Life in the Slow Lane

Trying to see it all, 2011 I may never look down the aisle of an Amtrak train without remembering a baby bouncing, holding fast to the seat as the train rocked and bounced even faster. All the world over, trains carry a reputation for efficiency and frugality. That has never been my experience with Amtrak.  The Adventure Begins, June 22, 2011 Thirteen years ago (almost to the day) our little family set out on our first Amtrak adventure. We thought three weeks touring the United States on a train with an infant made so much more sense than the alternative. The alternative being flying or driving (with the same infant) to a wedding in the middle of Cornfieldville, Ohio. Being young and foolish, it made perfect sense. Our baby did not yet sleep through the night, so sitting up in coach seating night after night wouldn't affect our sleep all that much. With a rolling ice chest filled with lunch sacks that prevented us from knowing in advance whether our meal was Option A, B, or C, w...

This week, my oldest turns 10. In case you're curious, that statement does funny things to the inside parts of me. It also makes it a decade that I've been a working-from-home mom. I was enjoying my first maternity leave (still pre-baby), when my boss called, sharing news that had completely rocked the company. In the end, she convinced me to cut my maternity leave short with the promise that I could work from home. So I did. Much of my first year of clocking hours while working from home looked like this picture. Notice my tired eyes and the computer screen have both been carefully cropped from the picture. In fact, much of the reality of working from home with small children (and then adding homeschooling to the mix) has been carefully cropped out of public glimpses of my life. For something that has characterized my life for a decade, I've only written three small blog posts about it... and those all came within the first year. Well, that isn't complet...

For years I avoided the thought of marriage because living it well seemed impossible for a person like me. I am a person easily overwhelmed by hardship, sorrow, suffering and evil. The only way I could be comfortable with the enormity of the life-long commitment to have and to hold, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, was to tuck my wedding day right up close to Easter as a reminder that God raises the dead, the hopeless, the sorrowing, the repentant.  Only in the stirrings of Palm Sunday and the triumphant "Hurrah!" of Easter could I imagine living the symbol meant to explain the mysterious wonder of Christ and His church.  Only in walking through the Holy Week and seeing Christ's ultimate life-giving death, could I begin to trust the strange thing that is marriage... the many deaths to self that somehow bring life.  I needed to start my marriage with the hope of Easter glimmering in the near future because...

Waiting  has  had its perks. Our socks are wearing out. It's December and I have no long sleeves. Wearing summer clothes, back when it was still summer. It's time to mail out Christmas cards and I have no return address. Wearing summer clothes when it is NOT still summer with a borrowed jacket (and shoe). These are not complaints. These are matter-of-fact observations about our life right now. Way back in June, we threw the bulk of our belongings in a Pod, with the certain assumption that in a month or two we'd meet up again with our plentiful closets and favorite toys. So surely, we only needed a week's supply of summer clothing to see us through. Leaving the parking lot after waving goodbye to our Pod. Notice, we didn't even have enough stuff to completely block our windows. But it's been a lot longer than a month or two. The seasons have changed. The toddler has outgrown both pairs of shoes we brought along for him.  And me, we...

The first time I walked into apartment 502K, I sat on the floor and cried. I had many reasons for those tears, among them the hormones of being eight months pregnant and finishing up two months of living out of a suitcase. But 502K provided plenty more. Dorms are a special college experience, but not quite so glamorous for a young family, and 502K screamed dorm living from every inch of its 660-ish square feet. For months I tried to beat the institutional construction into a more homelike existence, and it seemed I met frustration at every turn. I'd measure shelving then go out to purchase organizers only to have to return them when I discovered that the size of the shelf was not uniform across it's length and so didn't fit... or maybe it would have fit, if there hadn't been a totally awkward door frame around the closet or if the bathroom door didn't make it impossible to have a bath rug in the bathroom or if the cupboards had been large enough to keep dinn...