the cat and the baby

a quiet, grayish afternoon

Everybody wishes for excitement here and there, but sometimes a quiet productive afternoon is the best thing, especially if it's very gray and cold out.

There's no excuse for the dog. He ought to be pulling a cart or something.

But everyone else has worked hard all day, some wrapped in blankets.

Me, I should get up and do a bunch of laundry, after I drink this.

the laundry: that great dark cloud of despair

I really ought to be downstairs doing laundry...I feel like that line should be set to music and be playing as the soundtrack to my life...it's always down there, like Gallum, hissing at me in the dark, even when I'm up here doing nice things like making tarts for a sad goodbye to graduating seniors.

Strawberry Tarts: pie crust rolled out and baked in muffin tins and then filled first with a layer of cream cheese whipped with the juice from sugar macerated strawberries and then a layer of the berries themselves and then whipped cream.

Chocolate Tarts: dark chocolate melted in a double boiler and then whipped into the rest of the cream cheese not mixed with strawberry juice. Whipped cream on top.

I doled out a small number of tarts to the children in the kitchen before making them go play. More and more I am for all the children going to play when grow ups are trying to talk. Everyone is pretty happy this way because no one has to be bored by grown ups or annoyed by whining children.

I was also generous with the rest of the strawberries and cream. I may yell, occasionally, but the compensations for my short temper are sweet. Now Stop Screaming And Eat!

See how nicely everyone is chewing with the mouth closed? 

So really, back to the laundry. It doesn't matter what other massive jobs I undertake, the garage, for instance, the laundry is ever there, living its great dark presence in my broken and diseased mind.

Even when we flee to the great out doors, to lovely parks 

on golden warm afternoons

sitting in a heavy cloud of lilac scented glory.

And yet, for all it's wretched guilty presence, we do manage to go out clothed and mildly sane. Even on Sundays, some bows and vests can be scraped together and applied before libations of chocolate milk and cookies.

Every Sunday I'm told they look beautiful, which they do, but only by grace and not my own works, my long exasperated works of washing, folding, flinging into drawers, picking clean things up off the floors, and some cussing.

And then the inevitable Sunday Morning Fuss in which I discover that I did not pick the right dress for one child or that a vest is covered in pen, or that no one has any shoes at all.

But once they're out the door they seem to forget. And I do also, until I descend back down into the pit, or Sheol, as I've been more recently calling it, to have another go at it.

Really, I argue with Jesus, at least the Pharisees did wash the outside of the cup. At least they washed something. So they never bothered with the inside, at least they cleaned something. Whatever, says Jesus, stop complaining. 

 So I guess I will for now, stop complaining that is, and revise my school plan for next year, because just as laundry hangs over the conscience, so does homeschooling. But at least that can be done in the light and there is a vague sense of going somewhere and accomplishing something.

See. One child done, Elphine,

one nearly so, Alouicious, spurred on by the future hope of something I've been told is called Sweet Frog. 

i'm the mother

I'm still basking in the glow of Mother's Day. Matt bought me this gorgeous cup and also cleaned the kitchen very late on Sunday night after I decided I really didn't want to stand up any more. 

Elphine is addicted to drawing angular tulips. Every chance she gets she draws another tulip. She gave me several over the course of the weekend.

People always greet me on Mother's Day enthusiastically. There's no question about it. I am a mother, so many times over, so happy Mother's Day to me. And happy Mother's Day to my own mother.

Doesn't this just make you all weepy and nostalgic? Sitting on a mud floor watching peanut sauce come together under the brilliant hands of Jallaya...me, I'm feeling so nostalgic. 

Motherhood, having babies and then feeding them-- it almost always comes down to the kitchen. Not that you can't be a good mother if you don't love being in the kitchen (just like you can be a good mother even if you don't blog) but liking to be in the kitchen helps, I think. Being in the kitchen helps me to stop screaming. And the children stop screaming--here, stop crying and eat this. 

So thanks for all the breakfast helps. I'm pondering carefully the whole waffle soaked in egg extravaganza. In the meantime I've made two new kind of muffins and Just This Morning I dished up a most easy and delicious fruit thing, inspired by Nigella. Frozen blueberries and strawberries plus and mango mashed in a pan and coated with sugar and cornstarch and then covered with a layer of uncooked oatmeal mixed with brown sugar, cinnamon and melted butter. Baked at 350 or something for a while. So delicious I broke my diet, blast it all. 

Also, I amused myself all weekend by thinking of new categories for those churches that make their poor mothers stand up during the service on Mother's Day. So instead of oldest mother, youngest mother, mother with the most children, newest mother etc. I thought of things like

Mother Most Disappointed in her Children

Mother Whose Children Still Live in her Basement Even Though They're All Grown Up

Most Stressed Mother

Mother Who Thinks Everyone is Secretly Judging her for being A Bad Mother (then we could all stand)

Most Hypocritical Mother

Worst Mother

and then, as the crown jewel,

Best Mother (but only after a contentious and public vote).

And on that note, I'm going to prepare myself for another undesired visit to the dentist. Clearly, I have to go there so often because even though I am sometimes A Good Mother, today I must have at some point been A Bad Mother and God is judging me. (Just kidding, obviously I am going to the dentist because of my teeth and not because of my adequacy as a human person, srsly everyone, lighten up.) 

{phfr}:gasp

In a last ditch effort to save my children from the "indifferent" education I've always feared I would give them I've dropped just about every single thing I was doing before and have directed myself towards the exercise of 'school' for nearly every waking moment, except for some moments to cook and do laundry. It could be construed as a narrow and confining existence except that, hysterically enough, I'm enjoying myself and haven't really wanted to bother about anything else. In my stock taking I discovered that Elphine is only a week away from finishing all her work for the year, whereas Alouicious and Romulus have been 'working' in the modern sense of the word which means they have been doing nothing at all. But all is not lost. They are chaffing a bit at my constant presence in their lives but at least they are Doing Something, and that is no small achievement.
{pretty}
In the small extra moments, I have been rescuing tulips out of the hand of Marigold whose great desire to pick them is driving me to abstraction.

{happy}
On Sunday we threw a Farewell Party for a friend, indeed no cause for happiness, however, I happened to make a cake (the cake itself was too dry but I loaded up the cream with a little something and no one seemed to notice) and also a golden pile of crepes. It is only a matter of standing around in the kitchen for a couple of hours on a Saturday evening drinking a modicum of cheep wine out of a box and watching something weird on Netflix.

{funny}
The children aren't suffering too much from actually having to work. No matter how much I suppress them, they refuse to be suppressed. The indomitable human spirit I suppose, thriving under adversity, or whatever.

{real}
Marigold is a fuss budget. She wanted a 'little tiny braid' in her hair but it was crusty (don't judge me) and Lord help me if I was going to muscle her into the bath on a Monday. So I bunged pony tails in and when she started crying I plunked on the big bows and took her picture. Every day it's something. Every.single.tiny.day.

he lives, we seem to still be living

It is April, as some of you might have noticed, and I am sitting in my bed covered by two large quilts and holding a warm mug against my mouth waiting for it, my mouth, to slowly thaw, or whatever the word is. There are stupid ugly snow flakes dithering their way down out of the ugly gray sky. (I like to keep track of the weather, for future reference, so when my children look back at this moment they will know exactly what kind of day it was. That Kind of Day.)

Earlier this morning, having dressed myself up in red striped socks, soft comfortable jeans, a thick sweater and the armor of anxiety, I presented myself precisely at 9:50 to the fancy and expensive specislist dentist at the top of that hill in Binghamton with the expansive view and capacious cemetery. There, for two hours, I fixed my internal eye on Jesus and survived my first, and it seems, probably not last, root canal.

Knowing that I have a surprising ability to gag and more than a goodly share of anxiety, my own new regular dentist had called ahead for a large tank of nitrous, or, as they so funnily call it, 'laughing gas'. I lay back and breathed heavily waiting for all my troubles to melt away. Well, after a few minutes, I did feel very drunk, a sensation I not only do not approve of but also do not enjoy (not, of course, that I would know) but there was no melting away of anything. The hysterical woman on CNN persisted through any sense of relaxation (it must be hard, keeping the hysteria alive, hour after hour, in this case about Michael Jackson--really?--and some poor basketball coach who said something unpardonable which they wouldn't say on TV), and then the various injections killed the rest of it off after that. As they lowered my head towards the floor and started chipping and whacking away, the grief of the suffering of the cross--that our Lord lay and died, that his friends were similarly tortured--wafted over me more powerfully than any so called 'laughing gas' and I eventually gave myself up to sorrow and pain and lay there crying.

'Are you ok?' The begloved and persistent nurse kept asking, 'Are you ok?'. Oh sure, I'm fine, I thought, nodding cheerfully, I feel like I'm drowning and choking and definitely dying, but otherwise fine. When she wasn't asking how I was, she was telling me to swallow, something I couldn't manage to properly do.

So to all the people who told me this week that they fell asleep during their root canals....well, I
I don't really have anything to say. Please don't try to commiserate with me about it or I might say something unbecoming of my station and situation in life.

As I write this the children are eating vats of candy and fighting over some Xbox game. Elphine is baking an Italian apple cake. She has only broken one tea cup saucer and received one slight burn in the process of making everyone fried eggs for lunch. I didn't want her to make fried eggs, but she took advantage of my emotional weakness to bash me into letting her have a try. So also with the baking of a complicated cake. For some reason, the baby is stark naked and covered with chocolate. I dressed her twice before I went away this morning.

Here they all are in their Easter Finery.

Here is Strawberry Jello concocted by Alouicious for Easter Dinner. None of us had made jello before, let alone in any kind of mold, so we were all impressed.

And here is Plum Pie, by Elphine, not in the sun, obviously, because there hasn't been any sun for weeks, but it was for everyone.

And Eggs, ready to be hidden.

Everyone ready to hunt eggs. No pictures of them hunting because no one held still for even one second.

Marigold, hopped up on sugar.

And here is The Table, before the children had a go at it.

Flowers of the altar made their way home with us. Thank you Altar Guild!

So, here we are, lying back in a house awash in Easter Bunny grass (stupid Easter Bunny), a couple of baseball practices to force us out of bed, teeth perhaps on the mend, a few hundred piles of clothes to wash, waiting for Elphine's cake to be a triumph. Another season of penitence gives way to joy, exhaustion into rest, snow into...oh never mind.