God-loving, heart-centered. Poetic, philosophical, and practical. Rural homeschooler & homemaker.
Joined December 2022
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A woman weaves the fabric. And she knits and she stitches.
Nowadays, few women do that handwork. But the fabric of society still needs weaving.
It is the knitting together of a household. It is the stitching together of people into a family, a clan, a neighborhood, a village.
People do not connect merely because they live close to one another. A family living in a single house can become strangers. A family spread out in a single city may never see each other.
Never seeing each other is easier.
Coming together takes work. Consistently. Insistently.
There must be a place, a reason, and a call.
Someone must call everyone together.
A lucky family has a woman who knows how to weave, stitch, and knit them together. She calls together the loved ones, pulls them out of their isolation. She keeps a place for them to come to.
She tells them why to do it: It’s Thanksgiving. It’s the weekend after Thanksgiving. A baby is coming. It’s a birthday. It’s almost Christmas. It is Christmas. Now it’s New Year’s Eve.
Don’t be alone, be with us. We need to eat and drink together. Sing together. We need you to come play your guitar. We need you to bring that pie you make. We need you to bring your kids. You’ve got to come tell us about your travels, your project, your ideas.
When they come, she pulls them inside, links them to one another, and fills up their hearts with such warmth that they feel a little unwilling to face the unstitched cold afterwards. They linger in the doorway, they let just one more conversation start. They spot one more person they haven’t spoken with yet.
They like the feeling of being woven together.
When leaving comes, it feels, even with a loved one in the car, like solitude, compared to that glowing place they just were in. The conversations, the play, the laughter echoes in their hearts.
And it reverberates in the walls of the weaver’s house. The house that is a loom, where she brings together the threads of her family, her clan, and makes something purposeful, needful, and beautiful.
We have to remember how to value those kinds of things that cannot be standardized, measured, and quantified.
You were promised liberation, but as I sit here looking around at most of our lives as women, it seems to me that we were instead given a mold, we were give a script, we were given standardization.
Women have been completely engulfed by the industrial model of production. But so much of our nature is the literal opposite of this. The feminine body and our nature are deeply cyclical, seasonal, and just unpredictable, yet somehow in the name of liberation we now must become cogs in a never-ending assembly line.
if we want any chance at bringing back femininity and feminine values then we need to ditch this industrial demand of being endlessly productive. This is also why there is such a deep dislike for mothers who stay home, there is nothing more inherently anti-industrialization than the work we do home. There are no quotas or rules, there is no income or numbers to measure. There is no money to be made from our work, and so it is called unimportant.
We were told that liberation meant we would free ourselves from these old outdated expectations of womanhood, and yet somehow, we now find that we need to conform to a standard that was built around men.
And so ask yourself, how can any movement be pro-woman in any sense when it does not even allow for women to just simply be women?
Reading very good books to your young kids matters. It’s also so much more enjoyable for the grownup doing the reading!
This is 100% the parents’ fault and there’s no excuse for it. Preschoolers love AA Milne and Beatrix Potter. Lots of kids can handle the Fairy Books and Grimm before kindergarten. Don’t let them have Underpants and Wimpy Kid garbage or other thin “chapter book” series. They deserve excellent prose and complex characters. Small children can sense the difference, even if they can’t articulate why good literature deserves to be canonical. Shape their appetites young and they’ll crave more than short form video entertainment when they’re older. If you read them EB White, Rudyard Kipling, Ingalls Wilder, James Herriot, Narnia, LOTR, Arthurian legends when they’re in elementary, they’ll be ready to discuss the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, and Dostoevsky with you in their early teens. Also, just because they’re teens doesn’t mean you have to give them access to social media brain rot. Grow a spine and simply don’t allow it.
It is common for feminists to say things like that, despite the scanty evidence they wield.
Whatever attempted data manipulations there are, I know maybe 30 men (friends, family) well enough to know whether they engage in those behaviors. And they don’t.
As is the case with women, the transgressors are few. And far between. And our fairy tales warn us about the witches AND the wolves.
Oh no. I didn’t think about this. What a project I have ahead of me.
Keeping our unaltered civilization building books is so important. Failing a huge personal library, what better than an offline bulk digital storage?
But what will my husband think of my new approach to prepping? We’ll see!
Acceptable reasons to do this to kids are FEW and RARE.
Adults in these situations often think, "My children know I'm unhappy and want me to be happy."
NO.
Your child has no clue you've "grown apart" from the person you gave vows to.
The children feel safe and happy, and the announcement that their family is destroyed comes from nowhere.
Adults, you can CHOOSE not to do this to your children. Unless we are talking about abuse, addictions, safety concerns, etc choose NOT to destroy your children's lives. Do everything within your power to reignite and protect your marriage.
Rural people: How often do you think you hear coyotes in the evening, but it’s actually your neighbor’s children playing pretend?
Tonight, as my kids yelp at the stars, I wonder what the neighbors think they’re hearing. 😂 These are some pretty convincing coyote yelps.
Maybe don’t do it this way. But we should all be oxytocin hacking. Stare into your kids’ or spouse’s eyes. Give long hugs throughout the day. Quality of life will improve dramatically if you’re not already doing these things.
Ok this isn’t looking good. Going to be watching this closely over the next few days.
The U.S. says it's closely monitoring a potential case of pneumonic plague in Russia, after a laboratory worker who studied the disease fell ill and died.
Russian authorities insist there is no cause for alarm, but officials have also imposed quarantines and other anti-epidemic measures at several medical facilities in Siberia.
@GeoffRBennett speaks to @AnnieJacobsen for more.
Honest accounts by daycare workers are really important.
Every time someone who worked in daycare is honest with me, I hear the same thing. “There was so much crying, all day long, and that was the hardest part.”
That’s what I was told recently by a young woman who worked in a good, popular daycare for babies.
When I was 14, I assisted at a daycare during summer break.
The first thing I learned was that the children did not want to be there. I had never gone to daycare myself, so I was surprised. It looks like it would be fun when you’re older. Lots of toys and activities.
But little children don’t like it. They may put up with it, might even have a little fun sometimes, but none of them preferred daycare over being home. Not a single one.
They all wanted their mothers. They would stare at the door. We would try to distract them. Some would cry all day long. Some were constantly angry.
I should add that this was a luxe newly built daycare in a small Nordic town where everyone knew each other way back. Not a bunch of random strangers.
The nannies knew the families, but the children still didn’t wanna be there. That was irrelevant. The parents needed the daycare. Nobody asked the children what they wanted. But we could all see it.
After working in a daycare, I could never enroll my children in one.
At a small scale, many of us can provide a viable off-ramp from feminist girl-boss culture to being a SAHM. We can encourage the women around us, and remember that we are representatives of this life choice.
I have a friend who is marrying rich. She is extremely sweet and gentle. She is going to be a great wife and mom.
When she told me she got engaged, she was also speaking about how her fiance had said she didn’t have to work.
She mentioned this almost in a whisper and said she felt bad. There was pressure coming from her (boomer) mother and an implication she was failing for choosing to be a stay at home wife and mom. She’s college educated after all!
So I sold it to her as a privilege, as prestigious, as a responsibility. It’s high-class, wealth, status.
Since then she’s quit her job to focus on the wedding and the marriage. Huge weight off her shoulders, she’s much happier. When she told me she quit her job she was again almost embarrassed but I just smiled and encouraged her.
A lot of women are begging for permission to stop pretending they are a girl boss. They are driving themselves crazy because they don’t see a viable off ramp from the feminist girl boss indoctrination that allows them to save face socially.
So when I get a chance I elevate this. I wonder how to do it at scale.
And if dinner is too intimidating, inviting friends for a weekend afternoon is great also. Do it between meals.
Let the kids play and just have sliced oranges and crackers for the little ones. Offer adults canned soda or coffee. Easy peasy, and really quite delightful.
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Ananda retweeted
A sufficiently smart person can make a compelling verbal argument for any position. My friends and I used to do this as a game in college. You need a memetic immune system beyond just “reason” or you’ll be controlled by the smartest wordcel you were recently exposed to.
Ananda retweeted
Cutting boards are finally back in stock. 🫡
Why not get ahead on your Christmas shopping? 🐝
Humming Meadow cutting boards coated with our own beeswax are now available in the shop!
These are handmade by @Gallo_Woodworks and the darker ones use cherry milled by @WadingSmith!
Dimensions and pricing at HummingMeadow dot com.
Want to know why my kids are a bit messy? It’s because I’m a bit messy. It helps that my husband gently points this out now and then.
For real, I’m seeing that I’m not able to manage so much stuff and I need fewer things! So these nail polish bottles I let out are going in time out, and this clutter of mine is getting donated or trashed. 😅
Be the change you want to see in your home, right?
Are we respecting items (and the money it took to buy them) if we leave them scattered, perhaps some without lids, after we use them? No. That’s no way to take care of our belongings. The scattered markers start under the dining table. But we know what happens if not picked up. They migrate throughout the house, until someone (an adult) either collects them or, not having the time to escort this plum purple marker back downstairs to its bin, throws it away.
And are we respecting our parents when we refuse to put things away? No. Mom and Dad are working, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of these kids. There isn’t enough time for everything, and time spent cleaning up things the kids toss around is time not spent reading to them, or sleeping, or taking care of something else important.
We should respect our things by taking care to put them away. If we have so many things that we cannot take care of them, we should have fewer things. We will start with these markers that you used this morning and are still under the dining table at dinner time. Clean them up, or we will put them in the trash.
(That’s the logic.)
It doesn’t even need to be THAT old! Pre… what, 2010?
reasons to read old books:
1. definitely not written by AI
2. written by people who were NOT doomscrolling
3. written for readers who were expected to have long attention spans
4. will give you useful points-of-view that have been forgotten
5. vetted by time
6. will give you access to words, arguments, and ideas that are unavailable in the current discourse
7. will give you a panoramic historical view of what changes across time, and what does not
8. if you're an artist, old books will enrich your set of creative references
9. old books free you from the gravitational pull of the Current Thing
