary because we'll be moving again in the fall, the rest of the way across the country, to BC where my husband will be returning to school (electrical engineering) and I will again become a work-at-home mom. As my husband was unable to find work after the company he worked for shut down last June, I applied for and accepted an opportunity with a post-secondary educational institute here in Manitoba. While I could have returned to my former job full time in the city, it would have meant long days without seeing my son. Moving us here meant, in addition to having my family around, that I could come home every noon hour and spend some time giggling away with the little guy. It's not an optimal situation, but it seems to be working well so far – again, though, I'll try to stick to the short version.

Third (and arguably most exciting), we're expecting again! What a long year it was, waiting for this wonderful blessing. The baby is due mid-December, and we are planning a midwife-attended homebirth. We are so excited. I haven't been feeling too bad so far – bouts of mild nausea here and there, a definite lack of energy, not much interest in food – but nothing at all like my first pregnancy where I was horribly sick 24/7 for the entire first three months. I'll take the occasional mild morning sickness over that any day. We've been talking to the little guy about the baby, but I have no idea how much he really understands. Right now he'll say there's a baby growing in mommy's tummy and that he's going to share his milk with the baby. He's currently nursing 1-3 times a day – I don't plan to actively wean him at this point, but I won't be at all disappointed if he gives it up on his own! Fortunately I've had very minimal pain while nursing and no apparent change in my supply so far.

Well, that's the short version. I've got more to say – so much more – but I'll save it for later. Everything always seems to happen at once, doesn't it? I think I'm ready to settle back into the blogging world, though, now that we're settled in here. Settled in and waiting expectantly for a gloriously warm and exciting summer. Come soon, sun.

Knitting adorableness

Last month I began knitting a pair of wool pants for the little guy. I intended to use it as a diaper cover, but wouldn't you know it, he was mostly out of diapers by the time I finished. Fortunately, they make adorable pants anyway.



This was my first foray into making clothing (other than hats and mitts). It was so much simpler than I expected, I'm kicking myself for putting it off so long!



I learned a few new techniques in the process, most notably short rows (I was a short row virgin before beginning this project) and provisional cast on. Fun stuff!

(Pre-blocking)


The Details

Pattern: Adorabubble Baby Britches (Ravelry; Etsy)
Yarn: Lion Brand 100% Wool in midnight blue
Needles: 4.5mm and 4.0mm
Mods and Specs: Custom sizing; enclosed i-cord drawstring waist, seed stitch cuffs.
Began: Feb 17, 2009
Finished: Mar 11, 2009



Current project - my first pair of socks!

Ah, Spring

How I love thee.

It's the time of year where some people are out in shorts and sandals while others are still huddled inside parkas and winter boots. Me, I'm somewhere in the middle - still sticking to longer skirts, but I couldn't resist slipping out the sandals in place of the winter boots today. Ah, happy feet. I detest socks.

When my husband makes fun of me, I just remind him that Jesus wore sandals. Hence, I am more godly than he. *pats self on back*

I love the smell of spring - that warm and wonderful fresh spring smell. (Or is it the smell of melting dog poo and rotten leaves? Either way, I love it.)

I can feel my spirits rising already. The warm sun, the growing patches of grass, the warm breeze, the longer days, the warmer temperatures, the lack of biting cold, the warmth, the lack of snow, oh yes, and the warmth. Mostly the warmth. And the long walks where you come home feeling refreshed instead of wanting to die from the cold.

On the other hand, at least winters here aren't as bad as they were in northern Manitoba where I grew up. I haven't forgotten those -50C days that froze your nostrils and eyelids shut and left icicles on the men's mustaches. Woohoooo, those were the days. Is it any wonder I have such an aversion to winter?

Then again, the snow forts we built were pretty awesome.

Still - spring, glorious spring, is here at last, and I am one happy lady because of it.

Wouldn't it figure that next week the little guy and I are headed back to northern Manitoba - still firmly in the throes of winter - to visit my family? Ah well, goodbye sandals. I shall see you again when I return.

Recommended Reading: For the wee ones

So far, our son is as much a bookaholic as both his parents are (he didn't have a chance, really). I thought I'd share some of our favourites.

One of our favourite favourites - both mine and my son's - is Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers. The illustrations are delightful, as is the rhyming verse. And I can't help it - I'm automatically partial to any child's book that lists breastfeeding and babywearing alongside bottle feeding and strollers.

Our very first favourite - the first book that my son "learned" (knew what actions were coming up next) - was Baby Cakes by Karma Wilson. We both still enjoy this sweet little interactive book.

Another old favourite of ours is George and the Dragon by Chris Wormell. This is one of those books that is just plain fun to read.

Our most recent favourite discoveries are I Love You Through and Through by Bernadette Shustak and How Do I Love You by Marion Bauer. Both books are adorably illustrated by Caroline Church. My son requests both of these over and over.

We're just getting really interested in the I Spy books here, so that's been something fun and interactive to do lately.

Although I'm not a huge Sandra Boynton fan, we do love Snuggle Puppy. Such a sweet book.

We're not always fussy, though. We do love almost anything by Dr. Seuss!

We're big fans of Richard Scarry here as well, but by far our favourite ones are Cars and Trucks and Things that Go and What Do People Do All Day. These books will keep my son entertained for nearly an hour at a time, so full of entertaining illustrations. Incidently, these were my husband's childhood favourites as well!

Speaking of classics, who doesn't love We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen? Or Brown Bear, Brown Bear by Bill Martin Jr (and illustrated by the infamous Eric Carle)? Or Love You Forever by Robert Munsch?

Ah, who are we kidding. We love anything by Robert Munsch!

If you weren't fortunate enough to grow up with Chicken Soup with Rice by Maurice Sendak, please, do yourself a favour and buy this book of monthly poems! In March the wind blows down the door and spills my soup upon the floor. It laps it up and roars for more. Blowing once, blowing twice, blowing chicken soup with rice.

Another of my husband's childhood favourites is Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel by Virginia Burton. This is a very cute book.

Then there's Jan Brett - surely I don't need to say more? We particularly enjoy The Mitten, along with our newest Jan Brett favourite, Noah's Ark (thank you Trace for pointing out this particular gem!).

Another new discovery is Karen Kingsbury's Let Me Hold You Longer, a sweet book about remembering our children's lasts as they grow. My husband, however, thinks the book is just plain depressing. I prefer to describe it as "bittersweet" - as growing up always is.

Naturally, not a single home library would be complete without at least one set of Mother Goose nursery rhymes - our Mother Goose book of choice is illustrated by Scott Gustafson. I could not possibly rave over these beautiful enchanting illustrations enough. Our next purchase will be his Classic Fairy Tales.

Max Lucado's Wemmick books are among our favourites as well, particularly You Are Mine. Although these books are too long for my son to sit through yet, he loves the illustrations and requests them often anyway. For now I just paraphrase the important messages in each.

Speaking of important messages, we do have a couple other favourite Christian children's books - I Love You This Much by Lynn Hodges, I'd be Your Hero by Kathryn O'Brien, and God Loves You by Kathleen Long Bostrom. The last one is part of the Little Blessings series, illustrated by Elena Kucharik, artist of the Care Bears. I love her illustrations, but more than that, I love finding a series of Christian children's books that aren't either really bad, really "off" theologically, or watered down to the point where the message itself is lost. I have a very hard time finding good Christian children's books, so this series is definitely one I appreciate.

On the topic of good content (thought not from a Christian viewpoint here), I do appreciate the level of information in Dinosaur ABC by Roger Priddy - not enough to make it boring, but enough for it to be a book that grows with kids. Right now my son loves the pictures of dinosaurs (and hearing me try to pronounce the names - good thing it comes with pronunciation keys!), but as he grows there is more detailed information there for him to dig into. Likewise with Priddy's Monster Machines book - great for toddlers who like pictures of trucks, great for little kids who want to know more details about them.

One of the nicest set of gift books we've received is Why I love my Mummy and Why I Love my Daddy by Daniel Howarth. Another wonderful illustrator and very sweet books.

Well! I'm sure I have more favourites, but that's more than enough for now. I'm always very excited to find a new children's book that is really good, and I look forward to having our options grow along with him!

What are some of your favourites?

Adventures in nursing a toddler

Yesterday, at my son's insistence, I breastfed a dinosaur. And then I had to nurse his car, too.

Definitely a new experience for me.

Today he discovered, for the first time, that he too has nipples. So he tugged them a couple times, signed "milk", then pointed to his chest.

I laughed myself silly while trying to convince him that he couldn't get milk out of those.

This kid's a riot.

Ash Wednesday

Today we begin in earnest the preparation of our hearts for Easter. A dear friend of mine shared this wonderful quote about Lent:

Some years ago a friend of mine told me that he had urged his children to move beyond giving up candy to giving up some habit of sin that marked their lives. About halfway through Lent he asked the children how they were doing with their Lenten promise. One of his young sons had promised to give up fighting with his brothers and sisters during Lent. When his father asked him how it was going, the boy replied, "I'm doing pretty good, Dad—but boy, I can't wait until Easter!"

That response indicates that this boy had only partly understood the purpose of Lenten "giving up." Lent is about conversion, turning our lives more completely over to Christ and his way of life. That always involves giving up sin in some form. The goal is not just to abstain from sin for the duration of Lent but to root sin out of our lives forever. Conversion means leaving behind an old way of living and acting in order to embrace new life in Christ.

My vision for this Lenten season is a time of refocusing my heart and my attitudes by spending more time in prayer and reading God's Word. With that as the foundation, I pupose also to use this season as a time of cultivating more of a servant's heart in my relationships, and in particular my marriage.

This has been a difficult past 8 months for us with my husband unemployed and I have begun to recognize much bitterness and anger within me. It is that bitterness and anger that I want to root out, to give up, replacing it with a giving heart and gentle spirit, which I know I can only do through the power of God.

My desire is a living faith, a faith which is demonstrated through the fruit and good works which arise naturally out of a loving relationship with our God.

How will you use this Lenton season?

Finding my place

(This is a bit of a continuation of my last post.)

These past two years have been years of discovery and change, to the point where I no longer feel at home, well, anywhere within the Christian community.

I suppose, though I now cringe to admit it, I would previously have described myself as being on the very conservative side of conservative Christianity. If it was "conservative", I was there - and the more conservative, the better. And clearly anyone who disagreed with some part of conservative Christianity was just using that as an excuse to not have to be obedient in that particular area - a sentiment I still hear almost daily from the conservative side of Christianity.

Gratefully, and by the mercy of God, I no longer feel that way myself. Slowly I began to see the things that weren't quite "right" with that ultra-conservative ideology - first one thing, then another, then more and more until what I had previously felt at home with now looked so completely foreign to me that I could no longer abide with it.

Now I see it everywhere. It seems glaringly obvious to me, this ideology that appears so "biblical" on the surface and yet, digging deeper, is often nothing more than excess burdens imposed by man, a need to keep up with the Joneses, a competition, mere outward appearance.

I know I linked to this series in my previous entry, but Taunya really hit the nail on the head early on in her first installment of The Marketing of the Titus 2 Woman:

This month we must wear skirts only, the next we must purchase an 1868 dictionary, the next we must only read from the King James version of the Bible, the next month KJV is out and it must be the ESV or else we are reading heresy. By the middle of the year we must change our homeschooling curriculum because the one we are using is not Christian enough, by early summer we must all have our children stop dating and read the latest book on courtship, by mid-summer we are going to hell if our daughters even look at a college with interest. By then end of summer even our sons need to stay out of college in favor of an apprenticeship. By fall we must all put on clothes from the 1860's and admit that the South was right all along and Lincoln is the worse thing to ever befall this great nation of ours. By Thanksgiving we had all better be trying to have as many children as the Duggars (currently they have 18) or else we are not as godly as we think we are. By Christmas if we find we cannot have that many children we had better adopt that many. By New Years we need to have all of our children (dressed alike I might add) lined up according to size and ready to leave our church of 10 years to head to that Family-Integrated one down the road. What is a Family-Integrated church? Wow! if you don't know you aren't as godly as you thought you were. Finally and most importantly our husband must immediately be able to teach us and our children theology on a seminary level or else he is clearly a backslidder who does not love his family!

The hardest part in untangling it all is that it is all based - very loosely! - on biblical principles. Start with one verse or biblical principal, ignore the context, build up a whole set of rules around it, and presto! One more man-made burden to take on in the name of being "godly" - and shake your head ruefully at any who don't jump on the bandwagon right behind you.

So much of it I can no longer stomach. The patriocentric movement. The quiverful movement. The "biblical method" of parenting - I feel physically sick to read some of the descriptions. (And these are parents who truly love their children and mean well, earnestly desiring to raise godly children! If only they could see the damage they are doing - like the quivering daughters they leave behind.) The proliferation of "Titus 2" and "Biblical Womanhood" and "Biblical Femininity" writings, and the even greater abundance of women who form their ideas of biblical living based on such writings, turning their families' lives upside down every time they step away from the newest blog post or book. The "one size fits all" approach to everything. Our ("godly") way or the highway. The legalism that drenches it all.

As I said, I could never feel at home there again. Which is funny, because I do most of the things they preach - I just do them for different reasons, and I don't believe they should necessarily be universally applied to all Christians. I am a skirt-wearing, birth-control-avoiding, homeschooling, living-lightly mama with a marriage that most conservatives would approve of. And yet I firmly disagree with patriarchy, I don't believe it is a sin to take steps to conceive or to avoid conception provided the couple is following the promptings of the Holy Spirit and not the flesh, I don't think it is sinful for women to wear pants, and I understand that someone can be both Christian and send their children to public schools!

But I don't fit in with the liberal end of Christianity either. I do believe there is Absolute Truth. I do believe there is one way to God, through Jesus Christ, His Son and our Saviour. I do believe the Bible is true, inerrant, and historically factual. I do believe that homosexuality is a sin - while sincerely loving the person and welcoming them into fellowship. I do believe there are fundamental differences between a man and a woman - while wholeheartedly rejecting the teachings of patriarchy.

The evangelical movement. The health and wealth gospel. The emergent movement. I can't find any footing in any of them either. There seems to be no one set "type" of Christian that I can identify with - and many days I am so disappointed by what I see in the church that I wish there was some other way altogether of identifying myself as a follower of Jesus Christ.

(And, of course, there is no one defined "conservative" or "liberal" or "evangelical" or "emergent" or "_____" Christian - there are all sorts of people within each - which only makes it harder to find solid footing or to discuss any particular ideology in any sort of fruitful manner.)

Sometimes it can be difficult to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater, if you'll pardon the cliché, but I have sought earnestly to be cautious that, while turning away from the extrabiblical principles of conservative Christianity, I don't leave behind the true biblical principles at the same time. So that's where I'm at right now - continually digging, searching, praying, looking for the Truth in a religion that has strayed so far from where it should be. Walking away from religous teachings and back to the Bible and the welcoming arms of the Creator Who left it for us. Giving my life to God, not to a movement or doctrine.

Relearning Grace - grace from God, grace for others, and grace for myself.

Grace, sweet grace.