Yarn Along

I’m about an inch away from finishing the second arm.  Sometime this week I hope to connect all the pieces together, and then the real magic happens.  Sigh.  If only summer weren’t so busy.

I’ll admit, I’m loving my garden this year.  It’s just so beautiful, and the food is unbeatable.  I’m getting so much canned, frozen, eaten that basically nothing is going to waste and we’ll be eating preserved garden produce easily into next summer, if not beyond.  Food is everywhere.  I’m giving away, and have already started lining up people willing to take some of our squashes and pumpkins that are growing like crazy all over the garden.  I’m staying up late every night in my kitchen trying to finish up the day’s work so breakfast is doable in the morning.

These days I’m working on dill pickles, and canning the raspberries into dark chocolate raspberry sauce for ice cream.  (Recipe here…for the sauce, not the pickles.  Oh my goodness, it’s to die for.  I substitute dark dutch process cocoa powder for regular cocoa powder.  Yum!)  There is just so little down time.  At camp last weekend, I got a few inches of knitting done on the sleeve, but even so, I tried to allow myself to just sit and be as often as I could. That’s why you go to camp.

I look ahead at our schedule, and see very little downtime in the next month as well.  I’m trying not to get upset about that, and just embrace the season for what it is.  My parents are coming up for a visit soon, and I know my mom’s heart is usually to give me some down time, but when they end up getting here, all I want to do is just sit on the couch and drink tea with her in any spare moments I can pry the kids away from her.  My tomatoes are going to be crazy then as well, so even sitting and drinking tea when they are here might be a pipe dream.

Out at camp, I had a chance to go through yet another book that I’m previewing before I assign it to Silje.  This one is Do Hard Things.  Do you remember the book I Kissed Dating Goodbye ?  That was written by Josh Harris.  This book was written by his younger twin brothers.  They wrote this when they were teens, for their peers.

I like how they lay a good foundation of grace in the beginning of the book.  It’s NOT “God want’s you to do more” or “You need to do hard things for God to love you.”  No, the message is loud and clear:

“You were made for more than what the world has to sell you.”

It shares a very interesting history of the word “teenager” and where the concept of this in-between world between childhood and adulthood originated.  They say it goes back to child labor laws, which were laid in place to prevent children dropping out of school and going to work in horrid, unsafe factories where many of them died or became permanently maimed.  It goes back to requiring “kids” to be in school longer.  Basically, both of those changes are less than 100 years old.

In the previous generations, adulthood, or at least expecting kids to start acting like adults started when you went through puberty.  This book talks about the pendulum swinging over to the other side of teens viewing the high school years as years to party.  The attitude of entitlement begins, and problems of drug and alcohol abuse arising from teens who are frankly bored with life become prolific.  The position of “teens” changed from that of a producer to that of a consumer.

This is a book rooted in Christianity, so those coming from a secular perspective might be annoyed by the constant referring to God.  I love the message, so far.  It’s good for people of any age: God has saved you.  He died so that you can live.  So live.  Stop wasting your life.  God has a purpose and calling for you.  It’s not all about being happy.  It’s not about serving yourself.

As I have been discussing this book with Knut, I realized it all boils down to how we view work.  Is work a blessing, or a curse?  If you make your children/teens work, are you blessing them, or cursing them?  Of course nobody wants to swing back to the days where 7 year olds were shipped off to factories.  That is not the kind of work 7 year olds should be doing.  But what sort of work should teens be doing?  I don’t attempt to give a whole complete thought on “what is work” because the topic is worthy of a whole book.

But I do believe that work is a means of giving dignity to people.  Participating in various charities makes me firm in that belief.  Of course, there is a time and a place for everything, and extremes are bad places to live.

I am no more eager for my children to grow up any faster than any other mother.  However, I want my kids to know the dignity of work.  I want them to know it before they leave this house.  I don’t want to hold them back from all the things they are capable of doing.

Anyway, I’m off to look at a rabbit with Silje.  She got money for one for her birthday, and we might have found one that she likes.  So I’ll have to leave my work tangent there.

Also, I’m linking up to Ginny’s blog, but there’s a good chance she may not host the Yarn Along today.  One of her dear friends, a mother of 4 little kids, and 21 weeks pregnant with her 5th child died very suddenly due to a wasp or bee attack and allergic reaction, and her unborn child died as well.  Please still do stop by the website, and find ways to help the grieving family there.  They are in our prayers as well.