No, we haven’t been robbed. The house looked like this when I left. If cleanliness is next to godliness, I’m living in the second, or possibly third, circle of hell.

I kick my way through the duplos and pick my way around the books and random pieces of paper lying on the floor.

There’s a pile of towels on the dining table waiting to be folded. Another pile waits on the sofa, and still another is on my bed.

The duplo bin is sitting in the middle of the living room, full of books; the duplos are shoved into a corner of my bedroom and scattered under and around my bed.

The boys have gotten hold of a marker and scribbled hieroglyphics on the arm of the sofa. Not that it matters. The sofa is falling apart: holes in one of the cushion covers require me to keep the zipper facing out, so the boys don’t pull the stuffing out through the holes.

In the kitchen, lying among biscuit crumbs, flour dust, and salt crystals is a plastic deodorant tube.

Besides the duplos and deodorant tube on the floor, there are pencils, crayons, markers, clothes, books, puzzle pieces. And trash. Used tissue and bits of paper, little pieces of tape, string, and is that a strand of dental floss? Really? Who lives like this?

I do, apparently.

I set the grocery bags on a bare spot on the kitchen floor and head back through the mess to get two more bags from the car.

Almost every older mother I know has told me at one time or another not to worry about the mess, has said that in 20 years I won’t remember the messes, that in 20 years I’ll be sad that my kids aren’t little and cuddleable anymore, that in 20 years I’ll wish I’d spent more time playing with them and less time cleaning. I believe them.

But you know what? Some days it is hard to look past the mess. Some days, like today, it is hard to remember what the mess represents: that I am blessed with healthy, happy, creative kids. Days like this, the second law of thermodynamics seems to operate in hyperdrive and the mess is overwhelming and I just want it to go away before I go stark raving mad.

I do manage to get the mess picked up – eventually – but only after I put the groceries away, after I make and serve lunch, after I meet a friend and her kids at a local museum for the afternoon and invite them to come over for dinner. I feel the heat burning my cheeks as I warn her that my house is a disaster.

She says, “Kimberlee, there’s no judgment here. You have four kids and a small house. I’ll help you pick up, okay?”

She does. Together we pick up duplos and garbage and books and puzzle pieces and clothes. She sweeps my floor. In less than 20 minutes, the house looks like a home again. Like my home again.

At least till the entropy strikes back.

*****

On this first Friday of February, I am not grateful for the messes – never that – but I am grateful for the children who make them and for friends who help me clean them up.

I’m also grateful for:

2385. Mist draping the hills.

2386. Brown cow lazily walking on a hill opposite where I sit looking out the window.

2387. Limestone sculptures in Cathedral Caverns.

2388. Cave dark: I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face!

2389. My kind and generous husband, who is making dinner so I can journal.

2390. Tree skeletons against a palest pink sky tonight.

2391. Sunset on the trees, turning the branches rosy gold.

2392. Icicles hanging like daggers from a striated cliff face.

2393. Light in the treetops.

2394. Frost on the fields.

2395. Snow falling softly beyond the stained glass windows of the church.

2396. Chili pepper-infused chocolate, which, as Jack said, is “pleasantly spicy.”

2397. Snow piled thick on camellia leaves.

2398. The silence of its falling.

2399. Red berries, bright against a snowy gray sky.

2400. Luke’s happy scribbling; he loves pencils and paper.

2401. A clear night bright with countless stars: a moment of wonder shared with the kids.

Linking today with L.L. Barkat at Seedlings in Stone

Thanks so much for your patience with me.

The Magician’s Elephant by Kate diCamillo, illustrated by Yoko Tanaka

This is a beautiful book from the first sentence to the last. DiCamillo somehow manages to evoke a sense of warmth despite the chill gloom of the book’s atmosphere, and Tanaka’s subdued illustrations perfectly complement the beautiful prose. Together, pictures and text render the whole book dreamlike and magical, lyrical and hopeful. Truly a must-read.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

I haven’t read this book since junior high, which is (scarily) almost 25 years ago. I liked it well enough then. I loved it now. Tolkien’s language is so beautiful in places that I wanted to eat it.

Several times, I stopped and made the kids listen to sentences a second time, just because they were so fabulous. They humored me. I didn’t push my luck and make them listen a third time (though I often wanted to): they might have mutinied. After all, they wanted to find out what happened. And what happened was wonderful. Another book everyone should read (or maybe eat).

Since my reading list this month is so thin, I thought I’d round it out with a few riddles Doug, Jack, and I made up. Call it our little tribute to Tolkien. (For those of you who aren’t Tolkien readers, riddles figure crucially in The Hobbit; it’s how Bilbo escapes from Gollum and re-discovers the all-important ring.)

We’ll start with a couple easy ones:

Rings around eyes, rings around tail,
Scavenges garbage without fail.

***

Mute companion by day
At night fades away.

A harder one:

Around you by day, though straight at night,
Animal skin, a daily sight.

And my favorite:

A baseball team
Certain flowers
Roman cubs
Stars and towers. 

I’ll post the answers on Friday in the comments, but in the meantime, go ahead and take a stab at them.

Photo by Doug Ireton via Instagram.

As I’ve pondered what this might look like, Eugene Peterson pointed me in a surprising direction. In a different book than the one I quoted last time, he writes of his journey as a writer, of what he calls “heuristic writing:”

It was a way of writing that involved a good deal of listening, looking around, getting acquainted with the neighborhood. Not writing what I knew but writing into what I didn’t know, edging into a mystery…

Writing as a way of entering into language and letting language enter into me, words connecting with words and creating what had previously been inarticulate or unnoticed or hidden.

Writing as a way of paying attention.

Writing as an act of prayer.

Yes and yes and yes.

I’ve long known that I write myself back to faith when doubt or fear assails me and that part of the reason I write is to hold on to the moments of my life, so they won’t slip away so quickly. I’d never thought of these things as prayer. Now I’m beginning to.

And I’m beginning to see, too, that even when I’m not writing with pen and paper or pixels on a screen, I am writing in my mind, capturing the present moment for a little longer when I hold it with gratitude or acceptance or pleas for mercy. Or all three simultaneously.

Sometimes, I can even move beyond the writing in my mind, the trying to capture in words the sights and sounds and smells and emotions of the moment, and I can simply be in it, me, here, now.

This, too, is prayer. It is prayer that prays itself, without consciousness and without self-consciousness. Perhaps it is the best kind of prayer, because it is prayer not just with my heart or my mouth or my mind, but with my whole self because I am wholly here, wholly alive, wholly now.

Or is that holy?

We walked down to the coffee shop where I write on Friday afternoons. I bought two steamed milks, plain for me, with vanilla for him. We sat at my usual table by the window. He pulled out his notebook. I pulled out my laptop.

I wasn’t sure how well this was going to work, honestly. He’s eight. A very active eight. This is the boy who climbs the windows and door frames, who prefers running to walking, especially in the house, and who delights in wrestling, wrangling, and otherwise harassing his siblings. (And no, even his 18-month-old brothers are not exempt: they are regularly subjected to fake punches on the back, arm, or even in the face.) He fidgets with his clothes or his lip when he’s reading to himself. He fidgets with my clothes or his lip when I’m reading to him. He seems all but incapable of sitting still.

So I was skeptical about my getting any work done at all. But I managed to write a whole host of emails and even work on a blog post.

While my fingers flitted over my keyboard, Jack sat quietly across from me. He sat there for more than two hours. Mostly he stared out the window, but he did manage to write almost a whole page.

As we were walking home in the damp dark of a January evening, he took hold of my gloved hand. “That was fun,” he said. “Can we do it again when we get home from Alabama?”

I squeezed his hand. “It was fun, wasn’t it? And of course we can do it again.”

The rest of the way home, we talked about his book, brainstorming possible dangers for John and Sara as they travel to the chamber of mysteries.

Much to my surprise, Jack worked on his book while we were in Alabama, writing part of the scene where John and Sara meet the obligatory sage who points them in the direction of the chamber of mysteries and gives them the obligatory gift for use in their darkest hour. My son has a keen understanding of the conventions of fantasy stories.

But despite the formulaic nature of this story – he is only eight, after all – he has moments of prose that blow me away.

Just after the obligatory gift scene, Jack wrote one of the best chapter endings ever: as the sage sends John and Sara on their way, he warns them, “The midnight dangers await you if you do not reach the moon cave before nightfall.”

When he read that to me, my eyes widened. You see, I started writing stories when I was six. By the time I was eight, I had progressed from “Candyland in Trouble” – a three-page story about the bullied Candlylanders and their quest to run a frizzy-haired giant out of town – to the eight-page “What Rabbits Do at Night.” They play baseball. (Duh. What else would they do?) Luckily, I ran out of steam after four excruciating innings of singles, doubles, triples, and homeruns, and I ended the story before they could play all nine innings. Thank God.

Let’s just say that midnight dangers, moon caves, and nightfall were completely foreign ideas to me. Even now, I’m not sure I would have come up with the first two. No wonder my eyes went wide.

I think for our next writing date, I’m going to pick Jack’s brain, see where he comes up with stuff like that, and if he’s got any more like it. Then I’m going to steal it.

Writer-mama turned word-thief: now there’s a midnight danger.

I know this is a stretch, even a reach, for many of you: a whole book of the Bible? (Gulp.) But I’m here to say that if I can do it, anyone can.

Last year my friend Susan made me a booklet with my memory work pasted onto each page. I can’t do that for you, but I have made a template you can download, print, and cut and paste into your own little notebook. We’ll be memorizing no more than four verses each week, and just three most weeks, with a few review/catch-up weeks thrown in for good measure, which means we’ll have all 105 verses of 1 John memorized by mid-October.

If that sounds daunting, it is.

But it’s also completely do-able, one verse at a time.

For those of you who are game, here’s the template. And here’s a cheat sheet to help you with your memory work (okay, so it’s not really a cheat sheet; it’s a helpful hints sheet, but that only alliterates; I wanted to rhyme).

If you’d like to join the fun (and yes, it really is fun…some of the time…), and you haven’t already left a comment or sent me an email, please do so: I’ll be sending out monthly emails to encourage and exhort you to keep up the memory work. And you’ll be holding me accountable to doing the work as well.

Let the reaching begin.

We were supposed to arrive in Seattle an hour and a half ago, but our flight from Nashville was delayed, so we missed our connecting flight, and the airline rerouted us through O’Hare, which I believe has the fewest on-time departures of any airport in the world. I could be wrong about that, but it felt true when we were sitting and sitting and sitting in the terminal for three hours.

But we’re in the air now, thank God, though we all wish we were in Seattle already instead of two hours away.

I’m not sure we’re going to make it two more hours.

We didn’t bring enough food, supposing as we did that we’d be home for dinner, not stuck in a metal tube 30,000 feet over Colorado, and everyone is hungry.

What food we did have when we got on the plane is covered in hummus: shortly after take-off, the container exploded in our food bag. I did my best to wipe the hummus off the NutriGrain Bars and the Cheerios bag, but you can only do so much cleaning with baby bibs, especially when the babies the bibs belong to are squirming in your lap. I try to pretend that my hummus-smeared cords are in fact the latest Parisian fashion. I call it hip-mama-meets-Greek-food flair.

Doug surveys the food bag and decides the hummus stuck to its insides isn’t edible. He springs for an airplane meal, but the kids aren’t that hungry, apparently. Can’t say I blame them.

Besides being hungry, we’re all wasted.

The babies are so exhausted they’re manic, in constant motion, crawling over Doug or me to get to the aisle, doing headers into the aisle, pushing themselves up and trying to run down the aisle, getting scooped up from the aisle and set in the middle of the row of seats between Doug and Jack or Jane and me. Again.

Rinse. Repeat. For four hours we rinse and repeat. Doug and I keep looking at each other with wide eyes. “Hey,” I say. “At least we don’t have to wear oxygen masks, right?”

He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, and at least the plane isn’t plunging toward the earth in flames, either.”

“Well,” I say as I scoop Ben up yet again, “if it did, at least the flight would be over.”

Ben stands up in my lap and bounces like the snake-in-a-can toy that Jack got for Christmas. On the other side of the aisle, Luke is attempting to crawl under Doug’s legs. This constant motion isn’t helping them get to sleep. It’s also annoying the woman sitting in front of me, who keeps heaving really loud sighs and flinging herself forward on her tray table whenever one of the babies so much as touches the back of her seat.

I’m trying to ignore her, to pretend that it’s not me and my babies she’s annoyed with. Trust me, I want to tell her, I want these babies to sleep even more than you do.

I’ve nursed Luke three times to try to get him to sleep, but he’s too wired. He nurses long enough to stop crying, then pops off and looks around and heads for the airplane aisle again.

Ben took one look at my proffered breast and made a disgusted face, like he was saying, what is that thing, lady, and why are you shoving it in my mouth? So much for that.

Jane is so tired she’s crying, and there’s nothing I can do for her. Doug and I each have a baby we’re trying to keep from climbing the seats and walls of the plane. We don’t have enough arms to rock Jane to sleep, too.

An hour before landing, she finally crashes out, her body flung across both her seat and Ben’s, her hair draping down to the floor where small circles of crushed Cheerios and smeared hummus attest to our family’s presence here.

A half hour before we’re supposed to land, someone finally, blessedly, turns off the overhead lights, and the babies relax enough to fall asleep – just in time for us to land and wake them up and haul them off the plane and drag them down to baggage claim and out into the bitter cold to wait for our friend Sprague to pick us up.

I bless him when he arrives in our minivan. I bless the sofamobile I have long vilified. I bless the darkness in the car and the hum of familiar roads under our tires, rocking the babies and Jane back to sleep.

When we get home I bless our house and our heater. I bless the Pagliacci guy – a father of twins himself – when he arrives at our door with hot pizza.

I bless hot water that pours over my tired achy body in the shower. I bless sleeping babies. I bless my own bed. My own pillow.

Sleep.

Linking today with L.L. Barkat at Seedlings in Stone

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!

Two years ago, I started counting gifts on first Fridays. How fitting that the tradition continues today, this day when Christians celebrate the coming of the Magi with their gifts.

Here on Epiphany, I remember a few of December’s many moments of wonder and love, gifts of grace from the endless Giver:

2311. Jack: “I love Ben’s swirly hair. It makes his head look like a cinnamon bun.”

2312. The Godly Play gathering at Julia’s: good conversation, rich silence, awe, and worship.

2313. Clear sky: stars!

2314. And Jupiter – all month he’s been shining in the eastern sky – glorious.

2315. Full moon, bright and white and beautiful.

2316. Taking photos of the neighbor’s Christmas lights last night.

2317. The last leaves of a birch, like gold coins glinting in the sunlight.

2318. Dark clouds in the west, a band of blue hovering on the horizon.

2319. Sunshine on the solstice.

2320. Ben’s sweet babbling: “dadadada-doodoodoo-dadadoo”

2321. Luke’s happy shrieks.

2322. His even happier laugh.

2323. Tawny peeling bark of madrona trees.

2324. Reading One Wintry Night with the kids.

2325. Sleeping babies.

2326. Library today.

2327. Playtime at the park.

2328. Ben’s delighted face as he chased pigeons at the park.

2329. Beauty in brown leaves, fallen and curled, at the base of a young birch.

2330. Taize at St. James: the music, the silence, the candlelight and poinsettias and paperwhites.

2337. Starfall in the sanctuary.

2338. Watching Doug chase Jane across Kerry Park.

2339. Christmas tree-topped Space Needle.

2340. Doug – always, in every way.

2341. Wrapping the kids’ presents this morning.

2342. Tomorrow is Christmas!

2343. Red berries bright against a gray day.

2344. A hand-written letter from a friend.

2345. A quiet moment in the car.

2346. Tea with a friend.

2347. Emmanuel – the Best Gift Ever.

For what, in this new year, are you grateful?

Photo of starfall in the sanctuary taken by Doug Ireton via Instagram

I told how I had gotten Teddy when I was two, how I had slept with this patchily fuzzy bear nearly every night of my life.

I told how Teddy came to grade-school sleepovers with me and to summer camp all the way through high school, how I took him with me to college and how, on my quarter abroad, he traveled around the British Isles crammed into my backpack.

I told how in my horrible first year out of college, Teddy was one of the few stable things in my life.

And I told how one day in April of that year, I sat in the lunchroom at one of the many offices at which I temped during those months. As I ate my soup and read from Richard Foster’s book Freedom of Simplicity, I came upon his suggestion that I, the reader, let go of the possession I held most dear. Not consider letting it go, but actually let it go.

Like a knife plunging down from Heaven, I suddenly had a terrifying sense that God was asking me to let go of Teddy. My stomach clenched into a knot. I burst into tears. I quickly gathered my things and fled the lunchroom in fear and humiliation.

I could not give Teddy up. I would not give Teddy up.

The thought of him sitting for months on a dusty shelf in a thrift shop with a bunch of cheap plastic toys and then being thrown in the garbage made me physically ill. And no one I knew had a child young enough to want a patchy old bear. I wasn’t sure such a child existed anyway — who besides me would love this tattered stuffed animal?

In the end, I gave him to my dear friend who was moving to Spain for a year. She understood what a huge gift he was. I couldn’t have given him to anyone who didn’t.

She brought him safely home, and for years – until this year, actually – he sat on my bed during the day.

He no longer sits there.

I’m not sure when or how it happened. All I know is that Jane began to play with him when we’d sit on my bed, me nursing a baby (sometimes two), her chattering to me, dancing Teddy around as she talked and sang.

She kept circling back to him, playing with him, cuddling him while I nursed the babies. One night, in February or maybe March, she asked me. “Mama, may I sleep with Teddy tonight? Please?”

I thought of those months of anxiety when I was 22, when I feared Teddy would languish in a thrift shop because no child would love him, patchy and falling-apart and slightly sad-looking, and I smiled at Jane, my heart brimming in my eyes. “Of course, sweetheart. I’d love for you to sleep with Teddy.”

She took him with her to bed that night, and every night since, her body curled over him and her tiger, Jojo.  She chose Teddy and Jojo as the “friends” she would take with her on our road trip. When she left Teddy in the car one night, she cried until Doug took her outside to get him.

“Mama,” Jane says when I’ve kissed her good night. “You can’t leave yet. Teddy wants to give you a hug.” She fumbles under her covers, untucking the blankets I’ve just tucked in, extricating Teddy from Jojo, who both lie squashed beneath her chest.

She holds him up to me. She moves his arms to squeeze my neck. “He loves you, Mama,” she says. “I love you, too.”

She pulls Teddy back to her chest, tucks him under the covers beside her, wraps her arm around him. “I love Teddy, Mama. I love him so much.”

I nod in the dark. I know. I know.