What I’m fixing:
- More sourdough waffles. I used extremely runny homemade yogurt (can we call it kefir?) for the milk, and added chocolate chips because that’s the kind of house this is.
What I’m fixing:
So, what’s in your robot fleet these days? For us, I’d count the bread machine, slow cooker, washer and dryer, dishwasher and now Roomba.*
Do we come out ahead with these innovations? Wendell Berry and co. would argue we lose skill and dignity in outsourcing these jobs, but I’m not sure I agree.
If you use these time savers judiciously, I think you can come out ahead. To be the conductor is not to be unskilled, and you can use that time in pursuing other skills (versus, say, zoning out on TV or Facebook). There is, after all, a place both for making and faking in most of our lives. If you use your robot symphony to free up time for your children or projects, sure (hey, blog). If you use them in ways that still allow for creativity, absolutely (bread machine recipes). If you use them wisely but won’t crowbar all jobs into their domain (as when, once a year, I handwash the wool things with much fear and trembling), then yeah, I think you’re coming out ahead.
The only real danger here, I think, is becoming a slave to privilege so that you find yourself complaining of injustice when your robot fleet is no longer at your disposal. I’ve hand washed my clothes, in Uganda and on a hiking trip and, perhaps insanely, as an adventure in frugality in grad school. I’ve lived without a microwave and understand an oven. I don’t tend to complain on vacation when I leave behind my favorite time savers. (Except a washing machine. I have two kids under five and I’m never going back.)
The other danger, then, is using these devices to ratchet up the pressure. Now that I have a robot vacuum cleaner, I have no excuse not to always have spotless floors! Now that I know my way around a bread machine, there’s no excuse not to have fresh bread all the time! No: there will definitely still be days and weeks when these jobs, even outsourced, fail to get done, sacrificed to more important tasks of the moment or season.
The robot symphony still requires time and effort and know how, even if it does mercifully save my third trimester back a lot of work. But bring on the robot revolution!
* PS- I am still afraid of the Amazon Echo and my Instant Pot. Help.
What is a commonplace book? For me, this is a space where I post interesting links, reflections on what I’m reading, and the newest recipes I’ve been trying out — a collection of miscellaneous micro-posts.
What I’m fixing:
Granny humors me and smiles with her (Pippin-decorated) cake
What I’m reading:
When I come to town with my kids, the table is extended to its maximum size and my dad makes a quintuple batch of crepes before sitting down to drink a few cups of strong coffee with splashes of cream. When he brings the mug to his mouth, he overlooks a table full of two generations of his making.
We only have a few pieces of really grownup furniture, but one of them is the dining room table J’s grandma bought us when the original homeowners were selling it along with the house, and we already have so many happy memories gathered around it.
So, my last Commonplace Book posted, but was backdated, and when I tried to fix it, I deleted it. It was all very livejournal circa 2004. So, picking up where we left off:
What is a commonplace book? For me, this is a space where I post interesting links, reflections on what I’m reading, and the newest recipes I’ve been trying out — a collection of miscellaneous micro-posts.
What I’m fixing:
What I’m reading:
What is a commonplace book? For me, this is a space where I post interesting links, reflections on what I’m reading, and the newest recipes I’ve been trying out — a collection of miscellaneous micro-posts.
What I’m fixing:
What I’m reading:
“As the candles caught their light one from another, Cecily had a vision of the flame running in the same way from one church to another throughout Christendom, far around the world: new light, new joy, fresh hope. Thousands of candles, pure wax, wax of bees, made through the year by the wings and work of infinitesimal creatures like us, thought Cecily, made for this night.”
I remember thinking something similar — though infinitely less lyrical — as a teenager in Mass, imagining the same feast being celebrated the world over, century upon century. And look! Dwija is reading it now, too!
That was a story, too; they all had stories. They had mothers or fathers, sisters or lovers. They weren’t alone in the world, mattering to no one but themselves. It seemed utterly wrong to treat them like pennies in a purse. I wanted to go and speak to that boy, to ask him his name, to find out what his story really was. But that would have been dishonest, a sop to my own feelings. I felt the soldiers understood perfectly well that we were making sums out of them—this many safe to spend, this number too high, as if each one wasn’t a whole man.
Don’t you just love that! I hate action movies and skim action sequences in books (also: Quidditch), but Uprooted highlights the humanity between warring sides, and its fantasy is truly innovative: spooky and unpredictable, deep and wide, like there’s a whole world just beyond the scope of the story. Anyway, highly recommend.
What is a commonplace book? For me, this is a space where I post interesting links, reflections on what I’m reading, and the newest recipes I’ve been trying out — a collection of miscellaneous micro-posts.
What I’m fixing:
What I’m reading:
But that morning I just stayed where I was, physically and mentally content to remain at home.
I am sorry for the months and years I wasn’t able to be in this place with my kids, but I have no guilt.
I don’t think I was ready for full contact motherhood until recently. I think it was essential to my mental and physical health that I have some degree of separation from my kids, and I think it helped me to survive a demanding season of life.
But my parenting muscles are growing. I’m getting stronger and more able to withstand long stretches of time without the relief of going off duty, even if only mentally. And I’m so glad. Because I love my children, but also because for a while there was a sneaking suspicion, never voiced but ever present, that maybe I didn’t pick the right life, so to speak. That I should be doing motherhood better, stronger, more joyfully.
Now I can see a little more clearly that as they have grown and changed and matured, so have I.
I kind of need that reminder sometimes. That it’s a process to learn how to manage it all, to grow into being a mama, and that it’s ok to need space and breaks. Evidence below:
Bad parenting day = sitting in the grocery parking lot after a solo grocery run, eating a {tragically stale} doughnut and reading teen fantasy because sometimes you just need a break
It’s an ongoing thing for me. It helps that I was raised in a family that values housework, in which both parents adopted and enjoyed certain tasks. (Except ironing, which nobody claimed.) It helps that I’m an introvert who also enjoys structuring her own time. But beyond this foundation, I’ve had a lot to learn — I was a pretty useless kid, and until I was about 25, I moved often enough that I never had to clean baseboards or ovens. (Though I really probably should have.)
Still, here are some of my professional (homemaker) interests at the moment: