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1. take a pair of stockings or tights and lay them out flat.
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2. This step is tricky to see, so here's two photographs in hopes that you can see better. You flip and fold about 2-4 inches of the waistband inside out and down over the stockings, all the way around. Imagine the child in the stockings with the waistband turned halfway down for some reason (ie, you don't fold over the opening. There should still be an opening in the middle of the stockings).
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 3. Now fold the stockings in half symmetrically.
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4. Start rolling the toes up toward the waist.
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 5. Now you have this nice stocking roll with an opening. I've inserted a pen here to show you where- I'm going to hold this in my left hand, and put the fingers of my right hand down inside this pocket, and then pull it down (towards the right, away from the stocking roll), and then down and under and around the roll. Clear as mud, I know. Sorry.
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 6. But this is what it will look like when you've done it right.
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 Again- take a pair of stockings, lay them out flat, fold the waistband inside out and down all around (about 2-4 inches), fold in half., leg over leg. See?
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 Roll the toes up toward the waist. Put your fingers inside the pocket made from turning the waistband down and inside out, and flip that waistband edge in reverse, out and around the bottom of the stocking roll, making a tidy bolster pillow like this:
 Play catch.
Tidy the stocking drawer.
Play catch some more.
Oh, when you do this with underwear and boxers, it works best if instead of folding the item in half vertically (leg over leg), you fold it in thirds- one leg about halfway over, just to the center, the other leg over that one. That did not work well for stockings.
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Snow-Flakes
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.
Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.
This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in the silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.
That first stanza has been part of our winter poetry copywork for years and years. I came across it in some book or other- I've forgotten which book, although it seems it might have been a biography of Helen Keller or her teacher, Annie Sullivan.
I had never seen it before and did not know there was more to it until the days of the internet came to our home and I discovered the wonders of Google. It's actually part of a much longer poem, but I like this bit best.
When I say it aloud, it sounds like snow falling to me. |
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New Year's Eve we went to midweek Bible study as per usual. Well, not quite as usual, since I've been fighting a sinus infection (it's winning) and Angel's been sick and it's been too cold to take her out at night most of the time, and to be honest, I hate to get in the car and drive anywhere at any time anyway.
But we did.
Afterwards we had a small group of friends over- her family, him, the grandparents from next door, an elderly lady from town, a family of four from up north and a young man they brought along, her and her husband, who hardly count as company, and, of course, the 8 of us.
We had a variety of snacks, including home-made cheese balls and crackers, leftover Christmas goodies, shrimp and dip, crackers and a delicious dip from Granny Tea, popcorn, hot cocoa, coffee, tea, and cokes.
On the drive home we had a stirring discussion ranging in topic from hot and cold water and freezing temperatures to philosophical questions about what is real.
We discussed these issues further at home, finally googling the issue of whether or not hot water pipes freeze sooner than cold and why. What is real had to be tabled for later.
We pulled out the hymnals and sang a round of hymns. Then most of our company headed home except for them and him. We pulled out the games and had simultaneous bouts of Killer Bunnies, gin rummy, Lego building, fort making, and more singing, this time some of us indulged in spontaneous outbursts of such old favorites as:
Skiddamarink
Shoofly Pie
Down in the Valley
Auld Lang Syne
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
I'm Just a Poor, Wayfaring Stranger
These spontaneous outbursts were also generally incomplete, as nobody could remember all the lyrics to most of them.
I shared a favorite song of mine about a mother haunted by the ghosts of her three children, whom she killed. I like it because of the haunting melody.
Then we had a discussion about the appeal of songs in a minor key (they appeal to her and I muchly), macabre folk songs in general, and a few icky true crime stories I could have done without, as well as a brief and unsuccessful attempt to get at the mindset of women who dispatch with their children for the sake of mere men (or any reason, really.).
The New Year came in with but little fan fare, as the game players were disinclined to interrupt their rounds of Killer Bunny and Gin Rummy, but the youngest boys did grab a pot lid and spoon to make a bit of ruckus (isn't that a suitable word?).
We stayed up until 2 a.m. and then made sure everybody visiting had a place to sleep (guest-room- 2; sewing room- 1; couch- 1) and went to bed.
In the morning my prince of a husband made waffles for everybody, we played Bible Outburst, she made cornbread and cleaned the kitchen, I made Hoppin' John and did not clean the kitchen, the little boys worked on the outside fort (which now looks like a trench from WWI, lacking only the barbed wire but please DON'T mention this shortcoming to my son), and we counted up the number of over night guests we had in 2008. We did not count people twice, even if they stayed twice. For instance, my dear son-in-law who was not yet a son-in-law came a year ago for Christmas, then again in the spring, again in the summer, and again in the fall, and then back again for good in November, but we only counted his first visit. Somebody else who shall be nameless to save her some embarrassment said they'd tried to count how many times they'd spent the night with us this last year, but got embarrassed when they filled an entire stick=it note with neat and tiny dates and still weren't done, but we only counted them once. We had a discussion about babies- our guest book goes back a long, long time because I took a previous guest book and cut the pages out and taped them in this one. One of the earliest entries is from Japan, when a young family expecting their second child stayed with us several days while waiting to go into labor. Last February we attended the wedding of that baby girl, and two of our girls were her bridesmaids, and this November she returned the favor and was bridesmaid for the her. That baby who first stayed with us as an unborn child is now expecting her first child. So do we count the unborn child? After all, we ARE staunchly pro-life. In the end I made an arbitrary decision, saying that if we could hold the baby we would count the baby as having spent the night as well, but if we couldn't hold the baby we didn't include the child in the count. This was a risky move, as another family with a baby very nearly hadn't let any of us hold him, but at the last day of their visit they relented and so we were able to count this delightful youngster.
The grand total- 59 people spent the night here at least once this last year. And I am an introvert. In INTP for those of you do the Myers- Brigg.
We then continued to have vigorous discussions on what is real.
Naturally, in the midst of these discussions, The Velveteen Rabbit came up, and The Common Room denizens and damsels were shocked, I tell you, shocked, to learn that NONE of our male visitors had ever read this book, indeed, I think they had not even heard of it.
Well. As has been noted elsewhere, we are apparently evangelistic about exporting our family culture. We want to assimilate EVERYBODY, and the thought that these three men had reached, or nearly reached, their 20s without hearing Margery Williams' deeply philosophical work could not be borne, so she tripped upstairs (literally) and brought it back down while the Pleoless Child brought me the tissue she knew I would need, and I read it aloud to everybody. The males were polite about it, but I am not sure what they thought. Well, my delightful and much loved son-in-law fell asleep. Hmph.
And then it was time to go to my folks for New Year's Dinner and our shiny pennies, where we continued to discuss reality, only somebody who shall not be named but his initials are My Daughter's New Husband subtly changed his argument so that it now resembled precisely what we had been saying all along and we took that as a tacit admission that we were right in the first place and we had the prayer and sat down for dinner.
Perhaps The Velveteen Rabbit had been seeping through his subconscious while he slept.
During the meal my father told her that two years ago we had decided that something was wrong with either his brain or his mind and we took away his driver's license and he wanted it back. After the meal he regaled the guests with an explanation of an abstract bit of African textile art my mom has on the wall- he does this often. It is a free ranging explanation and it is never the same twice. He makes it up as he goes along, imbuing the piece with all sorts of philosophical and esoteric symbolism, and sometimes he wraps it up by letting the guests know that he was making it all up, and sometimes not. This time, I think, was one of the 'nots.' The Pleoless Child did not know he did this on purpose and she tells me that she and he spent some time trying to see the hidden pictures Grandpa assured them were there.
This time we divvied up and played rounds of Killer Bunnies, Euchre, Kings in the Corners, Dutch Blitz and Boggle. The Pleoless Child pretty much annihilated everybody at Dutch Blitz. She and her Daddy beat Jeremy and him at Euchre, and since he was teaching them, I am not sure what that says. I am not sure who won Killer Bunnies. I won Boggle by a hair, but only because I apparently have a secret stash of archaic words in the cobwebby corners of my cranium. Archaic words and me? I know you are all shocked.
Again and again I would say, "I am not sure what this means, but I know it is a word," and the HG would look it up in my mother's fifty year old dictionary and incredulously say, "It IS a word, but it's another archaic one, Mother. I suppose you think that should count?"
Of course I did.
I took a short walk to look at the ice-storm downed trees in the woods. The youngest three watched a Celtic Thunder show Granny Tea had recorded for them. We cleaned the kitchen, ate dessert, ate dessert and cleaned the kitchen again.
I read aloud snatches of poetry from a poetry book I'd been using as a hard surface to support my lists of archaic words from Boggle, and the Progeny took turns guessing who wrote those poems. These two took the floor by picking up my first line and running with it, reciting all of Flanders' Field for us. We choked a bit over WWI poets, and then I retired within myself to ponder The Happy Warrior by Wordsworth.
We came home and said toodles to Ryan, who returned home to finish his Christmas Break, played more games, talked more nonsense, some of us watched Tim Hawkins, a DVD she bought him for Christmas, some of us checked e-mails and wrote blog posts, I played around on Pandora trying to find a suitable list of music for a radio station I am calling 'Rock the House Clean' (failed- the bouncy, energizing tunes I like have lyrics I do not want to hear my youngest two children singing. Any suggestions?), and I read some from a book by Marrou called History Of Education In Antiquity. I am participating in a reading challenge for 2009, and that's my book for this month.
in short at length, as you see, a brilliantly good time was had by all. I think.
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From American Motherhood By Mary Wood-Allen, vol. 28, no. 1, Jan. 1909- a reflective article on New Year's Resolutions that I hope touches you as much as it did me:
"WHEN a child I used to imagine that on New Year's day the whole earth took a flop somehow and began on a new level, and this, I fancied was why we all resolved to turn over a new leaf. It would be easier to turn when the earth did. Then, too, I fancied that on birthdays we made a big leap from one year to the next. I did not know just how, but yesterday I was 6; today I am 7, a whole year older. I must have made the jump in the night while I was asleep.
I am wiser now I know that the earth does not turn a somersault on New Year's day and that people do not leap from one year to another at a bound. I have learned too that resolutions made on these special days are very apt to be broken unless we have been practically keeping them a long time in advance and therefore the best way to keep a New Year's resolution is to make it and keep it every day in the year.
O, but I've learned a deeper lesson than that, and that is if we want to keep our resolutions we must make them moment by moment. I was cross yesterday and last night I resolved I wouldn't be cross today, and the first thing I did this morning was to get out of patience. I put off my resolution too long. I should have made it yesterday just at the moment I lost control of myself and have kept making it all day, or better still, have kept myself so in the spirit of Christ like love that the irritable spirit would have departed and have taken with it the possibility of being vexed. Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose heart is stayed on Thee.
Ah! I did not seek the in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee. Ah! I did not seek the source of Peace before I began the day.
I think I have learned another lesson and that is that it is very foolish to bear the burdens of the past or forecast those of the future. Israeli in Lothair makes one of his characters say of another that he always experiences what he fancies will come and warns him against imagining possible griefs and cares, and mental scientists today tell us that we create our future by our hopes or fears. Be that as it may, it certainly is unwise to grieve over that which has gone and cannot be changed or over that which is possible and yet may never come. If we observe closely ourselves and our friends, we'll soon see that we are all loaded down with past and future burdens as well as with present ones. In truth, we feel sometimes conscience smitten if we drop griefs. If we have lost a dear one from our home we feel that we must often go to the grave and weep there or we are showing a lack of love. Perhaps I am a little peculiar but I never think of my departed ones as in the grave, and I find no more comfort to go there than to go to some closet where their worn out clothes were hanging. Indeed, not so much, for the clothes would have some association with them and the grave has not. They are not there.
If the cast off garment of earthly life has been laid in the closet of the grave, they, robed in immortality, are living and are still loving me. They are not made happier by my tears so I will not weep.
Sometimes I think we all enjoy being miserable. We would not pull open the cut on our finger in order to enjoy the pain over again but that is just how we do with our griefs, not only once, but many times. We tear open the wounds made by slights or snubs or cross words and pity ourselves because it hurts. Or we picture the troubles that seem to us inevitable and then weep in advance. We laugh over the girl who wept because maybe some time she might marry and her husband might die and she might be obliged to weave for a living and the baby might crawl under the loom and the shuttle might fall on its head and kill it, 'ah, woe the day!' And while we laugh at her, we are just as foolish ourselves in forecasting trouble. We smile at the child who digs up his buried bird to feed it but we continually dig up our buried troubles to feed them with our tears, and so, overburdened with the dead past and the not yet alive future, we stumble where we ought to trip lightly and weep where we should rejoice."
Why not forget all the things that are past
Why not be happy light hearted and gay
Yesterday's skies were with clouds overcast
That need not shut out all the sunshine today
Yesterday's burdens were heavy and sad
Today's will be heavier if we persist
In recounting ever the trials we've had
Why not count up all the troubles we've missed
Yesterday's garments we mended with care
Shall we rip them to pieces again one by one
Just to see how big were the holes we found there
Or to count all the stitches so patiently done
Let's not picture trials the future may bring
Nor add coming burdens to those we now bear
Past cares to the winds let us heartily fling
And fill up the present with love work and prayer
So full that we haven't a moment for tears
With hearts full of sunshine though skies may be gray
With faith so abounding we've no room for fears
Remembering our Father rules over today.
Hints for New Year's Resolutions:
Make sure your goals are not the sort that will find you burning bridges with others on your way to burning out yourself. Remember that the point of what you are doing SHOULD be to bear fruit of the sort useful and sustaining to living souls, real people with hearts, feelings, strengths, weaknesses, made in God's image. You do not want a 'perfect' house and a 'perfect' homeschool that accomplishes primarily 'mechanical action instead of the vital growth and movement of a living being.'
Do not fall prey to marketing schemes trying to sell you the new you.
You cannot buy the new you. It won't come in packages, a boxes or bags. It won't come accompanied with a sales tag. YOu cannot accessorize yourself into greater spirituality or a better personality.
I'm pretty sure that God needs none of those things to make all things new. I am reasonably certain that many of those things even interfere with the sort of renewal God has in mind for you.
I've fallen prey to this line of marketing before, not because of their slick appeals to my weak and lazy inner woman, but because I have a slothful inner woman in the first place. There are many things I want to be able to do, but few of them are things I want to take the time to learn to do. I don't want it to hurt, to require self-discipline, or take much time. I just want to be that new woman much as Cinderella was able to go to the ball. Playing the role of Cinderella in my personal fairy tale dream is yours truly. Playing the role of the Fairy Godmother would be my checkbook, or worse, a credit card. This way lies only disappointment and debt.
You can't buy a better spiritual life. You have to live it, pray it, study it, and you probably have everything you need at home already.
Start the new you by walking away from advertisements and marketing schemes without spending a dime. Become a new you the old fashioned way.
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