I'm afraid this is all that's left of the jacket.

My mom said I live a spartan life.  I like to get rid of stuff, actually I LOVE to get rid of stuff.  It’s almost a hobby I have.  And there is little I regret having gotten rid of.  I guess there is the lettermens jacket.  That was Eric’s and that is still a sore subject around here.  But other than that…

I first practiced this method on my mom when I was still at home because she was, as she said herself, a pack rat.  I got rid of lots of her junk this way and yes, she does know about it now (at least she will after she reads this post).  In fact, I think she said she was thankful I had done it. 

I would take all the things I wanted to get rid of and stuff them in a big garbage bag and then stuff the bag in some dark hole never to be found by my mom.  If she wondered where a particular item had wandered off to; an item I thought needed the ol’ heave ho, I could quickly produce it.  “Why here it is!”

I would keep the bag around for about three months and if she never asked for an item from the bag the whole thing went to the Goodwill, never opened again.  That’s the rule of this game, if you never yearn for another thing out of the bag you have to get rid of all of it without peaking.  Otherwise you may find yourself longing for the collection of rocks you painted in second grade or the bright yellow smiley face teapot.  You know the kind of things I’m talking about.

I generally skip this step and ship it all to the Goodwill.  I should probably employ this method more around my house and we might not be short a lettermens jacket.

The time of the year we all aspire to having a junk drawer like Martha.

I’m wanting to know– is there some little timer inside every adult head that goes off in January telling you to clean out, get rid of, and organize EVERYTHING within reach? From the number of magazines that follow this trend for their first issue of the year, I would say yes.

Closets, garages, fridges, children’s rooms, and shoe shelves– nothing is safe from the purging. And for me, it really doesn’t help that this year I’ve got an insane case of “nesting syndrome” setting in with my due date just 3 weeks off. Zac came home the other night to find both Freyja and our bedroom’s completely re-arranged with all the new baby furniture set up in a corner of our room,  and me in a little, red-faced heap on the bed panting from exhaustion. I’m trying to tone it down now, and get organized with a little more order and restraint.

So this next week we’re offering some tips, tricks, and ideas on giving in to that wonderful, new year impulse. It’s time to get organized!

Enjoy!

A terrific thing that I learned recently is that things will happen whether I obsess over them or not , even though that’s what I do best, obsess.

There is, I think, a careful balance between planning and organizing and knowing when to let off and be done.  Too often, I am able to fill the time allotted with the chores at hand and if I am done ahead of schedule the temptation is to just keep doing stuff. Perhaps nothing important or even necessary but just because the time is there I manage to busily fill it.

So it was really throwing three sheet to the wind for me to simply hop in the car and go  on an explore the entire day before Christmas. Ten of us jumped into two cars and went to a barren beautiful place and climbed a large hill (and some of us including Andrew did some major jumping), we walked and drove along the river,    and  simply enjoyed the day.

And when we got back in the late afternoon, we still managed to bake a batch of gingerbread cookies, wrap the last few gifts, fill stockings (17 of them!), go caroling in our neighborhood with little bags of cookies made up by Caitlin and Aileen, attend church that evening and visit by the fire with cookies and hot chocolate and just one gift for the little kids to open.

But! We were out of eggs and gingerbread waffles need eggs, and sixteen people eating gingerbread waffles need a lot of eggs.  Things were surely falling apart because I was not holding it together, I had foolishly thought I could gallivant around and have enough eggs for Christmas breakfast.

We found the store open Christmas Eve and bought eggs and I am so glad I went out that day.  I am so glad I didn’t know I was out of eggs.

The memories will last a lifetime.

What young child would you allow to pick up a metal brush with sharp bristles and scrape the peewaddlin out of your brand new garage door?  And then the next night you allow them to do it again.

And if you were to make them go outside and play for awhile she would use that metal brush on your new back door.

And then you let that same child  knock the Christmas ornaments off the tree and rip them to bits on the living room rug.  And for good measure they climb up on the mantel and whack away at the little dangling icicles on the twig you put up with cardinals clipped on it.

And  if that’s not enough, you let them run down to the basement, find the new snowboarding jacket and pants and pee on them.

You know where I’m going.

Sooo we gave in to the scratching at the garage door and let the darn cat into the house at night.

Now about 3 AM we hear “maaa,  maaaaaa,  meaaaaaw”  I roll over and pretend I’m asleep like Andrew used to do when our children were infants and made that same noise at 3 AM.

I also occasionally hear a pack of coyotes outside at 3 AM too and the temptation is definitely there to give old Nixie the heave ho out the door.

Just as I was thinking maybe I should end on a positive note about this cat and how of course I wouldn’t dream of tossing Nixie to the coyotes, and what a terrific little bed mate she makes for whoever snags her first (Taite or Matthias that is NOT me), and how darling she looks all cozy on the sofa pillow; she throws up all over the living room floor.

We named her Nixie because it means water spirit and I found her as a kitten down at the Yakima River all tiny, hungry and crying.  But her name also means: “Nixie (Postal), a piece of undeliverable mail, or the postal marking on such a piece of mail which indicates that it is to be returned to sender.”

Believe me the temptation is there to  ”Return to Sender.”

We got a very special opportunity to see Sarah Palin at her book signing.

Reading the news, one would think that there might be, oh, twelve people waiting for the book signing that would begin at noon.  At 9:00 AM the line was a mile long, easily and three deep!

People, if you read or listen to the general news sources, like NPR or NYTimes, you have been sold a bill of goods.  This woman is loved.

And really, why would the media take so much time vilifying a person if they didn’t think she was a threat?

This article at Pajamas Media explains why a woman who should be loved by all feminists is instead hated vehemently, “Feminists are enraged that her can-do, have a Down’s Syndrome child in her 40s, shoot-moose persona will be used as a paradigm of a liberated women. She is quite attractive, fertile, and married to a Jack-Armstrong 19^th-century man… When a Wasilla, you betcha, no abortion, Christian PTA mom comes on the scene with an Idaho BA, then red flags go up. Poor Sarah—had her mom only been a Colombian aristocrat, she might have at least pulled it off as Sarah Maria Dias-Palin, and compromised some of the furor. Poor Sarah, if she only could speak through nose. Poor Sarah, if she could only show up at her Wellesley reunion.”

If she could only demure as people question which ivy league school she attended, have diplomats for parents, and be pro abort she might go far with the left wing elitists.  But no, she is the real thing, a regular woman as opposed to the likes of Barbara Boxer and Nancy Pelosi,  ”Liberal elites are, well, deemed elites because they predicate their stature on things such as where they went to school, where they live, how much money they have access to, where their children attend university, and whom they know—all done in a sort of understated, coded fashion. The best snobbery is the least stated.”

So… when I got a call from my son-in-law’s brother (how’s that for a connection) we were ready to go meet Sarah Palin and have her sign a book.  Following protocol, we addressed her as Governor Palin, well, I did.  When it came time for Andrew to spit out a little greeting, he was speechless!!  I kid you not, he kinda just stood there in awe.  We invited our friends, John and Wendy, to be part of the honor and they managed to talk briefly about the cattle business, but words just would not come to Andrew and if you are acquainted with Andrew, the one thing about him is that he is rarely speechless so that was really something!

I have been reading (and loving) Supper of the Lamb by Robert Capon and my son-in-law, Tim, recently recommended that the guys read For the Life of the World by Alexander Schmemann to discuss at Christmas over cigars and port (Tim didn’t mention the cigars and port part).  Both books begin by insisting that eating is one of the most spiritual activities we can engage in.  I am captivated.

Schmemann quotes philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach: ”Man is what he eats.”   Feuerbach hoped to make people think they did not need the spiritual world that what man really needs is food.  When he said that, however, he instead opened up the heavens.  Man is what he eats and man has been connected to food in a very deep way since the beginning.

God put man into the garden of Eden and said, “Eat.” (Gen. 2:16)

When the Lord appeared to Abraham He was fed cakes of fine flour, beef, butter and milk. (Gen 18)

The last thing the disciples did with Jesus was to eat. (Mark 4:22)

And the sacrament of communion is all about eating and drinking. (Matt. 26:26)

Jesus on his last day before being crucified looked forward to the day when he would eat in the Kingdom of God. (Luke 22:15f)

Jesus asked the disciples after His resurrection, “Children, have you any food.” (Jn.21:5)

After His resurrection from the dead, He ate, “Jesus said to them, ‘come and eat breakfast.’” (Jn. 21:12)

But Satan is smarter than any old materialist philosopher and he knows how to get this man of substance and being under control.  He understands that as long as man deals with real substance, man will remain substantial.  Instead of taking away the material we have deceitfully been encouraged to mentally alienate ourselves from reality.

Corrupting our relationship to food has become a great way to dehumanize our humanity. Rather than eating for enjoyment and pleasure we have turned eating into a burden.  By totally absorbing ourselves in our diets, our food choices, our bodies, we have made ourselves the center of everything and we have lost the delight of eating.

We obsess over how many calories, how much saturated fat, and how to avoid white food (rice, flour, bread…)  and have turned our energy to worshiping our whole grain, organic, raw food diet.  And taste be damned.  Food is for  maintenance.

We have been conned into thinking that eating is to be endured; how dare you enjoy that lovely fried egg with toasted white bread  and lavishly buttered with real butter when you should be drinking that, that horrid stuff you whirled in the blender for all the health benefits it guarantees, the premordial ooze of life.

Enjoying the delicious taste of a meal well prepared makes us human and earthly in the best sense.

“To break real bread is to break the loveless hold of hell upon the world, and, by just that much, to set the secular free.”

We’ve been had.

“Food does not exist merely for the sake of its nutritional value.  To see it so is only to knuckle under still further to the desubstantialization of man, to regard not what things are, but what they mean to us- to become, in short, solemn idolaters spiritualizing  what should be loved as matter.”

True, true, man’s body is to be a temple of the Holy Spirit. (1 Cor. 6:19)  But given man’s tendency to idolatry, his penchant for obsessing over himself and thinking that he can control his destiny, his length of days by what he eats, by what we deny ourselves, given this tendency we need to start eating food that tastes good and leave off with the devilish cult of diets.

So how can we feast to the fullest and not become as big as a house?

“To eat nothing at all is more human than to take a little of what cries out for the appetite of a giant.”

Ah! The godly discipline of fasting.

And, “the real secret of fasting is not that it is a simple way to keep one’s weight down, but that it is a mysterious way of lifting creation into the Supper of the Lamb.”

We have always drunk whole milk, not the blue stuff and at long last our suspicions have been verified:

Children who drink full fat milk weigh less than those who do not, a new study has found.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 4, 2009)

Children as young as eight who drink milk every day have a lower body mass index than those who drink the low fat variety, according to the study from Gothenburg University in Sweden.

The new study found that children who drink full fat milk weigh on average almost nine pounds less than other children.

Diet experts believe that children who do not drink full fat milk may be fatter themselves because they drink fizzy drinks instead.

Dietician and author of the study Susanne Eriksson, said: “It may be the case that children who drink full-fat milk tend also to eat other things that affect their weight.

“Another possible explanation is that children who do not drink full fat milk drink more soft drinks instead.”

The researchers also discovered a difference between overweight children who drink full fat milk everyday and those who do not.

Children who often drink milk with a fat content of three per cent are “less overweight” but eat more saturated fat than recommended.

However, those children with a high intake of fat have a lower BMI than the children with a lower intake of fat.

Miss Eriksson examined the nutrition, body composition and bone mineralisation of 120 healthy eight-year-olds after the children told her team what they had eaten the day before, how often they ate certain foods and after taking blood samples.

“Many of these children had been examined when they were four-years-old, and we discovered that their eating habits were pretty much unchanged four years later.

“It appears to be the case that eating habits are established early.”

The study found that nearly two-thirds of the children had low levels of Vitamin D in their blood.