I told MFH the other night that it seemed like things were starting to crystallize a little; a couple of little things suddenly came clear for me. Well, once crystallization starts, it can take off very rapidly.

One of those little seed crystals was that I made a more substantial writing journal–MFH long ago settled on one particular style of notebook that he always carries around, but I used random frugally-acquired notebooks, or loose paper. But somehow the cover from an old altered book I had started a long time ago, and old paper left over from my grandmother’s teaching days, came together in some quick-and-dirty bookbinding, and now I have a book-shaped journal, with lots of pages, and room to paste things in. And I think that it is a style that I will stick with.

Jesus, I’m a sucker
I wish I’d believed less of the lies
Did anything I thought I knew
Turn out to be true?
‘Cause baby boys and little toys are all that
I see anymore
And will somebody close the door
It’s cold outside
It’s cold outside

It has been particularly exasperating this weekend. MFH has several projects that he would like to be working on all day long and half the night. I have been throwing off new ideas like sparks off a grindstone, and also wanting to dive very deeply into a couple of new subjects. Not being able to get very far with either, I end up in a very prickly mood.

I have been working on another book, though I was stuck for a while. When I am working on a project (any project, not just writing) I keep serendipitously finding all sorts of useful little tidbits for it. For book writing, I scribble them on scraps of paper, and then gradually assemble them into an outline in Freemind. But this one had a dry spell, which was finally broken by finding a little “bread crumb” of an idea in a diving magazine, of all places, over Thanksgiving. This morning I received a whole pile of bread crumbs, so I have a bunch of notes to sort through tomorrow.

I also have a long list of books that I want to read RIGHT NOW. One is the third book of Madeleine L’Engle’s Crosswicks Journals, The Irrational Season. Then I just learned that there is a fourth book in that series, Two-Part Invention.

First, I redid the lampshade for my floor lamp, which was starting to fall apart. I took off the trim and fabric, retaped the translucent plastic body to the wire frame, and then cut leaf shapes out of white woven fabric to glue onto it. For glue I used fabric stiffener, which seems to be about the same stuff as white glue or Mod Podge. I also sponged a light coat of this over the whole outside after I was done, and finished with a quick coat of spray acrylic. Then I glued on some new trim; dealing with the conical shape of the shade turned out to be the hardest part. It still looks a little rough; there was some glue left over from the original fabric that I couldn’t get off. The fabric leaves do have a nice texture that shows when the light is on.

I also made a leaf stencil from a plastic lid, and experimented with bleach stenciling my couch cover, which is a dyed canvas dropcloth. It was a partial success; the dye on the cover is so light that the bleached parts are barely visible. I am thinking of doing some spray paint stenciling on top of it later.

I also decided that the bathroom really, really needed a painting of a seashore in it. I found a beach picture in one of our books to use as a reference, a piece of scrap canvas from some rummage sale, and scrap plywood to stretch it on with a staple gun. I found some kind of a sling chair in the garbage, which supplied wood for the frame. I have a few basic acrylic paint colors from the art store. Then I spent most of my spare moments in the week painting, with cotton swabs, toothpicks, and the foam insert to some box. For a first attempt, it’s not too bad. I think I very much overworked it, but this also gives it some subtleties that I really like. As Alexandra Stoddard said, when you change one thing in a room, you more or less end up having to change everything…putting the painting in the bathroom meant that I had to screw two more bulbs into the light fixture to make the colors show up.

After all those things, the rest of the home wasn’t looking very well kept, so then I spent most of a day just scrubbing and purging and putting things away. And making good things to eat.

Today I installed MFH’s new keyed doorknob–finally solving the problem of keeping little children out of his office without making holes in anything. Also, I got out to a nearby consignment store that I had never been to before, and gave my eyes a feast.

In fact, the average cost of raising a child to age 17 is over $150,000 per year.

That cost is the total estimated birth-to-age-eighteen cost, probably from the USDA’s Cost of Raising a Child calculations, not the actual annual cost, thank goodness.

The rest of the article is better. The author rightly mentions the greatest cost of having children, which is opportunity cost–all the things that you give up having and doing in order to care for your children. And opportunity costs are indeed substantial, these days. As I sometimes say to myself, “We’re doing twice as much as those people, on half as much money, and in less than half as much living space.” So I don’t entirely agree with the article’s brief mention of productivity in the context of parenthood; productivity depends entirely on what metrics you are using.

On the other hand, raising children has never been easy, all the way back to Eve. I once read somewhere that the increased pain she was cursed with in childbearing would be more accurately translated as an increase in hard work. In my book, I mentioned my idea that this increased work in childbearing extends long past childbirth itself, and includes all the toil of bringing up small children. I keep seeing various solutions to the “mother is going crazy trying to care for family and home” problem, and none of them really seem to get to the root of it. “The only way out is through,” as far as I know.

1. Earplugs. Even the happiest babies with the most loving parents are sometimes inconsolable. Mothers’ ears have so much to listen for, that sometimes the auditory processing part of the brain just gets tired.

2. Lobby broom and a standing dustpan. Once they start eating solid foods, babies generate astounding quantities of crumbs, but pulling out the vacuum every time is too much work. These can also be useful during pregnancy, when it gets difficult to reach the floor, and for stealth cleaning while the baby naps. A lobby broom is also a good size for a toddler to use.

3. Real locks. Babies quickly grow up, and the average childproofing device is far too easily defeated. Installing keyed locks on a couple of cupboards or closets will help protect both children and sanity.

Not a baby shower gift, but still very useful:

4. Slipcovers, preferably all-cotton and machine-washable. Upholstery is not easy to clean.

Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas R. Covenant the Unbeliever, two trilogies worth. An intriguing premise (fantasy writer thrown into another world that may or may not exist only inside his head), some memorable characters, a few scenes of haunting beauty and action, but mostly the main characters just travel around feeling aghast and miserable.

Dante’s Purgatorio. This is easier to read than expected, as was Inferno, though not as vivid. My copy has the Italian on one side, and I want to go back and look at it sometime, and see how much of it I can follow.

Michael Crichton, Airframe and Sphere. We’ve been watching Air Crash Investigation episodes lately, which reminded me of Airframe.

The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America is a few years old, and quite voluminous, but clearly outlines the decline in American education over the last hundred years or so. I finished high school just as the outcomes-based education fad was starting to take hold there. In this book I found a couple of arguments against charter schools and vouchers that I hadn’t heard before: charter schools lack local control via an elected school board, and vouchers bring government control along with the money.

It is really starting to grieve me that we are spending our fourth Christmas in an apartment complex that doesn’t allow live Christmas trees, or even wreaths. So I put up a lot of Christmas lights this afternoon.

Last week, TLG gave the shepherd of our Nativity scene green hair with a whiteboard marker. Baby Jesus has appeared in various unlikely places, such as on the roof of the stable. While I was putting up the Christmas lights, OLC was playing with the other figures: “Oh no, the giant is putting up the lights!”

December 3: Object is an embossed Christmas card picture of Mary, but the reverse side, where I did a rubbing with a graphite pencil. Text points out Mary’s willingness to be the mother of the Messiah.

———————————————————

We have been getting some snow today. I finished up a few projects recently: new endpin for my fiddle, drainboard for the kitchen, painted my old eyeglass frames dark purple. At least two of those three projects went seriously awry. The drainboard is steel from a file cabinet, already a little rusty, painted with old latex paint, and the paint is doing some crazy alligatoring where it has gotten wet. For the next one, I am going to use aluminum, I think.

For the endpin, I made two attempts to whittle one from raw ebony, and both ended up too small for the hole. Finally, I resorted to the screw tin, found a drywall screw, a wall anchor, and two black rubber feet that make a good groove to accept the tailgut when I put them front-to-front. It is unconventional, but works, and doesn’t look that bad. So now I can play my fiddle again, though I have to rebuild my skills and muscles for it almost from scratch. I didn’t do anything with the pegs, so it is still very challenging to tune the strings that don’t have fine-tuners. The teeniest adjustment moves the string a full step up or down in pitch.

Meanwhile, StrongBaby has almost completely lost the ability to be put down for a nap…except on the day we had our dentist appointments. He is getting three or four new teeth all at once, and has been experimenting with standing unsupported. TLG has been dropping his afternoon nap, sometimes goes to sleep early, and is full of mischief. He has been two years old for about a year, and now he’s two-and-a-half. OLC taught herself how to draw stick figure monsters, and is very interested in reading chapter books.

We looked at a house for rent in St. Paul, but decided against it. It would have been a very rough commute for MFH, and I couldn’t figure out a way to make the spaces of the house really work for us.