relationships – Page 24

Blessings of Habit, Good ol' days, Homemaking, Inspiring, Pre-schoolers, Who's the mom here?, Womanhood

You CAN Can – Help!

Posted on July 21, 2011November 25, 2013 by Katharine

Canning, Gardening, and Kids – Oh, MY!

Since we’ve been on the subject of canning all week, let’s talk about canning and children.

Children who are old enough ought to help. Little ones ought to stay away. Too much is going on for you to trust yourself to watch them carefully. All that blanching and lugging jars adds a safety factor with which they are too young to cooperate, and one act of confusion or disobedience could be disastrous.

So draw a line and make it stick. This is a time when high chairs, play pens, door gates, etc., are proper for the safety of precious little ones.

Let me tell you how we enlisted our children’s help in the garden when the days were blistering hot. We woke them at daylight, and had them dress quickly and go directly to the garden with us. Everyone had an assignment, only 30 – 45 minutes worth of work.

Each one managed his own row, which he kept weeded and proudly displayed to guests. Really, the garden looked good.

The youngest one’s work was to play nearby without walking on garden plants or eating dirt.

Then it was back to the house for our reward. On these days we would have treat-type breakfasts such as cantaloupe and ice-cream, oatmeal raisin cookies, fruit juice popsicles, strawberries on cereal, frozen chocolate-dipped bananas, cheesecake with blackberry sauce—whatever they considered rare and delightful. They loved it! They knew how hot the world would be by 10:00, and they seemed to appreciate my organizing things this way.

Then if we HAD to work in the heat, we would take quart jars of ice water with us and drink straight from the jar. They loved this, too. When such hot work was done, their daddy would throw them squealing into our large stock tank (which was kept for the children, only, and was un-licked-upon by any livestock) and they had water play in their work clothes.

These types of rewards were the heartbeat of our children’s summer gardening memories. They are adults, now, and still remember it with smiles, still do gardening, themselves.

Sometimes they fussed a little or grew competitive, but often the sweet sounds coming from the early morning garden rivaled those of the birds.

Tomorrow: recipes for the surplus!

Blessings of Habit, Good ol' days, Health, Homemaking, Inspiring, Who's the mom here?, Womanhood

You CAN Can!

Posted on July 18, 2011April 8, 2016 by Katharine

Rotel, carrots, pumpkin, tomatoes, beets, tomato soup, pickles, and green beans — Rotel, carrots, pumpkin, tomatoes, beets, tomato soup, pickles, green beans, and more pickles.

I remember canning.

Mama had jars, lids, rings, spoons and pans all over her huge kitchen. She let me hand her the “rings” (screw bands) which I wore like bracelets up and down my then skinny arms. The temperature in there had to be at least 100 degrees, but I do not remember that. I remember her praise when I managed to stay focused on my job and hand her the ring on time. I felt so grown up.

I also remember disappointments, especially the cherry jelly that turned out like taffy. MY we loved that. I remember our neighbor, Eula, tanned and in flip-flops, who made her own catsup. And dear old Mrs. Secrest, who always gave me hand-pumped cold drinks from the well inside her dark, quiet house.

For some reason I’ve kept those memories fondly. I’ve tried to resurrect them in my own adult life. I do canning. I make jelly and catsup. We have a well. I want this for my children’s heritage. I wonder why.

It’s not just that the food is better. It’s not only that it is more healthful. And it is not simply that I grew up with it.

It is the soil–the harvest–the glorious, breath-taking heat–the oceans of perspiration replenished by oceans of teas and juices. It’s working together, sharing . . .

Oh! I know what it is! It is the fellowship with those who have gone before and those who are to come, stepping into my place in a long, long line of real people living a real life, marching to the rhythm of summer.

So all my children and I would march down to the garden to harvest God’s blessing for each day.

I hope you will join us. Then together we will all put back something for those special winter days when only that which is straight from the garden will do.

Tomorrow: Six Tricks to Get You out of the Canning Kitchen Faster!

Good ol' days, Home School, Inspiring, Scripture, Wisdom

What Are We Doing?

Posted on July 18, 2011July 18, 2011 by Katharine

Enjoy this, the first published article I ever wrote, over sixteen years ago, for An Encouraging Word magazine, published out of Oklahoma. I got $20 for it, back then!

It is taken from Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 7, and John 12.

Once there was a woman who loved Jesus so much, that she did something so radical, that she incurred such unreasonable wrath from those around her, that the Lord Jesus was pleased to publicly defend her.

What she did was not illegal. She had not stolen anything, nor lied, nor killed anyone in the process of her actions. So why was she censored?

I believe it was because what she did was something that should only be done to God. It was an act of unadulterated adoration, totally unfitting to be performed for a mere human, however good that person might be.

This is what she did: She took something of hers that was worth around $50,000.00 and destroyed it at this man’s feet, all the while crying and kissing him. (He was not her husband.) She did this in public. In fact, it was before a large gathering of his friends and acquaintances.

“But He was God,” you say.

“He IS God,” you add.

True; how easy for us to have such excellent hindsight! But this woman had the gift of faith, Scripture tells us, to know Jesus as Messiah (before that telling moment of resurrection) and the crowd around her did not. Her actions were proper,but her critics simply were unable to agree.

In fact, her critics were embarrassed to the point of making up some fumbling arguments about the poor people in some poor place somewhere. Dollar amounts were rumored around. People were generally appalled.

Do you wonder how this relates to us?

I propose that most home educating parents are doing the same thing. Those of us who realize our children are the most precious things we have, are investing their entire lives at the feet of Jesus.

It is not illegal, but it has caused quite an embarrassed public stir. We hear all the traditional fumbling arguments about cost, socializing, college, etc. They say our children have been wasted and they cannot understand why. We have incurred wrath; we have critics who would love to censor us.

But you are right. He IS God.

By faith, somehow, we are able to know that our actions are proper. The telling moment of high ACT scores is upon us.

Rejoice with great joy! He is pleased to defend us!

Health

She’s Back!

Posted on May 30, 2011 by Katharine

Well, I promised a report from the eye doctor, and here it is.

I do not have glaucoma and I do not have macular degeneration. Whew!

What I do have, though, is somewhat serious: fluid on the eye.

Now if you are scratching your head and thinking ALL eyes have fluid, you are echoing my first comments to the good Dr.

Patiently, the explanation came: The interior of the eye is supposed to contain fluid, yes, but the tissue comprising the perimeter of the eyeball comes in several layers and my excess fluid is between those layers where it does not belong.

This fluid build-up warps the “screen” on the backside of the eyeball and in that way, causes my vision distortion. He says this condition points to high blood pressure, which mine was not great, but satisfactory while I was there in the office. So we are puzzled, but will find the cause.

At least it is something that is fixable. He says once we determine and eliminate the cause, I might find improvement, or else he can treat it at that time. Yea!

So, all you who have prayed, please keep up the good work as I try hard to be in better health, whatever that means, to keep my vision.

To the rest of you, I say, thanks for putting up with my couple of personal posts.

And to all, I say, “sorry” for taking off so many days for all the running around I had to do regarding this condition. Really good eye doctors are rare and booked to the ceiling at all times. My 9:00 a.m. appointment took until 2:00 p.m. to complete, simply because of the sheer multitude of patients there that day.

And the doctor, for some reason, said, “It’s not going to get better in the future.”

Home School, Inspiring, Sayings, Who's the mom here?, Wisdom

Babies!

Posted on May 24, 2011March 13, 2015 by Katharine

I love babies. Their clean, new innocence makes me want to hold them, smell them, touch them.

I know I am not the only one. Every day, someone wants to chuck a baby’s chin, stroke a baby’s arm, or hold someone else’s baby. In the store, at church, even total strangers smile and want to see the baby or hold their children up so they can see him. Even stodgy, yuppie types give half a smile and nod to the babe-in-arms.

What makes most people give goofy faces and noises to extract a smile back from a baby?

Why—when newborns look basically like little old men—do we croon about how beautiful they are?

And when they get fat and develop a glistening dribble of spit on the lip, why do we exclaim how adorable they are?

I think it’s because we naturally protect. Our nature causes most of us to envelope the innocent and helpless. Some think of the potential lying in that baby carrier and all the life ahead of it. We imagine how confused we must have felt when we were that size. We think of this small bundle as incapable of wrongdoing, worthy of protection and advancement.

Our thoughts mirror those Socrates called for in his dying words, that our children justly deserve our input during their journey to be our rulers.

We naturally call up thoughts like Plato expressed in his Republic, that the beginning is the most important part of any work, for that is when the character is formed.

We echo Aristotle’s Rhetoric where he says pity may well up in those who think we may eventually find some sort of good inside a person.

Even in Homer’s Iliad, we find:

He stretched his arms towards his child, but the boy cried and nestled in his nurse’s bosom, scared at the sight of his father’s armor, and the horsehair plume that nodded fiercely from his helmet. His father and mother laughed to see him, but Hector took the helmet from his head and laid it all gleaming upon the ground. Then he took his darling child, kissed him, and dandled him in his arms…

The thought of a ferocious warrior, removing his armor for a baby, rings true in our hearts. We may not realize we have such bold and universally defended thoughts. However, although written a bazillion years ago, this tender scene resonates with most of us, much as meeting a stranger’s helpless baby in an elevator does.

The fact is that every human with a truthful heart cares about a baby.

We can even say that about dogs: often they sense, they know.

The protection due a baby can alter what we would expect their reactions to be, can surprise us, as does the reaction of a seeming iron-clad soul in a chance meeting with a baby.

All of the above is one good reason not to abort.

And a good reason to homeschool.

Blessings of Habit, Home School, Inspiring, Pre-schoolers, Wisdom

Weekly Photo Challenge: Wildlife

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Katharine

Not much to say, today, but wanted to show off one of my favorite photos. Surrounded by the safety in many uncles (the blue stripes and the adult finger belong to two of them) a young boy learns about which wildlife is to be trusted, a family tradition meant to instill wisdom and fearlessness:

: Boy and Bug

Tomorrow I’ll show you why this post was late.

See ya’.

Cats, Inspiring, Womanhood

Katharizing the Whole World . . .

Posted on May 10, 2011May 29, 2014 by Katharine

I seldom use the suggestions for Postaday blogging but one recent topic has struck my fancy: explaining my name.

Katharine is a popular name, if you count all its variants, such as Ekaterina, Caitlin, Kate, Kitty, and even Karen. Chosen by Russia for its famous queen, by Shakespeare for his famous shrew, and by the parents of the famous actresses, Carlyle, Hepburn, Z-Jones, and Ross, it is now also the top hit on every search engine because of England’s recent joy.

Katharine is also a family name, for me, handed down from my mother’s side. According to her, the family, being Lutheran, chose the name of Martin Luther’s wife for one of their daughters. Eventually it came to me to bear the honor of sharing with this great woman who never really achieved fame, nor wanted it.

We go farther back than that, however, back to the foundations of language, itself.

Specifically, the First Century Greek language contains words like katharismos, meaning “purifying”, and katharos, meaning “pure”. With Greek being the dominant language of much of the western world for some time, it yielded the name, Katharine, a good choice for parents to name a daughter if they aspired to purity for her, and a popular choice if they were educated people.

In the early fifties, I discovered my name means “purity”. I wish I could say this discovery dominated my every act from then on. However, the thought of it did lend me a certain awareness of possessing a backbone, of wondering about purity. Although this awareness resided quietly in the back of my mind for many years, it would occasionally surface, especially when I learned a meaning of any other name. In fact, learning name meanings became a hobby I enjoyed from about age eight.

No kidding, at a young age, I read baby name books from cover to cover, comparing the names of my acquaintances to my perceptions of their personalities, and, later, comparing the names of various beaus and the implications of the meanings, to my future.

Even today, when a person introduces himself to me, I mentally scour the pages of names I memorized for clues to his personality. Fitting or not, it colors my first impression. Still, I also realize we cannot help the name our parents chose and not every “John” grows up to be “Baptist”, although I believe each one is “given of God”, which is what the name means.

This beginning made me a person who feels sorry for people whose names have no meaning. Chosen from thin air because they feel good in the mouth, like pablum does, these names often are misspelled by any definition of phonetics. Often they also imply absence of a daddy in the “family”, and sometimes the absence of even a granddad or great-granddad. It saddens me, for the bearers’ sakes, this having no definition or history, no foundation or instruction for the core of their beings.

Like candy, their names give only short-term gratification and leave behind no sustenance.

I would be unfair, though, if I did not tell you one more thing about those Greek kathar- rooted words: They also gave us our word “cathartic”, which word I will leave you to look up, and to chuckle about, to yourself.