Dominion Family

(For stalkers and family followers and Hannah and Granny Click Here for more pictures!)

Less than 24 ours ago I became a grandmother. Since the blog is still here thanks to the overly kind Valerie, I thought it was as good a place as any to announce the fact. I am still in the market for a grandma name……

We welcome Timothy Daniel Rollins III on August 29, 2008. 7lbs 3 oz.
And if you are in the market for a midwife in the Athens area we have found a wonderful one.

The birth was great and Natalia came through unscathed and beautiful and although we don’t have decent picture yet, this is one pretty baby:

In 1984 Timothy Daniel Rollins I meets Timothy Daniel Rollins II:

In 2008 Timothy Daniel Rollins II meets Timothy Daniel Rollins III:

Alex is glad to be an uncle and helped the nurse out. He thinks it is great not to be the youngest member of the family anymore:

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Tim and I made the decision to stop blogging a few weeks ago and I have to say that since that time I have had fewer and fewer doubts about the wisdom of the decision.

When I first hopped on the Internet express, I was alert and aware of all the potential ways that I could stumble into sin. It seemed the Internet could offer up any sin on a platter and my job was to be careful. I knew I needed to avoid evil.

In the end, it was not the evil things on the Internet, not even the arguments and negativity, but rather the good things that bogged me down. So many, many good things. Pictures of decorated houses, libraries, recipes, book suggestions (this alone has been enough to almost drown me), crafts, knitting, aprons, sewing, frugality, weather, poetry, audio files, friends, homeschooling suggestions, music and the ideas, the wonderful, wonderful ideas.

Almost all of my successes in life have come because I do less than other people not more. I realized this the other day. I am not one of those whirling women impressing the luncheon guests. If I have less of a garden and less of a house and less curricula, fewer hobbies, fewer errands, smaller expectations I accomplish more. My productivity goes up as my distractions go down. Maybe I shouldn’t admit this but my favorite books are English spinster schoolmarm books where the old maid comes home fixes herself an omelet and a cup of tea and reads. It is just a tiny glimpse of a tiny world and it is comforting to me. Please don’t take that to mean that I don’t love or want my children. I would have been perfectly happy with 9 more children. Honest. But what I have to remember is that I chose the children. That decision determined many other life choices for me. I have already planted the flag.

And in the midst of my small world comes the Internet, almost like a god, vast, unmeasured. Always like a siren wooing me with good things, great things, better things.
It is almost like if I have a problem my first thought is Google not God. I can search everything from marriage to murder, Bible verses to bedtime stories. The Internet really is a replacement for our current concept of God and it is a clue. It lets me know that something must be vastly wrong with my concept of God. I have never been able to get God to cooperate with me the way Google does.

Now, of course, I am not that theologically warped but the hint is there. I still love the Psalms. I still love the quiet moments when it’s OK that God isn’t giving away the plot, when I have to just trust and love without answers. Those really are the best times, the times when I am very, very small and God is vast, unmeasured, boundless, free.

It is my hope, that without blogging, the Internet will become a very tiny part of my life. I still love it. It has done much to make my life easier from bill paying to airfare. I will still use it to look up Rembrandt and Renoir. I will still stop by sometimes to say hi on your blog. I just don’t want to live in Pandemonium anymore. People used to treat us like we were so spiritual for not having a TV when in fact it was our lack of spirituality that led us to get rid of the thing. Same here! I have managed to avoid pornography and in-fighting on the Internet but I would love to write another story about that beautiful evil Pandora. In my story, she would release a box full of a million good things leaving restraint in the box.

So the last message of this blog is what it has always been. Less is better. Little things done daily are better than grand plans. Give your children lots of tiny moments. When they approach the computer turn your chair around and look them in the eye and if you find more in their eyes than on the screen get up and take them on a nature walk or read a book to them. Pandemonium will still be there when you return.

It has been a huge joy for me to blog over the last few years. Thank-you for joining me on my journey.

Buenos Noches, mis amigas and please remember as you are reading blogs that it was the woman who was deceived first.

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My final book review is the perfect book to complement this blog. How Does a Poem Mean? by John Ciardi. I first heard about this book from a discussion on Mars Hill Audio. I immediately went to and ta-da the 1959 textbook arrived at my doorstep via Internet magic (more on that tomorrow).

The book was written as one part of a four part introduction to college literature. The first chapter alone is the single best introduction to poetry that I have ever read. I wish I could just read it out loud right this very minute and I am tempted to figure out a way to do that. He makes it clear right out of the starting gate that the modern approach to poetry is from the school of our old friend from Hard Times Mr Gradgrind the spawn of Descartes.

Ciardi says that a poem must be experienced to be understood and loved. The tearing down of its parts is no help at all.

W H Auden was once asked what advice he would give a young who wished to become a poet. Auden replied that he would ask the young man why he wanted to write poetry. If the answer was ‘because I have something important to say,’ Auden would conclude that there was no hope for the young man as a poet. If on the other hand the answer was something like ‘because I like to hang around word and overhear them talking to one another,’ then that young man was at least interested in a fundamental part of the poetic process and there was hope for him.

In the same way that we can’t separate the dancer from the dance we can’t separate the poem from itself.

I love this first chapter so much because Ciardi understands and explains something I have only felt and not been able to articulate. It is that words are fun and poetry is playing. It is a puzzle with intense emotional and intellectual rewards at the end.

Every game ever invented by mankind is a way of making things hard for the fun of it. the great fun, of course, is in making the hard look easy.

He spends a good part of the first chapter illustrating this word play with the Robert Frost poem Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.

He ends by noting:

…that the human insight of the poem, and the technicalities of the poetic devices are inseparable. Each feeds the other. This interplay is the poem’s meaning, a matter not of What It Means (nobody can say entirely what a good poem means) but How It Means- a process one can come much closer to discussing.

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Who can read…The woods are lovely, dark and deep but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep…. without the feeling that something deeply solemn is taking place. It touches us in ways we can’t explain.

Not only is this a great discussion of poetry but it is a wonderful anthology of poems. I feel like I finally have a friend who feels about poetry like I do. Welcome to my book table, Mr Ciardi!

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Sentinel: City of Destiny

I mentioned in my recent MT post that I was reading Sentinel: City of Destiny by Landel Bilbrey to my little boys. Alex (almost 7) and Andrew (almost 10) are enjoying the book very much but what is even better is that we are getting a chance to have theological discussions as we read slowly through this adventurous allegory.

This is the first time I have agreed to review a book for an author although I get requests every week. When Mr Bilbrey described the book he had written for young boys I just couldn’t resist. It sounded as if it were just what we needed and we have not been disappointed.

Sentinel is a straightforward allegory of the Christian life with the peculiar angle that it is geared for boys. A father from the land of Terrenea, the city of Callow, tells the story of his twin sons’ (Jaden and Jerol) quest for Sentinel, the city of destiny. On the way, they must collect the 4 keys to mettle (manhood): vision, courage, integrity and service. You could say it is a Pilgrim’s Progress for modern boys with shades of Paradise Lost and even a bit of Peretti but best of all the book is biblical without being divisive.

While the story itself holds the children’s attention, I stop frequently along the way to take full advantage of the message. Yesterday, the three of us had quite a discussion on the meaning of iniquity. In this regard the book is full of helps. It has maps, lovely illustrations, parental glossary of terms, a study guide for each chapter and even a proclamation of the gospel for boys.

You can read a few chapters online to see what you think. The book would make a great read aloud for family devotions. I truly appreciate Mr Bilbrey’s efforts to provide discipling tools for parents of boys and the opportunity it gives me to discuss deep things with my little guys.

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Tuesday 1/29
Chapter 19 Minimum Wage Laws

I came to this chapter with my eyes open because I have always had a negative opinion of minimum wage but when my son asked me why I sounded a little weak.

You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage you substitute unemployment. You do harm all around, with no comparable compensation.

I thought that first line hit the nail on the head. You cannot make a person worth what they are not worth.

This is perhaps as good a place as any to point out that what distinguishes many reformers from those who cannot accept their proposals is not their greater philanthropy, but their greater impatience.

The above quote also seemed to me to explain some of my confusion. We call our impatience philanthropy. I am guilty of this in my own small sphere as I tend to be impatient.

So government policy should be directed, not to imposing more burdensome requirements on employers, but to following policies that encourage profits, that encourage employers to expand, to invest in newer and better machines to increase the productivity of workers — in brief, to encourage capital accumulation, instead of discouraging it—and to increase both employment and wage rates.

The final paragraph of the chapter was an excellent summation. Our family has owned several small businesses over the years. By the time we obeyed all the laws, especially in NJ, and insured ourselves against litigation, we were absolutely unable to make a profit. Our employees made money but our business did not.

The next chapter is on labor unions another economic subject that has touched our family.

Chapter 20 Do Unions Really Raise Wages

The thing that frustrates me about our own economy and he hits on it in this chapter on unions is that productivity is really not on the table at all. It has always been my belief that good workers are desired in industry and those who work hard and learn quickly will rise to the top. Increasingly, it appears that this is not the case at all and perhaps American industry is really about just spreading jobs around without any real concern for productivity. Where can this be heading? I personally believe that the current college situation where 80% of the population attends college is just a way to keep workers out of the work force because the economy doesn’t need them. The economy does need to support a massive higher education structure. Therefore not only is productivity not necessary but true education is totally beside the current college point. I don’t suppose anyone who reads this blog will be surprised that on my last few days of blogging I bring up this point.

Chapter 21 “Enough to Buy Back the Product”
Chapter 22 The Function of Profits
Chapter 23 The Mirage of Inflation
Chapter 24 The Assault on Saving

In the final chapter, The Lesson Restated Hazlitt borrows the story of The Forgotten Man:

The reader will remember that in Sumner’s essay, which appeared in 1883:

As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X or, in the better case, what A, B and C shall do for … .. What I want to do is to look up C…. I call him the Forgotten Man…. He is the man who never is thought of. He is the victim of the reformer, social speculator and philanthropist, and I hope to show you before I get through that he deserves your notice both for his character and for the many burdens which are laid upon him.

There is much to this forgotten man that goes even beyond economics. If I may digress completely for a minute I can’t help but think of all the ordinary Christian husbands who are the victims of the Utopian ideals of the men their wives follow.

The last part of this book seemed easier to read, probably because it hit closer to home. The agrarian model is helpful here because it lets us glimpse a different sort of economy. I am not sure it is an actual solution. Although, if we have political and economic collapse we may all quickly resort to agrarianism. Once again, I am not one to hold out hope that things will change apart from a general collapse. I tend to see my job as educating myself and my children for a time when rebuilding begins. How weird is that?

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It has been hard for me to think about blogging anything this week. Nicholas and Hannah left last Thursday and my parents left also. I can’t begin to describe the chaos our family creates when we are all together. We literally go from one game to another until the wee hours of the morning. We talk, debate and argue. Newcomers to our family are always a bit taken back by the arguing. Who needs a logic program when 9 (10-1, my husband doesn’t argue) people are going to make you prove everything you say? The only thing I can compare it to is perhaps the Kennedy family including the football. One of my favorite things about the boys is that the are oblivious to age differences. When they go outside to play football, they ALL go. From 23yo cage-fighting Timothy (this is called transparency, folks) to weenie 6yo Alex, all on the same field with the same heart.

After the game, the motley crew sitting on….my couch. It really is nasty and I am sorry if you visit but you will have to sit on this same couch.

My daughters, new and old. The girls are relegated to cheer leading during football games although the boys do sometimes let the girls in on tennis ball. So you see while they don’t use age-based discrimination, they do tend to be chauvinistic. On the other hand, having more girls around is lovely for me. I love my daughters-in-law more every time I am around them and I know Emily is happy with the change. She actually got to go shopping twice last week.

Saying goodbye:

We also played several games of Dictionary (Balderdash with only a dictionary), Rook, poker (not me), Tabu, dominoes, marbles and rummy. We quoted poetry and discussed books and movies. I even cooked. So you can imagine that after a week of that blogging was a bit difficult.

I have a couple of posts I want to get in before I say goodbye on Friday, I just hope I can pull all my thoughts together by then.

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The problem with me reading a book like Economics in One Lesson is that I have nothing to compare his suppositions to except my own limited experience and literary examples. My knowledge base is almost zero on this subject although I do own a fair amount of common sense which generally stands in for wisdom at my house.
I very much appreciated it when he used the examples of Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson in chapter 15 How the Price System Works.

A Swiss Family Robinson, perhaps, finds this problem a little easier to solve. It has more mouths to feed, but it also has more hands to work for them. It can practice division and specialization of labor. The father hunts; the mother prepares the food; the children collect firewood. But even the family cannot afford to have one member of it doing endlessly the same thing, regardless of the relative urgency of the common need he supplies and the urgency of other needs still unfilled. When the children have gathered a certain pile of firewood, they cannot be used simply to increase the pile. It is soon time for one of them to be sent, say, for more water. The family too has the constant problem of choosing among alternative applications of labor, and, if it is lucky enough to have acquired guns, fishing tackle, a boat, axes, saws and so on, of choosing among alternative applications of labor and capital. It would be considered unspeakably silly for the wood-gathering member of the family to complain that they could gather more firewood if his brother helped him all day, instead of getting the fish that were needed for the family dinner. It is recognized clearly in the case of an isolated individual or family that one occupation can expand only at the expense of all other occupations.

The final quote from chapter 15 also seemed to bring it all down to common sense:

It follows that it is just as essential for the health of a dynamic economy that dying industries should be allowed to die as that growing industries should be allowed to grow. For the dying industries absorb labor and capital that should be released for the growing industries. It is only the much vilified price system that solves the enormously complicated problem of deciding precisely how much of tens of thousands of different commodities and services should be produced in relation to each other. These otherwise bewildering equations are solved quasi-automatically by the system of prices, profits and costs. They are solved by this system incomparably better than any group of bureaucrats could solve them. For they are solved by a system under which each consumer makes his own demand and casts a fresh vote, or a dozen fresh votes, every day; whereas bureaucrats would try to solve it by having made for the consumers, not what the consumers themselves wanted, but what the bureaucrats decided was good for them. Yet though the bureaucrats do not understand the quasi-automatic system of the market, they are always disturbed by it. They are always trying to improve it or correct it, usually in the interests of some wailing pressure group. What some of the results of their intervention are, we shall examine in succeeding chapters.

I also thought it was interesting in light of today’s news about our extra tax refund. While I am happy to take the money and run, I can’t help thinking about what is really going on and how easily bought we must be as a people. Somehow $800 is supposed to make us all feel good about the economy. Oh, what tangled webs we weave comes to mind. Oh, and don’t forget the Mimimum Tax Penalty. If they give you too much money back they have built into the system a way of recovering your money.

So anyone want to discuss this current tax refund?

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We have been staying up late and getting up late with our visitors and I am not ready with my readings, but for the diligent people let’s get the show on the road. I was extremely happy with last week’s discussion on a couple of the blogs and I am pretty sure we haven’t plumbed the depths of those issues yet. I love that we are getting different perspectives and also how nicely this dovetails with the presidential election.

By the way, I just got this fascinating course description in my email from Memoria Press. Hazlitt and Wendell Berry sounds like a fantastic course!

Tuesday 1/22
Chapter 13 “Parity” Prices
Chapter 14 Saving the X Industry
Chapter 15 How the Price System Works
Chapter 16 “Stabilizing” Commodities
Chapter 17 Government Price-Fixing
Chapter 18 What Rent Control Does

Next week’s readings:

Tuesday 1/29
Chapter 19 Minimum Wage Laws
Chapter 20 Do Unions Really Raise Wages
Chapter 21 “Enough to Buy Back the Product”
Chapter 22 The Function of Profits
Chapter 23 The Mirage of Inflation
Chapter 24 The Assault on Saving

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To everything there is a season,
A time for every purpose under the sun.
A time to be born and a time to die;
A time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill and a time to heal …
A time to weep and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn and a time to dance …
A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to lose and a time to seek;
A time to rend and a time to sew;
A time to keep silent and a time to speak;
A time to love and a time to hate;
A time for war and a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Sometime before we moved to Alabama, 5 years ago, I began blogging when AOL offered a journal. I had 7 hits the first day and I don’t have a clue who they would have been. My husband used to tease me that he went around on different computers at work and hit my blog.

When we moved to Alabama all of my children, and yes, it was very much like a soap opera, were at home. Next fall it is very likely that only 5 of my children will be left at home. On the plus side we had 4 new members around our table last night, one hidden from sight. More weddings are on the way.

Our family has changed drastically in 5 years. The baby is almost 7. He has crossed the final frontier by losing his front teeth. I have lost 5 good workers also. The massive amounts of work we do around here just to keep up have subsided slightly but the work force has diminished as well. You can just imagine that my current 9yo is not the same kind of worker that my oldest was at 9. It is like night and day what my expectations are now compared to then.

I have gone from doing all the work alone to doing a few jobs to almost doing nothing and now I am being called on to rejoin the home work force. My time is being pulled away from the computer to more practical pursuits.

Because I do love ideas I have thoroughly enjoyed having a blog. It has been a world of blessing for me.

A few weeks ago my husband, Tim and I were discussing things we could do to make life simpler, especially for me. It seemed suddenly obvious that long before I quit Morning Time, I should cut out blogging. We both agreed that this was the time for that. In the past he has always encouraged me to keep up with my blog whenever I got discouraged.

In the early days blogging did not take up much of my time. I wrote my opinion, my 3 friends read it and that was that. Increasingly over the years I have had to spend more and more time keeping up with the blog behind the scenes. I spent 6 months last year dealing with someone who felt I had misrepresented them. I am increasingly aware that I am handing out advice on parenting to people I have never met and I get lots of emails from young moms. While I do so very much want to reach out to these women I am also aware of how vulnerable what I say is to legal ramifications. Some advice is best found among our covenant communities rather than online.

I have met so many truly wonderful people through blogging, some have even become the women I would turn to in a crisis, that I hesitate to say goodbye. Of course, I will not be disappearing. Valerie, my faithful blog administrator, and I are trying to figure out what to do with the archives. Hopefully, we will be able to keep most of them available in some form for a while.

This has not been a hasty decision and it is not a happy decision although I am convinced it is the right decision. The plan is that I will blog until Feb 1 so it won’t be a quick departure. Until then it will be business as usual around here. Maybe someday when this season passes, as I know it will and fast, I will return to the blogosphere. When that time comes I will probably be using a different title in order to avoid confusion.

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My favorite You Tube Video ever so far:

Via MMV

Your Personality is Very Rare (INTP)

Your personality type is goofy, imaginative, relaxed, and brilliant. Only about 4% of all people have your personality, including 2% of all women and 6% of all men You are Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Perceiving.

Nathaniel read me the full description of this personality…disorder and it was hilariously scary. He was an INTJ using a more reliable test.

Last night Tim and I went out to Surins with Timothy and Natalia, Nicholas and Hannah, and Emily. I had curry, YUM! Emily had seaweed salad which really tasted nasty to me. We did a lot of passing plates around and the European thing and sat around for a couple of hours talking and laughing after the meal. We discussed books but we didn’t get too technical; the boys are trying to collect their favorite picture books for the children yet to be and even one being formed already. Our family is growing.

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