I'd rather be knitting.

Darn.

I logged in, opened this page, hoping to write, and realized:

There are too many things to record, moments to share, discontents, hopes, fears, joys, worries. I sit in front of the keyboard and am helpless amongst the swirl. How do I pick which one to focus on? (When I try to write about a little of everything, it turns into a list, not a piece of writing, and then nobody's satisfied, most of all me.)

Swirl. Swirl.

Oh, forget it. I'm going to go knit on that sweater.

27) Knitting, which is mindless yet productive, giving both time to reflect and new challenges to overcome, and which provides me hours of entertainment and a sense of community at ravelry.com.

Speaking of community... (Look! The swirling cloud has parted! Something's emerging!) Here's a little topic that's on my mind:

How do you, as a parent, navigate the confusing waters of forging friendships with other moms? I want my daughter to have regular playmates, but darn it, I also want to feel secure that I am genuinely liked by their parents. My previous incarnation as Working Ministry Wife meant that I pretty much haven't needed to MAKE new friends for myself in years (as the church and my job always brought people into my life fairly naturally).

However, there seems to be no natural way to meet other toddlers and their moms when I'm raising two at home, putting them down for naps every afternoon, and then doing the dinner/bedtime boogie once they wake up at 4pm. Our church has exactly one other toddler in it, but for some reason, that mom does not seem to interested in anything deeper than a Sunday relationship. (I play the Insecure Mom Mantra in my head when I start trying to figure that out: Is My Kid Ugly to Her Kid? Is My House Too Dirty? Am I Too Dull or Ugly or Unwashed or Old or Sinful or Condescending? Did I insult her without knowing it? Am I somehow UnFriendWorthy? I know of no way to get an honest answer to that question, or even of how to ask it without sounding like the pitiful nerdy kid in youth group who everyone had to be friends with because it was the Christian thing to do even though he was about as interesting as a used toothbrush.)

I want good friends to share coffee with while our toddlers run amuck in our houses. I had that once, back before I had a toddler; she'd come over, I'd brew the coffee and stick in the Superman videos, and we'd laugh and ponder and pray and chat all morning. She let me convert her to Lasagna Gardening and the lust of Other People's Organic Material, and we spent hours lugging home bags of leaves and grass clippings for our gardens. I went to the hospital with her during the late-night scares of her second pregnancy, and took off work for days to help when she came home with him (and a giant spinal headache from the epidural). I'm realizing now that it was, perhaps, the best friendship I've ever had, and possibly the best I'll ever know in this life.

Given that I still have fifty years or so left on the earth, that's rather disheartening.

There is no ToddlerMama Support Group type meeting in this town, as far as I can find. I have no time to join organizations based on my interests (knitting, historic preservation, the arts, etc) to meet women I'd mesh with. Leaving our beloved little church to attend big churches with lots of toddler families doesn't seem right either. I mean, I love our little church. I generally hate the big ones, and the ones who have delusions of bigness. I'm afraid that, to have a big enough pool to find the kind of friends I'd like to have, I would have to belong to a church that would make my stomach churn on Sunday morning. (Surely that's not God's idea of a healthy spiritual situation.)

All I really know to do is to pray my pitiful little used-toothbrush prayer to One who knows how insecure and isolated I'm feeling about this. Here is my heart's great need. I lay it down there, and just keep going through our days, hoping that less lonely ones lie ahead.

My heart beats fast for Amish drygoods.

I have a secret love:

Lehman's.

It's a store in Ohio that originally was created to serve the Amish, providing simple tools for living that were becoming difficult to find elsewhere. But they also have a website, and it carries wonderful things.

A tabletop butter churner.
A wooden form to make seedling pots from newspaper.
A non-electric doorbell. (We actually need one of these.)
Composting toilets.
Amish-grown popcorn, dried on the cob in a corncrib. (Don't ask me why that's better, but doesn't the sound of it put poetry into your movie snack?)

Clotheslines, old fashioned toys, woodburning cookstoves, apple peelers: this stuff feeds my Inner Homesteader. I mean, really: how many online stores have a Home Butchering category, or sell German Fermenting Crocks for making your own sauerkraut? Where else could I browse and learn so much about home canning products or purchase a book titled "Anyone Can Build A Tub-Style Mechanical Chicken Plucker"?

My husband recently pointed out that I have a secret desire to build a cabin in the hills and live there squirreled away from the world, living off the grid and growing my own food and growing flowers to sell at the farmer's market. It's true, although I know enough to realize that it is not really going to happen. I think my yurt and tiny house fascinations tie into this, along with my irrational love of the idea of Urban Chickens and my much more rational love of Mel and the work of his Square Foot Gardening foundation.

I have two babies, each of which have more stuff and require more of my time than I ever imagined. I won't be fitting my and my husband's life into a 120 square foot cabin or learning to raise all my own food anytime soon. But in the meantime, I'll keep browsing at Lehman's, dreaming of simpler ways.