Category: thoughts

Scruffy hospitality means you’re not waiting for everything in your house to be in order before you host and serve friends in your home. Scruffy hospitality means you hunger more for good conversation and serving a simple meal of what you have, not what you don’t have. Scruffy hospitality means you’re more interested in quality conversation than the impression your home or lawn makes. If we only share meals with friends when we’re excellent, we aren’t truly sharing life together.

Anyone who has been to my house knows I embrace this wholeheartedly.

http://www.knoxpriest.com/scruffy-hospitality-creates-space-friendship/

You are about to give birth. Pregnancy has gone smoothly. The birth seems as if it will, too. It’s one baby, in the right position, full term, and you’ve never had a cesarean section — in other words, you’re at low risk for complications.

What’s likely to be the biggest influence on whether you will have a C-section?

(A) Your personal wishes.(B) Your choice of hospital.(C) Your baby’s weight.(D) Your baby’s heart rate in labor.(E) The progress of your labor.

The answer is B.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/opinionator/2016/01/19/arsdarian-cutting-the-number-of-c-section-births/

An animal did evolve as a specialist predator on humans, as remains in caves in Africa have shown. Its name is Dinofelis, and its signature is a pair of puncture holes left in the skull. It has survived in folklore and even in our most basic instincts: every child knows that there is a monster under the bed, and the only way to stay safe is to keep very, very quiet.

The first two answers are not correct, in my opinion. The first says that mosquitoes are that animal, the second says that humans are that animal. Nah. It’s the skull-piercer up there. Be very, very still, child.

The link references studies that showed little children are instinctively good at hiding from large predators.

https://www.quora.com/Since-humans-are-slower-and-weaker-than-some-predators-why-has-no-animal-evolved-to-prey-on-humans

We are, in fact, surrounded by arthropods—insects, spiders, centipedes, and other animals with hard external skeletons and jointed legs. They are the most successful animals on the planet, and the walls that shield our homes to the elements are no barriers to them.

In the first systematic census of its kind, a team of entomologists combed through 50 American houses for every arthropod they could find, and discovered a startling amount of diversity. Each home had between 32 and 211 species, belonging to between 24 and 128 families. Most are not pests. Many were found everywhere, and yet are so obscure that only keen naturalists know about them. These bugs are our closest creaturely neighbors, and we barely register their existence.

We have scorpions, yikes. Although they have declined markedly since we moved in several years ago. And my nemesis, the Indian meal moth. shakes fist

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/the-bugs-of-the-american-home/424584/

Back then, D&D was the subject of a massive smear campaign claiming that the game promoted suicide and satanism. A Christian student who learned that Laycock played D&D chided him for “worshiping gods from books,” a charge he found puzzling.

“Most Christians know about their god primarily through a book, through the Bible,” Laycock says in Episode 185 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “So there was a really strange reversal there, where I found a lot of the claims-makers were actually engaging in the very sort of behavior they were accusing D&D players of doing.”

I know several practicing Catholics, including quite a few priests, who are avid role-playing gamers. I used to play, before I became Catholic, but my stopping had nothing to do with my conversion and more to do with a lack of time and interested friends. My kids play fantasy RPGs all the time. I’ve never seen the problem.

http://www.wired.com/2016/01/geeks-guide-joseph-laycock/

Hello, bookends. I love these kids so much. The delight of a large family is having teens and toddlers at the same time.
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress

“She told me she’s homeschooled,” Papo said, meaning that True didn’t attend a traditional school, but instead, learned at home. “I literally didn’t know it existed. When I heard about it, I thought it was really strange, a really odd thing.

“How can these kids be normal if they’re not part of the mainstream?”

They aren’t normal though. And that’s the wonderful thing about it, and it’s one of the main reasons I homeschool.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/17/health/cnnphotos-homeschooled-children-new-york/index.html

Quine has had some language gains! She has kept ball, and added apple, banana, cheese and cookie. She also says uh-oh! but it doesn't seem to be meaningful in a standard sense. She has been watching Gloria and Dorothy for cues and nonverbal prompts in games at well. I have such hope for this child that she will continue bloom and her little self will be revealed. The person we see is very much her, of course, but communicating with her is such a trick! She still drags us around and places our hands on the things she needs, which means we usually figure it out. She's pretty patient, and if she is crying in frustration and we figure out why, she immediately calms and continues bopping along. What a pretty little thing she is too. #autistiquine #autism
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress

There's my Abaigeal!
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress

Look at that! They made beds, nightclothes on, brushed teeth, ready on time! And all without nagging! #whatgreatkids
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress

I get migraines. I didn’t know that’s what they were, I thought I was having a stroke. Mine have very little pain, no nausea and extreme visual disturbance. The outer edges of my visual field start to ripple and then flash, and then my central vision fades in spots, while my brain tries to make up for it by collapsing the information around the blind spot together. This results in things like faces without noses, and headless cats. Bad scene.

I hope they stay this way and never get painful. They’re like an acid trip without the high. Entirely unenjoyable, but tolerable. They last about 20 minutes to an hour, and can be triggered by reading light text on a dark background. Also that vibrant fluorescent green that was a hot color a few years ago.

Anyway I feel one coming on, so it’s time to turn off the screen.

On the tweeter! This is just a test post to see if the IFTTT recipe works. If so, expect all my blog posts to autopost to Twitter. IT’S LIKE WE LIVE IN THE FUTURE.

That weekend, after the kids were in bed and the laundry room was finally done, they started talking about putting a match to this thing they loved so much. Sherry was ready to quit right then, but John wasn’t convinced. The YHL brand was their primary income. “I wanted us both to calm down. And I wanted to know what our next move would be.” They both made lists of old freelance clients from their days in advertising who might take them back. It felt terrifyingly uncertain, but also, liberating. In a perfect metaphor for the moment, John’s laptop promptly died.

The next morning, while John rushed his computer in for life support, Sherry published an announcement. “We felt this shift from ‘John and Sherry’ to ‘Young House Love: The Brand’ [and] the blogosphere as a whole has become increasingly sponsored/corporate lately,” she wrote by way of explanation. Almost immediately, 5,348 comments began to roll in: “Ignore the jealous people.” “Are you breaking up with us? :(” And the refrain: “We’ll be here when you come back!”

The next month, they logged on again, to publish a farewell post. “We thought it would be nearly impossible to click off that urge to over-share this past month,” they wrote. “But it actually felt just right.”

When you blog your life. Yesterday, I was at a baptism, and I saw quite a few people who are known to me only tangentially – they are friends-of-friends, or I only know them via Facebook. I was surprised at some of the comments I heard, about how I appear on the Internets vs how I am. There is significant overlap, to be sure. Everything I post about myself and my family is true. But, and here’s the thing, I don’t post everything that’s true.

I apparently seem to have it together a lot more than I actually do. Some of that is by design. We were falsely accused of neglect and investigated by Child Protective Services ten years ago (wow. that was ten years ago.) and it is still a point of fear and anxiety for me. We were totally cleared and the accusations were seen for what they were, vindictive and petty, but the impact of those weeks will be with me forever. I don’t parent like most people, and the idea of that happening again and being separated from my children is terrifying. So, I maybe don’t show you the really messy laundry room, or the pile of three days’ worth of kid junk (books, crumpled socks, waffle boxes, a strand of dried spaghetti) that lives under my dining table on a rotating basis. I’m a bit panicked even mentioning it exists, actually.

So, that kind of blogging, like the YHL folks did, attracts and repels me. I guess it’s all personas we put on, even virtually. Especially virtually.

http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/01/can-young-house-love-escape-the-internet.html

Gloria drew this dancing elephant.
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress

Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining about its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life was short if we lived 10 times as long?

Since there didn’t seem any way to answer this question, I stopped wondering about it. Then I had kids. That gave me a way to answer the question, and the answer is that life actually is short.

Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it’s impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.

Ok, so life actually is short. Does it make any difference to know that?

Spoiler: yes, it does!

This is the best thing I’ve read in ages.

http://paulgraham.com/vb.html

Random shot from the party after the baptism today. There is a platform/stage in the hall where the party was, which all the children were drawn to as if they were magnetized. Then they ran around in circles, laughing. Not just my children, but every child under about eight. It was delightful. I saw four parents wince or flinch at the potential for injury inherent in about twenty hyper children and an eighteen-inch drop, and then visibly stop themselves from chiding the children. I said, "This may end in broken teeth and a lot of blood, but hey, baby teeth, amirite?" One father said "I'm just going to look away…" It was so great to see parents NOT helicoptering. They were all Millennials, too. #freerangeparenting #letthemplay #nobodygothurt
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress

Many Irish folk songs lead to delicate father-daughter talks about when to obey the law, respect the Church, believe the authorities, and avoid violence. My daughter understands that the protagonist of “Whiskey in the Jar” is an unreliable narrator, a bandit who bemoans yet deserves his fate. She gets that “John Barleycorn” is a symbol of grain, so a gruesome song about his slow death becomes a story of where our food comes from.

Other songs lead to more difficult territory, but I’m glad to see her wrestle with her small understanding, in the hopes it will strengthen her moral immune system. She often asks for the “Digger Song,” that rousing cry of Evangelical farmers in the 1600s, and knows most of the words by heart. Each verse deals with a different group that tries to evict the farmers from their land: the Cavaliers, the gentry, the lawyers, and the clergy.

The club is all their law, stand up now, stand up now.
The club is all their law, to keep all men in awe,
That they no vision saw, to maintain such a law, 
Stand up now, Diggers all . . .

“What was the club?” she asked. The king’s men tried to force the farmers off their land by hitting them, I explained. The farmers said that only men with clubs have a right to rule. That’s all most leaders are.

“Did they fight back?” she asked. No, I said, they didn’t want to become like the king’s men. They were better.

“You don’t always have to fight,” she said, and I agreed—I had just shown her Destry Rides Again, in which Jimmy Stewart’s pacifist deputy tamed a violent town. At some point, though, I will have to explain why there are no more Diggers.

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/10/singing-lessons

Nursing the toddler. #asyoudo #normalizebreastfeeding
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress

At a baptism!
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress

More Sherlock with the teens. I had forgotten how good this show is. I love the references to the stories.
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress

Agafia Lykova is the only surviving member of the Lykov family. The Lykovs fled Stalin’s persecution and lived in the forests of Russia, 150 miles from the nearest village. Agafia has lived in the Siberian wilderness since she was born, in the 1940s, and didn’t see another person outside of her family until she was an adult in the 1970s.

She has lived alone, in the cabin she grew up in, since her father died in 1988. The local government sends care packages to her now and again, but this week, for the first time in her life, she has left the remote area she grew up in to be airlifted to a hospital for severe leg pain. Spoiler: she has deteriorating cartilage and osteoarthritis, but is otherwise fine and is expected to be able to return to her home soon.

Incredible.

Family history to 2013:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russian-family-was-cut-off-from-all-human-contact-unaware-of-world-war-ii-7354256/?no-ist

More photos and history here, and the recent airlift:

http://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/n0552-helicopter-rescue-for-russias-loneliest-woman-who-shuns-modern-civilisation/

 

These are clever and cute! My favorite is probably “I WHEELIE LOVE YOU” + toy car.

http://www.popsugar.com/moms/DIY-Noncandy-Printable-Valentine-Day-Cards-Kids-13791428

“You can do anything with an axe. And things you cannot do with an axe can be done with a tool that an axe will help you make,” Pavel explains.

I like my modern life, thanks!

http://offgridquest.com/life-stories/surviving-winter-in-the-middle-ages-man-

Trixie wanted me to take a picture of her apple before she ate it because it was pretty.
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress

Hi kid.
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress

It's a pretty day.
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress

We never do anything special with the placenta, but we do wait to clamp it for a long time.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/javiermoreno/this-photo-of-a-babys-umbilical-cord-spelling-love-honors-a#.gsy35oAZlm

Baby hat delivered to baby head. #knitting #babyhat
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress

Freckles!
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress

Truer words… @theinspirobot at it again.
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress