Write It Down!

I walked by the parlor where the boys played cards yesterday. I heard Grant say, "Someday you'll be a winner Rowan." Without any conscious thought I grabbed a pen in the kitchen and wrote down his 7 year-old words and continued on my way. It's a habit. A wagon track trail through the prairie of my mind, I write everything down. It's a passion, a way of life, hand to hand combat with mortality, survival.

The second most uttered comment about motherhood, right behind "it goes so fast," is "write it down or you'll forget." And it's true. Brains strung out on Starbucks and chocolate and home school curriculum forget easily. Even, I might add, brains on organic and gluten free diets forget easily (this from experience).

And this journaling our journey works. Last summer Avonlea and I went through a very hard stage in our relationship. Our personalities diverged in major points and the stress of it was painful. One starry August night Dave and I sat out on the patio and talked about it. As I was pouring out my heart I looked over at him and realized he was sleeping! Well I had to talk to someone and my words aimed themselves at God. There in the star swept stillness He answered me. I went into the house and wrote it down. Three pages worth. I keep it near me always. When Avonlea and I waltz toward destructive patterns I read it, and I remember.

God wrote His Word out for us. In the person of Jesus and with the ink of man. The written word is precious.

I keep journals and scratch paper handy. I have a journal for each child that I started when I was pregnant with them. I have spirals full of funny saying out of the mouths of babes. I have a continuous list of blessings on my desk. A quotation journal lingers by my books. I even used to have a dream journal, but it got scary. Little pieces of paper are sometimes all I can get my hands on and they find their way to the most random places just when I need a good laugh.

So I, along with the masses that have gone before me, encourage you to write it down, just a sentence, a thought, an idea. A chicken-scratch to remember today.

Pictures of the Rooms upon Completion

The rooms are done and filled with healthy happy children! Thank you Lord!

Clay

Eight encrusted little hands
pound and form and shape
Fingers deftly fumble
manipulate to duplicate
Evolves a thought,
half-formed, unspoken
Voiced in soft dough alone,
communion unbroken.
I watch them concentrate
I, who sit with hands mute
The clay proclaims their very selves,
independent, resolute.
Evolves a thought
half-formed, to mull,
I am clay, held, imprinted,
and my hands are full.

Sheldon VanAuken calls them "timeless moments." Emily (of New Moon) refers to them as "the flash." Jesus says to the disciples, in the pregnant calm before death, "watch with me." Those are moments when we find ourselves outside of time and inside of eternity. Those moments that hold something of the feeling of dusk, a haziness between sharp realities.

It happened when my husband proposed to me. We stood detached from sorid earth, on an iceberg in Alaska, and somehow viewed the past, present, and future in each other's eyes. How many mortal minutes passed, we didn't know and didn't care. Then, with an alarming jolt, we realized that the tide was coming in and the ice berg we were standing on was disintegrating under our feet. After a scramble in mush up to our waist, we felt it was probably best that timeless moments are rare.

And Friday, a gray rainy day spent at the children's museum, it came again. As the children molded their clay and the minutes slipped by unheeded, their every movement poetry. As if by consensus, the flash ended and they all clamored to explain their creations. But the taste of timelessness lingers in my mouth, and in my heart are the words, "watch with me."

Loose

The reasons for caging Posy no longer exist. The fumes obviously got to her in a big way because she participated in Rowan's game of barbershop. His play went as follows: sit Rose on an ottoman in her room, tell mom we're having a tea party, tie a piece of toilet paper around her neck (personally I thought this touch rather ingenious), tie a blanket over that, find a sharp scissors (one out of mommy's sewing box will work seeing as she never uses it), and CUT off every trace of blond hair you can get to without injuring Rose and thereby incurring intervention.

I know it will grow back but even buckets-full of luscious hair couldn't erase the mental picture of her newly shorn.

We were at a loss for punishment for Rowan because he brought her to me and presented her with the air of a creator gloating over his masterpiece. Begrudgingly I must admit he did a fairly decent job (thank you friend who suggested that this might lead to career options).

We always have the choice to laugh or cry at our children's shenanigans. I did both, which I believe to be a relatively safe option.

The results of several choices...

We decided to breed Persians. Lewis now resides in a cage. (Rowan has already locked Dave in it once).

We decided to cage up Posy as well. Can't let things that cute run around loose, it undermines parental discipline regimes.

We decided to strip and stain our 100 year old fir floors. We like it, however............

the fumes seem to have gotten to Rose.