Settling in

Our first guests from Boston have arrived and, after six months knee deep in tools and dust, we feel settled and happy in our house. If you're interested, here are some pictures of the house back in January. I'll post more pictures gradually.

Noah's pictures are getting better

Here's two before pictures of the bathroom:

And one "during" picture, to give you a sense of where Eug had to start from- he had to figure out how to rebuild the walls of crumbling brick, he learned how to solder copper pipes and had to figure out how to run the PVC pipes from the washing machine under the tile:

Here's a partial view of what the bathroom looks like now.  One of our favorite things is the little people shower head and the big people shower head. Noah loves it.

Don't use big tiles. Trust us.

My other favorite thing is that the roof (which is our staircase) is visible through the plexiglass. Can you see it?

Eli doesn't care as long as he's fed and warm.

My Year of Not Bathing

It doesn't have the same ring to it as "A Year of Living Biblically" or "A Year of Eating food grown within 100 miles", does it? It wasn't really a year, but I still sort of regret not keeping a diary of our past 4 months without showering (and largely, without much cleaning whatsoever).

We kept thinking "one more week" until one week became 4, then 8, then 16. Notable events during the 4 months included Eug turning 33, defending my thesis proposal, giving birth to Eli, me turning 29, Noah turning 2.

The bathroom is 98% done and we've taken our first showers. I've never appreciated showering so much.

Over the course of about a year, I had stopped using shampoo, face wash, moisturizer etc, and used much less soap. My conclusion after the 4 months: all those products are optional (even soap much of the time), but water is the ultimate cleaning agent.

While I appreciate water in a new way, the hardcore part of me is happy that I could go without a bathroom again if called on to do so. I do not mean to romanticize the realities of the majority of the world who go without running water. There's nothing romantic about it. But I don't feel the same fear of spending time (or living) without a bathroom. I understand in a new way that our family can be blessed by whatever circumstances we find ourselves in. These few months have been a time of heavy dependence on my extended family- dependence that was a little foreign- and it felt good.

The bathroom was a burdensome project, and as Eug did the final demolition that exposed the beams of the staircase this week, he started to feel the burden lifted. It was all the more burdensome because it was voluntary- we bought a fixer upper knowing that the bathroom had serious issues. After being absolutely certain that we should never try to renovate again, I look at the almost-completed bathroom and am incredibly happy- no contractor would have done what we (Eug) did- imperfections and all. (Pictures to follow)

Have any of you gone months without showering?

Enjoying it All (or at least some of it)

It's funny, I was reading the Having it All article at around the same time I was reading about mutuality,  around the same time I was breastfeeding (I'm pretty much always breastfeeding nowadays- including as I write this). I'm not going to go into the very real structural challenges for women in leadership, though I think they are important. After being quite conflicted for quite some time (having grown up in the conservative church) I believe that men and women should be equally valued in marriage and in church life. It seems like a bit of a no-brainer because of how I'm phrasing the issue, but for some reason it's not. The Bible verses around this could go either way, and I'm not scholarly enough to tell. So I go with the spirit of Jesus' message, the examples of women heroes and prophets, and more practically, with what works in our marriage. 

Now I see through a glass darkly- Noah has been using our camera

Equality for us means doing a lot of housework and a lot of childcare. For the last while, I've been doing most of the childcare and cooking and food shopping, and Eug has been doing most of the renovation and cleaning. Not that it matters too much. We've both been working the tiniest amount to get by. It's a brief season in our lives.

We both feel the pull of bigger dreams, which are less about ambition and more about calling and providing for the family in a creative way. It's the hardest thing in the world for me to set down my computer- even though I'm not making much progress anyway- and enjoy Eli or Noah's presence. 

We're blessed with the help of family which I think, down the road, will make all the difference. I don't want to outsource all of our childrearing and cooking and cleaning (and even education), because these are the things that tether me most to the real world. These are the things that definitely make a difference. I take sourdough and flour and water and produce bread, the dishes go from dirty to clean. My children go from tiny to fat just on my milk (and I go from fat to skinnier). Noah starts to have conversations and questions and we're the ones who he gets to have them with. It's all quite tangible.

I was lucky to get a career focus very early on- even before college. My PhD and career focuses on refugee health but I'm still not convinced that that career will be better for the world than washing the dishes. And I don't think that undermines my commitment to the field. To me it doesn't make any sense to write about the longings of refugees- longings for a living, for family, for proper food and social standing- unless those longings are at least partially addressed in my own life.