Summer Dayze: June 8 - 14

I call on the Lord... and he answers me.
Ps. 120:1

With a more relaxed summertime schedule, I feel deliciously like I'm always on vacation. My total office hours per week are about the same, but they're organized differently, and a simple shift in schedule can bring a huge shift in perspective. Now I can sit on a blanket in the magnolia's shade in the front yard, reading, while Henry gathers up magnolia seeds from the grass. Now I can "sleep in" until 7:00. Now I can weed the brick patio when it's convenient - or skip weeding the brick patio, if the sun's too hot. Now nothing seems urgent. Weeks roll over onto weeks, instead of the short weekend feeling like a moment to pant for air between fast furious sprints. Summer, if you work in an academic setting and operate on a school calendar, is a long, long runway of freedom. No more rules. No more deadlines. Just popsicles and swimming parties and sunburn and endless reading for months on end.

OK, so there are definitely still deadlines. And of course, it's never quite as free as it seems. As scrumptious as this week was, next week is a hairy mess of appointments, phone calls, and errands. Not the summer bliss I might have imagined. So I find, only one week into summer vacation, that it doesn't measure up. I longed for stress-free days layered with lemonade and library books, but instead I'm scribbling in my planner and wondering when I'll fit in a shopping trip for groceries.

I know summer can't ultimately satisfy. Neither can Christmastime or the most autumn-colored October or any day or month or year. Satisfaction comes from days that honor Christ and lives that see eternally instead of putting too much stock in the here and now. My first week of summer vacation reminds me of this.

I'm an organized girl, though, and I know the peace that some simple orderly habits can bring, both when the summer sun makes you so carefree that you forget what day of the week it is, and when the calendar is booked up for days straight and you forget what a free afternoon is like. Here are a few simple ideas, that can help keep summer lovely, keep (some of) the stress out of life, and keep the days feeling vacation-yummy all year round.

1. Slice off the first part of the day for the Lord. Most days, I still wake up before Henry and Pete and take the first half-hour of the day for quiet time. A night's sleep often leaves me anxious and irritable (is this true for anyone else?), so taking time to pray, reflect, and remind myself of the gospel realigns me to what's true and important before I embark on the day.

2. Do not let the budget spreadsheet get behind. Do you keep track of your spending? We do, but when I let the receipts pile up, doing the budget paperwork is a beast of a task. And in summer-mode, it's especially easy to let things pile up on the desk. The best policy is to record purchases, and bill payments, on the day that they're made. When the spreadsheet is up-to-date, I don't have to wonder how the month's money is working out as I pull out my debit card at ALDI.

3. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: keep those photos organized. Instead of toting around an iphone full of uncatalogued photos (which subtly stresses me out, but maybe I'm just obsessive), drop your pictures onto a computer harddrive, sort and name them, and toss blurry ones, duplicates, or the ones you really won't ever need to see again. Better yet, take time regularly to put together photo book pages in an album on snapfish or shutterfly. By December, you'll have a family yearbook you can order when they run a year-end sale.

4. Make a list of easy meals and try to keep the ingredients on hand. Is there anything worse in life than food shopping? OK, maybe packing lunches. Take some of the misery out of meal planning and carry index cards listing favorite easy meals and the needed ingredients. If you've stocked up ahead of time, grabbing a package of chicken and a green pepper might be all you need to have fajitas for dinner.

Sometimes life gets in the way of life. I don't want to let the pesky parts of life ruin the pretty parts of life. As summer vacation stretches out ahead of me, I want more of this:

Here's to a simple summer.

Grateful this week for: 
frozen strawberry pie
fireflies
ceiling fan
day lilies
a pedicure
manila envelopes
email
best-ever burgers
swiss cheese
watching my baby cousin marry his dream girl
windshield wipers
storm clouds
garden lettuce
mint water
yard-walking
superstar husband washing the dishes
three days in a row at the pool
edging into first place in our roof contest!

Extreme Housewives

Homeward Bound, Emily Matchar

Simon and Schuster, 2013, 250 pages

You’re a female college graduate. Smart, creative, efficient, organized. You’ve had a great job, loved it, and then you’ve fallen in love. Gotten married. Had a baby or two. And in a matter of just a few years, your priorities lurch off your well-planned course onto one you didn’t expect. No longer do you have a passion for staying late at the office and fine-tuning reports. You spend lunch meetings texting the babysitter under the table. You wonder more and more about the safety of jarred baby food and long for time to puree your own in the kitchen.  

This is just one of many stories that send working women across the nation packing up their office desks and setting up shop as homemakers. These are the lives Emily Matchar explores in Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity. Matchar takes a look at the arenas in which women are recently returning to the home and the reasons for the growing trend. With a healthy mix of history lessons, anecdotal evidence, and diplomatic opinion, Matchar’s book reads smoothly enough for poolside lounging, but is hearty enough that you’ll find yourself hmm-ing thoughtfully throughout.

So why are women today - in the post-feminist world - finding the tasks of homemaking appealing again? If your social media feeds are anything like mine, your friends are baking their own bread, growing their own veggies, canning jam, making soap, sewing clothes, raising chickens, and using cloth diapers. Is a young woman’s future today redefined as we experience a swing from our parents' generation, that saw the dawning of vaccines and microwave meals and two-earner families, to the extreme opposite, in which any help from "the man" is seen as risky and all of life is funneled through a DIY filter?

Matchar finds a few key motivators. A backlash of feminism found women feeling trapped in the much-longed-for role of a wage-earner. Instead of feeling triumphant as top-tier managers, women discovered they no longer knew the things their grandmas did – how to make soup from scratch or knit a scarf – and they were no longer satisfied being ignorant about the domestic arts. Couple this with a recession that hit nearly every sector of the economy, and women had fewer and fewer reasons to desire work outside the home. They headed home in droves and changed the face of homemaking. “The symbolism around homemade items began to shift,” Matchar says. “If a jar of home-canned tomatoes was once a sign of poverty, it now became a sign of an enlightened attitude toward food and the environment. If an apron was once a symbol of oppression, it was now a kitschy-cool reminder of the joys of cooking.”

Moms were particularly inspired to leave the workforce, especially considering that “the United States is the only country in the developed world without guaranteed paid maternity leave.” The unfriendliness of the American workplace toward the American mom left disappointed women across the nation. “Feminism raised women’s expectations for career satisfaction, but the larger culture didn’t rise up to meet these expectations,” says Matchar in a chapter called The Emergence of the Hipster Homemaker. 

While so-called “DIY Parenting” is one expression of the New Domesticity – homeschooling, co-sleeping, natural childbirth, homemade baby food, extended breast-feeding, eschewing vaccines – a DIY lifestyle not just for moms. Childless women also find the return to homemaker status satisfying. Earning a living from internet-based businesses like Etsy, setting up an off-grid homesteading lifestyle, or just taking a little more time to live self-sufficiently appeal to women with any number of reasons to reject the American Dream. Distrust for the FDA, the CDC, and the corporate sector make carving out your own living seem much safer than relying on American culture and industry. Matchar sums up the DIY life: “This new style of home-focused, sustainability-minded living seems to offer an answer to the opt-out question for creative, educated women… New Domesticity moms imbue their days with meaning and purpose in doing not only what’s right for their family but what the believe is right for the entire world.”

My response to all this is necessarily couched in my own experience: a college-educated woman who graduated in the 2000’s, a wife and mom who cut back to part-time after the birth of my son, a fridge homesteader who grows veggies in the backyard and buys local whole (but not raw) milk for my little boy to drink. Before looking objectively at the trend, I stamp down the temptation to dismiss domesticity simply because I haven’t drenched myself in it. Mommy Guilt is real. Homemaker Guilt is equally real. Though most women in my age category have at least dipped their toes in homemade domestic life, the idea that all-in is the ideal way to live can leave guilty women hiding storebought cereal high in the cabinet when friends come to visit. So I’ll tease out my reactions and try to leave emotions behind.

Firstly, some red flags go up when I read quotes from career women turned homesteaders like “When you start producing your own food, even the simplest plot of potatoes, your life regains some of the authenticity we’ve all forgotten about.” Homegrown potatoes fried in butter make an awesome breakfast, but if your life’s authenticity depends on harvesting vegetables, you’ve missed something crucial. Matchar points out the overlap between Mormons, lesbian couples, Christian wives, and end-of-the-spectrum political liberals, all of whom find themselves drawn by the pull of new domestic life. Christian wives might not expect to find solidarity from such a diverse group of peers. I fear that many, though, put the homemade life on the pedestal that should be reserved for a Christ-made life. When value and meaning are found in shelves lined with home-canned jam and handmade soap, the domestic goddess has overstepped her bounds. Like any obsession, domestic living can become life-consuming.

Secondly, and I take this point from Matchar’s concluding chapter, the New Domesticity is most often connected to the upper-middle-class who have the luxury to quit their jobs and sustain their own homegrown lifestyles. Women in lower-class settings “don’t have time to breast-feed for three weeks, let alone three years.” Wives who canned tomatoes as “just another chore for women whose fingers were already worked down to the bone” won’t see the do-it-yourself foodie-ism with the same romantic nostalgia as wives who left a successful boardroom career to live off a quarter-acre garden. It’s important to acknowledge this if we self-righteously refuse to buy a jar of Smucker’s.

Finally, I think cultural feminism, which argues that “some gender inequality is actually just ‘gender difference’ and that we should honor women’s (and men’s) natural, inherent natures,” actually aligns properly with the Christian ethos of feminine skills. A biblical worldview would never suggest that women should be banned from business or confined to a round-the-clock job of knitting, baking, and gardening. But it’s clear that women and men are created differently and the New Domesticity appropriately recognizes that. Women climbing the career ladder or delaying child-bearing because they love their jobs aren’t necessarily making a wrong choice. But if and when they find themselves fed up with the American workplace or without enough hours in the day to balance mothering and working, there should be no shame in reorganizing life to resemble the traditional housewife. On the other hand, there should also be no shame in a lifestyle that includes dinner at Wendy’s every once in a while. No woman need feel guilted into extreme domestic life. With kindness and fairness, Emily Matchar pries open the doors on the lives of today’s young women and gives a neutral assessment of the twenty-first century housewife’s successes as well as the potential dangers of diving in too deep. Grab a glass of homemade iced tea and take a fresh look at New Domesticity this summer with Homeward Bound.

Fewer Words: June 1 - 7

Let me live that I may praise you, and may your laws sustain me.
Ps. 119:175

This was the last week of school. Stress was high, to-do lists were long, and I couldn't wait for Friday's sun to set so we could take in deep breaths of summer vacation. As I checked exhausting day after exhausting day off my list, I tried to take special notice of happy things.

So today, after a few weeks of publishing heavy, wordy posts on Fifty-Two, I thought we might need some breathing room. It's not profound, but it's real life. Little tiny bites of this sweet life.

Simply a "Grateful this week for:" list, in snapshot form. 

Wild honeysuckle.

Red-letter words for not-so-red-letter days.

Our book lover.

Garden sugar peas.

Bathtime bliss.

Lettuce row at the school garden.

Mornings like this. 

Those eyes.

Welcome, dear sweet summertime! 

MidWeek Mini: Just Believe

I'll be honest: I’m writing today with an agenda. We need votes in order for our home to win a new roof and I’m going to be asking for yours. We’re one of four finalists in Berks County to win a free new roof installed by Mast Roofing and Construction. Three weeks of voting will determine the winner.

We bought our home in 2012 and it was clear from the first time we set foot inside that owing it would be a dream come true. It’s exactly what we love: historic, full of slanted floors and high ceilings and behemoth radiators and tons of charm. But lest you think it’s purely dreamy, let me assure you that we’ve had our share of nightmares. Flooded basement, bats in bedrooms, scraping old paint from the gingerbread front porch, clogged drains, mice in the pantry, fallen gutters, and a leaking roof. We’ve been overwhelmingly blessed with solutions for most of these issues and have been given so much help in upkeeping our precious dinosaur of a home. But the need for a new roof is one we don’t think we can manage alone. We don't know exactly what ours would cost to replace, but with two main roof sections (one of which is veeeery high) and two porches, we know it would be pretty steep. No pun intended.

If our house were smaller - and closer to the ground - we would reshingle it ourselves with friends as volunteer labor. We tried to get some insurance money for hail damage, but were told that most of the damage up there is not from hail. It's just an old, tired, weather-beaten, dying roof.

For months now, I’ve been called back again and again to the passage in Mark 5 about Jesus raising the dead little girl. While Jesus is on his way to heal her from an illness, the messengers bring word that she has died. They tell the grieving father, "Don’t bother Jesus anymore. It’s all over now." The dad, I imagine, feels his heart break. His last thread of hope is snipped in a single second.

But Christ ignores the naysayers. I picture him cupping the dad’s crying face in his hands, forcing him to meet His eyes. "Don’t be afraid. Just believe," He says. In the absence of an easy solution, He promises something better. He essentially says "What looks like death to you is actually a chance to show off my power." And He rolls up His sleeves and you know that whatever happens next is a miracle. So we've put the crushing burden of our dying roof into God's hands and asked Him for a miracle.

Maybe this contest is our miracle. Maybe it's not. If we're not the winning house on June 21st, then we know there's another answer to this desperate need.

But as we pray for an answer - any answer - I ask you to vote. As of today, we're in second place and there are 18 days of voting left. You can cast one vote per email address here. And if you're willing, please share this post, or the voting link, with your friends and family members and communities and ask them to vote.  

And when your hope is lost and you're about to quit, listen closely and you'll hear Him tell you the same thing: "Why are you discouraged? Why are you giving up? Don’t be afraid. It's not over. It's all just about to begin. Just believe."

Reactions to Sadness: May 25 - 31

I rejoice in your promise like one who finds great spoil. Great peace have they who love your law, and nothing can make them stumble. 
Ps. 119:161&165

Sadness. It stacks up in our Facebook feeds. It sours our stomachs at parties when we expected to be enjoying a cheeseburger. It lurks in plastic smiles and in rooms filled with bridesmaid tulle and hairspray and makeup.

It’s the canvas our lives often seem to be painted on: Sadness. Loss. Abandonment. Disappointment. Some smudges of joy might be there too, some brushstrokes of bliss and laughter and contentment. But behind it all, don’t you feel there’s a permanently sad backdrop?

When bad news piles up, it’s easy to think this way. Families aren’t just broken, they’re completely shattered. Lives aren’t just lost, they’re taken. Sometimes, all the worst things happen at once, on every side, crowding into the edges of my own ordinary days. So when God gives me a happy toddler in a baby pool in the green grass in the shadow of a gorgeous home in the cool afternoon breeze, but gives someone else an obituary and an autopsy report or a pile of divorce paperwork and a custody battle, how should I respond?

My initial reaction is gratitude. “Thank you, Lord, for sparing me that burden.” But I once heard Larissa Murphy speak, and she cautioned against this type of thinking. When Larissa was in her early twenties, her boyfriend of ten months was injured in a car accident and left with a permanent brain injury that affected speech and motor control. His survival was a miracle, but he would never be physically the same and would need years of treatment and therapy. The couple had already been pursuing engagement, and they continued to feel that God was drawing them toward marriage. So in spite of the accident, they married four years later.

Larissa often hears from women who tell her things like “Thank you for sharing your story! You’ve made me so grateful for the life God’s blessed me with!” She’s not as encouraged by these comments as the grateful women expect her to be. “Don’t use my life as a comparison checkpoint to make you glad yours isn’t as hard as mine. How will you feel if God does call you to carry a burden like this?”

So, gratefulness is not a sturdy enough reply to the collapses of lives around me.

Perhaps a little more helpful is an attitude of compassion. Can I ever guess the wounds that are oozing under the masks people wear? I see only a tiny corner of each life that intersects with mine. I can’t know the sadnesses that keep him up at night or drive her to silently cry in a bathroom stall in the middle of the workday. Maybe there’s nothing I can do for a heart so wounded. But maybe the humility of a genuine kindness would soften the ache just a bit. Or even drain some of the sadness away.

Most of all, though, when sorrow licks at my heels or drips out of other lives into mine, my response should be fervent prayer. What’s sparing me from funeral plans or legal proceedings or watching somebody walk down the wrong aisle except the mercy of God? Do I have any chance of avoiding the breakdowns of life without His help? When broken hearts crack right in front of me, the only one who can stitch them up is the Lord. So I pray those hearts into His hands, the same place I put my own heart if I want any hope of keeping it whole.

Sad news will always come. It might even come all the way up to my own doorstep. So I’m humbled this week. I’m grateful. I’m moved to greater compassion. And I’m driven to my knees.

Grateful this week for: 
shade
a day off
reading the face of a friend, not needing words
Roku with Pete
strawberry pie
raspberry milkshake
AAA
a chance at a free roof (more on that later this week!)
garden cuttings for the table
honeysuckle in the air
slowly swelling grapes
new shelves in my pantry closet
porch swing

MidWeek Mini: Cloth Diapering for Toddlers

Henry's been in cloth diapers since he was about 8 weeks old. To be fair, he never actually wore them full-time. I always used a combination of cloth and disposable, switching to disposable while the cloth were in the laundry cycle, and always using disposable overnight. He's 16 months old now (that's almost one-and-a-half, if you're trying to calculate), and we're still using BumGenius 4.0 about half the time. 

Since we're successfully cloth-diapering on a 30-lb pre-toddler, I thought it would be helpful to give some feedback on this stage, for those who might be jumping into cloth diapering for the first time, or who are a few steps behind us in the process and worried about losing heart.   

What makes cloth-diapering a toddler possible - at least for me - is using throwaway liners which go inside the cloth diaper to catch the solids. They're about $10 for 200, or a nickel each. (Disposable diapers are between 20 and 35 cents each.) It didn't matter when he was a tiny baby and was just producing that grainy breastmilk poop. At that point, I didn't even bother to rinse out the diaper. The whole thing just went right in the washer. But once he started on solid food, especially once he moved from baby food to actual table food, the diapers got a lot messier to manage.  

These liners are a lifesaver because I no longer have to carry a poop-filled diaper from the nursery to the bathroom, use a spatula to scrape poop off the diaper into the toilet, and then return to the nursery to put the diaper in my washing bag, all while managing to keep the child on the changing table and/or away from the soiled diaper. I just pull the liner out, poop and all, and toss the whole thing in the trash. The diapers are then much less messy when washing time comes. I use these liners.   

My part-time cloth-diaper routine is also a lifesaver. I could not do this if I had to keep the cloths in constant rotation. My routine usually goes like this: On Friday afternoon when I get home from work, I have the diapers clean and assembled and ready to go. I start using them then, and use them for the weekend. I have 12 and that is just about perfect for Friday evening, Saturday, and Sunday. Then I wash them, usually on Sunday night.

The entire wash process is long. I do a short (35 minute) cold cycle first, which is basically for rinsing. Then I do a long hot cycle (my machine calls it "Bright Whites"), and I add an extra rinse for a total time of 1 and a half hours. For both cycles, I use this detergent which you can find at WalMart. When they're done, I put the inserts in the dryer, and hang the covers on a drying rack. If I do this in the evening, they are dry by morning. Or I might run the wash overnight, then start the drying process when I get up in the morning and they're dry by the time I get home from work.

On most Mondays Henry goes to spend the morning with my mother-in-law, so I send disposable along with him while he's not at home and I get the cloth ones ready to start up that afternoon. Tuesday and Wednesday we're back to cloth diapers again and I usually get through most (maybe 10) of the 12 total diapers by Wednesday evening. Then I go back to disposables for a day or two, and get the cloth ones all washed and ready for the weekend again.

There are a LOT of opinions about how to wash cloth diapers. Stripping? Bleach? Vinegar? My BumGenius diapers are supposed to be washed only in BumGenius detergent. I confess that I do not buy the special detergent. I've gone with the simple wisdom from GroVia, a company that makes cloth diapers and also makes the disposable liners I use. Their recommendation is to keep the wash routine simple, use enough detergent, wash for a long enough time, and not add anything additional to the washer. The routine I describe has been effective in keeping my diapers clean. I do use bleach about once a month, since that is recommended by BumGenius for these diapers. And when possible, I let them dry in the sun, or lay out in the sun after drying. A good sun-bleach freshens them up.

From the start, one of my main considerations in choosing part-time cloth-diapering was saving money. Yes, it was also an environmental choice, and definitely a traditionalist choice, but primarily I was hoping to save some cash. The compromise we're using is definitely accomplishing that. A $25 box of diapers can go pretty fast. Using cloth part-time is a huge benefit. Surprisingly, I have not even seen any significant change in our water bill from the extra loads of laundry.

At this point, I'm planning on cloth-diapering all the way until Henry is potty-trained. We love our routine and love these diapers!

Please comment with any questions or with your cloth-diapering experience. 

Imperfect: May 18 - 24

Your compassion is great, O Lord; preserve my life according to your laws. 
Ps. 119:156

I don't tolerate mess. I can't abide disorder. I hate imperfection in its many forms and flatly refuse to allow any part of my life to fall into disarray.

But the week is hectic. The evenings are long and the dishes seem to multiply on the counter despite the endless scrubbing. The afternoon rainstorm floods the basement. I'm eating handfuls of chocolate chips because sometimes a girl just needs chocolate. The fridge is empty again and the husband and the toddler are hungry. The coffee is too strong. Or the coffee is all gone. The floor is dirty (dirty again already!?) and I'm 28 and still fighting zits. The naptimes don't coordinate with my plans. There are fruit flies all over the kitchen. I forgot deodorant and I stink. There's bad news about old friends. And I think my library books are overdue. We've spent months trying to sort out insurance money for a new roof, and we've gotten practically nowhere. My son has eczema and a heart murmur and a big swollen thigh where he got a shot this week. And when my husband turned the wrong stove knob and ended up cooking over a cold burner while a different burner glowed blue with flame, he was wrong when he said "You would never do something like that." I'd like him to be right because I'd like to be above mistakes. But I've actually done the same thing.

Water, being pumped out of the basement.

"I don't accept this," I say.

"This doesn't happen to me."

"I refuse!"

I stomp my feet and shake my fists and threaten to quit life if things don't get back to perfect.

But families will never stop disappointing. Cars and houses will never stop breaking. Rooms will never stop getting dirty. As long as I shovel those imperfections into pretty jars, screw the lids on tight and hope no one notices them in my perfect little life, I poison myself. Not with the stash of disappointments, but with the refusal to face them.

I don't accept this? Me, not tolerate mess and disorder?

But what about the One who actually is perfect?

The One whose nature can't abide a single flaw?

Does He tolerate this mess?

Praise the Lord that He does. And not just my messy house, but my messy heart. He not only tolerates it; He embraces it. He reaches toward broken lives. He sacrificed everything - and brought on himself every possible imperfection - in order to welcome the rotten and the stinky and the sloppy, the heartbroken and the broken-down.

If I'm the gold standard, what a sorry world this will be. If it's my approval that matters, I dare not even accept myself. Thankfully, the Lord doesn't measure me by the perfection of my home or even by the list of sins I've 'conquered.' It's not my job to clean up. He dips me in the grace of His son and He sees me as glowingly perfect, all blemishes bleached out.

So instead of faking the ideal life, I'll just tell you the truth: It's not perfect. But it turns out that it's ok.

Grateful this week for the imperfect things: 
sweaty armpits
fruit flies
wrinkled laundry
greasy hair
dead flowers
dust
crabby baby
meal prep mess
aching neck
insurance paperwork
acne
crumbs on the floor
crumbs on the counter
oversleeping
dry eyes
itchy skin
so-annoying senior class prank
unmade bed