We’re a little sidetracked with school this morning. The baby uncovered an old, lost metal tin of dental floss, so the kids decided to make a leash out of the floss to walk the kitten. They concluded that cats do not like walks, and I made sure that they did not choke the kitten. Now, they are stringing circa 1970 dusty buttons on the floss to make necklaces.

Maybe I should order the kids some real games? Nah.

More later.

In case you’re wondering about the silence, I’m getting over the flu. Will stop in after I get my house and self back up and running!

My five-year-old is a hard worker. When the other children lose steam and grow tired, hot, and bored, she is the one who will be there many hours after the job has grown tedious. After the three hurricanes last year, she was the one who raked the twenty bags of debris with my husband and stayed until the job was over. And she was only four then.

Now, my other children are not lazy, but they do not have the drive to stick with a task and push beyond their weariness when there is no reward in sight. After an hour of raking and leaf mashing, you will usually see them playing sword fight or jumping in the pile of just-raked leaves. Which is fine. My husband likes to keep their interest by letting them each have a turn being…The Leaf Masher. This is where Dad uses the kid– a.k.a. The Leaf Masher–as a human stick to mush down the leaves in the giant garbage can.

The time will come that they will have to develop the ability to push beyond their distaste, and I don’t want it to be a shock for my teenagers. Not all children are good workers naturally. In fact, sin causes us to love laziness and incline ourselves toward that which gratifies ourselves. This is not a sin just for children but for all of us. As a mother, this means that I must teach my children to work and not make excuses for their laziness. Or my own.

It is easier in the short-run to ignore their laziness; more effort is required to teach a good work ethic. However, if you take the time needed to combat laziness, you will reap fruit in the short-term as well as the long-term.

I recently spent several hours cleaning the upstairs bedrooms. The start of the school year, my recent agreement to be the church pianist again, and getting the flu all attributed to neglecting a deep cleaning of the upstairs rooms. My daughter worked alongside me the entire morning and did not grumble when I gave her some of the more distasteful jobs: scrubbing the toilet, washing the floors, and cleaning out the trashcans. I worked alongside of her every step of the way. Of course, I let her squirt all the spray bottles when we got to that part, even though it took double the time for her to do the task. It’s important that they enjoy the “fun” parts of a job too, even though I could fly through them much faster.

I washed all the sheets, blankets, and pillows in the guest room, and I decided that I should teach her how to make a bed properly. I showed her how to get all the wrinkles out of the sheets, how to pull everything tight, and how to stuff a pillow into a case. She was overwhelmed at the beginning because there are tons of pillows and blankets on the guest bed. But we worked through the task, talking the whole way through. When we were done, we threw ourselves across the bed, looked at the ceiling, and chatted. Then I took her to the store to pick out material for a few new skirts, but she did not know that a reward was waiting for her at the end of the task. That made giving it even more pleasurable.

Every child-development psychologist in the country would tell you that it is important to give children age-appropriate tasks. The truth is that children can do a lot more than dust the TV and feed the goldfish when you work alongside of them. The problem is not that we expect too much, but that we expect too little—of our children and ourselves.

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned a new category of “Living Simple” that I wanted to write a few posts about. Since then, I’ve written a few things in that category, but the main reason I started it was for this post. I’ve put off writing this one. While I already know that we’re on the fringe of conservatism, I don’t always enjoy hearing everyone tell me so. This post will serve to certify and seal any extreme beliefs you might hold about my notions.

While we have a comfortable house here in suburbia, USA and thank God for our circumstances, nevertheless, we are pursuing a larger land purchase unless the Lord decides otherwise. It may work out; it may not. Many people have done this sort of thing—left city life for the country—but perhaps not everyone has the same core reason that we have for pursuing this course.

Many small factors make a move to the country appealing to us. Our kids eat fruit by the pound. Oranges are the only fruit that doesn’t require “chilling hours” –unless your kids will eat lemons and limes– so we’d like to have a mini orchard of fruit and berries, which is impossible in Florida. If you were paying our grocery bill, this thought might appeal to you too. If you were paying the milk bill too, a goat or cow might even cross your mind as well.

Because we are comfortable suburbanites, we have a concrete backyard pool and a manufactured swing set. While this is not a bad thing, I’d like to replace the chlorine water and plastic slides with a good old-fashioned creek, tire swing, and tree house. Why? The thought of not paying five grand to remarsite my creek and two Saturdays fixing the wood rot on the play set appeals to me. When a tree branch rots, you throw the tire swing rope onto another branch.

I do not have notions of life being easier. In fact, I know that it will be more work, but it is work that is more rewarding to me than carpools, traffic jams, play date schedules, and cleaning the leaves out of the pool filter.

I’m privileged to have the only house on my street with a front porch, and while not a requirement, it’d be nice not to be the only one sitting on the front porch within miles.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had to take an antihistamine before bed every night if I want to function the following day. When we lived in California for six months, I did not take one pill. It was wonderful. But you do not have to worry about me moving to California. My pocketbook can’t handle it. Neither can my politics. But the fact remains, my nose needs different air.

These are all little reasons that when added up might result in a big reason. But this is not the big reason for us. The reason we desire country life is for the future of our children. We want land because we can afford it at today’s prices after selling our house (in some places, it is $2,000/acre), and we might not be able to afford it later. We want land because we want to give our children a good start in their adult lives and, well, there might be a little in it for us too.

Financial reasons
If the Lord chooses to lead in this way, our children will have the opportunity to begin their marriages with land and shelter debt-free. It is our goal to have our son begin building a home with his dad when he is a teenager. The house would be simple and well designed so that he can add on should a wife and children arrive and as more funds allow. A very open kitchen, dining, living room combination would be appropriate bachelor quarters until the time came to add on.

If you are willing to think outside the box, there are many options for affordable housing that does not resemble paying $75-200/square foot.

I have no doubt that my first daughter would be able to build a house single handedly, but as the Lord leads, perhaps the house building venture would be a good way to test out potential suitors as her father and brother work alongside love-struck boys. No boy who has yet to become a man will be able to handle my first daughter, and house building might be a good way to separate the men from the boys.

When a family is sharing resources, only one tractor is needed instead of five. There is no need to purchase more than one paint sprayer. Only one fence is needed for the property, and there would be many hands to fix a few broken lines. There are also many eyes watching out for you—not like the neighbor who won’t get the newspaper out of your driveway to deter robbers. And so on.

Many Amish, Jewish, and other ethnic groups have practiced this kind of community for centuries and have prospered. I am not thinking up something new and weird, but we are just considering a return to the old ways. It just makes more sense. It is a modern notion to scatter.

Vocational reasons
Without the burden of debt and mortgages, my children would be able to choose a vocation more freely. This applies mostly to my sons, but my daughters’ husbands will also benefit greatly from this. Pastoring small churches, farming, and writing are all vocations that might be otherwise unattainable with the burden of providing for a mortgage. Short- and long-term mission trips are also now easier with the ability to self-fund and not have “stuff” to worry about. The possibilities are endless: from temporarily renting out houses to help pay my son’s medical school bill to having the freedom to tell a corrupt boss that you can just find another job to having a larger cushion to start your own business.

It’s about being even more available to follow God in the way that He leads without the burden of debt. Why continue the American lifestyle just because Sprite wants me to obey my thirst?

Practical reasons
Now, here is where my heart is. I want my daughters and daughter-in-laws close to me so that they will have someone to help them with their first babies, to give them relief when a child has the flu and has been up all night, to tell them which kind of cough doesn’t require a trip to the doctor, to fix the crooked quilt they spent all year on, to give piano lessons to the grandkids, to tell them to get home and make dinner and stop complaining, to tell them to not be short with their boys’ ruckuses, and to love their husbands by never speaking ill of them.

Yes, it’s possible to do some of this from afar, but it is the daily things that make up daily life. Life is a bunch of daily moments, and the ordinary is what life is. It isn’t Thanksgiving and Christmas. And if I have the opportunity to be a part of the small moments, it will be a big moment for me.

I hope to prepare my daughters well before their marriages, but there are some things that are just learned in the dailyness of life. This is going to sound like a criticism, and it is: I can’t rely the modern church to take my daughters under their wing and disciple them in the manner of Titus 2. So with forethought, I am preparing to undertake the task myself for my daughters and for any others the Lord sends my way.

The original Cheaper By the Dozen is not a black and white movie or a PG-13 comedy starring Steve Martin, but it is a decades old book written by a man with a dozen children. I read the book a couple years ago (though the questionable content and bad language precludes me from recommending it to you or reading it aloud to my own children). The father was an efficiency expert by trade, studying movements and motions of company workers and making recommendations on how to increase the output by reducing the number of motions required to perform a task. I never heard of such a thing before. Nevertheless, the father employed the same method in his home and gave each child a reward whenever the child came up with a better method to perform a chore.

Efficiency is a subject that sometimes keeps me awake at night and occupies my thoughts, but never more especially than while I am caught waiting somewhere. With a houseful of little children and at least one more on the way, wasting time is not a pastime I should engage myself in too often. And so, while I am chopping garlic for dinner, folding clothes, or sitting at the piano, I will often ask myself, “Is there a better way to be doing this?”

Now, “better” is a relative term sometimes, and so I want to back up and say that I am looking for ways to increase my efficiency without compromising those things in which efficiency really has no place. For example, it would be more economically efficient to place my children in daycare (the younger ones in a local preschool and the older ones in a free public school) so that I could spend my days bringing home a respectable paycheck. But it would not be spiritually efficient. Likewise, it would be more economically efficient to just stop having children since we’ve finally figured out what causes it, but we believe that the monetary, physical, and emotional demands related to raising children do not compare to the reward of seeing faithful children serve Christ and His kingdom.

What I mean by efficiency is described with a basic definition of “the ratio of the effective or useful output to the total input in any system.” In other words, is there a better way? Living in a modern culture, we are programmed to believe that something is superior if it is faster, cheaper, and can be contained in a smaller package. But forty years of desert wondering tells us moderns that God has a bigger purpose than just getting us to Glory before our social security runs out. Indeed, God is efficient—because He never wastes—and we must keep in mind that His ways are better, especially if He should ask us to build an ark when it is not even raining.

And so, while I put the hammer to the nail, I co-labor with my five-year-old daughter, not because it is immediately efficient, but because in the end, it is the most efficient. I lose time and money on the onset; my daughter slows me down and she overuses materials. But it is the most efficient because she gains character, a good work ethic, time tying strings with her mother, and skills that she will need when she becomes a godly mother as well.

That was a long introduction just to say that I’ve been thinking about turning on my deep freezer again. A baby is on the way, and beginning in December, I will spend a lot of time on the couch complaining about how my back hurts. Being 5’2 and carrying 8 and ½ pound babies just makes me tired thinking about it. It is so much easier to ask my husband to stop by the Chinese take-out on his way home four times a week, than it is to use a little forethought and planning. And in this case, I think it is wise to be more economically efficient.

I remember when “Once a Month Cooking” was the latest craze, but I never really took to that model. Instead, I use a different method that seems to work well in our house. Whenever I make a casserole, a tray of stuffed shells, or other entrée, I make at least a double portion at the minimum. One portion is for the evening’s meal; the other portion is for the following night. We usually have the same main dish two nights in a row, but my husband doesn’t mind this as he thinks I cook pretty well. Whenever I have the foresight to triple it, I’ll freeze one of the portions. Now, however, it is time for me to step it up a notch and begin quadrupling recipes.

The reason why this is more efficient is because you can brown four pounds of meat in the same pan that you brown one pound. You are only washing one pan one time instead of one pan four times. And so on. This is just more physically efficient. When I get the pepper out of the cabinet to spice up a recipe, I can pour four teaspoons in the same amount of time that I can pour one. And I only have to retrieve the pepper out of the cabinet once.

This method will not only save you time, but it will also save you trips to the doctor. It is better for your health, because inevitably, your casserole is nutritionally superior than take-out food or boxed foods. You can not order brown rice from a menu. And when “one of those days” comes around, it is easier to pull dinner out of the freezer than put in a call to your husband on his way home.

This is the same method that I use to do the laundry. I only put away clothes once a week, because it is the same effort to put away two dishtowels as it is to put away a stack of ten dishtowels. However, less steps are required to put away ten dishtowels once every seven days than to put away two dishtowels every other day.

And so long as there are no moral restrictions (e.g. your kids are not left without clothes because you only wash once a week), than taking a minute to ponder the efficiency of your methods is time well spent.

My three-year-old stood up in the bathtub when she was a toddler, slipped, and knocked her front teeth up into her gums. They eventually abscessed and had to be pulled. She has no memory of it, but I have to swallow hard whenever I talk about it.

She has the prettiest smile, though, and a gentle spirit to match. My second daughter has no idea that her missing teeth might be a handicap. She can eat apples, corn-on-the-cob, and anything at all.

It’s not that she doesn’t know about her missing teeth. Just this week, she reminded her baby sister, “Sweetie, you have to sit down in the bathtub or you’ll knock out your little toofies!”

Just today I was thinking of my own handicaps that prevent me from doing my job in the most excellent way: my back, my nausea, my [the list goes on]. And then I thought of my girl, who eats red apples but doesn’t care too much for the green ones, and I pressed on.

Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. ~II Cor. 12:9

Click on the link above to enter this month’s drawing. It’s not a scam; I even won once.

The past several days in the kitchen has left me scrambling for substitutions: applesauce for oil, honey for sugar, and a knock on the neighbor’s door for an egg. I am out of milk too, so my mind wanders off to a country home with a goat in the pasture. “Yes, then I’d always have milk…” But then I remind myself that I’d probably be out of feed for the goat too.

While they are good in the kitchen, substitutions are not fitting for the task of raising children: full-time daycare in exchange for mom, “quality” time for quantity time, and regular drive-thru trips in place of lingering around the table at home. I was reminded of this fact by two things. The first was that I just finished reading Home by Choice, a book extolling the research on the significance of mothers raising their own children. It is a sad commentary that a book like that must be written, but today’s modern culture demands it.

The second reason I was pondering this idea was that I daily engage myself in the battle of… The Mess. With a houseful of children underfoot all day, the second law of thermodynamics is readily in effect all day long: Energy spontaneously tends to flow from being concentrated in one place to becoming diffused or dispersed and spread out. In other words, the house deteriorates all day long. The train mess in the living room diffuses to the hall and morphs into a greater mess on the floor in the kitchen. And then you find a train track in the dryer days later. If my husband were here to ask, he’d probably tell me that this isn’t the truest meaning of the law, but nonetheless, I think it’s an application a mother can put her brain around. Similarly, the first law of thermodynamics states that you can’t destroy energy. Any mother of a boy already knows this.

But I digress. Time is the only thing I have with my children. The Battle of the Mess will go away, and I will wish for it when I am old. (So the aged women counsel me.) There are no substitutions for time with my children. This morning while the older three were on break from school, they found a snail to rescue from the monsoon pouring outside. They made a home for him. They punched holes in his home so he could breathe, and gathered wet leaves so he could eat. They have given him the name, “Mr. Snail”, and they asked if he can sleep in the guest room.

For now, the Battle of the Mess will wait. I will sign off and find an extra good spot for Mr. Snail in the guest room.

Preferably a place where he can’t escape.

* Postscript: If you tell the kids that lunch will be served after clean up, your house will look spic-and-span in five minutes flat. It just won’t stay that way…

Do you have any friends in real life who live life in a very different way from you? And if so, how do you approach posting about your very strong views, knowing that they are reading them and might feel judged?

I do have many friends who are very different from me; in fact, I cannot think of anyone who agrees with me on everything or even almost everything (except my dear husband, and yet, we still have differences on what an acceptable level of mess is…). My longest standing friend is a liberal socialist who would rather choke down an onion than read this site. And yet, she asked me to be the maid-of-honor in her wedding, but I didn’t get to because she eloped in Vegas. She just likes my decorating advice, I think.

I’m not sure that I’m the best person to give advice on how to win friends and influence people for what little skill I acquired on the subject was learned mostly by non-examples. Though, if I had the chance to have a cup of tea with younger married women starting their families, I’d tell them not to have a chip on their shoulder. When someone asks them, “Do you know what causes that?! What about socialization? You’re going to do what?”, I’d tell them to smile sweetly and come up with a witty reply and a wink.

As far as people feeling judged, so long as your speech is seasoned with grace, your motive is charity, and your tongue is not promoting virtue found outside Christ, I think it is best to let the chips fall where they may.

There are two primary reasons I think that people walk around feeling “judged.” One is that they see in you a value that they do not hold, and their conscience tells them that they ought. They refuse a lifestyle change because the cost outweighs the convenience. Modern culture tells us to “obey our thirst,” and the mantra rings stronger than the call to take up one’s cross.

Another reason that people feel condemned is because they are—sorry for the weak word—insecure. I can relate. I remember when my first child was a young toddler and someone criticized me for allowing him to drink from a bottle instead of a cup. I was so upset, and I’m not making this up. If you want to say something to make a woman weep, wail, and gnash her teeth, go ahead and remotely criticize her mothering skills. Drinking from a bottle is not a moral issue, but from the way I reacted, you’d think his salvation depended on whether it was appropriate or not.

It is a silly example, but it illustrates nicely that I was still young in my confidence and in need of reassurance. Being twenty-one, it is understandable and forgivable, but you’d be wrong to assume that everyone grows in confidence in the same way that they age. And so, we must be gentle with one another.

Sure, I live my life according to my conscience, but in every culture there must be those who are willing to say, “People, the emperor has no clothes.”

It is more often than not that whenever I mention company’s-a-comin’, my children will beg to wait in the road for their arrival. It doesn’t matter that our guests won’t be here for another hour; it doesn’t matter if they know who’s coming or not; it doesn’t matter if they are only coming by to drop something off. They just love it when people come over. So, the older three children will sit on the front porch rockers, play in yard, and stand at the end of our long street during the long wait for our company. Oh, and they will poke their heads in the door every ten minutes and ask why it’s taking so long.

From our driveway, the kids can see the end of the road, and so they know when a car is approaching while it is still about 30-45 seconds away. So before they can be seen by company, the kids will run inside the house, yelling, “They’re here! They’re here!” However, here’s the best part. When we go out to greet our company, they act like this is all no big deal. They’d be mortified if I ever explained aloud that they waited an hour outside. So I won’t mention it.

Upon some reflecting on my current steps heavenward, I was concluding—prematurely—that my lack of zeal was just like my children’s nonchalant mannerisms: I was not lacking zeal, just lacking in showing my zeal. But I was wrong. Explaining away a dry heart will not cure the problem. It is not that I don’t show my love for Christ, but rather, that I don’t love him enough. And so, I pray with the hymn writer:

And oh, next time you’re over, you might ask the children why it looks as if they’ve been playing outside all day…

Eric Ragle is giving away a free WordPress site (including hosting) here.

Whoever coined the phrase, “Don’t cry over spilled milk,” must have had a housekeeper. It wasn’t even 9:00 a.m. this morning when milk had spilled three times. It’s always nice when they break a dish while they’re at it, too. My 12-piece place setting is down to seven in the small plate section. But I’m a trooper: I won’t cry about the milk.

I’ll whine about the dishes instead.

So imagine my dismay upon opening my email this morning and reading these words by Elisabeth Elliot, “Life is likely to continue to hold many forms of torture and dismay …for all who refuse to receive with thanksgiving instead of complaint the place in life God has chosen for them. The torture is self-inflicted, for God has not rejected their prayers. He knows better than any of us do what furthers our salvation. Our true happiness is to be realized precisely through his refusals, which are always mercies. His choice is flawlessly contrived to give the deepest kind of joy as soon as it is embraced.”

If spilled milk was the worst of my lot, I’d say that I got a pretty good deal. But spilled milk isn’t the worst of it. From spilled milk to facing death, we all experience those things that we long for but are never received, those things that we shrink from but are never taken away, and those things that we don’t fully embrace because we don’t know how.

And so I ask myself this, “What does one do about spilled milk?” And the answer is obvious: embrace it. But how? We will not be satisfied if we stop short by taking the simple advice to not cry over it. However, I have a choice to give thanks for it, and so, I thank Him that He sends His mercy through such common, ordinary things. Another messenger of grace is another glass of spilled milk. He will send his mercy when we ask.

So, I’ve got a game plan for the next glass of spilled milk, which according to the numbers– should be happening in the next nine minutes. But what about those breaking dishes?

Plastic, my friends.

KSMilkmaid one-upped me with a comment on the post below. I said, “Whoever coined the phrase, ‘Don’t cry over spilled milk,’ must have had a housekeeper.”

She replied, “Whoever coined the phrase, ‘Dont cry over spilled milk,’ didn’t have a dairy farm.” Spoken by one who knows!

Don’t miss her new family farm site that is still under construction. My friend, Valerie, is designing it (–is my screen the only one that sees the background as pink?–), and Milkmaid is filling it with lots of down-home wit and wisdom.

On another note, I saw that only five people contested for the free blog offer so far. What’s with you people? Don’t you enter contests just to win? Wait. That sounds a little too personal. If you’re not up-to-speed, here’s the link again: Eric Ragle is giving away a free WordPress site (including hosting) here.