What’s New?

Posted on August 27, 2009 by Barbara Harper

My mother-in-law asks me this nearly every day, and most often my answer is, “Not much!” Just the usual — laundry and meals and dishes and such. But here are some odds and ends of stray thoughts and happenings:

Our church had a lovely reception for Jason and Mittu last Sunday night after the evening service. Since most of the folks couldn’t go to the wedding in OK and since Mittu wasn’t here for several months before the wedding and we couldn’t do the normal bridal shower, they had this reception. It worked well because Jason was with her and could introduce her to those she didn’t know — she didn’t have to be by herself with a room full of women she didn’t know at a shower. They had just gotten a DVD of the wedding, so we had that playing in the background. We have some incredibly sweet and generous folks at our church!

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I’m still having this odd sensation of waiting for Jason to come home at night, even though I know better. Just habit, I guess. I don’t remember feeling that way when he was away at camp for the summer — maybe because he was actually away then, and now he’s here, but not here. When he was at camp I did actually forget and set the table as if he were here a few times — I’ve only done that once since he’s been married. 🙂

The newlyweds seem to be doing well. In the “being a mother hen never stops” department, I am hoping the folks in their new “young married” class are friendly and open to them. It takes a while in any new class to feel a part of things, but I hope they have a very short transtion period. Mittu has been looking for a job, but so far nothing seems to be open in area day cares. I was surprised that there weren’t even any listings in the classifieds. But she’s been submitting applications anyway to some in the area. I’m still trying to find the balance between giving them their space and privacy and keeping in touch. I don’t want to “bug” them and often second-guess whether I should call — but I want to be available and keep in touch.

Funny how a room looks big until you start putting stuff in it. I’ve been enjoying getting my sewing/craft/guest room set up (though I need to find a shorter name for it!) I’ve got all the major pieces in except a daybed or futon or something for guests to sleep on. Need to go shopping for that. During the summer when I kept feeling inclined to sort through my craft stuff, I kept thinking it would be more efficient to just wait til I was able to move things into my new room, only handling them once that way. I should have gone with my inclination!! Sorting and organizing is what will take the longest. I’m enjoying it, though.

I mentioned on my nightstand post on Tuesday that I wasn’t enjoying How Do I Love Thee? by Nancy Moser as much as I thought I would. That changed within 24 hours. 🙂 I would love to just take the day off and read it.

I haven’t gotten my body clock changed around for the new school schedule yet. I’m getting up earlier but hadn’t been getting to bed earlier until last night, so then I’ve been needing a nap during the day, which cuts into my work time. I should go to bed when Jesse does at 11 — but I like to unwind for a while before doing so.

Sherry at Semicolon had an excellent, thought-provoking post about using the Muslim thirty days of Ramadan as a time of special prayer for them.

I think those are all the stay thoughts swirling about just now.

Have a great day!

Thank you, a question, and laudable linkage

Posted on August 22, 2009 by Barbara Harper

Thanks so much for all your sweet birthday wishes! My family gave me a wonderful birthday — I’m thinking I might save the particulars for the next Friday’s Fave Five post.

Some of your comments gave rise to a question, though:

How do you get those musical notes in your comments?

Those were so neat — and there are times I’ve wanted to do that but didn’t know it could be done.

I have some assorted puttering around to do today — a little cleaning, a few errands, etc. But I wanted to share with you some great things I’ve read recently. Some of these are blogs I am subscribed to through Google Reader — some I found through a series of links that I forgot to make note of.

Studying love at Making Home — great study of I Corinthinas 13.

Gifted Moms — funny post from Christian comedian Cheryl Moeller.

Before I was a Mom — poignant post on love learned as a mom by The Diaper Diaries.

Interview with Stephen King and Jerry Jenkins — the latter of the Left Behind series as well as several other books, the former of…well, who doesn’t know about Stephen King? I haven’t actually read his books — I don’t do scary — and the only film I’ve seen based on one of his books was Stand By Me, and I really enjoyed that. But though the authors are opposite in some ways, they have some similarities and mutual respect, and I thought this interview was quite interesting.

On the craft front — I love these little collages by Charlotte Lyons at house wren studio.

I’ve mentioned before that I was looking for ideas for craft storage or craft/sewing rooms: here are links to some inspiring ones I’ve found.

Lynn at Queen of the Castle is hosting agiveaway for the book Making It Home.

Reason #4,926 why I love him by Carpoolqueen. Just go read it. It’s hilarious.

Have a wonderful Saturday!

His one and only

Posted on July 15, 2009 by Barbara Harper

My husband asked me to make a deposit in our account and his mother’s on a day when he was out of town and couldn’t do so.

As the teller handled my mother-in-law’s deposit, she looked at the name and then called me Mrs. H-, which is, of course, also my mother-in-law’s name. I said, “Well, I am one of the Mrs. H–s.”

She stopped and looked up at me and said, “You mean he has two?”

I hadn’t realized how that would sound! I quickly explained that, no, I was the wife and the other Mrs. H– was the mother. She had just been reading a book on polygamy and its problems, so perhaps her mind jumped to that conclusion a little more easily than it might have otherwise.

We had a good laugh over it. She was still chuckling as I left.

Things I remember from childhood

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Barbara Harper

I don’t know what triggered this trip down memory lane, but a few days ago I started jotting down snippets of childhood memories. Then I found out via Cindy that Monday was Childhood Memories Day.

I was born in the late 50s. so I would have had most of my growing up years in the 60s.

— Record players for kids that came in a box that latched and had a handle. My aunt gave me a whole collection of 45 rpm records of children’s songs that I loved.

— Little Golden Books. And they are still around — I read them to my kids, too.

— Families bringing lawn chairs out into the front yard to talk with the neighbors while the children played together in each other’s yards in the evenings after dinner.

— My dad taking neighborhood kids for rides on his motor scooter up and down the street.

— Riding bicycles everywhere.

— Collecting glass bottles to get a refund for turning them in at the store. I don’t remember how much we got for them, though — does anyone?

— Nehi Cola in grape, orange, and strawberry. Fruit-flavored soft drinks don’t appeal to me now except just every once in a great while, but we loved them then.

— The bugs of summer: mosquitoes and calamine lotion, fireflies, noisy June bugs getting caught in the screen doors.

— Oscillating fans at bed time and nap time. I thought my aunt lived in the height of luxury because she had central air conditioning. I loved taking naps at her house.

— Having one of the first Barbie dolls with the black and white striped swim suit and pony tail on the crown of her head. I wish I still had her, but I passed her on to four younger sisters…

— Cars like this:

— Traveling with my grandmother. Her kids were scattered in Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama, and she drove to visit each of them and took me with her a couple of times. We called her the “galloping Grandma.”

— Spending the night with my grandmother and both of us staying up late reading.

— My grandfather’s teasing and distinctive laugh.

— A collie named Sam.

— Putting a note in the offering at church because I didn’t have any money and my cousin’s grandmother taking it out. 😦 I don’t remember what the note said, though.

— We lived near Padre Island in southern Texas, and nearly every celebration, party, get-together involved the beach. I had forgotten how much I loved and missed the water til we went back for a family reunion years ago. I saw then, too, why every beach I had seen since then seemed inadequate: I guess because it was an island, there were sand dunes as far as the eye could see in one direction and water in the other direction. Little strips of beach along a highway that we had seen in other places didn’t seem like a beach at all.

— The Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights, The Ed Sullivan Show, the Andy Williams Show.

— Tether ball and four-square on the playground at school as well as my friends and I pretending we were a singing group singing “Downtown” at recess.

— Commercials: Mr, Whipple, Brylcream, the Frito Bandito, “Mikey Likes It!”

— Going to eat at a drive-in restaurant every Friday night after getting groceries and eating steak fingers and the BEST milkshakes. I tried steak fingers at a restaurant as an adult, but they just didn’t live up to my memory.

— Going to see movies at the drive-inn theater in our pajamas.

Some of these might sound idyllic…there were unpleasant memories here and there, too, but why focus on those?

Anyone else remember any of these? What are some of your childhood memories?

Snippets

Posted on June 29, 2009 by Barbara Harper

Whew! Busy day. I feel like I’ve been “going” all day — and I am definitely not the Energizer Bunny! It’s nice to sit down for a while.

Jason got his first full-time pay check a few days ago and remarked, “Now I know why people gripe about taxes so much!” Welcome to adulthood, m’boy.

The boys went to a fellowship at church last week that I missed due to not feeling well, and when they got home I asked them what kinds of things were served. In naming some of the things, Jeremy said something that sounded like “foreos.” I said, “What….?” He replied, “Fake Oreos. Faux Oreos. Fauxreos.” I thought that was pretty clever.

Had a quick and easy dinner tonight. We had some leftover sausage from Jeremy’s pizza last week and a partial package of pepperoni, so I stopped at the store for some crescent roll dough (love that stuff! What did we do before someone invented it?) and provolone cheese and made pizza rolls. Then I borrowed an idea from Jason’s fiancee that she had made once while she was here and made a few with chocolate chips and a glaze made of powdered sugar, milk, and a bit of vanilla for dessert. Good stuff.

Jon and Kate

Posted on June 24, 2009 by Barbara Harper

I don’t watch Jon and Kate Plus 8. I’ve caught just a few minutes of it here and there as I’ve flipped through channels. My fleeting impressions were that Kate was high-strung and somewhat disrespectful of her husband and that Jon seemed to be just…there.

I am very sad to hear that they are planning to divorce. I would hope they’d go for some type of counseling. All too often I have known of people to struggle silently in their marriages and then decide to divorce without trying to get help in the mean time, and it seems once that course of action is decided, the door is shut to any thought of healing and reconciliation. I am from a divorced family. The Bible calls marriage a coming together of a man and woman to become one flesh, and the rending of that relationship is just as painful as real flesh tearing.

But what also saddens me is the “chatter” I’m seeing on various blogs and Facebook about them, especially among Christians, whose speech is supposed to be “always with grace, seasoned with salt,” (seasoned with salt, not primarily consisting of salt.)

I admit I struggle with where the lines are between evaluation and judgment, criticism vs. critcal thinking, discussion and gossip. I don’t always know where the line is that crosses from one to the other.

I do know it is a major mistake to assign motives when we don’t know what is going on in another’s heart.

Of course, inviting the public into your everday lives means they are going to see faults and failures as well as everyday life, and of course we can learn from others’ mistakes. But that doesn’t mean we can’t exerise compassion as well.

Hodgepodge

Posted on June 16, 2009 by Barbara Harper

Busy morning — I have to run my husband’s mom over to the audiologist. The part of her hearing aid that goes into her ear has torn a little.

Why does it seem when you’re most in a hurry, the computer runs the slowest?

I discovered an extra week! I had thought getting ready for Father’s Day, getting Jesse ready for camp, and getting the ladies booklet done all had to happen this week, but looking again at the calendar, I saw one of those things didn’t have to happen til next week and another the following week. That’s sure a nice feeling!

I need to get back to making lists. I always think with all the obligations of the school year past and a mostly wide open schedule, that I’ll get so much done over the summer. But somehow that’s not happening! It’s not like I am lazing around in front of the TV (summer TV is pretty much a wasteland!!) but things aren’t getting done — at least not the things I am wanting to get done, though I did get my closet cleaned out and went through a stack of magazines in addition to the ever-present laundry.

Once a quarter or so my mother-in-law’s assisted living facility has a “family dinner” where family members of the residents are invited to come for a meal, and the one for the summer was last night. Always an interesting experience. 🙂 Many of them get so agitated when there is any change and routine, and you want to somehow help them just relax and assure them it will be ok. Unfortunately, I can see seeds of that in myself already! (edited to add: I see from Thom’s comment I may have given the wrong impression. It was an enjoyable time, but some of the folks were a bit more fidgety. Jim’s mom tends to get agitated and repeat herself a bit more when anything “different” comes up, but afterward she said she enjoyed it.)

Back later to catch up with you all…..

Children, dogs, and safety

Posted on June 15, 2009 by Barbara Harper

Yesterday afternoon I heard my neighbor calling out to her little foster daughters, who obviously weren’t responding, because she kept calling over and over. It occurred to me that sometimes she lets the girls come over and pet our dog, so I thought perhaps I should go outside to check on things. I have never known our dog, Suzie, to even snap at people, much less nip or bite, unless she was hurt. She’s as gentle and patient as the day is long. Normally if any stranger comes into the yard, she lopes up to them, tongue out and tail wagging, wanting to be petted. But, still, you never know. Especially with children, a poke or pull or something sudden or unexpected, inadvertently hurting or surprising a dog, and who knows what could happen.

I went outside, and the little girl was chasing a tiny Chihuahua dog in our back yard right in front of Suzie.

I have known Suzie to snap at other dogs before, so this made me very tense. Even though Suzie was only looking at it like, “What is this thing?” — if she should snap at it and get the little girl instead — I just didn’t want to even imagine it. I went out and held her line until the mom got dog and child in tow. The mom said she knew Suzie was good with kids but jokingly said the little dog would be a “snack” for her. I told her that the only time I had seen Suzie upset and snap was at another dog so that hopefully she would understand that letting a dog and child run around near her unguarded was not safe.

Some years back a little girl in our area was severely injured when she wandered into the yard of a neighbor who had a Rottweiler. She had let the child play alone on the back yard, and the child ended up going to see the dog. I tended to be way overprotective when my children were young, so I don’t think I would ever have left them alone even in my own back yard when they were pre-school age. Who knows what they might put in their mouths or who might happen along to lure them or take them from safety or what they could get into. But I was astounded to read in the newspaper the mother’s quote, “I had told her not to go over there.” You can’t give a child at that age instructions like that and then walk off and leave them. They’re learning to obey, but they don’t have it down yet: a distraction, forgetfulness, desire, any number of things can make them forget or disregard those instructions. They need parents with them to guide them, warn them, watch out for them.

There was a big fuss in the paper about the dog being chained up, and chained dogs were supposedly more territorial and prone to attack. I don’t believe that is true. When you take a walk in any residential neighborhood, all the dogs, even the ones behind fences, get territorial and start barking. The chained ones don’t bark more than the fenced ones.

Suzie is on a chain, but she is on a line so that she can run the length of the whole yard (at night or in bad weather she is put into a smaller fended area where her dog house is, but it is too small to keep her there all the time). We do want to build a fence, but it just hasn’t been in the budget. But, as I said, she’s not a snarling, snappish dog who barks and bites anyone who comes onto the property even though she is on a line.

But whether a dog is on a line or behind a fence is really beside the point. Little fingers poked into a fence can be snapped at. The point is children should never, ever be alone in close proximity to a dog, even a neighbor’s dog, without adult supervision. Children don’t know what could provoke a dog, they don’t know the warning signs, they don’t have enough experience or common sense yet to know what to do or not do or when to back off. Even a gentle, patient dog can snap if hurt, and some dogs will snap with very little provocation.

I’m not writing this to “rant” about my neighbor; not at all. This incident just reminded me about the awful situation with this little girl and other children who have been hurt by dogs. “Better safe than sorry” should be the principle applied here.

Feeling blah

Posted on June 11, 2009 by Barbara Harper

I finished two books this morning and I started to review one, but the with the time of day it is already and the need to get some other things done and the desire to take great care with one of them, I think I’ll save it until I can do it justice.

I was amazed at the Ladies’ meeting Monday night that I felt great, and I thought, Wow, this must’ve been the shortest cold in history! But I think the Lord was just giving me a respite to get through the meeting. Over the weekend I had more of a foggy-brained and tried feeling with a few cold symptoms, but by Tuesday morning, the drippy nose and sore throat started picking up, joined now by a barking cough. Bleah. I’m not “feeling” as bad as I did over the weekend, but this part is a real nuisance!

I slept in this morning and need to go get dressed and get a few necessities done, but otherwise I don’t have great plans for the day.

I wanted to leave with you something I marked the other day. A few years ago I read Joy and Strength, a devotional book of verses, poems and quites by Mary Wilder Tileston, because it was recommended by Elisabeth Elliot, but it hasn’t been one of my favorites. Some parts of it are too “mystical” for me. Nevertheless parts of it did really speak to me, and off and on this year I’ve been recording quotes from it that I had marked. This one from June 8 was a rebuke to me:

Put on therefore, a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, longsuffering; forbearing one another, and forgiving each other, if any man have a complaint against any; even as the Lord forgave you, so also do ye.
COLOSSIANS 3:12,13 (R. V.)

THE discord is within, which jars
So sadly in life’s song;
‘Tis we, not they who are in fault,
When others seem so wrong.
FREDERICK WM. FABER

SELF-PREOCCUPATION, self-broodings, self-interest, self-love,–these are the reasons why you go jarring against your fellows. Turn your eyes off yourself; look up, and out! There are men, your brothers, and women, your sisters; they have needs that you can aid. Listen for their confidences; keep your heart wide open to their calls, and your hands alert for their service. Learn to give, and not to take; to drown your own hungry wants in the happiness of lending yourself to fulfil the interests of those nearest or dearest. Look up and out, from this narrow, cabined self of yours, and you will jar no longer; you will fret no more, you will provoke no more; but you will, to your own glad surprise, find the secret of “the meekness and the gentleness of Jesus”; and the fruits of the Spirit will all bud and blossom from out of your life.
HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND