the squibix family blog

"I bited my tongue."

"Do you want me to pray for it?"

"It only hurts a little. You can make a decision when to pray for it."

"How about when you're all done pooping."

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(I don't have any big thoughts to write about this conversation, I just want to post it to the blog so I can save it for posterity. I don't know how this thing will go, this experiment in faith, trying to raise children with the knowledge of a powerful God while being a very flawed person myself who is sometimes very far from God's love and power. I have big hopes for Harvey, but I know that life is unpredictable, and whichever way this thing turns out I want to remember when he was nearly four he asked me for clarification about the immediate power of prayer while he was on the toilet.)

2. Set up: in the bicycle, passing the neighbor's empty rabbit hutch.

Zion: Bunny? pet?
Me: Sorry Zion, the bunny isn't there anymore. We can't pet him.
Harvey: Derek says the bunny DIED.
Zion: No! Deedees died!
Harvey (laughing): We ALL die.

3. Set up: Apropos of nothing. (And for the record, we are not currently pregnant.)

Harvey: Zion and me are excited to get a new baby.
Me: I'm excited for a new baby too, Harvey, but you know it takes a long time -
Harvey: I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW.
Me: Mama and Dada still have to -
Harvey: I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW. You don't have to TELL me.

In my dreams he comes to me not like the neat religious fantasy I have concocted where a cartoon-faced Jesus takes the dead by the hand and leads them to a clean bright holding-pen in the sky. In my dreams Neil comes to me like the real life Jesus after his resurrection. Now appearing, now disappearing. You're always chasing him yet you see only the trace of him. Then you're talking to a stranger and as soon as you realize IT'S HIM! he is gone.

Perhaps the veil between heaven and earth is more wispy and strange than I have imagined. Likely God in his grace is more strange than I have allowed myself to believe. I would like to know the whole piece, to read the manuscript and see for sure, but it slips through my fingers.

The small campus tucked among normal suburban Arlington homes includes a modern living space for the Sisters of St. Anne-Bethany, a large stone-clad chapel that's used for programs and retreats for both church groups and interested individuals, and an intriguing statue garden. The garden was the site of our prayer walk on Friday.

HighRock church provided the readings for each station and Dan and Ms. Katie (who is a member at HighRock and turned us onto this event) bravely engaged the children around the story and prayers.

In between the readings there was plenty of leeway for exploring the garden.

There was a stone amphitheater with some books laid out, an irresistible draw for my boys and the young Mr. Nathan.

All in all I was amazed how many little corners of peace the sisters packed into under an acre of garden space. I hope friends invite us back here again!

Hosana in the highest.

In past years I've made stuffed animals to go in the easter baskets, but I backed off this year because the kids didn't really take to the chicks I made last year and because they have too many animals as it is. And I'm doing the suits for their babies, which is sort of a toy. I did, however, make them an 'educational' present to share. They've been having fun playing with the felt board sets lately, so I made them an extra fancy felt set for Easter. I give you the Golgatha play set:

I made a tomb, a big stone, Jesus, Mary, and a soldier. I know there are more characters in the story but I got bored. This will be enough for one year.

I said to Dan while I was making Mary Magdalene, "This is the sluttiest looking two-dimensional felt doll I've ever made!"

Okay now, let's get serious.

When Zion saw this figure in process he exclaimed happily "Dedus!" But that was before I attached the hair. The hair confused him and now he thinks it's a girl. I kept saying "Jesus" and he kept shaking his head and saying "gu-gul" and sometimes "mama." Yes, I know mama acts like a martyr sometimes but this would be pushing it.

Here he is with the stone rolled away.

For those of you who sew you can tell that both stone and tomb were dashed together in no time at all. I told you, I've got a lot to do this week.

Since this is a blog post about religion and crafting I should now say something high-level about offering faith to my children. Something stirring or questioning or heart-warming. But it's beyond me today. I don't think anything I can sew or say will romance my children into a relationship with Jesus. And that's probably for the best. If Jesus isn't compelling and magnetic, if he isn't good to his word and good to those who give their lives to him, then he isn't real. I'm banking on Jesus being real, so my only job is to get my children to recognize him when they see him.

With or without long hair.

Though that idea (does it have a formal name?) that only those who hear the Gospel will be judged for rejecting it — well, it's kind of silly. And impossible in the information age. And not supported by Romans 1:18-20, but I'm sure there's argument within the bible if someone wants to disagree with me.

At any rate, we're here now. There's no turning back. Both my kids now recognize Jesus, I'd better not give him a bad rap.

While I'm bragging about my angelic children, here's a sampling of some of the darling things Harvey has said this week:

"Jesus lives in heaven and in my heart. I know how he do's that. There are two Jesuses... wait, no.... I don't know how he do's that."

"I need you to play with us in the living room. Right now we're playing Seedling."

Me: "Harvey, did you and Zion eat all the cookies?"
Harvey: "They were so beautiful, we had to put them in our mouthes."

"No! Mama! We were having so much fun without you!"

...

Jesus said:

"The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." (Luke 4:18)

I don't know who will clean my house in the kingdom of God... maybe still me but I'll be less snitty about it. Maybe the kindgom of God is less dusty. Maybe these things are beyond my imagination.

At any rate, I know who came to vacuum me and the world of our sins. He as already done it, even as we look to him to do it more. And so on this eve of Christmas when in stress and exhaustion I think, "I just want to get this over with!" I say instead, "Come Lord Jesus!"

So on that note I share this prayer with you. May your home be filled with the presence of our Lord tomorrow. And may he not track in any mud or straw.

Merry Christmas!

In the same vein I have been scanning the mail for catalogues to file directly into the recycling. Do not pass Harvey, do not extract $100 dollars. But when the World Vision catalogue came a few months ago I couldn't be so harsh. I brought it to Harvey and Zion so they could ooh and aah over all the cute animal pictures. Then I heard my self say something dramatic. "You can pick out any gift in this catalogue to give to a child in Africa."

When I said it they were looking at a $30 flock of chickens. I didn't expect Harvey to jump at the $75 goat!

"$75 is a little bit expensive," I explained to Harvey (after I explained again very clearly that the goat would be going to Africa and not by way of our house.)

"I have some money in my piggy bank," he said. "I could give it to you."

Then he asked me to get down his piggy bank, and he asked me to help open it, and he pulled out a handful of nickels and quarters.

I tried to show him all homeschooly how many quarters makes a dollar, but he wanted nothing to do with putting them in stacks. He just kept grabbing handfulls of money out of his bank and handing it to me, as if to say, Not enough? How about now? Still not enough? How about now?

In the end we filled a mason jar with coins and took it to the coin-star machine at Stop&Shop. He helped me put them in and saw a receipt print out.

"Does the paper say about our goat?" he asked.

"No," I explained, "We have to put this money on the computer and buy the goat on the computer at home."

"Oh. Okay."

At home I made a big production of buying the goat online. I showed Harvey a video of a family whose goat had changed their lives.

"Is that the girl who got our goat?" he asked.

"No, they already have a goat." I said. "Someone like them will get our goat."

A week later a catalogue came from Episcopal Relief and Development. It also had a goat on the cover, held by another adorable African girl."

"That's the girl who got our goat!" Harvey exclaimed.

I was so bowled over by his joy and exuberance that I didn't stop to correct him.

I guess I felt pretty smug about Harvey's generous spirit. Until I noticed that every time he sees someone who looks African he now says, "Hey! She looks like the girl who got our goat!"

So. Is Harvey overwhelmingly greedy or overflowing with compassion? The answer is Yes. Or more truthfully, the answer is he's three and he feels every desire big big, whether it's selfish materialism or selfless generosity. And even these labels are false distinctions I create. Since money has no concrete value to him, why shouldn't he ask for everything he wants and everything everyone else wants too?

I try to teach him many things, but "the value of money" has been low on my list. To tell the truth I'm a little ambivalent about it myself. I want him to get excited about getting gifts, because it makes me happy. I also want him to abound in compassion. I don't hold those things in opposition, though perhaps I should. He certainly doesn't.

I could throw him in the car by force or bribe him with chocolate, but I don't think that's great parenting either.

Instead I'm calling this a phase and hoping it passes in a week or so. He went through a time at 18 months when it was hard to get him to do anything. We got in a lot of useless fights me trying to drag him to story-time. Then I decided that was ridiculous. Calm down and let him grow out of his crippling social anxiety. And he did, for the most part, so when it flares up again I'm trying not to be too concerned. Also he's going pee every 30 minutes. That may be a factor. But he says it doesn't hurt when he pees, and if his penis hurt I'm sure it's something I would hear about. So. Trying to be chill about staying in the house for long periods of time.

Perhaps I'm not chill enough. Perhaps I'm putting too much pressure on him. Because this morning I was singing Lord of the Dance:

I danced for the scribes and the Pharisees but they wouldn't dance and they would not follow me...

when Harvey interjected: "Maybe they didn't follow Jesus because they wanted to stay home."

"What?"

"Maybe they wanted a day at home" he clarified.

My heart just broke into a million pieces. "No sweetie," I said, "the Pharisees didn't follow Jesus because they didn't want justice or equality. They wanted to hold onto their power. It had nothing to do with wanting to stay home. Staying home or going out has nothing to do with following Jesus."

Harvey looked at me blankly. And vulnerably and impressionably.

"Do you want to just stay home today, sweetie?"

Harvey nods his head.

"You can stay home and still follow Jesus, sweetheart. That has nothing to do with whether you go out."

"Okay" Harvey says, giggling. I don't know what he understands of anything, but he's happy I'm no longer asking him every half hour if he's SURE he doesn't want to go in the car to the store.

Look, playing in the house all day is not my cup of tea. I get really really bored looking around at more and more things that need my cleaning. BUT. That's just my preference. I wonder how many other things that are just PREFERENCES I'm trying to force on my kids like they're RELIGION. To say the thought makes me nervous is an understatement. It makes me downright terrified.

Then I got a string of sore throats. I got antibiotics for Strep but it didn't take the problem all the way away. I would feel okay for three days and then have a low-level fever and sore throat for a week. This lasted all spring and into the beginning of the summer. Then I had about a month and a half of lovely summertime when I thought I was cured.

Then the ear infections started.

Lately I have felt a bit desperate. I have started eating two cloves of raw garlic a day. Last night I tried putting garlic in my ears. Normally my husband says he likes the smell of garlic, but on the way to church yesterday he opened the windows and said, "Um, can you turn your face that way? away from me?"

As unhelpful as it is to be sick, the worst thing is my attitude about being sick. The running tally of my sins includes:
Blaming a fever for impatience with my children.
Blaming a fever for untidiness in my house.
Blaming my family, friends, and amorphous set of responsibilities for making me sick.
Using my sickness to act like a big whiney Jewish martyr.
etcetera etcetera.

Last night at church I prayed that God would make me better. That he would make me better physically or that he would make me a better person to deal with being sick. Because, really, either one would work right now. I want to be healthy but more than that I want to be a human.

I had this vision while I was praying of a giant God holding me on a giant fork. Like Jack and the Beanstalk kind of scale. Fee Fi Fo Fum.

And the idea I had was that God is going to somehow EAT this crappy body of mine. And that that would be a good thing.

And then I thought, WTF? That's not even just gross it's A-BIBLICAL! That's pagan kind of shit. God doesn't eat people; he says in psalms that he doesn't need to eat at all. That's devil-worship madness sneaking into my consciousness. Devil, stop speaking to me in Jesus name.

Then today at the lunch table, I hear Harvey making up a song:
"He ate the sickness
and He ate the deadness
that's cuz God is a rescuer.
I WANT MORE KETCHUP!"

(The Ketchup part is per Harvey, not God, by the way. Harvey likes a massive amount of ketchup for his grilled cheese.)

I would like to see this as a different spin on Isaiah's prophesy: "Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows." (Isaiah 53:4) Surely He ate the sickness. Surely He ate the deadness. Because God is a rescuer.

I want more ketchup.

(I hope this doesn't sound too snarky, I just thought the question was beyond my capacity for earnestness. Perhaps I shouldn't be trusted to fill out paperwork after 8pm.. but that's the only time the paperwork doesn't get covered in crayon!)

So we took a trip to Marshalls and snagged me some $30 shoes before playing in the toys section. The toys section at our local Marshalls is awesome. The boys usually play with light-up toys and balls and very rarely beg to bring them home. But on Saturday Harvey and Zion wouldn't leave the book section, asking me to read book after book, some bizarre examples of childrens' stories I never knew existed (Baby Bear Baby Bear, What do you See??? Seriously? No way am I buying ANOTHER one of those things.) Still, some of the cheap deals bowled me over, especially since Zion is all up in my face with the board books now, so I bought a picture book of baby animals and a copy of Freight Train by Donald Crews for a few dollars a piece. Hey, I need board book variety too. It can't be all Brown/Polar/Panda Bear all the time.

While I was there in the book section I spotted a new Children's bible I hadn't seen before. A while ago I read a book called The Rise and Fall of the Bible (I really recommend it, by the way) and it quoted research saying the average Christian household has something like ten bibles. And I was like, Oh yeah? Well, let's see... I have a NIV, 2 Messages, Harvey has a NIV, Dan has a KJ, and someone left a new NIV study bible here that no one will claim. So that's 6 adult bibles, plus a 2 kid bibles I got as gifts and 2 I bought so.... HOLY SHIT! WE ARE AN AVERAGE CHRISTIAN HOUSEHOLD! HOW DID IT COME TO THIS!!

Anyway, I opened this new kids bible (by Andrew Geeson) ready to be unimpressed. When I open a bible made for kids I usually ask it a few questions to see wherether it's a terrible piece of crap:

Is there a picture of the cross? If not then it's NOT REALLY CHRISTIAN. You'd be amazed how many kids bibles jump from "Jesus loves the little children" to "Jesus is alive again!" Like, yeah? Wasn't he alive before? What? Next I ask: Is there a moral at the end of each story? If so, it probably has theological errors AND will make me what to puke while I'm reading it.

The bible at Marshalls had both a cross and absence of morals, and some other things to recommend it too, like lots of words per story. I picked out the story of Goliath to read as a tester and was pleased that including something about David playing the harp. So I brought the bible home with us (in addition to the two board books and the sneakers - I can't go into Marshalls for a fortnight now.) But unfortunately some of the pictures don't match the text for historical detail. Dan was reading it to Harvey and called to me from the living room:

"When were the Levites allowed to touch the ark?"

"What? Never!" I yell.

"Well they're carrying it on their shoulders in this story about Joshua."

"What? No, they carried it on poles. They always carried it on poles. Show Harvey a better illustration from the other bible."

The other bible I refer to is A Child's First Bible by Kenneth N. Taylor. The illustrations in this book are great for accurate details. If you're the kind of person who has read the entire old testament then you'll appreciate that Eli is wearing the ephod in the story about God calling Samuel. You won't appreciate that the story of Samuel is only four sentences long. In fact, every story in that book is super short, in order to fit the whole bible into a half-sized kids book. We make most fun of the story of Job which reads:

Job was a good man. He loved God, and God loved him. But God let him get very sick. He hurt all over. But Job still loved God, even while he was sick.

OMG, leave anything out here?

Still, I think this one is a good reference for a kid to get an idea of what a whole bible is. Harvey and I have sat and read the entire thing in a morning, and it feels rather fulfilling to read the whole bible to a one-year-old. This was before Zion was born, of course. Now we don't read anything together that isn't a board book and doesn't include pictures of chickens.

Zion will read one bible, though. We got it for a present and it's called Baby's Hug-a-Bible because it has a fuzzy cover. This is a board book with less than ten pages, each with a long poem about how God helped one person or other in the bible. Zion loves the fuzzy cover, but he often (ahem, ALWAYS) turns the page before I reach the end of the poem. Which is kind of frustrating because the poem is all "Who made the seas? Who made the birds? Who made the bees? - " and Zion turns the page before I can shout out "IT'S GOD BY THE WAY! HE MADE THAT STUFF! Wait, you're skipping over Moses... now you're skipping all of Daniel..." I hated this bible at first but it's grown on me after a while. I think because I realized it was written by Sally Lloyd Jones who also wrote the Jesus Storybook Bible, so I feel like it must be somewhat reflective.

The Jesus Storybook Bible is the one bible I bought for Harvey out of extensive internet research. This bible tells various stories from the old testament, each demonstrating in the last two sentences how that story relates to Jesus and God's master plan. Then it tells a very moving account of Jesus's life, death and resurrection. "Moving" is one word for it... "emo" is another word I use in my head when I'm tired of reading "the cross part" for the 700th time. But on balance I think it's probobly the best kids' bible out there. The presentation of the bible as "one story" is as well done as it is heavy handed, and the pictures are beautiful and moving. It's editorializing, sure, but I don't super disagree with any of the conclusions because they're not like "be nice to your little brother" type morals. And Harvey likes the cross part.

There are several books we like that are bible stories while not being complete bibles. Harvey's all-time favorite of these is The Book of Jonah by Peter Spier. (Let's not forget the time he read it on video with much awesomeness.) We have also gotten from the library (and I'd love to own someday) The White Ram by Mordicai Gerstein. This is a jewish midrash retelling of Abraham sacrificing Issac. (I like it much better than the actual passage in the bible.) While totally Jewish, the story forshadows Jesus' sacrifice perfectly so perfectly so that's it very difficult to get through the thing without crying. I also really like a book on Adam and Eve called Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden by Jane Ray. The pictures are so lovely and not religous-y at all (look! real breasts!) and it's heavy on the agricultural ramifications of the story, ending on an up note: "In the bare earth beyone Eden, Adam and Eve planted a new garden for their family."

And while I'm extoling virtuas of books from my local library, I'd recommend A Road Down in the Sea by Lorenz Graham. This is a retelling of the exodus from egypt in African English. To give you a taste:

The Egypt people hold the Hebrews tight
And make them slaves
And make them work the farm
And work the road
And work some kind of hard.
The Hebrews cry
And sometimes they fall down and die
And all the time they moan and pray
And say "How long, O God, how long?"

Yeah, I should really buy that book one day. Next time I redeem my household coins for Amazon money.

If you are episcopalian or like the already-thought-through nature of that brand of Christianity I recommend I Believe: The Nicene Creed which I took out from the library and then immediately purchased for our home. The illustrations are done in the style of illuminated manuscript and it's just so so peace-inducing to look at (though I don't know if Harvey gets anything from the language.) I also purchased Easter by Fiona French because it's simply the Easter story with illustrations that look like stained glass. The cover of the book says, "With words from the King James bible." I should not pretend like it was simple to take four different gospel accounts from the King James bible and mash them into one narrative with words from the Kind James bible; obviously there was some editorial choices on the part of French or her editors. But whatever, there's no "moral." And a good Easter story without bunnies is hard to come by.

I'm sure there are a hundred million awesome books for kids designed to stir their faith and engage them with the bible. This doesn't pretend to be an exhaustive list, it's just our current list for an over-literary three-year-old.

And the new bible I bought Harvey? He's already says he doesn't want to read it anymore, because it's scary. "All those guys" are scary he says. He wouldn't say which guys or from which story, so there's no way of knowing. It'll have to wait on a shelf until later.

If you've read this far I feel like you should get a cookie or something. A lot of this post was written for a friend who asked for bible story recommendations. As a result it comes off as a bit listy and, I dunno, not very earnest? I'd hate to seem like I'm saying, "I read my kid this and this and this... all this educational shit! aren't I awesome???" When really, right now I read him one book while his brother is asleep MAYBE, and it might be a bible story or it might be something about robots. Otherwise, Dan gets to read Harvey his books at bedtime, and I just get board books during the day because if it's anything other than a board book Zion will DESTROY the offending creature or THROW IT ACROSS THE ROOM if there are no pictures of chickens. And I'd hate to say I give in to a one-year-old terrorist, but it's no fun to try to read when someone is screaming AND attacking you, and as a result I can recite a surprising number of board books with my eyes closed. "A cow says moo, a sheep says baa... I should be doing more educational things for Harvey but instead I'm sticking my fingers in my ears and saying LaLaLa..."

Both the children are sleeping now, fallen asleep in the stroller without even reading any bedtime books. I feel like I need some spiritual guidence that isn't about picking literature. I think I'll go read myself A Road Down in the Sea...

Now Moses never see that side before
And he don't know the way.
God say
"Moses,
Nev mind.
I set My mark up in the sky
You walk the way I show.
By day My mark be in a cloud
By night it be in fire."

"What? What kind of terrible gangster rap does Dada have on his — oh, that's Gregorian chants," I say looking over at the phone. "It's a picture of Jesus. Yes, I'd love to listen to that."

Harvey has more questions.

"Why's he got blood on his hands?"

"Those are the marks from the nails," I say.

"Why'd he get nails in his hands?"

"Well, remember when Jesus was hung on a cross?"

"Yes."

"They put nails through his hands so he couldn't get down. When he came alive afterwards he had blood marks on his hands from where the nails where."

"Oh."

I go back to knitting. Harvey has more questions.

"Why's the picture blue like that?"

"Well it's a mosaic. You mean why is it blue in some places and gold in some places in the background?"

"Yes."

"Because it's a mosaic which means it's made out of lots of little tiles. The people who used to sing this music were monks and they made these sort of pictures to decorate the walls of their monastery —"

Dan comes into the room to interject.

"Actually, these aren't Gregorian chants," he says. "Gregorian chants are mono-tonal. Secular composers who came later than the monks, in the renaissance, invented multi-tonality and made new arrangements of the Gregorian chants. The renaissance arrangements were multi-tonal. That's what we're listening to now - Renaissance music."

"Thank you Dada, but he's asking about the picture - I'm trying to explain about mosaics."

"Use the iPad," says Dan," It'll be easier to see the pictures."

So we get down the iPad and I do a google image search form Jesus Mosaic. Harvey flips through the pictures. "Oh, this is where he's on the cross! Oh, this is where he's in the tomb!" he exclaims.

I point out that the mosaics are made of many little tiny tiles. Harvey asks why Jesus has a circle around his head and I explain that artists made the circles called halos to show that people knew God. Harvey asks why in another picture Jesus has rays coming out of his head. I say because Jesus is like the sun that has rays and lights up the world. Harvey doesn't understand and I draw on the magnet board a picture of the sun and a picture of Jesus both with rays coming out of them. Harvey asks about another mosaic and I say it's Jesus' baptism. He asks about another and I say it's when Jesus died and was taken down from the cross, the women holding him is probably supposed to be Mary Magdalene since she's a woman and not wearing blue, and the man crying over him might be the disciple Jesus loved, John, or it could be the one who purchased the tomb for him.... um... Joseph of Arimathea.

"I've heard it pronounced ArimaTHEA," Dan calls from the kitchen.

"What's goin on in this picture?" asks Harvey, flipping to a different mosaic.

"That's Jesus ascending into heaven. After he came back from the dead he stuck around for forty days, then he rose into heaven while his disciples were watching."

"How'd he do it?"

"Um, he just kind of flew up there, I guess."

"How'd he do that?"

"God helped him."

"How'd God help him if Jesus IS God?"

"Um... Dan?" I yell. "Any Help?"

Dan comes in from the kitchen. "God is everywhere, so even when Jesus was God on earth there was still a God in heaven. Also, Jesus talked about God as his father even though he WAS God too."

"There's only one God. It's an amazing mystery." I add.

I tell Harvey we can make a mosaic ourselves out of paper, or out of tiles if we buy some cement mix stuff. I cut up squares of paper and print out one of the Jesus mosaic picture that Harvey chooses so he can follow the model and cover it with squares. This feels too heavy-handed to Harvey, and immediately he gets frustrated that he can't get glue on the tiny pieces of colored paper, and then that I put glue all over his picture. We end up with bits of paper all over the floor and to avoid a melt-down Dan calls Harvey to the dinner table.

Harvey sits down at the table and summarizes the last half-hour:

"I put on Jesus music for Mama because Mama likes thinkin about Jesus."

ed note: after dinner Dan returned to the mosaics and made one that was totally awesome. I feel bad for Harvey; he is often frustrated that his level of crafting ability isn't up to his desired level of production. That's what we do in our family, instill crafting anxiety along with religious instruction.

Nevertheless, I found myself using a morel from the Babel story in my discipline of Harvey yesterday. He was yelling "PIE PIE PIIIIIIIIE" while we were already FUCKING SERVING HIM PIE. Does it sound like I'm irritated by this? Because it's very irritating, this thing he does when we're getting him the juice he's all moaning "juuuuuuuuuuuice" like he's just come from wandering in the desert. So I said (after Dan and I both ordered him to SHUT YOUR MOUTH AND YOU'LL GET SOME) "Remember in the Babel story when the people wanted to keep from being scattered all over the earth? So they built a big tower? And then precisely because of the tower they got scattered all over the earth? Maybe that means that if you want something real bad you should STOP TRYING EVERY STUPID THING YOU THINK OF BECAUSE IT PISSES GOD OFF. Now I'm God in this story. And I know you want pie. But your whining makes me mad at you."

I don't know how much he's getting from these nice little chats.

So we kept him with us in the big service. I guess he was learning something about church and about God, but also he was getting yelled at a lot for acting like a child. And a lot of the time I thought things like: What is the point of this? They can run around and be loud at home and I wouldn't have to disturb other people or drive an hour total; I could just wash dishes.

But then I thought: what does THAT teach them? You can't go to church anymore because you're bad???

So back to kids church. Dan did a great job these past weeks of building up the idea of kids church for Harvey, how fun it would be now that he's a big kid, how great the toys are. And Harvey was SUPER excited to get in that room with the toys; he didn't mind at all when we left him. I even walked out and said, "Wow, that was easy!"

I had been in church ten minutes when I got a page to come back for him. Harvey had wet his pants. He was standing in the adjacent classroom, snotty and sobbing, tootsie-roll wadded up in his fist. And I thought, What is the point of all this? I thought, I just want to take them home.

After a few minutes of cuddles Harvey recovered enough to listen to the creation story while sitting on my lap. But before the end of class time he wet his pants again, this time while standing right next to me. Because I had only brought one change of clothes he went home in a pull-up and spare pair of sweat pants.

We came home from church and I immediately got a fever.

This whole thing is so hard. Every week we go to church, and I have an agenda. I want to GO TO CHURCH. I want to sing songs and hear a sermon. I want to feel like I prayed and connected with God.

My kids have an agenda too. They want to play with toys, play with other kids, play on the playground. They want to eat bagels. They want to feel safe while they do all this and feel like their parents are looking out for their needs.

They don't care for a sermon. They only care for songs if they can run around like maniacs.

They don't care that every other day of the week we go on outings 100% for them, 100% designed to make them engaged and happy. They are justifiably confused that I have a different agenda.

I was thinking as I sat holding sobbing Harvey this morning. I was winded from running across the parking lot carrying Zion, and I had to pee because I hadn't gotten a chance to go to the bathroom between dropping Harvey in his class and getting to church, and in this altered state I suddenly I had a selfless thought: If this is what it takes for Harvey to have a relationship with God then I will sit in this stupid tiny room all year. I will drive to Cambridge every Sunday to be a human bean-bag chair and take Harvey back and forth from the bathroom, if that's what he needs. I already have a relationship with God. If Harvey needs to sit on my lap every time he hears a bible story then I will give up every pleasure I have in Sundays so that he can sit on my lap on learn about creation.

Then I had another thought. This is insane. How much can I possibly give up? Sleep? Privacy? Alone time? Physical integrity? I already don't have anything left. Every second of my life is already giving something up because it might make something slightly easier for one of my children.

But maybe these are just the thoughts I have when I'm ill. I don't know if it's the line of thinking that gives me the fever or the fever that gives me the line of thinking. Last time I waxed existential I had a persistent throat infection, but as soon as it got better I felt a lot better.

Dan says he will take Harvey to kids church next week.

Harvey also sewed the rainbow, which is to say he drove the pedal of the machine while I turned the fabric wildly to try to get the stitches to curve at Harvey's warp speed (I don't let him use my computerized sewing machine for obvious reasons, but that means the only speed control he has is how hard he puts down on the pedal. And he's three - gradual gradation is not really his thing.)

We did Noah's ark on the flannel board two and a half times this week, the half when Zion abruptly ripped all the pieces off the board and Harvey announced, "Let's go outside!" I'm eager to move away from Noah and get on to the tower of Babel (skipping Noah getting drunk and exposing himself to his sons; that's a lesson for high school). Harvey thinks Noah's ark is a bit scary, because of the giants. He is very happy when they get killed in the flood, and he relishes wiping them off the board when the waters rise. But he notes that we need more animals to die too in the flood. Yeah, I think he's learned enough here.

I'm not very spiritually moved by the Noah story. I think God related to prehistoric peoples in a way that probably made sense to previous ages more than it makes sense to us. I'm also not totally happy with this felt set-up. I wanted to press the point that Noah wasn't the only person in the ark, but my zeal to represent his family and then following fatigue at cutting out figures gives the impression that there were more people saved than drowned in the story. Which is false. Also, it's a bit tricky to fit all those guys in the ark and shut the door and have the thing still stick to the flannel board. I'm thinking ahead to IMPORTANT stories in Genesis (who's playing God now!) and I think for big groups of people like Joseph's brothers I'll cut them out as a crowd block and then decorate them some way that's not so neon.

Harvey seems to be learning a lot from these stories. Preschool homeschool isn't so hard, I realize. Just the other day I asked Harvey what he wanted to do for school at home this year, and he said, "Well, we already did weaving, and making a sweater, and numbers.. so I don't know! We already did everything!"

UPDATE: Harvey loves the flannel-board, but he says he doesn't need to hear the creation story again. He wants to know where are the figures for Jesus and the disciples and the boat for Jonah.

But that's not what I'm thinking about today. In this book Beni writes about prophetic acts as mater or course for the intercessor. Things like pouring oil on things, sticking swords in things, whatever. Weird shit that sounds like a waste of time. Somehow, writes Beni (who doesn't herself use the term "weird shit") these acts shift something in the spiritual realm so that months after she went somewhere and threw a sword in the ground there is profound reconciliation in the politics of the city.

She's not making this up out of whole cloth. The prophets did this kind of thing all the time. With God leading, they walked around naked or married prostitutes or ate poop cakes to demonstrate to Israel something God was trying to say. (Ugh, should I site sources here? I'm so lazy and my bible is all the way over there. Let's just say if you're curious leave a comment and I'll find the real verses.)

I have been thinking about prophetic acts in regards to my big dreams. Living in a way that's sustainable for the environment. Leaning lightly on money. Teaching my children to have power in God. You know, stuff that's pretty much impossible.

I had just finished Beni's book when I was walking the dog and kids on the bike path connector in Bedford. And, like, there's trash everywhere. Seriously, I don't understand why littering is still a problem. Are people like, "Oh, I just can't make it to that trash-can 20 yards away. I know, I'll just throw plastic bag filled with food wrappers on the ground."? WTF? Anyway, it's impossible for me to pick up all the trash on that path; it'd take like two hours and a big trash bag. But I had a little bag for the dog's poop, so I said to myself, "I'm just going to pick up these few pieces of trash around me right here. It won't make a dent in the problem, but I'm going to do it as a prophetic act to say MY WORLD IS NOT MADE OF TRASH!"

And you know what? When I picked up those ten wrappers I felt like something WAS moved in the spiritual realm. Someone cares. Someone says this path, this town, this world isn't trash.

Now. There are bigger problems that I think about vis a vis the environment. Bigger than litter. And I can think of big solutions for my family and for the world. But as much as I might like to right now, I can't move to an island. I live here in the suburbs and since I can't do big moves I feel like now is the time to act small-ly and prophetically. And watch the rest of the world follow. (Or, you know, be burned in hellfire... I don't want to paint an unfairly rosy or picture... that wouldn't be very biblical.)

I wrote to Jo in an email recently that I want to be somehow "prophetically anti-capitalist." She immediately started using the phrase to make fun of me, which is pretty fair. Still, Dan just started an awesome farm stand that's the most prophetically anti-capitalist thing I've ever seen, so I'm hoping he'll share tat with you soon. Also, Jo stole this whole idea from me for her blog post today, which you're welcome to read. Especially if you're sick of my incredibly vague references to the bible.

We are trying to teach Harvey the "golden rule," which is some blah-dee-blah that Jesus said and that parents make their children parrot. (As opposed to the other blah-dee-blah Jesus said about selling your stuff for the good of the poor. That part isn't so widespread in daily child rearing.) So do to others what you would want them to do to you, Harvester. Jesus goes so far as to say "Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back." (Luke 6:30) But in Harvey's case we're starting with "Don't hit Zion or he will hit you with something harder like a block." Willingly sharing the toys? That's an advanced spiritual concept. We're working on "Jesus says, this will make Zion punch you in the nose."

Oh God. What if I'm the abusive authority figure who's keeping my children from effective allocation of blocks?

Yesterday Harvey was whining that he only had water in the stroller instead of juice and I shouted, "THE ISRAELITES GRUMBLED AT MOSES IN THE DESERT BUT THEY WERE REALLY GRUMBLING ABOUT GOD AND GOD GAVE YOU ME TO BE YOUR MOTHER SO YOU SIT DOWN RIGHT NOW AND ASK GOD WHAT HE WANTS YOU TO DO IN THIS SITUATION!" Which is not really fair because a) I haven't like drilled the story of the poison quails with him, b) Harvey can hear God's voice just as well as I can and probably better if I'm not yelling at him, and c) if someone orders you what to pray the appropriate response is to tell them to fuck off.

But maybe, in addition to calming down around the juice issue, I should let the children figure out how to live together with one set of blocks. It's hard when one can't speak the language and the other has a lack of impulse control, but then again the same thing could be said for adults.

It's fun to twist the dreads in my hand and think, "It's working! they're really becoming something!" Then I look in the mirror and say, "Good Lord, that looks like a mess." Fortunately though, since I don't need to style my hair much, I don't really look in the mirror. Once a week I wash my hair with dreadlock shampoo (baking soda and vinegar would work equally well but my mom bought me dread shampoo for my birthday) then I roll the dreads while they're wet and again with wax after they're dry. It's about 40 minutes of maintenance work a week, but I usually split it over two days because like I said I'm pretty lazy and (perhaps related to the tiredness) it's hard to get twenty minutes to myself.

I did, however, try to look somewhat presentable for a wedding I officiated last weekend. I rolled on the wax the morning of the wedding and did a half-up thing crowned with a scarf that I thought might look priestly. Here's the result. (I'm dancing with a sleeping baby on my front, in case anyone has a hard time figuring out the photo.)

You can see the bottoms of the dreads are still quite curly. I look forward to long tubular dreads a year or so from now but in the meantime I'm diggin the in-between.

I thought I was being rather formal for the wedding... I had a whole vest thing I wore over my dress for the ceremony, I tied up my hair and even used a scarf. Then I got to the bride's house and everyone was putting on makeup and I was like, "Oh right. Makeup. Should I, like, do that or whatever?"

It's only been two years since I gave up makeup, and yet it feels like a different lifetime ago. Then again, it's only been two months since I stopped fixing my hair every day and I've taken to it quite naturally.

There. Does that feel like a hair update? I hate that everything comes with a "I've been sick" preamble, but that's pretty much where I'm at right now. If I was praying for someone at church and they said, "I've had a lingering infection for two-and-a-half months" I would say "Did something happen in your life right before the infection started?" And if someone asked me that question I'd say, "Well, I got my hair dreaded, and then right after that I got sick."

Now, dreading my hair was nothing if not a good decision. It's much easier to manage given the demands of the children. It's much easier for my sensory integration issues, since I don't get the feeling my hair is pulling at my scalp. I don't feel all "hippier than thou" in fact mostly I'm not conscious of my hairstyle. I prayed about it in advance and felt convinced that God said, "Leah, I could not possibly care LESS about your hair." So it's not sin that's making me sick (not that that's how it works anyway, but that's the subject for someone else's book.)

Maybe I feared people would think I was lazy if I got dreads so I immediately got sick so I'd have to be lazy? To live down to expectations? It doesn't make logical sense but it sounds a lot like me.

Anyway, I like the hair but not the lingering illness, so I pray the Lord will redeem it somehow.

Which is to say, I felt suddenly happy to have some distance. I am a hippy but not a murderer so bad things will probably not happen to me.

It's funny how closeness and distance works on the internet.

I don't know Lauren of Sparkling Adventures, but I feel like I do because I read her blog. I love reading blogs because I appreciate the inside glimpse into someone else's heart. I think our desire to connect with people we don't know is a beautiful thing. I also have a blog, and I appreciate that other people read it, not because we serve ads (we don't) but because the people who read my blog have an accurate picture of the inside of my mind, the disgusting sin menagerie that it is, and then when these people go and talk to me in person despite what they read on the blog it's like grace in action.

If I like reading blogs because they connect me to other people, I had reading news. The point of news is to sensationalize awful events, with the result that each person feels more isolated and fearful about the world around them. Whereas blogs reflect the complexity of experience, news creates a video-game summary of it. Identify the bad guy. Fire. We all feel safer but more disconnected.

This week the Sparkling Adventure family transitioned from the bloggers to news items, and as such there doesn't seem to be a healthy way to relate to them anymore. Except this one thing:

As Christians we are called to intercede for people, which means we personally stand up in the gap between an individual and God. Ezekiel 22:30 says "I sought for a man among them that should make up the hedge and stand in the gap before me for the land that I should not destroy it: but I found none." When someone does a bad thing, the gap is a very scary place to stand. And yet this is the place where we get to see God, where He connects people more powerfully than reading blogs ever can. So Lord God, I ask that you would show your face to David, Lauren, Aisha, Brioni, Calista and Delanie. I ask that Your presence would give them peace that passes all understanding, even mine. amen.

The thing I was finding was that my frustration level tends to build during the day, on account of 1) feeling like I just CAN'T get done the things I need to get done and 2) feeling sick or in pain. After I've felt really sick for a while or really thwarted sometimes I do break out and yell. Not all the time. Not very violently. But the guilt about it does weigh on me.

In order to work on number 1 (feeling thwarted) I tried to pear down the number of things I feel I need to accomplish in a day. This meant putting a stop to the knitting and sewing and basket weaving projects, because while I absolutely love to create things, starting a project means there's something in process on the kitchen table, making me feel thwarted till it's finished and also thwarted in my need to clear the kitchen table for lunch. Also, I've been sleeping so poorly that it's just stupid to try to stay up late to accomplish something. There is only one thing I can do about number two, feeling sick, and that's sleep. If it's gotta be in two-hour bursts then the first one needs to start at 8pm.

My reaction to this experiment has been largely positive. I don't feel that the kids are thwarting me as much, and I feel like the house cleaning is a little bit more attainable, because I'm using my free time to clean in little bursts rather than weave a few rows of a basket. Also when I get my 30-minute union break (that's what I call it when Dan comes home and gives me a break from the kids) I mostly fold laundry instead of ignoring the mess to run straight to the sewing machine. It's not as glorious, but it means we mostly have folded laundry in the drawers. Look, cleaning is always a bottomless pit and even now there are things all over the floor and two baskets of unfolded laundry. I'm not saying my house is CLEAN. I'm saying I now realize that an hour a day of dedicated cleaning time is the minimum this house needs to function, and if I'm not doing that I'm either being unrealistic or selfish.

This is not to say that I have thrown my adult personality out the window to become Cinderella with stretch marks. We do participate in two adult church meetings a week (three if you count church!) and those are non-negotiable. I am right now blogging, which is a semi-adult activity, because the kids are both napping (thank you over-stimulating Discovery museum!) There are plenty of opportunities I have for self-actualization without messing up my house pretending to be Martha Stewart.

I think there's a tendency in our culture to say if parenting isn't going great then you should just parent less. Give the kids to a sitter and just go out. Or let them watch Dora. Or put them in daycare and go back to work. I don't want to get into a judgey thing, it's just... that's not my thing. I don't know if it comes across in the blog, maybe it doesn't, but I feel like I'm trying to DO something here. I'm trying to raise children in an authentic way, some way that's integrated with my values no less than 100%. I'm trying to raise makers, naturalists, revivalists. I'm not gonna... fuggin ... back off on the main goal of my life just because I'm dealing with a little exhaustion.

As Bill Johnson said about his kids, "I have a lot of dreams, but THEY'RE my dream."

Anyway, I'm aware I've been a wee bit whiney on the blog lately, and I apologize. It's not the most gracious season for me. I hope someone else will find the rawness interesting without suggesting I commit myself.

I ran to the back door, jumped into my boots and threw on the outside lights. Outside the door I saw... nothing. The coop and the yard was quiet. Suddenly reason caught up with me. If there is a raccoon, why am I running at it headlong and empty handed? I need a bat or something. I thought of grabbing the cast-iron skillet before remembering I can barely lift the thing onto the stove.

By this time Dan was downstairs putting a collar on Rascal. He also grabbed a broom. Get the dog and something hitty, that man can actually think at 3am.

We all headed out to the yard, but nothing was screaming anymore. The chickens were locked up tight and sleeping, three on the roost and one in the nesting box. In retrospect I hadn't heard any clucking, which would have been a better indication of a chicken attack. The scream could have come from behind our property or from the woods across the street. Rascal sniffed around the fences, but didn't find anything to fight.

I walked over to Dan who still had broom in hand. The night air was very quiet. "Let's live outside," he said. "It's peaceful out here."

"Oh well," I replied. "Back to changing Harvey's sheets."

Thankfully Harvey was not at all frightened by the excitement. "Was it a dog?" he said when I came back in his room.
"No, I think it was a raccoon," I said. "But anyway the chickens are fine."
"Oh. I thought it was a dog," he said cheerfully. It's funny what sorts of things do and don't freak out this kid.

As I lay in Harvey's newly made bed cuddling him to sleep, I got to feeling a little ashamed of my cowardice. Why did I stop at the doorway? Because I saw nothing? Because my fears got the better of me? I'd like to think if there was a raccoon, if I had stepped outside into a gruesome war-zone, I'd like to think my adrenaline would have carried me running pellmell at the beast. I'd like to think I'd do something courageous and brilliant like grabbing the metal rake by the chicken coop and beating the animal from a sensible distance.

The more I parent, though, the more I think that courage is just practice disguised as confidence. That and pure adrenaline. I wonder which it was for king David, who I also thought about while I was lying awake in Harvey's bed. Here he is speaking of Goliath:

But David said to Saul, "Your servant has been keeping his father's sheep. When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, I went after it, struck it and rescued the sheep from its mouth. When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair, struck it and killed it. Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, because he has defied the armies of the living God. The Lord who rescued me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will rescue me from the hand of this Philistine." -1 Samuel 17:34-37

Oh, right, he probably had a little bit of faith too.

(An aside: how do YOU find quotes in the bible? Does anyone go, "Hmm, I think this is in Samuel. I'll just flip through and if not I'll look in Kings." I am wondering if the age of memorize verse numbers is coming to an end as our smart phones get quicker at opening up a bible app. I googled "Your servant has slain both the lion and the bear" and voila.)

"Harvey," I said, "I know how you feel. Sometimes when I want to rest and you're talking to me I find it annoying. What you could try is, instead of yelling at Zion, sit nice and quietly in your seat. Close your eyes. Think restful thoughts. Then even if Zion is talking to you, you could just ignore him and take a little rest in your own mind.

Harvey was quiet for a moment. Zion sneezed.

"Bless you Zion," Harvey said. Then he added in a voice that was all sweetness and light: "Mama, I'm not telling Zion to do anything. I'm just saying 'Bless you Zion.'"

Now. I hate it when bloggers are all "Everything that comes out of my child's mouth is a beautiful penny from heaven." It's sappy and it's lame and most of the time children are not spiritually deep they're just plain silly. But this spoke to my soul with the voice of God himself: don't tell them what to do — just bless them.

And after our lunch date with Ashley, when Harvey was skipping down the path to the playground saying "I'm hopping for joy!" it felt as if we really were blessing each other, as if the clouds parted and I really truly enjoyed playing in the park with my children. Of course, I shouldn't underestimate the value of talking with another adult during the day, or eating a big sandwich full of meat (I'm still a bit protein deprived, despite my commitment to cooking obscene amounts of lentils.) Or being outside on a nice day, or being excited about Ashley's wedding, or knowing that when I got in the car Dan was at home waiting for me. All very important for emotional management. But still I think there's something helpful in all of us saying to each other, "I'm not telling you to do anything. Bless you."

I am not 100% convinced that a stuck egg is the problem. When I give her the old how's-your-father I can't feel anything like an egg insider her, just a long empty vent with a hard mass up on top of it. Perhaps the egg is stuck WAAAAAAAY up in there, and failure to descend is the problem. Maybe there's something else gone horribly wrong internally. At least I feel that I've done all I can do by way of home remedies. I've bathed her, lubricated her, given her plenty of exercise. By now I'm ready to let nature take its course in either direction.

I could take her to see a vet, theoretically. Way back in the beginning, when I was thinking of getting chickens, I reasoned that I would never take them to see a vet. Baby chicks cost under $4. Every month I buy about $20 of food and supplies (shavings, worms, etc.) so what I've put into this particular chicken, as one of four, is less than $60 so far. A vet visit would cost over $100, and who knows if it would help. Financially speaking, it'd be crazy.

And yet, I look into those beady chicken eyes and do feel bad...

People have asked me if I will eat the chicken should she die. My answer is: I don't know. Probably not. On one hand, she's not dying of disease, so she's probably safe to eat. On the other hand, if I wait for the stuck egg to kill her I'm not exactly sure by what mechanism this happens. Does the back-up cause sepsis or something? If so, it's probably not the healthiest meat. Better to eat a chicken that you slaughter, rather than one you find dead in the henhouse in the morning. Also, I'd still have to bleed the bird, boil a huge pot of water, pluck all the feathers, figure out the dissection, er, preparation process... After all that a fancy $15 chicken from Whole Foods sounds pretty good. So I probably won't eat her, but I might do some sort of autopsy to satisfy my curiosity about what went wrong.

If so, are any of our blog readers interested in photos?

I want to say something more in case readers think I'm horrible and heartless for not taking my chicken to the vet. We love having chickens. I can say that I "love" the chickens as a flock even if I don't love every individual chicken as a pet. I love having them around, seeing them peck about the yard and dash at worms. I love fresh eggs every day. I also see them as "livestock" which is to say they're like a stock of food, like how you stock your pantry, and there's a certain fluctuation up and down when you keep stock of anything. It's the same when that stock is "live." Which is to say, we came into this process expecting a certain amount of loss, which is to say death. When this happens it can be sad while also unsurprising. I can have different emotions at the same time. I have sadness for the animal, pride in my unflinching hands-on care for her, wonder at the nature of life itself. I feel very humble that it works at all, as it does most of the time.

And I also feel in awe (forgive me for quoting scripture here - you must be exhausted if you've read this far - the last thing my non-Christian friends need to hear is a bit of bible again - but this part is for ME!) I feel in awe that God created these amazing birds, sold so cheap, yet says, "Not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father." (Matthew 10:29.) And he says this to speak of his love for US. "So don't be afraid," Jesus says, "You are worth more than many birds."

So that's the update on our sick chicken. If anything, this experience has only made me want to get MORE hens. Which is, um, good. I guess.

Now. These are not the first Christians to conclude that their liberation from sin plus their love in Christ for every man equal open hunting season for hippy booty. (Has anyone used the phrase "patchouli booty" before? They should.) We talked about this in bible study last night in fact... Why should we stand agape at an open marriage and not, say premarital sex or driving on the sabbath or wearing garments made of mixed fibers. I mean, Jesus invalidated lots of laws. Isn't where we draw the line only based on our moral relativism?

By the way, if your bible study doesn't discuss free love when you read Revelation then I feel bad for you. I'd be happy to sign on as a consultant...

But back to the topic at hand. I have often found myself defending polygamy. Polygamy solves a lot of problems... the need for extra help and companionship in chores and childbearing, the need for someone else to have sex with your husband when you're recovering from giving birth.... for 13 months. Of corse societal polygamy causes problems too, notably the need to purge a large number of boys from the fold every generation, but I then there are drawbacks to everything.

I confess, however, that sometimes I fantasize TOO MUCH about polygamy. I would just love it if someone else could jump in and solve all the challenges that being married presents. I can even concoct very loving looking orgy fantasies. But they're not really biblical. "An elder must be blameless, the husband of but one wife..." (Titus 1:6) I have a tough time arguing that Jesus's death invalidated laws written in the New Testament.

Dan's conclusion last night in BStudy is that whether or not free love works for the Sparkling family, blogging about it risks putting a stumbling block in front of those who are struggling with promiscuity and its negative effects. I think that's a nice counterpoint to a theology of complete freedom.

And hey, there's another lesson to be learned from this: If you want to increase loyalty in your readership base, announce something sexy on your blog. I just can't wait to hear what happens next.

Here's another banal deep thought coming your way. It's hard for me to reconcile my current sense of self with the person my facebook friends knew ten years ago. Of course, the Leah who goes to reunions is the same person: I certainly present the same combination of fake-outgoing anxious over-sharing bubbly exhaustion that I did in high school. That's just the way I talk. But from a values perspective there are few things I cared about ten years ago that I still care about now. (Of course how banal again. I had kids in that interim and that changes everything; I'm not saying anything that everyone else hasn't figured out, and yet and yet...)

The person that I was ten years ago, overanxious and striving and wicked concerned about my appearance, that person died (theology alert!) and was buried in the waters of baptism. Yes, I know the way I appear in this blog post is overanxious about my appearance, but, er, it feels different and I swear I'm a different person. And theologically speaking I can be both that person and a different person; we are resurrected both in the "now" and the "not yet."

Dot dot dot. I feel like I started to write this post with an air of "You guys don't get me" and now that I've written it I find the whole thing kind of bitchy.

Dot dot dot. I've left this post and come back and I've completely changed my mind. Of course I am the same person I was ten years ago, extremely anxious over how other people view me and whether they accept me. If not, why would I vomit so many words about whether people like or dislike a hairstyle that I haven't even gotten yet?

No. The Leah I was at 6 and at 16 (theology alert!) is the Leah that God created, the same Leah that lives today saying every stupid joke that comes into my head and being more exuberant than the social situation warrants and having my heart break into pieces every time I see a fuzzy animal. But. (one last theology alert and then I'm done.) The Leah at 16 did not live in freedom, and I do. On account of Jesus, yes. Primarily so. But also on account of pursuing a life of freedom. Living freely sometimes feels very easy (thank you Jesus) and sometimes very difficult (thank you facebook). But that's the struggle that we've set ourselves to, and I hope that's what my friends see in me when they look at me and see a crazy person.

Okay, enough on this already. Hair is going into dreads on Thursday. I'm not going to talk about it again until I have photos.

Harvey for his part likes getting dressed in lots of clothes, and together they made a striking pair.

The sewing details are as follows: The pants are the Little Heartbreaker pattern from the book Sewing for Boys. A good pattern, even though it is long and exacting. Nothing too hard, just a lot of steps with the pleats and the pockets and the edge stitching every which way. Still, I really like the look, if you can make it in the right size. I made Harvey's in size 4/5 and that was a big mistake. He normally wears a size 4, but the pattern came out way too big and I needed to take in an inch on either side. Even so the pants were falling down throughout the day, and I had to make some impromptu pleats in the back with safety pins. So he won't get much wear out of this pair, but I'm thinking of making some jeans for him in the 2/3 size. He really does like those pockets.

The vests are based on a free Burda Style pattern that Dan helped me size up for Harvey and down for Zion. They go together really easy for a big presentation value. I got some great compliments at church along the lines of "Where did you FIND those outfits?!! Gasp! You made those?" (Yeah, that's totally why I do this, ego pet pet.) Unfortunately, our best guess at the pattern drafting wasn't quite wide enough for Zion's ball-shaped body, so I used elastic closures around the buttons instead of button holes. It ended up looking really cute, and gave him a lot more room to maneuver his pudgy little torso. And it was easier for me than making another entire vest. Drafting is not really my strong suit. One day I'll learn my lesson and make a stupid muslin.

Dan came up with the idea of bow-tie for Zion / tie for Harvey, and as always he was spot-on with his fashion sense. Both come from internet tutorials that I altered so much it will not serve you to see the original links. If you want the accessories like the ones you see here you can come to my house and copy my pattern. Or you can buy some from my etsy shop... when I get around to creating one.

Harvey is so lovely to sew for. What an appreciative little child. In every fitting he just gushed over the pants. "Beautiful beautiful pants you made, Mama!" "Can I try on my Easter pants again?" And when he knows I'm making something for him he's so excited about it. "Is my tie ready?" "Can I wear my tie tomorrow?" What a doll. I sure do have a nice family.

But what is Easter really about? Photos? Presents? Bragging about my sewing and my stunningly cute children? No, Harvey said it best when he was playing on the floor this evening: "Life is risen! He's risen indeed!"

Happy Easter everybody!

I did eat fruit because people who say fruit is sugar are crazy. And I okayed maple syrup and honey to be there in case of emergency. And on sundays I put equal in my coffee because the point is just to miss something, not to hate life entirely.

But still. It was kind of a big deal.

I had a big thing to ask God. I wanted a real relationship with Jesus. Not a theoretical relationship with the historical Jesus. I wanted to meet the guy.

Now, of course I had a relationship with Jesus before. I'm saved and all. But what it felt like was, I'm this prisoner and I have a big hot-shot lawyer in the best law firm in the country. But he's so busy that I never see him, I only sometimes get to talk to him on the phone. And mostly I don't even get to talk to him on the phone, he's so busy he never picks up, so I only write my notes on the margins of the legal briefs and pass them along and hope he reads them. I'd like to see him sometime if he gets the chance, but all the same he's a great lawyer and I'm really glad he's representing me.

Like that.

So I did this sugar fast thinking it'd help me get closer to Jesus. And I'm happy to say I don't think it had anything to do with the sugar. Jesus was more than happy to take a meeting.

Of course, the way I am, I think to change my life I have to change my diet. What a Jew I am. Perhaps I over-think things.

I am looking forward to the return of sugar this Sunday with some excitement. I really do miss ketchup (Oona, I know you're laughing at this if you read all the way to here). But there's also lots of trepidation. I don't miss walking into the kitchen when the kids are screaming and thinking, You know what would make this day go better? CHOCOLATE CHIPS!!!!! Maybe the next time that happens I should call my lawyer.

"Okay," I say. "One day Harvey the Pirate fell off his boat. God arranged for a great fish to swallow Harvey the Pirate. And he was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights. And Harvey the Pirate prayed to his God from the belly of the fish - "

"Noooooo," interrupts Harvey. "He didn't pray. He just couldn't see anything down there."

"Oh, okay. So he didn't pray. And the fish vomited Harvey the Pirate onto dry land. And from there he went to Nineva and spoke out against it because its evil ways had offended the Lord."

"Can you tell me another story about Harvey the pirate?"

"Well, if we're on this kick, one time Harvey the Pirate was crossing the sea of Galilee when a terrible storm came up. And the wind was blowing and the waves were crashing, but Jesus was asleep on the deck of the boat. So Harvey the Pirate woke up Jesus and said, 'Don't you care? We're perishing!' And Jesus said to the wind, 'Stop blowing!' and he said to the waves 'Be calm!' and they were! And Harvey the Pirate said quietly, 'I think this is the son of God!'"

"Ha ha," Harvey laughs. "Can you tell me about Harvey the Pirate nailed to a cross?"

"um, well, okay. Harvey the Pirate was nailed to a cross next to Jesus. And there was some other guy on the other side of Jesus, and the other guy was mocking Jesus saying, 'If you're the son of God get us all down from here!' but Harvey the Pirate said to Jesus, 'Don't listen to him. Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.' And Jesus said to Harvey the Pirate, 'Truly I tell you, this evening you will be with me in paradise.'"

"There's a tomb in that story."

"Yes, er, then they were all laid in a tomb. Jesus and Harvey the Pirate and this other guy."

"But then other people came."

"Yes, other people came to the tomb and Jesus wasn't there. The angel said, 'Jesus is alive!' And they were happy. Hurray! The end. Now at your lunch."

Golly. I hope Harvey stops asking for these kind of stories by the time he's old enough to find this upsetting.

(Now for a joke only Dan will appreciate: Earlier Jesus had said, "You ask to see miraculous signs. I tell you the truth. No other sign will be given except the sign of Harvey the Pirate. For just as Harvey the Pirate was three days in the belly of the fish, so the Son of Man will be three days in the depths of the earth.)

In a way I'm sort of glad that I ruined this sweater. Far worse things could have happened. I could have built my own house and saw it burn to the ground. I could have lost my wedding ring down a storm drain.

There is a sort of freedom that comes when I do something terribly stupid. Of course I'm an idiot. Of course I do stupid things all the time. That's my nature. That's why I need God all the more. If I do anything right ever it's because God helped me. Without God, everything I do quickly turns to shit. It's freeing to think that there's no middle ground. As much as I wanted that sweater, I want God more.

I keep imagining disappointments that could feel worse. I could have moved across the country to start a church that never got off the ground. I could have lost a pregnancy. I could have been the australian relay runner who trained her ass off for years to get to the Beijing olympics, only to have the US runner fall into her lane before she ever got to pass her baton. (ed. note: I tried and failed to find a picture of this. I can tell you from my memory though, that the woman looked wicked super pissed.) I have a high opinion of Australians, so I imagine after the foot-stomping was over she went back home to her massive sheep farm and went on with life. If a reporter asked her about it the olympics she'd be all, "Yeah it was disappointing, but things like this happen. Stop running??? Why would I stop running? I run all the time. You got to around here, mate, to avoid all the poisonous snakes."

And there's something else. I take a lot of pride in my knitting. Too much pride, probably. Pride is a sin, and how much worse if you stretch it out over 60 hours of thinking, "Everyone is gonna think this looks so good. Everyone is going to be so impressed by my craftiness." I love knitting, but I don't want to spend my free time weaving garments of condemnation upon my soul. I want God more. I want to stitch away thinking, "Let this glorify you somehow, Jesus."

Dan said something very encouraging yesterday. He said: "You're so brave to make big things that can get ruined." I think this needs to be true for crafting and for everything. Let's admit there's an element of risk in doing big things. Let's lean into that risk anyway.

Dan things the sweater is salvageable. We put mason jars in the sleeves to stretch them as they dry, and I'll see where things end up in a few days. Maybe it could come out as some sort of tight pullover. If not, I can always felt it some more and cut it up for slippers. 60-hour slippers. I don't want to think too hard about it.

"You wanna hear about when Jesus was born? Or about grown-up Jesus?" I ask.

"Grown up Jesus."

"Well," I say, wondering how much detail I can convey without burning onions. "When Jesus was 30 he went to his cousin John the Baptist to be baptized in the Jordan river. And when he did the sky split open and a bird came down from heaven. Well, it was like a bird but it was really the spirit of the Lord, and a voice came down from heaven saying, 'You are my son, my beloved, with you I am well pleased.'"

"Can you tell me more of that story, Mama?"

"Well, after that Jesus went into the desert for 40 days and was tempted by the devil. Then he came out and began his ministry."

"Can you tell me more bout that?"

"Jesus walked around from town to town and healed everyone he met who was sick, and helped people with whatever they needed, like if they were hungry he made them some food, or if they wanted to know the right way to live he told them what to do, which was to follow him."

"Tell me more!"

"Then the jewish leaders didn't like what he was saying, so they had him killed after kind-of a puppet trial, they killed him on a cross which is called crucifixion."

"Oh," Harvey says giggling. "Can you tell me more of that story?"

"He went to the place where the dead are, and on the third day he rose, which is to say he came back from the dead. He was resurrected. And people say Jesus died for all our sins, and if you believe in him you're what's called 'saved.' You could be saved too if you want, Harvey."

Suddenly Harvey's face turns ashen. "I DON'T WANT TO!" he yells.

Harvey has asked me several times this week to "tell the christmas story." Of course this is the kind of moment in parenting where a spotlight shines down from heaven and I turn on my thousand-watt smile and say "of course my little darling!" and drop whatever dishes or laundry or christmas present I happen to be wrapping. (Yes, I'm so exhausted now I've started wrapping dishes...)

I vacillate between trying to put the story in words Harvey can understand and reverting to scriptural recitation because I don't want to leave anything out. Harvey would prefer the latter, I think. When I was saying yesterday "The Glory of the Lord shone roundabout them and they were very afraid," Harvey interrupted and said, "They were SORE afraid, you mean!"

At any rate, whether you'd prefer goodwill towards men, to humanity, or only for those on whom His favor rests (I'm referencing translations here, not trying to provoke an ideological battle on Christmas Eve) I pray that you will feel a bit of peace on earth today, peace that only God can give, which feels the same no matter how you put it.

All this is to say that the following stories are adorable, but please don't think we're like crazy fundamentalists force-feeding our two-year-old bible all the time. He talks about many other subjects, including Santa Clause and Thomas the tank engine. (I don't know why I pick these out as anti-religious examples. A subject for another post I guess.)

I think that's enough preamble. On to the biblical cuteness.

————

Here is Harvey's one-sentence summary of the bible, spoken as he was flipping through a copy on the coffee table:

"Now they go to sleep. Then they wake up and play. And on and on and on."

————

We listened to a bit of audio bible on our drive to Market Basket this week. After we were done shopping, as we were walking back to the car, Harvey suddenly got very excited about listening to it again.

"Are we going to watch the... uh... uh... the savior show?" he asked.

————

We sang a song in church last sunday called "Bless the Lord." As the last chorus was dying down a woman near the front yelled out, "Bless the Lord! Bless Him!" Harvey's eyes widened and he immediately called out in his loudest voice:

"Bess da 'Ord! Bess 'Im!"

Because, you know, he can't say the letter "L."

Then, because it felt so good to yell in church, he did it again.

If all 500 churchgoers hadn't turned around the first time, they turned for the second.

And I just stood there like some parenting prodigy. Yes, my child is moved to praise by the Holy Spirit ALL THE TIME my smile beamed.

I pray this half jokingly, though of course I would really like my student loans cancelled. On Sallie Mae dot com there is a loan-cancellation raffle that picks a winner each month. This is what my friend Bridget calls "a very legitimate contest" and we both pray to win. But Bridget is more morally upstanding than I, and I would be happy with a server melt-down or some other cataclysmic event that could magically wiped my loans off the face of the earth.

I'd still take a golden ticket or a useful crash of the banking system. But no less magically my father came to visit this weekend, bearing the news that my Grandmother is making an early disbursement of inheritance this year to the tune of the remainder of my student loans. Plus a nice extra chunk of change that will give us a bit of breathing room in 2012.

"But Dad!" I said, "She gave us money last year, and this is twice as much!"

"Well, you have two kids now." he said.

"Oh no," I said. "Don't encourage us."

Anyway, I'm pretty excited to be debt-free next year, I mean excluding the bottomless pit of the home mortgage and all. I'll take it as an answer to prayer. Also Dan took Harvey out for the afternoon and I miraculously got both a nap and a some time to sew. And the few hours with 35 pounds less children turned my foot problem from a major wincing limp into a minor irritation.

So there is a God in heaven after all. And come January he is totally buying me a new pair of running shoes.

Anyway, that's not the part I like. I like the part that comes before that:

"Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce... seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile... When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place."

Jeremiah had a harsh word for the exiles. They weren't getting back home for seventy years. That meant some of them weren't getting back home at all. But it's this knowledge that was supposed to bring them hope. "I know the plans I have for you..." says the Lord. YOU may not know them. YOU may not like them. But you're not the plan-maker.

Now stop being a dick to your neighbors.

We've had too many nights without sleep around here. Harvey needs changed at 2am for some reason. Zion needs to be awake at 4:30 so he can poop. I want to go to sleep every night at 8pm, but Harvey's sweet voice calls from the back of my mind saying "Mama you make my backpack?" It's not difficult to recall the sound; he asks about every five minutes when he's awake. Seriously, if he were asking me to buy something I'd probably smack him, but for some reason the nag to get sewing is endearing.

Plant gardens and eat what they produce. Don't worry about WHEN the big problems are gonna be solved. Maybe it'll be hard for a long time. It's not my business to worry about it. The hope and the future are part of God's plan, not mine.

Harvey at 1 day old. When I had no idea what I was getting into.

Preconceptions

I felt like I had already read a lot of the bible before. Growing up I attended Hebrew school three times a week, so I felt pretty comfortable with my knowledge of the Genesis stories. I knew the highlights of Exodus: what we learn from Passover and then from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream coat. I knew of the kings Saul, David, and Solomon, their rises to power and the major sins that brought them down (or, whatever, didn't. Biblical history isn't as moralizing as we'd like it to be.) I felt like if you've read three psalms you've read em all. The first three Gospels were things I read recently. The letters I've studied on Wednesday nights.

Revelation was something I never intended to read.

Logistics

The bible has a lot of words in it, some of them interesting. Some of them are numbers, like in the book of Numbers. I read every single number printed in numbers, though I can't say I got anything out of it other than some sort of bizarre pride in my resolute follow-through. I also didn't get much from reading the endless genealogies either, though because I was pregnant during 4 months of this project I did cast about for baby names during the process. (We were set on Zion even before the pregnancy, which was good since I failed to convince Dan that Jubilee was the best female alternative.)

I read the books of the bible in the order in which they appear, because I wanted to read the bible I'm used to and I didn't want to have a study guide or some such thing to lose somewhere and waylay the project. There was only one point when I thought I would never make it through, and that's when I hit the psalms. Leviticus I liked and Numbers I plowed through the way one ploddingly attacks the middle of a marathon, but the psalms just made me want to hit my head against a wall. There's no narrative flow, often not even within a psalm, and they're all so much the same I found it impossible to keep my place from one day to the next. In the end I skipped the book of psalms and went back to finish it last after reading everything else. I innovated my approach by using a tiny stick-it to mark the next psalm I had to read next; that way I could immediately tell where I had to start and prevent the infuriating suspicion that I had read a single psalm twice.

Post-Conceptions

If I had ever had the urge to tell someone "the bible says" before, it is completely gone from me now.

The bible is a very long book which says a very many things, some of which are contradictory. If I were to pick a single commandment-type theme that runs through the bible, it would be this:

DON'T WORSHIP OTHER GODS.

God seems to be pretty set on this point. Don't bow down to idols, stop making idols, seriously you guys stop worshiping idols. By volume, I'd have to wager that this is the most repeated command in the whole bible. Other than that, I'd say the meaning of the commandments are up for discussion.

There are a lot of different books in the bible. They were written by different people. Ezekiel and Revelations were apparently written by paranoid schizophrenics. Some letters ring truer than others. As Shane Claiborne puts it: that's why God invented highlighters.

What's the worst thing in the bible?

A while ago Dan posed the question: What is the worst thing in the bible? I thought of that a bit while reading through the thing, and I've come up with two answers. The most heart-wrenching moment in the bible, for me, is when Abraham sends Hagar into the desert with toddler Ishmael.

When the water in the skin was gone, she put the boy under one of the bushes. Then she went off and sat down about a bowshot away, for she thought, "I cannot watch the boy die."
(Genesis 21:15-16)

A week into January I thought: I can't go on. Genesis is too real.

Granted, there are plenty of references later on to women eating their babies or dashing them] against walls, but they're written rather impersonally so we don't feel connected to the characters.

But God ends up saving Hagar and Ishmael, so I think the worst thing in the bible is the list of curses at the end of Deuteronomy which warns what will happen if we don't follow God's law:

You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life. In the morning you will say, "If only it were evening!" and in the evening, "If only it were morning!" — because of the terror that will fill your hearts and the sights that your eyes will see. The Lord will send you back in ships to Egypt on a journey I said you should never make again. There you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and females slaves, BUT NO ONE WILL BUY YOU.

(Deuteronomy 28:66-68) (emphasis mine. Isn't that horrible?)

In Summary

Since I finished in October, I can honestly say that reading the entire bible in a year is not hard. I hope to do it again next year, although I think I'm gonna put in for a different translation on my Christmas list. Sometimes in church we read psalms from "The Message" translation and they seem a whole lot more accessible.

Meanwhile, I have the next two months to work on some other end-of-year goals. Like the Christmas presents. Oh God the Christmas presents.

Because what on earth was I thinking, cutting AGAINST the grain? Now the stupid hat doesn't stretch horizontally and it's all bunchy on top when I wear it. Once when I was in high school I was making a pair of pants as a girl-scout project, and in a fit of industriousness I thought I would pre-cut all my pieces before bringing them to my girl scout leader. You know, to save time in our sewing session. She spent the whole time shaking her head saying, "I can't BELIEVE you cut your fabric without talking to me first!"

And I was all, I'm not supposed to cut fabric without a chaperone? Sewing is unbelievably lame.

Now I look back on that experience and I am of two minds. On one hand I say, wow, that really turned me off sewing for a while. I wish I could have been given free range to be more creative and learn my own lessons progressively. On the other hand, what was I thinking cutting all my pieces out willy nilly? If I brought my current self those pieces now, I would be all, "I can't BELIEVE you cut your fabric without talking to me first!"

Religion is like that too. As helpful as it may be to your overall life happiness to, I dunno, read the bible or tithe or respect your husband, if someone tells you that in a you-must-do-this sort of way I'm all, "This religion stuff is lame."

It's only after years of having your life go poorly that you turn to your younger doppelganger and scream "For the love of God, PLEASE don't have PREMARITAL SEX!"

I find myself sometimes acting as a sewing killjoy these days, looking at my friends getting all excited about sewing and yelling "PREWASH YOUR FABRIC! PAY ATTENTION TO THE GRAIN! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T CUT THAT INTO QUILT PIECES IF YOU DON'T OWN A SEWING MACHINE!"

As if whole continents hadn't hand quilted just fine for hundreds of years without the aid of machines.

If I think handmade hats are ugly it's probably sin in me that tells me so, and I should certainly stop judging the quilts at church for being finished without bias tape. As for religion, there seems to be no good way to mind-meld our dogma onto other people, as helpful to them as that might be.

See? Even the bible thinks that was f-ed up.

Also, in a related note, I finally made it to the end of Isaiah in my read-the-entire-bible-in-a-year discipline. The books only get shorter and easier to read from here on in! Hurray!

Some other favorite bits from my recent reading:

"You were sold for nothing,
and without money you will be redeemed."
-Isaiah 52:3

But my favorite bible bit you'll never hear in church is this cute story from 2 Kings 6:

The company of the prophets said to Elisha, "Look, the place where we meet with you is too small for us. Let us go to the Jordan, where each of us can get a pole; and let us build a place there for us to meet."
 
And he said, "Go."

Then one of them said, "Won't you please come with your servants?"

"I will," Elisha replied. And he went with them.

They went to the Jordan and began to cut down trees. As one of them was cutting down a tree, the iron axhead fell into the water. "Oh no, my lord!" he cried out. "It was borrowed!"

The man of God asked, "Where did it fall?" When he showed him the place, Elisha cut a stick and threw it there, and made the iron float. "Lift it out," he said. Then the man reached out his hand and took it.

I know, really deep, right? I didn't say I planned to understand the entire bible in a year. Just read the thing.

"Wait, I've got it!" I said to Dan. "What about Zion?"

So Zion (rhymes with Brian) was enthroned as our leading boy's name, even as early as two years ago. It's a good thing this little one came out a boy too, because a potential girl baby really dodged the hippy bullet on being named "Agape," or "Easter," or "Jubilee." (Although I still can't see why Dan vetoed Jubilee. I may still fight for it in the future.)

Whether you are Jewish and waiting for the messiah to come, or Christian and waiting for the messiah to come back, Zion represents the hope we have in God's future. One day people will so reconcile with God and with each other that the real places where we live here on earth will be made new. And we don't want to be lazy laggards ourselves; we're trying in our little ways to infuse our environment and relationships with reconciliation. Obviously sometimes better than others. Hey, that's why it's a hope and a vision, not a brownie try-it.

With your children it is the same: you hope for big things and you work for little things. You hope grandly that they would live freer and truer and more connected lives than you ever could. At the same time you pray humbly that they would know God, that they would grow to follow Him, and that God would forgive you for the defects incurred in the shipping and handling.

All that hope wrapped up into a very little name for a very little guy. That's Zion. For the moment I'm calling him "Baby Z" and that seems to suit him too.

Because Neil's death was so sudden and stupid and random it was like I had to change the whole way my brain worked to fit it in. Obviously people die all the time, in car accidents and from cancer and from freak things like amniotic fluid embolisms. But I just don't want to believe it - it's one stupid puzzle piece that just does not want to fit. So I think maybe I should hide it or throw it into the trash because its presence means that I might have been putting the whole rest of the puzzle together wrong.

We read it in church today and this time of year every year. Men die. Sons die. Prophets die. It's true but also random and stupid and hard to make fit. So instead we say: Look over here! Look at this bunny!

Rascal killed a baby bunny once. He hardly touched it and all of a sudden it was dead. The poor little thing looked so sweet and perfect and beautiful and completely and stupidly un-alive. As did the mouse who died this week in our kitchen. We try our best to catch the mice humanely, but this one we didn't even trap - it was one of two that got stuck in the recycling bin overnight. Harvey and I released one mouse who'd gotten stuck in the bin plus two we'd caught in the traps, but the other little one who'd fallen into the recycling looked very sick when we transfered her to the big cage, and she failed to make a rallying recovery when we moved her to a warm little hospice box next to the stove. By bedtime she had stopped breathing, and even as I was relieved that she looked so peaceful I was almost inconsolable that something so sweet and small and perfect just died because of my stupid recycling.

I know that mice die, that indeed these ones only lived because of my kitchen scraps, and when they're pooping disease all over my silverware every morning it's a war of them versus me. But still, it's my fault. My kitchen. My recycling bin. My big wide sphere of influence that I can't control that includes death.

And when I reflect, I know that the other three mice who we drove 20 minutes into Carlisle to release might not even have it any better. They may not have found warm places to bed down for the night. They might have gotten eaten by hawks just moments after I set them down. Even driving there yesterday I was thinking: does it really matter? Does it really make a difference? Does this little outing for the sake of my conscience do anything really? anything at all?

What Jesus did on Good Friday seemed pretty trivial at the time too. That he died on a cross instead of while leading a violent insurrection... Seriously dude, what the difference between a dead messiah and a dead messiah? What's the difference between a mouse dying in the woods and a mouse dying in our kitchen. Does it really make any difference at all?

Is there something in the way that Harvey says, "Mouse fee inna woods?" Something that means something? Something that makes me tear up because "free" means something somehow important?

One stupid death on a cross among other stupid deaths on crosses, it shouldn't have made a difference or changed anything, but somehow it did; somehow it changed our hearts and through some miraculous mystery set them free. Even though death surrounds us, even though we all taste it someday and smell it in our nostrils long before that, still there is something in this Friday that we call it Good, something about the assurance of freedom that is important. That in death and before death and after death there is a real freedom, that is a real thing that means something.

Neil, you knew that better than me.

That said, there is nothing in the universe I'd rather be doing right now than raising my child minute by minute. I love getting excited about the things he gets excited about. I love presenting new things for him to get excited about. I love watching the little wheels in his head spin and expand as he gets older. Like today when he held up a lego green floor piece next to a duplo green floor piece and said, "Big big one? tiny tiny one?" Woah! Or also this morning when he helped to unload the dishwasher by putting all the silverware in the drawer, and then tried to open the other drawer when he came up with a measuring spoon, and I was floored by how he knows where everything's supposed to go. Or how he walked by himself into the garden, picked up dada's watering can, and walked around trying to water all the seeds while saying "ehn ehn ehn" because the can was so heavy. He walked between the beds and carefully kept his feet off the seedlings. I should have taken a video.

I love that Harvey makes jokes now. That he sings to himself. That if he wants me to sit down and stop bossing him around he says "mama knitting." I love that he mimics my tone of voice to say, "in a second" and "one more" and "Rascal no digging." I love the smell of his hair.

We've gone through pockets of time this year where I've despaired at having no idea what I was doing. Every few weeks I seem to feel that I've reached my stride, only to be thrown back by a new situation or behavior that blindsides me. Which, I guess, pretty much describes parenting. I've been helped by Dan's sound advice (thanks to years of internet reading he knows everything about all subjects at all times, especially child rearing) and also by two books in particular on raising toddlers. The Rosemond book contained a real revelation for me: that parenting a baby is substantially different from parenting a toddler. Babies need to be loved and coddled and taken cared of no matter what, so they learn to trust their parents and by extension the world around them. Kids need to learn they are not actually the center of the universe, and therefore build up their own self-concept and independence. Toddlerhood is the shaky bridge between the two, corresponding to genuine shifts in a child's brain and understanding. Thus, the revelation for me was that sometime between 18 months and 2 years my own actions also need to reflect a shift from babying to parenting. And firmly, otherwise I'll muck everything up. So I've been trying. And I gotta tell you... discipline is awesome! Getting your child to actually do something for you? Much more fun than training a dog!

For example, here are some things we're currently working on in our house. Sand stays in the sandbox, or the sandbox closes. If you hit the dog, you get a 1-second time-out. If you hit mama she will ignore you until you give her a kiss. If you can't stop whining it means you need to go back to bed.

Also, I'm not going to fight you to put your jacket on. I'm going to sit here and read until you come over and say you're ready. It's you who wants to go outside, not me.

Don't I just sound like a mother? Yeah, it surprises me too, sometimes.

Harvey is a good kid and he's taken very rapidly to saying please, to knowing that it's time to shut of the whining machine, and to recovering on his own from a screaming crying tantrum. At the same time, we have challenges. I haven't yet taught Harvey to go to sleep on his own, so we're still doing nursing put-downs, which I have grown to hate. Dan thinks I coddle him too much by going into his room in the night when he calls. I reply that nighttime is scary and turns big boys into babies. Dan replies that I am TEACHING him that nighttime is scary. I say, well, nighttime IS scary, and no amount of pedagogical reading, self-reflection, or grace is going to fundamentally transform me into a person who isn't afraid of the dark. The kind of mother I can be is limited to the kind of person I am, and I'm working hard man, but some things just don't change all that much.

Challenges aside, the days are mostly so good around here that I fell I've finally hit my stride at parenting a toddler. Of course now we're going to go bring a banshee screaming infant into the mix. And then everything will change again.

And then just when I've started to hit my stride with 2, I plan on getting a brood of chickens.

Still, there's a lot down the road to look forward to.

So we prayed together for baby Nathan, our dear friends' tiny baby who is now well on his way to health and normalcy after defeating the terrible blood clot that waylaid him during his first few weeks of life.

I have to admit, Harvey's response to my question was pretty impressive to me. He seemed to "get" that praying for baby Nathan was a thing we did, even though we never tried to teach him so or include him in our prayers (although I'm sure we prayed in his presence several times. He does, after all, hang out with us a lot.)

It just goes to show the wonderful and frightening truth that your kids ARE in fact listening to you, whether you believe it or not.

After praying for baby Nathan was done Harvey also asked to pray for mama, which also made me happy. Then he requested we pray for the window and the crib and his stuffed zebra. Then I told him it was time to stop stalling and go to sleep.

So we read through the story of Jesus, starting when he was 12 (I skipped the 10 pages on Christmas, since I had just read it yesterday) through the crucifixion. Harvey likes the page where Jesus sits on a rock and delivers the sermon on the mount ("Harvey sit rock one day?") as well as the transfiguration ("Harvey up mountain one day?"). Since "one day" is Harvey's favorite expression du jour, we end up having a conversation every page about what we'll do one day and when specifically. We can sit on a rock as soon as the snow melts but we'll have to wait till July to go up a mountain. Anyway...

Harvey has a tendency to take any line of text he understands and repeat it with a more familiar subject, so it shouldn't have surprised me when I read to him that Pilate let the soldiers kill Jesus and Harvey peeped up:

"Mama kill Je-SUS?"

"Um... er.... Yes Harvey, mama killed Jesus. He died for my sins."

"Dada kill Je-SUS?"

"Yes, dada killed Jesus too. We all did."

"Harvey kill Je-SUS?"

"Yes sweetness, you killed Jesus too. You see, he died so all your sins could be forgiven."

"Rascal kill Je-SUS?"

"Well, it's theologically unclear. But no, I don't think that Rascal killed Jesus."

Harvey seemed content with that explanation until we got to the page summarizing the book of Revelation and Harvey repeated "Je-SUS coming one day?" I tried to unexcite him a bit by explaining that all the world first needs to be saved, but I think that was introducing too many new concepts at once since he just kept repeating "One day?"

So it's good to see him taking an interest in his adorably impressionable 21-month way. No pressure on me to get things right or anything...

We finished reading the book and headed off to clean when Harvey demanded, "More song Soul Coughing?" Okay, so we'll listen to Soul Coughing while we vacuum. I'm not the only one in this house who's working on stuff with Harvey, apparently. The 90s punk is all Dan's doing.

Then I got sick yesterday. I am so tired of being sick and pregnant, of the snow and the cold, of all the laundry being dirty and mouse poop in our kitchen drawers and everything being all up in the air. It's infuriating and exhausting. I would like poor little Nathan's health trials to be over. I would like to have enough cash in the bank to pay my midwife next week. I would like to get over this yucky cold which keeps me away from the hospital and makes me offer Harvey videos of trains instead of read-aloud time with real books.

And despite all this, like Dan I am aware of God's presence and provision which sit with us in and despite what's going on.

Unlike Dan, I often ruminate on tragedy. Imagining tragedy in vivid detail is pretty much my main nervous preoccupation. If the dog runs off in the woods I imagine what I will do if I find him lying by the side of the road half run-over, or how I will react when I come around a corner unprotected and bonk into an angry pack of coyotes. Neither is very likely, but it seems important to me to plan how I would react. Since I was a child I have always believed death or a horrible disfiguring accident were just around the corner. When any member of my family goes out in a car I figure it's about a 50% chance that they make it back alive. When I go out I put the chances of my house still standing when I return at about about 60% (good odds!) Violent house fire? I worry about that pretty much every evening before bed.

All of which is to say, you can take the girl out of her Jewish mother, but you can't take the Jewish mother out of the girl.

(Although I don't know if I really phrased that properly...)

Yet I also know in my heart, not just theoretically but experientially, that God is good, that in all things he works for the good of those who love him, and that he has a plan to prosper us and not to harm us. Bad crap still happens, of course, and God is not a push-button robot to stop bad things from happening, but sometimes he does stop bad crap from happening, and if he doesn't he's certainly right there with us when the crap hits the fan. That may or may not be comforting, depending on my mood and the time of day and how much I want certain bad things not to happen. I would prefer my worst fears not to come to pass. I also know that if necessary God will walk with me straight into the middle of my worst fears and I will find them, like a vacant tomb, empty. And either way, what can we do? whatever happens God's all we got and we're in this for the long haul.

None of this comes off as a coherent blog post, but it does help me unload a bit and if nothing else offer an excuse for not showing you cute Harvey pictures for so long (I think the photos on my camera are a month old or something.) Harvey is very very cute. His current preoccupation is asking me to buy everything I can't offer him at the moment. "Harvey Helicopter...Mama buy one?" Um, not right now sweetie. Why don't you pray about it.

But no, now I'm a grown up. A grown up woman, and not just a woman - a mother - who cares about topics like "fostering an environment of faith in your home."

Well, actually, not that topic. That workshop turned out to be totally lame.

The biggest leap of faith in this whole expedition was parting with Harvey for a whole 11 hours. The night before I barely slept at all. I was sure the universe would explode the second I pulled out of the driveway. That's an exaggeration of course, only to illustrate the strength of my anxiety. I actually had much more concrete things I was worried about. For instance, that Harvey and Dan would get in a car accident while going to the store to get milk, or get hit by a car while walking the dog, and I would be an hour away when the hospital called me, and then I'd be so frantic driving back that I'D get in a car accident, and then there you go: all of us dead just because I wanted to go to some stupid conference. I put the likelihood of this happening at about 50/50.

In reality no cars were wrecked over the course of the weekend. The only ill effects seem to be that Harvey didn't poop all day Saturday, and still seems to be holding out until he's sure the mama staying put situation is stabilized. I on the other hand have a stomach severely upset in the opposite direction, so jostled around was my poor belly with all the nerves of the trip. I guess I can't blame my child for having an overly emotional digestive tract. Some things just RUN in the family. ha ha, get it? RUN in the family?

That was a poop joke.

The conference was in Plymouth MA, so the highlight of my day was getting taken out to lunch by my friend Bridget in historic Plymouth center. We even made a trip down to Plymouth rock, the landing site of the pilgrims, which is, er, just a medium-sized rock encased in a cement pavilion. I had been anesthetized to this site by countless school field trips from my youth, but Bridget was like, "THAT's Plymouth Rock??? HA HA HA!

cough. snort.

Really? THAT'S Plymouth Rock???"

You have to admit, it is pretty lame.

Anyway, I'm very happy to be home again, as well as happy to have gotten in some continuing education for my soul, if only because it means I won't have to leave on such an adventure for another year or so. 2-hour long breaks are more my speed these days. Otherwise I have to be home for my little boy... if only to wipe his butt.

So we saw them all this morning at church, and as Dan chatted to Alex about buying a used car in the US, Nelly and I talked about parenting styles in the US versus Europe.

"I haven't really meet any American moms" Nelly complained suddenly. "I want to meet some Americans to be friends with, but every time I go to the park, it's all Germans! So many Germans I meet in the last two weeks! So far I meet 4 new German friends, but only 1 American!"

Eek, I said! This is obviously all my fault. I've been praying for you to meet German women. I'll change up my tactics, clearly.

Okay, so these days there's a lot of stuff we're asking God for. Dan's desperate for more work and I'm desperate for less. I could use a little more patience and we all could use a little more sleep. But it's nice to know that God still delivers abundantly in some things just because you ask. Even if it's not exactly the right thing.

The entire project is constructed out of felt - recycled plastic felt to be exact. The ark took the longest part because I made up the pattern for the body of the boat and did a demo. Dan helped tremendously in drafting the shape of the top decks. The little house on top was all trial and error.

Of course, there are animals on an ark too. I figured the farm animals were the most important, so I made those first. First I made some pigs.

Because felt has a tendency to pull apart if it's stretched too thin, I had to stitch these pigs entirely by hand. I learned this after the first pig I made came apart in the stuffing. Total time spent making pigs, 5 hours. You don't want to know the time total for the whole project.

The cows were a bit bigger so thankfully I could make these on the machine. The draw-back is that they had like a billion tiny pattern pieces to cut out. I bought a pattern for a 9-inch cow and scaled it by half. All the animals had to scale with each other and the door of the ark, you see, which also had to fit the normal stuffed animals that hang around the living room. So much thought went into the sizing. It's called OCD. Or parenting.

And of course I had to make Noah. He's entirely hand-stitched, although I used the machine to make his clothing. He has hair and a beard that are removable, because it's a long voyage. I figure he either grows a beard or loses his hair over 40 days.

Harvey isn't so keen on Noah, although he likes the ark to put things in... out-of-playset things like legos and sippy cups. And he likes the cows very much, probably because every time he picks one up I say "Moooooooo." These days he's starting to grab one and say "mmmmuuuuuuh." He's pretty smart that little guy.

Anyway, I was thrilled this morning that the rain let up and I could again participate in my daily ritual. I knew it had been raining a lot, so much that our basement flooded again, but last time this happened my calf-high boots could handle the puddles in the woods so I donned them again without worry.

Someone should explain to me the phenomenon of "water table." You can forward elementary-school diagrams to leah at this domain dot net.

So we got into the woods and I let Rascal off the leash. In a few minutes we approached our first puddle - one that had been there in the last rainstorm. My boots had handled it last time so I didn't think twice about wading in. Seconds later I felt the rush of freezing cold water into my boots. The water was up to my knees.

Freezing pain was followed by growing dread and increasing numbness. I imagine this is a tiny slice of what death must feel like. (Then again probably not, but that does sound lovely dramatic, doesn't it?)

According to Jill Homer, when freezing cold water rushes into your boot in the wilderness it's bad news. Here you can buy here book on traversing the alaskan tundra by bike. This being Bedford, I wasn't quite in iditarod territory. I was after all only ten minutes from home. But still, fear of consequences wasn't ill placed. My feet were starting to go numb. How long until frostbite sets in? And then gangrene? Will I ever complete a marathon again?

Or is gangrene for hot places and frostbite in cold places until the darn thing falls off? Why don't I know this?

At the moment Rascal was out of view. I screamed and screamed for him, the panic mounting in my voice. "Rascal? Rascal!!! Mommy's hurt and needs to go HOME!"

I frequently think the people with houses that border the woods shutter up the back windows when they hear me coming. That nut job again?

I prayed to God furiously that Rascal would come back. That the spirit of warmth would protect my toes. That I'd get out of the woods quickly relatively unscathed.

Miraculously, Rascal appeared moments later and I tromped the whole procession back across the lake and on home. So happy was I to get off those boots and socks and soggy jeans. This is about when I decided, "I'm friggin staying home from work today."

After an hour of dryness everything's fine and I have regained feeling in my toes.

The bible says we make stupid choices and them blame God for them (somewhere in proverbs - too tired to look it up.) That seems fair. I don't always blame God for my dumbass mistakes, but I do frequently ask him to bail me out, so to speak. Get me out of cold water. Get me out of hot water. I didn't wear the right boots. I've got too many loans. I'm in a career that's boring. Can you magically snap your fingers and make it okay?

Not sure what the answer is theologically speaking, but I'm crossing my fingers and hoping for a yes.

This t-shirt is my second try of this pattern. The first one came out a touch too small, so of course the second is too big. Some day I'll get it. In the mean time, it's the perfect thing for an extra layer beneath overalls.

Palm Sunday begins holy week, a seven-day spiritual event where you reflect on HOLY SHIT WHAT IS HARVEY GOING TO WEAR FOR EASTER???!!!

Just kidding. Sort of.

On the topic of holy week, last night we had a seder at my parents' house, and I noticed our Christmas card still displayed prominently on my parents' fridge. "Harvey was so cute as a sheep!" I said.

"Yeah," said my mom, "I've been meaning to ask you. What does it mean 'All We Like Sheep?'"

"Well," I said, "We usually read from Isaiah at Christmas. Isaiah writes that 'All we like sheep have gone astray, and the Lord has laid on him - him being the messiah - the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.'"

"Oh Goodness." My mother said rolling her eyes and walking away. "That's terrible."

My dad was in the kitchen too. "That's sad" he said.

They both walked away shaking their heads.

You annoying morbid Christians. Why on earth would you put such a thing on a holiday card?

Holy week is a time when we celebrate a lot of things. Bunnies. Babies. Cadbury Cream Eggs. The fact that Jesus died for our sins.

As a latecomer to Christianity, I appreciate the idea of a God who didn't just make cute things to turn a blind eye from the bad and ugly.

So anyway, if you're into it, have a wonderful holy week. I'm celebrating on the blog with some fun project revealed every day. There is easter sewing to photograph, and videos in editing, and minimal complaints about my breasts, so it should be a fun week!

A certain childcare provider in our stable of helpful baby watchers has a real "thing" about the cold issue, especially as it pertains to the little space between the baby's socks and his pants when he moves around. You see, as he moves sometimes the pants ride up and SKIN IS EXPOSED!!! (As if were were in the arctic tundra and that skin might instantly frost-bight in the 63 degree air inside our house.) So to save the baby from certain amputation this childcare provider pulls up his socks as far as they can go, up onto his calfs, and then the crisis is averted. No frost-bight praise God.

I, on the other hand, am a person who HATES the feel of constricting socks. Why don't you just pour cement around my feet and drop me in the river?!!! So when this childcare provider does the thing with the socks, I point out that the top of the socks make a line on his skin, and clearly this is an indication that they are cutting off his circulation, and this will positively kill his potential for future success in the Russian Ballet.

They need those calf muscles. Look at Barishnakov.

Suffice it to say there there have been spats over this issue the sock height issue. Still, I was surprised the other day to hear my reasons reinterpreted in the following fashion:

"Your mother doesn't like it when I pull up your socks" I heard her say to the baby, "because she thinks it looks faggoty."

WOAH WOAH WOAH!

SAYS WHAT NOW???

"How could you possibly ever think that was even close to anything I ever said in my life ever???" I stammered out, my head spinning into another dimension.

"What? I don't want his legs to be cold, but you said it looked bad!"

"Cuts. Off. Circulation. Not.... Looks.... F-Word." (here I was hyperventilating, so I couldn't get the words out so well.)

Not to say that I'm an immaculately non-judgmental human being. I have made one or two or several hundred thousand off-color remarks in my day. But here was a clear example of this woman I trust NOT LISTENING WHILE I GIVE SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS REGARDING THE HEALTH OF MY BABY! No, just kidding, I was mad because I'm not a bigot.

I do hope that in the new millennia certain words slip our of use from our collective vocabulary entirely. I'm thinking of you, N-word. And you, C-word. And you, faggoty. Not even for knee socks.

Thinking about hope and faith and healthcare this morning got me remembering a story. A few days after Harvey was born I had some swelling in a private region of my private region, and the midwife determined that what was necessary was a shot of cortisone. This isn't exactly street-level stuff, at least not if you live on a street in Bedford, so she told me to go find a doctor to prescribe it. She could administer the shot, but as a home-birth midwife she can't actually get the medicine because blah blah blah this country sucks. Anyway, after bypassing the medical industrial complex for my entire pregnancy I suddenly had to go begging for someone for a shot in my hoo-ha.

First I called my regular gynecologist, the one I hadn't seen for over 10 months, and let's just say that she was not happy with my request. If you're brave enough to give birth at home you must also prepare yourself for getting yelled at. A lot. Plan B was the ER, so Dan and I prepared ourselves. We packed books, lunches, diapers for the baby, and headed over to our local hospital.

I presented myself to the admitting desk. "I gave birth three days ago and I have swelling in my la-la-la." She looked at me with a completely blank face, stared for a few seconds, and then said, "Go talk to the nurse. Around the corner."

I entered the ER proper through the large double doors and looked around for a nurses' station. There was a desk with a few ladies in scrubs standing around, so I addressed myself to them. "The woman at the desk told me to come here. I gave birth three days ago and I have swelling in my la-la-la." They looked at me blankly. "Ummmm," one of them said, "You'll need to talk to a nurse."

They called over another woman who was walking down the hall. "This lady wants to speak to a nurse" they said.

(Not to interrupt the story too much, but maybe a start to reforming healthcare in this country would be implementing an actual procedure of admitting patients to the ER... I'm no process expert myself, but this sort of thing might help as a time-saving measure.)

"I'm a nurse," the woman boasted, her chest puffing out in front of her as she sauntered over. It was as if we had called for Superman.

"I gave birth three days ago and I have swelling in my la-la-la," I said.

"Oh Brother!" she sighed. She looked me over like I was toxic. "Okay," she said with another big sigh. "Let's get this girl a room."

That's why people go into nursing I hear, because they loooove helping sick people. No, I'm just kidding! It's because they can't get into college.

"My husband is here with the baby, I'll have to get them," I said.

"WHAT???" She exploded. "You brought a newborn to the hospital? Tell them to get out of here right now!"

"Um..."

"Go tell them to go home! Then you come back here! This is no place for a newborn!"

(Not to interrupt again, but does anyone else see the irony here? I AGREE that a hospital is no place for a newborn, that's why I didn't give birth to one there.)

Anyway, here was my predicament. Three know-nothings inexplicably dressed in scrubs and Superman over-burdened the nurse wanted to put me in a room for an undisclosed amount of time, separating me from my three-day-old baby who needed breast milk every hour.

I walked back through the doors of the ER and into the empty waiting room. Dan was sitting there reading a book with a sleeping Harvey in his car seat. To protect from ambient germs, the car seat was covered in a linen blanket like a giant face mask for the whole contraption.

"Let's go," I said.

We went out to the car and called the midwife. "I'll lie down all day, I'll ice it, I'll apply salts. Can I please just go home?" She heard the trembling in my voice and she told me I could give it another day and reevaluate tomorrow. We drove back through Concord with the sleeping baby in the back. Diaper bag still stacked with fresh diapers. Wrapped up sandwiches uneaten. I bit my lip and felt like a moron.

We pulled into the driveway and turned off the car. Dan came around to my side to open the door for me. "Our hope is built on nothing less," he started humming "than Jesus Christ and God's goodness." The rest of the hymn continues: "I shall not trust the sweetest frame, but only rest on Jesus' name."

It's true. We know that home birth is medically safe - we have hard evidence. But we also know that medical evidence isn't the be-all end-all understanding of the universe. And that's the real reason we chose to begin our family far away from the judging eyes of nurses. They're not the ones who can bring life from death, even if they do think they're superman.

The chorus of the song goes: "On Christ the solid rock I stand; all other ground is sinking sand. All other ground is sinking sand."

The next day the swelling was gone.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to make anyone think that the way out of our nation's health care crisis is to voluntarily forgo medical treatment when nurses are bitchy. It's a different comparison that I was drawing in my brain. Everyone was so hopeful that healthcare reform would get passed, but then the politicians all mucked it up like they normally do, and the bill got watered down like it normally does, and now we've elected another republican to the senate which makes it less likely that even the crap version will stay in tact. And yet, are we that surprised? That the two-party system failed us? That something sucky happened in politics?

It's a bit early to look to the end of the age for help, what with so many politicians unsaved and all. But it's not too soon to put hope in a good repository of hope. It's worked out before. And so, at the commenters urging, I will ask Jesus to inspire our politicians to make nice with each other.

After all, if a little prayer can alleviate swelling in your normal every-day pussy, it shouldn't take much longer for the ones in congress.

This is the theatrical challenge I face in lo three hours. The costumes are sown, the lines are memorized... all that's left is the improbable portrayal of the holy family that we must execute this afternoon. Acting ability = stretched.

On the other hand, Harvey is going to be the cutest baby Jesus this town has ever seen!

We will post pictures of Harvey's acting debut, as well as results from all our holiday elfing in not too long. In the mean time, may heaven's wishes of peace on earth and goodwill to all mankind manifest themselves in your household this evening.

Merry Christmas!

There have been some scattered moments of grace over the weekend, moments which renewed my faith that I am not alone in the creation, redemption, and sustainment of the little Harvester. On Saturday Harvey spiked a fever, and I gave him tylenol but he threw it up thirty minutes later, and then I took his temp and it was 102, but I couldn't give more tylenol, could I? How much absorbs in 30 minutes? I felt certain I would make the wrong decision and that I was completely helpless. So I ran a baby bath and plopped Harvey in it and said on his behalf, "Jesus, take my fever away." Harvey flushed for a second and the next moment he was cool to the touch. I took him out of the bath and his fever was down to 100.5

Then on Sunday, lest I start to develop a magical belief in water, the miracle repeated itself in a slightly different manner. I measured a temp of 102 with Harvey on the changing table, and because of my newfound faith I put my hand on his head and said "Jesus, lower the temperature." I shook the thermometer and took another reading. It was 99.9 "Harvey" I said, "You don't know it yet, but we have an awesome God."

Today Harvey was feeling fairly cool but I wanted to check his temp just to be sure. I took off his diaper, gave him a wipe, and stuck the thermometer in. 102. 102? But that doesn't make sense! He's barely warm. I shook the thing like a Polaroid and took another reading. 99.5. Wait, what? What the hell? Who makes a thermometer with a confidence level of plus or minus two degrees???

Oh wait, here's something. We have an electric wipes warmer, and I've been using the hot wipes to clean the thermometer before putting it in. Do you think that maybe could have had an effect on the reading? Do you think that putting a hot wipe on the tip of the thermometer right before sticking it in his butt could maybe, just maybe, affect the accuracy of a digital thermometer?

So maybe Harvey wasn't really in that much danger after all. But of course, that's what Satan would have you believe.

I lie. What really happened was I googled "christening outfit" on the internet and the cheapest one was like fifty bucks. And I was all, WTF? No WAY am I paying that much money for a dorky elf tux that he's going to wear one time! I'm going to sew that effing baptism suit if its the last thing I do!

All this decision making happened on Monday, when I had a full week in front of me to dream big crafters dreams and poo-poo the christening industrial complex. Unfortunately, it was also a week full of a big conference at work, which meant that I got all the way to Friday (two days before the big event) with narry a stitch done sewn. So Friday afternoon as soon as the work whistle blew I threw the baby at his father and locked myself in the craft room. Which is a lie too, actually. The craft room is really just Harvey's room with a sewing machine in the corner, so there's no locking myself in there unless I want to cut off access to the changing table, which oh I DO NOT want to do.

Anyway... the outfit. It came together in about 5 hours, with extra minutes thrown in on saturday and sunday to add buttons and make slight adjustments. It's a one-piece sailor suit made entirely out of fleece. The pants are pleated at the waste and flounced at the bottom; two flourishes that took a long time to do for not really coming across in any of the photo. The top has a bow-tie sort of thing that I threw together without bothering to look at the directions or even any picture of what a sailor suit should look like, so I take full responsibility if you (like my mother) think it looks ridiculous.

The hat I didn't make. It, like our bagels, is used, or as I prefer to say "vintage" from our local consignment store down the street. I hadn't planned to pair the fleece suit with the silk hat, but Dan put them together this morning and marveled that we had a budding french chef on our hands.

Harvey performed admirably in his holy spotlight today. He slept through the church service until it was time for the baptism, and didn't make a peep when the water hit his head or when the priest carried him down the isle to the congregation. He suffered being passed from hand to hand at the big brunch we threw for him, and generally showed off what a good baby he was. Although when I took him upstairs for his nursing it was clear he was exhausted from the social effort. He fell asleep after just a few bites.

But our little guy is a party trouper! After a brief nap, he joined the crowds again, who in their brew-filled merriment insisted on seeing Harvey in his halloween hat. At the same time folks were passing around some hand-made lollypops that our neighbor Jen had made, and one made it into Harvey's hand, which is how we got this photo:

Sailor suit, sheepy hat, cross-shaped lollypop, and brown winter boots. It's a confusing world we live in, Harvey. That's why Christ walks it with us. Happy baptism!

This church group is a Vineyard SmallGroup, pronounced with the emphasis on the first sylable as if it wasn't a modifier. You gotta say it as if it's all one word. The proper pronunciation is very important if you want to fit in with the evangelical crowd, so we don't want to get it wrong. Anyway, we've been spending more time at the Cambridge Vineyard church lately, on account of the rockin worship music and free bagels. So we thought we'd take the plunge and get to know some of the folks on a more regular basis. This particular SmallGroup is less intellectual and more pray-y than our normal bible study, which is fun just for a change of pace. And it's family friendly with a rotating baby sitting role, which will be helpful if I ever decide to let Harvey out of my sight for an hour.

This Friday Dan and I volunteered for kid patrol. We had a lot of fun playing with two kids who were there and with an incredible variety of brand-specific Mr. Potato Head attire. Note: it's very important not to mix the Star Wars feet attachments with Red Sox arms attachments if you're 4. Meanwhile the rest of the group watched the documentary film Finger of God, a film about miracles.

I had already seen the movie (indeed we own it) so I didn't mind missing the replay. Still, I was bummed to miss out on adult group time, so you can imagine my excitement when the kids' mom came in to get them ready for bed and told me I could join the group for the last 10 minutes of discussion. Of course it's a bit of a weird dynamic, jumping into a meeting already in session. I hadn't even introduced myself to all the people there, and when I came in they were debriefing the film, so I just plunked down in a chair by the door. The folks were talking about the types of miraculous healings in the movie, and wondering if it would be too much of a leap of faith for us regular people to try to do this stuff. Then the leader of the SmallGroup says, "So why don't we try this sort of thing out here, just to try something on a small scale. Does anyone here have some physical aliment that we could try to pray for?"

I waited a beat, and then another. Another few seconds went by as everybody looked around at each other. No one piped up. So from the back of the room I dove right in. "I've got something - I don't know if it's the kind of thing we want to pray for - but I hurt myself giving birth and I now can't have sex anymore."

Now normally I would have asked Dan permission to bring up such a topic in mixed company, mixed meaning that we don't even know half the people there. But he was still in the other room helping with the kids, and this issue has been sort of consuming my thoughts for the past month, and I can't abide a group silence, and also? Maybe I'm a little nuts. Because my brain is drowning in not-used-up sex hormones. Yeah, I think that's the way that works.

Anyway, these dear willing strangers had me sit in the middle of the circle while they all prayed for the restoration of my lady parts. Seriously and earnestly. Because that's what they're like at the Vineyard church - you should go! And let me tell you guys, my embarrassment over the whole situation was seriously counter-balanced by the fact that I could feel it working. Although, I did get a bit red in the face when Dan walked into the room a few minutes later. I couldn't see his face because I was turned facing away from him, but it was immediately apparent what everyone was praying for. And my poor long-suffering husband, I didn't hear him snicker or anything, but in my head I imagined him realizing turning a shade of purple.

As of right now this is more of a story about my embarrassing forthrightness than it is about a miraculous healing, because at the moment who's to know; the latter has not yet been scientifically tested. This was only last night, after all! And we got in late! But if we do manage a successful sexual encounter in the next few weeks I will consider it nothing less than an act of God.

And so begins costume crunch 2009. I have some ideas, but we'll see what I'm able to execute in time.

We hate Halloween.

What? Forreal? How could anyone hate Halloween?!

Well, there are several good reasons. The bellyaches for one, and then the over-priced plastic costumes, of the enforced sluttyness of most female options (cheerleader or sexy kitten?). But I don't mind that stuff all that much, and I'll defend any teenager's right to express herself in an obscenely short skirt. It's just that, well, we're Christians. And Halloween is a celebration of all things occult. The neighborhood is already starting to fill up with displays of ghosts and skeletons. Then closer to the date we get the devils and the zombies. I mean, I don't want to confuse God about what team I'm on.

Like I said, you can call us nutzoid, and it would be fair. Nobody ever got excommunicated for dressing their baby up like a puppy dog. Certainly not after the pope saw the photo and was all like "awwwwww.... the baby looks like a puppy!"

But I feel like you can't attend a bonfire without burning stuff, and so it feels disingenuous to take part in a collective festival of ghoulies and ghosties. But then all the neighbors are asking us what Harvey is going to "be for Halloween" and I'm just thinking "He's getting baptized the following day... I don't want to fuck it up!"

Which reminds me, mark your calendars for Sunday November 1st. We're gonna throw the hottest baptism brunch you have ever seen. Costume optional.

Holding the snotty stick in my hand, seeing the baby's face contract into a sob, I had one of those moments where all time stands still and I think: is this it? Is this the moment? Where I just broke our entire life? Will I forever look back on this morning as the day I reached into the baby's head and pulled out a chunk of brain?

Well, the good news is there was no brain. Just a snotty snotty stick. Not even any blood. But I still freaked out like my life depended on it. I turned on my heals and high-tailed it home, praying all the way. Oh man, did I pray. I prayed way out of proportion for the not-bloody crisis at hand. I drew down healing from heaven, I commanded angels concerning him, I called on all the spiritual authority I had every heard any Christian call on, and I ordered that shit around like it was my job. Hey God who brings folks back from the dead, it's me Leah: PLEASE FOCUS ALL OF YOUR ATTENTION ON THIS TWIG!

The baby, for his part, was pretty good about the whole thing. He cried for a moment, and then promptly fell asleep, which is a normal reaction to both trauma and being bounced quickly home, but it made me even more freaked out. When I reached home I practically threw the baby into Judy's arms, just as she was pulling up in the car. I called the pediatrician and tried to find an appropriate way to explain how I got a stick two inches up my kids nose without making it sound like they should call DSS. A moment later the nurse came on the line and told me that it was fine... they actually stick swabs up kids noses all the time, and if it hits anything bad then the nose will bleed. No blood? No problem. And by this time, Harvey had looked like he had forgotten the whole incident completely.

That was maybe an hour ago, and I'm still sitting here shaking, so I'm going to go run and try to forget about the feeling where I saw the future flash before my eyes and then disappear. Oh Lord, it's tough to be a mom!

We had our first ultrasound yesterday. We had declined ultrasounds all throughout the pregnancy because we felt like they weren't necessary and caused unneeded worry, especially the driving into Brookline part! Unfortunately, at 41 weeks an ultrasound becomes necessary, so in schlepped Dan, Oona and me for the big show. Although everyone at the ultrasound office was extremely nice, they seemed a bit dumbfounded that this was our first ultrasound... I think I disappointed them by showing up in sweatpants instead of some sort of African wrap skirt with bells on it. The scan proved fine however; the baby's good and healthy, if a bit raptor-like, and my fluid levels are fine too. In other words, nothing to worry about. Except of course, the ticking clock. 6 more days and then...

I seem to be rapid cycling between assurance and blind terror. If we don't get the baby out naturally within a week, we'll have to go in for a hospital induction, a hand-out hospital induction no less, since we don't have an OB, which is kind of like handing an IRS agent your taxes and saying "I hate math." On the other hand, we have a lot to throw at this problem in the next few days, including membrane sweeps and acupuncture and some rather intense herbs, and most women deliver before 42 weeks. On the other other hand, 6 days is not a lot of time and there's a scalpel at the end of this tunnel.

We've been praying a lot about this, and God seems to be giving us the assurance that everything's okay and the baby's coming soon. It's hard to share this kind of information with other people, since most folks trust doctors more than God. Indeed, it's when I have to share news with other folks that I get most panicked. The fear from my friends and neighbors is contagious, and while privately Dan and I can trust that everything's going to be okay, when I go outside people look at me like I have the dead baby plague and ask me why I haven't already been induced.

Anyway, the baby should be on its way soon, and we won't insult you with ultrasound pictures while waiting for the real thing.

As Dan pointed out to me after the call, it's like doctor's today are Catholic priests of the middle ages.... they're all like: "Why are you attempting to reason for yourself? We already have all the answers right here for you!"

Unfortunately, the doctor's responses reveal not only blatant anti-hippy prejudice, but a basic failing in the area of statistics:
1) Of course you only see the times when home birth goes terribly wrong... that's the only time folks come into the hospital! That's called sampling bias. In other words, she's seeing the 5% of home birth cases that end in large medical complications, and making a judgement on the safety of home birth as if that 5% were 100%. However, this judgement disregards the risks in the opposite direction, like 30% of the hospital births which end in c-section.
2) Wow, you mention vaccinations and doctor's crazy flags sure do go up. As someone who 100% supports complete vaccination, I have to worry about a doctor who won't even entertain parental concern about toxic levels of aluminum (regardless of whether they occur for longer than 24 hours... aluminum is a neurotoxin... how long do you feel comfortable exposing your brain to a level 20 times higher than EPA recommendations for toxicity? Or do you just trust the politicians at the CDC more than the politicians at the EPA?) Doctors shot kids up with mercury for 15 years before they were all, oops! just kidding, that shit causes autism. But NOW we've got it all figure out; trust us NOW!

Double unfortunately, we still need a doctor for our kid, and precious time is running out. It took me a week to get this one on the phone, and she came highly recommended (admittedly, by people who don't share our anti-interventionist values and actual grasp of mathematics, but then again I don't know anyone else who does.) Dan has agreed to help research and call doctors this week. I don't know what else to do... In my desperation I even called my Mom to ask for help, and she very helpfully told me to get recommendations and call more doctors. (Why do I have to get a project manager for a mother and not, like, say, a mother? Remind me to call her again when I want to get super bossed around about shit I already know!) The good news is that the stress from this situation made it so I couldn't sleep all night, so I just got like four hours of work done between midnight and 4am! Guess who just freed up the morning to call doctors!