Mountain of laundry vs. mountaintop experience

Summertime for me, means camp. Church camp, and camping with my family. I love being on a mountaintop, off the grid, away from the city. I just hate what I have to go through to actually get there. I'm preparing to leave for a week counseling junior high kids at church camp. I love it. But camping, if you have a family, means laundry... lots of it.

Funny how all those years that Brian and I were planning our family, thinking we'd probably have 2 or 3 children someday, I never considered the laundry. I've done laundry in many different places over the years. At home with my parents, in the basement of my college dorm, in the basement of our first tiny apartment, at the laundromat when our 2nd apartment was renovating their laundry room. I don't actually mind the chore itself. In fact, it can be soothing to let my mind wander as I sort, carry, load, unload, dry, carry, fold.

But we live in a townhouse now - it has 3 floors, and 2 sets of stairs. I swear the steps get steeper every time I trudge up them. I once figured out that in a normal week, I do 8 loads of laundry. Normal meaning that no one came down with the flu or needed extra clothes for some reason. Six loads of clothing - light, dark, medium, and reds (yes, really - it eliminates accidentally dyeing things pink!). One of sheets, one of towels. Normal week.

Camp week - ugh. Sleeping bags (only 1 fits per load), other camp related bedding, extra towels, extra out of season clothing (gets cold up on that thar mountaintop). I'm finishing up the nth load. I've lost count. Sometimes I wonder if our electric washers and dryers really save us work, or just give us different work. I don't have to hand scrub clothes with lye soap and a washboard, rinse them by hand, run them through a wringer and hang them to dry. But I'll tell you what - by the time I've lugged some dozen loads down the steps and up the steps (with extra trips for the delicate things that don't go in the dryer) I feel like I could give those pioneer women a run for their money.

I won't be volunteering to churn butter anytime soon, however...

When all the equipment is finally gathered, all the lists checked off, the car packed, and me ready to head off into the sunset, I've noticed I don't breathe a sigh of relief....yet.

There's a magical point where that happens. As I turn onto Route 9W and begin winding my way through the back country roads up to Maryland, there's a point where the road levels out and the countryside opens up. Suddenly I am surrounded by gently rolling farmland, with the misty purple mountains up ahead in the distance. A deep breath and a sigh - this view makes me smile, every time. I'll see you at the mountaintop...

Security blanket

I'm not quite sure when it happened. When you live with someone 24/7 you don't always notice these things right away. Sometime in the past couple weeks my baby son has turned into Linus van Pelt. You know, the thumb sucking, security blanket carrying, wisdom spouting friend of Charlie Brown in the Peanuts comic strip. Being not quite 2, Connor is not spouting any wisdom yet (that I can understand, anyway) but he has caused quite a few awww! moments lately. (If you're a parent those are the moments that send you running for the camera.)

This is a fascinating experiment in human behavioral development for me. Our oldest son, Christopher, never carried a "lovey" (what all the parenting books call a child's favorite object that he carries everywhere.) Being the first child, he was given tons of stuffed animals. We practically begged him to attach to one when he was upset. Here, please accept this fuzzy tiger and calm down, please, pretty please. Whether it was (what we later learned) the mild autism which caused this or just his very independent personality we'll never know. But I'll tell you those animals just sat around getting dusty until his little sister came along. Chris liked to gather up handfuls of his Matchbox cars and trucks to scatter on his bed before going to sleep.

Charlotte seemed to be following in her brother's footsteps until her first Easter. Brian's mom had found a very huggable, very soft and fuzzy little yellow stuffed lamb to tuck in her Easter basket. Whether it was because it was so cuddly or she just liked the look of it, Charlotte latched onto that little lamb and pretty much didn't let it out of her sight for the next 2 or 3 years. We named it Lambie (yeah, we're real original with names) and watched it almost as closely as our daughter. Lambie went everywhere with us. I suddenly had a great deal of sympathy for parents who found themselves buying a back up of a favorite toy to prevent meltdowns. The day we got back to the car and found ourselves Lambie-less was traumatic indeed for all of us. Fortunately, after a quick and frantic search I found her in the parking lot not far from our car. Thank you, God, for small blessings.

So now it looks like we will be bringing "blankie" with us everywhere. Funny enough, Blankie is another of Chris' castoffs. My mother-in-law's best friend made Chris a beautiful bassinet and filled with all kinds of baby things - one of them was this wonderfully soft, fluffy turquoise blanket. Since we had 2 lovely homemade quilts (Brian's mom) and a cuddly knitted blanket (my mom) and countless receiving blankets this one didn't end up getting used as much.

We made a discovery when each of our kids was tiny - they strongly objected to being put down to sleep on that super firm crib mattress now required for all babies. It was hard, and it was cold (especially in the winter). We were tearing our hair out trying to get/keep them asleep. In desperation one night I grabbed an extra baby quilt (lined with soft fuzz but not thick) and tucked it firmly down around the mattress and put the baby on top it. Aaaaaahhhh!! Instant relief for all...

Well, by the time Connor came along, this particular quilt was very well worn. Enter the fuzzy turquoise blanket. One night I tried to put him to bed when the blanket was in the wash. You can guess what happened....right.....he stayed awake until the blanket came out of the dryer, and fell asleep within minutes of cuddling it. One morning last week or so, it followed him out of the crib. He's dragged it around ever since. It's very cute, actually. He plunks himself down in random places throughout the house, snuggling the blanket with his thumb in his mouth.

It makes me wonder if the children who go through this developmental are somehow better adjusted when they get older. Certainly our daughter is the epitome of confidence and independence. She introduces herself to everyone she meets, totally confident that each new person is a potential friend.

And Connor is utterly fearless. I'd like some of that confidence, please. I have wished many days God would give me a spiritual "blankie" to comfort me on those days when I'm feeling lost and lonely. Still looking...

Profoundly ordinary

I had a very ordinary day today. After it was nearly over, I started thinking about my ordinary days and my Christian walk. In the Bible, it's all action stories, Noah building the ark, Moses parting the Red Sea, Joshua marching around Jericho, David fighting battles, Jesus preaching, teaching, and healing. Big action. Lots of it. I've had some big action days, and they're great. But most of my days are very ho-hum. Like today - just the doing of necessary things with a bit of relaxation thrown in.

It was a fairly typical day in my life as a stay-at-home mom with 3 small children. I had to get up early to make sure that I was ready to whisk my 5 year old daughter off the the lab for her routine well-check blood tests. One of them required her to not eat, so I wanted to get her there ASAP. Like me, she gets very grumpy when she's hungry. Of course she objected - loudly. Afterwards I thought she deserved a treat, so I got us some breakfast at McDonald's and let her play in the really big outdoor play park they had. Then since we were already headed in the right direction, we went to exchange the flip flops for her and her brother (in which mommy accidentally picked up last year's size - but they looked right, man those little feet grow fast!)

I dropped her off at home, grabbed some ice water and a book, and my forms, and headed off to the DMV to renew my license. Which of course takes forever - I had waited an hour by the time I was all done, and grateful I was that it was *only* that long. I enjoyed the book I brought. It's not my usual genre, but very compelling, called The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I usually go after happy fluffy fiction, but since I am trying to wean myself off romance novels (that's a whole other story) this is doing nicely in holding my interest.

So I got done with my necessary errands, and after my husband left to go do his teacher end of year thing and sign off his classroom, I spent a happy afternoon catching up on reading my own favorite blogs. One of my favorites, Stuff Christians Like by Jon Acuff, had a bunch of new posts. Also on one of his other ones, 97 Seconds With God he is doing a wonderful chapter by chapter devotional on Genesis. Awesome stuff!

When my baby son started climbing the walls (almost literally, this little guy has monkey genes in him somewhere, I swear) I decided a nap would be good for him and for his mama. So I did. I find it really hard work to spend a morning hurry up and waiting.

As I was dozing, I realized that my day certainly did not seem to fit your typical action Bible story. It made me wonder what God thinks of my ordinary days. Really most of my time is spent doing the necessary chores of living. By the time I'm done running errands, grocery shopping, cooking, doing laundry, paying bills, filling out forms, shuttling kids, attending meetings, and feeding, clothing, and caring for 3 children (oh, yeah, and cleaning - er, occasionally) there's really nothing left of me to be extraordinary.

Like many Christians, I try to have a quiet time (not always every day, but as I'm able.) During which I read about the exploits and adventures of all our Bible heroes. Only laundry and grocery shopping are not very adventurous. Unless you include trying to keep the laundry pile from swallowing me and fighting traffic in the parking lot - not your typical Bible adventure. But in the middle of my musing I remembered two things that Jon Acuff mentioned in recent posts. One, that Adam and Eve spent their time in the Garden just hanging out with God. Hanging out with - not looking for, avoiding, pleading with, or bargaining with - just, hanging out. Like friends do.
The one that really got me though was when he reminded me of the verse that says that "Noah walked with God". That was before he built the ark. He spent all those years walking with God. Hmmmm....

So Adam and Eve tended the garden and looked after the animals, and hung out with God. Noah married and raised a family, fished or farmed or worked a trade, and hung out with God. Kinda makes me wonder if maybe I've been trying too hard...again.

Another layer in the mask

I didn't know what to title this post. But I got a bit of a wakeup call from a dear friend today - what we have jokingly referred to as God's holy sledgehammer. It was about me and my blogging - or, not blogging as the case may be. I've been doing this little experiment with blogging as a way to share my musings with friends, and a way to test the waters as a writer. To see if I can get all these ideas floating around in my head down in some concrete form so I can have my brain back. I have 3 kids - I need the brain back once in a while.

Only, I get stuck. A lot. See, there is a problem that many writers or would-be writers suffer. The problem of trying to write and edit at the same time. Which my dear friend pointed out to me is exactly what I was doing. Ouch.

This ties in very neatly with a previous post I did on our profound conversations following my "watershed moment." It's about the problem of wearing masks. You know, that public face that we all put on so that people will not run away screaming when they meet us. It's necessary in a civilized society. But some of us, like me, learn the lesson all too well when we are very young. Hence, the Editor....on my mouth, on my brain, on my actions. Somewhere along the line the Editor has come in and taken over my life. And my writing, evidently. There's an old saw that my dad used to say, "If a thing is worth doing it's worth doing well." So I try. I agonize. Over every word, every nuance, every thought. Is this acceptable? How we people read this? What will they think of me? Yikes!

And you know what? It almost hurts in a long underused part of my brain to just type this out in stream-of-consciousness form. Kind of like trying to write with my wrong hand. Amazingly, I find my fingers flying across the keys hardly able to keep up with my thoughts. This is the way I write when I write just for me, in my old fashioned journal with a regular old ball point. It's refreshing - kind of. It's also scary, like riding a bicycle down a hill when you know you have no brakes.

Funny, I seem to always have had this idea lurking in the back of my mind that if I don't convey the perfect thought with the perfect words, it won't mean as much to anyone reading it. Too many years of English classes and being corrected by my English teacher mother, I guess. It's like my brain decided that the real me is like Freud's id and so my superego Editor has to rein that in of course. For the good of society - ha! The Editor always wants me to be highly profound. Which I'm usually not, most days. Many of the things I might have shared on this blog my Editor told me were too ordinary, to blase to be of interest to anyone but me. So the next time that pesky Editor starts whispering in my ear, I'm going to do something I have rarely done - I'm going to slap him on the wrist and tell him to go away!

In the meantime, he's sitting in a corner, hyperventilating....

My love/hate relationship with technology

I just spent a frustrating half hour on my computer. I was trying to figure out how to import my blog as notes on my Facebook site. For some weird, nebulous reason the application decided not to recognize the URL of my blog. I tried it on 3 different web browsers. I tried it from 2 different links and typed it in a dozen times. I checked to make sure the DSL cable hadn't gotten knocked loose. I checked all my settings. Finally, on about the 12th try, it took. I still don't know what I did - or didn't - do that made it work.

I have always had this love/hate relationship with all my technology. I hate the learning curve. I love the benefits. My husband, who can cobble together his own platform from discarded computer parts that seem to follow him home, does not have this problem. He seems to intuitively know what to try. Oh, that didn't work? Try this. Not that either? Ok, just go here. It's like he's the computer whisperer or something. I usually learn all the basic functions of my technology, but skip the special features. I use my cell phone to make and receive calls. I don't retrieve voicemail messages, use the phone number index, play the games, or use it as an alarm clock. I know I could learn, but that would mean sitting down and reading the instruction manual from cover to cover (and I still would probably need Brian's help to interpret it.)

It's as though technology is a language in a foreign country that I've been dropped into to learn by immersion and I only know how to ask "Where's the bathroom?" and "How much is that please?" I know enough to get something to eat, but not enough to rent a car and go driving around the country to explore on my own. It seems to take me 3 times longer to learn how to navigate it. Part of it, I know, is impatience. But sometimes it feels like my brain hurts trying to comprehend it.

I am trying to push myself to be persistent when such things come up - and this morning the rewards were worth it. I had the satisfaction of seeing it work! But I'll tell you what - I almost sought out my old fashioned journal and a pen to write down my musings, and set aside the technology in the hope that it might be feeling friendlier to me later....

Heavenly music

I had the opportunity to attend an amazing concert last night. My husband's mom, dad, and sister invited us to come hear their choir, the Bucks County Choral Society, perform their spring concert in conjunction with the Fairfax Choral Society at National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. I love choral singing. I love to sing, and I love to hear other people sing, but I hold a special place in my heart for sacred choral singing. I had the privilege in college of going on 2 concert tours with the Lebanon Valley College Concert Choir. It was there that my love of sacred choral music really took off.

There is something unique and magical about this style of singing. Unlike many church choirs (and I've sung in a bunch of those) each member of the ensemble understands that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There is no soprano diva drowning everyone out on the high notes. No lonely tenor squawking to stay on pitch. No replacement of volume of sound for talent. Our beloved director, Dr. Getz, used to refer to it as "singing as one voice with many parts." In this style, the singers use their voices to mold and shape each note, each syllable, with love and passion and reverence. When it is done well, it is like I imagine it would be to hear the angels sing. I was in the anteroom of heaven last night.

One of the things that made the concert so special was the placement of the singers. Many of the pieces were sung with one choir down front and one up behind in the balcony. The other thing that brought the music to life was the venue. National Presbyterian has a very "live" sanctuary. For those not familiar with the term, a "live" venue is one in which the acoustics are such that the music is reverberated from the architecture - when the music stops the sound still rings in the air.

The last piece was the most special of all. It was written in the 1600's for 40 voices, each singing a different part. Since there were 200+ voices there were 2 or 3 to a part, but still, a very complex and difficult work to sing. For maximum effect, the choir members were placed all around the audience - literally standing in a circle, completely surrounding us. There were *eight* conductors to keep all the singers together. The piece is amazing. It is a musical tapestry - rising and falling, soaring, sparkling, dancing. By turns sounding like a babbling brook, a rushing river, a crashing ocean, a lullaby. Ethereal, unreal, all-encompassing, awash in sound. A musical glimpse into the greatness and the majesty and the creativity of our God.