holy days

We’ve spent much of the past year “chasing after the fleeting winds of youth, through forests of indecision”, as I wrote long ago in high school, way before I actually knew what that meant. It turns out there’s great fun to be had in trying to catch certain moments as they fly past, all giggling and breathless and fresh from the well-springs of young hearts alive with discovery; but then the task gets more difficult: trying to capture them for keeps, to preserve them as vibrant and bright and meaningful—that’s the real trick, isn’t it? And yet that’s where we manage to find some of our highest purpose, while wading through the messiness of life, of new jobs and new babies and new challenges that tempt us to become overwhelmed in the sheer inconstancy of it all.

And 2009 has certainly proven to be that kind of year: we’ve made major life decisions and changes, career shifts, and discovered that our passel of 5 children evidently was not complete, and now we expect our sixth sometime in late March of 2010. The children have grown, and changed, and are all finding ways to make their marks on the world already, even as we—as their parents—work to find ways to make our marks on their hearts, through the sacred days that are masked in the mundane.
We had the delight this year of trekking up to Yellowstone, one of the most fascinating and beautiful geological wonders on the entire planet. We were struck by the changing, moving nature of the earth in that place, how some places within the park can grow by several feet a year, while others recede, a terrestrial dance of balance. This is no sterile, stagnant monument for the ages; instead, it is the very picture of creative forces at work, forging their paths up through what, at first glance, seems to be impenetrable rock. The result is often chaotic and sometimes a little scary, but always beautiful and irresistibly thrilling.

We’ve found a great many parallels between our experiences in Yellowstone and those within our network of family and friends this year; the nature of our relationships is always changing—growing or receding or just changing form—and what we wind up with is always beautiful in ways we couldn’t have imagined. Late nights at the coffee house with a few good friends, an impromptu dinner with someone we just met, game night with cousins up in the mountains of Montana, even a frightening evening in an urgent care waiting room with the children huddled about; all of these experiences, though often unplanned, have been little expressions of a great Love bubbling below the surface of our lives, rising to break that surface and creating something surprising and Beautiful. These are the moments that we treasure and chase after, trying to capture them, like snapshots, for the scrapbooks of our hearts. And we thank God—and you, our precious friends and family—for the chance to experience the greatness of the small moments we’ve shared with you throughout the year. It is our prayer that we learn to let more of those moments happen with each of you, to look past the façade of our mundane everydayness and reach out for the Creative and the Beautiful, wanting and waiting to happen.

We pray you a coming year of fullness and grace and vision to take hold of what is truly important in the world, beyond dirty dishes and money and commitments and schedules, and all that threatens to cloud the sight, and into the real joy of capturing the great moments for all that they’re worth.

a hard lesson in gratitude

We went in Tuesday to see our midwife and find out the sex of Baby #6; we were, well, shocked to find out that we're having yet another boy, especially after Bonnie and I took such delight in picking out all that pink quilt fabric and the pieces were already coming together. Bonnie began to cry during the ultrasound as soon as Jessica announced that he's a boy, and I've spent the remainder of the week in a state of mild befuddlement over what the cosmic plan is for my raising half the planet's testosterone in my own house. I told Bonnie that evening that, while I'm sad we don't get our little girl we've been waiting for, I can't help but be thankful for the gorgeous toes and fingers and ribs we see moving around on the ultrasound screen, obvious signs of a healthy, happy baby; so many people don't get healthy, whole babies. And yet, despite my preaching that perspective, I've felt a growing jealousy of every little girl I've seen all week, and I've felt a little resentful that we weren't getting our girl. We're 22 weeks along, by the way.

Enter the story of Shauna, my classmate from high school, who is 2 weeks behind me in her pregnancy. She was going in yesterday to find out the sex of her baby; I jokingly wrote on her Facebook page yesterday, "If you end up with a girl, wanna trade? I have 5 healthy boys to choose from!"

I'm glad Facebook has a delete button.

I confess that I stewed a little bit all afternoon yesterday, sure that Shauna would come home from her appointment and post to Facebook that she was having a girl, and being preemptively envious of her good fortune. But the afternoon waned on, and no word came. Then one of her sisters posted something alarming about praying for her sister, and then her other sister posted something similar. By this morning, the story was out that Shauna found out yesterday that she was having twin boys, and that she was in labor. There was twin-to-twin transfusion happening, and the excess fluid caused by this put her into labor; she was fully dilated by the time she felt a contraction. The boys, Luke and Josh, lived for 15 minutes last night, and then slipped away.

My sweet little healthy boy is kicking away in my belly as I type, and I have never been more grateful, or more shamed.

--Teri.

i cry at books.

There's a long-standing tradition in my family of reading books aloud to each other; usually I'm the reader, and the rest of the family sits in wrapt attention while we live out in our collective mind the perils and adventures of real and imagined heroes and villains. Our latest literary escapade was Timothy Egan's newest work, The Big Burn. It's about the largest forest fire to ever sweep the United States which, on the surface, may not sound like the best topic for an entire book. But wrap that up with the personal stories of the men who fought it and survived or perished in the firestorm and the political underpinnings of the day, and you have an insanely nail-biting tale that had everyone from my five-year-old to a family friend begging for an excuse to have a chapter read to them. Whenever we had to pile into the van for an outing, the first question, before seatbelts, was, "Do you have the book?"

I possess no great skill in oral reading, but there's always something about having a story read aloud that people never outgrow. We've had weekend reading parties for years whenever the opportunity presented itself, usually looking something like what happens when a college frat house and a child's slumber party collide in our living room, big strapping guys draped over all the furniture next to kids-of-all-ages, lasting late into the night until everyone has lost the struggle to hold onto the last threads of consciousness and one more paragraph of whatever great story we're engaged in.

I'm never quite sure whether it's this unique synergy of generations of friends and family all tangled up in some exotic tale, or whether it's the story itself, but I often find myself struggling to continue on through the last few pages without a lump rising in my throat and warm tears obscuring the words on the last hallowed pages. By the final chapter of The Big Burn, I was a heap, almost sobbing while listening (my voice was out and Christopher had to finish off the last few pages for me) to the last breaths of lives that we'd become so enamored of during the past few weeks. My oldest son was surprised that tears were freely flowing down my cheeks, and he asked me why I was crying. What could I say? When it came down to trying to put that emotion into actual words, I came up short. What came to mind was, "How can I not?" I become so invested in the humble heroes of our epic tales, their struggles, victories, and losses, and the whole experience of reaching into a piece of literature and finding myself tugged by the hand from the other end, that it seems like a natural response in parting to shed a few tears and not want to say goodbye.

Maybe my son understands better than I do that it's never really a parting after all, but that the stories become a part of us as much as we become a part of them, and that they take up residence in our souls and color our view of the world, helping us become the heroes of our own stories.
--Teri.

duggaresque...part deux

I'm always a little nervous when I find those rosy places in the blogosphere where nothing is ever messy and the world is just dang skippy all the time, and lest anyone get the wrong impression from my last post that my artsy little sweet-spot of a home is all peaches and smiles, I submit to you Duggaresque...Part Deux.

Have you ever visited a real art museum? Well, yeah, me neither, but let's pretend for a minute. The halls are lined with inspiring works of imagination from some of the great minds in the craft over the centuries. Statues stand, loftily and perfectly, somehow above the sometimes-chaotic crowd bustling around below. There are no boogers here. And no wet paint.

Okay, now then, for a bit of perspective, have you ever visited a children's museum? You go over to the super-trendy 'art station' to have the kids create something, only to find that some hungry little "artist" has already made off with the tips of every single broad-tipped marker in the building, probably having eaten them and chased them down with glue or tempera paint, and obviously the green glitter, which also seems to be completely empty. And what's this? Oh, how nice--fingerpaint in puddles on the floor, and now on your shoe, and somehow up your pant leg, and suddenly all over your hands and the diaper bag and the baby and your hair. Nice.

Maybe the scupture station is a little more well-organized, so you make tracks (literally--remember the paint on your shoe?) over in that direction, only to find that the glue-glutting kid from the first station found out the hard way that those items don't sit so well in the stomach and somehow the cleanup crew has missed his not-so-little technicolor masterpiece now oozing into the carpet, you know, for posterity to enjoy, since it's full of glue (ooh, and that pretty green glitter!) and rapidly becoming one with the floor. Maybe they'll give it a name and make it one of the permanent exhibits, if the administration hasn't set aside funds for new carpet in this sort of event. But we were talking sculpture, weren't we? Ahhhh, modeling clay. Since the manufactureres of this staple of childhood creativity haven't yet discovered a way of keeping the colors from 1)bleeding 2)mixing or 3)smearing all over every surface they touch, at least without making the whole compound so toxic that you need a decontamination shower after opening the package, you try your best to interest the kids in the gummy-lump of poop-brown clayglomerate before you. Somehow, the best you or they can manage to come up with resembles strongly a zoo display of wild animal scat (those little pellets are from African pygmy deer; that big lump? Supposed to be a giraffe, but doesn't that look just like Siberian wolf scat after its latest meal of boneless mouse wings?)

I think of the Duggar's little television-world home in kind of the same way as that art museum: we don't see the mess, only the masterpiece. Nevermind that Van Gogh got so frustrated that he whacked off his own ear (I'm sure Michelle Duggar never has those kinds of days); and you think that Jackson Pollack started out by slinging paint at his canvas? Anyone care to guess what happened if the great sculptors of antiquity suddenly found themselves with a one-armed Venus because of one wrong chisel blow? They'd stick it back on with wax mixed with some rock dust, pack it up quick and ship it away to the buyer, and pray that a sunny day didn't come along too soon! Isn't that a bit like the TLC show, where the snotty noses and puddles of vomit are somehow edited out, and we get to watch a polished, perfect family moving in unison and having-a-very-nice-day-every-day-of-the-week?

My house, on the other hand, is more like the children's museum on most days--we have a lot of fun and we make a lot of mess. Oh, sure, there are some great works of art here, but they're works in progress, and sometimes the chisel hits a little too hard, or sometimes not hard enough, and sometimes we have to pray that the wax will hold. I may not be tempted to cut my ears off, but you can bet that sometimes I want to pull my hair out! And sometimes I've been found guilty of slinging the paint like Pollack and leaving the world to wonder, "What was she thinking??" And on some days, the best I can manage to create feels and looks an aweful lot like a pile of crap.

But there are days, when I take a peek past the hallowed doors of the future imagined, into the day when my dripping, cracking, smearing works-of-art are finally completed, when I have lovingly applied the last brush strokes, smoothed the last surface on the alabaster man, carved my name into the heart of each one, and see a moment when I have offered up my best works to the world, ready to take their places in the hall of great masterpieces. No one will remember the children's museum days when we struggled to make sense of anything, when we all wondered how this art project would turn out, when we wanted to sling paint all over our hard work, and when tears and goobers were all part of the process.

On that day I'll stroll past in silence, admiring the beauty, and make one last track of fresh fingerpaint footprints down the hallway on my way past.

--Teri.

duggaresque

As my belly begins to be a little more conspicuous lately as our sixth child gains a sizable standing (literally!) in our family , I'm getting more and more comments from mostly-well-intentioned people comparing our family to the (in)famous Duggar family of TLC renown. Somehow, now that we're standing on the lofty edge of 6 children, everyone we know (and most that we don't!) are tempted to throw a rope across that vast divide that separates our 6 children from the Duggar family's 19, and wait for us on the other side.

Like we're physically capable of raising 19 children without literally, figuratively, and in every other sense dropping dead (I'm flattered by the notion, really).

The critics of the Duggar family's jackpot of offspring complain that the family is too big, too white, too Christian, too organized, too delegated, too mid-western...the list goes on. There seems to be a never-ending stream of criticisms against a family who has chosen to go counter-culture and have a lot of children, receiving them as gifts, nondiscriminately and in their own time. And that pretty much scares the crap out of me.

We've decided to go counter-culture, too. Our kids don't mix with a ton of other children, we homeschool, we don't own a television, the kids have a lot of responsibility for their ages. We have about three times the culturally accepted number of children, and people are afraid we're not quitting. Some people wring their hands and worry that we're environmentally irresponsible, that we're rabidly over-populating the planet almost singlehandedly, that we're raising an army of homogenized, milky-white prosumers with a cultural appreciation for grilled-cheese-and-that's-about-it. They worry that maybe we don't recycle enough, that the kids will all grow up Republican, that they'll hate the arts and freak out when they hit sunlight.

But do I have to apologize now for being white, Christian, or mid-western? Do I have to apologize that I consider myself an artist's tool in the hands of the Great Artist, and that I consider my children to be masterpieces that I helped create? Last time I checked, my lily-whiteness wasn't on the menu of life-choices I was given, so I can't really back-pedal on that one. The mid-western thing might can be remedied, but still not really a reason to be apologetic. And as for my Christianity, while sometimes an embarrassment because of the knuckle-heads in our ranks (I include myself in this epithet at various times), I can't really apologize for that, either. Or won't, anyway.

So that leaves the kids. All. These. Kids. And I wouldn't dream of apologizing for these little jewels, their amazing uniqueness, the obviousness of their potential impact on a hurting world. One scathing commentary on the Duggar's children called the latest addition to the family a "mewling sewer rat". Really. Really?? Has that nay-sayer never held a little 'mewling rat' in his arms and fell in love in the most irrational and profound way possible? Has he never looked into the face of a little one and seen the future, fresh and undefiled? How could I possibly apologize for helping to raise my very own passel of little tomorrows? Heck, they may all grow up Republican, and we may not recycle enough, and there's at least one of my brood who has good reason to freak out when he hits sunlight (oh, the woeful whiteness!), but not only will these kids love the arts, they are the arts--little kinetic masterpieces in a world in need of colorful motion. I could no more apologize for my children than Michaelangelo could have apologized for the statue of David.

But we will try to recycle more.

--Teri.

soup du jour, a la teri.

This may be the best soup I have ever created, and while my children say I should hoard the recipe as some kind of clandestine concoction, I'm sharing it, and I think you'll love me for it. Keep in mind that all amounts and processes are approximate, as I was all about the flow-of-gastronomical-consciousness on this one.

Sweet Potato Chowder with Bacon and Leeks

3 Tbsp. vegetable oil
1/2 lb. bacon, chopped
1 leek, sliced fairly thinly (1/4"ish)
1/4 c. white cooking wine
4-5 lg. sweet potatoes or yams
2-3 c. water
4 c. milk (whole milk is, like, yummy)
1 pt. heavy whipping cream
flour, mixed in water, to thicken (about 1/4-1/2 c. of flour)
salt & fresh ground pepper to taste
1/4 tsp fresh ground nutmeg
1 bunch green onions, chopped (or sliced, however you look at it)
1/4-1/2 c. tequila
1/2-1 c. romano cheese, grated

Okay, so you saute your bacon and leeks in the vegetable oil in a decently-sized soup pot, and throw in some white cooking wine. Cook over fairly med-highish heat until the yummy caramelly thing starts happening, then remove everything and throw it in a bowl for later.

Cube up your sweet potatoes, add that and the water back into the pot, and cook on high until the sweet potatoes start to be tender; add the milk and whipping cream, and bring it back to a simmer, then add in the flour/water mixture, salt and pepper and nutmeg. When that all starts to thicken up and bubble oh-so-deliciously, toss back in your bacon-n-leeks mixture and the green onions, and then throw in some tequila and let the alcohol cook off. Add the romano cheese, give it all one last good stir, and throw in some more tequila just for good measure. ;) Serve to the hungry masses, who have been drooling at the smells since the bacon first hit the pot.

Serves about 10 as a lunch soup or more for a course, of course.

my side of the mountain: in which i fail to climb a 14er

I promised to post about our illustrious adventure up the slopes of Gray's Peak and Torrey's Peak in northern Colorado last weekend, or at least about the performance of my aforementioned cheap clothing layers.

On the climbing end of things, the story doesn't go so well; the kids mostly freaked out within the first quarter mile, we had some altitude sickness going on, and we turned around, the only people actually heading down the trail at 6 o'clock in the morning. Humiliating? Yeah, but you can always blame it on the kids, right?

Sunday morning, Christopher, Ben, and Isaac redoubled their efforts and started out on the trail once again, and this time made it all the way up Gray's Peak and down again--quite an accomplishment for all of them, but especially Ben and Isaac, Ben having now summited two 14ers in a month's time, and Isaac having successfully summited his first before his seventh birthday.

But I digress about all that. I'm here to talk about layers! We camped at about 11,000 feet in late September and somehow managed to not freeze--in fact, we stayed pretty comfortable most of the time! I attribute this to 1) a kick-butt sleeping bag 2) a little Coleman Black Cat tent heater and 3) our layers-on-the-cheap. Even the guys, who experienced cutting winds and even some snow at the top of Gray's, said that they stayed pretty comfortable on their trek, thanks to their Target layers, their Wal-Mart fleece gloves and headwraps, and their Smartwool socks. Apparantly, at 14,000 feet, those neat little air-activated hand warmers don't do much (no air up there?), so it was definately the clothing that did the trick.

Down at base camp, the remainder of the kids and I broke camp and packed everything up in the face of some pretty gnarly winds, but still managed to keep toasty in our wicking base layers, fleecy mid-layers, and wind-and water-resistant top layers. Of course, the hardest part is always crawling out of the warm sanctuary of the sleeping bag, but the shock was mostly absorbed by having good clothes to put on immediately, so we were happy campers.

Uhh, pardon the pun, but you knew that was coming, didn't you?

--Teri.

layers on the cheap

When I started this blog, I promised to mix it up a little and include posts on all kinds of stuff. Lately, I've been drawn to the deeper waters, posting mostly on movies and my own mental muddiness, and I've realized that the deep waters are usually the coldest, and sometimes not the most friendly.

So I thought I'd write about clothes shopping, instead.

My family came up with the wonderful idea this summer to hike our first 14er (14,000-foot mountain, for those flatlanders among you), and then the summer suddenly just melted away. Now we find ourselves swirling about in the eddies of autumn and wondering if we can still pull it off, now that the weather will be significantly cooler, and I seem to be the only member of the family who actually has any concerns about not freezing to death. Hey, I attended a ladies' camping workshop at REI, and I know what's up! I know that it's a sheer miracle that mankind has managed to survive this long without wicking layers, and that, if you don't have your fleece in the middle, and water-and-wind-proof breathability on the outside, you're as good as dead. I know that you have to have Smartwool socks or your feet will die of hypothermia, and then frostbite, all at 45 degrees!

I also unfortunately know how much this thinking costs, and it hurts. I've been drooling over the *perfect* jacket at REI for a couple of weeks now that would set me back 200 smackaroos, and ruminating over the cost of layering up in true mountaineering style. It would probably be well over $1000, just for me. There are seven of us. And this is one mountain (maybe two) we're talking about. And 5 of us are growing, fast. Well, make that 7 of us, if you count my belly and its little inhabitant (which you really do have to take into account, especially when all these spiffy layers have to zip up over an expanding waistline).

So my natural inclination is to try and chinch, but not too much, because that's always disastrous--you do, after all, get what you pay for. I searched WallyWorld, Ross, REI's clearance rack, all the usual haunts, and came up pretty much empty-handed. But then I turned to Target, and was delighted to find a great variety of stuff: not only a wicking, long-sleeved base layer, but one that even has compression! Base layer pants that keep the moisture away from the skin; a mid-layer fleece jacket to add more insulation and moisture control; a water- and wind-resistant top layer jacket to round it all out. Now, I don't get the prestige of wearing around the REI or North Face or (gasp!) Arcteryx label, and I might not get quite the performance out of this gear that I would had I spent gads and gads of cash, but I can tell you that, for about $150, I got pretty much the entire shebang, plus some other camping gear and quite a bit of layering for a couple of the kids...not bad!

I'll let you know how this all works out after we get back from the weekend excursion up the long slope above timberline.
--Teri.

the boy in the striped pajamas

Some films are like riding in a roller coaster: you pay your money, settle in, and you get some excitement and ya-yas.

Some films are like riding in your car: you know where you're going, you can predict a happy ending, you don't have to think too hard, everyone's happy.

Some films are like having triple bypass surgery in the back of a moving ambulance: you have no idea how it's going to turn out, it's scary, it's hard, it's bloody, and it's necessary.

We watched The Boy in the Striped Pajamas a few nights ago, naively thinking that a Holocaust story involving children might have a just-in-time happy ending. We forgot temporarily that the Holocaust itself didn't get to have one of those nice tidy endings, and for a few moments after the end credits began to roll, I felt sort of ripped off, like Hollywood had cheated us out of a good time with this realism nonsense.

How myopic I sometimes am.

--Teri.

underthinkers anonymous

I think I finally got my fill of idiotic responses last night while trying to contribute a tidbit of perspective to someone's sentimental but not very well thought-out battle anthem for standardized healthcare in America. The original phrase went something like 'No one should die because they cannot afford healthcare, and no one should go broke because they get sick.' In other words, 'The government should pay for our healthcare, and the government should pay for our healthcare.' Which sounds nice. Really nice, especially for people who have health problems and are uninsured and are having a tough time paying for it. I get that. And I'll even qualify that by saying that my family constitutes a few of those 'millions of uninsured Americans' who can't afford 'decent' healthcare, and yeah, it's frustrating and insecure.

But really, at its core, that statement is oversimplified. People hear the siren song of free something-or-other and somehow forget that there is always a price to be paid. And the bigger the sugar cube we think we're getting, the bigger the pricetag. So I commented on this, that we need to remember that, for all the media hype about how wonderful universal healthcare is, I hear stories from our neighbors in the north that you have to be prepared to wait up to 2 years for things like major surgeries. Two years! That's a price to be paid. And I'm not even talking about the taxes, just the logistics.

So some other person wrote in with the stereotypical, "Wow, I guess these people want people to die and go broke! I thought the debate was a lot simpler than that!" Now, normally, I would calmly try to further elucidate my point, which I believe is valid to the discussion, but last night I just snapped instead, and whipped back, "Yep, I'm all into death and poverty, can't you tell? Good grief." Which is not a very diplomatic approach to a debate, to be sure, but really, how sad is it that people get so attached to what they underthink will be the cure-all for a bad situation that they cannot intelligently discuss factors they hadn't considered?

Now, I realize that some of you reading this may be proponents of Obama's healthcare plan, and for those of you that are, I can understand your reasons, and I respect that--a lot. I'm not presuming to hold a corner on the facts in this very heated debate, and I understand that there's a lot to consider. Maybe universal healthcare is a great idea, and maybe it's a terrible one. Maybe it's just so-so. Maybe it'll work, and maybe it won't, and maybe it will just sorta work. Our system as it stands is certainly broken and in need of major overhaul, so don't assume that what Obama says of conservatives is true, that we just want to keep things the way they are.

But please, please, oh, pretty please, whatever your leaning, don't underthink the issue and become the voices of a million clanging cymbals not saying anything at all. There will always be heated debate about every political, moral, and social issue there is, but that never, never, never makes one side stupid because they disagree or have something dissenting to factor into the conversation. Have we lost the ability for civil discourse entirely?

--Teri.