a brief history of baring it all

Finally, a posting worthy of dedicating to my big sister Rebecca! ; )

Ain't she cute? Ok, no that's not my sister, but this photo does bring back memories of the voluptuous teenager she was, very cute and curvy--I was more long and, um, sleek (the opposite of curvy, if you will).

This image comes from a fascinating photo-essay on Slate.com, about the history of the bikini. Two pieces (ha!) of information I learned from the article: First, when the bikini first came on the scene in Paris, the models there were so scandalized they refused to model it. So who did the designer find to model? A stripper named Micheline Bernardini, pictured above.

Second, before the bikini, women's swimwear took its modesty cues from the movies. Fascinating!

Notable quotation from the photo essay: A few years ago, Sports Illustrated dug up a 1957 issue of Modern Girl that declared: "It is hardly necessary to waste words over the so-called bikini since it is inconceivable that any girl with tact and decency would ever wear such a thing."

http://www.slate.com/id/2221241/?obref=obinsite

This is all the more interesting when contrasted with an article I read when visiting Susan in Colorado Springs (it was from a magazine in your living room, Susan--maybe a Newsweek?) that discussed the recent "alarming" trend among young French women to be more modest in their swimwear, esp. eschewing the topless beaches.

My own opinions about bikinis developed mainly from two realization: one, that most women look worse and not better when they bare it all; second, that I believe modesty is valuable, and want to instill an appreciation of it in my chidren.

We are not at all prudes around the house, partly out of practicality:

And partly because we are trying to teach the children to think their bodies and what their bodies do are good, beautiful, natural things. That their bodies are designed brilliantly, and should be admired for their miraculous qualities and their intrinsic aesthetics. That nothing about our bodies is bad except how we sometimes choose to use them to hurt or offend others. How our bodies and spirits are part of a whole person, and we cannot separate one from the other, and so what we do with out bodies affects our spirits, and vice versa.

Clearly there are so many ways we could talk about this subject and get really deep and profound, but let's just get back to the bikinis. ; )

Most of you probably have figured out that our girls will not be wearing skin-baring clothing until they are out on their own--what they do as adults will be completely up to them. But as kids, I have the perfect beachwear for them:

Not a great pic--taken when visiting a friend with a pool!--but you can see their swimwear, which is most decidedly modest. But that is not why I love these suits, which we get from a company out here in CA called Tuga Swimwear. I love them because:

--no more slathering on sunscreen! with these SPF rated suits and their sunhats they are protected fully unless we are out for a long time or in very intense sun, when we still need to lather arms and legs and faces. Esp. no more burned areas on shoulders and backs where regular suits rub off the sunscreen or where parent fingers sometimes don't get the lotion all the way to the edges of the suit!

--no more sand rubbing painfully in tender areas! No more sand in diapers! Even when the kids bury themselves in the sand!

--no sand in the crotch means no sand sneaking home in the suimsuit crotch to spill all over the bathroom floor when girls clean off in the shower! (ok, some still sticks to the fabric, so we still strip out on the back deck when we come from the beach--but nothing like my memories of the handful of beach we would be sitting on all the way back to Aunt Rosalie's house in, when we would strip in the shower and watch it go down the shower drain. Bring back memories, Rebecca?)

--we can go from playground to beach, etc. and the kids are more comfortable and ready for anything!

When the girls are older, they may not go for the full coverage swim combos anymore (the one-piece only go up to age 6 anyway, but I love the bike short/rashguard oldest sister G is wearing in the pic), but luckily it shouldn't be because they are not "cool"--because while California is the home of the bikini here in the USA, it is also the home of surfing USA, so a lot of the coolest girls wear rashguards and board shorts! Great white shark fears aside, I'll take a surfer girl over a stripper girl anytime!

So, there you have it, a bare bones (ha! i am really on a roll. a pathetic roll, but a roll.) perspective on swimwear past, present and future.

Photograph of Micheline Bernardini in 1946 courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Dedicated to my big sister, of the bikini worthy curves, who now has two beautiful and modest teenage daughters. ; )

we interrupt the scheduled posting for a resounding THANK YOU LORD!

D just came home from church, where he took G and M this morning. I stayed home with B, who might have pinkeye, and E, who has a cold.

I went out to the driveway to greet him and ask them all to be quiet coming into the house because E was asleep. We chatted about their morning for a few minutes, enjoying the sunshine, and then D told me a story about what happened to them a few minutes ago:

They were in the minivan coming home from church, sitting at at red light at the intersection of Cabrillo/Highway 1 and Highway 9. They were in the left-hand lane, with the lane to turn onto Highway 9 on their left, another car in front of them, and another mini-van in the lane to their right, and the right-turn lane onto Hgwy 9/River St. to the right of that. He heard a horrible screetch of tires, like you hear right before a huge CRASH, and saw to his right an 80's muscle car barreling past him, trailing a huge cloud of black smoke. The car passed BETWEEN our minivan and the van in the right hand lane, running the red light and charging through that very busy intersection without accident.

D thinks the car was going about 45-50 mph when it entered the intersection. He figures the driver was speeding up while approaching the intersection, then had to slam on the brakes (enough to make them smoke so badly!) to try to stop, realized he could not, and chose to hit the gas to get through the intersection as fast as possible.

We drive on that road multiple times a week. I do not believe there is enough room for a whole car to fit between the cars parked in their lanes. A motocycle, yes. A mini-cooper, maybe. A full sized car? No. I cannot comprehend how that muscle car flew between two rows of vehicles--WIDE vehicles, mind you!--without even touching them. There should have been major wreckage to all the cars he passed, crumpled doors, shattered side windows--at the very least there should have been knocked off side-view mirrors, or even just one car's side scraped!

For that car to get through that very busy intersection unscathed while running the red light is something we would say was "a miracle," but mean it in the sense of an amazing, but conceviable possibility. But how the car made it past the cars waiting at the light seems to me inconceviable; truly impossible.

I firmly believe God just performed a quick, quiet miracle to save my family and the others there at the intersection.

Our mini-van has three rows of seats, and we have the last row pushed back as far as it goes to accommodate all the car seats. Both older girls were sitting in their seats in the last row, maybe 16 inches from the rear hatch. If that car had hit our vehicle, D would have been injured, but the girls would most likely have been killed.

But God is so good, he not only protected them from harm, but Beulah (our mini-van) too. In what should have been a horrible, tragic accident, NO ONE even got a scratch.

Amen, amen, amen!

the rhythm of life Pt. 1

I have been working on this for some time, and have been meaning to blog about it--and since Desiree over at the Happy (Atheist) Homemaker also wrote about this topic this week, I thought it was time to get my own butt in gear.

Rhythm of life Pt 1: FLYing by the days of the week
The topic is how we schedule life. There are several ways I do this, so I thought I would make a different posting for each application. This first post is on the way I structure the week for taking care of the home. I don't know when I first realized I needed to do this, but it was a few years ago, probably around the same time I discovered FlyLady*, who completely revitalized my ways of thinking about my home and how to maintain it with peace and joy. Ok, still working on the maintaining, the peace, and the joy, but she really has a great method to get you going on these things as a lifestyle, and her ideas--the ones that really worked for me--are the foundation for what I am doing now in my home. I am finding more and more that if I do not PLAN on something to happen, set aside time for it and make it an expectation, then it does not happen. This is true for everything from cleaning the bathroom to reading to my kids to date night with my husband.

Maybe the rest of you reading this never have problems remembering to get things done in a timely manner, or have more self-discipline than I do, or something. You can stop reading now and go spend the time you would have spent reading this post sitting comfortably, surveying your perfectly clean and well-ordered house and patting yourself on the back. You deserve it.

Any of you who are not yet perfectly in control of your homelife, I am writing this partly to help myself focus, since I am revamping the life schedule a bit and writing it out helps me work it through thoroughly, and partly in case some of you might find it interesting or even helpful.

Here are some of the FlyLady ideas for scheduling that I find have become part of the fabric of my daily/weekly existence, in a very good way:

The weekly home "blessing."
FlyLady has her own way of doing it, but here is how I make it work for me: schedule into the week two days when I plan to "bless" my house with quick-n-dirty cleaning. I do this on Mondays and Fridays, and these are the days I vacuum (i.e. get the helper monkeys to vacuum! ; ), swish the toilet, wipe down the bathroom, and imperfectly dust the house. By now this routine is so ingrained that I always remember it, even if I have a reason for not getting it done. But that is seriously half of the battle. And since this is very specifically NOT deep-cleaning time, it should only take about 30 minutes.

Breaking up the house into "zones."
I mentioned previously how the zones have worked really well for the girls: each girl has a zone in the bedroom she neatens as part of her morning routine, and then each girl has a zone in the living room she neatens as part of the evening routine. But it really comes in handy when working out my own deep cleaning chores. Flylady suggests breaking up your house into zones and then spending one week in each zone in rotation, spending 15 minutes a day doing a deep cleaning task. I have tried that, but was dissatisfied with how dirty the rest of the house seemed to get inbetween (between the wood-burning fireplace that puts out a lot of ash dust when D cleans it every morning and the dirt driveway that sneaks in on everyone's shoes, our house gets really dirty really fast). So I am trying a variant of this now: giving each section of the house a zone, and then spending 15 minutes in that zone on a different day of the week (this is time specifically for deep-cleaning, so is in addition to the bi-weekly home blessing and regular daily maintenance like doing dishes and picking up). So it is a daily rotation, not a weekly one.

So right now that looks like:

MONDAY: living room
TUESDAY: entry/back door areas
WEDNESDAY: kitchen
THURSDAY: bedroom (we only have one, which the kids use)
FRIDAY: bathroom
SATURDAY: shower room (they are separate in our little cabin built before indoor showers were the norm)

Sunday is the day of rest, of course. ; ) But I do usually try to clean the sink and counter in the kitchen on Sunday evening--nice to start out the week Monday morning with this welcome.

Saturday is also the day I take our bedding out to the back deck and shake/beat the dust out.

So when I am in the kitchen zone, I might clean out a cupboard or wipe down the cupboard fronts or wash the kitchen windows--the idea is to do one task that takes only about 15 minutes that you don't normally do when you are in the kitchen. It is basically maintaining the home in little increments, and it really works well, although only when you let go of the perfectionist need to have the entire house clean all at the same time! (Although thanks to mothers-in-law, there will still be times for that too! it is just not required on a daily/weekly basis.) The Flylady idea is that you end up having done an entire Spring cleaning in your house every 5 weeks--just a little bit at a time! She is more systematic about it, but I think my way works well too, it just may take longer than 5 weeks.

The beauty of scheduling is that there is a regular flow to the week, so housework has a logical time to be done, and once I get into the rhythm, I find yourself doing it without even thinking about it! And it all gets done, but not in the crash and burn kind of housecleaning I used to do, that leaves me irritable and exhausted--and so discouraged when it all looks dirty again the next day.

Other ways I use the weekly schedule:
Wednesday is both outdoor day (for garden work, girls getting to get really dirty outside) and anti-procrastination day (for doing anything I have been putting off!). Recently this is also my big cooking day, when I can motivate myself to be creative in using up foods in the fridge and cooking more elaborate meals. It just so happens Thursday is the day I get my weekly box of CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) veggies, so it makes sense to make room in the fridge and use up whatever veggies are still hanging around from the last week.

This may sound like a lot to tackle on poor old Weds, but somehow it works for me! Esp. since we are usually home all day Weds. and if the girls have had a good start to their homeschool week they can have an easy school day and their chores that day are also outside or things we have been putting off. It also works because cooking and working outside are two things I tend to procrastinate on!

But I think I also like Weds. (and Mondays and Fridays) as key scheduling days because they are so logically placed in the way I perceive the week. It is just the way my brain works.

Friday is also correspondence day. This means I consciously think of who I might need to call or email--consider this loving people long distance day. So I try to reach out to one person that day.

Scheduling special family time:
And each night of the week has a special focus, too, for building special family time. Each child gets one night a week to stay up and get quality one-on-one time with mom and dad, doing what she/he wants. G has Monday, M has Tuesday, B has Wednesday, E will have Thursday once he is old enough to notice his sisters are doing it. Friday night is date night (usually means I make pizza and D and I watch a movie on the computer. ; )

And my ideal has long been that one night a week is family night--either Sat or Sun night, when we would watch a family movie, play games, etc. But since we have never planned it officially into the week, we have only been doing these kinds of family things sporadically! So I need to get that into gear.

So that is the overall look of the week.

If anyone would like to share what YOU do in your weekly schedule, please do so in the comments! I find this kind of thinking about the week SO helpful, and would enjoy reading how you do it in your home.


Next topic: the rhythm of the day




* http://www.flylady.net/ I will write more about other helpful Flylady ideas in another post--some of them I cannot believe I ever did without.

Blessing of the week: daylight savings!

I'm lovin' it!

I have never felt this way about daylight savings before. In the past, the whole "Fall back" thing just means you can get an extra hour of sleep (well, that is before kids came along). Last year it was great because with adjusting to having four kids we were always running so late to church, and that Sunday we forgot about the time change and were so late we almost did not go, out of pure embarrassment, but went anyway--and arrived to find we were actually early! Whoo-hoo!

But this year, there is something different about it, something refreshing and revitalizing. My body clock is still on the old time, but this means that when I finally drag myself and baby E out of bed in the morning, even though I have been loafing, it is still only 8:00! And in the late afternoon, when it is starting to get dark and I think to myself, "huh, well, I'd better go figure out what to do for dinner"--it is only 5:00! That means dinner is on the table at 6, instead of the horrible hour of 7:00 I had gotten into for the previous couple of weeks (I have been meaning to write about my cooking blahs and procrastination for a while--meh, I'll do it later ; ) We actually have had the girls all ready for bed by 7:00 for several nights in a row! This makes the evening SO much better--instead of me being too tired and *done*, I am thinking, "hey, we are early!" and then I have more patience for the whole bedtime routine, which is a GREAT thing! (Esp. because D has been working late this week, so I have been the "on" parent from get-up to go-down) And best of all, D and I are going to bed a little earlier! Our body clocks had been set to 11:00 pm for a loooooooong time. Even when I try, it seems like I can't get to bed sooner, and getting the kids to bed at 9 only exaserbates the problem. So now, when the body clock says, "I guess I should go to bed now," I look at the clock and it is 10:00! That just seems like such a little gift!

So, really, nothing has changed. My bad habits are still here, needing to be addressed--but this time shift feels like just a little bit of grace to tide me over while I re-teach myself some better time management practices. I still have the same # of daylight hours in which to do my work, and the same # of nighttime hours in which to get my sleep. But somehow my mind is tricked into feeling like there is more time, more sleep--and it is giving me energy and higher spirits.

And a fresher mind! How about you?

True or False:

1. Daylight-saving time is observed by all U.S. states and its territories.
2. One of the biggest reasons we change our clocks to daylight-saving time is to save electricity.
3. Beginning in 2007, daylight-saving time was extended by one month.
4. The American law by which we turn our clocks forward in the spring and back in the fall was instituted in 1890.

5. Benjamin Franklin was one of the first to suggest the idea of saving daylight.

Answers:

1. False. Daylight Saving is not observed in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and most of Arizona (except the Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona).
2. True. In general, energy uses and the demand for electricity for lighting our homes is directly connected to when we go to bed and when we get up.
3. True. Last year, daylight-saving time was extended one month and now begins for most of the United States at 2 a.m. on the second Sunday in March and lasts until the 2 a.m. on the first Sunday of November.
4. False. Although daylight-saving time has been around since the early 1900s, the law is known as the Uniform Time Act and was formerly instituted in 1966; it does not require anyone observe daylight-saving time, but states if we agree to observe it, it must be done uniformly.
5. True. American patriot Benjamin Franklin first published the idea in an essay written in 1784 entitled, “An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light.”


Image and quiz from https://newsline.llnl.gov

if mama ain't happy. . .

Ain't that the truth?

I have known this for years, but since summer I have really started to notice how much my words and tone of voice and responses affect our whole homelife. I learned years ago that whenever I started hearing the girls using snippy voices with each other, then I needed to listen to how I was using my own voice around the house. Monkey see, monkey do, right? ; ) But what I have been noticing is more than just my children emulating me. Recently I have become aware of how other people's responses to the girls seems to directly correlate to my own--other people take their cue from me.

For example, I used to admire how my husband could be so patient with the kids, esp. at the end of the day when I was done and he could waltz in from his commute home and help the kids do their final bedtime tasks, listen to them talk and talk and talk while he changed into his casual clothes, even get engaged in some discussion of the origin of everything, or whatever. According to him, they ask the most brilliant things while they are in bed but have not yet officially said good night. So they all talk for a long time some nights. I must say they are brilliant--getting all profound and cute so Daddy lets them stay up late and gives them his full attention. So awesome that they have that sweet daddy/daughter time. I, on the other hand, have been listening to them talk all day and my ears are by then completely full, and I have a baby who needs to be nursed and put down and I am not falling for that trick, no matter how cute or profound.

But I started to notice, back in those three horrible weeks I have already written about, that when he came home and I was done with the children and had succumbed to yelling or even just being snappish, he would not be the rescuer I was waiting for, but would be snappish himself, and most definitely not patient.

I would be surprised, and would think to myself, "Hey, that's not fair! I have been dealing with kids all day, and am just now starting to lose my cool--you can't just walk in and lose your cool in your first five minutes of parenting!"

Ok, ok, I realize this sounds like it is all about me. Ok, it is, but not in the way you are thinking. ; ) I completely acknowledge that my husband is certainly not expected to be a saint and have endless resources of patience and rescue me from my own life work. Well, not every day. And I am very aware that he too has a right to come home not in the best frame of mind and not have to be perfect. And that he sometimes has stressful days at work. And just like I can dream of being rescued, he can fanticize about coming home and finding his wife calm, showered and in the mood; his children clean, fed and sweetly in bed; his home a sanctuary from stress. Much, I imagine, like this:



But life is just not always like that, is it? So when D would come home and find me cranky with the kids and start in being cranky with the kids too, it first surprised me, then concerned me. One one hand, it is nice to feel supported and not condemmed for my frame of mind at that moment. On the other hand, it makes me feel a greater weight of responsibility for my words, tone of voice, attitude. I am not just capable of influencing my children's responses to one another, but also my husband's. Ugh.

And it is not just my husband! I noticed on our long road trip with my parents this past summer the same thing happening with them. The kids during our two week drive back from IL were overall REALLY GOOD KIDS. I just want to make that clear--REALLY, REALLY GOOD. Just plain awesome roadtrippers. But they are still kids, and still siblings, and so would still occassionally fight, mouth off, etc. So by the end of the day, I would sometimes be tired and short tempered--especially when we would stop for dinner at a restaurant, where you have higher expectations for the behavior of your children anyway. And I noticed that my parents would adopt a slight frown to their voices--not being harsh or negative in the least, but using that slightly grim "We're watching you, now" tone that indirectly tells the child you are expecting them to be bad. Even if the kids were BEING GOOD, all the adults were politely stern, as if that would keep them behaving well!

Ok, it is a little funny to look back on, but more sad for me. Because I know my parents, like D in the above example, were trying to be supportive of me, and were taking cues from me about how to interpret the situation and respond appropriately. They saw me tired and tense and were trying to a) step up and help give me a break from parenting solo, and b) keep the kids "good" because they interpreted my testiness as a sign that my kids were not being "good" and that I cared about them being "good."

I hope this makes sense. Mom and dad, you were great, and I am truly thankful for everything you did for me and the kids on that trip, and would do it again in a heartbeat. : ) You did nothing wrong--in fact, you were trying to be as helpful as possible, which is all I could ever ask for! But those moments were really good for me to see--it was like getting a glimpse of my own parenting skills (or lack thereof) from an outside perspective.

Having the lesson then affirmed in my home with my husband cinched it. The need is apparent: using the language of my whole body to reflect my spirit to build up my family, my home. Hmmmmm, now that I type that I am ashamed to say I had not previously thought of how this is another interpretation of one of the Proverbs most meaningful to me: The wise woman builds her house, but with her own hands the foolish one tears hers down--Proverbs 14:1.

I am not a person who has read the Bible a bunch of times and can rattle off pertinent Scripture verses at the snap of a finger. I would like to know more, and will slowly but surely keep working on that journey too. But the few bits of Scripture that stick with me are those that seem to keep popping up when I do study, and seem to always speak to me in a new way. So they are probably the very ideas I most need to hear.

Here is another one, which is so relevant, and which comes to mind sometimes when I ain't happy: "Let your gentleness be evident to all--the Lord is near."* It becomes like a mantra for that moment: let my gentleness be evident to all. let my gentleness be evident to all.

So, dear readers, what do YOU do when you feel your best parenting efforts beginning to crumble and you need an instant dose of perspective? Please share your own in the comments--I would love to hear them. (Classroom experience counts too!)

Wishing all of you a week of happy parenting!

*Philippians 4:5. That chapter goes on to say:
". . . whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things."

image from tumbleweedpottery.com--i might need a plaque like this to keep me reminded of this lesson on a daily basis!

more monkey business

In my posting a few days ago I mentioned how the girls are my little "helper monkeys." And it brought to mind a funny story:
Once about a year ago when the girls first learned what helper monkeys were and we watched some youtube videos of them in action, helping people with disabilities, the girls liked pretending they were helper monkeys and so I set them to tasks and they pretended they were my "hands." I think they were supposed to be cleaning out the car that day, and at one point I looked out the window and thought I saw G doing something naughty or destructive--can't remember now--and went out to her in the car, scolding, "Bad monkey! Bad, bad monkey!" G was so hurt she burst into tears. I truly felt awful, because I had been trying to use humor to correct, but she had been taking her helper monkey job so seriously and turns out had not been doing anything wrong after all. Of course I apologized as best I could.

But sometimes, when I am angry at the girls, I hear myself saying in my head, "Bad monkey! Bad, bad monkey!"

the halloween follow-up

My garden/pumpkin patch

G and M: Native American princesses
B: ballerina
BFF: pirate and waitress


G's papoose!

M's papoose is loose and down to her caboose!

Breaking out the loot, before we even make it home.
Ah, childhood.

I hope all of you had a fun night too!