Family

Was it a happy Mother's Day for you, friends? My this-just-in secret for enjoying Mother's Day is this: low expectations. Which sounds harsh, I know, but don't we just set ourselves up for disappointment when we hope to be made deeply happy by having all of the love and service we lavish upon our families given back to us in full on one day of the year?

This year I really got to practice focusing on making it a happy day for OTHER mothers, because I had both my mother and my mother-in-law in town to celebrate with, and that never happens. I thought I'd share a few photos from our traditional Diller brunch, which was joined this year by my mother, sister, and brother-in-law. Fifteen of us all together.        

Same time, same place, same people (more or less), every year. We do love our traditions!

One Class to Rule Them All

From the "I've Been Meaning to Blog About This" files ...

One thing I've observed in my huge pool of double-blind, placebo-controlled randomized studies, is that some of the coolest opportunities for our kids' education come along when one parent simply has an idea and says to another, "I was thinking about doing this with my child," and the other parent says, "Hey, we'd like to join you!" and one thing leads to another and lo, there is a class or a club or a camp or a cozy group of cooperating friends, making the magic happen.

There's not much that's formal or official or expensive about it. Sometimes it doesn't even have a name.

Like the class Ian (and I) took this past year. Basically, a few of the parents in our Classical Conversations group who had kids of middle school age who weren't quite ready for the official "Challenge" program that CC offers were kicking around resource-pooling ideas. Our 11- and 12- year olds were still in the Foundations program  -- the elder statesmen of the group, if you will. But they needed a bit extra around the edges.

So one of the dads volunteered his time to teach six kids introductory Latin and geography one afternoon a week He understood how this motley crew functioned (or didn't function), and kept things fun and energized. Yet he challenged them to acquire some organizational skills, seeing the potential beneath their goofy exteriors. And sometimes, especially if you're a preteen boy, figuring out what it might mean to be a man, you'll listen to an exhortation from someone's dad, someone who can draw Chuck Norris like nobody's business, a little more closely than you will to Mom. Just sometimes.

The other part of the informal class was led by my friend Sarah, who truly was not looking for a classroom teacher role but sort of fell into it, experienced a few growing pains at the very beginning, and ended up doing a fabulous job. She guided the kids, plus a few of us parents, through something called Literary Lessons from Lord of the Rings.

Along the way, the discussions of Tolkien grew more and more vigorous and freewheeling. We touched on Harry Potter, on Narnia, on Henry V, on The Odyssey, on "The Charge of the Light Brigade," on Greek mythology, on the American Civil War, on the Bible. These kids were asking some big questions, making connections, weaving together the threads of their learning. In the back of the room, the three spectating adults just couldn't help jumping in sometimes, raising our hands, "Oooh! Oooh! Oooh!"

On the last class day, the kids spent an hour drawing the entire world by memory. Then we ate cupcakes and popcorn and bade goodbye to Frodo and Sam for the last time and let Ian read his "LOTR Infinities" story (Basically a "What if X didn't happen?").

Then the kids got up and presented their two teachers, these noble and valiant and incredibly generous parents who stepped up to service, with a huge card and some incredibly thoughtful notes and speeches. 

And then a couple weeks later, we celebrated with a movie party. With costumes. And themed food. Of course.

The funny thing was, our class never had a name. We were just "The Afternoon Class" or "The LOTR Class" or something like that. Perhaps it's best, with apologies to Mr. Tolkien, just to call it "One Class to Rule Them All" ... and to give humble thanks for it.

A Few Things to Share

Hey there!

Just wanted to pass along a few little gems I've picked up along the trail this week. They were all shared with me by others, so consider this paying it forward?

Watching ... Call the Midwife.  I got an urgent text from a good friend alerting me to the possibility that my life would not be complete until I made my way to Netflix Instant Watch and started streaming these episodes. Obediently, I did so. What a treat! This is a BBC series based on the memoirs of a nurse-midwife who practiced on the down-and-out side of London in the 1950's. It's an uplifting celebration of the power of love and kindness, without being saccharine in any way, in my humble opinion. Season 2 is now on PBS -- hopefully on Netflix and Amazon Prime soon! (Or, you can watch the episodes online at pbs.org.) {Thank you, Stefani.}

Exploring ... DIY.org. Aimed at kids of a certain age and independence, this website is absolutely chock full of project ideas, with opportunities to earn skill badges (electronic and otherwise). Today, I had a bunch of girls at my house and we tie-dyed milk, which was a huge hit. I can already tell we're going to plumb this resource aplenty. I mean, hello? A skill set called "Tape Ninja?" Yeah, we're there. {Thank you, Laura.}

Reading and Contemplating ... "Learning to Love What Must Be Done" from the always-thoughtful Circe Institute blog. These words amiably haunted me as I emptied the dishwasher for only the six thousandth time today. And I had to share these lines with the kids:

"Education will have its high moments, its epiphanies, break-throughs and moments of joy--much like a marriage.  But the larger tranquility of a good education comes from the regular labor of worksheets, translations and reading assignments, in the same way a good marriage grows on preparing a meal, raking the lawn and taking a walk."

{Thank you, Heidi.}

Wishing you a happy and restful weekend, friends!

Of Jellybeans and Marathons

So I've run four half marathons, which my daughter computes to equal two full marathons, which is a kind of mathematical reasoning I can get behind. People ask me if I'll ever do an official full, and I can't say for sure, but if you were to ask me that question when I was five minutes from the finish line of a half, I'd look at you and ask what you were smoking.

NO WAY.

Even twenty six point two half miles seems out of reach. But 26.2 miles of the premier marathon in the world? The august, the vaunted, the famously elite and heartbreaking Boston Marathon?

NO WAY NO HOW.

Now, imagine running 25 of those miles. Imagine making it up Heartbreak Hill. Imagine having trained for months and months, having survived a tough qualifying marathon already just to show up and be in this race. Imagine telling yourself, "Just one more mile. Legs. You can do one. More. Mile." Imagine the agony ... and the anticipated ecstasy.

And then imagine being suddenly told in no uncertain terms that you have to stop running, turn around, start walking back the way you came. The race is over. You won't make it to the finish line. There no longer IS a finish line. And eventually, when the explanation comes, you can only be grateful that you weren't a few minutes faster. You missed the finish line, but you have your limbs, and your life, and others don't.

I spent most of the yesterday being completely preoccupied with what was happening at the Boston Marathon. Partly because my friend Hannah and her husband had been running (they finished safely). Partly because I am a human being, and one who feels pain perhaps more than average. Partly because I am made in the image of a compassionate God who grieves for His people and the way they destroy each other. And partly because Boston was, for twenty years, my home.

I know the intersection where the explosions occurred. I drove through it just a few months ago, visiting a high school friend. I know what this race means to Boston and its surrounding area. Every year, school and offices and shut down for this day we call "Patriots' Day" but is unofficially known as Boston Marathon Day. Crowds turn out to cheer, from Hopkinton to the finish line. I remember the corner in Wellesley where we'd stand to watch and gape and admire.

It's funny, though, how in the midst of drama that shakes you and numbs you and makes you feel like you can barely breathe, the ordinary details of life keep grinding on. I sat in line at the bank drive-thru yesterday afternoon, reading the news on my phone and trying not to cry in front of my kids, who find that embarrassing. Texts were coming in. Facebook was buzzing. And in the middle of it? The kids sensitively offered me a vomit-flavored jellybean, masquerading in the guise of peach.

They found it uproarious, watching me gag and spit it out. They chattered on amongst themselves, comparing flavors and planning more pranks. And I had another of those moments where it hit me between the eyes: This is my life. I am listening to a conversation about jellybeans. I am preparing a bank deposit. The sun is shining. And right in the middle of it, I am grieving for strangers and mourning for a city. 

"If our single, all-embracing passion is to make much of Christ in life and death, and if the life that magnifies him most is the life of costly love, then life is risk, and risk is right. To run from it is to waste your life," declares John Piper in Don't Waste Your Life. Piper then goes on to explode the myth that there's really any such thing as living a safe life. Sure, I can refuse to take risks when God calls. I can remain in control. I can keep things safe and predictable. I can "love my soul life." (Revelation 12:11)

But the Marathon attacks and others like it remind me that there are no guarantees of a long and happy life in this world where some choose to practice evil. Life could slip away as we sit in the bank line. As we drive around the corner. As we watch a foot race on a beautiful spring day. These things happen, punctuating our lives of mostly mundane sorrows and pleasures and they jolt us awake.

Given that we risk just by being alive in this world, "what a tragic waste when people turn away from the Calvary road of love and suffering," comments Piper. "All the riches of the glory of God in Christ on the broad. All the sweetest fellowship with Jesus is there ... All the ecstasies of joy. All the clearest sightings of eternity. All the noblest camaraderie ... All the most earnest prayers. They are all on the Calvary road where Jesus walks with His people. Take up your cross and follow Jesus. On this road, and this road alone, life is Christ and death is gain."

That is the road where I want to run.
That is the course I hope to finish.

Life Through the Lens

My blogging time has become so scarce of late that it almost feels intimidating to write anything any more -- as if every (increasingly rare) post needs to come with an explanation for my absence. Which makes it harder to write. So I don't. I think the only want I can continue to inhabit this space while still juggling a busy life and a slow, shared computer is to just plunge in and say what I can, when I can. And hope that it entertains or resonates with those of you still reading, or at least draws you into the circle of our life.

Oh, wait. Just heard one bedded child shouting at another. Excuse me for a moment. 

Okay. Jimmy Carter here, back from the Camp David Accords. I thought I'd share a few photos of the last couple of weeks from my iPhone. I'd share some from my camera as well, but it ran out of battery mid-event yesterday, and I can't find the battery charger. Life's a bit topsy-turvy these days.

Oh! I should add! Since my last post, we did sell our house. Like, very quickly. That sign in the front yard now reads "Contract Pending." God is very gracious. (And no, we don't know where our next house will be, other than "somewhere in Austin.")

Spring has come a bit more shyly than usual this year, and we're glad of it. These lovely mild days means taking some of our homeschooling outdoors onto a quilt, as we have so many times in the past. Days in this back yard are numbered, and how precious they've been:

 The baby of the family has finally learned to pump on the swing! Huge milestone here, folks. Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, my trapezius muscles are free at last:

Because we really didn't have enough going on recently, my older two children decided to go for Memory Master, which is a challenge offered by Classical Conversations and involves reciting 24 weeks' worth of memory work in 7 subjects -- first to each parent, then to a CC tutor, then to the campus director. Proofing can be scary; the standard for accuracy is extremely high. I had to proof another child as a tutor this year, and I think I was just as nervous as he was, if not more so. But he passed, and so did Ian and Eliza, and boy howdy, are we celebrating!! 

On a recent Sunday afternoon, I dragged my family of homebodies out for a hike along our favorite woodsy trail. Along with heart-shaped rocks and riots of wildflowers ...

 

... we found a decrepit, completely rusted-out car, and had to investigate. O the aura of mystery! The kids told us repeatedly how CREEPY it was. Probably the Boxcar Children lived there. Or! Better yet! KAMESH. (Kamesh is a character they've invented with some of their friends. He's a hobo who knocks at your door and asks if you want a sandwich, and, as best I can tell from the chauffeur spot in my mini-van, plays a starring role in many, many imaginary dramas. CREEPY.)

Ian (on the right), his friend Ethan, a trooper of an adult friend of ours named Sam, and couple other kids participated in their first 5K "race" this past weekend: Foam Fest San Antonio. Ian used the Couch-to-5K app on my iPhone to train for it, but it really turned out to be less of a competitive run and more of a long, crazy, and thoroughly MUDDY obstacle course. Do I even need to tell you that it was EPIC?!?! Good news, local folks: Foam Fest is coming to Austin in October!

And that's all for now, friends! Lots more to say, but the night advances. Wishing you the happiest of weeks ahead! 

Leaving the Shire

So.

It's here.

The weekend we've been working toward for months now has arrived. Tonight our house -- the house we've lived in and loved in for seven years now -- went on the market. Tomorrow is shrouded in mystery, the whole weekend a giant question mark. We live in a very hot market. Anything could happen in the next three days ... or nothing at all.

The realtor and her husband pounded the sign into the front yard this afternoon, and as I held my sobbing youngest child, I had to fight back tears of my own. Yes, this house has never tempted me with pride -- although I've certainly given thanks for it over and over. But it's been our home.

We've raised three children into the middle years in it, the baby and toddler years but receding signposts in our rearview mirror. We've spent countless Thursday nights with a crowd around our smallish dinner table, and seen a new marriage come out of it. We've planted and weeded and painted and dusted and prayed and wept and laughed and given what we had and received a double portion in return. We've waged epic Nerf wars. Or at least, dodged the bullets and then pulled them out of the couch cushions days later.

And now, cleaner than it's ever been and decluttered past the point of simplicity, it feels like we're living in a nearly-empty shell of a house. Hoping someone will come and like it -- fall in love with the house that has been our home, an extension of our selves ... although by now, as we tiptoe around our show-ready abode in sock feet and whisk everything personal from sight, it already feels like home is slipping away.

Where to next? We don't know. Somewhere in the same city, apparently. Odd, aren't we? All we seem to know is that we were supposed to get our house ready to sell and here we are, it's ready, and the edge of the cliff is before us, and it seems we're meant to leap. Leap into the arms of love. Or, like Bilbo Baggins -- from a tree that's catching fire to  the wings of a swooping, farsighted eagle. Surely an armchair by the fireplace in a hobbit hole in the ground in the Shire would be more comfortable than this?

But after all, we long after a better country. "It was by faith that Abraham obeyed when God called him to leave home and go to another land .... He went without knowing where he was going. And even when he reached land God promised him, lived there by faith -- for he was like a foreigner, living in tents." (Hebrews 11:8-9)

I'm with Abraham -- just here, tending my heartbroken little seven-year-old sheep, looking a bit like a wanderer, following a God who doesn't show me the map and wondering, on this unexpected journey, where our next tent will be.

Are You Willing to Be Weak?

I'd like you to introduce you to a beautiful person named Kelly. (And speaking of beautiful, she wrote this incredibly moving piece on mourning the loss of her infant son here.)

I met Kelly a year and a half ago, when our family joined the Classical Conversations community in which she and her son had already been enrolled. That year, Kelly had answered the call to tutor -- i.e. to lead a class of 8-9 children through a morning of drilling new grammar in seven subjects in a fun and engaging way, conducting a hands-on science experiment, experimenting with various forms of fine arts, practicing public speaking, and playing review games.

About two weeks, I, Newbie Mama, sat down next to Kelly at lunch. I noticed that she looked a bit weary and drawn, so after introducing myself, I asked her how she was doing. She volunteered that she was feeling discouraged by her first two weeks of tutoring. As a sweet, soft-spoken mama of one, she was struggling  to manage a classroom of lively seven year olds who were more accustomed to "doing school" in their pajamas or on the trampoline than to sitting in chairs and raising their hands to speak.

Were Kelly and I best friends? No. We'd just met. Yet she had no desire to impress me with any bravado about her abilities. No compulsion to hide her struggles and paste on a happy face. She was willing to be weak before me, and to trust that I'd accept her anyway.

Our paths didn't cross a whole lot that year, but in the spring, we fell into step one day en route to one of our regular community pilgrimages to the nursing home. I asked her how the teaching was going. Her face lit up with warm contentment.

"It's been so good!" she replied. "I've really enjoyed the kids."

"Really?!" I said, "That's great! So things improved for you?"

"Oh, yes," she said happily, "It got easier as the year went on."

Around that time, the call had gone out for moms to prayerfully consider signing up as tutors for the next year. Something fluttered in me. I told our director I'd pray about it. Of course, there were all kinds of reasons why I shouldn't do it. I have no formal teaching background. I could barely get my family there on time for morning assembly each week (backpacks, lunches, water bottles, tennis shoes), never mind arriving forty minutes early to prepare a classroom and pray with the other tutors. I'm not naturally organized. Others are more talented teachers, more experienced, more charismatic. Oh, and way  more industrious.

Then I thought of Kelly. This woman, I mused, had not come forward because she felt strong, qualified, capable, ready to spread her abundant talent around. She simply saw the need, felt a stirring inside, and bravely stepped forward to offer up her five loaves and two fishes for God to bless, break, and use as He saw fit.

"God delights in using ordinary Christians who come to the end of themselves and choose to trust in his extraordinary provision. He stands ready to allocate his power to all who are radically dependent on Him and radically devoted to making much of Him." - David Platt, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream  (Insertion: Not to be bossy? But you must read this book. Must. That is all.)

And because she was willing to share her struggle with me, her seeming weakness gave me strength. Strength to just say, "Yes, I'm willing. Use me as You see fit." So for the past six months, I've had the weekly privilege of growing and learning, succeeding and failing, along with nine delightful, loving, spirited girls. I am ordinary. But His provision is indeed extraordinary.

I think I'll be back for seconds.