Home from Babysitting the Taylors

Learned a lot babysitting the Taylors.

First off, I feel quite proud of how well I handled the kids. I'm amazed how just a year in Primary has really kicked me into shape. I managed to be generally friendly but firm all week, I think I balanced "fun" with "authority" in a way appropriate for a family friend slash babysitter. I feel like I picked my battles well.

A few things I learned.

First off, the schedule is freaking awesome. I have been feeling strongly, especially since conference, that Jed is ready to be on a more regular routine. I know he would flourish with everything so predictable, he's just that kind of kid. The problem is coordinating ME. I LIKE my flexibility! And the truth is, I think there's nothing wrong with enjoying it while I can, but with this new baby coming and Jed getting older and responsibilities piling, up, I need to see my life changing and change along with it. It's time to control my day to day living.

This all ties into my personal revelation during conference that I need to start making my day to day living more holy, more organized, more consecrated. The Lord doesn't really do things ad hoc, and if I want my life at home to feel peaceful and sanctified, I need to organize myself, prepare every needful thing. A big part of that is my new cool household binder (need to post on that...) I feel like I have plenty of time and capability to keep my house clean, my kid clean, cook decent food, and still get the important things done, but without careful organization it will never happen.

Also, Ie Mei has a lot less stuff than me, which is highly appealing. Why, why can't I just throw my cereal boxes and vinegar jars out? Freecycle, baby, it's got to be my new best friend.

Taking time to maintain myself is important with a house full of busy, demanding kids. I hardly sat down for four days, didn't read my scriptures. Family prayer didn't happen (blast, didn't happen tonight either...) Didn't read our scriptures as a family, etc.

Which brings me to another important observation, that I REALLY prefer eating dinner at the table, sitting down as a family. This whole kids at the bar up and down and back and forth while mom serves is totally lame. No WAY. I want us to sit and eat and talk. I want to lock the toddler into his booster and make him sit with us for fifteen minutes, dang it, so we can be together. I am still surprised at how much I hated the bar. I always thought I would like that, but it's just so spread out. You can't even look into each other's faces. It's like fast food, but at home. Not cool.

I need to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier. Having two free hours, or even one, before the toddlers woke up was fantastic.

Also, need to make sure I'm scheduling in quality time with my husband.

Boredom really is the mother of useful playtime.

Worried about the future computer usage. Those boys are computer fiends.

School eats up pretty much the whole day. How do you even know your kids?

And, last but not least, I would just like to say how much I LOVE MY BOY. Other kids are great, but no kid rivals my own. He's the sweetest, happiest, most obliging two year old on earth and I am incredibly grateful to be given stewardship over him. The Lord gave me an easy one first so I could get my act together, and I've got three months to do it.

Precondition for the Home

For the intimacy of recollection to be able to be produced . . . the presence of the Other must not only be revealed in the face which breaks through its own plastic image, but must be revealed, simulatneously with this presence, in its withdrawal and in its absence. . . . And the other whose presence is discreetly an absence, with which is accomplished the primary hospitable welcome which describes the field of intimacy, is the Woman. The woman is the condition for recollection, the interiority of the Home and inhabitation.

- Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity

Companion

The familiarity of the world does not only result from habits acquired in this world, which take from it its roughnesses and measure the adaptation of the living being to a world it enjoys and from which it nourishes itself; familiarity and intimacy are produced as a gentleness that spreads over the face of things.

This gentleness is not only a conformity of nature with the needs of the separated being, which from the first enjoys them and constitutes itself as separate, as I, in that enjoyment, but is a gentleness coming from affection for that I.

The intimacy which familiarity already presupposes is an intimacy with someone. The interiority of recollection is a solitude in a world already human. Recollection refers to a welcome.

- Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity

Home

The home would serve for habitation as the hammer for the driving in of a nail or the pen for writing. For it does indeed belong to the gear consisting of things necessary for the life of man. It serves to shelter him from the inclemencies of the weather, to hide him from enemies or the importunate.

And yet, within the system of finalities in which human life maintains itself, the home occupies a privileged place. . . . The privileged role of the home does not consist in being the end of human activity but in being its condition, and in this sense its commencement.

- Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity