Thanks so much for your patience with me.

But just in case you find you simply must have something to read on this blog today and/or Friday, I’ve included a couple of old posts for you.

Here is one of my most popular posts:

Day of Destruction

And here is one of my personal favorites:

Home Sweet Home (Warning: this post is only for those with a highly developed taste [har har] for the scatological.)

And if that’s not enough reading for the week, here are a couple of blogs I enjoy:

L.L. Barkat’s Seedlings in Stone
Ann Kroeker
Melissa Wiley

See you next Tuesday. Until then – happy reading!

I don’t weed my yard, water my flowers, trim my hedge, or mow my lawn.

I don’t clean my bathroom every day (and with six people using it, I really, really should).

I don’t mop my floors, wash my windows, or iron.

I don’t clip coupons or shop for deals. I don’t shop, period, unless the kids have nothing to wear that fits, and even then it might take me a few weeks to get to it.

I don’t sew. I don’t knit. I don’t crochet or embroider or paint or draw.

I don’t read magazines. I don’t do home improvement projects. I don’t host dinner parties.

I don’t blog every day. I don’t read blogs every day. I don’t leave comments on other blogs every day.

I don’t use cloth diapers, let alone wash them myself. I don’t sign with my babies. I don’t even play with them much.

I don’t read the newspaper or listen to NPR.

I don’t belong to or participate in a mom’s group, PEPS group, or mothers-of-multiples group. I don’t volunteer at civic organizations or even my church.

I don’t enroll my kids in extracurricular activities. I don’t arrange playdates.

There are lots of other things I don’t do (like watch TV or movies), but I don’t much care that I don’t do them. The things on this list are the things I either wish I did or feel vaguely (and sometimes acutely) guilty for not doing.

The thing is, there are only 24 hours in a day, and I have to sleep for eight of them, and I don’t have time or energy for all the good things out there that I could – or even ought to – do.

I have to choose what’s most important, what best aligns with our family’s values and vision. Sometimes I miss the mark, and I choose to do something I really don’t have time or energy for (like writing a guest post for someone else’s blog), or I choose not to do something (like reach out to a friend or family member or neighbor) that I really need to do.

It’s a growing edge, this whole learning-my-limits thing.

It’s humbling, too, especially when I look out my dining room window and see the vine whose name I don’t know growing over my screen and the blackberry sending its thorny fingers into my fig tree – and even more humbling when I look past all that into my neighbor’s yard, which looks like it came straight out of Mayfield or Martha Stewart Living.

These are the times I have to take a deep breath and say, Okay, so my yard looks like the set for Little Shop of Horrors, but hey, my kids have great vocabularies.

Now that the twins are a year old and I’ve begun sleeping at night again, I’ve started thinking more about my blog here…as opposed to what I’ve been doing for most of the past twelve months, i.e., frantically trying to write a post the night before.

One of these thoughts I’ve had I’d like to run by you. Ready?

I am thinking about becoming an Amazon Affiliate. (She said, cringing.)

Up to now, my blog has been an ad-free place. I like that. A lot. Which is part of the reason I hesitate to take this step.

By becoming an Amazon Affiliate, almost nothing will change, except that when I link to books on Amazon (which I already do with some frequency), the link will include my affiliate number and I will get a small commission should any of you buy the book after clicking through on the link from my site.

The links (so far as I can tell) won’t look any different to you. The price you pay for the book will be the same as if you’d accessed it in any other way. Amazon will simply pay me a dollar or two for my role in directing you to the book. And somewhere on my site I’d have a small note stating that it’s affiliated with Amazon.

The only reason I’m thinking about this is because I’d like to offset some of the costs associated with my blog, and since I already link to Amazon, it seemed a rather painless way to do that. After all, if a megacorporation is willing to share its proceeds with little ole moi, maybe I should let it.

Of course, I’m under no illusions that I’m going to make a lot of money this way (if I make five bucks a month, I’ll be thrilled), but even if I were destined to make boatloads, it wouldn’t be worth it to me if it meant you stopped reading.

You are the reason I write. That you spend your precious time reading my words means more to me than I can say. I know you’re all busy and have plenty of other things you could be doing besides giving me your time and attention. And I want to honor that.

So, please let me know what you think. Is this a great idea, a wretched idea, a divinely inspired idea, an idea from the pit of hell? Whatever, this inquiring mind wants to know. You can opine in the comments, or if you’d rather, you can email me.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

I turn my head, and he holds up a catalog. Emblazoned across the top are the words, HOMESCHOOL SALE!

He grins. “Want to buy a homeschool?”

I roll my eyes and turn back to the cutting board. He starts turning the catalog’s pages. “Wow. Listen to this sweet deal: half off canned beans and ammo!”

I snort back a laugh.

He turns another page and says in his best Old-Uncle-Bob-from-Arkansas twang, “Retired missile silos are 25% off! And with every purchase over fifty dollars you get a free video on how to skin and gut a deer!”

I’m laughing so hard I knick my finger with the chopping knife. “Stop,” I say, “or I might chop off my finger.”

“Not to worry,” Doug says as I grab the band-aid box. “They have a first aid kit with complete instructions for reattaching a severed digit. And it’s 50 bucks, so we’ll get that deer vido to boot.”

Said baby refused to nap two days in a row. Said baby refused to be put down on the floor or the bed or in a high chair. Said baby wanted to be held and held and held…

So this mama did not get to finish the aforementioned self-mocking birthday post.

To be fair to said baby, I could have finished that post. But I would have had to miss out on my movie night with some girlfriends, and I haven’t had a movie night with girlfriends in…well, I can’t remember the last one.

So I decided to skip the blog post in favor of Enchanted April, which is one of my favorite movies ever. It’s a character-driven period piece with lots of great British actors; it’s slow, sweet, and has a happy ending that leaves you grinning from ear to ear. What’s not to love?

All that to say, no post today. Maybe I’ll get around to finishing the self-mocking birthday post next year.

On the day of our wedding, the reader board outside our church said, “Love Covers A Multitude of Sins.”

Underneath that was a pink construction paper heart and the words, “Congratulations Doug and Kimberlee!”

Doug laughed. He thought it was hilarious, the kind of thing you’d see after the end of an article in Reader’s Digest. I laughed, too, but only with my mouth. In my heart, I was terrified. I was sure I’d been found out. Someone knew.

They knew I wasn’t marriage material (whatever that is), that I was a liar and a hypocrite, that I was only pretending to be someone normal and functional and okay, someone who could be a loving partner in a marriage.

But I plastered a smile on my face and posed with my laughing soon-to-be husband for a photo next to the reader board. I was pretty good at pretending I was okay even when I was not, and I wasn’t about to let on that it scared me that someone knew that about me.

Eleven years later, I look back on that girl, and I want to give her a big hug. I want to tell her, “You aren’t as screwed up as you think you are” and “Relax. It was an innocent faux pas. No one was sending you a secret threat message.”

But it wouldn’t have mattered. That girl was determined to see herself through the critical eyes of the men at the Seven Oaks Country Club and through the even more critical eyes of their catty, mean-spirited wives. As Doug said to me during that first year we were married, “You won’t believe the nice things people actually say about you, but you believe all sorts of mean things nobody ever said.”

But somebody did say those mean things.

Me. And that chorus of critical voices I carried around in my head and projected onto almost everyone I met.

However innocent a faux pas those words on the reader board were, they were also prophetic. Love really does cover a multitude of sins. It’s taken eleven long years, but the dailiness of living with my husband, of living in the circle of his love for me, of slowly coming to see myself through his loving eyes instead of my own critical ones—this has transformed me.

Oh, the country club men and their nasty wives are still around, but I don’t listen to them quite as much these days. I tend to laugh when I mess up instead of freaking out that someone is going to find out and I’ll be a pariah. I’m more likely to own up to mistakes instead of hiding them or verbally flagellating myself for them. And I’m way more likely to tell the truth about who I am than hide behind a fake smile or a misrepresentation or even an outright lie.

It’s a process, of course, and I still have a long way to go on this journey into love and trust. But I am so grateful to my husband for loving me faithfully, even when I am unlovable, for walking with me these past eleven years, for holding my hand and covering me with his love when I am scared and insecure, when I’ve made mistakes and even when I’ve lied about it.

Love does indeed cover a multitude of sins.

Love makes us beautiful and worthy and wonderful in the eyes of those who love us.

And love, more than anything else, sees truly.

–an edited repost from the archives

This trip, and I mean that in every sense of the word, is now officially known as Our Second Heinous Driving Vacation. I didn’t quite hallucinate, but I did faint. Three days before we came home, Jack and I got stomach flu. I was freezing, so I decided to take a bath. When I stood up to get out of the bathtub, I fainted. First time I’ve done that in over a dozen years. But hey, at least we weren’t camping that night. Can you imagine yakking into a pit toilet?

Apart from the stomach flu, it was a pretty good trip. Well, except for the part where we learned that Jane suffers from motion sickness.

And the part where I lost our car keys in Yosemite.

And the part where both babies started wailing while we were on an open air tram tour of the Valley, and the only way to get them to shut up so the rest of the people on the tour could hear the ranger/tour guide lady was for me to breastfeed both of them at the same time while on a moving tram. Oh yes. I did.

But you know, except for that, it was a good trip. I mean, we came back with the same number of people, and each of those people had the same number of limbs and digits. What more could I want?

Maybe to have some fun? Well, you know what? We did. Here are a few of my favorite moments:

A lovely picnic lunch at the Jackson Historic House outside Chehalis, Washington.

Family church and tree climbing by the Willamette River our first Sunday on the road.

Discovering our new favorite honey.

Kids laughing in the wind, coats and hair streaming back, leaning into the gale, strong enough to hold them up.

The scent of orange blossoms when I stepped out of the car in Fairfield, CA, where we visited Jane’s godfather. Good conversation with a good friend.

Chips and homemade guacamole and margaritas poolside with my parents, my sis, and her family.

Music and dancing on Mother’s Day.

Jack “Evel Kneivel” Ireton’s amazing diving board jump.

Lunch at the Hot Dog Plane with a childhood friend. The hot dogs were quite good, as was the locally brewed root beer. And we had a fabulous conversation, our first in over a year.

Our first glimpse of Yosemite Valley.

Waking to light on the rocks above our campsite.

Hot showers after three days of camping. Clean babies, clean hair, clean skin, clean clothes. Ah, the joy of clean.

Four black-tailed deer grazing outside our cabin near Ashland, Oregon.

The High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon (especially the Birds of Prey and Miller Family Ranch exhibits).

But my absolute favorite moment?

Walking in my front door on a gorgeously sunny Seattle day.

I just love home.

If he’s feeling better today and if no one else gets said bug, we will depart at nap time tomorrow for our first road trip as a family of six. I’m not sure if it’s going to be a delight or a disaster. At this point, it could go either way. Or both ways.

Truly, this very well may be Doug’s and my second Heinous Driving Vacation. (Our first was a trip to Wales when Jack was two: I didn’t understand that it took seven hours to drive from the north to the south end of Wales, a mere 200 miles, you see, which on the West Coast would take about three hours. But in Wales you can actually go negative miles per hour. I am not making this up. You really can. And we did.)

Anyhoo, a few weeks ago, our friend Tara was visiting from California. We ran into her in the hall at church. “I hear you’re coming to visit us next month,” she said.

We’ll be staying one night at her house on our way to bakin’ Bakersfield to visit my parents. On our way home from Bakersfield, we’re going to visit Yosemite.

“Yosemite?” Tara said. “What are you going to do there?”

“We’re going to climb Half Dome,” Doug said.

“And he doesn’t mean hiking,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said. “We’re going to scale it.”

“With the twins on our backs,” I added. “And once we get to the top, we’re going to rappel down.”

Doug snorted scornfully. “Rappelling’s for wimps. We’re going to BASE-jump.”

“Wow,” Tara said, “I didn’t know you guys liked to live on the edge like that.”

“Oh you know me,” I said. “I’m all about edge.”

She laughed. “Yeah, sure.”

She’s right. I like to stay as far from the edge as possible. In fact, the riskiest thing I ever did was on a night in November 2009. The twins were born eight months later. With that kind of luck, my parachute probably wouldn’t open.

So. We won’t be BASE-jumping off Half Dome. But we will be camping in Yosemite. And on the Oregon coast. And a few other places, too.

I am keeping my expectations for this trip (please note I did not call it a vacation) extremely low. I figure that as long as we come back with the same number of kids as we started with, it can’t be too much of a bust.

Right?

But it wasn’t.

You see, it took both my in-laws and Luke’s godfather just to get the twins fed, diapered, and dressed for bed. Forget dinner or dishes or anything not baby-related.

When I got home at 6:15, dinner was half-finished, the table was half-set, and both babies were still awake. My father-in-law was rocking Ben who was, and I quote, “completely wired.” My mother-in-law was patting Luke’s bum as he lay wailing in his crib.

It took me about half an hour to calm the boys down and get them to sleep (with bum-patting assistance from my father-in-law; it’s much harder to simultaneously bum-pat now that the boys are in separate cribs). Meanwhile, Doug and his mom finished dinner, Jack set the table, and Jane and Uncle Sprague played in the urban wilderness behind our house.

At dinner, Sprague said, “I have a whole new level of respect for you, Kimberlee. It took two of us just to get Ben’s pajamas on him.”

My mother-in-law seconded. “I don’t know how you get them to bed and get dinner when you’re here by yourself.”

To be fair, I’m never here by myself. Jack often helps with dinner and always sets the table. Jane sings to the babies and holds toys over them while I’m dressing them, which keeps them happy and on their backs so I don’t have to wrestle Ben to the bed.

And I’ve been doing this every day for nearly nine months now. It’s a lot easier when you have a routine, when you’re used to it.

Still, it was nice to hear their words of affirmation. It was better than nice. It made me feel like a rock star, like a full on domestic goddess. Just call me Vesta.

*****

I invite you to come back later this week for some off-schedule posts: Thursday through Sunday I’ll have short reflections on the Triduum. Among the holiest of days in the Christian year, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday each deserve their own post. As, of course, does Easter. I hope you’ll join me.