“Usually, when the distractions of daily life deplete our energy, the first thing we eliminate is the thing we need the most: quiet, reflective time. Time to dream, time to contemplate what's working and what's not, so that we can make changes for the better."
– Sarah Ban Breathnach
Sabbath day thoughts accompanied by images from a drive into the mountains a couple weeks ago. No doubt the color is even more fiery right now. I wish we were there today! But we needed a lazy Sunday with naps and list making afternoon even more. A quiet walk in the neighborhood is planned instead.
"….for the place where you stand is holy ground." Acts 7:33
Four years ago this week we made a pilgrimage to Fatima. I realized I never shared those images here. Today, celebrating the centennial of the apparition, seemed like a good time to retrace our steps.
"…you are going to have much to suffer, but the grace of God will be your comfort." – Our Lady of Fatima
"I will never leave you"
"Many persons," Sr. Lucia explained, "feeling that the word penance implies great austerities, and not feeling that they have the strength for great sacrifices, become discouraged and continue a life of lukewarmness and sin."
Then she said Our Lord explained to her:
"The sacrifice required of every person is the fulfillment of his duties in life and the observance of My law. This is the penance that I now seek and require."
"Are you suffering a great deal? Don't lose heart. I will never forsake you." – Our Lady of Fatima
Extroverted introvert, they call it. The sort who can be perfectly content with lots and lots of alone and quiet time but will chat it up with no problem when the opportunity arises. I am so that and sometimes it really serves me well. September was such a chock full month, full of driving and games and school and appointments. My husband came home a couple weeks ago in the middle of the madness and I had dinner in the instant pot. The sun was still out and it was unseasonably warm. He mentioned maaaaybe taking a walk, but fatigue was voting for sitting down instead. I ran and grabbed shoes and dog leashes and convinced him we could squeeze in a short walk before dinner with the girls and dogs.
We were rounding a corner, with girls and dogs, when we noticed a chicken coop in a side yard. A woman and her neighbor were hauling some brush out into a flatbed trailer and all chicken heart eyes I gush, "Are those your hens?" As if they would be anyone else's hens shacking up in her back yard. This urban farmer matches my enthusiasm and says, "Yes! Do you want to come see them?!?" Um, yes. I did, in fact, want to see the chickens. A lot.
The girls and I handed dogs off to my husband and traipsed into the yard to see the small flock and we talked non stop. Where do you live? How long have you lived here? Was your house near the fire? How old are your kids? We have a big party every summer! You should come!
The next week we got together and they brought us eggs. Today we sat in my kitchen talking a blue streak while the girls got to know each other. Amazingly they too hit it off immediately and had to be appeased with promises of another visit soon.
It is hard to start fresh in another place. Whether you do it once or do it every few years. Building your tribe all over again from scratch is daunting. It takes a lot of fortitude to put yourself out there. To be honest, the first two years we have spent here have been emotionally and physically taxing. I have put off taking chances like these because it felt like one more hard thing that needed to happen and might not work anyway. It doesn't always. This is part of the package though. This is how a community is built. You can be bitter that you have to keep doing it or you can celebrate the beautiful people who come into your life. I won't kid you – I have done both of those things.
Tonight, I am celebrating.
Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatevery you call it, whoever you are, you need one. – Jane Howard
Friends know my deep, abiding love for Pinterest. Let me tell how much easier homeschooling, homemaking, and all things creative are today! I remember the tremendous struggle it once was having a list of poetry to memorize, for instance, and not being able to track down a particular piece in print. Countless dead ends or false starts accrued simply because there was no way to access all the materials or patterns or whatnot. My gratitude for the internet, generally, and Pinterest, specifically, is therefore profound. So many resources right at your fingertips. You have to be smart about how to gather and make use of them however. Good ideas you cannot quickly access will not likely be put to use. It is wonderful to have it online but since we cannot and would never dream of doing all there is to do it helps to decide which of those fun things would make the most of our month and then start to plan.
I am busy printing out pages and creating binders for each month so our lists are at the ready and can be slipped out when we run to the store or library. Some of things included in our binders are:
recipes we plan to make
craft or decorating projects we hope to finish
books we will look for,
poems we will recite
hymns we will learn
seasonal worksheets
coloring pages
quotes (seasonal or liturgical)
Before I put these in page protectors I snapped some photos of some of our October pages:
There are numerous links to free fall printables, so one of those will be the cover.
One or two crafty or food ideas for each week to include feast day desserts and a birthday cake and a gift.
The book basket is never exhaustive but rather just a smattering of titles pulled from our modest stash which will be supplemented by library books, ebooks, and online articles.
“A true home is one of the most sacred of places. It is a sanctuary into which men flee from the world’s perils and alarms. It is a resting-place to which at close of day the weary retire to gather new strength for the battle and toils of tomorrow."
It might seem superficial to gather autumn ornamentals when the headlines are blaring disaster, to simmer soup when the schools are practicing live shooter drills, to smooth bedcovers when nerves are frayed. I wonder, though, as I pot the mums, if we aren't doing the very best thing we could be under the circumstances. Our families are navigating a loud and unsettling world, daily. We can't fix that by ourselves. We can however create a soft place to land at the close of day, a sanctuary space to launch from every morning.
That's what I am doing. We woke to mass casualty news. We had dental appointments which resulted in prescriptions and an oral surgery consult for one boy. The brakes appear to be shot. The dog got sick on the carpet. So I put on my new dress, kept the news off where children are present, explained extraction procedures in the best possible terms, cleaned dog mess, lent my van to the teens, arranged a sitter for a parent meeting tonight, and made dinner in the instant pot so we have warm food whenever we all gather again from the four corners we are dispersed to today. Pollyanna? Maybe. Or maybe super pragmatic.
"Far more than we know, do the strength and beauty of our lives depend upon the home in which we dwell. He who goes forth in the morning from a happy, loving, prayerful home, into the world’s strife, temptation, struggle, and duty, is strong–inspired for noble and victorious living. The children who are brought up in a true home go out trained and equipped for life’s battles and tasks, carrying in their hearts a secret of strength…" - JRR Miller
I can't fix all the things. I can do the little things that will send us all out again tomorrow with that secret of strength which is home.
It wasn't the most expert job ever but the girls' first go at designing and making doll clothes 'all by ourselves' was fruitful in so many ways.
When I caught wind of what they were working on my mind began rapidly populating a syllabus with lessons about seam allowances and finished edges and a dozen related points before I caught myself. An article from years ago by homeschooling pioneer Jessica Hulcy came to mind. She was a leader in hands-on, thematic studies. She would probably have lesson plans for this right? There should be plans. Thorough plans. And supplies. And lots of books. No doubt, as time goes on, we will indeed explore all the above. Right now, though, I am reminding myself of the time that wise woman said that the best tools she could equip homeschool moms with were a gag and handcuffs, for themselves, for just such moments as these. The idea is that there are few things better than personal experience to instill a need to know and to light the fire of their imaginations. Sometimes the best gift you can give a child is discovery, complete with the freedom to make many imperfect preliminary steps.
Gathering all the materials myself and preplanning a foolproof unit might have resulted in a picture-perfect project the first time around. For so many reasons we are off to a much better start now. Now, they are curious: Why do you sew on the wrong side of the fabric? How do you get the seams to go on the inside? what happens if you leave the cut edges raw? What makes the dress go on easier? Now, they are curious and motivated. Now, they can't answer those questions fast enough.
What they needed most here was not a dress but an experience, a series of connections that could explode into dozens of other possibilities. They got that.
There will be more experiments. They will come out a little better every time. Their competence and creativity is amazing and before we know it we will be coming to them for tips, just like we go to their brothers and sisters for their areas of expertise. This, after all, is the real goal for us – not just to impart to them what we know, but to watch it mingle with their other life experiences to become something new and different altogether.
Exactly halfway through the 1990's a young woman found herself transplanted to Texas from the midwestern state that had been home to her young and growing family for seven of nine years of married life. She had a new baby. Her husband had a new degree and a new job. Together they also had three rambunctious little boys who had been born within 47mo of each other. And an aging cat. And a new puppy – because just what you need in such a situation is another incontinent, unpredictable creature or two added to the mix. She was working very hard to keep all her plates spinning but you could say there was some china breakage going on.
Down the street there was another family of four, a few years older, who had befriended them. Their simply furnished, spacious home was positive, upbeat. It was the sort of place you could sit back and take a deep breath. Unpretentious. Welcoming. Non-judgemental.
Those little boys kept that momma on her toes….and on her knees. Their dad worked long hours and there was a baby to care for, a puppy to housebreak, boxes to unpack. So many boxes. Things occasionally got the best of her.
There was one particular day when one errant little man was scolded and sent inside much to this momma's embarassment. The neighbor mom down the street knew all her frustration without having to be told. She had been there too. Without elaborating or getting preachy she offered a few words that stuck:
"You know, what helps most is trying to remember we are a team."
This was the 90's. We had just begun seeing some offices hanging posters of sweeping landscapes with inspirational sayings like, "Together Each Achieves More" and "There is No I in Team" There was no Pinterest yet and pithy slogans still made you stop and think.
Those little boys and the children who came along after them played basketball and football and later soccer every year, often with their dad coaching. Sports analogies were relatable. Long after the sayings got overused and tired, one or another – often the momma and later the others – would exhort the rest by saying, "same team." That became a code to remind everyone that we were not just a chaotic mass of competing goals and desires. We were supposed to be playing on the same side, even when it didn't feel that way. Let's be honest. It doesn't always feel that way. A mother can look at a naughty child, a husband can look at a wife, a brother can look at his siblings and any of them can begin to feel locked in battle of wills against instead of with those humans.
It's been a lot of years since I was that young woman. My plates spin a little better today, but I keep a broom and dustpan handy just in case. I look at those boys all grown up with so much gratitude. I see the younger sisters and brothers who followed. I see a marriage that has been up and down and all over the map. Somewhere along the line those cheesy sayings stuck. No matter how frustrated we get at times there is a sense deep down that we are a team. We have deeply held opinions and incredibly unique and different temperaments but we have a shared goal – to thrive and grow together. No matter how we have sometimes upset or disappointed each other, so far that goal has trumped the rest.
It is clear when I see older brothers pacing the sidelines. You hear it when one mentions something another one said about a topic in question. We read books and watch programs because one of us has insisted the others simply MUST. Then we compare notes and debate endlessly. There is shared applause when someone goes big – a wedding, a graduation, a relocation, a promotion. There is hushed solidarity and earnest prayers over infertility, relationship woes, miscarriage, job or finance trouble. And we have had all those things. The victories are better together, however, and the valleys a little less lonely when you have someone willing to come up alongside and navigate them with you.
Do we always perform ideally? Are we perpetually good sports? Not by a long shot. It is at those times we have to dig deep though and remind ourselves we are not a collection of random individuals, fiercely protecting our own agendas. We are a team, the best sort of team, and we need to act that way. Sooner or later we tend to come around. We back down from unsustainable positions, we soothe over misunderstandings, we forgive. It is hard, hard work. To me though, this is winning.
People talk about it hypothetically – the things you'd grab in a fire. For most of us that remains an intellectual exercise, the kind of thing you muse over when you are feeling particularly introspective. It became a very real and concrete discernment for our family this week.
We often sleep with our upstairs bedroom windows open when we can catch a breeze on summer nights. We opened them wide and fell into bed Monday night. We had been on the go all weekend, staying up late and busy each day. A good night's sleep seemed promising as the wind picked up some. Before long however the canyon gusts began to howl, forcing my husband to go down and secure the patio furniture. The ruckus outside kept us sleeping with one eye open.
When morning finally came we hit the lights and noticed they were dim. We were groggy from the restless night and started to explore other rooms to see what was happening. Every fixture was at half strength. We were beginning to gather in the kitchen sorting things out when the power cut entirely. This has happened before during windstorms, annoying, but temporary. My husband opened the laptop to check our power company website to get an idea of the scope. I was kicking myself for not having powered down my computer the night before.
We started to make adjustments to our morning routine to get ready without electricity. I was lighting the stove manually and trying to get some coffee figured out when my husband called me outside. "Doesn't that look like smoke moving in?" Well, it did. But in the West there are often hazy skies when the wind picks up. It carries in smoke from distant fires. During dry seasons it sometimes kicks up a lot of loose surface dirt into the air. When you live with a military man you learn to consider all the logical explanations and most importantly you don't panic. So I didn't.
A few minutes later he had checked the front of the house. "It's definitely smoke over in the canyon," was his first thought. "It's probably not as close as it looks," was the next. I walked to a higher window while he went down the culdesac. It was in fact as close as it looked. But I was still not supposed to panic. We heard sirens. They probably had it under control. Might be a house fire which the wind was aggravating.
While we reassured ourselves with that thought there was a knock at the door. At that point my stomach gave a lurch. A runner was out early morning and said there was a fire spreading up the mountain and while there was no official emergency response in the neighborhood yet he was waking everyone up and spreading word.
"Should I start to pack things?" No, my husband said. He would go investigate. I got up the rest of the children however and had everyone dress and find shoes while he went to talk to the neighbors again. He came back shaken up. The fire was spreading rapidly given the high winds. We should stay calm, but begin to start moving essential items "just in case." I grabbed the important paperwork from the safe. Then started to unplug hard drives and put photo albums into boxes. He didn't return but the children were watching over the ridge out back and bringing back all sorts of bad news. A house had caught fire and had burnt before their eyes. The church was filling with cars.
I brought the little girls up to the house. Our incredible view was turning into a horror show and it was too much for them. The dogs were also getting frantic with the smoke. We kenneled the little dogs and stuck the kennel in the truck. Husband came in and said fire crews were working their way up the hill and we should seriously gather anything else we needed. Abbie Rose clutched her bear and held tight to Archie's leash while her eyes began to well up. Tess was working very admirably to be "big" and not freaked out. The others were silently packing their bags.
I made another round through the house. The problem with filling a home with only things that have personal value to you is that everything then feels important. I looked at the walls, the drawers, the counters, filled with items which were used by my grandparents, my mother, my inlaws. Things my children grew up with. Things my husband and I grew up with. Things we bought at different duty stations. It all meant something but it could not all go. I made some quick decisions about what precious items could fit in the cars.
The next thing we knew there were bull horns outside and another knock. Evacuate. We had a little bit of time but we should start heading out. We stopped for a moment and reached for a holy card a priest had given us earlier this year. Pestilence and…fire? We repeated the words of the prayer and put the children in the cars. Four cars, six kids, three dogs, a cuckoo clock, our crucifixes, several hardrives, and countless albums. Then my husband and I walked back in. We each took a jar of holy water and went to opposite ends of the house sprinkling each room. I set the holy card down, crossed myself, and we looked around one last time, making peace with whatever we might return to.
We all drove off together and traveled to a grocery store parking lot where we stood stunned as the cloud grew behind us. What should we do? Where should we go? That question was answered when old friends called and said to go to their house to wait. With lunch in tow we detoured around the road closures over to their place, got the children settled in the basement away from windows to play pool, and the older set of us watched our mountain burn from their deck. We would see smoke die down only to reappear in another spot or a huge burst of black billow up as a building was struck. The ebb and flow was wrenching.
We started calling around for hotel rooms when finally the fire crews began to get the blaze out of the residential areas. In time a few streets were permitted to return. Ours was one of those. We were lucky. Many did not go back for days. Six families have no homes to return to. And of course we know how truly fortunate we are to be in the midst of an isolated tragedy of relatively limited scope in comparison to the devastation happening around the country. Should the worst have hit we have insurance which wouldn't replace the memories but would have prevented homelessness for us. Many worldwide are not so lucky.
In the end we were spared the worst case scenario. We left our things near the door in the event the fire once again expanded with the expected coming wind. It did not come however. The air and ground crews have worked every day since. We watch them with gratitude and awe. We also look at our neighbors with similar respect and thankfulness. They were clearheaded and pulled together. Before we all left people were opening their swimming pools. Helicopters used them to refill water buckets to battle the blaze. It was incredible to see everyone pull together.
It is hazy in the evenings and, although the ground is charred in places, it is still a wonderful place. We are grateful to be at home with our familiar things in place. They are held loosely though. At some point all of us will be required to let them go – maybe sooner, maybe later. We aren't taking any of it with us either way. So we are catching our breath and hopefully taking a quiet weekend to put it all in its place again, gratefully, and focusing once more on what really matters – those people who traveled out of this neighborhood with us. Together we pray for those who are or soon will be facing their own worst fears as storms rage this weekend and earthquakes shake the ground. It's all so fragile. And its probably important we never forget that.
Tess took her first sewing class away from home this month. She made a notebook cover with pockets and ribbon tie. Her overall impression was that there was a lot of pinning, cutting, and ironing involved and it was worth it.
Following this success she and her little sister are enrolling in the full semester course starting soon. It is so very exciting for me to see which directions each child goes creatively and to be able to accompany them on their way.
This has been a stargazing sort of summer. We have studied constellations before and I will tell you straight up I am NOT very good at finding them in the sky. That may change this year given some of the books we have found and the projects we have done. My first favorite is the Stikky Night Skies book (link below) which is every bit as awesome as the Stikky Trees book was. It leads you along step by step into trickier configurations. Somehow it breaks down this wild spattering of white dots into something you can begin to sort out. Or maybe most normal people can sort this out? I definitely needed extra help.
As always, Pinterest is my BFF, my bestie, my personal assistant, my teacher's aide. "Hey Pinterest, what have you got for constellations?" Pinterest shot back with marshmallow and toothpick constructions and some flash cards. I was also beside myself to find this chart by Alice Cantrell. I have loved her work forever and am so pleased she has something that works for this unit.
Child's Introduction to the Night Sky This was another fave. Chock full of trivia and history to include the stories of the constellations. These work well for narrations and notebooks. A keeper.
Starry Sky Journal 