Surprise! What To Expect When You Are Not Expecting: A First Foster Placement

I wrote this post right in the midst of having our first long term foster placement. I didn't publish then because it all felt so new and I wasn't sure if I was qualified to talk about it. Several years later, I am happy I found it so I can publish it now.

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Just when we thought it wouldn't happen, when we were debating whether it should or not, when we were really super comfortable with life... It Happened.
A foster placement.
A baby.
A really little one.
Surprise!
I have been practicing the transition to three children on and off for a while with respite care, so that's not so bad. There have been good surprises like a newfound maturity in my youngest daughter as she takes up the mantle of Big Sister. There have been bad surprises like when the bathroom sink started leaking, the girls were fighting, and I was trying to change a diaper with a social worker at the door all at the same time. Keepin' it real.
But mostly the surprises have been kind of superficial. I'm not ready to be deep yet. I have a baby. My brain is fried. I thought that because I wouldn't be recovering postpartum things would be easier. I won't kid you: It's easier, just not in the areas and levels I expected.

Expectation: I'll have more energy.
Reality: For a few nights I was so sore I couldn't sleep from doing all of the squats and arm curls a baby brings! And anyway, not breastfeeding means you actually have to get up and wake up at night. On the other hand, not having all those crazy hormones and having had a big human pushed out of me means my husband is still attractive to me, so... yay!

Expectation: I'll take it slow once the baby is born.
Reality: My house has never been this clean on the regular since ever. Having social workers over constantly really puts the fire under me. Plus no one comes to help you recover or bring meals. And instead of getting a pass from doing things, there's a whole round of extra appointments for the baby: I reference the above statement about the frequent visits of social workers. Still, I didn't push a human being out, so I'm in a better position to handle it.

Expectation: Some people like bottle feeding better. Maybe it'll grow on me!
Reality: Nope. Still nope. You know how they always say to drink a glass of water when you sit down to breastfeed? I was good about that with the girls, but bottle feeding takes me two hands, and I am incredibly dehydrated. I think that's what has shocked me the most. I thought I would be better at self care. So that's a goal.
P.S. In retrospect I also missed the quiet gentle bonding of breastfeeding, and overall I think the baby missed it too. This is not to say that bottle feeding is bad, or that you can't bond, but that I did notice a difference having done it both ways several times over.

Expectation: I didn't really know what to anticipate with my children's reactions.
Reality: There is a degree to which it is stressful for them to share mommy with another person, and we didn't really prepare them for that the way we would have if I had been pregnant. There was nothing obvious that signaled that change was coming! For the most part they have been really happy and really helpful with the baby. At the same time, their fuses are quite short. Tears are coming easily, and misunderstandings abound. I may have been accused of evil step-motherhood a time or two. It's been important to celebrate their new roles, reinforce what routines we can salvage, and acknowledge the changes that are hard. I am praying that a few weeks will find us with a new, less tearful normal.

Expectation: Dance will need to go on hold for a while.
Reality: Yep. Night time feedings are kicking my butt, but I have plane tickets to dancy things, so miraculously a-dancing I will go, at least once this month. Once a month is probably doable right? [Side note: I must say doable often, because the girls sort all undertakings into the categories "Doable" and "Not-Doable."]
P.S. I ended up dancing at least twice a month throughout babyhood. Toddlerhood is kicking my butt though!

Six Things I Learned From Fostering

A few years ago I wrote about why I feel fostering is important here. I stand by every word.

We did respite care for a while, and then were placed with a baby boy whom we have since adopted. Our home is now closed to fostering as we focus fully on the children we have. I feel like this process has taken all of my personhood for a while. It's probably a good sign that I feel like I can talk about it now.

So in retrospect here are a few important things that I wasn't expecting about the foster journey.

Redemption is hard. I knew that beforehand in the way that I knew my bedroom might smell like a man when I got married and shared my room with a man. It seemed like “maybe” it would smell which through mental gymnastics really means “maybe not!” or that it might be romantic and musky, or that the pungent masculine aroma might have to do with sheets not being changed often enough. But no. It’s not a housekeeping issue, and it’s not romantic, and it is a certain part of living with a dude. 

Redemption is hard, and I don’t mean maybe. Redemption in this case is about choosing to take the consequences for possibly generations of bad circumstances and bad choices off of a child and taking it on yourself. Competence won’t hurt, but it doesn’t get you off scot-free. Like the terrain of a Bear Hunt, you can’t go over or under or around it. You have to go through it, and it’s messy. There's no "maybe not." It isn't romantic. No one is filming you stroking a cherub's hair in the sunset. It's just hard. To the degree it is hard it is also deeply good and right and necessary. It is enlightening, and I feel like I better understand the redemption that comes through Christ as a result of slogging through our own little mini story. 

Doing the “right thing” doesn’t always feel like the right thing. When our son first came to us he seemed pretty well cared for, and people who knew his mother had some positive things to say about her. As much as she had made some choices I questioned, she had also made some I could really get behind. I was filled with horror. What if I was playing for the wrong team, depriving a mother and child of one another? What if the grand act of selflessness people were lauding me for, to my confusion, was actually destructive? I finally concluded that I hadn’t been the one to make any of the decisions involved except to open my arms, and my job was to love this child as hard as I could while the decision makers weighed his next move. That wasn’t the end of feeling wrong though. Each time I had to weigh my bio children’s needs against that of a newcomer's, each time I had to evaluate how to interact with a birth mother, each time I was asked to take another child and had to say yes or no, there was no angels-trumpeting-Mayor-presents-you-with-the-key-to-the-city-parade-worthy kind of “Yes! This is right!” feeling for any of the choices. We have just had to use our heads, use our training, and try to give every person involved neither more nor less than what they truly need. 

People are much more supportive about fostering than about adoption, and the key is finality. People think that fostering is harder than adoption. The number one thing I hear is “I couldn’t open my heart to a child and have them taken away.” The uncertainty is what really tugs the heart strings. So many horror stories circulate about relatives coming to claim a beloved foster child at the 11th hour before adoption. Signing up for that sounds crazy to many people, like volunteering to get your heart broken. In contrast, the narrative with adoption is revealed by the phrase people use, “Forever Family.” It sounds just like hot chocolate and Christmas carols. People think when an adoption is- listen for that language -Finalized, it’s over and everyone is safe and everyone is happy, and we celebrate by going to Disney for a week, roll credits on the family photo of us in front of Cinderella’s castle. 

In reality the adoption journey is no more completed in a courtroom than a marriage is complete at the altar. 

At the end of the day, in the situation of a foster child being placed outside your home you can say after much struggle “I did my best and I hope they are okay, but it is out of my hands.” There is a lot of grief to that.

There is another kind of grief that people don’t rally around as enthusiastically when you realize that you must continue to do your best every single day into the future and redemption is hard and you don’t know where the energy will come from. You signed up for it. Suck it up! It sounds like whining to say “This is hard, this is harder than fostering” but for us at least it has been.  

There is always grief: My theory is that post part depression is about hormones but also about grief. I got PPD symptoms with foster children too. Grief when new children come and your schedule and family dynamics change. Grief about sharing stuff, grief in saying goodbye to free time. Grief when children leave. Grief over the too-quiet. Grief wondering where they are, and calculating how old they are this year. Grief is a part of life. Grief means you have loved. It makes the shadows no lighter to know this. 

There is joy. I wish you the mega-watt joy of introducing a foster child to something they have never experienced before, like a real theater movie, or putting together a Lego, or cooking as a family. Many foster children have never been sung to. They want to hold your hand crossing the street and read a million stories just to sit in your lap. Some will accept literally any affection and positive interaction they can get. Especially as a respite provider you can basically be a fairy godmother of positivity. There is no one else knocking down doors to spoil these children and it means a lot. 

The joy of social workers and judges really took me by surprise. They see the worst humanity has to offer every day. They see addiction and mental illness and blood curdling abuse, they deal with mystery fluids in their cars, and acting out in public. They are trying the nearly impossible task of finding adoptive families for teens with juvie records, and that’s all just part of the job! Then while they are trying to do their jobs racist people berate them for working with families of another color, and people wonder aloud why they do what they do, or whether they could make it in a “real job.” But seriously. The family court judges preside over the official affairs of generations of a family so they have been watching the equivalent of a ten car pileup of life choices for years. Everyone has tears of joy when something goes right for a little one. It is the most beautiful thing.   

Christmas in August

The time to knit stockings is not during the holiday season when you want to be making gifts, so I curl up in the air conditioning to hide from the heat and knit. We are officially legally adding to our family very soon via adoption from foster care! The inspiration for our son's stocking pattern comes from kente cloth to acknowledge and embrace his biological ancestry. In joy our family wishes you joy as well... in August, even though it is traditional to wish such a thing in December. Big gifts can come in any month! 

How To: Make Alternative Montessori Style Sandpaper Letters

 
Have you noticed a strong inverse relationship between how much prep time you spend on a teaching related project and how interested your kids are? Not so with this project in our family. Using hot glue to make flash cards worked! It doesn't look fancy, but if it does the job, who cares? These are a great teaching tool for Montessori style learning and D'Nealian cursive, as well as general writing skills. I can see this technique being successful for children with sensory processing issues who don't like rough things as well.

For the most part I really adore Montessori materials and concepts. One material my children rejected outright is the sensory sandpaper letters and numbers to trace with your finger as preparation for writing. The materials I got from Adena Montessori are great quality, but the girls abhor the feeling of sandpaper and took their strokes willy-nilly out of order regardless of instruction, so I let it go until their numbers were reversed and I was in an all-out war over cursive.
#teacheroftheyear right?
The beauty of the hot glue cards is that the glue guides their fingers into the strokes in the right order! Before I took the plunge I started with numbers 0-9 with gold stickers, and with success ventured into lower case and finally upper case cursive letter cards.

  Note: In a world where people write by hand infrequently cursive seems like an indulgence that is "way too hard" according to my kids, except for one thing– You remember things better when you write notes by hand, and one of the best ways to write fast enough to take thorough notes is cursive. I credit a lot of my good grades to cursive. Plus if you have nice handwriting its an easy ego boost because people always notice.

My children vehemently disagree with my premise, preferring to print in all caps, hence the cursive battle!

Montessori Hot Glue Letter Cards 

Supplies:
27 cardboard sheets sized 5.5" x 8.5" (mine are 8.5" x 11" cardboard sheets cut in half),
ruler,
pencil,
eraser,
marker,
a popsicle stick (optional),
red or pink glitter glue,
6 blue metallic dot or star stickers for vowels, (mine is leftover table confetti)
21 red metallic dot or star stickers for consonants,
hot glue gun, and
10 sticks of hot glue

1. On 19 cards draw solid marker lines 1.5" from the top and bottom, and a broken line 4.5" from the top, centered between the solid lines. My broken line is 1/2" on, 1/2" off. These cards are for the letters that sit on the line. 

2. In marker on the lower righthand corner print these cards with the letters a, b, c, d, e, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, r, s, t, u, v, w, and x. 

3. On the remaining 8 cards, draw a light pencil line 1.5" from the bottom, a solid marker line 3" up from that, and a broken line another 3" up from your solid line. These cards are for letters with tails that drop below the line.

4. In marker on the lower righthand corner print these cards with the letters f, g, j, p, q, y, y, and z. Yes, 2 y's, as one will serve as a consonant and the other as a vowel.  

5. Apply a line of pink or red glitter glue to the bottom-most solid marker line on each card. In D'Nealian handwriting curricula the line the letters rest on is often red/pink. Highlighting it helps the child to hold the card right side up, line the cards up by matching the red line, the glitter is a rough counterpoint to the smooth glue, and shiny is always better. 

6. In pencil, lightly rough out each letter referencing D'Nealian resources, Learning Curve Pro font for cursive, School House A font for print. For the letters with tails, use the pencil line toward the bottom of the card to show how far the tail should drop. Use the popsicle stick as a point of reference for the width of the strokes, and to round off the ends. Draw your final lines in marker and erase all visible pencil marks.

7. Apply blue stickers or confetti to the leading stroke of each vowel: a, e, i, o, u, and y. Why use stickers? To show where to start. Why metallic? Because, I am told by my product testers, that is one of the things that make these cards great. Why blue? Because in the Montessori method vowels are always shown in blue.

8. Apply red stickers to the leading stroke of each consonant, b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, y, and z. Why red? Because in the Montessori method consonants are always shown in red. 

9. With a steady hand, squeeze an even amount of glue along the outline of each letter starting at the first upward stroke. You can see on the letter "h" here that if a stroke crosses itself priority is given to the first pass, in this case the stroke from bottom to top, and the later stroke is partial for the sake of simplicity. 

10. Spend the rest of your children's school ages trying to get the little glue strings off. Good luck!    

Now, does anyone want to buy my barely used sandpaper letters? 

Three Year Old Tantrums– Making Peace

Three year old tantrums are like tsunamis. You don’t know how big the cataclysm will be until it’s on top of you, and you can’t stop it once it has started. You just have to be prepared beforehand and get to higher ground. 

As my daughters have moved from the developmental stage identifying themselves with me to seeking individuality and choices, the transition has been rocky and full of temper tantrums. As much as I would like to point fingers and blame their tender youth, I myself am not always the example of maturity I wish to be. I try to let myself off the hook because I am not a yeller, but I’ll say it before someone else rats me out: Bull-headedness and snarling are patterns God convicts me about regularly. Oh God, you multi-tasker, you! Using me disciplining my kids to discipline me! 

So here we are with long, massive meltdowns in very public places, but that doesn’t even matter because I happen to know you can still hear that little voice shrieking inside the house from down the block. Thank God we don’t live in an apartment at this point!

As I said, there’s no stopping it: The element of surprise is impotent. Punitive action and reasoning are equally fruitless. It takes a good 20-30 min. before distraction is an option. Mostly tantrums just have to be forestalled before they start. 

Sure, I know that means eating real meals at regular intervals. Of course it means getting regular sleep. Gee, thanks, parenting sites. I'd never have thought of that on my own!

The key for me was realizing what my daughter was trying to accomplish with her tantrums. On the surface they seem whimsical –in a bad way– but for her it is all about feeling like her rights were trampled on and having no recourse. Her solution might not be the same as your child's solution because her reasons may be different than your kid's. But if you think it may help, read on! 

What has really helped is having a family peacemaking strategy. The work of making peace is not best done by the clear-headed outside observer. It has to start in the heart of the person who is angry and sees the wrong. We have found my daughter's temper escalates when she sees no recourse for due process and justice.

My idea and my children’s ideas of justice don’t often coincide at first, but having a calm, consistent road to travel together makes a difference.

Here are the tools I want to give them: A desire for justice, capacity for mercy, a chance to cool down, a template for respectful discourse, empathy, and experience with un-begrudging compromise. The terrible thing is that this list doesn’t describe my heart of hearts! My own desire and practice are far from perfect, so this is for me too. 

My efforts at cool down time and respectful discourse had so far been blown away in the blast of living fury that is my second-born, so I needed a new strategy. We tried a Peace Table ala Montessori, and it is working surprisingly well! The idea is to have a neutral place for conflict resolution and the promotion of peace. The genius of it is that it gives my kids an avenue for positive action, not just violent protest. 

Supplies: On the table we have a rose in a shallow bowl- not a long stemmed flower in a vase, because vases are easier to knock over, and long flowers can be turned into cart whips by furious children– and a battery operated candle. 

Step 1: If someone in the home is feeling upset or experiencing conflict they can present the involved person with the rose, and it is part of the social contract that they go to the table together to resolve their difficulty. 

Step 2: Whomever is holding the rose has the right to speak, and anyone else has the privilege of listening. 

Step 3: The rose is passed between them until they resolve the matter. 

Having physical tools to hold as protocol for the intellectual/emotional process of conflict resolution is grounding and reassuring for them. It keeps them on track. There is a Montessori book to introduce this activity, but role playing was enough, and in fact, quite revelatory for us!

The purpose of the battery candle is that it is an extra task and treat for the angry child to turn on, allowing for a few more split seconds of cool off/distracted time. Every instant counts! Also they are mesmerizing and cheap at the dollar store! Another advantage to having a dedicated space for this is that it is proactive. Choosing from a small selection of activities from the table is a self-directed action. I see cool down time-outs as preventing anyone or anything getting hurt, but the angry child sees it as punishment or banishment, which compounds the drama. I want them to grow up knowing that they don’t get positive or negative consequences for how they feel, but for what they do with the feelings they have. Mature people find activities that de-escalate themselves when they are angry, but sometimes we stop kids from de-escalating by mandating things that make them angry. Once again, anger is fine, being destructive and rude is not. They have to be dealt with separately. 

When I said that role playing was revelatory, what I mean is that I discovered a reason my explosive child has a short fuse: Her fuse is not that short, it’s just that her sister is a pyro. As I found myself trying to negotiate a pretend argument for the rights to a toy I don’t even care about, I discovered that my oldest drives a really hard bargain, and she denies others acknowledgement that they have a real case. While she looks level headed and peaceable to authority figures, she looks like a tyrant when you are standing eye to eye. It raises the point that making peace is everyone’s job. No one is exempt. The burden of it can’t only fall on the people who burn for justice. Acknowledgement and sensitivity are really important. Without empathy the person who is wronged just comes off as a complaining troublemaker, and that is unjust too! As a mother it is tempting to focus my efforts on the child who is most publicly embarrassing, and who inconveniences me most, but my job is to help both the explosive child, AND the kid who casually plays with emotional matches. One is no less important than the other. 

 The spiritual component is something we are working on as well, but not in the tsunami moments. Jesus said that when you try to feed pearls to swine, they turn around and eat you. Raise your hand if that’s happened to you when your kids are angry! I find my relationship with God, my prayer life, and the help of Scripture invaluable, like pearls, but when my kids have a hunger for justice they don’t appreciate moralizing.   

Becoming peacemakers is a life-long, not week-long evolving process. Additionally, peacemaking is not just about resolving conflict, but about developing an eternal perspective, deepening one’s walk with God, developing love, practicing patience, and self-control. As my children master the peacemaking skills we started with, I expect to swap in other activities at the peace table. 

Here are my ideas: 

• Calm-down glitter jar,
• Music player with Scripture songs,
• Books about peacemaking... any suggestions? 
• Stones with applicable Bible verses on them,
• Tactile celtic knot tracing activity to introduce labyrinth prayer aides,
• Recorder for work on taking deep breaths, and 
• Puzzles for taking time to cool down.

The end of this story hasn't happened yet, but we have gone from 2 huge tantrums a day to 1 or 2 short ones a week. My daughter has been swallowing back the fearful rage and seeking healthy things like cuddling and talking about it since we have a plan. The rose is something she can present to parents too, and be certain her appeal is heard. The table also gives us a benchmark for the minimum of what is required to work something out. Often I would see my older daughter sulking about something her sister did. She always claimed to have tried to work it out, but I wasn't sure. Now I can tell them "If you haven't invited your sister to the peace table, you haven't tried to work it out. If you aren't willing to do that, you can sulk in your room, but not in our space." Very effective! 

Little Big Challenges

I'm typing one handed with a baby on my lap amongst other hinderances, knowing what I want to write, and also knowing I don't have the time to write to my quality satisfaction.
This is life.

It's easy to show my process when life looks pretty and put together, and harder when I have more time to think than act. This is a really crucial point in my work, I think. I've never felt more assured about direction, more certain of my mind, more confident in my work, or more supported by the people who count in my life. If only I could get into the studio!
In my twenties I was really honing my technique, I just didn't know what to do with it. Now I'm motivated, but the same little people who are arranging transformative life experience are also the main reason I can't get a move on. Here's to taking the scenic route!

 

Succulent Painting

When I am working on a project I desperately want to be able to write about it one day and show you the next without a pause, but art labor intensive, and it takes time. Factor in making meals and taking kids to lessons and parks and libraries... well, here's what is left!

I have been working on a silk painting for a while now. My idea was that the girls love to paint too, and maybe they wouldn't interrupt if we were all painting together. Hahaha! Sheez, I crack myself up.

The original sketch itself was in progress for the months of February and March through mid April:

I drew succulents afternoons, evenings, and whenever I could steal a moment while binge watching Beauty and the Geek Australia on Youtube. As I am a beauty married to a geek I consider this to be pure research, not reality tv. What I mostly learned is that self tanner has magical transformative powers. Never mind that, what is important is that I finally ended up with a 36" square pattern of succulents. It is a repeat, meaning that if you lay the pattern side by side in any direction it will fit together like a puzzle.

As I said, the pattern is one yard square, but my fabric is 45" square. I traced the pattern onto my fabric lightly in pencil making use of the repetitive properties. You can kind of see the faint pencil lines in the picture above. The fabric was then painted over with wax, then the wax ironed off. This is what the paper looks like with the wax ironed onto it. I always think it is rather beautiful.

  I had to do the wax/iron step twice as I ironed too thoroughly the first time and not thoroughly enough the second. Applying wax is fun. Ironing the waxed fabric is pretty much my least favorite job, pretty paper notwithstanding.

Then I paint. And paint. And paint. I am trying to watch as many of the American Film Institute top 100 movies list as I can stream while I paint. That, and looking introspective. You can't spend enough time trying to look introspective.

 

Such is my progress to date!

Artist? Craftsman? Designer?

By now I have read enough blogs, listened to enough podcasts, and watched Lost in Living so I know I am not the only one asking “Am I an artist?” and “Am I still an artist when I am not making?” For me there is another foundational question I have to ask before that: Am I an artist, designer, or  craftsman? It's a loaded question because these are different paths. By far the option with that takes the most courage to look in the eye is artist. Growing up I was “the creative one,” shirking my responsibilities to draw and manning many a craft booth to make cash. I won a few little prizes, but nothing exceptional. My parents paid for years of watercolor lessons and I am still a terrible painter. Since my mom spins yarn and sells it, that was the family business, and definitely a craft. 

My real talent and passion after the baby-seal-drawing phase was in clothing, so I had the gaul to apply to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. I didn’t know how bad the odds were, I just knew that I had read every book on costume and fashion in my small town library, and they were written by FIT professors and/or referenced the FIT costume library, so I scraped together money I didn’t have to apply to a school in a scary city I had never visited. I got in. I thrived. I worked myself into the ground. I still don’t think I was exceptional, I just had a good sense for design honed by years of reading and making, and I worked exceptionally hard. There was a lot of talent that burned brighter than mine, but I struck a decent balance and I won bigger awards, had bigger opportunities and teachers who believed in me.  

Then I got married and moved to Texas. I was completely lost. I Drowned in a sea of the infinite possibility of time and absolute impossibility of place, being remote from all things creative. Remote, really, from all things. 

I am grateful for the time of experimentation I had in that painful solitude. I am thankful for the forge of motherhood and just generally growing up. I began to find my voice. But then there is motherhood and stuff. I haven’t put in the hours I need to. 

My studio is calling me now. I am serious enough about creating that the first room you see in my house is the one dedicated to making. Making a mess, mostly. Should I seek my voice again? Is that even right or responsible? How serious am I? Where is my place? I have asked the questions thousands of times for more than half of my life. Sometimes in my head I say I am an artist because what I have to say is not just practical, not just a thing, but a living idea. Sometimes I call myself a craftsman out loud because I am not making real art. But the-buck-stops-here reason I am not making real art is that I am afraid. I am a decent and dedicated craftsman but a designer with no market and no heart for mass production, and a poor artist. A dabbler, really. 

Being the worst at something scares me more than anything else and I have no credentials. 

In fact, I have trained and refined taste, so I know exactly how bad I am. I don’t even know if I have a dream. But there are things I must do. Things I must make. Things I must say. Things that have nothing to do with alphabets. Can I be an artist if what I am doing is knitting and sewing? I don’t know. I tried self-identifying as an artist at a party the other night and I wanted the heat in my cheeks to sublimate my whole self and all claims on artistry into the heavy air. I didn’t, not because it is impossible, but because I caught my breath and the crush of imagining denying this part of me held me in place and time. 

That is why I am still here to ask the question. 

Henna Alphabet Letter "Z" Printable

 Can you believe this is the last letter? I started this alphabet in the Fall of '13, so it's been a long time coming! Soon I want to get them rounded up so you can see them all at once, but until then, all of you Zs out there have something nice for a change.

Click to download and print in Brights Palette "Blue Green." 
Click to download and print in Naturals Palette "Sage."
Click to download and print in Black and White.

Getting Unstuck

This popular meme summed up the creative process in 6 steps:

1. This is awesome.
2. This is tricky.
3. This is crap.
4. I am crap.
5. This might be okay.
6. This is awesome. 

You know it's true. In the past 2 weeks I find myself hanging out in the vicinity of steps 3 & 4 wondering if all the collagesI have made  –which are so many more than these–  were all flukes!

That's just how projects go sometimes, and the best thing to do is go for a walk, soak in the tub, have a dog pile/tickle/cuddle extravaganza with my kids, sing Shake It Off karaoke style (go big or go home), and tell ridiculous jokes.

Here is the one I cooked up:
Q: Why did Cinderella's soccer coach bench her?
A: Because she is always late to the ball, and half the time she loses a shoe!

Here is one my daughter shared in the style of a knock-knock joke:

Her: Salmon!
Me in a stage whisper: What do you want me to say?
Her: Whoa!
Me: Whoa!
Her: Wait. I'm a salmon, not a horse!

So there you have it.
Now time to get back to work, because the main thing is just to keep showing up!


 

About the troubling time when God was going to kill Moses

Do you remember ever hearing a lesson on the end of Exodus 4? I've wracked my brain. You would think that Moses was somehow miraculously transported from Mount Horeb to the banks of the Nile because there's this tricky un-churchy Exodus 4:18-31 passage in between.

     Moses asks Jethro for permission to go back to check on his family in Egypt. He packs up his wife and sons on a donkey (more on that in a moment), and then this: v.24 At a lodging place on the way, the Lord met Moses and was about to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son's foreskin and touched Moses' feet with it. "Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me," she said. So the Lord let him alone. (At that time she said "bridegroom of blood," referring to circumcision.)

    And now back to your regularly scheduled programing.

    What-the-what? Where was this musical number in The Prince of Egypt? I find the stories people leave out at church really interesting. I started working on digesting this one months ago when I was lesson planning for junior church. We are studying theophanies and meetings with God looking at his character, and this episode is enigmatical and chilling, but I couldn't shake the feeling that it was important.

     Why was God going to kill Moses? Why was the solution the circumcision of his son? Why only one son, when it mentions that two sons got on the donkey? Why, I reiterate, was God going to kill Moses? What was that like?

    This is one of the stories that give people theological whiplash. How can a God of love just up and decide to kill his servant, who was on his way to do his bidding? When I shared this story with a group of kids they all erupted in "That's not fair!!!" No one quibbles when Zeus does this sort of thing, but then again no one is asking you to believe in Zeus today. Why the sphinx-like enigma? How can we reconcile this story to Jesus?

    Here is what we can see in the story: God's action was not capricious or secret, because obedience changed his course. At least Zipporah knew what was up, because her decisive action saved her husband's life.

     Over 400 years earlier God established the covenant of circumcision with Abraham in Genesis 17. As a sign of the covenant where God promised to be with Abraham's descendants and give them the land of Canaan, Abraham's family would circumcise every male in their households. Blood set them apart and joined them together. Every male who was uncircumcised in the flesh would be "cut off" from his people and God's promise. In that paradoxical way the Bible has, it was a wound that symbolically joined and healed a family into the body of God's people, while remaining in the natural physical state "cut" one from the promise and the people. The thing is that every generation decided for their children and gave them the heritage of faith. Moses had the heritage, but he had not prepared to pass it on to his sons.

    As a side note, there are a few possible explanations, but I believe only one of his sons was born at this point. Only one is named in Exodus 2:22, Gershom, or "an alien there," and only one is circumcised in the course of the story. Perhaps the other child was in utero. Poor Zipporah!

    The name Gershom highlights a major feature of Moses' life: His alienation. He did not live like one of his people, and at the same time he was not fully of the palace. He was not just an alien when he fled to Midian as a murderer, but practically from the moment he was born by virtue of his dual life as a slave child and royalty. Moses' guilty flight to Midian was but one escalation in an identity crisis that here reaches as much denouement as can be expected in non-fiction. Was he Hebrew, Egyptian, or Midianite? Who would his children be? Moses' indecision for his children exposed the state of his own heart– the part his own parents couldn't choose for him. He was reluctantly pursuing his commission to Egypt, but his non-decision for his children was a decision in itself. Moses was not "all in."

    If there is one thing God hasn't got patience for, it's making a lifestyle out of keeping your options open. Let me rephrase that and call it "lukewarm," and you will know exactly what I am about to quote next. Revelation 3:14-15,19-20 "...These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God's creation. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm––Neither hot nor cold––I am about to spit you out of my mouth... Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me."
As pet owners can relate to, God is not willing to let us stand on the threshold forever. At some point he is going to shut the door.

    God's character in Exodus and his character in Revelation correlating is not so surprising. Both have a dark reputation. What about Jesus, though? The popular vision of Jesus is namby-pamby or mystical. That's where I would turn to Mark 11. The day after Jesus was welcomed into Jerusalem as a king, he was on his way back into Jerusalem to clear the temple, and he saw a fig tree in leaf. I am no expert in fig trees, but I am told that if there are leaves, there should be figs. So the tree was advertising fruit, but not bearing any, and Jesus cursed it. Whoa, there Jesus! Somebody needs their breakfast right? Talk about hangry! By the next morning the tree was dead, and it seems somewhat shocking! It's actually a picture Jesus used quite a bit in his teaching, it wasn't a new symbol for him, or for John the Baptist for that matter. It wasn't about breakfast. They both said that when someone makes a faith claim, check the fruit. In an arid climate there is no room, no time, no water for a tree that doesn't bear fruit, and good fruit at that. They both warned that a branch or tree that does not bear fruit will be cut down and thrown in the fire. Keep in mind that this story book-ends clearing the temple, where Jesus used a whip to chase vendors and money changers out of the temple courts. Their fruit wasn't living up to their claims! You can fool yourself into thinking that you are doing God's will, but God always knows when your fingers are crossed.

    Going back to Zipporah's story in Exodus, it was Moses who sinned, Moses who was going to die, and his wife Zipporah who dramatically saved him. I don't know how stepping out in faith for others works. It seems to generally be a difficult and/or messy business (Exodus 4:24-26, Matthew 17:14-23, Mark 2:1-12). We don't even know how Zipporah felt about this episode, because the statement "Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me," could really depend on the flash in the eye and tone of voice. Check me on this, but she doesn't sound enthused to me. But she did it. She fought for her husband, she viscerally overcame in faith and in action to save her family. What is so encouraging to me about this is not only that she succeeded, but that she is tired. There is unrealistic pressure on women in the church to be preternaturally cheerful about hard things sometimes. Christian radio makes things sound so chirpy. Who am I to say you can't do tough things with a smile on your face? It's just nice to have permission in the form of a Biblical example to be honest, to be grim even, if that's where you are at. For all of our sakes let's not stay there in that feeling, but acknowledge the weariness when it comes. Unless I can acknowledge that I am not enough to rescue my family with one hand tied behind my back, I cannot admit that I need Jesus for this.

    God was not going to kill Moses because of the state of his son's body, but because Moses was not circumcised in heart. Moses spoke to the people of Israel later about a new kind of circumcision in Deuteronomy 30:6 "The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live."

    In the words of a perceptive seven-year-old "Moses wasn't sure what team he was on" and that will always cost you your life whether God takes it or you fritter it away. Like Moses, though, we find ourselves unable to obey, unable to be "all in" of our own strength. We all need a Zipporah whose righteousness can stand in the gap, but you know and I know that we are not enough. We need someone bigger. Stronger. More righteous. We need Jesus, bridegroom to the church, whose blood truly is enough.  

     
      

Little Cooks in the Kitchen

This week is all about the kitchen. On the creative side, I have been wood burning kitchen wares like crazy. Some of it is special order, and some is on my newly revived Etsy site.

 
    If you see anything you like that's not on my site, you can shoot me an Etsy message to inquire about special orders. (I love special orders!) What is really keeping us in the kitchen is that the girls just discovered that cookbooks can fill their weekly library requirement of non-fiction books.
We have done a lot of eating from this Disney cookbook. I was fully prepared for it to be horrid as so many cookbooks are, especially licensed ones, but it is actually fairly healthy and delicious because you can't mess up Creole cooking and soul food that much!

    The cookbook pictured below is Fairy Tale Breakfasts, from the Fairy Tale Cookbook series by Jane Yolen. The stories are great, because it's Jane Yolen, and it inspired the girls to try their hands at cooking "Eggs in the cradle" by themselves. I just turn on the stove for them.

    This, in turn, sparked a conversation in our church community group. Do you let your kids cook? At what age? My mother and grandmother had me sitting on the counter from the time I was tiny, measuring and stirring. I didn't think twice about having the girls help as soon as they could hold things. They have never cut or burned themselves, they have always been careful. I can fully see why some kids are safest outside the kitchen, but for us it's a precious daily ritual. I let them start cutting soft things like mushrooms when they were younger, in addition to stirring and licking. They have graduated to pancake flipping, measuring, and spreading peanut butter and butter– a surprisingly tricky business.
    They never stir things like soup that have hot steam, and they stay away from the oven. Knives are with supervision only.

    What are your kitchen rules? Do you handle kids in the kitchen the same way you grew up, or have you tweaked things?

 

Support Languages

"I feel so alone in this. It's bewildering."
It didn't matter what the issue was: It could be anything, but that's what my husband and I were telling one another recently. Intellectually we knew we were in this together, but it felt like we were not. Ambivalent is the word we kept coming back to, because while we felt loved, each of us felt the other spouse was not particularly invested in things that really mattered to us. What was maddening was that we really do care! It just wasn't getting through.

Does that feel familiar?

It did to us. It reminded us of Dr. Chapman's books The 5 Love Languages and The Five Languages of Apology. The idea behind the books is that individuals weigh some expressions of emotion more than others based on personal needs and experiences. Dr. Chapman cites 5 categories for expressions of love: Quality Time, Acts of Service, Physical Touch and Closeness, and Words of Encouragement. I've never met anyone who didn't need quality time, but additionally, to show affection I am a snuggler. As a words guy Daniel turns into an all-out cheerleader. Of course the way we show love is also how we crave it, so we have worked hard to become more fluent at making one another feel all-out adored, and to honor the less familiar expressions. That's why we were so surprised by this disconnect.  

So we came up with a new phrase: Support Languages.

Daniel kept saying "But I have shown up to everything! I’ve pitched in! What more do you want?” and I was wondering “I have kept up to date on every detail of this! I ask you about it every night! How could you think I wasn’t interested and supportive?” As it turns out, Daniel was needing some Acts of Service, and I value an inquisitive listening ear.

Is this really different than love languages, or have our needs and habits shifted over time to neglect some forms of support? I don't know. In some ways it doesn't matter as long as we add this new question to our marriage toolbox: "What kind of support would be most meaningful to you right now?"

Henna Alphabet Letter "X" Printable

Guys... I'm almost done! One more to go! I have nothing else to say about this.

Click to download and print in Brights Palette "Gold." 
Click to download and print in Naturals Palette "Sand."
Click to download and print in Black and White.

Felted Kitty Hats

It's not as if they needed more hats, hats are just the perfect transformative accessory and I just can't resist making them.
At all.
   So I saw this kitty bowler hat from Marks and Spencer on Pinterest and I just had to try it. My favorite yarn store, i.e. my mom, ordered the yarn from Brown Sheep and knit up the initial hats from this Fiber Trends pattern leaving the finishing to me.

 If I were doing it again I would make them 1 1/2"- 2" shorter before felting, because I think they turned out long. The ears are double knitted: They look 20 stitches wide, but they are really 40. With two double pointed needles you slip every other stitch on each row so you end up with 2 knit stitch faces to your work. Every third row I slipped with the yarn forward instead of behind.

Once the ears were sewn on and all ends hidden I threw the hats into the wash for some quick shrinkage, but I had to finish up by hand. By that time I was at my in-laws for Thanksgiving, and I found the perfect hat block: A medicine ball! It was all knobby and just the right size as I reshaped and finnessed the hats into shape.

All that was left to be done was embroidering the faces on with a chain stitch.

 

Story, Sweet Perilous Story

When I started writing curriculum for my church’s Junior Church program last year it became clear that the kids kind of didn’t know what the Bible is, so we started there: What is the Bible? Who wrote it? Why is it arranged the way it is? What are in the different sections, and how do you find things fast? We memorized the books of the Bible together. We did worksheets. It was very satisfying, and we ended the summer with a happy glow and a hard-earned pizza party.  This semester we turned to the subject I really wanted to tackle: God's constant character, from creation to the end of the world. I want the kids to really know God’s character. 
We are doing a detective theme. 
It’s cute. 
It is not, however, nearly as fulfilling for any of us. Whereas cranking out a polished lesson every week was a joy in the first unit, this one is a real wrestling match. It gives me goosebumps, it’s a little fly-by-night, and the pace feels absolutely punishing. Some weeks the kids are not so enthusiastic either, to be honest: All of which got me thinking “Why?” 

   I think that the unit on the history and purpose of the Bible was so fun for all of us because it dealt with concrete facts: This is how many books there are. This is how you find the New Testament. Facts are fun because they are easy to impart, easy to memorize, easy to feel accomplished about, easy to test on, easy to check off your list. You can do really creative things with facts, and then in the end they are there, nice and solid like coming home. 

   The thing is, if God knew it would be best for us to connect with him in a quantifiable way, surely he would have given us such a way. Instead he gives us his presence via the Holy Spirit, Jesus, of course, and stories! Doctrine too, but the doctrine is like the bones beneath the flesh of the stories. I find that fascinating and terrifying. Stories, I mean, not bones! I love bones. And stories. But you knew that.

   Story is enmeshed in every culture. Whether you tell stories to drumbeats around a campfire or via Youtube, story is how we pass down meaning and cultural value. It’s how we explore, internalize, and make sense of the world. Your family stories confirm who you are and where you came from: The love, the ethics, the humor! Story has a potency of it's own, and serious staying power in the mind. Every time you approach a really good story you have a new thought. It touches your experience in a new way. Think, for instance, of how many times over we tell Red Ridinghood. We need to tell it again and again because Red Ridinghood is each of us, straying off the path, rationalizing, entranced by something just up ahead. Like us she is both innocent and willfully ignorant, or even a bit fascinated by gleaming incisors. Like life, it could be dark, comic, tragic, or reassuring depending on your angle. Red Ridinghood is also someone we love, whom we want to protect from wolves. Heck, Red Ridinghood might be the wolf! What then? We need this story because we are not sure to recognize a wolf when we see one, because the wolf might be misunderstood, because no matter how well you know your grandmother, you can’t know her all the way, because it isn’t certain whether we can wait for a woodcutter, or whether we need to be prepared to slay the wolves ourselves. Story helps us work these questions out. 

   Our culture is just as heavily dependent on story as any other, with a key difference from traditional society: Overall it seems like we are less commonly adept at telling stories ourselves. On average we are more consumers of story than purveyors. That may be a somewhat temporary problem as younger generations are finding new ways to convey stories with common technology. But here we are, a little bit in between, and if God saw fit to speak to us through story, and I am supposed to be passing that on to the little minds in my charge, the problem is this: Instead of teaching story the same academic way I'd teach fact, how do I celebrate the story and become a really great storyteller? How do I equip other teachers to become really great storytellers? I don’t know, I’ll have to keep pressing into that. That’s the fascinating part.

    I am a little distracted from the "How Question" by this scary observation: Story is really dangerous to consensus. Literature is perilous! If you sit 3 people down to talk about a story they may agree on a few facts, but they will disagree on the interpretation. You can get consensus amongst peers in many areas, but with literature you can’t always get everyone to agree on something as foundational as who the villain is. I don’t know if this is objectively true, but my observation is that the better the story is, the more nuanced and wide ranging the interpretations seem to be.  That’s so true with the Bible too, isn’t it? It helps us work our questions out, but we approach it with experiences and presuppositions, and we don’t always come up with the same answers. God has given us that leeway, even with the Holy Spirit. There are facts there, but He didn’t make his primary message to us a mathematical proof. He made it story. And that's where the skeleton of doctrine comes in, because it gives us facts, a place to start. Still, there's the Living Word humming with the bass line of truth that rattles us. 

    I think as we try to responsibly hand down the Christian faith in our western secular culture, it really is easier to retreat into dry fact mixed with personal opinion, memorization, ritual, truisms, common experience, politics, vitriol, warm fuzzies, crafts, moralism… anything but story. Story cannot be controlled and regulated the way these other things can. When it comes down to it, all we can do is deliver both the great story of the Bible, and our own stories accurately, vividly, daily. The Holy Spirit must do the rest. That’s the miracle isn’t it? That in each generation God does the heavy-lifting in spite of our toddler-like counterproductive help. 

Dance Collage

This past year I spent my efforts on writing outside of this blog, but as 2015 comes in I find myself eager to get back to this. Hobby blogging can be a distraction, but it is also a way to record the small progress that goes otherwise unnoticed during the year. Because of the anonymity of it, I don’t actually know who if anyone reads what I write, but it is not important that anyone else remark on what I do, but that I celebrate it myself: to say “I did this and I am glad!” 

This piece makes me ecstatic. For me this is what dancing feels like. I started working on it when I was expecting my youngest daughter and I actually finished it in the spring. I love the impossible fairy tale light quality of collages done like this, and who doesn't love dancing? This really lifts my heart. It is a gift for a friend, one of the dancers in the piece.

The collage material is from magazines. The background is blown, brushed, and layered inks on bristol board.

I just love their hands.

If you attempt something like this, please get it framed with UV protective glass, or it can really fade.

Happy New Year!  

Play All The Things! DJ Meme

When someone asks if I share my playlists...
There's just too much good music to be a hoarder.

Henna Alphabet Letter "W" Printable

The last 9 months are conclusive proof that I cannot multitask!
I had every intention of finishing out the alphabet and I stalled out with only a few letters to go. Here's to rectifying that.
In the intervening time I have been creating curriculum for my church's junior worship program and dancing. Guess what I discovered? I really miss this place!
Blogging is kind of a juggernaut: It's hard to get all the photos, writing, and editing started, but once I do, it takes on a life of its own. Maybe I'll be in the groove for a little bit, just to keep things fresh.
You will find the links for printing at the bottom of the post.

Click to download and print in Brights Pallete "Angora."

Click to download and print in Naturals Pallete "Spring."

Click to download and print in Black and White.

Henna Alphabet Letter "V" Printable

In like a lion, and out like I lamb, they say about March, but where is the lamb? We have enjoyed a few nice though blustery days and the line dried sheets they have afforded, but the meteorologists are predicting snow again next week! Until then the girls and I are counting every sign of spring we can find, and drawing and sewing when we are forced back in by the weather. Speaking of drawings, I just tied up the letter V, and not a moment too soon. I am also working on a second cashmere doll, some ink experiments in conjunction with a collage commission, and trying to give myself permission to sew myself something new.

Click to download and print in Brights Palette "Pink." 
Click to download and print in Naturals Palette "Bark."
Click to download and print in Black and White.