Now please forgive me if I am wrong here, but isn’t this pretty much what we Christians have been saying for, you know, ever?? Of course, when we say it we’re a bunch of old-fashioned women whose overbearing husbands have gotten the better of us and are stifling our creativity and smarts by making us stay home and do dull things like endless piles of laundry.

When some new book babe comes out using the First Lady as her best current example of this type of thinking, then wow! this is all new and brilliant. No wait, I should amend that to read Democrat First Lady. This is only new and fresh if you’re a liberal. Republican First Ladies would no doubt get the aforementioned old-fashioned description.

Ha! I guess if you read it that way, it is new and newsworthy. Only the headline is wrong, so I shall rewrite it correctly:

“Liberal women finally discover what everyone else has known for millenia: Standing by Your Man makes everyone happier.”

Here’s the article:

‘Quit work to help your husband’, says a controversial new book that has infuriated feminists

I really enjoyed the article. It was the funniest thing I’ve read in weeks.

Rachel

Of course, I haven’t had much reading time lately with holiday and all that yap, but the slow days of winter fast approach and I need something to curl up on with on the couch that doesn’t start climbing on me and kicking me in the head within three minutes.

George found a great list of sci-fi books that non-sci-fi people will love so that’s going to be my new reading list. Well actually I’ve read a bunch of the stuff on the list, but there’s a bunch more to go through. Yay! If you are a sci-fi or good book enthusiast, here’s the link: 10 Sci-Fi Books That Even Non-Geeks Would Love. Actually, that whole website is full of fun stuff too. Ciao!

Rachel

P.S. My 6am wakeup is going well. Managed Friday, Saturday, and today (Monday) at 6. George asked me to set the alarm for 7 on Sunday. Day of rest and all that.

What usually happens is one of two things: I close my door and work upstairs for a little bit and they open it right back up and waltz in with dollies, bionicles, Cheerios and whatever else they have managed to pick up for their daily household item relocation project at that moment. Then they sit on my bed or eighteen inches away from me at the floor to play or talk or fight. This entirely defeats the purpose of having a desk away from the main floor.

So eventually I shoo them back out and tell them to go clean their rooms or something. This works for a few minutes and then either Kyra takes something or Georgie starts bossing people around or Faith won’t eat her breakfast and they all start yelling at one another. Or they’re all quiet for a lovely amount of time and when I go downstairs I find that they have taken out every single toy they own and built a city where the kitchen floor used to be or trucked out every stitch of bedding to build an impassible wall in the hallway. Then the noise comes from me!

None of these solutions are great. After long days of re-cleaning messes in places that were cleaned half an hour before; laundering clothing for a houseful of people; fighting with my checkbook; kissing fingers with small, nearly invisible owies on them; and hugging and smooching several charming children and one husband, I tend to want to decompress at the end of the day and not spend the evening working. The only place to add more hours to my day was in the morning.

Alarm clocks are stupid, loud, and I have a really terrible habit of slapping them until they shut up and then promptly rolling back over to sleep for just a couple more hour-length minutes. If I’m going to get up early, I have to figure out how to fix this. Last week I found this article about How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Clock Goes Off. The guy who writes the blog is one strange, anti-religious duck; however, he does seem to have a plausible solution to my alarm aversion.

Last night I set my alarm for 6am (my first thought was 5, but then I decided I didn’t want to give myself a total heart attack and it was 12:30am already). After running through in my head a few times how the alarm would sound, how I would sit straight up, turn off the alarm, take a deep breathe and stretch, and then pop right up and go take a shower, I zonked out.

Six o’ clock came and that is exactly what I did: sit up, breathe, stretch, pop up, shower. I think this may have been made slightly easier by the fact that I used the alarm on my cell phone which is really loud and sounds like a phone and it scared the crap out of me. Actually, I think who it really startled was George who I had not directly mentioned my experiment to. He showed up in the shower about ten minutes later.

I’m planning to try this whole six o’ clock thing through the rest of January and see how it goes. Then I’ll either try moving it back an hour or will give up in disgust and go back to my lazy ways. So far it is now 8:44 and I’ve been up for nearly three hours. This is going to be my lead for next week’s GNGC edition, so now I don’t have to worry about that next week. Yay!

I’ve already organized bills stuff for this week and am generally enjoying having had some time to hear myself think before the swarming masses wake up and crowd out whatever conversation myself and I were having.

Ahh, and here’s swarmers #1 and #3. Guess it’s about time to go. Ha! We have a little bit of snow again this morning (under 1″). Georgie’s reaction: “Oh no! Not again!” What kid reacts to snow like that? Apparently one who spent two weeks stuck in the house.

Rachel

Anyway, due to weather-related peculiarity our Christmas seemed odd this year. We were stuck in the house for all but one day for the entire two weeks prior to Christmas Day, which meant no shopping (hurray for Amazon or we’d have no presents!) or visiting friends or going to church or anything at all. Very weird.

Thankfully the snow began to melt enough on Christmas Eve for my family to make it here and happily a bit more on Christmas Day so we could get to Hubby’s family’s house on Christmas Day.

I like playing hearts with my side of the family and Dutch Blitz with my SIL’s on Hubby’s side on holidays. When my Dad’s parents lived up here we used to hang around with all Dad’s brothers and his parents and play hearts (at least that’s how I remember it), so now playing hearts says Christmasy, family things to me. However, holidays also involve a lot of things like eating good food, opening presents, and other non-cards activities. Besides that, I think I may be the only one on my side who has such a strong attachment to playing hearts.

Moving to a Twelve Days of Christmas type of schedule would take care of this because then we could spend all day in the kitchen on the holiday for those who like to do such a thing and I could get my cards fix later. Plus, no more problem of scurry, scurry, scurry, oh look it’s over already. I hate that.

I may have to do some thinking about how to do Christmas on a more leisurely schedule. Wouldn’t that be nice? I think so. I was poking around today looking for websites on twelve days of Christmas things, and found some interesting things. One of them was about the Twelve Days of Christmas song. Apparently there is some dispute about the origin and meaning of the song, but one of the ideas is that the numbers in the days are all used to help catechize children.

The numbers help remember things like this: Four Calling Birds reminds us of the Four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), Five Golden Rings reminds us of the Five Books of the Law (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), Six Geese-A-laying reminds of the Six Days of Creation, etc. Pretty neat! I’m always up for cheesy memory helps. Here’s the link in case you’re interested (scroll down to the bottom for the song): Twelve Days of Christmas. I’m going to have to put that in my Christmas box for next year so it doesn’t get lost and I can teach it to the kiddos.

Actually, they probably already have all this stuff memorized due to our excellent RCC Sunday School program. So nice! I think the sum total of what I learned in all my Sunday School years growing up in a non-Reformed church was that Jesus loved me and the song, “Father Abraham had many sons.” So sad. Now I’m going to have to go quiz the kids and see what they know.

Well, we are having what seems like it’s going to be about a gazillion people here tomorrow night for New Year’s Eve, so I’m off to go clean some more. Downstairs is about done. I love that the children like to mop and don’t complain too much about helping when we ask them to! It’s especially nice since, you know, three-fourths of the mess is from them in the first place.

Rachel

I hate having company over when my house is doing its most impressive toxic waste dump impression; and since we have people over every week at a minimum (my family is over every other week for Family Dinner night, and my girlfriends come over on the off weeks to play cards), the house gets what my Mother colorfully refers to as “a lick and a promise” type cleaning done with some regularity. I’ve always wondered exactly what is being licked and/or promised and by and to whom this is being done when this de-griming is occurring, but I don’t think I want to know the answer.

Lately, however, I’ve been feeling oddly housewifely, which has naturally made me ponder the age old question, “WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH ME???” I have been actually enjoying my ancient nemesis The Skillet, and courting my primal foe, The Oven. Artisan bread, a whole stack of newly acquired (and disturbingly tasty) dinner recipes, and home baked breakfasts ~ what is this newfangled obsession? Maybe I’m the subject of some bizarre government experiment in which masked men sneak into my house at night and inject me with genetic material appropriated from Betty Crocker. No, that can’t be right. I’ve decided instead to blame my apron. Well, aprons plural.

You see, I’ve never been an apron person. They’re frumpy and tacky, and a woman who has five children constantly spitting and spilling on her all day (among other things) needs no help in feeling tacky or frumpy (the woman in question may or may not be me). Wearing stylish clothes (well, sort of) with drool on them is infinitely better than covering my only moderately dorky clothes with a blob of faded fabric that would make Vanna White look like she was wearing a very badly tailored potato sack (I can’t think of anyone more recent than Vanna White?? Oh neural synapses, how I miss thee… Also, I think there must be a large market out there for tailored potato sacks. Someone should look into that.).

A couple of years ago I was off procrastinating doing something constructive (probably cooking) by bobbing along on the internet, and I came across a site selling aprons produced by some lady named Jessie Steele, who I’d never heard of. Apparently Oprah’s heard of her, but lacking that oh so important direct link into The Oprah Brain, I was happily swilling around in apron ignorance… until that black day.

Not frumpy, in no way reminiscent of a misfiled potato sack, this apron was fantastic! Stylish, flirty (always important in an apron because ovens get very temperamental if you aren’t cheeky with them occasionally), and earning the Mary Poppins seal of approval by being practically perfect in every way, I had to have one. Well, if it hadn’t cost $40, I would have had to have one. Since it did, in fact, cost $40, I simply saved the link so I could return to the site and drool at it whenever I desired while my apron dream languished as a sadly overlooked item for two years on my Christmas and birthday lists.

Then in November my Mother and I were discussing Christmas shopping and what to get for my sister-in-law. Mom said that my SIL had some crazy $40 apron made by Jackie Steele or somebody or other on her list, and what could possibly make an apron worth that much anyway? The exploding psycho look on my face may have been an indicator to her that I had in fact heard of these aprons and had formed an opinion on them.

Around that same time, I had poked around Amazon and made one of those cool Wish Lists you can make on their site and then email to all your family members who keep asking you every other day what you want for Christmas. Since I couldn’t find the Jessie Steele apron I wanted, I substituted another funky apron that I didn’t think I’d get either. Well, it turned out that I got both aprons for Christmas, one from my SIL and one from my Mother-in-law. Hurray!

And so my apron days began. Slowly they bled one into the next with my aprons stuffed silently in a drawer. I’d put them on when I remembered and I always felt great wearing one, but after dinner back they would go into their dark abode to be forgotten for another week or so. Then in February my friend Amy booted Handsome Hubby and I out of the house for a couple of days and made us go away to the beach so she could come and play with my little goofballs for the weekend (what a friend!). When we came back, my dusty aprons had been relocated to the mysteriously placed hook next to my fridge.

Every day there they were beckoning to me in there Lorelei voices, “Put me on. You too can be a stylish member of the post-1950’s, retro sorority.” Well, when an apron starts demanding things, you ignore her at your own peril! And so on my aprons went (not together of course; that would undoubtedly cause a squabble).

At first I started wearing them only while I was making dinner. Then, since I seem to be congenitally incapable of cleaning without splashing something on myself, it occurred to me that the women in those old ’50’s vacuum cleaner ads wore aprons while they cleaned. They also wore dresses and high heels, but I refuse to do that. Well, at least until I can find sexy pumps (preferably red) that both feel like tennis shoes and that I can carry around small children or go down stairs in without breaking my ankle. Once that occurs I probably won’t even take them off to sleep in, much less vacuum in! Showering may be negotiable. Now if they’re waterproof as well…. Ahem, aprons. We were talking about aprons.

Anyway, I found myself wearing my lovely aprons an increasing amount of the time. I’d start actually prepping dinners in the afternoon instead of waiting until 5:00 just so I could wear my apron. Also around that time, my sweet Hubby found that scrumptious Artisan Bread recipe from a couple months ago, and I began making the dough for that in the evening so it could proof overnight. More reasons to wear my apron!

Now my aprons spend most of their days protecting me from the dirty dishwater I drip all over myself, shielding me from the horrors of poofing flour when I fiddle with my bread, and defending me from the formula that my daughter dribbles down my shirt when we’re snuggling on the couch for her breakfast (in their off hours, my aprons moonlight for the Portland Police Force). The other day Faith was toddling around in that haphazard, slightly tipsy looking way that newly walking babies do. She started wobbling badly as she walked past me, so she reached out and grabbed the first thing she could reach: my apron string. And here I now am, domesticated by small pieces of black and purple fabric, my aprons.

Rachel

P.S. Here’s some pictures of the two aprons I have in case you’re wondering what kind of aprons could possibly be worth $40 and turn a woman into a blubbering housewife who claims to like cooking after eleven years of culinary strife. Recently, my brother-in-law skeptically asked me if I really thought my aprons were worth all that money. I have pondered this often since then (at the time, I casually answered in the affirmative); and upon further reflection, my answer is an unequivocal “yes.”

My aprons are kind of like a uniform or a costume for a play. Once one goes on, I all of a sudden become SuperMom. Then when I take it back off, I am back to my mild-mannered persona and read a book (well, maybe “mild” is a stretch…).

Jessie Steele apron: Currently selling online in a bunch of places as well as on eBay for much better prices. This seller has them for $27 or so, which is a great deal (Jessie Steele has several other styles too, and all are fabulous so be sure to check out the other ones):

Jessie Steele Apron

Funky Dots Apron from Amazon: Funky Dots Apron

 

No, neither of the women modeling the aprons is me. They’re, well, models.

Anyway, no more! I’m turning over a new petal. The house we moved into last summer has one of those fancy green house window things in the kitchen: you know, the ones where the window sticks out from the rest of the house by a foot or so and is enclosed by glass on all sides so that the whole thing catches the light. All winter I’ve been eyeing it, trying to decide whether or not to risk local plant life against my not-so-green thumb and actually try to grow something.

Well, with my current wild and crazy cooking kick, I finally decided a couple weekends ago to screw my courage to the sticking place and put in an unassuming little herb garden with basil, oregano, and cilantro (in case you are having literary frustration trying to remember where that “sticking place” phrase is from, it’s Macbeth; but small children may also possibly know it from the song Gaston sings at the end of “Beauty and the Beast” as he winds up the villagers to go kill the Beast). So now it’s ten days later and my plants are still alive! Yes, I know ten days is not very long, but my previous record was closer to three so I’m happy.

I also have a pretty little ceramic pot in the window box that my Handsome Hubby has been killing avocado pits in during his so far failing experiments at growing a tree. I’m thinking about throwing out his dead seed that’s been denied a proper burial for the last month and asking my Mother for another cutting of the ivy from my wedding bouquet that she’s been nurturing for the last eleven years and protecting from my seedling obliterating ways.

She’s actually given me at least three snippings in the past, all of which have fallen victim to my inattentive watering habits. Huh. I wonder if she still has any. I seem to vaguely remember something a couple years ago about the ivy’s health failing, but I don’t remember whether or not it became terminal. Of course, it’s very likely that I’ve filed this episode incorrectly since plant discussion typically shuts down all areas of my brain where cognitive thought resides until the conversation changes to something much more interesting like bunnies, politics or new shoes. Well, maybe not bunnies.

Last night I used a wad of my fancy new alive basil in our dinner (Big Basil Burgers), and I must say that was rather gratifying. I suppose it would be kind of like raising, butchering, and eating your own beef except without the raising and butchering part. So I guess it’s probably nothing like that…. Well, it’s satisfying on a very diminutive level nonetheless! Perhaps if I can keep these plants alive for another couple of weeks I’ll be ready to graduate to something really hard. Maybe I’ll get a cactus.
Rachel

Well, okay I might do some profound pondering at some point, but it’s not gonna be today! All I’ve got for today is drivel. Maybe the kids will say something weird and then I can put that up. Hmmm, seems highly possible…

Rachel