Technical Difficulties and a Change in Operating Proceedure

For some reason it always surprises me when I encounter a project that doesn't sail smoothly from start to finish without any false starts and practice runs. How's that for humility! I think sometimes my vision of the end product is so clear that I cannot fathom how anything could go wrong. If I could only jump right from the planning stage to the finished stage . . . it is all those intermediary steps that trip me up! What? Opaque, heavily painted muslin doesn't resemble the iridescent and multifaceted feather's of a butterfly's wing?! What, do you have to be God  to create a butterfly that doesn't list drunkenly to the side?! What's that about Pride going before a fall . . . ?

I am anxiously anticipating starting my second round of butterflies. This first set was for our "color of the day wreath". In some Waldorf schools they use a color of the day to help preliterate children feel the flow and repeats of the weeks. The colors are pretty standard:

Monday is Purple Day
Tuesday is Red Day (We do pink)
Wednesday is Yellow Day
Thursday is Orange Day
Friday is Green Day (As someone who grew up in the 90's this always makes me laugh!)
Saturday is Blue Day
Sunday is White Day.

I started incorporating the color of the day last summer for just that reason; to help B have a sense of the unit of time we call a week. It was my challenge and goal to organize our activities so that the same thing falls on the same day each week, giving our week a balanced rhythm. The color of the day is to give B a visual way to track where we were in that rhythm. I hung a wreath in the dining room where we can see it prominently. We have had various beings, according to the seasons, help us track the color of the day. These butterflies made their appearance on Ash Wednesday in anticipation of the coming of Spring and the celebration of Easter. A second set of butterflies will hatch out of their cocoons on the nature table Easter morning. That gives me just under two weeks.

Hopefully, with that amount of time, and the practice from the first set I will find a groove, but for some reason I am still anxious. I didn't give myself a whole lot of time before Ash Wednesday to work through the kinks in the technical side of this project. Some of our new visitors didn't take flight until more than a week after their first appearance, and I found myself up late each night painting the next day's butterfly. This is not how I like to work, but I am finding that crafting time is growing scarcer and scarcer.

Because, of course, I am so very rarely alone anymore!

I am facing a shift in thinking. Crafting used to be by and for me. Then, it became for me and my children, but still by me. Slowly (or not so slowly!) it is becoming crafting by me and my children. I honestly don't know how I feel about that! (blush) Ultimately, I hope very much that my children learn from me, and enjoy making things with their hands. I hope to pass on the confidence of being able to tackle any project, and the enjoyment of making beautiful things.  But there is a part of me that really enjoys creating something and setting it out, unexplained, to be found, and played with, and marveled at. And there is certainly a part of my that enjoys working in peace without having to stop mid flow to fix, or straighten, or clean up. I suppose it will just take some adjustments in time management; definitely some patience on my part; and some clear boundaries about which is my project and which is our project.

Somebody is One!

Shrove Tuesday

Pancake Day! Pancake Day!

Don't let your pancakes frizzle away!

                                                                                                   -- Traditional

 

We went on a little outing to our fancy health food store in search of a Shrove Tuesday snack. I am always in mind of a little photo-copy a friend sent me that comes from Hints on Child Training by H. Clay Trumbull, wherein the author describes ways to make the Sabbath day stand out in a child's mind, even from their earliest days. I am usually a little suspicious of things that talk about "training" children. I worry that they are geared more towards the convenience of adults rather than the good of the child. In this case, however, I think "training" actually means "building a foundation" rather than "eradicating unwanted behavior". Trumbull gives delightful descriptions of saving a child's best clothing, toys, and foods for the Sabbath day so that the child actually feels in every activity that the day is special.  He says,

It is for the parents to make clear the distinction that marks, in the child's mind, the Lord's day as the day of days in the week's history. The child may be differently dressed, or differently washed, or differently handled on that day from any other. . . . There may be a sweeter song sung in his hearing, or a brighter exhibit of some kind made in his sight, . . . which links a special joy with that day in comparison with the days on either side of it.

It seems quite apparent to me that one can expand on this idea to guide the celebration of the seasons as well as the weeks. Having never read the whole book, perhaps Trumbull does just that, but it has become a guiding light for me as I bring the liturgical seasons to these littlest of children. One of the most basic things we all take part in is food. Changing the kind of food one eats is a very simple and all encompassing way to mark one season as different from another. And so we went to our fancy health food store to find cookies, but also to find beans.

"Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." John 12:24

I was super excited to find a bean called the Christmas Lima. It's the second one to the left. I don't think it gets more poetic than that: the Christmas Bean must fall to the earth, become food for us, and rise again with new life! It's like everything Lent rolled into one! We will have to plant some of those! So, with a cupboard full of beans, a refrigerator full of stock, and pancakes in the making I think we are all set. Happy Shrove Tuesday!

Preparing for a Lenten Transformation

One of the things that is so interesting to me about celebrating the yearly festivals with very little children is bringing the powerful and sometimes very adult stories into our home in a way that is both accessible to little children and also sensitive to their developmental needs. I find it much easier with Christmas because the Christmas story is a picture of family which is what the little child knows. And of course, here in our family this past Christmas, we were still adjusting the the birth of our own baby. Babies are wholesome and easy to love. For Advent we set up a little basket bed and had pieces of straw to place in the bed whenever we had been particularly good; when we had been patient (with our children [me], or our new sister [B]), when we had been thoughtful, or generous, or kind. We talked about making a soft bed in our hearts for when baby Jesus came on His birthday. And sure enough Christmas arrived with the Christ child laying in His manger.

The story of the Crucifixion is another matter altogether. I was very fortunate to work with a wonderful (some would even say master, although he always begged us not to) Waldorf kindergarten teacher my first year teaching. He told me at one point that if you do nothing else for a curriculum for the littlest children, you can always have Angels for the Autumn, Stars for the Winter, and Butterflies for the Spring. Each of these, angels, stars, and butterflies, is in some way representative of the spiritual mood of the season.  As I have time, I hope to have more to say about this idea. I have clung to this idea in trying to bring the liturgical year into our domestic church. And, so, butterflies.

The Saints Go Marching In!

 I am very pleased to present our family's collection of peg people Saints! Last Christmas, over a year ago, I set myself a goal. I wanted to develop an overarching yearly rhythm that included not only the natural rhythms of the earth, but also the liturgical rhythms of the Church year. I was feeling a need for a greater differentiation between times of fasting and times of celebration. I felt like our consumption of sweets on a day to day basis was a little out of hand. I wanted to develop a seasonal rhythm that had breath to it; time for feasting and time for appreciating that we even have the ability to feast. I wish I could say that I had immediately implemented some great charitable plan to share our riches with others. My face is burning a little to admit that that didn't even occur to me. I guess that might be because I started by identifying the feasts, rather than the fasts.

As a family we have very organically begun identifying the Saints with whom we have a connection. I posted a litany of the Saints in our kitchen starting with those whose names we share. The second verse (so to speak) are those Saints whose patronage we have specifically asked for through confirmation, and those Saints whose memorials are the same as our birthdays. Then come all the Saints for whom we have a particular devotion. This litany has become a great help to us when things are down right horrid right around the pre-dinner melt down. I find that by singing the litany every so quietly it really does help calm us all down, and it helps me focus on what needs to get done to move things along. Since these Saints' days fall throughout the year I used them as a guide to help form the yearly rhythm that I was seeking.

I wanted the rhythm to be visible to B who was only just two at the time. I didn't want to say much about it to B, I just wanted to live the rhythm in such a way that he would feel it. I hope that by hearing the stories of these Saints year after year, they will become as familiar to us as aunts and uncles. So, through the course of the year I made these peg dolls. They appear on the seasonal table on their feast day. Since we like them, they usually stick around until it is the next Saint's turn. They are just the right size to be held in the hand, and didn't take so long to make that if they get a little frayed around the edges I don't mind. That is really the extent of the form these feasts took this past year. There are many rich traditions associated with celebrating Saints days. I am looking forward to bringing those traditions into our home. And, now that I have a little practice with this overarching yearly rhythm, I can work on cultivating the richness of the fasting times too. : )

An Angel and St. Micheal the Archangel

St. Brigid of Ireland, St. Patrick of Ireland, St. Nicholas, St. Martin of Tours, St. Valentine

St. John the Baptist

Sts. Joachim and Anna (with young St. Mary)

The Holy Family

The Three Wise Kings

Epiphany

The Host of Heaven

 I am flattered to say that these little peg dolls were so admired that it was requested that I make a tutorial. You can find Part One here!

On Nursing

"Was this to be the last kiss she ever received from a little mouth, sweet with milk?" 

 Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undsent Book II, Part III, Chapter IV. 

 I had an epiphany last night which completely changed the way I view how I have fed my babies. You see, M and I have only recently stopped nursing. She was almost exactly ten months old and it was bitter sweet, but we were both really ready. I had always dreamed of nursing my children for years. My youngest brother, the only one whose nursing relationship I remember, nursed until he was four years old. I grew up perceiving that nursing was a wonderful thing that every mother was able to do. I loved the natural, earthy, consonance of breastfeeding, and I longed for the days when I would nurse my own children. So I was completely brought to my knees and devastated when I was unable to produce enough milk to exclusively nurse B. But there had been a thousand complications with my pregnancy and his delivery, and so, when I was able to raise my head and look forward again I told myself, "next time".

 Yes. Next time. Well, at three weeks old M was not gaining weight. And slowly, half an ounce at a time, she took more and more formula. I struggled with justifying my desire to nurse her with actually providing her with food. I wracked my brain trying to figure out where I had gone wrong. I wept every time I offered my daughter a bottle. And then I would feel guilty about wanting to control how much she got from a bottle so her demand would still up my supply. We ended up precariously balancing bottle feeding and nursing with a lact-aid nursing supplementer. But she was taking a full 24-30 ounces of formula per day, and when she was really hungry, she wanted a bottle. And, while using a supplementer allowed me to nurse M, it was cumbersome and finiky and just not natural. I am happy that we struck a balance that worked for as long as it did, but I did roll my eyes at myself for using bottles. Not because no one should use bottles, but because I felt like I was cheating on my own ideals.

 

I have a friend whose experience is eerily similar to my own. Her pediatrician comfortingly pointed out that, had it been six hundred years ago, there would have been other women around who could take our children and feed them. (The way God and nature intended, I bitterly added to myself). She assured my friend that we do things differently now, in this country, but that doesn't mean we don't care about our babies. But still I rolled my eyes at bottles and formula. They aren't dynamic. They aren't human.

 And then I read Kristin Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Undset. It is not a book about breast feeding. But it is a book about 14th century Norway. And in 14th century Norway, when babies, for whatever reason, are not fed by their mothers, they are fed by foster mothers and wet nurses. And, although it had never occurred to me, those babies develop close, natural, earthy, consonant relationships with their foster mothers. And they might even fuss and reach out for their foster mothers when held by their own mothers. And that would have broken my heart more than any bottle. 

I sat in bed last night holding my baby girl as she held her bottle, and I was so, so, so grateful that I am the one who feeds her. She likes food more than her bottle anyway. She is learning to drink from a cup. The bottles will be put away eventually. But I am the one she turns to when she needs something.

Valentine's Birthday

Happy Birthday . . .

 . . . to my St. Valentine's Day baby!

We enjoyed the cake.