First, a warning about predictions in general: They can be wrong. Sometimes very wrong. No one can take everything into account; present knowledge is terribly imperfect, and who knows what might spring into existence tomorrow. But most of what I am predicting is already starting to happen: “TSIAH!” means “This Stuff Is Already Happening!”; it is the cry of my skittish little internal danger-meter, whose job it is to start panicking early, and give warning while there is still time to take action.

Prediction One: Many more do-it-yourself activities will become illegal or impractical. Safety nazis pushing for new regulations, plus governments desperate to perk up their tax receipts and extend their regulatory reach, plus corporations who would like you to purchase their ready-made answers to your every need, plus trade associations lobbying for their members’ financial interests, plus financial outfits who are eager for opportunities to charge interest and fees at every turn, plus an educational system that now teaches hardly any useful skills at all, plus snobby losers who look down on the more self-sufficient as being low-class, plus media horror stories about how some do-it-yourself-er managed to achieve an EPIC FAIL!, equals considerable pressure to stick to the day job, and hire out everything else while you spend your evenings sitting slack-jawed in front of a screen. TSIAH! Look around!

I am particularly watching for initiatives against home canning and Linux.

I went through it and dusted every single thing, and found some things that could just as well go away. I washed the vertical blinds and put them away and put up a curtain. Trimmed all the dead parts off the plants, and repotted the ones that needed it.

I also moved the table. We have a small dining room and a long, narrow table and I never thought that there was enough room to turn the table the other way, but there is!–if I put one end of it right up to the window. This also frees a little floor space at the end of the room. So now it feels like a whole different room to me. Now when I look into the dining room from the kitchen, I see the table end-on, and all the books and trivets on it don’t dominate the view.

I made a start on the living room, but it has been slower going, because MFH has been home sick most of the week, and also I’ve been thinking ahead to what I want to do in some of the other rooms.

Lately, I have been reading lots of home design books, analyzing floor plans, and thinking about what we will need in our next home. It’s clear to me now that our current apartment is actually too big for us, in some ways. The bedrooms are too big, it’s a long trek across the kitchen with a baby clinging to your leg, and we don’t really need the second bathtub. We do miss not having a garage, or an attic, or a basement, or a laundry room, or a yard. Everything we have is right in our living space.

Which reminds me of a book I just read: Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity , written by a guy who turned his habit of scribbling little cartoons on business cards into almost a livelihood. The book is very good, and you can see how playing within the constraints imposed by the physical properties of a business card has, ironically, been very freeing for him.

Every artistic medium has its own built-in constraints, and I’ve noticed that having too many choices left open can be rather paralyzing. Choosing whether or not to go to the farmer’s market was often draining for us. So now we have imposed the constraint of the farm share; whatever comes in the box each week is what we’re going to eat.*

The good thing about this constraint is that it is voluntary. I think the day is coming when we’re all going to get our produce by the box, whether we want it or not. The hippies are certainly being trained to eat their beets, turnips, and soy. Just wait until the government decides to impose a healthy diet “for our own good”. The farm share is a good way to practice cooking and eating simpler foods, before the other shoe drops on the economy.**

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*I received practically no art education in school. I particularly remember fifth grade, when there was a string of snow days that fell on the day of the week that the art teacher was scheduled to come to my class. As far as I can remember, that was the only year I ever had an art teacher at all, and my little half-cup of artistic talent certainly didn’t get nurtured. Later on, I gave myself permission to be an artist, and to craft a better life for myself and my family.

**We’re going to can some of the excess farm share produce; canning is another skill we are teaching ourselves, though I rather expect that home canning will be made illegal within my lifetime, “for our own safety”.

We managed to cloth diaper TLG the whole time, with no problems. Beforehand, I cut up an old T-shirt and made some throw-away diaper liners. The liners worked well, but the plastic bags that I put the dirty ones in didn’t contain odors well.

When we got back, I felt like sewing, so I finished up a few more cloth diapers that I had started a long time ago. Which he needed right away, until I got caught up on washing diapers from the trip.

I also finished making over a corduroy hat that I liked, but was just too small. I took out the sides of the hat, and put in bigger ones, and a new lining. I kept the top of the hat and the brim.

Finally, I whipped out a couple of cloth bags, since MFH wants some for storing produce without using plastic bags. I made them with French seams, which I am learning about for a future blouse project.

Today we put together a gingerbread house kit; a “party house cake” according to OLC. We’ve known for a while that artificial colors make her bounce off all four walls and the ceiling as well, so the rest of today should be interesting. (We’ve discovered artificial colors in children’s vitamins and in toothpaste, too.) Usually the first thing she does when she has had some artificial colors is to get into something that has some more.

TLG is walking better, but he still has a whole line of bruises on his forehead from falling down. He has been learning how to put things into containers, and how to blow a kazoo.

OLC’s number sense is improving. She used to ask for two of something that she really wanted, then three; now she asks for five.

MFH and I did a lot of talking and thinking about subcultures, and where we want to live when we escape from the big city. It’s not an easy question, because we belong to several distinct (and non-adjacent) subcultures, and one of our God-ordained roles seems to be to carry good ideas across subcultural boundaries.

Practically, what that means for my family is that the state will not be giving us about $100 of our money back, which is equivalent to a 13% increase in our state income tax bill.

TLG has been taking ten-minute naps again. But he sleeps ok at night, as long as you don’t compare him to a fictional baby that sleeps 12 hours straight.

He gave drinking straight from a cup a try, and was very proud of himself. He also learned how to blow in a recorder and make it toot, just like his big sister does.

OLC has been doing a lot of singing and strumming her ukulele, just like Julia Nunes (her favorite youtube celebrity). MFH took OLC to see Julia in concert a couple of weeks ago, and Julia signed both of their ukuleles.

I’m very grateful for the breastfeeding hormones that keep me fairly mellowed out most of the time.

My current project is making-over a corduroy hat that I liked, except that it was just too small enough to be annoying. I’m going to reuse the brim, and make a new crown for it.

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I was reading in Nehemiah how debts with (if I am reading it right) only 1% interest were considered crushing burdens. Back then, they easily could be.

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I finished the bra project, it turned out both awesome and amateurish at the same time. Then I made an apron, which was a simple project, but still took three days. Now I am resting up for the next big project, whatever that will be. I am extra tired because MFH worked 60-plus hours last week, and we ran around a lot on the weekend to compensate for being extra cooped-up.

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TLG hit his nine-month birthday, and really took off walking. Now he toddles here and there, and falls down a lot.

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I did the first pass through the taxes, and we will be able to take the earned income tax credit this year, thanks to TLG. So are we rich (living almost comfortably on one income), or are we poor? Sometimes it is hard to tell.

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Our car has gone a whole year without needing any major repairs, which is a first for us. Why yes, we do tithe. We tithed all the years that we paid thousands and thousands of dollars to fix it, too. I’ve been looking around on the internet, trying to determine whether or not it is actually possible to fit three car seats in the back seat. Some people say yes, some say no way, no how. We have two Britax seats, which sit fairly high, so I think we might be able to squeeze a lower, narrow seat between them. MFH has been able to sit between them for a short ride.

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I started a list of predictions for things that will occur within my lifetime. I am trying to decide whether “Laws will be passed to require car seat installation by a certified technician” should be added to the list. The trend is heading that way, but sometimes people need to move car seats from one car to another so someone else can transport the kids.

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I was holding off on finishing TLG’s birth story until we found out how much our insurance was going to pay for the prenatal care and birth. It turns out that all they will pay for is the lab work. By Minnesota law, they have to cover prenatal care and some other things, but our CPM was an out-of-network provider, and we had to pay a high deductible first, and we got to pay deductibles twice because the pregnancy was not all in one calendar year, and the insurance was pretty stingy on what midwife charges they actually allowed toward the deductible, and they specifically exclude homebirth and most medical care not supervised by a physician anyway. As MaxedOutMama says, “Health coverage does not equal health care!” Sometimes health coverage doesn’t even equal health coverage. Even though our midwife is licensed by the state to provide prenatal and homebirth care, there’s a gap in the insurance coverage statutes there. In the end we came out sort of ahead, because of the lower premiums for the high-deductible plan, and because MFH’s employer kicks some cash into the health savings account to return some of their lower premium costs to him. We also got to pay $100 just for our midwife’s insurance biller to bill our insurance, because “it’s a high-deductible plan and I might not get paid otherwise.” (I didn’t ask how she would have gotten paid for billing a normal-deductible plan, because I computed a zero probability of getting an answer that wouldn’t further tick me off.)

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The same insurance company just sent us the annual plan overview booklet. If we want the actual printed certificate of coverage, we have to put in an order for it, and they had a paragraph in the booklet saying, “If everyone was nice to us and didn’t order anything, we would save $X million in postage and printing costs.” No thanks, I want my $5 worth of real physical official documentation, and they can spare me the guilt trip.

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One of Home Living’s recent posts had a wonderful comment that basically said, “The Lord knows all about the constraints of your situation. Do the best that you can, even if it isn’t that great, and accept God’s grace for the rest.”

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I had that it’s-too-quiet-what-are-they-up-to feeling, and found the children in the kitchen. OLC was dusting her brother liberally with unflavored gelatin. Clearly if we start stocking up on things, they need to be things that are toddler-proof.

We did find out where my personal line in the sand was on toys in the church: No secular licensed characters. I found a few of these in the toddler room, decided that responsibility should come with some degree of power, and dealt with them accordingly. OLC doesn’t know about most of these characters, and she certainly doesn’t need to learn about them in church.

My other mental line in the sand is: No depictions of Noah’s Ark as a Happy Fun Animal Cruise. There is not much that I can do about that one, though; my church took the greatest catastrophe in Bible history as the decorating theme for the entire nursery.

Whole subcultures of society being trained to hate people like us? Check.

Obstacles and petty annoyances at ever turn? Check.

God shielding us from the worst of the storms, and sustaining us without fail: Check.