All belly, no button

Amos happily pointed out his own belly button, and Daddy's belly button, but nothing would induce him to look for a button on Mama's 8-month-pregnant belly. As he skipped away, he paused briefly to issue a correction over his shoulder. "No, it's a belly helmet!"

Sailing toward morning

When I asked Willie if I could post this picture on the Wuggy Chronicles, he was a little bit confused.

"But there isn't anything about ships in the Wuggy Chronicles, is there?"

I said that I guessed we'd have to change that, and his eyes grew wide.

"You mean the Wuggy Chronicles are real?

I nodded.

"All that funny stuff really happened in our family?"

He was very impressed, and as a writer, I was gratified to discover that my kids had been enjoying the dogeared two volume compilation (thanks, Mom and Dad!) as literature more than as family lore.

I'm not sure how he jumped from the idea that the Wuggy Chronicles are changeable to the idea that they are true, but somehow the connection feels exactly right.

Because truth is a vast ocean, and my ship is very small. May God breathe tenderly upon our fragile sails, and give us eyes to see the stars.

Coffee resuscitation

All the cool mommy bloggers shop at Aldi's. Then they post amazing tips about how they effortlessly feed their families nutritious gourmet food for mere pennies, and you could too... if only you had access to an Aldi's.

Well. Now that they've opened up an Aldi's right next to the fine arts academy where I teach, it's my turn to torment all of you.

Seriously, Aldi's is great. The prices are good, but the shopping experience is even better. It's so... simple. And straightforward. And so... not an endless vortex of confusion and manipulation.

Their coffee, however, is decidedly not great. I suppose the upside is that they really push fair trade. Their fair trade coffee is solidly mediocre, but a few weeks ago I tried their uncertified coffee, and was severely punished for my error.

Not. Even. Drinkable.

But necessity is the mother of invention, and coffee is definitely a necessity for a mother of six wuggies... or, for that matter, any other caffeine addicted human being with a boatload of stuff to get done.

I got my idea from bulletproof coffee, which obviously presupposes access to nice coffee and grassfed butter. The stuff I had on hand definitely wasn't going to make me bulletproof, but I wondered if my cheap Aldi's butter might make my cheap Aldi's coffee slightly more tolerable.

It took some tweaking too get the recipe right, but eventually, it worked. I put four "cups" of coffee in the blender (coffee-pot cups, that is) with a tablespoon of butter and two tablespoons of milk. Then I add as much sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg as I feel like, and maybe a drop off almond extract. I whiz it up until it's foamy and wonderful...

And then I try to persuade the wuggies that they really don't need a sip of my coffee.

That's the hard part.

Eclipse

Once in a blue moon we all get up early, to watch the uncracked dawn split open in the darkness, and bleed across the face of the moon until it turns to blue-gray ash.

Which sounds kinda macabre when you put it like that, except it wasn't. It was glorious and peaceful, except for the part where we were squabbling over the telescope, but even that wasn't too bad, and when that blinding sliver of moonlight reappeared against the deep periwinkle sky... well Willie said it looked just like any other crescent moon, but Nathan said out was like that bird that's reborn from the ashes.

We looked at it through the telescope, and that was nice, but not as nice as sitting on the park bench and just being there. I tried to take a picture, but all I got was a grainy shot of darkness with a tiny fuzzy spot of light that insisted on spreading out beyond its boundaries.

The way light does.

Now it is full daylight here, and the moon is free from our shadow. It's a perfectly normal morning.

Mostly.

Surely it comes as no surprise that Isaiah fell asleep over the newspaper.

Wuggy Science Fiction: Isaiah's Space Roller Coaster

What if there was a roller coaster that went around Earth, and was in space? It would be a big hollow ring that goes around Earth.

There would be a station where spaceships would drop off passengers and take them back to earth, like at a train station. There would be a big line.

The roller coaster would probably take a couple of months or maybe even a year to go around earth, so probably they would have to have a bunch of food and drinks. I think people might get bored after a while, because the roller coaster would be going on for days.

Even a space roller coaster would get boring after a day or two.

Summer

Summer is a time for listening. Listening to crickets and birdsong, to the wind rustling in the treetops and the frothy murmur of the endless waves of traffic, the airplanes overhead, and the buzzing air-conditioners that never, ever turn off this time of year. It's time of pausing to realize just how little silence there is, a time of noticing and acknowledging all the noise.

Above all it's a time of listening to toddlers, of stopping to figure out what that tantrum was really about. The louder it gets, the harder it is to listen, but listening well is usually a prerequisite to peace.

But in this season, even peace is pretty noisy, and Dadders and I seem to be the only ones craving stillness. Well, September, too, but at any rate, we're soundly outnumbered. And even now, as I write out loud to the wuggies, Kai-kai insists that he doesn't want to listen to my song, he wants to listen to Bopatado. (The round red guy who hangs out with Larry the Cucumber, in case you're not used to listening to this particular two-year-old.)

He's really asking quite sweetly (though insistently), and you know, I think we will.

There's a time for stillness, and a time for Silly Songs With Larry and Bopatado, everything in it's season under the glow of the setting sun.

Sticky-Sweet

Nathan wants me to write on the Wuggy Chronicles.

About Kai-kai and Amos, perhaps. Or bees.

I guess you could say that we're swarming with new life around here. Fortunately, the apiary contingent has been safely relocated to the farm of some delightfully eccentric beekeepers, who captured our imaginations with their amazing stories while they sucked up 10,000 or so honeybees with their shopvac. An alpha-swarm, they told us gleefully, and presumable ready to produce gallons and gallons of honey. 150 pounds a year, if Isaiah's memory serves correctly, and Nathan remembers that they said it would be enough to feed a whole village, though I'm not certain of what size or honey-consumption patterns.

(Nathan also reminds me to tell you that the beekeepers have lots of enormous bullfrogs on their farm, and that one of their friends had been killed by bees, and that they didn't kill our bees, but put them in a box. Of which box we were very sternly warned: Do. Not. Touch.)

 I'm told that when honeybees try to settle into a new home, they build precisely one new row of honeycomb per day. Sure enough, there were four rows of snow-white fresh honeycomb, one for each of the frantic days that it took to get someone out to our house to get those bees out of here. Apparently bee migration season coincides with peak honey production season, and every beekeeper in the area had a several-week waiting list. That would have added up to at least fourteen rows of honeycomb, not to mention all the honey.

But during one of those (many, and mostly fruitless) phone calls, a wild rumpus broke out, and it became manifestly obvious to the beekeeper on the other end of the line that there were children in the house. Lots of them. (Six, in case you've lost count. Nathan would like me to be sure to tell you that Amos was born four months ago. But back when this happened, he was still only three months old, and still colicky.) At any rate, the interruptions made my case better than I ever could have, and he agreed to drop everything and come that very evening, which is how it happened that the wuggies only got four rows of honeycomb and only one bee sting.

(Kai-kai was a very good sport about the sting, and his big brother Willie showed so much compassion that this part of the story is actually one that I treasure dearly in my heart.)

Finally the wuggies have something to take to the zoo trading shop, assuming that they don't use it for sealing wax instead, and we've all become a little bit obsessed with bees. Bees are more wonderful and fascinating and important and dangerous than I ever imagined, and bee-keeping has assumed a delightful role in all our agrarian fantasies. But oh, how my skin is crawling as I type, just remembering all those bees swarming by the front door of our townhouse.

Ever since the wuggies first grew old enough to upend their bowls of cereal all over the dining room floor, I've known that the promised land was a mighty sticky place. Back then I thought it was just a silly pun; mere humor.

But slowly I'm learning that there's nothing "mere" to humor at all, and even puns can be profound. The rose comes with its thorns, and the honey with its stings. Everything is bittersweet, and sometimes the only way to see clearly is to laugh so hard that the tears stream down your face.

Life is good. God has blessed us abundantly, overwhelmingly. We're so grateful, and so exhausted. It's very, very sweet, and very sticky. And when I remember to laugh, there's a sweetness in the sticky, too.

Overheard

"The wall is a very bad man. It hit me on the head."

Love

We've still been running the air-conditioner off and on, but suddenly it is heater weather. A simple flip of the switch, however, revealed that this means that it is going to be on and off jacket weather inside our house until the repairman comes out to fix the heater.

Texas, unlike California, actually has seasons, and this time of year, you can experience all four of them in the space of a week.

"Mama! You have ant bites, too?!"

Texas also has ants. Ants seem to be particularly fascinating to young blue-eyed boys, and Texas ants are the biting kind. Kai-kai, September, and Isaiah have always tended to stay clear of them, but Willie is enraptured with their swarming patterns, just like Nathan was at his age.

Stroking me sympathetically, Willie took a closer look at my arm.

"Oh, those aren't ant bites... you're just cold!"

He whipped his jacket off, and offered it to me. I thanked him for the sweet gesture, and told him that perhaps he could go fetch me my own jacket off the banister.

He immediately went scurrying off, and the moment he was back, and my jacket was safely in my hands, he picked up his own little black and red puffer.

"There. Now I'm going to put my coat back on. Because I'm freezing."

Song

It's the sort of day where you savor your mug of hot tea, as much for the warmth as for anything else.  Where you never bother to get out of your pajamas, but you do scrub the kitchen floor--or at least part of it--and it feels so good, if only in contrast to your stuffy nose and your thickly pounding head. The sort of day when your little boy grins at you with those melty-chocolate eyes, and somehow you feel the wonder all the more for being sick.

Or maybe it's just that like a snake swallowing its tail, all those voices of silence have choked themselves off.  They've dried up and blown away in the crisp November wind, and I feel so light and glad.

I can just taste the redemption that might be, that could be, and whatever stories there will be, I rejoice that it is offered.

Do they know? Do they know?

Those words have suffocated us all for so long, speaker and hearer alike, but now those words have crumbled into ashes. At the sound of the breaking pots, they've turned on themselves in the torchlight, and those words of darkness can never again drown out the words of light.

Do they know? Do they know?

They will say what they will say, and live the story of their choosing. I hope they come stand in the beautiful wind with arms wide open, and watch the ashes blow away, as far as the east is from the west.  But whatever words they choose to live, my heart overflows with gladness at the story that's been offered.

And as for me, I will play checkers with my daughter, pour another cup of tea, and sing the song of the redeemed.

My Sons.

I'm proud of 'em, and I get mamma-bear mad when folks have low expectations of 'em.

And then I take it as an opportunity to clarify my philosophy of education. In sonnet form, of course.

http://thereforeiambic.blogspot.com/2011/01/these-fine-strong-sons-of-mine-it-is.html

Plumb Line

One of the best things about having lots of kids is that you get to hear yourself reflected back--my interactions with them get played back over and over again in the way they talk to each other, and so I get to find out how I really sound.

And so it was that I was doubly pleased the other day, when I heard September speaking to Will with such gentle, loving firmness.

"Willie, I'll let you play with my football, but not in the bathroom, because I don't want you to flush it down the toilet. You shouldn't flush things down the toilet that don't belong to you."

Clutter

I’ve been reading the newspaper this afternoon—a rare indulgence. Newspapers are terribly messy and clutterful, and so I tend to get most of my news from the internet. With all the temptingly distracting hyperlinks, I suppose that the internet produces even more mental clutter, but at least it all stays contained in my head, rather than getting scattered about the house.

Of course, mental clutter is even more crazy-making than paper-clutter… until in finds its way out onto paper. It works just the same way as with the house—the more stuff you let in, the more of your life you have to spend organizing it all. There’s a richness in simplicity, and I’m trying to rid my life of extraneous junk. At the very least, I’m trying to count the cost for everything I bring into my life—not just the initial investment, but also the cumulative cost of constantly having to put it away, over and over again. It’s all too easy for the meaningless to crowd out the meaningful, for words to multiply, and dreams to crowd out their fulfillment.
Of the writing of books there is no end, but once they’ve been scattered all around the floor for the umpteenth time, they need to get put back into place so I can stop tripping on them. Yesterday, when I was trying to pick up the week’s accumulation of clutter, I found myself instead following my husband around while he cleaned, and chattering incessantly. I was explaining to him about why I really needed to write more, so that I wouldn’t drive him up the wall by talking his ear off quite so much. I stopped short as soon as I picked up on the irony, but he assured me that I wasn’t actually annoying him. He doesn’t mind when I talk about writing. It’s just when I talk about… certain things. He couldn’t remember what.

This afternoon, our beautiful, newly tidy room was strewn about with comics and economics and the weekly “Around the Area” column on local murderings and gristly accidents. I read aloud all the particularly infuriating snippets from editorial after editorial, and Andrew finally remembered what it is that always bugs him. Ah, yes. Politics. He can’t stand it when I talk about politics.

We’re pretty much on the same page, and though our views have evolved through the years, they’ve been changing in lockstep. But our attention spans are different, and Andrew is forever drawing me out of the endless round and round of the now, back to the slow, meticulous study of history that makes sense out of it all.

And of course, when I sat down to write, I had the intention of drawing some profound point out of all this.

It was terribly profound and wonderful, but it seems to be buried in a big pile with several pages of newspaper, some dirty dishes, and some unfolded laundry.

Poetry Blog, Take II

Okay, so I don't think, therefore I mess up the launching of my new blog, and then go get a puppy, and never make it onto the internet for a few weeks.

Here it is, for reals: thereforeiambic.blogspot.com

I'm starting out slow--expect weekly Saturday posts for now.

First up, a resurrection poem.

Because Christ is risen!

Hallelujah!

Oh, and in case you're wondering, she's a little white furball of a mini schnoodle, her name is Terpsichore, and although she's very cute, everything they've ever said about housebreaking small dogs is true.

Poetry Blog

I'm blogging in metered verse over at I Think, Therefore Iambic Pentameter.

First up, I've got a metaphysical sonnet about teabags, with sweetly innocent children's poetry, ruminations on fear of death, and even a little bit of cynical politics coming soon.

I'm also writing nonsense rhymes to supplement the wuggies' phonics lessons, and I may post some of that, too.

I hope you drop by soon.

Remember the Alamo!

We just got back from a little jaunt to San Antonio.

It's an inspiring bit of history, and we like being part of a state with an identity like that.

Along the way to the Alamo, we ended up traipsing through the backroads, and meandering through an old cemetery.

We like walking through graveyards, the skeletal outlines of lives long ago, a set of dates held together by a few lines of poetry. It is good to stand at a distance, to see what really matters after time has smoothed away most of the details, while magnifying others, as an ancient winding stream carves out the riverbed.

Remember the Alamo!

It's strange to think that after all these years, it really doesn't matter whether they won or lost, but it matters tremendously that they died and died valiantly.

We remember that they lost the battle, and we remember that their defeat was part of how the revolution was won.

But sooner or later, I'm sure it all would have turned out this way in the end, and it doesn't really matter how we got here.

But it matters that these brave men fought to the death against hopeless odds, and it matters that their comrades let them die alone and unsupported, and waited to bravely fight the battles that were theirs to fight and win.

All these years later, what matters is not how long their lives were, or even whether in the dying they accomplished their goals. What matters is that they chose wisesly, fought bravely, and died well.

The vic'try or defeat is but a token
of the glory spilled from lives valiantly broken.

Complicated Passages

I was reading a bit of Galatians to the wuggies this morning, simply because that's what I was reading to myself before they got up. Of course, this required a bit of context-building before we launched into the text. We looked up Galatia first on the map in the back of the Bible, then found the corresponding area on the globe, and discovered that it corresponds to modern-day Turkey.

After I explained to them how the people of Galatia had been led astray by bad teachers, September wondered if the Insulations ever got things straight again.

I didn't know the answer to that one.

Nathan, on the other hand, really just wanted to know why the area had changed names.

Another stumper.

But then, all on his own, he figured it out.

The land must have been invaded by chickens.

And there you have it.

Oot!

Paggles is talking! Vague-sounding complete sentences have been emerging for some time--it always sounds just like he must be saying something that makes perfect sense--but now his conversation is peppered with distinctly intelligible words. Like Mama, Da-ee, Timmo, Na-tin, Iyaya, and eat. Eat! Eat! That boy sure loves to eat, and to talk about eating whenever there's food in sight. But if there's one thing that he likes more than eating, it's goofing. There never was such a boy for goofing. And so his very favorite word of all--except maybe for "Mama," which to my great chagrin, is his word for any and all beverages... well, anyway, his second-favorite word of all is "Oot!" Which simply means that it is time to burst out into gales of laughter, because that's an awfully funny sound to make.

And since we're talking about Paggles and the meaning of nonsense words, I suppose I'd better explain how he came to be called Paggles.

It's really quite simple and rational. It should be fairly obvious why we took to calling him snufflupagus. But then we would jokingly shift around the emPHASes of the sylLAbles, and have protracted discussions as to whether he was really a snufflUPagus, or maybe actually a snuffloPAgus. In the end we concluded that he was definitely a snuffloPAgus, which slowly morphed into Pagus... Pags...

And that is how it came about that he is Paggles, and he says "Oot!"

I just realized...

...that I spent most of my writing time this evening trying to find somebody (anybody!) who had already said what I had to say, so maybe I wouldn't have to write it.

It was during the chunk of time when I was looking for a potential publisher for this half-written article, that I realized why nobody is saying it.

So for now, I'll just have to say it here, on my unfunded little blog.

Every word in the mainstream media is funded by big corporations.

Not something that mainstream media is likely to point out, and not something that you can really do much about, without making matters worse. It's simply a fact of modern life--our society has an awful lot of mighty effective megaphones available for purchase, and most of that purchasing happens in ways that are utterly untouchable by campaign finance laws.

Thank God that ordinary citizens are now permitted to pool their resources, and make their voices heard too.

Even if they aren't quite rich enough to buy the whole television network.

It's always bittersweet...

...to find a splendid library discard.