In our quest to rid the house of mountains of toys that the kids don’t bother to play with, we’ve been encouraging the kids to save up money from chores so they can buy their own toys. Our thought is that they might appreciate the toy more if they’ve purchased it themselves.

So the other day Jim helped Eden and Honor check out their piggy banks to see how much they’ve saved. Eden pulled out six dollars and some change. Honor pull out the title to our house all crumpled up with a big “H” scribbled on it in marker.

I’ve been thinking lately about how life has gotten a hold of me. I hate the feeling of not being in charge of what’s happening, but instead struggling to keep up. And what I hate most is just surviving life. What’s the point of that? I want to be passionate about the way I live my life. I want my actions to be actions of purpose. And I wonder how to get back to that point in my life?

One thing we’re doing right now is questioning the way we celebrate the upcoming holidays. When we first married EIGHT years ago we made the compromise to not celebrate Christmas in our home, but still participating in my parents’ celebrations. The first few years were excruciatingly hard for me as I had always loved Christmas. But as time passed, I started to see where Jim was coming from. I think now I’m at the point that it just doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. (Gasp! Can a Christian say that?) And I find myself in a good place: totally understanding why other people celebrate it and (finally) totally understanding why I don’t – and being OK with all of it.

Now that we feel pretty unified on the subject we need to come to a decision about what we teach our kids and how we handle it with them. I feel like we’re giving them totally mixed signals. Why do we go somewhere to celebrate something that we don’t think we should celebrate? How are they supposed to understand that we make choices for our family that most of the world doesn’t make? How are they supposed to understand that we’re not going to worry about the choices other people make? How do you teach your kids that WE believe something is wrong, but we have no problem with what other people choose to do?

(I think maybe that’s the fundamental question of life. One that I don’t see much of Christian culture being able to answer. I think it comes down to learning to truly accept people for who they are. Not tolerate them like one does a buzzing gnat, but accept them.)

But it’s such a hard thing to explain to a five year old who only sees the world in black and white. As an adult, I have a hard time answering the why’s about our choices. I feel like it can be such a loaded question and it’s hard to answer without people perceiving it as an attack on something precious to them. So how do we avoid miss black-and-white going to school and telling her friends that Santa is not real and that much of Christmas is based in pagan tradition? It’s like that time when she told one of my customers that we don’t celebrate Halloween because we don’t worship the devil. ooops.

I don’t want my kids to have wishy washy beliefs but I don’t want them bulldozing everyone in their path with said beliefs either. And I know, in the end, all was can do is teach them what we believe and then be prepared to accept whatever decisions they make as adults anyway.

So we have some decisions to make. Finding our own path on this has proven to be a lot harder than we anticipated. Learning to balance what’s important to our own immediate family with what’s important to each of our families is proving to be even harder. And the being in limbo while we’re trying to figure out what we’re supposed to do is the hardest for me – the person who has to have a plan to Fix. It. All.

More about my thoughts on this in the past here.

Over the long weekend we spent lots of time with both sides of our families. We had all seven of the cousins together on Jim’s side and hopefully got some good pictures. (They’re importing now.) It didn’t really feel like Thanksgiving to me. Probably because it just got cold here the day before – the weather had been floating around the mid 60’s – and because I was so busy getting all the holiday stuff ready for the store that I didn’t have much of a chance to think about the upcoming turkey day. Having a migraine for almost two weeks straight didn’t help much either. (I’m currently at one day and counting on no need to take pain meds.)

You should see Tangle, I have to say, all our hard work paid off. It’s jam packed with yarn and all kinds of goodies. We got in our last shipment of Amy Butler bags and there’s a huge mountain of them in one corner of the shop. I spent most of last week working on the website; adding all the new things that have come in and uploading new patterns and gathering together lots of gift ideas. I’m always amazed at how much work still needs to be done on the website. It certainly could become a full time job, just keeping that thing perfect.

Over the last couple days, I’ve finally had a chance to relax. (Although the tension in my shoulders hasn’t let up quite yet.) I knit 3 pairs of fingerless mittens. A pair for each of the kids – now that it’s cold, Eden needs them for the playground – and a pair for the shop. I think our shop pair of Cabled fingerless mitts was stolen! Can you believe it?! I finished up a sweater and washed it with SOAK – wow, I love that stuff. And I’m almost done with the Blue Sky Alpacas pleated vest. Maybe I’ll get to finish that off tonight.

Anyway, I figure that all those migraines were due to hormones, a screwed up back and stress. It has been an unreal last few weeks and I’ve handled it pretty well emotionally so I think that it all went into my body. I’m hoping that now that the house is finally in order, and the shop is in order that I can start to recover and that things will be looking up from here. But regardless, I now know that I can handle as super human amount of stress so my attitude is pretty much, bring it. I know I can take it.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Today I am thankful that I’ve had a few hour reprieve from the migraine that’s been hanging around for the past week and a half. I’m SO over this…

In the last week:
•We drove over the mountains, packed up a family member and moved her and her daughter to our house.
•We cleaned out the basement, scrubbed it down, sealed it up, painted and loaded it with our haul from the days before.
•We organized our new home office, the kid’s room and toys.
•Next, we tried to help the rest of the house recover from all of it – we’re talking loads and loads of laundry and dishes.
•At Tangle, we re-arranged, labeled lots of new yarn, started preparing for the busy season ahead by putting together kits and lots and lots of gift ideas.
•I designed and sent off for printing and mailing a postcard advertising our after thanksgiving sale and new classes.
•I had two migraines and a 24 hour stomach bug. (We’re talking $50 worth of migraine meds.)
And everyday my eyes have popped open right at 6:30am with no hope of falling back asleep.

Written down in these few sentences, I can’t seem to convey the largeness of what has happened over the last week. I just can’t believe that a whole year hasn’t passed in the span of these past 7 days…

I’ve had a busy, busy past week with not much of an end in sight. There’s lots to catch up on, but until I have time, take a look at the bags we just got in at Tangle. I’m so in love!! We just put in a big order for more today and we found out that what we’re getting will be the last of these specific bags. Phew! Thank goodness we got them!! The one pictured below is going to be MINE!!! More to come…

This morning, as I was driving home from dropping Eden off at school, I got a flat tire. Right on the bridge. Where they are doing construction work. Great. I’ve never gotten a flat tire before and even though I’m sure I could have changed it myself, I opted to call Jim instead and have him do it for me! And now we need to buy a new tire. Yay!

Right now it seems like my life is getting away from me. It seems like everywhere I go I’m late. Instead of being purposeful about anything, I’m just spinning circles just to keep up. I’m thinking the solution to any of this is to give up more sleep. And be more organized.

Sometimes I feel like there’s no point to organizing anything when I have to live my life with other people who aren’t so into the organization. But maybe it just means that I’m not organized well enough? Or maybe it means that sometimes things just don’t work in my favor. Like I had my grocery list all written up so I could shop Monday morning before work. And then Jim didn’t get paid when he was supposed to and that single event messed up my entire week. And it was such a great grocery list. There were so many good meals planned with snacks and lunches… It was even cross referenced to I could first check for organic items at the health food store before I went to the regular grocery store…. *sigh*

I don’t know… I guess I need to keep working at it. Keep trying to work on making our lives better and easier and keep being patient until it gets that way. (I’m not very good at being patient.)

• Yesterday I took Eden to her first school friend birthday party. While I sat at Chuck E Cheese with the other moms, I kept thinking to myself, “I don’t feel old enough to be doing this!”

• We’ve been tearing our house apart and re-arranging for a relative who might move in with us. We should know soon if we’ll have a new roommate but we figured that the house could use a good organization anyway. We moved more of the kids toys into their room, so now I’m going to resume my search for a cheap, modern bunk bed. (Either that or find someone with a truck that wants to drive me 250 miles to Salt Lake City so I can shop at Ikea.)

• So all this re-arranging started with cleaning out the basement. Jim needed space for his home office and all his music equipment upstairs, so we decided that the kids would give up their play room. I moved all my crafting stuff out of our weird, hallway that goes nowhere (we’re talking floor to ceiling shelves worth of craft stuff) and the kids toys took up residency there. (Because the hallway is weird, there is a smallish space to play too.) Since the playroom was empty, we thought it would be a good idea to rip out the disgusting carpet and paint the floor. (I’m kind of obsessed with painted floors these days. Can you tell?) So that’s going to happen tonight before Jim moves in all his gear and my crafting stuff finds it’s way from the dining room floor to the new office.

• I’m also getting ready for a big, 20 person class Christina and I are teaching at a local church tomorrow. Because, you know, when it rains it pours!

Eden has been experiencing an independent, slightly defiant, kindergarten spirit lately. Everything I tell her to do, she argues with me about. I’ve been trying to point out to her that the reason she keeps getting in trouble is because she refuses to obey, but it’s taking some time to sink in.

The other day, after she got in trouble for arguing with me, she looked at me and said, “Why can’t you be nice and sweet like your mom?” (My mom quite appreciated this sentiment.)

So I decided to add more buttons to my short sleeved cardigan from Fitted Knits and it turned out great.

It’s really comfy and now I’m just waiting for this warm spell to end so I can wear it! (not that I’m complaining, I lurve this weather!)

I used 2 skeins of Eco wool, added in 5 more button holes and knit this in about a week and a half. All it needs is a little blocking! I will say that I wish I wouldn’t have gone down on needles for the ribbing and knit one size smaller because the fit on top is a tad loose.

Here’s the sweater in action with Tucky puppy. (note: Friday I got my hair chopped. I don’t think it’s been this short since the terrible haircut of ’03. But this time I quite like it.)

(all photos by Eden)