I Don’t Know Anything

Lunch for a Week: Make-Ahead Salad

Four plastic storage containers of salad are stacked on top of each other. — Lunch is one thing off my to-do list.

We’re in the fourth week of my semester, and we’re settling into something of a routine despite all of the snow day interruptions. Everyone has gotten everywhere mostly on time, we haven’t run out of clean underwear, and we’re all fed. Yeah, my standards are sky-high. The only glaring hiccup in our routine was what I had been eating for lunch. Two weeks ago I did the responsible thing and cooked chicken breasts with the intention of packing a salad every day. Then I couldn’t find any clean storage containers for a salad, so I ended up buying Chick-fil-A several times last week. Chick-fil-A is the cheapest and fastest food available on campus, but it’s killing both my budget and my waistline. Warm, salty, crispy chicken sandwiches are the last thing I need since a nasty cold had kept me off of the bike for two weeks. Seriously, that cough could have caused a hernia in a weaker person.

So last week I figured that I’d get my act together, buy the necessary plastic containers, and pack myself some salads. I rebooted my diet at the new year, taking some tips from the book 8 Steps to Reverse Your PCOS by Fiona McCulloch. For whatever reason, my body doesn’t tolerate wheat and sugar very well, which means that meals take some advance planning if I want to stick with what makes me feel good. Sandwiches and pasta are out, but salads I can do. I’ve done this for two weeks in a row now, and I can’t tell you how much easier my mornings are when all I need to do is grab a container and a piece of fruit from the fridge. I’ve also got the peace of mind knowing that I’m saving my family some money and eating something that’s going to help me keep a clear mind and a good, steady energy throughout the day—no sugar crash!

Below is a salad that meets my requirements of being wheat-free, sugar-free, dairy-free, and something that I can make in bulk ahead of time. Consider the recipe as a rough guide and adjust as you see fit. If you can’t find Campari tomatoes, use another kind. If you prefer romaine to spring mix, use that. If you want to add cheese, go for it. Just make something that you’ll actually enjoy eating and rest easy knowing that your life is a little more organized.

Salad with Baked Chicken
Makes 4 servings*
Total time: 1 hour
Active time: 20 minutes

Ingredients
2 medium chicken breasts, about 1-1.5 lb
drizzle extra virgin olive oil plus 3/8 C
salt and pepper
4 t Dijon mustard
salt and pepper to taste
3 T red wine vinegar
1 red onion
2 T sunflower seeds
2 mini cucumbers or 1/2 regular cucumber
2 bell peppers
8 Campari tomatoes
small container spring mix

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Lightly coat chicken breasts with olive oil, salt, and pepper and bake until done, about 25-30 minutes.**

2. While chicken bakes, make dressing and chop vegetables. To make dressing, whisk mustard, salt, pepper, vinegar, and olive oil together until well-blended. Slice onion and mix into the dressing.***

3. When chicken is done, allow to cool enough to handle and chop into bite-sized chunks.

4. Layer into 4 storage containers in the following order: dressing and onions, sunflower seeds, chicken, peppers/tomatoes/cucumbers, and spring mix. Store in fridge until ready to eat.

*If you want 5 servings, one for each week day, just multiply all ingredient amounts by 1.25. Alternatively, keep the ingredients the same and make smaller salads.
**When in doubt, use a meat thermometer.
***Trust me. This takes the bite out of the onions and gives them a whole different taste.

Snow Days!

A laptop, graphing calculator, notebook, and chemistry textbook rest on a desk in a home office. — What the cool kids do on days off.

Today is our second snow day in a row and the third or fourth of the semester. Technically today is an ice day. There’s no new snow accumulation, but the roads were slick as all get out this morning. Leaving the house was ill-advised. The weather report predicted this, so I made sure to set my alarm for 5:30 to start checking the alerts from daycare, the girls’ school, and the college. Daycare is nice enough to call, and they started with a two-hour delay. If daycare is delayed, then you know that the schools are. After confirming that the college was on a two-hour delay, I turned off the alarm and went back to bed.

Normally I like to get up early and “beat my day into submission,” to quote my father. But sometimes our bodies need rest, and I had to admit that today mine did. For the past week I’ve been trying to shake a nasty cough that could give a weaker person a hernia. Frankie says that I sound like I’m on a TB ward. He blames it on my frigid office (there’s a reason I keep the electric blanket down there), my mom blames it on pushing myself too hard, and I blame it on Boy. He started it with a nasty cold last week. Whatever the cause, I was worn down enough on Sunday afternoon to nap for two and half hours, which is unusual. Falling asleep instantly for a nap is a sure sign that I’m under the weather. I would be stupid to pass up this rare chance to sleep in.

Because of the cold, I’ve fallen a little behind on school work. Colds don’t sound that bad until you actually get one. With a stomach bug, you’re immobilized for about 24 hours, and everyone understands that you’re incapacitated and they stay far away from the puke germs. Colds are different. You’re able to get around and do most things, but you’re stuck operating at like 50-60% capacity for a solid week. You can lose a lot of ground in that week, like three chapters of microbiology that go in one ear and out the other.

Part of me is bummed about the snow days because I was really looking forward to making my agar plates in micro yesterday and doing the math for my chem lab today. The other, bigger part of me is relieved that I’m getting the chance to make up lost ground. Getting behind early in the semester and staying behind is a sure recipe for disaster, so these days are a real gift. Yesterday the kids only had delays, but I had a cancellation! You know that I dropped them all off, headed home, and got down to work. I knocked out the post-lab for last week’s chem lab and did the prelab for this week’s (now canceled) lab. Then I reworked my flash card system (Anki all the way!) and listened to my micro lecture. The professor doesn’t want to lose ground on snow days and records his lectures online. He’s hardcore, and I like it. His high expectations push me to do my best.

Today I got in a whopping solid five-hour block of studying done. I’m caught up on chemistry and making headway on micro, having finished my reading and flash cards on bacteria and having reviewed my notes on archaea. Then I did some math to clear my head. All in all, it was a good day. But then it got better! My micro professor sent an e-mail this evening saying that this week’s test has been moved to next week, and lab is canceled tomorrow. Canceled lab means that I have a two-hour block to catch up on reading for biomedical ethics and my sociology class. So tonight I get to relax with some Grey’s Anatomy.

Oh, but now I got an e-mail saying that the girls have a two-hour delay, which means missing chem lecture and a quiz because Frankie won’t be free to watch the kids. Maybe the college will have a delay with some luck, but I’m not holding out hope. Whatever. It’ll all work out. At least I get to sleep in again tomorrow, right?

Ouch

Take that, Old Man Winter. You can’t stop me.

I was surprised the other morning when I had significant difficulty getting out of bed. My entire upper body hurt—back, shoulders, arms, you name it. Even my armpits hurt. What on earth had I done to myself?

Then I remembered: I had exercised.

I’m not going to lie, it had been a while. Like many mothers, I used to be kind of athletic and enjoy exercise for fun, but then life got in the way, schedules got busy, and I let the exercise slip. Right now I’m just not in very good shape, especially after being something of a recluse during my winter break. I’m not walking around campus with my giant backpack, and it’s too cold and icy outside for a walk anyway. After a disappointing Christmas weight gain, I begrudgingly dusted off the pedometer and forced myself to be honest about my activity level. It wasn’t pretty.

To be clear, exercise isn’t just about weight loss for me. It’s about feeling well, functioning well, and minimizing health risks. I miss running, and I want to be able to play on the playground with my kids and get up off the floor without groaning. I’m too young for all that. My other huge motivation is having the energy to get through med school and residency. Let’s face it. People in their 20s are exhausted by their medical training, and I’m on track to do it in my 40s. The last thing I want is to die of a heart attack or have to drop out because I didn’t take care of my health when I had the chance.

Part of the problem with my recent decline in fitness was moving to a smaller house. It’s a lame excuse, but it’s true. My daily activities aren’t substantially different from before we moved, but they’re happening in a much smaller space. I shouldn’t have been surprised because I had always noticed the opposite when visiting my parents—they have a big house, and I get a lot of steps in there. So what now? I do the only thing I can do and dust off the bike.

Making excuses for not exercising is so easy, but thankfully I’m a bit of a grouch and love to play devil’s advocate. I shot down every excuse I could make.

Excuse: There’s no room to set up the bike.
Rebuttal: Make room. It’s winter, and nobody will be using the sun porch for several months.

Excuse: It’s too hard with the kids. They get in my way and will stick their fingers in the spokes.
Rebuttal: You can see the toy room through the sun porch window. Plop them in front of the TV while you ride.

Excuse: It’s boring.
Rebuttal: So do something fun while you ride. You’re always complaining about not having time to read your library books. And you’re taking 17 credits this semester—kill two birds with one stone and do some homework.

Excuse: I’m out of shape. This is going to hurt.
Rebuttal: Yup, it probably will hurt at first, but you’ll get over it. You always do.

Excuse: I don’t have time.
Rebuttal: That’s just a lie, and you know it.

Excuse: My bike shorts are dirty.
Rebuttal: Who cares? You’re by yourself; no one is going to smell you. Or you could actually do laundry.

The final kick in the rear was a visit to the doctor last week where I had to admit, once again, that I kind of hadn’t lost weight. Even though I lost five pounds in January, I had gained seven over the holidays, making it look like I hadn’t made any progress. They even had the nerve to weigh me with my snow boots on, further hurting my cause. I still have eleven pounds of baby weight after a year and a half, and I’m tired of telling my doctor every visit that I really want to lose weight and am trying. If I don’t start seeing results, he’s going to think that I’m full of crap—if he doesn’t think that already. I don’t want my doctor to think that I’m full of crap.

After a week back on the bike, I’m feeling good and seeing an increase in my fitness level. My long-dormant winter cycling gear, which survived the Marie Kondo purge, has served me well during our recent snow storm and polar vortex. I’m riding for longer in a higher gear and actually enjoying it. My armpits and quads are no longer uncomfortably sore. And now that I’ve publicly proclaimed that I’m going to exercise, I must. I’ll report back to you all in a month to let you know how it’s going

Facing My Fears

This week I did something very, very scary. What was it? Bungee jumping? Public speaking? Revealing my stretch marks and cellulite in a bikini? Oh, no, it was much, much scarier than any of those things. I officially declared a major in chemistry.

Are you disappointed? You were probably bracing yourself for a death-defying tale of bravery, and instead you have to read about college. But I encourage you to read on. Even if this story doesn’t resonate with you or inspire you in the least, you can at least exercise your empathy muscles here.

Sometimes things that are not terribly scary to the masses are scary to the individual because of that person’s past experiences. Like how most people are OK with cats, but a person who has been attacked by one may be terrified of your sweet pet. Well, I was attacked by chemistry about twenty years ago, and it’s taken a while for me to recover. Here is a brief recounting of my woeful tale of failure and subsequent phoenix-like rise from the ashes. I admit that that’s a bit dramatic, but I don’t care. That’s how I feel about it, and this is my story. That’s just how important this is to me—facing my fears has vivified me in ways that I could never have imagined.

Many years ago I entered college with high hopes as a biology major with the aspiration of becoming a wildlife biologist. In retrospect, this was an awful plan because I’m terrified of birds—a vital and abundant part of wildlife—and had absolutely no idea what research entailed. Back then, before the job market tanked and the harsh reality of student loans entered the public’s consciousness, the standard college advice was to do what you loved. I loved nature (except birds) and being outside, so that was my decision. It made sense at the time.

My studies got off to a really rocky start. I got poor grades in biology and math, but I thought that I could salvage things and plow forward. Then I took chemistry. With a D in general chemistry, an F in organic chemistry, and a W from molecular cell biology, a science major wasn’t going to work. The defeat was soul-crushing. See, when you’re a nerd and don’t have friends, you have school. You escape to college out of town for a fresh start at something that you’re good at, and then you fail. When you comfort yourself with the thought “Well, I may not have friends, but I’m smart! I’ll make something of myself!” and then you don’t make something of yourself, what do you have left? You don’t have hope, you don’t have purpose, you don’t have an identity. All I had was being smart, and that was gone. Even the few friendships that I had developed in college caused me pain as I watched almost everyone in my friend group join PBK and pursue doctorates after graduation.

I moved on with life, getting married, earning a master’s degree, and working various jobs. Eventually Frankie and I started a family, and life was good. But deep in the back of my mind, my failures still haunted me. For over a decade after my college graduation, I had nightmares that the college revoked my degree because the D in chemistry was not good enough to satisfy my physical science requirement after all. Obviously this affected me very deeply, and it even bothered me that it bothered me. I wondered what was wrong with me that it bothered me so much. Like, get over it and move on with life already. What’s done is done. Let it go and focus on the work in front of you. So I gave away all of my old science textbooks, reconciled to the notion that I would never need them again and that I needed to let go of the past. A few months later, I got the nutty idea to be a doctor and now had no science books. Murphy’s Law always works.

Being a doctor requires chemistry, and a fair amount at that. Virtually all medical schools require four semesters of chemistry and one semester of biochemistry as prerequisites. I knew that if I wanted to do this, I had to face my fear head-on and slay the chemistry beast. I made a plan. Before spending money on school, I needed to convince myself that I could handle chemistry. If I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t be a doctor, so tackle that first. Success in an earlier, albeit unrelated, masters program combined with the knowledge that my grandfather had a master’s degree in chemistry (thanks for the genes, Pop) inspired a modicum of hope. I enrolled in a free Coursera chemistry course online, and would you believe it? I understood it. I had the confidence that I needed to take the next step. And then the next, and then the next.

That was a year ago. Fast forward to fall 2018, and I retook general chemistry I. Much to my surprise, I kept waiting for the class to get hard, but it never did (oh, I know that it will at some point!). What’s more, I enjoyed it. I reveled in setting up my equations and really diving into how things worked. I died a little inside each time a lab partner ignored sig figs. Each lecture inspired more questions and wonder—what is a Schrödinger equation, and what exactly does it tell us about atomic orbitals? How much calculus do you need to understand a Schrödinger equation? What exactly is angular momentum? Could I apply what I learned in analytic geometry twenty years ago about vectors’ magnitude and direction to bond polarity? (I learned the answer to that last question this week—yes, I can.)

At the end of the semester, my chemistry professor asked me if I would consider changing my major from health science to chemistry. Initially I dismissed her suggestion, but the more I considered it, the more I liked it. After my epic failure during college round one, I had played it safe because failing again would have torn me apart. The problem with that mentality is that you miss out on a lot of life—no risk, no reward. I’m done with that. Instead of fearing defeat, I anticipate the victory, which only gets sweeter as the fight gets harder. Yes, I’m still scared. Even professors’ eyes pop out of their heads when you mention the change to chemistry. They get this look like “Are you sure you want to do that to your GPA? Are you crazy?” Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. Whatever I am, I’m having fun learning and am rejoicing in my newfound confidence and mindset. Facing my fears has been one of the best decisions of my life.

Doing the Schedule

“Would you like to schedule your next cleaning?”
“I have no idea what I’m doing six months from now; I’ll call you.”

Every time I go to the dentist, I’m reminded of how strange my family’s schedule is. Are most people seriously able to schedule an appointment six months in advance and keep it? Probably, since that’s what dentists do. Businesses normally don’t do things that waste their time, like scheduling appointments that will need to be rescheduled. We must be the outliers here.

For our entire eleven years of marriage, the only constant in our schedule has been Sunday morning. Contrary to popular belief, pastors work more than just Sunday mornings. In any given week, Frankie may be meeting parishioners or staff at any time of any day; going to meetings with community groups or other pastors either in or out of town; visiting people in the hospital; attending to pastoral emergencies; hiding from the masses to write a sermon; or officiating a funeral. Weddings happen, but we usually have more advance notice for those. Usually. Frankie almost always forgets to tell me about the rehearsal dinner, and it’s not always clear if I’m invited to that or the wedding. Last summer he traveled to London, and he also plays the occasional music show and visits his friend in Pittsburgh a few times a year. He’s a hard man to pin down.

“Uh, are you coming home for lunch? We didn’t really discuss the day before you left.”
“Oh, I’m here at lunch with Jake. Want me to bring you something?”
“Just bring me your leftovers.”

Ours is an exciting life, but it takes some effort to manage, especially now that we have kids and I’m locked into a rigid school schedule. Every week we sit down to do the schedule with our Passion Planners, which we switched to after our iPhones bit the dust. The iPhone wasn’t working that well anyway because Frankie was so overloaded with dings and beeps that he ignored half of my calendar updates. Sitting down together and actually talking about the schedule has led to a lot fewer double bookings and a lot more peace of mind.

As chaotic and unpredictable as our lives are, Frankie’s non-schedule schedule is actually the one thing that makes my school work possible. People ask me, “How do you do it?” and I tell them the truth: my husband has a very flexible schedule. Because he works on Sundays, he gets one week day off. Boom. Free childcare for me to go to class! All of those evening meetings? If he’s working an evening, he can pick up the kids from school while I’m stuck in class. Because he has work that requires solitude and silence, he can work on the sermon, return e-mails, and make phone calls while a child naps or watches cartoons.

This semester, Bug will continue kindergarten all day every day, and Bear is adding another day of preschool to accommodate my chemistry lab. We were able to get Boy back into his daycare (we pulled him out over the winter break for financial reasons) and add the same extra day as Bear, so I not only have childcare during my lab, but I have a block of several hours free afterward to study. My first class isn’t until 9:00 every day, so I can drop all of the kids off and still get to class on time. Nana is always on call when Frankie is out of town or the kids are sick, so I think that we’ve got it covered.

Classes start Monday, I’ve got a meeting several hours away tomorrow morning, and Frankie has a music performance tomorrow evening. Sunday is Sunday. That makes today my last day of freedom. I’m torn between doing absolutely nothing and attempting an all-out, last-ditch effort at decluttering and organizing. I’ll probably work on finishing The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (it’s for fun but should tie in nicely with my biomedical ethics and women, health and healing courses this spring), but realistically I’ll need to finish cleaning out my office and getting the family ready for next. Whatever I do, I just need to do it before the day is over.

Survival Mode versus Learning Mode

My history collection has been waiting for me.

Once upon a time, I completed a history degree from one of our country’s most esteemed liberal arts colleges. Indeed, I am privileged to share an alma mater with multiple presidents, founding fathers, and elder statesmen. I didn’t just study history—I was surrounded by it. Being both a bibliophile and a recovering pack-rat, I have thus amassed quite a nice collection of high-quality history books, which I have recently been purging. Surely as the proud owner and presumed reader of said books I must have learned quite a bit, you ask. Well, no. I know squat about history, and you know why? Because I was in survival mode, not learning mode.

My first college degree didn’t go quite as well as planned for various and sundry reasons that I may enumerate at a later date. Or not. We’ll see. Long story short, I ended up having to switch my major from biology to history halfway through my junior year with zero history credits under my belt. At that point, I was focused on passing and graduating and simply didn’t have the bandwidth to learn much of anything. But I got a second chance at college and am now studying for a science degree with the goal of completing the prerequisites for med school. That’s a different post for a different day.

One of the best parts of being a non-traditional student is that I have a totally different perspective on learning and higher education. This time, I don’t have to learn—I get to learn. And what a privilege that is! Don’t get me wrong—going to school the first time was an enormous privilege, but I didn’t have the tools at the time to make the most of the opportunity. Now I get a second chance at something that I’ve always wanted, and I’m getting so much more out of it.

When you focus on learning, the good grades come as a natural result of being genuinely engaged with the content. As a rule, I remember things that interest me, so if I just focus on that aspect of the material, I’m usually good. Panicking about grades only robs my mind of energy that I could be using the learn, and learning makes me very happy indeed. Learning makes me feel alive.

Sometimes it puzzles me when my young classmates are complaining about their workload or concepts that I think are really, really cool (Hess’s Law is so elegant! Asymptotes are beautiful!) Then I remember that I was once in their shoes, totally overwhelmed by life when I didn’t even have one yet. Perspective is something that only comes with time and experience. I find myself thinking, “Wow, all I had to do back then was study, and I totally blew it!” But that experience of blowing it has paradoxically given me an energy and drive that I couldn’t fathom as an eighteen-year-old.

Now that I don’t have to read all of these history books, I can’t wait to read them. A few years ago I dipped back into a book on the French Annales School by Peter Burke, and I’m particularly excited to revisit The Book of Memory by Mary Carruthers and The Knight, the Lady and the Priest by Georges Duby. If you, too, are interested in learning instead of just getting a passing grade (or maybe you’re done with school but just want to read), I highly recommend How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren.

If you have an opportunity to learn, don’t waste it—embrace it. Happy reading and learning, friends!

PS—If you’re not into nonfiction, I highly recommend the authors Liane Moriarty and David Sedaris. Moriarty does insightful and funny chick-lit set in Australia, and Sedaris is an American humorist.

Little Nudists

Abandoned pants are a regular sight in my home.

As I lay in bed this morning nursing Boy, I overheard the following conversation emanating from the hallway:

“Bear, I prefer to be naked today.”
“But Bug, Mom said that we cannot be naked.”
“Yes we can.”

Right now they are.

It all started with the pants-free potty training. The general idea is that toddlers love to be naked, so parents should capitalize on said love of nudity to facilitate this most dreaded of parenting tasks. There are fewer accidents (obviously, without pants to pee) and less laundry. And it’s supposed to work really fast. Less laundry and speedy potty training? Sign me up! It worked like a charm, but nobody told me the horrible catch—after allowing your children to run around pantless, it is nigh on impossible to convince them that they now must wear pants.

Every time I tell the children that it’s time to get dressed, they ask, “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere! It’s what people in America do. They wear clothes. You don’t have to be going anywhere to get dressed!” I explain for the thousandth time. No matter. Every day it’s the same routine.

Bug is getting better since she does actually go places, like kindergarten and karate. Bear is particularly hard to convince, especially since she likes to pretend to be animals. Most days we have some version of this conversation:

“Bear, we need to get you dressed.”
“But I am Spirit/Balto/random animal! Horses/dogs/animals don’t wear clothes!”

One day out of sheer desperation, when she was pretending to be a dog, I googled pictures of dog clothes. “See?” I said. “Dogs do wear clothes! Look, this dog looks just like Balto, and it’s wearing clothes. You can still be a dog and wear clothes.” The girls giggled at the pictures, and it worked for an afternoon. Unfortunately, Balto does not wear clothes in the movie, so she returned to her naked ways.

Bear also makes the frequent claim that her clothes make her feel itchy. It’s a ploy. Offers of lotion or a softer outfit are generally rebuffed, leading me to believe that she’s playing me. The problem is that she does have genuinely sensitive skin, and I wouldn’t want to force her into clothing that would cause her true discomfort. If we’re not actually going anywhere, she usually wins, but I’m gaining ground. The one hard and fast rule is that they must be wearing underwear to sit on the upholstery or at the dinner table, and they listen to that one.

When I consider the mountain of laundry that awaits me daily, I wonder if the kids might be onto something. Why spend all of this time, water, and electricity to wash clothes that nobody wears? Maybe we could all move to a nudist colony in Florida. Supposedly there’s one close by in West Virginia, but that would probably get cold in the winter. Do they all just stay inside and crank up the heat six months out of the year?

Sometimes I fold the laundry; sometimes I don’t.

There are probably rules prohibiting minors from nudist colonies, and rightly so. Plus I have zero desire to be a nudist. I imagine that job opportunities for Frankie would be limited, and he would constantly be dressing/undressing to go do hospital visits, funerals, weddings, and other pastory things. The nudists might feel deeply judged when the only clothed person in their colony sports a clergy collar. I mean, the first thing that Adam and Eve did after their fall from grace was get dressed.

So we’ll just stay here, fighting the good fight against nudity, keeping the blinds closed, and doing laundry. But I will not be doing pants-free potty training with Boy, even if it means more laundry.

Plumbing

A dark secret lurked behind the shower curtain.

In November, we bought what we would call our dream starter home, AKA The Elf Cottage. It’s a quaint stone cottage complete with every little detail that we’ve ever dreamed of except a laundry chute for my husband. It has a gas stove, wood-burning fireplace, room for my office, no electric baseboard heat (so I’m picky, OK?), a walk-in closet in the master bedroom (in a 60-year-old home!), a gigantic yard with a garden, workshop space, and boatloads of character. God’s hand definitely orchestrated the whole thing, and we’re so happy to be living here, in our own home for the first time in our lives. We had been living in two different church parsonages for the last nine years, and having our own space is a fantastic feeling.

And then the fun with repairs started.

Yes, repairs are a part of home ownership. To quote my favorite GEICO commercials, “Everybody knows that.” I’m not complaining. It feels good to be the grown-up in charge, calling the plumber and cutting the check. There’s a lot more pride in that for me than having to call the church and relying on our generous friends there who volunteer their time to coordinate these things.

The immediate issue at hand is the bathtub. Yes, I have three children under six and no working bathtub. Well, technically the bathtub works; it just leaks into the toy room below when it drains. For now we use the basement shower stall and bathe Boy in the kitchen sink, but we miss the tub. The first hint of a plumbing issue came shortly after the move when the shower got stuck in permanent shower mode. This happened during finals weeks, which falls during Advent. Pastors are busy during Advent. Also during finals week was a tragic death in the family and dance recital, so the shower just wasn’t a priority. The kids were happy to sit in the tub while it “rained.” But after finals I was quite proud to solve my own plumbing problem with nothing more than a screwdriver, hex wrench, and my brain. I didn’t even need YouTube!

A few weeks later, I got an afternoon to myself. The girls (Bug and Bear) had spent the night at Nana’s, so Frankie, Boy, and I had a leisurely morning of sleeping in, breakfast at our favorite coffee shop, and some shopping around our local downtown. Then Frankie took Boy to Nana’s to retrieve the girls, leaving me alone for a block of several hours. Straight away I used the fancy new bath salts that I purchased at the herb shop that morning. All was well as I zoned out on the sofa afterward until I went to declutter the toy room. That’s when I noticed water on the floor and signs of water damage on the ceiling.

It took a few days to get a plumber in, but he assured us that the minor issue was fixed and that we were good to go. That evening I gave the kids a bath only to hear the water dripping into the room below as the tub drained. So today, we had round two with a different plumber. Nana spent the night, and Frankie let the kids stay up late, convinced that school would be canceled for snow again (it wasn’t). I fell asleep on the sofa while watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and both of our phones were about dead. So I missed the plumber’s earlier call and woke up when he rang the bell. I descended the stairs to find Nana hiding the perennially naked three-year-old under a blanket while the five-year-old scrambled for clothes, the boy played, and Frankie frantically plowed through the dirty dishes.

Greeting the plumber in my fuzzy robe and glasses, I sheepishly explain (make the excuse) that we have just moved. As a woman, I’m saying “Please don’t judge me and my mess.” As a man, he probably doesn’t care. Then I reassure myself that he’s certainly seen messier homes, at which point I think, “Those poor people! How could I actually wish for anyone to have a messier home than this?!” I lead him to the access panel and swiftly disappear to find my bra.

$95 and 15 minutes later, they are gone. The price seems high for the actual work done, but I’m happy to get them out of here before the three-year-old streaks through the living room or some other such indignity occurs. Looking at it that way, $95 is a steal.

Too Many Books

A messy office is overwhelmed by stacks of books and boxes. — I should have purged before moving.

This glorious space is my much-coveted office, and it must be serviceable for me to tackle another 17-credit semester in a mere 9 days. The rest of the house will also be totally decluttered, priming my family for a semester of success, wherein all five of us work like a well-oiled machine, arriving everywhere on time, getting straight As, eating home cooked meals, and never once running out of clean underwear! Or at least that was the plan when we moved a few months ago. Instead, I’ve spent the last month of my gloriously long winter break traveling for Christmas, sleeping, playing with the kids, and generally kicking up my heals. Because deciding that you want to be a doctor at 35 and going back to school full-time isn’t enough, we also decided to buy a house, enroll the kindergartener in a totally unnecessary dance production, and put the youngest two in preschool and daycare last fall, all while navigating the normal chaos that comes with being the pastor’s family. So I feel no guilt about this break—only gratitude that I get one.

But the office. Oh my goodness. This semester is not going to be successful if I can’t sequester a space for my work. Currently my chem lab goggles are at risk of getting swallowed by a black hole of unfinished crochet projects, and I can barely find a clear surface large enough to scrawl a flash card. This is the price to pay for downsizing to a home with quite literally no space for bookshelves. To help with this task, I have enlisted the help of Marie Kondo, or at least the bits of advice that I could glean from her Netflix show. Lots of other people seem to have the same idea—I’m number 231 on a waitlist for one of her books at the library. But the last thing I need is another book, right?

A messy office is cluttered with books, bags, boxes, decorations, and a chair. — The office houses neglected yarn, wedding mementos, a lifetime supply of looseleaf paper, and an electric blanket.

Somewhere in this mess is a book that I need for a Bible study that I’m teaching. I was quite embarrassed to admit last week that I could not find the book (thankfully it is ancillary, and I had read it last year). I thought that I had put it in a safe place, but I should have known better. Putting things in a safe place is generally an awful idea that results in multiple important items vanishing for days, weeks, or even years at a time. But the weather has mercifully saved me from further embarrassment this week! Winter storm warnings have caused all church activities to be canceled, so I will be able to tackle the book mess. As a bonus, my husband’s meeting was also canceled, and my mother-in-law headed up the road to watch the kids before everything was called off. I actually get two other adults to keep the kids away from my piles of purging! This evening —and a tidy office—cannot come fast enough.