No sooner had we unpacked 50% of our belongings and barely become oriented to our surroundings and opportunities here at the House of Cornelius, we discovered we were going to have a sixth child. And so, our seven months of living here have been highly colored, for me at least, but this fact. At first, I felt fairly awful and tired, followed by feeling very big, slightly uncomfortable and moderately overwhelmed. All of these perspectives are highly modified by how much sleep is in the recent past, of course. Thaine has been very helpful in taking various kids with him on errands, adventures into Mexico, and he is good to get inspired about cooking at times. In fact, I have not been in a grocery store, except when I wanted to go, for weeks if not months. The flip side to this is that I sometimes serve some very creative meals because I would rather work with what’s on hand than burn myself out trying to get to the store!
There are some definite challenges to raising and schooling numerous children in somewhat limited quarters, with the desert/farmland right outside the door, and the bipolar experience of campus life just down the road. By bipolar, I mean sometimes the House of Cornelius is a beehive of activity and riotous excitement, and other times it is deathly quiet. However, in the peaceful silence when there is no outreach team here you can sense how much there is to do, if only one could somehow engage five people aged 2-10 simultaneously. I have not figured this one out. A team of three family members seem to be fairly effective, any larger than that and the returns go right down the drain. This brief summary is to point out that there are some significant logistical problems to be solved here. Sometimes I think we have a handle on them, and other times I KNOW we don’t. Most of my waking hours (that I’m not writing a blog article or subversively reading a book now and then) are spent trying to trouble-shoot such dry, practical, down-to-earth subjects. If you want to relate to me, you probably will have to engage in a discussion about how to stagger people’s morning jobs so it doesn’t get too crowded and noisy.
Now, although Thaine cares about these things too, and IS involved, as I mentioned above, he manages to detach himself from the mundane and get his head up in the clouds more often. Sometimes I furtively call him the Man in the Ivory Tower, the M.I.T., because he gets involved in ministry more often, engages in theological discussions, and reads very philosophical works. It is consistent with his responsibilities on campus to live on that higher plane a fair amount of the time, and I only sometimes begrudge it J. It is simply a fact that when early childhood predominates in the household, the thought level of the primary childcare person averages out to be at a somewhat low altitude. If I am going to be around here more than Thaine, it would behoove me to figure out that morning job schedule, and NOW. That discussion about worldviews or cosmology is looking mighty irrelevant to how to make tomorrow flow better than yesterday.
And so, I came to contemplate the French toast. I’m not sure what was said at church last Sunday to make me recall the French toast. A serious and lofty challenge of some sort was issued (see, I don’t even know what it was!), and I remember thinking, "Gosh, I really agree with that, but I’m not sure I can ever rise up above the level of the French toast!" I had a sudden, vivid memory of the surface of that morning’s breakfast in evolution, as if it were before my eyes again. You know, after the toast is flipped over, and the surface is quite smooth, with some texture where the grain of the bread shows through the egg batter, hopefully with a rich golden brown hue..."
I know these challenging days of having several preschool aged, and therefore pre-rational, kids are limited. However, they are VERY challenging days, so they really, really count! I think I may live at the level of the French toast much of that time.
--Erika