life

reading round-up (5.30.14)

/ abby hummel / 6 Comments

Happy Friday! This week held a very noteworthy celebration: The first “real” piano student sign up of my Minnesota piano studio! We toasted this occasion with the most despicable-tasting sparkling cider available in the Target clearance aisle. (Seriously. It was awful. We both said something like, “We should have just had champagne. I think pregnant ladies in Europe drink sometimes and their kids are okay…”)
photo 2 (1)

Here are some reading suggestions for the start of a beautiful weekend…

[One] You guys, it’s been legitimately sort of HOT this week. We haven’t turned on the AC yet (we rebel against that sort of thing for a while), but it’s toasty enough to reschedule Max’s mid-afternoon walk so we can go to the basement for downstairs chores and naps instead. I have been really happy with my strategic door-and-window opening plan, which was inspired by this old post about “Living without A/C and Liking It!” from Like Mother, Like Daughter. We actually don’t know if the air conditioning unit works in this house, so we’ll get it cleaned out and hope for the best when it starts getting hotter! (I keep thinking… if you can’t make it until June for a/c when you live in Minnesota, you’re in serious trouble.)

[Two] I’ll probably whack out a whole post about how ridiculous the “mommy wars” are, especially in evangelical Christian subculture, but this post from Jen Wilkinson was particularly encouraging as I gear up for being a part-time working mom.

[Three] This look at the stairway to wisdom from David Brooks includes some great thoughts about the personal stories behind statistics, especially in relation to teen pregnancy.

[Four] I’ve seen this post about homeschooling popping around among friends quite a bit. I’m not going to deny that if I wrote an article about homeschooling (as someone who was homeschooled, has worked closely in tutoring other homeschool families in upper grades, is married to someone who was homeschooled, and will need to make some decisions about educating my own kid in the future) it would say the exact opposite of this one. In general, my opinion is that 85% of homeschool families need a more serious attitude about academics and a lot less restrictions for everything else. But it’s worth reading and reflecting critically whether you agree with it or not!

[Five] I love these thoughts on “scruffy hospitality” and welcoming people into life as you are!  Good, good words from Jack King.

“Don’t allow a to-do list disqualify you from an evening with people you’re called to love in friendship. Scheduling is hard enough in our world. If it’s eating with kind, welcoming people in a less than perfect house versus eating alone, what do you think someone would choose? We tell our guests ‘come as you are,’ perhaps we should tell ourselves ‘host as you are.’ …Friendship isn’t about always being ‘excellent’ with one another. Friendship is about preparing a space for authentic conversation. And sometimes authenticity happens when everything is a bit scruffy.”

[Six] Two different friends have recommended the “Hillsdale Dialogues” series to me for combating intellectual decay. These lectures on literature have provided some mental stimulation lately, so they are worth checking out even if you’re a little intimidated (or not immediately interested) in hearing about The Illiad or Sir Gawain.

[Seven] Maybe especially because, finally, some things are really coming together —PhD, baby, duckling, puppy… what else could we want?– we’ve been battling a lot of thoughts about hopes, both the ones we felt were dashed so many times in the last few years, and the ones we’re still not sure about for the future. There are questions about calendars and things that don’t look like we thought they should at this point, birthdays that came before all the things we wanted to do by that age were done, and uncertainty about how to redream for some of life. I loved this encouragement from Ann Voskamp:

Time can’t dictate dreams or hijack hope or determine destination. Time may have hands on the clock but it’s arms are too weak to rob anybody of hope, steal anybody’s prayers, destroy anybody’s joy. And so what if time’s got hands on a clock — it’s God who has His Hands on the universe. Every little thing is going to be okay because God is working good through every little thing. All that’s happening is just happening to make miracles. There are miracles always unfolding under the impossibles.
“Joys are always on their way to us,” writes Amy Carmichael. “They are always traveling to us through the darkness of the night. There is never a night when they are not coming.”
Because there is never a night where joys are not coming to us, there is never a road that can’t arrive at Hope.Circumstances can go ahead and run out of time — but the courageous refuse to run out of hope. We can always hope because there is always joy traveling to us down the unexpected roads.

“The LORD delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love.” – Psalm 147:11

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The mosquitos are particularly nasty, but we’re hoping for another weekend of bonfires, laughter, Max adventures, and some more painting. (I can tell it’s making a big and beautiful difference in this house that needed a lot of “lipstick and rouge,” but will it ever end? I think “soft flipping” a house and getting a puppy effectively eradicated the possibility of ‘relaxing weekends’ before the baby arrives. )

(You can enjoy more quick reads at Conversion Diary!) 

 

 

 

 

making way for a (belated) duckling

/ abby hummel / 3 Comments

A few weeks ago I mentioned Aaron’s childhood dream of incubating duck eggs, which fueled years of seemingly fruitless prayer, study, and excessive searching through the appropriate habitats in pursuit of a mallard hen’s laying ground. We did some massive minimalizing before moving to Minnesota, during which he finally tossed the old incubator he’d built specifically to hatch those longed-for childhood ducklings. Sometimes his sciencey nature completely baffles me, like when I peek at the detailed lab notebook he keeps every year for his garden with spreadsheets tracking how many plants germinated with what fertilizer and watering schedule, etc., and in those times it’s good for me to remember they are just the grown-up expression of everything that made that little boy hunt for duck eggs.

In the same post I also mentioned that we were not going to be raising any waterfowl at this house. You know, because Aaron works long hours and already caved on the “no-garden thing,” we now have a dog, we have no money, we’re having a baby, and even small hobby livestock is illegal in this city, among other things. (I try not to be a pessimist, but I manage to come up with a long list of reasons not to do almost everything “cool.”)

With all this in mind, it makes perfect sense that nearly 20 years after the height of the egg-hunting, Aaron went exploring with Max and discovered a lone duck egg on the shore of a small lake, which he promptly brought home and kept in a drawer while waiting for a new incubator to come in the mail. (Mama Ducks lay their eggs one-at-a-time at the water’s edge while they build their nest for a few weeks, then recollect whatever hasn’t been eaten by raccoons and start sitting on them all together, so they hibernate for a bit, and it was OK to set this one on it’s own for a couple of days.) It’s now been incubating cozily in our closet for the past few weeks, and Aaron is very proud that we can see the outline of little duckling growing when he holds it up to a flashlight.

There are many possible devastations that could yet occur with this little duckling, like a failure of our extremely low-quality incubator or the fact that we are simultaneously raising a dog with the specific breeding to instinctively put birds in his mouth. We also have no idea what we would do with it once it becomes a grown-up, since we have no backyard pond. (It’s one of those dreams we had to let go of for this house.) I’ve heard that hand-raised ducks often migrate when they see the other ducks flying south, so that might happen… We’ll see. For now, we’re just turning the egg according to schedule, and monitoring the temperature of the incubator while laughing about how birds keep showing up as tangible expressions of God’s love for us.

mallard

Come on, little duckling! We are rooting for you!

 

 

 

 

 

 

reading round-up (5.16.14)

/ abby hummel

red tulip

[One] It’s hard to shake off the joy that creeps up along with the new blades of grass each spring. Did you know one of the oldest notated English songs celebrates this very fact? It’s true. Sumer is Icumen In!


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[Two] Earlier this week, my younger sister (also a homeowner and expectant mama) and I chatted about our yards, which feels incredibly grown up. We’re both trying to cultivate beauty and order in houses that were poorly neglected by previous owners with the intention of turning a profit by selling in a few years. I’m not even sure what we used to talk about, but now it’s the merits (and resale value) of investing in grass seed, pavers, mulch, walkways, and firepits. So with that in mind, I really appreciated this article about how the primary work of man — that is, tilling the soil — makes nature more beautiful, and how much benefit there is to subduing the wilderness. My favorite quote? “If farming is the Martha of man’s relationship with nature, gardening is the Mary.” [Get Out of the Wilderness and Into the Garden.]

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[Three] Ever wonder what you should really know about American History? Here’s a five-minute clip from David McCullough to assist in your quest for greater knowledge (or just a higher level of cultural literacy.)
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[Four] If you’re looking for an hour-long podcast, we thought this interview in defense of genetic modification of plants was extremely interesting. Even if you are skeptical (or disagree) with the practices, this discusses the history of plant breeding AND some other common methods of modern plant breeding that are, in my opinion, infinitely  more concerning than mainstream cis- and trans-genic modifications. (Seriously. Should we be eating plants that came from parent plants blasted by radiation in order to produce the desired mutation? Or should we use precise technology to get the exact mutation we want and avoid the unknown effects of radiation or other changes? If you are lost in this part of the discussion, you need to study further before “taking a stand” on the GMO debate.) Furthermore, I thought his points about how your worldview shapes everything you believe were very insightful, especially in regards to the lack of “inherent virtue” in nature. (Maybe this relates a little bit to the necessity of man tilling the soil after the fall? Nature alone isn’t going to fully sustain anymore and scientific progress is going to have to improve things? Much to think on here.)
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[Six] Poor Max has his first ear infection. Dogs have deep, crooked ear canals and those things can get nasty. I won’t link to this, but a cursory glance of Google search offerings about caring for a dog’s ear infection before you can get in to the vet uncovered another world of crazy. Not only are there major “mommy wars” about food, medical care, and vaccinations, but also “doggy wars” about those things, too. I mean, if some tincture of coconut oil, raw unfiltered with-the-mother apple cider vinegar, leftover organic red quinoa water and a splash of sriracha (I don’t know what that is, but I’ve seen it on pinterest too many times for it to not be the next big item in your naturopathic remedies) makes your dog feel better, great… but I kept finding people saying things like, “I tried this natural remedy for four months and his eardrum finally ruptured – now he feels great!” It disturbed me. I hope they aren’t doing that to their kids, too. I’m pretty confident this is the result of some trapped water leftover from his weekend swim and some combination of anti-fungal and antibiotics should solve the problem.
SAD EYES
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[Seven] I could (and probably will) just write a whole post about how much we have loved (and learned) in having a dog for almost six months. In the meantime, several of the points from this list are really hitting home for me. (Also, there are whole lists of videos on YouTube where military service-members reunite with their dogs. I accidentally watched one of them right before Bible study a few weeks ago and was late because I had to go downstairs and redo all my makeup afterwards. Then I cried when I put Max in the kennel and he looked at me with the sad eyes. It was rough.)
happy max
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Hope you all have a wonderful weekend! We are hoping to enjoy some time in the sunshine with Max, evening bonfires, and have hopes of getting LOTS of painting done inside and outside the house. (It’s about time!)

foggy

/ abby hummel / 1 Comment

There’s not as much goin’ on in my head as I really think there should be, and I’ve been reminded multiple times in the past few days that “pregnancy brain fog is a real thing.” I’m not sure if I can blame my mental fog on the baby as much as the fact that I’m conscious of my caffeine intake, and everything I’d consume gives me heartburn anyway. Additionally, Aaron is working long, long, long hours. Maybe 4 extra per day MORE than we had been hoping for. Thus, speaking mostly to a dog all day is not particularly mentally stimulating for me. We’re desperately hoping this is not permanent, as three straight years of this (with a city commute before reaching the wife, baby, and doggie at home!) is not generally the way to create a satisfactory life for anyone involved. My brain feels a lot more worn out than usual, and I can’t even blame something like a busy college semester for this sad fact. So, Aaron’s frustrated by the excessive demands of his job, I’m frustrated by my lack of a job, and we’re both unreasonably jealous of the other person. Everything’s a little hazy here.

In this foggy state, “The Lesson of the Chickens” still holds true: when you’re pressed on every side, you probably need to do something that restores and enriches you even though you definitely don’t have time for it. (If you did have time, you would already be doing it and then you wouldn’t be under so much pressure in the first place.) This means right now the kitchen looks like a grow house for the vegetable garden we were “certainly not” going to plant this summer, I’m priming the trim even though that time would be “better spent” job hunting or piano recruiting, and I’m doing some cute (but not necessary) baby/house crafting.

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That being said, the house and yard still feel foggy in many ways. Nothing is really “done,” so I’m trying to focus on finishing the little projects we’re juggling (mostly painting some furniture and getting pictures up) to power me through for the bigger ones, like painting the trim and ceilings. This also makes me feel funny about showing pictures since everything is absolutely in progress! Also, it’s getting a lot easier to have a young dog, but pulling out some of our old stuff and keeping the stuff we do have looking nice seems a little pointless with Max at the large puppy stage. (Especially if the baby is 2 when we sell this house, I will have a puppy or a toddler the entire time we live here… is it worth unpacking those awesome ceramic blue candle holders I used all my 24th birthday money on? Big questions in life right now, I tell you.)

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(Here’s hoping some white paint will make drastic improvements for our terrible trim and foggy, frustrated outlook on life!)

“It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.” – Samwise, in Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. 

reading round-up (3.28.14)

/ abby hummel / 5 Comments

Max and I are making the most of a few days on our own while Aaron has meetings a few states south of here. It is very Always-Winter-Never-Christmas-ish outside, so I am trying not to be jealous of his travels. I have plenty of wool socks and a cute puppy to keep me warm, which remind me not to complain about the otherwise minor annoyance of not seeing leaf buds or blades of grass even though it is April next week.

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Despite my constant care and affection (and occasional rule-bending) throughout the week, little Max definitely likes Aaron best and mopes around when he reaches bedtime without SpaceDad’s return. We still call him “Little Max” all the time even though he has clearly outgrown his nickname. We might be yelling it out the backyard next year even if he’s 100 pounds by then.

depressed max

I had a marvelous list of links to share, which I have been saving up as I find them… and they are lost somewhere in the great blue yonder because my phone is smarter than my computer. Bummer. Here’s a few things I can remember from that list all for your reading pleasure. Enjoy, and happy weekend!

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I especially love reading blogs written by people I actually know, and this series on Fashion & the Gospel from Emily is really encouraging. Although I’m aiming to get by spending less than $50 on maternity clothes (a wild success so far with gifts, sacrificing older stretchy clothes for the cause, borrowing from friends, and GoodWill!) so I’m not exactly highly fashionable these days, she offers a lot of food for thought, particularly in the original purpose of clothes: “to cover, and in so doing, reveal God’s grace…”
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One of the other benefits of having awesome friends is that they also have other awesome friends you can meet.  Amanda, who is funny, loves great stories, and has a too-adorable red-haired toddler who could easily be mistaken for a little dolly, is friends with one of my old college room-mates. She wrote some great thoughts on my all-time favorite reality TV show enterprise – MTV’s “16 and Pregnant/Teen Mom” – and I’m really challenged to think about ways we might “step up” to support younger parents like the ones documented in those shows in the coming months and years.
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The shared level of frugal sense in our marriage is extremely high. Every family expresses this differently, but we were raised with very similar senses about how lifestyle should relate to income. This has come in very handy since basically NOTHING IN LIFE has turned out like we planned during our engagement, including grad school, jobs, etc., so we’ve been rocking out the not-quite-Dave-Ramsey-style rice and beans life for several years and will continue to do so for at least the foreseeable future. We’ll be fine. The only thing that has been really annoying to me? The pressure to use coupons. I know they can save you big money. I tried being a “couponer” for two weeks and spent my entire weekend running around to different stores. I ended up with two years worth of razors, three tubes of toothpaste for the price of one, shampoo that smelled funny, and a shelf full of cereal we don’t like. I didn’t spend more than usual, but that’s two weekends of my life I will never get back. Articles about keeping up couponing momentum make me want to break out in hives. But… I have discovered this marvelous couponing app called Snip-Snap and now I can save money (yes!) while mooching off other people’s coupon-clipping (yes!). I can quickly browse through the multi-use coupons other users have uploaded in search of only stores I visit or items I need, and I just show the barcode on my phone’s screen at the store to SAVE. Worth checking out, for sure!
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I thought this article about how badly kids need “wildness” in their upbringing was really fabulous. We have always said we want to be parents who aren’t all, “Stay on the side of the playground where I can see you, don’t go outside because there are BUGS OUT THERE, keep yourself off that thing because you might fall and get bruised,” and it’s encouraging to see we are not crazy in wanting kids to experience a little grit and risk. We’ll see how this works out in real life, but we do actually have a firepit in the backyard here…
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It’s been hard to know how to handle talking and sharing about the coming baby. If it had been up to me, I might… I don’t know… never have said anything, to anyone, at any time, about being pregnant until the baby was born. This is the custom in some cultures, and I totally get it. Sometimes I wish it was like that here, too. I still remember (most vividly) how awful it felt to navigate pregnancy announcements, baby talk, and pictures of bellies. Too many years of frustration, never knowing if it would provoke some hard reaction even when I didn’t want it to happen. Way too many women I love are still in that angst, so I’m not going to be doing much “pregnancy progress updating” or “picture posting,” (a great post on that is already written by Housewifespice!). But we obviously can’t ignore that this seems to be happening, and Aaron is good to remind me that the point of it all isn’t me, it’s the baby. And so, I’ll pop this one up here to celebrate the gift that is our daughter — yep! — coming this summer.

22weeks

there are two girls in this picture!

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[linking up this week with 7 Quick Takes at Conversion Diary!]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reading round-up (3.14.14)

/ abby hummel

I did a little painting this morning and ended up with more help than I bargained for…

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… I suppose I’ll be saving big projects for kennel time in the future!
There will be looooong-awaited house updates coming soon, but I wanted to say a quick thanks for all the love & prayers from the past few weeks and offer some reading and laughs for your weekend.

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Since there’s been an upswing in talk about pregnancy and babyloss around here, I’ll recommend Why Miscarriage Matters if You’re Pro-Life and Pregnancy After a Miscarriage for further reading on the subject. I appreciate how the first article calls out a lot of hypocrisy in the way most people talk about miscarriage, and the second highlights some of the special challenges for women who are blessed with a pregnancy after losing a baby. Good thoughts in both!
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I discovered the wonderful world of exercise videos on YouTube and it’s been a great way to stave off insanity while indoors for months at a time. My sisters and I have been long-time fans of the 10-Minute Pilates series, so I was excited to find the model (mix-and-match 10 minute segments for your own custom workout that is as long or short as you want) had branched into some pregnancy yoga sessions available for free online. Max was not cooperative during my warm-up attempt this morning. Apparently “namaste” has too many syllables for a puppy to understand.
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Tsh Oxenrider (can I just say for a minute how cool her last name is? So Oregon Trail hip!) has a great blog called The Art of Simple, and she wrote a post about our new theme-word, Risk, which I found very encouraging. “Living a good story means risk.”
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Tsh also had a great post about saying “no” to yourself, which is exactly what we do during Lent. Ann Voskamp has a great one about hearing “no” and how we respond — good stuff all around.
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Though we don’t have a dishwasher right now –the internet does not have the space to deal with my first-world whining on this topic– and I don’t feel bad about how hard it is for this lady to load and unload her dishes, I really needed the main idea she talks about: adjusting everything to make your dreaded chore easier to improve performance. As silly as it seems…. switching the side of the sink where I set the drying dishes makes it seem a lot easier to get the job done! Baby steps, people.
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Finally, speaking of baby steps, I’m a little bit in love with this adorable video…

Cute!
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Happy weekend!

various updates

/ abby hummel / 7 Comments

I really do not want to beat the dead horse of complaining about the 2014 Polar Vortex, but this week we can celebrate that overnight on March 3rd it stayed… above zero all through the night! I know, it’s practically the subtropics. After properly bundling up, I only lose feeling in my fingers when out for walks with Max now, not my fingers AND toes AND knees like I would in chillier temperatures.

The Max Update: 
This gentle giant weighed in at 35 big ones for his four-month checkup, and he is perfectly capable of getting anything he wants off the dinner table or kitchen counter. (I just found him licking the cutting board I had set in the sink after slicing a thawed venison roast into stew cubes.) For reference, his brother – our “second pick” from the litter and one of the bigger pups – is 23 pounds, so we are expecting him to be massive as an adult. He is fully house-trained (hallelujah) and when we keep him well-exercised, he is a delight to have around. My biggest fear right now is that I might love Max more than the baby after it’s born.

middlemax

The Baby Update: 
Surprised by that news? In a good way? Us, too. My official due date is July 31, but I am very determined not to be one of those people who complains about “still being pregnant” after their due date, so I’m trying to mentally prepare for going overdue at the height of summer. I’m also mentally counting down the days until reaching “viability,” where the baby would have a chance at surviving if I had to deliver early, and I’m only just now hitting the point where I don’t regularly dream about holding a baby while drowning in blood or planning baby funerals. I know the pre-term labor, NICU, stillbirth, infant loss, late miscarriage, etc., statistics, and my past experiences do not give me a “get out of the bad luck club free” card in any of those areas. I’m taking lots of medicine. I have to get lots of shots, which completely eradicate any “2nd Trimester Energy Surge” I was hoping for. I’m at a higher risk for future bed rest. I still don’t feel very “excited” most of the time, which I feel weird about. In some ways, even though I can feel it kicking and swimming around, this baby seems less real than the other ones. I’m frustrated that I’m quickly approaching another due date half-way pregnant and not all the way there — though several times before I have hit that milestone without being pregnant at all and I think that’s probably worse. We were supposed to discover the baby’s sex at my last appointment, but the baby was very modest and wouldn’t give us a peek of any private areas, so all we know for sure is that Aaron and I have a stubborn baby. (Please, stifle your laughter.) Lots of weird, hard feelings? Yes. But joy, too, and awkward jokes about pregnant ninjas when I have my black long-johns on, sighs when Max wants to sit on me to hug the baby bump, laughter during lighting-speed sprints to the bathroom, and high-fives when we find ways to save on future baby expenses. This feels scarier for us than it might for some people, but there is much love and grace in all this, and we are overwhelmingly thankful!

The House Update:
There will be pictures soon! But for now, we are exercising some mad domestic MacGyver skills and doing everything we can to fix a few things up for free. We’ve already installed new kitchen lights — which make the whole place feel better — and I have high hopes about my $3 bathroom redecorating plan for the upstairs bathroom.

The Rest-Of-Life Update: 
This probably deserves it’s own post as well, but we have been so blessed with a warm welcome to this area already! Being only a few hours away from our old town means we’ve had a few more friends-and-family connections, and being a bigger city means we’ve been reconnecting with old friends from Hillsdale, too. I hopped in to a community Bible study class right away, and we have tried to be really proactive about visiting  churches, which seems to be paying off. Our neighbors seem reasonably friendly despite the chilling temperatures, and Aaron is enjoying the work he does even though the commute is a beast in icy conditions. Still no favorite pizza crust!

So – that is how we are falling forward (sometimes more successfully than others) into the newness of these moments God has given. It’s hard, weird, scary, good, happy, sad, silly, annoying, lonely, funny, and exciting. Sometimes all at once, even. But those good parts are becoming more prominent and  I’m very thankful to be moving every day closer to spring!

“Oh, that we might know the Lord! Let us press on to know him. He will respond to us as surely as the arrival of dawn or the coming of rains in early spring.” -Hosea 6:3

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(Looking forward to Spring for sure! It HAS to be coming. And everyone who knows how tall Aaron is should be impressed by this picture!)

stirred by that Ghost

/ abby hummel / 12 Comments

(I’m still in enough of the puppy honeymoon that I think everyone must want to see pictures of this little guy all the time…)

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Yes, he is sitting on the couch in a bold moment of naughtiness. Hopefully those moments are becoming less frequent. We’ll see.

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Some of the scariest blessings of the new adventure have been wrapped up in anticipation of another very cute little addition to our family. It’s still sad to think about not having a baby this spring, but my doctor assures me we have no reason to doubt this new little one is on track to join us by the middle of August. (I don’t quite believe it myself yet!)

There are still plenty of questions and fear coming with this joy. I have been thinking of this Sabbath poem from Wendell Berry quite often:

A child unborn, the coming year
Grows big within us, dangerous
And yet we hunger as we fear
For its increase: the blunted bud

To free the leaf to have its day,
The unborn to be born. The ones
Who are to come are on their way,
And though we stand in mortal good

Among our dead, we turn in doom
In joy to welcome them, stirred by
That Ghost who stirs in seed and tomb,
Who brings the stones to parenthood.

(Wendell Berry – Sabbath 1982, V, “To Mary”)

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(New baby last week, growing strong at four months!)

As you do not know the way the Spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God, who makes everything. – Ecclesiastes 11:5, esv.

Please keep praying for us, but even more for others suffering under the heaviness of any sort of baby-waiting.

hearing and seeing

/ abby hummel

I’m not wildly proud of this, but moving to the Arctic without lots of social commitments yet means the TV has been on quite a bit more than usual.

Aaron won a huge plasma television in a drawing a few years ago. He was hyperventilating when he called me with the news, and the voicemail he left me about it was so scattered that I honestly thought he had been in an accident. I was eating lunch with a friend and we stopped to pray for his safety. After planning to sell it for a few hours… we caved and kept it with no regrets, immediately surrendering the old clunker we inherited from my parents. (This was the one they bought when I was 7 and we went from a no-television house to having one so we could watch VHS tapes for educational and religious purposes. In the years since I moved out, they built a special theater room in their basement with a huge flat-screen tv and zillions of channels. Of course.)

This story gets shared because I feel like I need to apologize for having a nice TV. It seems silly to have it when we are so thrifty about most things and we would both like to say we are not “TV sort of people.” In our minds, we read books, listen to music, enjoy a drink, and speak of the Higher Things in the evenings. Aaron has insisted that we will start doing Shakespeare nights sometime. I don’t think either one of us has read a line of Shakespeare since college. With time, this glorified vision is slipping away and we’re slowly accepting our old married, frugal, suburban reality, so we were excited to see that our makeshift antenna picks up more than three broadcast stations.

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Mostly, this means when Aaron was gone for a weekend, I snuggled up on the couch and turned on my old guilty pleasure, The Bachelor, for “Sean and Catherine’s Wedding.” I really bristle against sentimentality — I had to tell Aaron being cutesy with the notes and flowers and nicknames when we were dating was just too much for me — but I loved watching this couple get ready for their wedding and share about their faith openly. I thought the ceremony was beautiful and appropriately touching until it got to the vows. I almost lost the will to live. She said being in love with him made her feel like she was overflowing with love sprinkles. I had just been reading about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and tried to imagine how he would have delivered their wedding sermon.

“It is not your love sprinkles that maintain the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that maintains your love sprinkles.” (Adapted from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s wedding sermon in Letters and Papers from Prison.)

the bachelor

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As I cannot yet get my dog to carry on a conversation, my daily company comes, primarily, from Minnesota Classical Public Radio. Public Radio is known for it’s deadpan reporting, which is fine until they get to the weather. I have a really hard time with the fact that there is no emotion detected when someone mentions we’re under windchill advisory until noon for the FIFTY-BILLIONTH TIME THIS YEAR.
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This our second Winter Olympics as a married couple, watched with enthusiasm from the comfort of our white couch. We do our part to match the athletic vigor in snacking. Yes, we plan to sit and watch all sorts of sporting events while shoveling snacks into our mouths with record speed and agility. It’s our tradition. This is also a great time to talk about what you would call any future kids, because you can try to figure out if they seem like “Gold Medal” quality names. Or maybe you decide against one because it sounds a little too “figure skate-y” or “bobsled-ish” and you’d rather evoke a curling or downhill ski slalom vibe. (We might be the only people who do this.)
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For me, the Olympics is a great combination of pride in Team USA and celebration of sportsmanship in general. A favorite Olympic moment so far? Men’s downhill mogul last night. Just watching the moguls makes my obliques hurt! Though I have never skiied downhill in any way, I have watched enough Winter Olympics to feel like I can recognize skill and excellence in some of these events. We rooted for the American while he competed, of course, but watching Alex Bilodeau (Canada) nail every aspect of his run was breathtaking.  I probably shed a tear when he told reporters he competes in honor of his brother who has Cerebral Palsy. I was happy to see him win the gold medal for the excellent skiing alone, but his words made it even sweeter to cheer him on.

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A long winter and watching the Olympics are making me really excited for the coming days when I can enjoy walking Max for the sake of moving and being outside and not just braving the wind in hopes that he might calm down for a while afterwards!

pup snippets

/ abby hummel / 2 Comments

As expected, getting a new puppy right after moving has been a great way to start settling in to our new community. I take him on walks several times a day, which is great for improving his behavior and my mental health. While we’re out, we chat with the retired guys shoveling sidewalks, we meet the girls waiting for the middle-school bus who think he is “sooooooo precious!” and we explore new parts of the neighborhood. As it gets warmer and our walks get longer, this will start getting even better.

We’ve also ventured to the dog park on the edge of town, and have therefore been introduced to some of the drama of being “pet people.” There are the people who tell me it’s okay for Max to jump on them when I have just chastised him, because “he’s just a puppy.” I have seen an untrained Labrador knock over a child, which is unacceptable for a domestic animal, so please excuse me while I teach my dog to behave better than yours. Others make snide comments about how “you know what you’re getting because all Labs look the same,” and tell me they fell in love with their rescue dog just before he was going to be put down, which makes me feel like I should reassure them we worked with an ethical breeder and that strong breeding lines benefit dog owners everywhere. I usually smile and tell them their dog is wonderful even if I think it looks like, well, a real dog.

And crate training is apparently very controversial, too. Some dog owners think it’s awful and abusive to “lock your puppy up in a jail cage.” In contrast, I feel great about establishing myself as the head of the pack by teaching Max it’s a privilege to be in the house with me, and that he likes playing by himself in there anyway.  I don’t even want to know what people would say about shock collars on the little guy if it is needed when we start retriever training this spring.

Sometimes it’s a bit of a dog-owner-eat-dog-owner world out there.

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Maybe it’s because I’ve home by myself all day for a month, but I feel like I really have a sense for what Max would be saying to me if he could speak.
“No biting! That hurts me!”
-“Yep, sorry. I know that.”
“You can chew a stick or sit by my feet.”
-“I’m just licking my stick and your sock now. Licking, licking, lick/nibbling, licking, it’s more of a tooth massage than a bite anyway, licking, you don’t have to notice this bite, licking, licking with mouth on you, BITING, OK I’M JUST BITING AND I’M NOT ASHAMED.”

God must think I am such a puppy sometimes, too.

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Though Max is still naughty, and what he has gained in maturity just barely compensates for the fact that his increased size means he’s more powerful in disobedience, there are still so many wonderful moments where we all get to enjoy life in our new home. My friend Bethany reminded me that living harmoniously with animals is nature as it was truly intended. We are reclaiming a bit of Eden and proclaiming a bit of heaven, and we’ve been soaking up all these wonderful moments.

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Whoever coined that phrase about “Biting the hand that feeds you,” was most definitely thinking about raising a puppy.

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