Shanspirations

Today in her bath my daughter (five) was singing, “I’m a little fish of God, I’m a little fish of God…”

I heard her and wondered what she meant, but whatever it was I knew it was sweet because she had just been asking many questions about a story in the Bible on Abraham and had declared that she loved God even more than Abraham did. It was not quite true, of course, as I thought I should explain, since Abraham was willing to give up what he loved most in the whole world in order to obey God and Anna might not be willing to give up a candy bar if He asked her to. She herself had agreed that was probably true. We both know obeying is so very hard.  (I work to obey God and she works at obeying me.)

But now she was happily singing, “I’m a little fish of God, a little fish of God…”

When I came into the bathroom, she said, “We’re all little tiny fishes in the water and God is like a great big whale compared to us.”

And she went on singing, “I’m a little fish of God…”

I love the little snapshots into her mind I get in daily life as a mama. I also love that we’re homeschooling for kindergarten. I’m so glad I don’t have to send her off to school and miss her sunshine all day long. And I love teaching her. To think I’m the one who gets to teach her to read!

When I learned to read in first grade in an upstate NY public school, I thought it was the most wonderful thing in the world. It was one of the most exciting things that ever happened my whole early childhood. But my mom didn’t get to be the one to share in it and I can’t exactly find that teacher from long ago and celebrate the memory with her. What I mean is that Anna and I are making a memory as she learns to read and we’ll be able to share it our lives long since “mom and child” is a more permanent relationship than “elementary school teacher and child.”

Not everybody would find this so special; honestly, my own mom wouldn’t have and I know she loves me very much. But to me, teaching a child to read is an awesome experience.

I posted several months ago about using homemade dishwashing powder made with washing soda, borax, and a bit of 7th Generation detergent.   Not long after that post I decided to try using the powder as a bathroom cleaner to scrub my tub.  It worked fabulously!   I have taken to using this homemade cleaner for just about any difficult cleaning job that requires scrubbing.  It all stemmed from the thought:  “if this stuff can get my dishes clean in the dishwasher with no scrubbing and only water power, plus it doesn’t damage fragile glass, I wonder what it can accomplish with added scrubbing for other jobs?”

I like this powder better than any store-bought bathroom cleaner I’ve tried.  The conventional cleaners usually smell toxic (which makes cleaning less enjoyable) and the “natural” ones I’ve tried often don’t work as well, in addition to being expensive.  But this is inexpensive, non-smelly, yet works like one of the strong, “toxic” cleaners.

It’s funny, but little discoveries and experimentations like this one can be what makes being a homekeeper so delightful.  Recently my husband and I were talking about how nice it would be if he could work for himself/have his own business;  we were talking about advantages like avoiding wasted time and regimented schedules, having more freedom.

And I thought, “That’s what I love about my job as homekeeper;  no two days are much alike and almost every day is interesting, with no one telling me what to do or how to do it.”  In the years before I was married I had several jobs I thought were intriguing at the time, but I had to do lots of the same things over and over again.  In this homekeeping job there are repetitive tasks, too (laundry, etc.), but there is also room for creativity and imagination, variety and growth that many other jobs don’t hold space for.

Today is one of those days when I remember that I have my dream job.  And I feel very grateful.

When I decided (through my dad’s persuasion) to join a gym, I wanted to do things thoroughly this time. I read reviews on Amazon to find the best books on strength training and checked the library to see which were available to me.

Even before The New Rules of Lifting for Women: Lift Like a Man, Look Like a Goddess arrived, I knew it was going to be just the workout routine for me. It is. I can’t say enough about how good it is. All I can say is “get it!” (there is a New Rules of Lifting for men as well)

I do have more energy. Less back pain. I feel stronger. It’s easier for me to get my housework done (usually the dinner preparation alone would have me hurting) and cheery moods come more easily. Most of all, I am learning different, healthier ways to move!

For anyone who has pain and wants to start strength training, in addition to NROLW, I recommend a great companion book: Muscular Retraining for Pain-Free Living: A practical approach to eliminating chronic back pain, tendinitis, neck and shoulder tension, and repetitive stress injuries.

Muscular Retraining for Pain-Free Living isn’t even designed in particular to be a weight-lifting guide, but it teaches a body awareness and the why’s and wherefore’s that most strength training books don’t. It is a book well worth owning. I’ve read many books on muscular pain, but to me this is the best. It has condensed information that you might have to read eight other books on pain to find; and it’s all there in one, plus info I’ve never found in any other book.

If you weight train without Muscular Retraining, maybe you’ll decrease your pain, but it’s possible you won’t—because if you strength-train with poor posture and little awareness of how your muscles work together, you might only strengthen your muscles’ ability to keep your posture poor. Your muscles will be stronger and better at keeping you in pain! (I think that was often my problem 7 years ago when I had last strength-trained).

But if you read Craig Williamson on muscular retraining, and keep what he says in in mind during your workouts in the gym, what a powerful combination!

I started at the gym expecting it to take up to two years before I am fully pain-free (based on what my dad said). Maybe it will, but with this much improvement in only a month and a half, I’ve already achieved what I thought would take at least 6 months. I really think it is the combination of an excellent workout design along with the understanding the muscular retraining book gave me.

In the past I have done good stretch and isometrics routines (at home) by Pete Egoscue and others that also bring pain relief, but the pain relief didn’t last; I think I need the weight room to stimulate my muscles more intensely. But I also think these other routines were meant to stimulate muscle awareness and retraining simply through doing them, but that I needed more explanation. With what I learned from Muscular Retraining I am finding the muscular awareness to accomplish on my own what those routines are meant to do, however I am certain I will return to them every now and then, especially since what I’ve learned now may make them even more effective.

By the way, the lifting program I am doing from The New Rules of Lifting for Women is by Lou Schuler with Cassandra Forsythe, M.S. and workout programs created by Alwyn Cosgrove.

I am thankful to these folks for making a book that makes progress so easy. The forms provided make it easy to remember each workout what I’m supposed to be doing and to track my improvement. There is lots of information on the book’s web site, too, with forums and even videos of how to do certain exercises.

To sum up, if you can, get two books: The New Rules of Lifting for Women (or Men, as the case may be) and Muscular Retraining for Pain-Free Living: A practical approach to eliminating chronic back pain, tendinitis, neck and shoulder tension, and repetitive stress injuries. I love them both.

See here for prior post on how I got so motivated to work out.

When we went on vacation in May, my father (whom we were visiting) urged me to consider weight lifting for my back pain. I knew he had cured his own mid-back pain many years ago, but since I’ve tried strength training many times over the years, I had given up, and besides, with having a child, I didn’t see how I could go to a gym. Plus, I thought, as I often have, “I could work out at home” (only, because it’s hard to find time when my little girl isn’t distracting me, I rarely do! And I also don’t have weight-lifting equipment, but I can do workout videos and body-weight routines.)

Dad is very persuasive. He told me it took years of work outs before he entirely corrected his problem. We think there’s a strong genetic component to our pain since many family members on my dad’s side have a spot in our mid-backs that pops out of place bringing us hunched posture we can’t fully straighten along with miserable pain. Dad told me of years (before he started with weights) when he could barely stand any length of time without grimacing. He said the improvement he found through the gym came, not suddenly, but as a gradual process.

To me the most persuasive thing was what Dad said had happened when he stopped working out. After decades looking fit and muscular while always faithful in the gym, Dad had, for a time, due to overwhelming work in his business, dropped his workouts. In that period, he had felt as though his body was “falling apart.” He developed aches and pains; he felt old beyond his years. He realized as fatigue increased that his workouts had been giving him far more energy than he would naturally have had. Yet, because he was so busy, he continued to put workouts on hold and he felt and looked worse and worse. It was like aging ten years in one.

At last he started again and he could see what weight training really does for him! Energy rose and his moods were happier and he could get more work done in less time. He decided it was just too costly to not work out. I had long assumed that my dad had good genes when it comes to strength and energy. Since I was only a child back when photos show he was skinny (with no noticeable muscles) and pain-ridden, I’d hardly given thought to what a dramatic change he had undergone. It was realizing that that change could be undone that helped me recognize the true potential lifting held for me.

I started thinking: maybe I just hadn’t ever stuck it through long enough. I’d gone months, but maybe months wasn’t enough. Or maybe I hadn’t maintained a steady two to three workouts per week for those months (Okay, I hadn’t).

Dad encouraged me that I could find a gym with a decent monthly rate and childcare included (actually, it turned out I had to negotiate to get a price range with childcare that I could afford and I also negotiated to have month-to-month membership at the same price per month as a year contract).

I had assumed I couldn’t afford a gym when so many other things were more important; now I was wondering how I could afford not to join a gym when it was important for so many things. And, yes, I started praying about it almost instantly.

Dad didn’t know it, but the greatest motivation of all was that I was pregnant. After three and a half years of infertility, I had at last conceived and I knew I wanted to be fit in pregnancy, having learned through past reading that being strong and fit is beneficial to bringing positive pregnancy outcomes and avoiding common pregnancy ailments.

I didn’t know I would miscarry upon arriving home from vacation before I even got to join a gym (but after I had found the one I wanted to join.) But the motivation lasted even though the pregnancy didn’t.

I’ll share next post why I’m so pleased with my workout results and about two awesome resources I found that I just can’t say enough about. I’m writing through sheer enthusiasm as I fall in love with doing squats, deadlifts, and step-ups in a great gym.

Dishwasher Detergent has seemed expensive to me compared to many other household cleaning products.  One day I wondered if I could use less expensive household cleaners such as Borax to make my own.  Borax is versatile and I use it for many things already, so I thought it might work for dish-washing cleaner, too.  A quick google search revealed that, yes! you could use Borax to make dish-washing soap.  I read bunches of sites and the basic recipe and tips I settled on boiled down to this:

1.) Add 1 part Borax to 1 part washing soda (which is different than baking soda),

2.) Then add a little bit of store-bought dish-washing powder (I added about a quarter cup of Seventh Generation Free and Clear Automatic Dishwashing Detergent).  (This step is optional).

3.) Use this “homemade” mixture in your dishwasher’s pre-rinse spot.  In the place you’d normally put detergent, fill with plain vinegar.

(The vinegar is necessary for the product to rinse fully with no residue.)

I’ve been using this method for about 8 months and I’m so pleased with how much I’ve saved in purchasing dishwasher detergent.  I still have the same box of Seventh Generation that I had when I started and it’s still more than half full.  Borax and washing soda are significantly cheaper per pound than commercial dishwasher detergent.  And I just feel better about mixing up my own every now and then and no longer whipping through commercial products.

Felt so good about it today as I started a dishwasher load that I decided to post on it.  For the past year I’ve had a dishwasher again after living a year before that in a place without one.  That year I had learned it really wasn’t that bad sans dishwasher and that washing dishes by hand is perfectly do-able.  But this past year when I got to have one again?  I learned I really do like having a dishwasher (very much) after all!

My darling and I went on a family vacation recently (with our little girl, of course).  It involved a lot of driving and camping in lovely places southward, and visiting many of our friends and family.  One of the things we did while we drove was sing.

I have always loved group singing, the old-fashioned kind where no one is a professional and everyone is just having a good time.  (And I never could understand the appeal of karaoke compared to singing naturally with friends and family at home.  In some cases, it seems like an attempt to replace something meaningful that people are missing…only they probably don’t know what.)

Jacob and I were lamenting that so few people get to enjoy singing with loved ones the way we do.  We had initially thought singing together daily was just normal, but as we’ve had more experience, we realize we have something special.  Jacob grew up in a home where his mother played the piano and the whole large family (9 of them!) used to have family sing-a-longs.  As they grew up and various siblings married, the sing-a-longs didn’t stop; there were just more of us to join in.  I didn’t grow up in a family that sang together at home, but because I grew up in a faithful church-going tradition, I learned Christian songs, hymns, and choruses from earliest childhood.  I think I know verses from thousands of songs by heart.

As we sang on our trip, I thought about how wonderful it had been to marry a man who grew up learning many of the same songs I did—and how lovely to learn more songs together over the years and forever be having music in our home—not with overdone, professional voices, but merry imperfect ones!

“Why don’t more people get to enjoy this?,”  I asked him, between songs.

“I think people have gotten used to music as entertainment, as something that has to sound professional,” he said.  “They can’t appreciate singing any other way.”

That thought of his compelled me to write.  For I am passionate about this.  Every child should know what it is to sit around the living room or fire, piano or kitchen table and sing with his or her family!  If all the unity children ever get to find in activities with their families is through watching TV and movies, or having their parents attend their sporting events, how impoverished they are—and never even knowing it.

For these other activities are not the same as finding harmony together in song, partly because they don’t involve family teamwork. Perhaps, where voices blend, hearts do, too.  On days when my voice is off and I sound like a warbling duck trying to blend with my family, I am still working at finding my place with them; and that symbolizes something of the effort to find unity, even—especially—in our imperfections.

Group singing with loved ones, amidst all the merry noise, in a softer strain, says, “We belong to each other—and we’ll always keep working to fit our lives more closely together in harmony.”

I am thankful we had a vacation full of song.

I stepped into the world of Little House on the Prairie as an 8 year old in a Tennessee library one school day when a kind librarian offered to help me find new books.  When she learned I had never read the “little house” books (nor known they existed), she led me to a low shelf where I first glimpsed the colorful covers illustrated by Garth Williams.  The pictures were so appealing I could hardly wait to look inside and begin.  The librarian smiled.  She said I was going to love these books.

As I started reading, I remember being amazed by the librarian’s wisdom—how had she known I was just the type of little girl for whom these books would be just right?  Now I know that “Little House” books have been “just right” for countless children generation after generation.  My husband loves them every bit as much as I do.  He can hardly  believe I didn’t learn about them until I was eight!  His mother read through the series aloud repeatedly as her seven children grew up; and once married, he and I began to do the same, reading aloud to each other.  Now we have a four year old and we are reading the series again.  It only grows more wonderful.

In the Spring 2007 issue of a magazine I receive called The Old Schoolhouse there was an interview with Stephen Hines about some newly published collections of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s writings for a Missouri newspaper (written years before she began writing her books for children).  I had not known that there had long been unfound writings and that Hines had later searched them out and compiled books of them.  I made mental note to look these books up when I had chance (Writings to Young Women series published in 2006).  But first I have started with Hines’ Little house in the Ozarks: A Laura Ingalls Wilder Sampler—The Rediscovered Writings (1993).

And I love these essays!  I keep thinking that Laura was a woman after my own heart;  I have to remind myself that she makes many people feel this way and that I am surely not unique.  But it’s hard to fully convince myself!  I am inspired and uplifted as I read.  I am amazed by how many of her essays seem fresh and nowhere near as dated as they should be.  And I wish her commonsense wisdom with deep value held for joys of family life and community and creative work were more widespread with people today.

I hoped to find glimpses of her faith—whatever it was—in these writings; but glimpses is all they are, in my opinion.  Either she was too reserved to write in a deeper way of her faith in these public writings or she possessed a different sort of faith than than I hoped to find—one rooted more in a general Christian tradition of her upbringing than one tending toward intense appreciation for Christ as God-man who came to earth and made for Himself a whole new people.

I love sleep.  One of the most pleasurable daily gifts God gave, I think, is good, happy sleep.  I love to snuggle in layers of warmth on a crisp morning and feel the delightful tug of autumn luring me from bed.  I feel a sense of celebration for the wonderful night of sleep I had and when I get up, it is a pleasure.

Over two years ago, I first wrote The Finale: Becoming the Morning Person I Always Wanted to Be, an article in a series about my transition from living as a night owl who went to bed around 2 p.m. to acting like a morning person who consistently gets up and goes to bed early.

That change has stuck.  This was the sleep plan that worked for me when every sleep tip I’d tried—and there were many—failed. Except for a 2-3 month stress-filled period when I abandoned my sleep plan, we have continued it ever since.  And in that short period when I wasn’t following it, I felt awful.  I hated slipping back into night owl ways.  My husband missed our new life, too.  We both realized how much the sleep plan had added to our lives and couldn’t wait to return to sweet calm and order.

Yesterday, I edited the original Finale post so it would be shorter and easier to read.  You can find it here.  In cutting things from the post, I found some things worth keeping, but since I had crammed too much information in the original, I decided to move them. What follows is a summation of the material I cut.

Before we started our candlelight sleep plan, my husband didn’t have sleep problems to speak of; I was the one with trouble.  Yet, once we started it, he began to tell me how much more rested he felt mornings, that getting up was easier, and that he no longer felt as tired during the day as he often had. For both of us this was a nicer way to live. In addition to candlelight (which I wrote about in Finale), here are some of the other changes we made two years ago:

1.) We stopped using artificial light at night besides our candlelight. A TV counts as artificial light. So do blue LED lights on computers and glowing computer screens. Instead of using my cell phone, I preferred to use my land phone by evening. We turned off our refrigerator light that popped on every time we opened the door. Why? I read that in some animal experiments, a sudden bright light after dusk was the equivalent of early morning sun to the circadian clock. In other words, bright light, once your body thinks it is after dark and melatonin has been picking up, can possibly shut the melatonin tap and keep it from increasing for a while. Maybe there is even a component apart from melatonin that causes an increase in alertness with bright light. Whatever the case, I am sensitive to it.

I’ve also read that if you get up at night to go to the bathroom and turn on the light, the light’s effects on melatonin will cause your sleep to be less effective for the rest of the night. This could help explain some of those mornings when you slept all night, yet you wake feeling like you had only half a night’s sleep.

2.) We used blackout curtains over all our windows, including our bedroom, and covered our alarm clock to make the bedroom as dark as possible.

3.) We bought an inexpensive dawn simulator to have light in the morning.  We thought it was nice, but not entirely necessary.  For me and my husband, the dimness at night seemed to reset our bodies’ light sensitivity. I began to find that just a tad bit of window light poking through was all it took to get me wide awake when we’d had total darkness except for candlelight the night before. On the other hand, my husband really liked the dawn simulator.  He would wake to the dawn simulator and then when he rose, he would throw open the window blinds, illuminating the room for me to wake by. I prefer waking to outdoors light; it invigorates me better than a dawn simulator.

However, even without extra light, in following this plan, I just naturally wake up when I’ve had enough sleep. It’s not as much fun to wake in the dark, but I think the key to making it easier is going to bed early enough to get enough sleep.  In times when I rise before dawn, rather than turn the house lights on, I love to light a candle and watch the sunrise through the window, experiencing the growing brilliance of morning more fully.

Summary

We have made modifications over time as I wrote in my newly edited Finale post and sometimes I miss pure candlelit evenings, but we have kept the gist of it.  It has made our lives better.  Good sleep is good.