A Call for Information

This semester at school, I am taking a history course where the entire class is set up on writing an ORIGINAL historical research paper. It is incredibly intense because it requires loads of reading and writing (somewhere between 15-20 hours a week, for a 3 credit class!) but it is the ORIGINAL part that is really throwing me off!

My topic, which is still being revised, is how feminism has affected motherhood between the 1800s and 1980s. If anyone has any books or articles that were written in the 1800s about motherhood or the effects of motherhood, I would really appreciate any information that you could give me. You can post a response or email me. If you don't know anything, could you ask the people around you? I am searching for this information but I fear that I am not going to have enough to write a good paper.

My goal is to present this information in a way that leaves no doubt that motherhood as it was in the 1800s, before feminism messed with it, was a much "better" way to raise children. I am not really writing a persuasive paper here, but I think I can still argue the point a little bit. :)

Thanks for the help!

Update on Katie

My mom flew to New Mexico the other day and so now I have a consistent line of information. Katie is doing fine, she is at home now and the doctors think that the liver condition is a result of the mono. The major concern right now is to get the proper nutrients into her body. She is already extremely thin so she can't afford to lose any weight. Adding this to the other million things that are already wrong with her and my mom says that she is taking about 12 different medications, including pain-killers, everyday. Continued prayers are always appreciated.

Katie Elizabeth...

In other news, my sister, Katie (age 25), is in the hospital with liver complications. She has had a series of medical problems and this is the latest. The doctors do not have a diagnosis though talks of hepatitis have surfaced, they are just waiting for the body to fix itself (apparently, there is nothing they can do for the liver) but after one night at home, she is back in the hospital and now diagnosed with mono. Please pray for her health and healing. She lives in New Mexico and I am not able to visit her. She is, thankfully, a born-again believer of Jesus Christ the King.

Katie and Kelly (and me in the background) playing with some phones.


Katie and Kelly, twins.


My most recent picture of Katie (that I know of), taken Christmas of 2006. Katie is on the left, Kelly on the right (and pregnant with Bethany).

Recently...

My posting has thinned out and that is disappointing to me. There are so many topics and issues that I am learning about and that I want to discuss on this site, but I just don't have time. A monthly post is probably all I will be able to accomplish in the future, if that. My goal is (and always has been) a weekly post, but I have started school in earnest now and I think I can understand to a small degree what working mothers go through! My school schedule is simple, I am able to stay at home with my children because I am going to a 100% online school, otherwise I wouldn't have tried to go to school with my young children. When my husband and I were talking about finances, we decided that I needed to do a little extra work for us to make it every month. Since I get my Montgomery GI Bill, it pays for school as well as bringing in a little extra every month, so essentially, school is my job! Trying to get all my studying and class time done during naps and after the kids go to bed is not working and now I am trying to negotiate activities that will allow me extra time in the afternoon after the chores are done to study. After all that, I have very little time to read extra websites (and blogs) that I love, like Keeping the Home but when I do get a chance, there is invariably something that makes me think that I would like to make my own post about. Instead of going crazy about all these different topics, I am going to make a list of the issues I was to discuss and then whenever I do get a chance, I can just pull a good topic from my pre-made list. I will probably keep the list in my Home Management Binder (HMB). Once I figure out how to include pictures in a post, I will take pictures of my HMB and my house and my clothes for a week...at least that is what I am working on.

I did get a chance earlier today to read Candy's blog and post a response. I don't understand why people get so offended at someone else's opinion. I love Candy's blog and though I don't agree with everything she posts, I do agree with the majority of it and I appreciate all of it because she doesn't just wave about her opinion, she always supports it with Bible verses and good logic. She does feel like a mentor to me and her posts always make me think. Her recent post about being a sloth at home really hit dead-on. I am a lazy, procrastinating bum and with a good excuse, it is positively terminal for the happiness of our home. Her latest post about not "hanging out" with non-Christians is exactly what people need to read and I was really surprised that she got bombed for it! That ANY Christian not understand this fundamental truth surprised me and since I had lately "fallen for it" by allowing my conversation with a non-Christian to distract me and allow my behavior to not reflect Christ, I needed to hear it again and see the list of verses she used to support her position.

Day of Reflections

September 11, 2008; what a good day for reflections. I started my reflections this morning around 9:00am when I realized that today was September 11th, and that 7 years ago, I was in the military and just getting dressed to go to "PT" (I was on a swings shift) and I heard in formation that the World Trade Center had been hit with an airplane. I had no idea of the scale, in fact, I had no idea what the World Trade Center was. When my normally stoic platoon sergeant was late to formation, we were a little confused, but like good soldiers, we stayed in a loose formation talking amongst ourselves. As the platoon sergeant walked across the field toward us, stopped halfway to answer his cell phone, talked for a few minutes and then hung up and ran toward our formation as fast as we've seen him run. He called us to attention and told us that a third plane had hit the Pentagon and we were all to go to our barracks room and stay there until further notice. We saluted as the flag at the front of post was lowered and the gates barred. He told the soldiers who lived off post to plan on it taking several hours to get back on and recommended going home and coming back with plans to stay. He was right, though I didn't live off post at the time. Armed guards were stationed behind a bunker at the front of the military base and every car was searched, proper identification was required. For the rest of us, we went back to the barracks and called our loved ones to let them know we were okay and that the Army was still protecting it's assets, us. Later that day, we were marched to class (we had been allowed to either walk or march ourselves before) by a platoon sergeant or drill sergeant and though we had class on that day, much of the time was taken with talking about what was happening and what it would mean for us. We watched the footage over and over again, willing it to sink into our brains that something of that magnitude happened during our lifetime and not on the pages of the history book we were forced to read in high school.

Today, I watched the original footage from Foxnews.com (but I couldn't find a link, sorry) and it completely brought me back to the moments I first saw the attacks and the days and months of ensuing chaos. I prayed for the families of the victims, that they continue in their healing process and for our country to not forget what it felt like that day, to remember that urge to fight, to defend our country. I was us to remember all the flags flying and how proud we all were to be Americans.

Knowledge is Power

Knowledge

My Journey, So Far

It has been almost two months since I have begun this journey into Biblical Womanhood. It is so amazing to me how many "accidents" and "coincidences" that have helped shape my journey. It all started with homeschooling. My daughter has only just turned four, but I knew when she was born that I wanted the best education for her. I thought that the best I could offer was to send her to private school and I even found the one that I would send her to. It wasn't until I moved to this area (Olympia, WA) that I found people that recommended homeschooling as a way of life. As soon as the thought popped into my head, I was hooked. My very first homeschooling book was So You're Thinking About Homeschooling, by Lisa Whelchel. I think she does a great job of explaining and showing the different ways to homeschool as well as link you to places that can give you better information. I think by far, it is the best book to give someone who is THINKING about homeschooling. I plan on purchasing it for each of my sisters. As I read it, I honed in on classical education. I bought The Well-Trained Mind and scoured it. I attacked it with a highlighter and made charts and graphs galore. By now, my daughter was a year old, but I was ready to start preschool. [Unfortunately, all my motivation came to naught when I found that the television caters to young children. We have been trying to break Mommy's addiction ASAP.] I started to spread my wings as I looked back through Whelchel's book and saw Trivium Pursuit listed. I didn't like the site and brushed it off as "antiquated" and ignored the idea for several years. It was always lingering in my mind so after rereading Whelchel's book again several months ago, I decided that I must homeschool and I approached Trivium Pursuit again. I bought their book, Teaching the Trivium, and began to read it. I was evaluating everything against my "homeschooling bible" which was WTM. However, as I committed to reading the book, even though it just didn't seem like it was written for this generation, an interesting thing happened.

The Bluedorns recommended a book called The Mother At Home which was written in the 1800s. I decided to purchase it, since I knew that I was struggling with my purpose at home. However, I ordered through amazon.com and they like to sell extra books and on the site for The Mother At Home was another book, Passionate Housewives, Desperate for God, by Jennie Chancey and Stacy McDonald. Since I wanted free shipping and liked the catching title, I bought it as well. It was my husband's last day home for a month because of time to be served with the National Guard when my books came, but I was ashamed about purchasing them (because I didn't ask first) and tried to hide them. I was about as effective as Adam and Eve in the garden, but to my surprise, my husband wasn't upset. When I looked at the back cover, I found that Jennie Chancy was the founder of Ladies Against Feminism, which I mocked and that Stacy McDonald was the author of a book called Maidens of Virtue, I mocked her even further. After all, I had always called myself an "anti-feminist" because after my college class in "Women's History" I became convinced that all feminism did was trap women further than they ever had been in the past. That was not the popular opinion even though I was attending a Catholic School, run by Benedictine monks! However, maidens...ladies...virtue...skirts??? I was both intrigued and offended by what I was reading, but the intrigue won out. During the month of my husband's absence, I realized that my position as the "head" of the house had to change, and fast since just months before, we were very seriously talking about divorce- we had started to divide furniture and debt. It was incredibly humbling to see that I was the cause of the friction in the marriage. His biggest complaint? I didn't clean the house even though I stayed at home all day with our children. Yes, I was ready to divorce my husband because I didn't want someone to tell me when to clean house and how well to do it!!! Praise the Lord, He knocked some sense into me!!!

The "start here" page on LAF is really where I began with my Biblical womanhood journey. I read about modesty standards, but wasn't really too convinced because I had always considered myself to be a modest dresser. The biggest push came from the word "feminine" because I wasn't really encouraged to go that direction. The day I saw a VERY modestly dressed woman at the coffee shop sticks out in my mind. The was dressed in a loose-fitting (but not baggy) t-shirt and just above the knee length shorts. She was wearing athletic shoes and her hair was cut extremely short. Truly, there was nothing immodest about her outfit, according to the way I was judging modesty. What she completely lacked was femininity. This resonated deeply with me because I did not dress like a woman either. I spent some time talking on the phone with my husband who surprised me by supporting the decision, though he specifically said that often times, women's skirts are LESS modest than the jeans, to which I agreed and reassured him that that would not be the case with my skirts. One of the best articles I read at that time was an article called Modesty: Is it all in our dress? which really got me because it is very easy to ADD things, but Biblical Womanhood calls for the losing of oneself, no that is incorrect, Christianity calls for the sacrificing of oneself, women are just privileged enough to get to practice this principle in their own home among those who love them!

Anyway, to stop this story from getting any longer- where am I today? I have just received three new dress patterns from Common Sense Patterns and I am eager to begin purchasing fabric and sewing my fall and winter wardrobe. I have quite a few projects that are already under way, two long skirts to make, four dresses for my daughter, and enough fabric for two dresses and two underskirts. I have fabric coming out of my ears and yet, I am still eager to buy more. Wearing skirts (for I don't have any dresses yet) has been really difficult, more so that I thought. I am not worried about the people I meet in Wal-Mart as they have very little pull on my life. However, the people I am influenced by, like my parents and sisters, and of course, husband, are more likely to respond to the way I am dressing verbally, but they are also some of the people who are having a hard time adjusting to my change. Praise the Lord because my husband supports my decision and though he doesn't find my clothing "sexy" he also admits that that is a very good thing for clothing to be. He is very honest and tells me when he doesn't particularly care for something. It seems like his opinions are gradually getting more "old-fashioned" as I begin to wear more modest, feminine clothes. There are people who don't agree with me and it does make life more difficult, however, I am enjoying even the difficult times because I am able to go back and remember why I am doing what I am doing and I can take comfort in the word of God.