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Enjoying the Mundane Routines of Life
Filed in: 0-3 Months, Thoughts from Mom | |
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I hate the word bored. Boredom, to me, means that you do not have the resources inside of your head to occupy your thoughts when there are no outside forces acting to entertain you. The world has a habit of needing to go go go go go all the time. In this fast-food world of reality TV, McDonalds, and self-checkout lines, sometimes we forget to stop and admire the mundane daily aspects of life that make up our existence.
I thought about all this as I was sitting here tonight, in my nice comfy brown leather recliner, listening to the pleasant sounds of my husband snoring on the couch and the creak-creak-click-creak of the Winnie the Pooh swing that holds my sleeping infant. All around me I saw reminders, left-over crumbs of life that we dropped as we made our way through the day.
One day, none of these minute things will remain in our memories. They’re just not things we think to record as we hurry along life’s trail. Why don’t we record them? Laura Ingalls Wilder recorded them, and today, the “mundane things” of her version of modern world existance is read all over the world at bedtime by countless children and adults. Things that occured every day, such as Pa playing his fiddle, or Ma baking bread, doesn’t seem that special when happening in the present, but couple those routines with the passing of a full century, and they now seem special.
How will the people 100…200…10,000 years from now remember us? Will they look at a TV and wonder what that strange looking box is for? Will they discover a monopoly board, and puzzle over what the rules might have once been for this strange children’s game? Will women of tomorrow long for today’s routines of life as us traditionalists currently long for the “days of yesteryear” when women were feminine, and men were heros?
Who knows. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But one thing is for sure - if we don’t record our existance in some viable form - whether it be through scrapbooking, writing blogs, oral traditions, journaling, video taping, or even birthing children - all will be forgotten in less than a century’s time span, and our life will have been nothing more than a puff of wind, vaporized and gone, never to be remembered.
Here are some “crumbs” dropped by my own family this afternoon. Very mundane, very routine, but they say loudly who we are.
After touring through my photos, why not capture some crumbs of your own? Then come back here and leave me a comment with a link to your own post. I’d love to see them!
Here is the book I’m currently reading - Traditions of American Education. I like to balance my studies of homeschooling with studies on the history of American public education from a more positive light. The journal sitting on top is a nice leather one my mom gave me for my 2nd anniversary 2 weeks ago - I just wrote an entry a few hours ago and laid it on the recliner edge. The paper beside it is our car tax bill. It was due today, and when I clicked “send” to pay it online with the debit card, I got one of those danged error pages, so I through the paper down in frustration knowing I’d now have to wait a day or so to see if the debit really went through or not! ….Over near our coffee table, you see Jack-Evan’s block set. He’s not old enough to play with them yet, but his preschool age cousins Jacob & Julia were down from NY this weekend and they played with them. They were scattered all over, and everyone had a great time! The baby bag is just plopped in the space where we plopped it last night. I did search through it a little while ago to retrieve Jack’s nose squeegie bulb.
Here is my library card (well, one of them!), haphazardly tossed on our cherry filing cabinet. It had been on the floor when my mom was over earlier and she picked it up for me. The little push ball puzzle you see behind it was set out just this weekend in an “obvious” place so my neice or nephew would find it and play! (They did!).
Tonight we had a dinner of “summer” vegetable soup (meaning, loads of squash), and cheesy bean burritos. We would have had chicken and dumplings but I promptly burnt them to smitherines 10 minutes after turning the burner on. We always set our hot plates in the middle of the table during dinner on this pampered chef pizza stone my mom gave me. After dinner tonight, I forgot to put my centerpiece back. :) The small teeny tiny poloroid shot you see there near the bottom left was taken after my jujitsu class when I was in high school. Kevin had handed it to me during dinner to see if Jack would try to grasp it. Jack liked the photo, but didn’t care to hold it. He did care to blow bubbles on it though….
Mentioning Jack, during dinner we always have him sit with us as a family, even though he’s only 8 weeks old! Sometimes I hold him in my lap. Tonight we sat him in this little bouncy seat, and had the seat on the table, positioned so he could see us. After dinner, I stored the seat back on this blanket horse behind my recliner.
Ooops! I forgot to put our burrito shells up! We keep them in the fridge.
Jack’s toys…they were played with by his cousins this weekend, and I just tossed them on the counter around 4:30 pm today.
As I was snapping photos, I realized I hadn’t put the soup in the fridge yet. So, out came the gallon freezer bag, and in went the soup. It was delicious, so it’s great that I had some to save!
Our day’s dishes, awaiting their final resting place after tonight’s job well done.
Jack’s letters! He can’t read yet (we’ll give him a few more weeks), so I guess it doesn’t matter that as of this past weekend, they are no longer neatly arranged in alphabetical order.
These dolls were in storage until Friday afternoon when I brought them out to show our Aunt Bev who was here from New York. I made these dolls “from scratch” using thread, yarn, and socks! They’re the “Lisa and Kevin” dolls, made to represent me and my husband. Truly, they look like us, right down to the guy’s little argyle sweater and hat just like Kevin wears to my long typically multicolored hair! I sat them there after showing them to Aunt Bev, and that’s where they are tonight.
…today’s dishrag, tossed lazily beside the stove where it wiped up it’s last spill of the day….
The dog food canister that Kevin left on our washer after feeding the dogs!
Napoleon(a), the boy-turned-girl ferret, peeping at me whilst I was taking pictures. We recently moved him her from the guest bedroom to our utility room so we could have a lot more interaction!
Jack’s medicine (prevacid) that he has to take twice a day for reflux, and his nose squeegie bulb. We had to squeegie his nose for boogies a few hours ago (not to gross you out or anything….)
The bag were the “Lisa and Kevin” dolls were stored. It had been laying on the kitchen table until this afternoon, when I hung it here in an attempt to clean up before Kevin arrived home.
Kevin’s wordsearch book he’s currently working on. He loves these things!
…and last but not least, here’s Kevin. After a lazy evening of dinner, a shower, and wordsearch, he crashed here with some snacks to watch Nashville Star with me (and after that he promptly fell asleep)! My coffee table is quite cluttered now, despite the fact that it looked clean earlier today. It’s nice to have a comfortable “lived in” home! :) The pepsi cup has water in it (we drink water a whole lot), the soup cup..well, I’m not sure what Kevin had in there..perhaps more soup from tonight’s dinner?…and then the bag leaning against it is pizzaria combo pretzles! The tupperware container in front held (notice the past tense) held homemade cookies from Aunt Bev from New York. The science book you see there is an Usborne First Nature Collection Science book. (I LOVE Usborne Books!).
That was a few hours ago, and he’s just now got up to head to bed. His snoring on the couch is what prompted me thinking about this post in the first place.
So that’s that. The usual, the mundane, the routine daily crumbs of our meager existance.
And I love every bit of it!
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