At the still point of the turning world

Having my sister Heather here has brought our life under inspection and been found loud, regimented and quite boring. She's right, really. There is almost always someone crying or screaming. We are always within an hour of someone needing a nap, a meal or a diaper change and because it takes longer to prepare for an outing than the actual outing takes, we stay home a lot. We are often amused-- like when Finn runs back and forth on the lanai with a tin plate serving Heather and me imaginary eggs, bacon and pickled herring like a harried waiter. Or when Henry skates around the baby gym on one foot until he inadvertently rams into Jake who turns and pushes him away only to be rammed again. Or when Finn sings at breakfast and gets both the little babies laughing hysterically. But then, mostly we are boring and we are tired.

I've set out to take control of the things we eat, making more from scratch and buying less packaging. This weekend I started with pureeing vegetables for baby food, and baking teething biscuits and bread. So far, other than the wallpaper paste consistency of the sweet potatoes, it's been a great success and I really enjoy it. I wrote Mandy an e-mail to tell her about the first week of the experiment and I realized as I typed out the message that both Mandy and I feel isolated and tied to routine, and we have both been trying to find ways to interrupt the routine, make something beautiful, have a personality separate from the duties we perform and have control over a part of our world. For me, I think portioning liquid green beans into labeled jars and pulling batches of dinner rolls and loaves of bread from the oven gives me that. It's still pretty boring but it has my stamp on it. It's loving and in a basic, practical way, it's important--which in a life that often seems like a constant maintenance, feels very good to me.