If you want to feel important as a homemaker, I recommend taking up food preservation. Not only do you get the satisfaction of all those rows of jars and ziplocs and vacuum sealed pouches piling up, but you also realize how much your regular daily actions *do* matter when your energy is reallocated away from them in favor of the seasonal abundance. The rest of the year, I fall short of even the simplest of daily efforts like sweeping the floor (considering it a win if I do it 3 days a week instead of all 7), but turns out that even that far-from-perfect record still makes a considerable dent in the state of the house. 

I love and prefer to live in response to the season outside. Right now, that looks like food preservation and earlier bedtime. The days FLY by as the sun sets earlier. Crazy how much one less hour of daylight at morning and evening compacts the working day. I love that. I like feeling subsumed in a world larger than myself — so much “self improvement” feels very top-down, type A, geared toward people who seem to happen to the world instead of respond to it. I, on the other hand, struggle against the very type B tendency to just go with the flow so much that I have no effect on anything around me, even things that are very much within reason for me to affect. Right now, that entails my house and my children. 

Something tough about being a mom to babies and young children and still keeping other plates spinning is the conundrum of constant interruption. Even as I write this, part of my brain is a loaded spring, ready to go when a child wakes up. Any minute now! True flow state is hard to come by but there are other compensations in this era. As I held my almost-1-year-old earlier this morning (who still seems so tiny, even as he is so different from the baby he was a year ago!!!), I felt the frustration of being denied those long lingering stretches of uninterrupted focus, but that frustration paled in comparison to the delight of his warm squishy face pressed against me and his little sleepy snorts and sighs. Depending on the day, either uninterruption or sweet baby snuggles are consolation for the lack of the other. I chalk much of my contentment up to training my brain to feel like I’m getting the long end of the stick most days — back to the thing about the plight of those who happen to the world vs. respond to it. I’m responding to the circumstances that God in his wisdom and generosity has appointed to me. The fact that those circumstances are generally uninterrupted time with my babies is just ludicrously sweet. I do keep waiting for the other shoe to drop — because, one way or another, it will. This period is limited time only, no matter how I feel about it or what I make of it, and it’s going to pass anyway so might as well settle in as happily as possible. Which isn’t too tall of an order. 🙂 

On the docket: canning pickled beets, dilly beans, and possibly more sweet corn.