CarpeBanana

I am thankful for my Mum.

And for the Bananalets. Who honored me with stir-fried chicken, chocolate raspberry cake, Dark chocolate raspberry creams (note a theme there?), a potted impatiens, a butter bell, and a millefiore necklace. And numerous cards featuring both interesting quotes and creative spelling.

Psalm 113:9 ~ He gives the barren woman a home,
making her the joyous mother of children.
Praise the Lord!

Before I get rolling, let me just insert (can you “insert” at the beginning?) that the lovely Miss Dance just came and wished me a “Happy Mother’s Day Eve”? So I will pass that along to all of you Moms, “Happy Mother’s Day Eve!”

Mr Music’s venture into Little League is all new territory for me. I only have the fuzziest notion of sports rules so I have to do the same thing I do at classical concerts and look to see if everyone else is clapping (or cheering) to know if we are between pieces or just movements or if anything really good is happening in the game or if it is in fact too much action for the Other Team. So, I do not actually know what “infield chatter” is, though I’ve heard the term, and dictionary.com does not know what it is, either.

But, ignorance will not stand in the way of my having Opinions. No, no. I am not easily deterred like that.

I am amazed at the way the coaches and parents and kids keep up a steady stream of things to say when to my mind nothing is going on except some kids occasionally managing to hit a ball with a stick and usually remembering where to run and less occasionally someone catching the ball and throwing it to where every once in a blue moon another kid catches the ball and the umpire does some things with his hands and Mr Music can get his hot dog or slim jims and cheesy pretzels and we can go home to clean up the grass stains. Yet, all this while, as I am watching (how horrible is it to say that I only care about one child on the field and could just as easily be home admiring how beautiful he is when he sleeps?) they are all talking about stuff and making it sound like they understand mysteries I can only guess at.

There is a steady stream, as I say, of “Good eye!” “Be a hitter!” “Step back” “Where’s the Play?” “Choke up!” “Nice swing” “Come up throwing!” “Swing, batter, batter, batter, swing” “More just like that” “Grab the grass” “Get your glove dirty” “Cover first!”… I am choosing to interpret this stuff as “baseball chatter” and am wondering if the encouragement to the players is like what we get in a different sphere from the angels mentioned in Hebrews 12:1 Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us. Are they in the stands cheering for us? And do we get a chance to “Chatter with the Angels”?

Chatter with the angels soon in the morning,

Chatter with the angels in that land.

Chatter with the angels soon in the morning,

Chatter with the angels join that band.

I hope to join that band,

And chatter with the angels all day long.

My humble opinion is that I am sick of experts. 

So, in their honor, some quotations:

An expert is a person who avoids small error as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy. ~ Benjamin Stolberg

Where facts are few, experts are many. ~ Donald R Gannon

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. ~  Niels Bohr

Don’t be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce haemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world. ~ Colin Powell

There are as many opinions as there are experts. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done and why. Then do it. ~ Robert Heinlein

Many days here end with a square of Dove Chocolate. The wrappers in them have words of little wisdom, but I read them, anyhow.

Last night’s was Life without chocolate is too terrible to contemplate. Rather like the old ad A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine. Or Socrates’ The unexamined life is not worth living.

My thoughts: life could still be good without chocolate, though probably not as sweet for the stockholders in Dove Chocolates. Life is completely fine without orange juice and the accompanying sugar rush, and we can get by with marginal sunshine, being part bookworm and part hobbit. But, the unexamined life? Ack! Where would that leave bloggers?

Things I hate to go a day without:

* saving knowledge of Christ

* something to think about

Like most homeschoolers, we are always on the lookout for ways to “broaden our kids’ horizons” (that is, make them do stuff they are pretty sure they will not like and have no desire to do). So, Saturday night we dragged them off to a gospel quartet concert.

They group was experiencing the classic “technical difficulties.” Miss Language was quick to point out to Mr Music that the Bananalets could form their own quartet, and so, to the mortification of Miss Dance, they began rehearsing… starting with Go Fish Guys’ Christmas and You  followed by (on a roll here now with the Christmas theme) they worked on Babe’s Jingle Bells (la la la  la la la).

Whether for better or worse, the quartet got the microphone working at that point and so the Bananalet rehearsal came to an end. It turned out Miss Dog Lover did not like the way the floor vibrated when the bass singer hit his really low notes. At all.

Dragging them off to this reminded me of this dragging kids to church story I read on someone’s wonderful blog. Only I can’t remember whose, so I found it here on a search. Sorry if it was yours. I retraced as many footsteps as I could remember. I think it was a green background… I hope that is the only kind of drug problem my kids ever have.

Every now and then I realize Mr Music gets it. He really does. He understands when he’s done something he shouldn’t have.

He tends to get a pesky bit of spring allergies. But tonight it was much worse than the norm, eyes watering and red, etc, and I commented that I had picked up some medicine for him at the store and would give it to him in the morning.

At which point he shared with me, “Well, my nose still smells like pepper from smelling that pepper stuff.”

“What pepper stuff?” I ask, thinking he must have been sniffing the hot sauce or the green pepper in the fridge or did he sniff black pepper to try to make himself sneeze or is he so uneducated about flowers he thinks the lilac or bleeding hearts I cut and set on the table are some sort of pepper.

“You know,” he says, failing to make eye contact. “The kind in the closet by the door for spraying on bad guys.”

Oh. That pepper stuff. “Did you spray it?” I ask, beginning to understand the watering eyes and whatnot.

“I may have.”

“Did you press the button?”

“I may have.”

Oh my. He may have learned something.

I hereby give warning to any mothers considering starting classical education with their young children: if you do not want to have (very) weird children on your hand RUN the other direction.

This afternoon I was getting dinner supplies out of the fridge and dropped the pancake syrup. I asked Miss Language (who happened to be nearby) if she wanted any syrup. And in response, she starts paraphrasing Kierkegaard… “I stick my feet into the syrup: it sticks of stickiness…” (I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing…)

Run, I say. Before it is too late.

My blog at Reformedblogs has a cool little filter on it that lets you know how many spam it has caught for you. I think it’s too bad we don’t have lots of those in real life ~ wouldn’t it be awesome and motivating if in real life you were notified when you did something right and thereby avoided a big big problem? For example, you wash your hands and a message pops up on the mirror “Good news: you just averted a nasty stomach flu that would have ravaged your family for the next two weeks” or you stay home on a snowy evening and the news that night features a story “5 Person Fatality Avoided on the Interstate Because Carpe Banana had the Brains to Keep Her Car in the Garage”? That sort of thing.

But for the life of me I cannot imagine what sort of crisis this stable and praying penguin is averting, however, seeing he is wearing his little sailor cap, I hope he is not thwarted.

Some kids are the reverse of bottomless pits and give a lot back. Mr Music is one of these overflowing wells. Tonight, tucking him in I told him, “I love you more than the moon.” He shot back, “I love you more than the sun and the clouds.”

As Mary says on It’s A Wonderful Life when George offers to lasso the moon for her, “I’ll take it.”

He has always been good at sharing his vantage point on the world. Way back when he was two, one summer dusk, he reached his little hand as high as it would go, looked up, and solemnly said, “I will hold my hand up until a single star falls into it.” (It was the “single” that I loved.) And then a few months later, he caught sight of a huge, distant flock of blackbirds, and said, “Look, flying pepper.”

I think God wants us to give back what He has given us, to share it with Him like this. Thank you, God, for the sun and clouds. Thank you for stars and flying pepper. Thank you for children who overflow with love.

Sunday was a very nautical day. It started when I decided to wear my sailor dress and then at breakfast Mr Music said all I needed was a sailor cap and then I’d look like Stuart Little.  I know my sailor dress is a little over the top but I like it and didn’t really think I looked like a rodent. My little brothers had sailor suits when I was about 4. I was jealous of the one that had a wooden whistle with it, even though my brother was Strictly Prohibited from blowing it at church. I remember the Easter morning Mum had dressed him in his white sailor suit and he got into the black jelly beans. Mum was not happy about black jelly bean drool on her little sailor.

Anyhow, there I am already in a nautical mindset, when someone in Sunday school has to mention the word “thwarted” in conjunction with Jonah’s plan to run from God. And, being the word nut I am, I set off on two different tracks, neither one close to the intended lesson, one about how funny it was for him to use a word with a sea-related meaning while talking about Jonah, and the other about what an odd word “thwart” is, sounds like a speech impediment, and what could it possibly come from, anyhow.

So I get home and after dinner, clean-up, visiting in the nursing home, and watching Beyond the Gates of Splendor, finally got a chance to ask my friend at dictionary.com:

thwart   /θwɔrt/ [thwawrt]

–verb (used with object)

–noun

–adjective

–preposition, adverb

thwart·ed·ly, adverb

thwarter, noun

—Synonyms 1. hinder, obstruct. Thwart, frustrate, baffle imply preventing one, more or less completely, from accomplishing a purpose. Thwart and frustrate apply to purposes, actions, plans, etc., baffle, to the psychological state of the person thwarted. Thwart suggests stopping one by opposing, blocking, or in some way running counter to one’s efforts. Frustrate implies rendering all attempts or efforts useless or ineffectual, so that nothing ever comes of them. Baffle suggests causing defeat by confusing, puzzling, or perplexing, so that a situation seems too hard a problem to understand or solve.

Now, don’t you like that? I think the whole idea of “cross” is interesting. What did the cross thwart? Death, sin, Satan’s power. Thwarted.