Category: Jenni’s Ramblings

This category has sat unused too long. I am going to try to give up reading the newspaper over breakfast and read the daily readings instead. Then if I have some thoughts, maybe I will post them, maybe not. Celebrity Gossip and the comic page are great, just like sugar cereal, but it is time for me to move on to something a little more stick-to-your-ribs, like oatmeal. I am sure the daily reading will stick to my heart better than the comics too.

So anyway, today the first reading is most of chapter 13 of Daniel, the story of Susanna, one of my favorites: Daniel 13
The verse that really struck me today was about the attitude of the men that accused Susanna:
vs. 8-9 When the old men saw her enter every day for her walk, they began to lust for her. They suppressed their consciences; they would not allow their eyes to look to heaven, and did not keep in mind just judgments.
They not only started to feel things that could lead them to sin, but they encouraged those feelings in themselves. Now lust is not what I am dealing with but I know that I have done this myself.

I remember once when my younger sister was about two. My mom told her not to play with something; I don’t remember what it was. But my sister took that toy and went and sat behind a folding chair and started to do just what my mom had told her not to do. The folding chair was blocking my sister’s view of my mom, but of course we could still see everything that she was doing. My mom pointed out to me that she thought we couldn’t see her because she couldn’t see us. Many toddlers behave this way. If you play hide and seek with a very young child, sometimes they will just lose their eyes and think they are hiding. Only because they can’t see you.

I think we can be like this with God. The verse said “They would not allow their eyes to look to Heaven” Since these men were no longer looking to God (and couldn’t see Him) they behaved in a manner as if He couldn’t see them either. God is not the Celestial policeman, but He is looking out for us because he has better things in mind for us.

Lord, help me to keep my eyes on you and not direct them at other things intentionally or accidentally. Oh, and please help Paisley find my camera. Amen.

Oh wait. It’s only Wednesday, and it’s only 7:30am… we have a long way to go.

Monday this week was a fairly normal day. School went well. We tried a new pattern, instead of starting with math as we always have, we saved it to do until after lunch and were able to easily finish up everything else, including a nice game of Set to stretch our brains a little. The only major incident was finding out that Zinger had terrified one of Ben’s friends while he was here recently and I hadn’t known about it. I felt truly terrible that this had happened right under my nose and I hadn’t been able to prevent it. Apologies were given and accepted.

Max, who had been doing so much better with an increase in solids has suddenly decided that he wants nothing to do with any solids that he can’t feed to himself.

Tuesday was an interesting day. School went well again, but as we came down for lunch Jay called and said he was working nearby and could we bring him some lunch. I said sure, we needed to go to the library anyway, and he was right on the way. We ate our lunch, took his to him and went to the library. At the library, I replaced the movie we had lost, picked up my reserved books, and helped the kids to find their books. Since we are doing world history this year, I wanted to do some historical reading. I started looking up the call numbers on a few of the books on my book list.

First stop: Plato. I go (well saying “I go” makes it sound like such a simple process of walking across the library. It’s not. There are weirdos in libraries, so “I go” entails rounding up the kids, telling them to be quiet as we go into the grown up section, and trailing our book cart and the three who can walk behind me, while trying to convince Max that he really does want to stay in the sling, not get down and rip all the books off the shelves.) Anyway, I go to the number the card catalog gives me, but all I find there are books on writing like “How to Write Romance Novels for Dummies”. Ok, that doesn’t particularly strike me as having ANYTHING to do with Plato, and are the romance novels for dummies to read or to write? I start to puzzle over it but Ben has just backed into a paperback rack and knocked a bunch of books off, and someone is trying to get around us. Time to move on. I probably wasn’t ready for Plato anyway, and I know he wasn’t ready for us.

On to Aristotle. I find myself in a nutritional section. I am truly confused now. Did someone not know how to set up the Dewey Decimal system here? I double check my list of number copied from the computer. Nope, those are right. Oh well, I probably wasn’t ready for Aristotle either. The natives are getting restless but I am determined to go home with a Book, a real book that will challenge my mind and help me to be a Smart Person. So we go back to the computer – the whole line of us. I check my book list and select Plutarch. Let’s see if they have that. I write down the number, double check it, triple check it, and we all trail away to find Plutarch. Score!!! I select Volume One and we are on our way again. And in my wandering I also made another score, I found the Complete Peanuts! (Cartoons) I have to balance Plutarch with something light, or my brain cells might go on strike.

The rest of the day is relatively normal. Oh, except for the part where I was folding Laundry and Max came crawling towards me. His hands looked dirty, and when I picked him up I thought, “Oh boy, you got into the markers again!” There was red all over his foot. But on closer inspection, it was all over him and didn’t look like marker anymore. He was covered head to toe in BLOOD. It was all over his legs, feet, arms, hands and face. A sick feeling crept, no raced, over me as I started my inspection of him to find out WHERE IS HE BLEEDING? The hallway is too dark, so I took him to the table where I went over him carefully and found a 1/2 inch cut on one finger. So I put pressure on that with a napkin and start looking for what else is bleeding. NOTHING! We got him cleaned up and bandaged. We had to put a sock over his arm because he wanted to eat the band-aid and I was worried he would choke on it. We cleaned up the trail of blood and went looking for what he had possibly cut himself on. It turns out that the bowl he had pulled from the cupboard a few days before had sent a shard up into the cupboard that we hadn’t seen. We had been very careful to get the floor clean… VERY careful. So we cleaned out the cupboard and the floor again, just in case there was any left.

So now we have made it to Wednesday. My alarm went off this morning and I staggered to the bathroom. Ugh, no toilet paper, have to go downstairs for that. As I reach the top of the stairs I realize that toilet paper is going to be the least of my worries.

The smell that reached my nose as I stood there was… I don’t think I can describe it.

So I go downstairs, open the back door, then open the door to the downstairs bathroom and chase Zinger out the door. Sure enough, when I turn on the bathroom light. Oh, shit. No really the whole bathroom is plastered in puppy diarrhea. No one should have to smell or look at that sight at 5:50am, no one.

But now it is clean, and I have showered, and it’s time to move on with the day. And we are only almost halfway through the week. Oh goody!

The last three years I have picked out a “virtue” or something that I want to work on in myself. The first year it was Peace, last year was Diligence, this year I have picked Sacrifice. I know that those aren’t really virtues per se. But it is easier for me to simply remember one little word and renew my focus.

I chose sacrifice this year because I suck at it. I am horrible about giving things up and I am horrible about keeping my focus on God instead of the small stuff in my life.

This year for Christmas, Posy gave me a painted wooden heart that says “Mom” in slightly lopsided letters. It occured to me that each day my life makes a gift to God. Sometimes the best gift I can give him looks more like a black-marker-scribble on a piece of scrap paper, some days it is a painted, lopsided heart done with the best of intentions, some days I manage to churn out a masterpiece. But my masterpiece days are few and far between. I have more lopsided hearts. But the important thing is that I am offering it to Him as my gift, no matter how imperfect. If I get frustrated and throw away my work I am just spinning my wheels, getting burned out, and not doing any good.

So in these days of not getting anything done but holding a baby and praying that the other kids don’t kill each other or our house collapse from mess, I have to remember to make the best effort I can and offer it freely and lovingly to my Father in heaven.

I hung the heart that Posy gave me up in my bathroom, where I wash my hands after every diaper change. 🙂 So I will see it and be reminded of it many times a day.

I would love to lose weight, handle money better, be a better homeschooler, mom, wife, and friend. I don’t intend to neglect those things. But when I lose my focus this year I will picture that heart and remind myself that I need to be a living sacrifice.

Just two more days until Halloween. I can hardly believe it. As usual, I have been mostly oblivious to it’s approach. Luckily the kids haven’t and have their costumes all planned out. I don’t know how Trick or Treating will go on a Sunday night though. With Jay having mass to sing… looks like I am on my own.

Oh, and just so you know, we DO celebrate Halloween, in case you hadn’t figured that one out yet. Our family is not celebrating anything evil, even if other people are. We are just dressing up and getting WAY too much candy. I figure the “Holiday” means whatever meaning you give it. Yes, we will go to mass and celebrate All Saints Day. But first we will get all jacked up on sugar the night before. There, that is my final statement on Halloween. I refuse to debate it.

Anyway, this was supposed to be about TIME, not Halloween. This month I had a birthday, Ok, why bother to try to keep it a secret, I am 33 this year. Does that still count as “Early Thirties” or does that put me in the “mid-thirties” range? Doesn’t matter anyway. I feel like an old goat waddling around with this enormous belly. (Blessing though it is!) I have been noticing my hands lately. They have changed so much over the years. No ammount of moisturizer will ever bring them back to what they were, nor should it, I suppose. The skin looks so much thinner, my knuckles are getting wrinkly, and the veins pop out. I can remember as a child sitting in church next to my mom and tracing her veins on her hand. Now my own hands look like hers. I have mom hands. That is certainly not a bad thing. I have several little people around who love to hold my hands and rub them or just fall asleep with them placed on their backs. So as elderly as they may look, they still suit me just fine.

Just when I thought the height of rudeness had already been reached…. I run into Sue (Not her real name).

Yesterday was our fall festival, and by and large we had a really nice time. It was annoyingly hot, but fun anyway. Except for the comments. Going to the fall festival entails running into (and having to actually talk to) people I can successfully duck away from after mass. They, of course, feel the need to comment on the size of our family and how THEY are DONE. (Unless they are older, then the comments are usually mostly friendly and the worst it gets is “So, any day now?” Uh no.

So Sue starts a conversation with us by telling Jay what a beautiful voice he has and how his singing just makes her mass so much more prayerful, etc. Then she starts in with “I can’t believe you are having another one…” and before we can respond in some positive way she continues. “Since my husband and I know for sure we are done… we DO want to be able to go on a vacation without the kids someday… this is the year *I* get my tubes tied and boobs done!” (She even grabbed her boobs for emphasis.)

Jay’s response was “Aw, that’s too bad. ” in a sympathetic sort of way, while all I could do was to allow my eyes to glaze over and wish I was on vacation away from her.

Anyway, here are some of the horrible judgmental things we DIDN’T say:
– Do you share your mortal sins with EVERYONE, or just us?
– WE think that God would be happier with a new baby in the world than with having your boobs look better.
– We like our kids much better than vacations. (Most of the time)
– We felt that way too once, and Thanks be to God we were able to reverse our mistake.
– Sticking our fingers in our ears and singing “La, la, la, la…” really loud.
– Um, Sue, we didn’t ask if you were having any more.

Now I know that all families are not required to have as many kids as we have. We feel called to it ourselves, but why do people feel the need to divluge intimate details like this with us. We NEVER ask!

(And Sue was the THIRD person that day to tell me why/how she was “done”… and I had only been there for two hours.)

Oh and one more thing, one mom of five almost redeemed everyone else with her compliment. She said, “Oh, Jenni! I see that you two decided to go for number six! Congratulations!” First, she assumed that we did this on purpose, second she said congratulations without any reservation. But then as a mom of five, I am sure she had BTDT!