Entries in Life

If I would just keep my mouth shut, I could save myself a lot of work.

But no, I had to tell my parents about the quilt family members assembled for my neighbor’s 50th wedding anniversary. It had foot square blocks with an different embroidered picture for each family member. With my grandparents’ golden wedding anniversary looming on the horizon of time, I mentioned it as a gift idea to my parents.

A couple weeks later, my father asked, “how’s the quilt coming along?”
Before my next call to my folks, I went shopping for material.

Initially, my artistically inclined husband considered the quilt completely my project. In my haphazard way, I designed and embroidered blocks for our family.
Those blocks would have been sewn into the quilt – except my sister sent her precisely drawn and stitched blocks for her family. One look at her excellent work and my competitive man began cutting new blocks for our family. He used his talent and created fantastic pictures for me to embroider another set of quilt blocks for our family.

I don’t remember what happened to my unacceptable creations.

My grandmother hung the quilt proudly on the wall in her sitting room.
Ten years later, I made a similar quilt for my husband’s parents and a few years later a greatly modified version for my parents. Then I said I had finished quilting – I preferred cross stitch.

I meant it, too – until I realized I could combine cross stitched pictures with quilting.

Overnight I began collecting old quilting magazines at garage sales and talking about ideas.

If I could just make up my mind what I want to do before I start assembling a quilt, it would take a lot less time. I can’t make up my mind, so my quilts are not so much created as evolved.

I literally have had quilts completely assembled when I realized another cross stitch picture suited the quilt better than the one stitched deep in the middle of the quilt.

Each time, my husband assured me that the one in place would do. Each time, after he left the room, I began ripping out stitches to replace the block.
Replacing a block or two, is one thing. The most recent quilt – which uses a technique I have never tried before – has evolved so much that I have re-sewn some seams half a dozen times.

Before the most recent grandchild’s arrival, I told my husband, “I think I’ll make an “I Spy” quilt,” thinking of the ease and fun of assembling a multitude of uniquely patterned four-inch blocks for the child to discover.
“I thought you were going to make a bottle quilt,” he protested, no doubt thinking of the bundle of fabrics with realistic patterns of hobbies and objects he had recently chosen with the older grandchildren’s help.

Both quilts use small patches of no-two-pieces-alike fabrics. However, an "I Spy" quilt consists of square blocks while a bottle quilt requires assembling the same fabrics into bottles with lids.

I know I said I wanted to make a bottle quilt. I asked him to pick up fabric. But after I read enough about jar quilts to understand the challenge it would be to my beginner skills, I realized I should never have mentioned it.
Since I had mentioned it, our kitchen table conference concluded with the bottle quilt evolving into a “baby bottle and baby food jar” quilt – an even more complicated version of the bottle quilt.

I chose a dark blue background fabric to use between bottles and spent one long evening assembling and remaking one bottle three times before the white material against the blue background and the pale pink fabric of the complicated nipple came out straight and even.

Last week I assembled the bottles into a quilt top. The background of my nearly finished baby bottle quilt is not blue – it is a soft orange and has a much simpler pattern for the bottle’s nipple.

Initially, I set aside deep orange and purple fabrics to create shelves to ‘hold’ the bottles and jars and to back the quilt. Last week, I pulled out a warm brown fabric and used that instead.

The original plan included half a dozen extra things tucked between the bottles – items such as children’s blocks, a teddy bear and a camera. The quilt has none of those.

Over the months of puzzling my way through this quilt, I laid out the completed fabric pictures seven or eight times before I stitched them into place and declared it finished – stood back, studied it proudly and noticed two minor flaws in the arrangement.

The baby won’t care. Her parents won’t know the difference, but my hand keeps gravitating towards that seam ripper.

I expect to have it finished sometime before her golden wedding anniversary.

I have been given an assignment.  The topic is "Why My Husband Disdains Pop Music".

I don't know why my husband should disdain pop music.  There is no way I can explain or rationalize another's likes or dislikes.  Granted, pop music isn't all good, but it certainly isn't all bad.  As long as pop music isn't taken too seriously, then it should be enjoyed for the fun and entertainment value that it provides. 

Today's pop music isn't as good as the older pop.  I tell my children all the time that 80s music rocks!  And it does.  There is nothing academic or stuffy about that decade in music.  Trying to dissect any of that music is like trying to find intelligence in a beautiful woman that can't count beyond 10, and overlooking qualities in her that liven up a party.

Who do you want at your party?  The lovely rocket scientist, cordial, polite,  who can talk incessantly about the latest rocket fuel technology, or the vivacious, smiling sprite that's not interested in shoptalk but is interested in toasting to life. 

My parents practiced hands-off parenting. While my mother helped my dad with the evening milking on the family dairy farm, she would look across the yard into the mirror on the wall behind the piano in the living room. She readily saw the image of any child sitting at the old upright piano. She always recalled with gentle laughter our astonishment that even though she had been in the barn, she knew which child had not practiced.

A family farm promotes early assumption of duties, a strong work ethic and independence. Long before the state would allow my brother to drive a car, my dad spent many hours teaching him to back the manure spreader into the barn. So several years later, when illness kept Dad in the hospital and out of the fields, he assumed his five children: ages 16, 15, 14, 12 and 11 could take over the family farm – especially the important task of cutting and putting up hay into the barn's loft to feed the dairy herd in the winter.

Under the patient leadership of my 16-year-old brother, we did it exactly that.
I mentioned that summer to him, recently. He e-mailed me that, “the hardest part of that summer was not getting the bales in the barn, it was doing the baling. We had an old, round baler that frequently broke down and an old tractor that did not have a hand clutch. The tractor had to be stopped, put in neutral, install the string, wait for the bale to eject from the baler, re-engage gear, move forward until another bale was ready for the string to be installed and then ejected. A tractor with a hand clutch meant you just stopped and waited for the sting to be applied and ejected. The worst part was that after ever so many bales, the baler would break and required all the strength I could muster to repair it.

“The routine of loading the hay was: You three girls stacked the hay on the wagon or rolled the bales closer to the wagon. Burnie drove the tractor and I threw the bales on the wagon,” he wrote.

With no adults around all day, a bunch of kids took over the farm work that summer.
During the day, we worked by ourselves, while Mom went to work in the nearby community. From his hospital bed, Dad provided long distance direction. My mother did not panic about the danger of us working with hay hooks or the erratic baler. She pulled out the family movie camera and captured her daughters hauling rectangular bales over to the hay elevator, lifting them with the hooks and – with a kick of the knee – heaving them onto the elevator which carried the bales to the loft, where our brothers, using their hooks, snagged them off the elevator and built a stack to the barn's ceiling.

At the end of the film, we always laughed that our older brother, 16, came dragging out of the barn, dripping with sweat, while our younger brother, 11, bounced out dry and smiling. Obviously, big brother shouldered the bulk of the work and we respected him as our field boss.
A year later we moved away from the farm that had adversely affected my father's health and settled in Utah. Right after we arrived, my parents began three weeks of 12-hour workdays at the sugar beet receiving center by the railroad tracks. They expected us to unpack, set up the household, register ourselves at school, come home, make supper and get our homework done – all without Mom's magic mirror reflecting our progress.

She didn't need it – she and dad had done their job of parenting. They could confidently step back and trust their children to do what needed to be done, when it needed to be done – without mom and dad watching every move.

Such a celebration of feelings we experience watching our children graduate from 12 years of schooling, ready to leave home, to go to college, to tackle life on their own. The diploma and their age declare our sweet babies have grown-up prepared to handle life. And they will do just that – unless they have ‘helicopter parents’, so named because they hover over their children, refusing to cut the electronic umbilical cord.

Helicopter parents insist contact must be maintained – daily, constantly – with text messages, e-mails, phone calls and frequent visits. If the least bit of something goes wrong, the whop, whop, whop of chopper blades sounds across the campus.

With four grown children who attended four different universities, I know the many reasons for concern. That brilliant student may try drugs, may be caught up in the party scene, may rush to embrace a time without mom or dad’s strong guiding hand to point them away from the temptations of life. They may test different philosophies, get themselves caught up with the wrong group, make really bad choices, encounter some hurtful experience or lose their way.

They might do all of that – but before you reach for the phone to check on them one more time consider the story of Daniel.

There he was, a young man, possibly as young as 16 years-old, newly enslaved in a strange land with a few friends, but no parents, no relatives, no familiar faces of authority from his school or synagogue. But, all of his parents training and preparation remained intact including his brilliant giftedness and leadership. He had what it took to catch the eye of the king’s man.

“The king ordered Ashpenaz, chief of his court officials, to bring in some of the Israelites from the royal family and the nobility. Young men without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well informed, quick to understand and qualified to serve in the king’s palace. He was to teach them the language and literature of the Babylonians.” Daniel 1:4-5 NIV.

Smart, capable and good looking, Daniel had all the requisite qualifications for the scholarship to the University of Babylon along with three of his friends. The four realized the advantage to cooperating with the program. They learned the foreign ways and did as they were told – except when the training and activities crossed paths with their personal faith and beliefs.

So the book of Daniel opens with Daniel negotiating a deal with the king’s own man. Daniel wants his immediate supervisor to allow them a 10 day trial in which they would consume only vegetables and water instead of the rich foods and wines from the king’s table. Daniel and company considered that consuming such would defile them before God.
Reluctantly, the steward agreed. Ten days later all four looked brighter and better than the rest of the class. With that in mind, the steward provided them with a vegetarian diet for the entire three years.

At the end of that time, the king tested all the students and declared the faithful four were 10 times brighter and healthier than all the rest. He gave them good jobs in his kingdom.

In a time without any electronic umbilical cords, four young Israelites snatched from their homes and plunged into a totally different culture, still made good decisions, politely stood up to the king’s chief official and followed their faith. Without a single hovering parent, these four teenagers made healthy, wise choices. Through the rest of their lives, in the face of difficult circumstances and harsh threats to their lives, they continued to honor God and the training their parents instilled in them – long after their parents disappeared from their lives.

With graduation over for this year, spend these few weeks of summer mentally preparing. Prepare to exhibit confidence in your graduate. Step back, let go of their hands and allow them to enter college as the adults they are. Encourage them, pray for them, listen to them, but let them step out, fall a few times, get back up and tackle college and life’s realities without your hovering intervention.

Let them surprise you with what they can do on their own. They might make you proud – if you give them a chance.