Life is sort of busy with school, church, life on the farm and trying not to get too distracted from responsibilities. Here are a few things that occurred to me this week which will fall into the thinking on the blog category.
I think I have worried too much about who our family is. For instance......members of our family work. I mean there is work to do and so we do it. There is rarely time for recreational reading, tv watching, or generally sitting around and vegetating. To some people this is really cool and to others this has been 'how ridiculous'. So......I have this general paranoia about what other people's opinion is of our weirdness of not acting American. "What, you don't watch tv?" (or at least not the type that is piped in through cables or anteneas). "No," we say and frankly we don't care. Is that weird???? No, it is just us. Our kids are ok with that.
We do weird things like work on projects on the weekends and then......we don't have time to do other things. It doesn't happen all the time but it does happen. There is a dad at our house who likes to build things and tinker around in the great outdoors. Is he weird? Not usually, that is just who he is. Why am I saying this? Because there have been people who have said we are weird and seem to insinuate we need to change who we are. NO WE DON'T, THAT IS JUST WHAT WE DO. If someone thought that my dh would suddenly start playing golf or watching football because that is what they enjoy, then they are kidding themselves. These people are from the past but I think they formed a sense of paranoia about how I react in the present. If there is work to be done than we better get doing it. Can we sit around and be deep thinkers or vegetables on a wim. Not usually. Are we ok with people who can? Yes, of course. I do have to explain to my kids why people enjoy golf but that just stretches THEM to think of what other people enjoy. So this is realization number one.
Realization number two is.....don't laugh......I have a need for quiet on a regular basis. I am happy being on my own for a certain time period of each day. But the obvious problem is, that is not always possible. So I will be ranting the rant to my kids to learn to carry a book with them always and be prepared to entertain themselves by being quiet and not necessarily filling the air with noise. We are a witty bunch but wittiness CAN get annoying. I guess we need to get some more books (kidding) or read the ones we have.
I also have a need to do something creative on a regular basis. I have been craving a good horn playing with my piano playing friend session because making music is SO refreshing to me. Listening to music of the same variety is a close second. Pavarotti died last week and Andrea Bocelli sang at his funeral. Boy I would have loved to heard that. If I am stressed, I put on some Andrea Bocelli and life gets better. A cd full of horn concertos works too. These are just random thoughts to bring you up to date to where Karin's brain has been.
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9 comments:
I think each of us creates in marriage our view of the way the world should be. You and your family can comfortably move in your world and that is great. It's the way it should be!!
Wouldn't it be awful to live a life according to someone else's dream?
The trick for me presbytera, is learning to be comfortable in my own skin no matter how weird we are. It is the people pleasing sin basically. Justify my weirdness etc. I just need to be comfortably me and comfortably us. You are so right about the marraige view. But.....we love others not for being like us but because they are who they were created to be.
It can be hard not to take things to heart when people express their opinions. We, like you, are considered odd because of some of our choices. We don't watch TV either, our kids aren't involved in loads of activities, and we often times don't celebrate holidays like other families. We have a friend who literally thinks we are damaging our kids by keeping them too isolated (we live in a rural area) and because we don't have big traditional celebrations for holidays. I don't usually care what people say but it's harder for me to brush things off when the person saying it is someone I care about. What I've learned by reading other people's blogs is that no two families are exactly alike and the things one person might find odd aren't odd to someone else.
Yes, yes, you and your piano playing friend need to get together!
I have some favorite cd's for relaxing too: anything by the King's Singers, Borodin's String Quartet No. 2, and Renaissance recorder music come to mind as my favorites.
And about needing a little quiet time - that one does make me laugh a little, thinking of your vocation as mother of lots of little people, since little people tend to not have little voices. But seriously, I do understand. You are not weird in craving some quiet now and then. :-)
Heaven's no! I'd think you were weird if you didn't need regular quiet time, lol!
But "weird" is all relative really. People are created as unique individuals so therefore anything that is not the same as or similar to them may be perceived as strange or weird. But I say raise your freak flag and wave it proudly:)
Boy, it's been a busy weekend and I haven't checked back here recently. To Sandy, name a time. To the rest of y'all, I hear you. I was thinking last Christmas that it would be easier to spend the night there and eat all our meals together as a church family. Wouldn't that weird the relations out? But.....it sounds like a good idea. To Kim, my first pastor was very concerned for me when we bought our rural home. He thought I would get lonely - lol! Quiet, when it happens, is just what the doctor ordered.
I hear you about the need for quiet time and creative time. It's what I crave so that I can recharge my batteries. It allows me to serve my family better if those needs are met from time to time.
That phrase recharging my batteries is it! I guess I have thought of that before but I think I would suffer less guilt if I knew it was serving my family better. I know....Lutheran....guilt....not a good combination but it still happens to this finite mommy.
Being thought weird used to bother me. Now I embrace it. :) The latest thing that is weird about us is that our teens--and adult college student daughter--hang out with us. We go places together. We work in the garden or ride bikes together. I like this kind of weird. :)
And I know what you mean about needing the time for creative pursuits. I try to make them useful, too, but sometimes I just have to get out my scrapbooking stuff and play for a while.
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