Month: January 2025

Well, it is now very, very cold today; even for those of us who live in the Upper Midwest. This kind of cold used to happen on a regular basis when I was a kid (recess was inside in the gym or the hallways outside the classrooms, lots of Uno was played). But it’s more rare now, maybe once a year? We’re on our second round this month. I just wish we had some snow to go with it… alternating between April and 1995 January isn’t great for snow coverage…

Sometimes I look at the weather when it’s doing this over the last few years and try to imagine what this will look like or feel like in 10 years or harder, thirty years. This is a place I’ve known all my life but it’s not the same place (obviously! but this is the fundamental parts of it, the plants, the weather, etc) and it is almost certainly going to be a very different one when my kids are my age. The fact that the range of futures extends to include a whole bunch of ones from sci-fi books I’ve read is hard. I read the good sci-fi, so it’s not just cool space vacations! 🙂 How do you plan for that? It seems like most of my adult life it just keeps repeating where the world has something that is touted as definite and rock solid and it just goes right off a cliff and then everyone assures themselves that of course it was inevitable and no big deal.

It feels like a lack of agency, or a choice to lack agency because that also means a lack of responsibility. It helps to read history books (good ones) and see the crises and dilemmas from the past and also how people got through them even if some of them failed morally or for other reasons and the path to making a good outcome was winding and uncertain. Honestly, that’s the most reassuring thing I’ve found at the moment. That means choosing agency and responsibility though, the people who made a good outcome did a lot of hard things with no way of knowing how it would turn out, and it’s not just sitting quietly like waiting out a thunder storm.

So I’ll do my best, and I will advocate for good things where it will matter most and I will plant native flowers all around my house and grow a big garden and teach my kids to knit and sew and play piano and the names of the trees in our woods and all the good things like that. And I will win at my game of all of how local can I get for all the things and I will go for walks and read books and pet my cats and make awesome things.

So that’s some good stuff and good to think about.

So things have been cleaned! At least to a new, improved standard as a parent of small children! Sometimes that’s the best indication that our smallest is a toddler on her way to being a small child. Sometimes when everything feels overwhelming I remind myself how far we’ve come. The smallest sleeps through the night and plays with her brothers and can play outside and I have cleaning routines for key house stuff. The trees that were messing with the RA are gone, most of the carpet that messes with the RA is gone, I have air filters that minimize the things that annoy the RA that do get in.

I canned a lot of stuff and we have an awesome supply of things to eat. I learned two new skills (embroidery and lotion making). I’m on my way with more skills (upholstery, candle making, more soap/lotion things, felting, pressure canning). I have plans for systems to fix or at least work around some of the stuff that derailed last summer and systems to make doing things and having fun possible to coexist. So that’s all awesome and it’s important to remember how much we’ve done and how much better that all is. Sometimes it’s just hard to remember it, probably because life during the small child phase of things can be hard and chaotic even with the best efforts and wow-oh-wow the world at large. But here, we’ve done an awesome amount of things that make a lot better and more fun.

And the smallest will be 3 this spring and then may be in the presence of legos (and other tiny objects) and is getting pretty good at stairs so we can remove gates and she can play in the basement (which is currently a mystical land of wonderful tiny toys she only gets to visit) and hopefully we’ll be done with diapers soon. And she can play outside with someone watching her but soon she will be able to play with supervision but not the sort that requires hovering just behind her. That really improves the odds that gardening and yard work happens this summer!

For now though it’s small projects, seeing about growing some herbs in the window again and doing inside projects we have lined up (shelves! among others…).