A 5-year-old's monologue

My Suzy doesn't realize she's recording, so she thinks her camera clicks are snapping pictures.
 

On the way to Montgomery

We’re driving down the country headed to Motgomery, Alabama to see our friends, the Jecks. We’re going in a way that runs against many of our ideals. Instead of taking the trip slow and drinking our country in with long drafts, we’re zipping along. We’re sticking to the unnatural and boring interstates opposed to the beautiful, intriguing countryside. Right now, in fact, we’re in Louisville, just 30 minutes from Wendell Berry’s Port Royal, Kentucky, a place whose beauty and significance I have read and thought much about. But we’re not stoppin’ to see, baby.  Not this trip. We’re blazing right past at 70 miles an hour. Instead of packing meals or getting supplies at small-time grocery stores we ate at a Dairy Queen and got coffees at McDonalds. Our Days Inn is within earshot of the zooming cars of I-65.

At some point, our interests and the kids’ needs come into competition. Here on this trip, their needs win. We find that as much as we need to live out what we believe, our kids have greater and more urgent pulls on our energy. They desperately need our training – a big job that takes all our attention. Suzy needs to feel protected and to be heard by her mommy and daddy. Eli needs to learn that apologizing first and then biting his brother just doesn’t fly. Isaac needs to hear when told to change his undies, “I already changed them once this week” isn’t an acceptable stance. And Leeli needs to stop every few hours for her mama’s milk, which means that the trip is long enough even on the interstates.

So instead of beholding the beauty outside our van, we’re focusing on the beauty within it. And there’s is a beauty as breathtaking as any we’re passing. And it is ours to nourish. 

Family Pictures

A friend of ours from church gave us a family photo shoot as a welcoming gift to Rozalie. Here's a link to her blog where you can see a sampling.

7 posts in 7 days

I've dropped blogging since my Leeli was born and I started a new job (two days later). Leeli's great and the job is squeezing me. My friend told me that if you squeeze a tube of toothpaste, toothpaste comes out, and when a Christian gets squeezed, Christ better come out. I liked that. Christ hasn't come out, though, but that I need Him has.

So I have 4 blog posts that are half done, and a couple more that are floating around in my head. As a way to kick start this SOB, I'm gonna commit to you, my faithful reader(s), to post these posts, however edited and coherent, one-a-day, for the next week. This may mean not going back to delete possibly offensive swear-word abbreviations; it may mean publishing thoughts offensive to everyone I love; it may end up an offense to the written word. But there's no going back, friend(s). This here, is my commitment to you(s).

Rozalie Hope Stipp

Here she is.

Rozalie. Beth's grandma on her mom's side was born Martha Rosalie Polka. She was a wonderful, humble mother to her five daughters. Her husband, Joe Dhondt taught driver's ed. and coached football at a High School in East Moline, Il. When she was in her 40s Martha had a stroke that took away her movement on the right side of her body and her speech. Her life that was only half over was to finish far differently than she had expected. She became dependent upon Joe in nearly every way. Joe took on the responsibility of caretaker, cook, communicator, and sole breadwinner, all with the grace and joy of one who had loosed his life and found it. Joe died five years ago, and Martha has kept on, giving the sweetest smiles, the juiciest kisses, and the most joyful laugh you'll ever find.

Hope. We are raising our family in Little Village, a Mexican neighborhood with many good qualities, but a place also where the presence of evil is thick. We stick out here - sometimes like a beacon, and other times like a sore thumb. We came here not because we like evil or sticking out, but because we have sensed from the beginning of our marriage a call to bring light to the darkness that reigns in Little Village. Satan uses all sorts of principalities in here. Alcoholism, cycles of poverty, prostitution, witchcraft, drug abuse, domestic violence, inequitable education and health care, joblessness, marital infidelity, gang warfare, inadequate places for children to play. The list goes on, but what Satan does with these things here in Little Village (and elsewhere, of course) is bring people to their knees in despair. It is against despair in Little Village that we aim our lives. Saying the name Hope will be a reminder to us that darkness does not get the final say here, or wherever she goes.

Stipp. Even though Rozalie is as much Polka, Dhondt, Dame, Witt, Flint, Mitchell, and Remole as she is Stipp, she is named Stipp, and I am glad. Being a Stipp will first mean that she is raised in our home with her brothers and sister, who already understand themselves deeply as Stipps. This reality will sink down deep into her bones. She is sure to pick up on our laugh that consists mostly of noisy inhalations, our honesty, our love for one another, and our commitment to Jesus, all of which we Stipps have been given by our forbears. We will all tell her that "Stipps are tough," and "Stipps don't quit," just as my dad told me and his dad told him and on and on. And the name Stipp will be a gift, tying her to the past, and telling her who she is.

A Mother's Day Poem

I don't know anything about Billy Collins, but I really like this poem.

parenting thoughts

Like many parents, Beth and I sometimes worry that influences from outside our home will infect our kids. A friend of ours, whom we both respect as one of the holiest people we know, recently assured us that her kids have picked up on her values - even those she hasn't explicitly taught them. This had the ring of something true and got me to thinking.

If kids will pick up on who we are, is there any sense in talking about how to parent well independent of talking about how to live well? Isn't the best advice to parents to get their own lives in order? to rid themselves of unhealthy behaviors and thinking? to be holy?

And then I came across a similar idea in a Barbara Kingsolver short-story, called Quality Time. Miriam, a single mother, is reflecting on a conversation she had with her sister-in-law Janice back when she was pregnant.

According to Janice, parenting was three percent conscious effort and ninety-seven percent automatic pilot. "It doesn't matter what you think you're going to tell them. What matters is they're right there watching you every minute, while you let the lady with just two items go ahead of you in line, or when you lay on your horn and swear at the guy that cuts you off in traffic. There's no sense kidding yourself. What you see is what you get."

Miriam had argued that people could consciously change themselves if they tried, though in truth she'd been thinking more of (her ex-husband) then herself. She remembers saying a great many things about choices and value systems and so forth, a lot of first pregnancy high-mindedness it seems to her now. Now she understands. Parenting is something that happens mostly while you're thinking of something else.











And here's a picture of my boys picking up on their mother's delight in creation, and my girl watching her mother mother.