in which I am not Fate.

I would like everything to be perfect for my daughter. More than that, I want to make everything perfect for my daughter.

Sometimes it seems to me that the course of her entire life rests on my decisions, and that if I mess something up when she's 6 months old she'll still be dealing with the scars at 46. After all, I'm going to be the most important person in her tiny existence . .  so it follows that I bear the responsibility for who she is, what she believes, and how she lives until the end of time. Right?!!

Freakout material right there.

My dad is really good at counteracting this type of thinking. He has often reminded me that God reigns, regardless of the unwise choices we may make or the foolish things we may say. Of course those things matter. But they shouldn't cause us to despair. The fear of mistakes shouldn't deter us from living freely.

(Besides, though parents do indeed shape their children in infinite ways, it's not as if I'm spinning the thread of my daughter's life like all three Fates wrapped up in one. Perhaps overestimating influence is just as dangerous as overestimating it?)

All right. So I'm going to live life. I'm going to love our baby and do what I think is best for her. I'm also going to keep learning, keep thinking, and keep believing that God will be faithful to reveal the truth to me-- and to this child.

Freakout over.

sugar and spice and everything nice.

This picture courtesy of my dad.

"Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year."
-from A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas

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A post dedicated to our edible treats this Christmas.  

Roast Leg of Lamb: not exactly the recipe we used but this one has very similar flavors.
Brussels Sprout Gratin: this, by far, gets my vote for Best Item on the Dinner Table.
Tangy Cranberry Sauce: I didn't have enough orange juice so I put in 1/4 cup lemon juice as well.
Alfajores: again, not quite the recipe we used but it gives you the idea; ours includes lemon zest and calls for rolling the edges in coconut.
Cranberry Bars: I used King Arthur's gluten-free flour and a combination of cranberries and cherries, which was most excellent. These are quickly becoming my favorite cookie.
Sugared Plum Pudding with vanilla whipped cream: plums being entirely out of season, I substituted some roasted peaches that I'd frozen this past summer.
Cinnamon Vanilla Pecans: addictive.
Peppermint Fudge: seriously the easiest imaginable!
Bourbon Fudge: this was thanks to Luke, whose culinary endeavors often involve gratuitous alcohol, not that anyone's complaining . . . essentially the same fudge recipe, with less chocolate and 1/4 cup whiskey stirred in.

Weekend linkage

Helping (?) with Christmas dinner at my parents' house

"Hold on a minute. I'm trying to figure out how to turn that into a compliment."
-Jared

"You're very convenient to have around."
-Jared

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Pregnancy happenings: I have begun to feel quite . . . unwieldy. Last night we were at an event with lots of people packed into a room, and I discovered that it's difficult to maneuver myself and Tadpole through a crowd! The kicking has also become much stronger. Though not at all uncomfortable, it certainly gets my attention. :)

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Get your cruciferous veggies: roasted brussels sprouts are tremendously good. (Add a smidge of sriracha to the leftovers.)

The reviews on this banana slicer are awesome.

#britishpeopleproblems

Joey Newton, a pastor in Newtown, CT, writes about evil and the purposes of God. “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us.”

God rest us merry

The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds by Thomas Cole

"God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" is one of my family's favorite Christmas carols. It is great for harmonization and has a rollicking chorus that comes around frequently. (This is helpful when you can't remember the lyrics to each individual verse . . . you can always chime in with tidings of comfort and joy every four lines!)

This year, however, a particular verse jumped out at us as we sang it during Christmas devotions.

In Bethlehem, in Israel, this blessed Babe was born,
And laid within a manger upon this blessed morn;
The which His mother Mary did nothing take in scorn,
Oh tidings of comfort and joy.

Everyone's immediate comment: "Wait a minute. The witch, his mother Mary?!!"

Between that and reading Luke 2:16 as "Joseph and Mary and the baby lying in a manger" (how did they all fit?) we had some good laughs on Christmas morning.

And good food. I'll post about that later. :)

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

"But there will be no gloom for her who was in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.

{image credit: Lel4nd}

"The people who walked in darkness

have seen a great light;

those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,

on them has light shone.

You have multiplied the nation;

you have increased its joy;

they rejoice before you

as with joy at the harvest,

as they are glad when they divide the spoil.

For the yoke of his burden,

and the staff for his shoulder,

the rod of his oppressor,

you have broken as on the day of Midian.

For every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult

and every garment rolled in blood

will be burned as fuel for the fire.

"For to us a child is born,

to us a son is given;

and the government shall be upon his shoulder,

and his name shall be called

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Of the increase of his government and of peace

there will be no end,

on the throne of David and over his kingdom,

to establish it and to uphold it

with justice and with righteousness

from this time forth and forevermore.

The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this."

-Isaiah 9

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Well Written Wednesdays: a staff of ten could not have kept pace with her

There are many reasons I have fallen in love with the writing of Mark Helprin. One is simply the knowledge that, indeed, someone is still writing beautiful literature. A more specific reason is his marvelous characterization. To wit:

[Virginia] looked at her mother and was pleased and amazed by the sly, robust intelligence in the old woman's face, by her massive form which was neither fat nor tall nor thick, by the large strong hands, the shapeless velvet and muslin dress with a green yoke, the two sweet little eyes set close together in a glowing cheeky face topped with a haystack of soft white hair, and the purring white rooster (his comb was mandarin red) that she held in her arms and occasionally stroked . . .

Mrs. Gamely had never learned to read or write, and used her daughter as a scribe, and as a researcher among encyclopedias, questioning her at length about everything she found. The old woman's sense of organization was a miracle of randomness as illogical and rich as the branches of a blossoming fruit tree. She could easily discuss 150 subjects in an hour and a half, and Virginia would still finish awed and enlightened by what seemed to be a relentless and perfect plan.

Though Mrs. Gamely was by all measures prescientific and illiterate, she did know words. Where she got them was anyone's guess, but she certainly had them. Virginia speculated that the people on the north side of the lake, steeped in variations of English both tender and precise, had made with their language a tool with which to garden a perfect landscape. Those who are isolated in small settlements may not know of the complexities common to great cities, but their hearts are rich, and so words are generated and retained. Mrs. Gamely's vocabulary was enormous. She knew words no one had every heard of, and she used words every day that had been mainly dead or sleeping for hundreds of years. Virginia checked them in the Oxford dictionary, and found that (almost without exception) Mrs. Gamely's usage was flawlessly accurate. For instance, she spoke of certain kinds of dogs as Leviners. She called the areas near Quebec march-lands. She referred to diclesiums, liripoops, rapparees, dagswains, bronstrops, caroteels, opuntias, and soughs. She might describe something as patibulary, fremescent, pharasaic, Roxburghe, or glockamoid, and words like mormal, jeropigia, endosmic, mage, palmerin, thos, vituline, Turonian, galingale, comprodor, nox, gaskin, secotine, ogdoad, and pintulary fled from her lips in Pierian saltarellos. Their dictionary looked like a sow's ear, because Virginia spent inordinate proportions of her days racing through it, though when Mrs. Gamely was angry a staff of ten could not have kept pace with her, and half a dozen linguaphologists would have collapsed from hypercardia.

"Where did you learn all those words, Mother?" Virginia might ask.

Mrs. Gamely would shrug her shoulders. "We were raised with them, I suppose." She didn't always speak incomprehensibly. In fact, she sometimes went for months at a time strapped down firmly to a strong and worthy matrix of Anglo-Saxon derivatives. Then, Virginia breathed easy, and the rooster was so happy that had he been a chicken he would have laid three eggs a day. Or was he a chicken? Who knows? The point is, he thought he was a cat.

-from Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin

 The only words I knew in Mrs. Gameley's list were "soughs" and "pharasaical."

most highly favored lady

The Annunciation by J.W. Waterhouse

Christmas has a special poignancy for me this year, because it is the first year that I've truly been able to identify with Mary.

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!”

Now, I'm quite enjoying my pregnancy, excepting the dozen weeks of nausea back in the fall (even then I could keep it at bay with grapes and Coca-Cola). It has been an emotionally positive experience. Everyone around me is rejoicing over this child. I've been congratulated and hugged; I do feel like a "favored one!" Yes, I have freaked out over childbirth, and yes, I have gotten teary for no reason at all, but so has every pregnant woman in the history of the world. I've endured no fears or trials besides those I already expected, and even in the ones that have come, have been blessed with tremendous support from the people I love.

As Advent marches on, I think often of Mary and how she may have felt at this point in her pregnancy. Did she pause in her work to put a hand on her belly and feel that little baby kick? Did she lie awake at night wondering what kind of mother she would be? Did she and Joseph ever laugh together--a little scared, but for all that, in deep awe-- at the strange miracle at work within her? I'm sure they did.

However, the joys that must have come with her pregnancy, Mary also faced trials unlike anything I will ever know.

But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.”

That all sounds great, Gabriel, but let's get down to brass tacks. Just think of the mental stress Mary bore as she carried Jesus in her womb. How did she explain her swelling stomach to her mother? Her friends? I wonder if her parents believed the fantastic tale of divine blessing, or if they turned away from her daughter in shame. Though I giggle and snap a picture whenever I notice my belly pushing out farther in front of me, Mary probably wished she could hide it away. Few, if any, of her neighbors would have rejoiced at this new life. Wouldn't it have been hard for her to hear the whispers in the marketplace, to see the knowing looks cast in her and Joseph's direction? Wouldn't she have wondered at times if that angelic vision was real, if she truly had found favor with God? I'm sure she did. There must have been days when she questioned His goodness and wished that He would take this burden away from her. (No wonder that before long, she "arose and went with haste into the hill country" in order to stay with her cousin Elizabeth.)

And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”

I think Mary foresaw all these things at the moment of the annunciation. And she still said yes.

 

(All Scripture taken from Luke 1:26-38)

fudgalicious

This is not "real" fudge, but I don't care. It is luscious and chocolatey and hits the sweet-tooth spot. Furthermore, though I love cooking, I do not like tedious processes (peeling juicy peaches, for instance, or finagling potatoes into paper-thin slices). Happily, here you don't need a double boiler, a candy thermometer, or the know-how to distinguish between soft ball and hard ball; you don't need to caramelize anything, nor do you need to grease candy molds.

All you need is a nice heavy saucepan, a spoon, and a few very basic ingredients. Onward!

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Possibly the Easiest Fudge Ever
(from my college friend Courtney)

3 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1/4 cup butter
1 teaspoon vanilla

Melt everything together in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium-low heat (no flimsy pots allowed . . . they let things burn too easily). Stir constantly. Once smooth, scrape into a 9x9 square baking dish lined with parchment. Refrigerate for several hours, then cut into bite-sized pieces.

If you'd like to make a fun peppermint version, stir in 1 cup crushed candy cane pieces after removing the mixture from the heat. :)

Weekend linkage

23 weeks!

Pregnancy happenings: At night I just lie in bed and stare at my stomach. It shifts as Tadpole flips over, suddenly bumps up as she kicks, and otherwise behaves in very strange ways. I find this unfailingly entertaining.

On Sunday, we went to visit Tadpole's brand new cousin-- she's so tiny and cute and squishable, I just wanted to put her in my purse and smuggle her out of the hospital. But instead we left her with her mommy and daddy and went home to happily muse over our own wee one, who is lucky enough to have lots of girl cousins close in age.

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Roger Cohen: Thanks for Not Sharing. "Now I was determined to get through 2012 without doing a peevish column, not wishing to appear cantankerous or curmudgeonly, determined to be sunny and youthful as the times demand, but everyone has a tipping point."

Interesting article on the rising age of parents worldwide. Some of the assumptions behind it are disturbing-- young motherhood is labeled "a lifetime of reduced opportunity," parents are evidently expected to fund their children's post-college years-- but I still learned a lot.

Well, someone is excited about The Hobbit.

I just love Simcha Fisher. "This Isn't Who I Really Am!" Or is it? Let's be honest.

So funny: famous photographs doctored to look like cell phone self-portraits. Churchill is my favorite.

Look, I try not to snark about other people's education choices. But the idea of nixing good literature for the sake of manuals makes me seeth. (For this and so many other reasons, you can bet your britches that our kids will not be getting an American public education . . . and if by some act of God they do end up at a public school, well, guess you'll need to find some new britches.)

A full scale model of Noah's Ark? I think it's time for a field trip to the Netherlands!

gluten-free breakfast crumble

{image credit: jglsongs}

Once I tried an intriguing new recipe for fruit cobbler, intended as dessert. It didn't seem dessert-y enough to me, but in the morning, with a big scoop of creamy Greek yogurt? Glorious.

And yes, I do recommend Greek yogurt. Not just because it's the cool thing these days, but because it's absolutely luscious and has way more protein than regular. I try to get at least 20 grams of protein in at breakfast and this is a great way to do it. Make sure you buy the genuine stuff, the kind that has been strained, not some fakey product stiffened up with additives. Fage is the best brand I have tried; even their 0% fat line is incredibly creamy and thick. Voskos and Chobani are also excellent.

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GF Breakfast Crumble
(inspired by Family Fresh Cooking)

1 large apple
2 large peaches*
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup almond meal**
1/4 cup sliced almonds (or chopped walnuts)
1/4 cup rolled oats
3/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
pinch of salt
2 tablespoons melted coconut oil
2 tablespoons honey or maple syrup

1) Preheat oven to 350. Lightly grease a glass pie plate.
2) Slice fruit thinly and toss with brown sugar. Place in prepared dish.
3) Stir together almond meal, sliced almonds, oats, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt. Stir in coconut oil and honey to form soft clumps; sprinkle evenly over fruit.
4) Bake crumble for 25 minutes, or until fruit is soft and topping cooked through. Cool for at least 10 minutes and serve with yogurt.***

*I used frozen peaches, so if you haven't any, you could substitute whatever firm fruit is in season: pears, plums, and the like. Blueberries would probably work well too. You just don't want something really soft and juicy, such as raspberries or oranges.
**I buy mine already ground, but you can just pop some almonds in your food processor.

because she is a person

Webster is not particularly helpful in this matter.

This past summer I spent a lot of time mulling (stewing? simmering?) over the topic of manhood and womanhood. What God says about it, what that might look like for me, where the culture and church have gotten it right, where we've gotten it wrong.

I put the subject to bed for a while when the school year began, as I felt that I'd gained a much better understanding and was at a relatively peaceful point in my reflections. Plus I was too sick to do much thinking anyway. :) Since the discovery that we are having a little girl, however, the topic has resurrected itself.

Mainly, I'm struck by all the terrible images of womanhood floating about. It seems like every slice of society has a different, bad idea. There's the misguided push to be "just as good as a boy."* There's the flaunting of female sexuality to manipulate men.  There's the ongoing oppression of women (whether in American pornography or in African sex tourism). Underlying them all is the assumption that the two genders must always be at war.

Well. Part of my job to help my daughter to sort through this junk and understand the truth about who she is.

For example, I want her to grow up knowing that she is valuable. But not because she's just as good as a boy, nor because girls rule and boys drool, nor for any other reason than because she is a person. She is a female person, which is delightful for many reasons. However, that does not affect her essential value, which rests on the fact that she is the image-bearer of God. It does not change her essential purpose: to know and love and exalt the Creator. Our daughter is neither more nor less important because she is a girl.

oh good, I was wondering.

Does this mean that we'll be downplaying her femininity? Ha, no. We're certainly going to teach the Tadpole that God made her to be a woman, and furthermore, that womanhood is a wonderful thing. We won't be parenting a genderless child, believe you me.

Yet I don't want our daughter's primary identity to be "girl." I don't want her to go through life obsessively filtering everything through her femaleness, believing that she must be distinctive in every way from the males around her, and that if she isn't, she is somehow failing as a woman. This is a suffocating and ultimately self-centered mindset, a trap into which both secular feminists and orthodox Christians often tumble-- they just get there by different roads. (Jared remarked the other day that no matter who we are, we just love to take God's good commands and run over the cliff with them. Our exaggerations get us into worlds of trouble. While we may think we are honoring our femininity or masculinity by making them into the most important thing about us, we are actually abusing them, because we end up focusing on ourselves and forgetting Who assigned us those roles in the first place.)

So I don't want that to happen to our daughter. Instead, I want her primary identity to be "human being who belongs to God," so that she walks through life with eyes fixed on Him. Her femininity is secondary. A remarkably crucial second, and one whose neglect causes disaster, but . . . still . . . secondary.

After all, when we first realized that this baby existed, we had no idea what its gender was. Why did we rejoice, then? Simply because a soul had been created. When I felt our baby's first movements, I praised God for giving us a child. No matter which way things developed, our joy would have been the same.

This, perhaps, is what Paul means in Galatians 3 when he says:

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise.

The Creation of Eve by Michelangelo

Taken in context, it's clear that Paul is not suggesting that gender has been erased or that it does not matter. (Just think about the rest of his writings, where he spends whole chapters upon the proper conduct of men and women within the family and church!) Rather, I think he is reminding us that we have all put on Christ, all become heirs of His promise, so our first identity is now in Him rather than in our chromosomes.

In the end, of course, that core identity in Christ liberates us to live up to those chromosomes in a new and wonderful way. And we'll teach our daughter about that too. Not only is she a human, a remarkable and complex thing in itself, but she is also a woman. Wherever her womanhood ought to bear upon a situation, we want her to freely embrace it for the beauty that it is, and to understand that God was deeply pleased when He created Eve-- and when he created her.

I have other thoughts on this. So many. If I ever organize them, take cover: it will be an inundation. But that's just something that's been rolling around in my head.

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*Though I think that this impulse is misguided, it's also thoroughly understandable in light of the historic preference for males. Consider who has received the education, inherited the money, enjoyed legal protection, and been celebrated at birth in countless societies around the world. Injustice is real. I just don't believe that the solution is to try to be a man. Instead, I believe that Scripture provides the much-needed corrective to history's twisted view of women: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

Well Written Wednesdays: a little cell of warmth

{image credit: Giulio Speranza}

I try not to let good things go by unnoticed. In spring the foliage slowly closes in the prospects from all the windows and the porch. When the trees are in full leaf, this place, close to the road as it is, seems remote and set apart. When the leaves fall, the distances lengthen all around. The river is more visible from the house then, and I can see the pastures and cornfields on the far side, and beyond them the hills.

Some days a strong breeze fairly fills the place. Every leaf moves, and the sound is like a long breath. Sometimes there is a breeze that moves the leaves without a sound.

And I have known days when the temperature would not rise above zero, when snow would be deep, ice on the river, the north wind rattling the branches. Then this house is a little cell of warmth, a cold brilliance coming in at the windows, a good fire in the drumstove, a pot of bean soup simmering, the dog asleep on the floor. Nobody comes, only the birds to the suet feeders. And I have nothing to do but read and watch. I seem to be in a room in the wind. I talk to the dog, who raises her head to listen and then goes back to sleep.

-from Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

not a problem.

"Godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content."
-1 Timothy 6:6-8

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I had a eureka moment the other week; a certain shift of thought can help me walk through undesirable situations with more grace, more contentment, and less complaining. See, although I tend to view any unpleasantness as something going wrong, it may just be that it's not going how I wanted. And there is of course a big difference there.

Right now I feel out of my element. I'm neither in my own house nor among my own belongings. My usual habits have been disrupted and I'm unsure what I should be doing with my time. I miss my husband, who has to spend most of his free time sanding banisters and cutting out moldy plaster.

For quite I while I was categorizing this whole situation as a problem, that is, something that ought to be fixed. That perspective caused even more frustration because I couldn't find a way to fix things, or anyone to blame!

One day, though, I realized that I'd been looking at my circumstances wrongly. There is no error here, nothing to be repaired. It's simply the way things are right now. I may not like it, and I may choose to lament it loudly, but in that case the problem lies in me rather than in the situation. :)

So now I have begun to deal with my frustration differently. Instead of tearing my hair out with anxiety, wondering what I can do to remedy my "problem," I can have faith that God has actually designed this season for me and ask Him to give me patience. Instead of saying to myself If only we could finish remodeling the house so I can get back to the correct way of living, I can say This isn't my preference but I will choose to live fully in this moment.

I know nothing-- at least experientially-- about caring for a newborn, but I suspect that this mindset may help me in the upcoming and months of little sleep and lots of crying. After all, if I'm awakened at 2 AM and think There's something wrong here! This shouldn't be happening! then I will have a cranky attitude and struggle to act lovingly towards my baby, since I'll be viewing her as a malfunctioning part of my day (or night, as it were).

On the other hand, if I think I really don't want this to be happening, but it's my life right now, well, I might still have a cranky attitude. But I can also remember that God has assigned this baby to me, and that there is nothing "wrong" with the poor thing . . . she's just not doing what I would prefer at the moment. :)