Jodilightful!

… while camping with them for three days and two nights.

This past week, we went back to the same campsite where we spent the first night of our camping trip last summer.  I’ll admit that I’m not a camper by nature, but I’m learning.  I love the opportunity camping provides to see our family grow closer and form rich, lasting memories together.

I guess most of these weren’t really news to me, but it was so fun to see how everyone’s personalities shone through in reaction to things outside of our normal little life.

1.  Romilly *does not* like: loud noises (such as a pack of Harleys driving past the campsite), getting sunscreen in her eyes (way, way worse, by the way, than the tiny strip of sunburn  you get by staying clear of the eyes while applying), or bugs of any kind.  Even the tiniest little fruit fly invokes shrieks of horror.  Camping?  You can imagine.

2.  Beatrix does not mind any of the above whatsoever.  She would happily wrap her chubby little fist around any bug that caught her attention and, I daresay, hop right on the back of one of the Harleys, if given the chance.

3.  Pippa *lives* for making new friends.  At each new place, she immediately scopes out the friend scene and plans her attack.

4.  Juniper is the easiest, happiest, smiliest baby there has ever been.  Ever.  She is competely unflappable, and awfully cute to boot.

5.  Trevor is superdad.  He really is.  Each day he had the three big girls out in the lake by himself while I sat back and watched from the blanket with the baby.  Each night before we went in the tent he rearranged our sleeping beauties in the tent to make room for us to sleep without any of them even stirring.  Oh, and he’s pretty cute, too, actually.

6.  Mommies and Daddies need to wear sunscreen too.   It’s not just for kiddoes.

7.  Beatrix can spend an entire 4-hour car journey looking for playgrounds.  After long periods of relative quiet from the back, we would occasionally hear “Ere he is!  Paygound!” with so much enthusiasm we thought she might pop right out of her carseat.

8. Sleeping in a tent is a slumber party (complete with hysterical giggles way past bedtime) even if you’re sharing it with the same people you always share a room with.

9.  We no longer comfortably fit in a four-man tent.

10.  I love, love, *love* my family.  I can’t imagine five people I would rather spend each day with, and I feel so incredibly blessed to have each one of them in my life.

(Does everyone who has four kids employ the same system we do to name any two of them as a group?  We use: Bigs, Littles, Odds, Evens, Middles, and Bookends. Very useful for outings, e.g. “I’m taking the Odds to the bathroom, you’ve got the Evens.”  I don’t know what people with five kids do…)

For more Wordless Wednesday, click here.

I like to think I am a reasonably intelligent person.  Or at least I used to be.  I was a very good student in high school.  In college I majored in physics.  I was a lab assistant and even tutored other students to earn a little extra money.  Before Pippa was born I worked as a physics teacher for three whole years.

I had everyone completely fooled.

Now that I am living my real, grown-up life and facing the way-harder-than-being-a-physics-teacher task of being a competent wife, mother, and human being in general, I find that I need a very complex flow chart just to get out the door.

Put baby in infant carseat (always use these for as long as they fit – it’s one less munchkin to wrangle).  Shut dog in kitchen.  No, wait, lock back door first.  Okay, back door locked, dog in kitchen.  Wait, wet clothes still in washer.  Reopen dog gate, move laundry to dryer, reshut dog gate.  Sorry, Puppy.  Shut down computer if leaving house for rest of day.  Adjust thermostat if leaving house in winter.  Shut blinds, leave appropriate lights on.  Gather season-appropriate and activity-appropriate children’s apparel and accessories.  Gather diapers et al.  Preferably both sizes, though in a pinch,  Bea can still get into a size 1 (Not that I’ve done that.  Twice.)   Gather children. Style four heads of hair.   Go back to kitchen (step over gate this time), and actually start dryer.  Regather children.  Head for van.  Take only youngest two children while other two run back in to go potty.  Set infant carseat into base.  Strap toddler into carseat.   When older children reappear, strap them into carseats.  (And this one is apparently important:) Go back to front door to shut and lock.  Get in van.  Inspect carseats and count children.  Drive.

Is it any wonder that just occasionally my husband might come home to find a wide open front door with a key stuck in it? I always try to remind him to be thankful that he didn’t find one of our *children* sitting on the step in front of the open door with the key stuck in it, but the fact remains: I have misplaced at least a few of the marbles I once had.

Today, my mom and I and the girls were coming out of the hospital where Pippa goes for her check-ups.  We got in the elevator.

My mom: Which floor did you park on?

Me: Uhhh…

(She pushes every button.)

Me: Wait!  Two.  I think two.

(We all get out.  My mom waits with the girls by the elevator while I scope out the scene and look for the van.)

Yes.  That’s my van.  Wait, no.  That looks like my van, but it can’t be.  The sliding door is open.  That’s somebody else’s van.  They must be just getting out.  There are lots of vans just like my van.  This is somebody else’s van. I’ll just head back to the elevator and go to the next… wait…somebody else’s van with an infant carseat base?  In the same seat as Junie’s?  Maybe I’d better just take a closer… with the same dent in the bumper from when I backed into a concrete lamp post at Paige’s soccer game? And with no sign of anyone else coming or going to it???  THAT’S MY VAN!  With the door wide open for the last two hours in a parking garage in the middle of the ghetto! (Oh, but don’t worry – I had remembered to lock it.  I’m not stupid, you know.)

My mom:  So the battery will be dead?

Me: Oh, no, don’t worry.  Trevor turned the interior lights off after the first two times I left a door open and made the battery die.   Should be fine.

* * * * *

I looked to my mom for wisdom and comfort in this situation.  I try so hard to be responsible and conscientious.  Why do these things always seem to happen to me?

She could only remind me of the fate of her last two cell phones (Splash, and splash again into cups of iced tea in the cup holder where she usually keeps her phone in her car), and tell me that *today alone* she: 1. Tried to grab her soda at the Wendy’s drive-through through a half open car window and spilled most of its contents onto the street.  (They gave her a new lid, wasn’t that thoughtful?) and 2. Took someone else’s car keys from the key rack at the gym, and got all the way to her car before noticing that her enormous keychain was missing.

Oh, well.  At least I come by it honestly.

We wish our little friend Kenna and her family all the best as they move to Florida this week.  You will be missed!

For more Wordless Wednesday, click here.

For some reason, more than with any of the other girls, we get told that Bea looks like people.  And it’s always true.  We’ve even observed it ourselves on some occasions.  Below is a sampling of  people we’ve been told Bea resembles.

Which do you think is the most striking resemblance?  Cast your vote in the comments!

I know.  Two weeks in a row after months of HSSSS drought.  Don’t expect us to keep it up; I’m pretty sure it’s just a fluke.

Very early on in our marriage, it became clear that Trevor and I had been raised very differently regarding the spending and saving of money.  It wasn’t that we came from very different socioeconomic backgrounds: very similar, actually.  Our parents just have very different philosophies, which is funny, because I’m sure none of our parents think of themselves as having any particular philosophy on money at all.  Nevertheless, the difference was there, and strong.  While Trevor had been raised to save as much as possible and spend only when and as much as necessary, I had been raised to enjoy life and spend fairly freely, within reason.  Let me illustrate how this played out early in our marriage with an example.

A conversation, while walking home from somewhere, maybe a half hour’s walk tops, circa Summer 2000, a couple months married:

Me: I’m thirsty.  I’m going to run into this store and grab a soda.  Do you want anything?

Him: No, don’t.  We’ll be home in like ten minutes.  Why would you buy a drink now?

Me.  Because I’m thirsty now.  Plus we don’t even have soda at home.

Him:  But there’s plenty of water.  Come on, you can make it.

For the sake of sensitive readers, and friends and family who are under the illusion that I have always been the perfectly submissive wife I am now (*cough* *choke*), I’ll leave it at that.  The drama that then ensued was one one of my very first, badly-failed lessons at the Trevor Young School of Frugality, but I have to say (and I think he’d agree) my grades have been steadily improving ever since.  I don’t actually remember whether I got the soda or not, in the end (do you, Sweetie?)

Despite Trevor’s solid foundations as a careful penny-saver (his years under the employ of McDonald’s while in high school and college funded his 7 trans-Atlantic flights during our courtship), we were still pretty free with our money before we had kids, at least compared to now.  We didn’t really eat out often, but we didn’t think much of getting fish and chips on a Friday night or stopping for fast food after church on a Sunday either.  We got a great deal on our flat, but a not-so-great deal on our car, so we were pretty hit or miss with our financial wisdom.

Then after Pippa was born and I stopped working, money started to feel a little tighter. Some months we would eek by, others we would have to dip into our savings a little, but our lifestyle as we knew it definitely wasn’t sustainable.

We muddled by until six months after Romilly was born when we moved to America.  A nice little windfall from the sale of our flat helped us make a downpayment on our house here as well as buy our van and most of our furniture.  In hindsight, we should have been a lot more protective of our buffer of savings.  By the time Beatrix was born in July 2007, it became apparent that the streets of America were indeed *not* paved with gold.  We were still going to have to figure out how to adjust our lifestyle if I was going to be able to stay home with our children, which was pretty much a non-negotiable.

The newly-frugal-minded Trevor that emerged during this time in our lives made the Trevor of our newlywed days seem positively extravagant.  We hadn’t bought soda on any kind of regular basis ever, so I had long since learned I could live without that.  But now he was asking questions like, “What could you do to earn some income from home?”,  ”Do we really need these phones?”,  ”This cable?”,  ”This particular part of our auto insurance coverage?”, “Couldn’t we make our own diaper wipes?”, “Isn’t there somewhere we could be getting our groceries for less?” and “Do we really need two cars?”

Gradually, I opened my eyes to where our money was going.  I found that there were actually a lot of things I could part with very happily if it meant that I could stay home with my girls and watch them grow without fear of an unexpected expense cropping up and yanking the rug out from under us.  I discovered that the answers to the above questions were: “Sell on eBay (a gift from God that came at just the right time)”, “Nope”, “Nope”, Nope again”, “Yup (but they really don’t work as well on the really gross-o diapers, it must be said)”, “ALDI!”  and “Ask us in six months or so and we’ll let you know.”   I found that the more of these probing questions Trevor asked and found answers to, the more I began to enjoy getting control of our money and to embrace the challenge of helping him cut back our spending even further.

What I once may have mistaken for stinginess or lack of compassion in my husband, I now realize has always been motivated by a desire to be able to provide for me, and later for our children.  It has always come out of love, and now it is one of the things I love most about him.   Speaking of him, go read  what he thinks about it.

1 Timothy 6:7-10
For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

Amy‘s post about the Junie B. Jones books reminded me that I’ve been meaning to blog about this book for months!  Junie B.’s full name is Juniper Beatrice, so on the surface of things, I can see how someone might mistake me for a fan, but they would be wrong.  In fact, I had never actually read one until shortly after our little Junie was born, though I was aware of them and had even bought one for my aunt Junie as a “fun” little birthday gift once.  Little did I know!  Junie B.’s harsh language and defiant attitude ought to strike fear in the hearts of parents and teachers alike, but for some reason words like “stupid” and “smelly” and “shut up!” along with a healthy dose of foot stomping and door slamming must seem endearing coming from an adorably illustrated six-year-old.  I believe that there is an attempt to bring the stories around to a reasonable moral – Junie B. does learn that the stupid, smelly school bus is actually pretty cool – but I’m not going to take the chance that my girls will figure out for themselves that her behavior while on the road to enlightenment is not okay.

And so, I commend to you moms of little girls (and little girls at heart) an alternative: The Milly-Molly-Mandy Storybook, by Joyce Lankester Brisley.  This book is hands-down my favorite of all the wonderful books we’ve read together this year doing Pippa’s Pre-K homeschooling, and it had some tough competition.  Millicent Margaret Amanda (not quite as fabulous a name as Junie B’s, but still pretty great) is an only child who lives with her father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, and uncle and aunty (think Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) in a little cottage with a thatched roof somewhere in the English countryside.  Do you love it already?

While the books are not overtly Christian, they were originally published by Christian publishers, and paint a better picture of Christlike home environment than any I have ever encountered in a children’s book. I have found myself on several occasions referring back to these stories for examples to the girls of frugality, unselfishness, helpfulness and thankfulness. I’m not sure a little girl as lovely as Milly-Molly-Mandy has ever existed, even back in the twenties when some of these stories were first penned, but I’ll take a role model over realism any day!

The chapters are short and self-contained, with lots of repetition of certain words, so these stories are ideal for new readers, but also super fun to read aloud together.  We’ve also used them as a springboard to go to the internet and learn more about things that are now  less familiar to our modern American minds,  like blacksmiths and thatching a roof.

Here is an excerpt from the chapter, “Milly-Molly-Mandy Has a Surprise”, in which Milly-Molly-Mandy has just helped clean and redecorate the jam storage space in the loft, not realizing she has actually been helping to convert it into her own little bedroom so she will no longer share a room with her parents:

The next day, when Milly-Molly-Mandy  came home from school, Mother said, ” Milly-Molly-Mandy, we’ve got the little storeroom in order again.  Now, would you please run up and fetch me a pot of jam?”

Milly-Molly-Mandy said, “Yes, Mother.  What sort?”

And Father said, “Blackberry.”

And Grandpa said, “Marrow-ginger.”

And Grandma said, “Red-currant.”

And Uncle said, “Strawberry.”

And Aunty said, “Raspberry.”

But Mother said, “Any sort you like, Milly-Molly-Mandy!”

Milly-Molly-Mandy thought something funny must be going to happen, for Father and Mother and Grandpa and Grandma and Uncle and Aunty all looked as if they had got a laugh down inside them.  But she ran upstairs to the little storeroom.

And when she opened the door,… she saw…

Her own little cot-bed with the greencoverlet on, just inside.  And the little square window with the green curtains blowing in the wind.  And a yellow pot of nasturtiums on the sill.  And the little green chest of drawers with the robin cloth on it.  And the little green mirror hanging on the primrose wall, with Milly-Molly-Mandy’s own face reflected in it.

And then Milly-Molly-Mandy knew that the little storeroom was to be her very own little bedroom, and she said, “Oh-h-h-h!” in a very hushed voice, as she looked all around her room.

The suddenly she tore downstairs back into the kitchen, and just hugged Father and Mother and Grandpa and Grandma and Uncle and Aunty; and they all said she was their favourite jam-pot and pretended to eat her up!

And Milly-Molly-Mandy didn’t know how to wait till bedtime, because she was so eager to go to sleep in the little room that was her Very Own!

*  *  *  *  *

Junie B. could learn a thing or two, and I’m hoping my girls will, too!   They adore these stories (though I think not *quite* as much as I do) and I think I may just make them required reading for each girl every year once they can read alone.  In the meantime, I’m more than happy to read it aloud a few more times.

For more Wordless Wednesday, click here.

After a much too long hiatus from HSSSS, we are back in business with what seems to me to be a very timely topic.  Facebook.  I’m on it; he’s not and doesn’t want to be.  Could be interesting.  At first I thought it might break down as a simple pro/con approach, with my post being the pros, and his being the cons, but I’m not sure it’s that simple.  Instead, I find myself a bit remiss to sing the praises of anything that could become yet another temptation to waste time when we almost certainly all have better things to be doing.

So, I’ll begin by chronicling my descent into Facebook, and perhaps I’ll come to some useful conclusions about it along the way.

A little over two years ago, while we were in Scotland visiting Trevor’s family, I received two e-mails in the same week from different friends inviting me to join Facebook.  I’m not sure I had ever heard of it before.  I ignored those invitations and got on with my life.  A few months and a few more invitations later, just after Beatrix was born, my  sister finally helped me set up my account.  I had a profile picture and some “friends”.  Kind of fun.  I went to my page only when my e-mail told me to do so, and life went on as usual.

Then something happened.  When we were ready to announce our pregnancy with Juniper, I thought I’d give this “status update” thing a try.  After all, there’s always a little bit of awkwardness about announcing a pregnancy, and this seemed an easy way to get the word out without having to actually tell anyone.  I wrote, “Jodi is pregnant, and wonders if anybody actually reads these things.”  Within minutes, literally dozens of people had come out of the woodwork to congratulate me.  I guess I had my answer.

After my little experiment, my use of Facebook gradually started to pick up some steam.  I found a few friends I’d been out of touch with for a while.  Fun.  I got to see pictures of friends’ kids whom we haven’t seen since leaving Scotland.  Fun!  I’ve even posted a few pictures of my own family and got floods of  oohs and ahs.  Fun, fun!  I still wouldn’t call myself a full blown addict (yet), but I’ll admit I have a tab open for it pretty much any time I’m on the computer.

In my defense (hmm… is acknowledging the need for a defense an admission of guilt in itself?  Pretty much, I think.), I will say that in some ways, Facebook is a great timesaving device and a convenient way to get in touch with friends.  Many a playdate has been organized through Facebook, since it’s rare that I can be guaranteed a few quiet moments to make a phone call.  Facebook “chatting” is our main way of keeping in touch with at least one of our missionary friends,  and the status updates keep us in touch with many more dear friends than we would otherwise be able to keep tabs on.

Here are a few of what I see as the “dangers” of Facebook.  I’m *not* worried about stalkers or people pretending to be someone they’re not or anything like that.  Maybe I should be, but we’ve been using the internet to show off the kids to faraway friends and family for as long as we’ve had kids, so I guess I just have a comfort level with that. The dangers for me are much more real and present: 1.  That I would fall into the trap of neglecting my duties to my family in favor of spending time on the computer, and 2. That my motives for posting photos or updates would be somehow rooted in pride, and in a desire to “show off” what God has blessed me with as though I were responsible for any of it myself.  I’m sure there are others, but those are the two that I feel I have to wrestle with most strongly.  Maybe there are even others I ought to be wrestling with but haven’t realized yet.  And almost certainly these Facebook pitfalls apply as well to my time spent on this very blog!

Bearing that in mind, I don’t feel that Facebook is all bad.  As with so many other tools of this world that can be used by the enemy to keep people away from God, God in His sovereignty can still use them for His glory.  I love having so many friends at my fingertips to encourage and be encouraged by, and I love seeing what He’s done in the lives of people I had once lost touch with.

Oh, but the quizzes?  Well, I learned my lesson about those when I took one entitled “How many children should you have?” and was told that my personality is most suited to having an only child to dote on.  I guess I have three little girls going spare if anyone wants them.  (Kidding, kidding!  We’re totally keeping them!)

Now go see what my nay-saying husband has to say about it.  ”Nay,” I imagine.