Runaway Pork Chops -- My Sweet, Funny Little Girl

They say that the first thing you are supposed to do when you cook is verify that you have all necessary ingredients.   

You would think, by now, I would know I need to do that; I’ve run into that kind of trouble before.  But why do you really need to verify when you remember, personally, going to the store and buying the required ingredients?  I knew that the key ingredients, for my dish, were boneless pork chops, apples, and a stuffing mix package.  Each item, I knew I had made certain to buy when I went to the store.  I distinctly remembered putting them in the cart.  Checking would have been a waste of my time, wouldn’t it?

The first thing I did was prepare the stuffing mix.  I boiled the water and butter, added the mix, turned off the heat, covered it and moved on.  When I was ready to add it to the skillet at the end, it would be waiting for me. 

Next, I cut up, cored, and peeled four apples.  I’m not really fast at cutting vegetables, but it didn’t take too awful long.  No need to worry about them turning brown, since I would add them to the skillet to cook along with the pork chops.  Apples don’t start turning color as quickly as something like potatoes do, anyway.

Next, I got out the skillet and started some butter melting.  It was time to brown the pork chops before adding the other things that cooked along with them.

I opened the refrigerator to get out the pork chops.   

I guess you know, by now, what happened.  I turned the refrigerator upside down.  I must have opened that door and checked inside it for the missing pork chops ten times in the next half hour.  Then I checked the freezer.  I called J in, whose job it is to put away the refrigerated items when we get home from the store.  He so often finds things I can’t see.  He came up empty.  As a matter of fact, he never remembered seeing them, either.  I went out the freezer in the garage.  Sorry.  They weren’t there, either. 

I know I bought them.  I actually pulled out the receipt and checked it, twice.  At first I didn’t see it, but then I did find them listed.  Pork chops.  We paid for them!  They had to be here!  So I looked, all over again. 

I finally concluded that somewhere between the check-out counter and the kitchen, the Pork chops were mislaid. 

All that time I had spent preparing dinner.  G was still at work in our only car.  It was too late to start cooking something else.  G wasn’t going to be able to stop at the store tonight, either.  The skillet was dirty with nothing but butter.  The apples sat waiting to be added to ingredients that weren’t going to show up, as did the stuffing.

I froze the stuffing and apples for another time.  Thawing them won’t be convenient, but that’s better than letting them go to waste.

Does this sort of thing happen to anybody other than me?

* * *    * * *   * * *

This afternoon, K and I had some fun together, just the two of us.  The bigger kids were playing outside in the snow.  I changed her diaper and we danced together to one of her CDs, played together on the bed, looking at ourselves in the mirror.  Then I got up to leave the room.  “No, don’t go, mom!”  K begged.  She had enjoyed our one on one time. 

“Mommy’s hungee,” I said, repeating the way she talks.  (Most two consonant syllables are shortened to just one the way she talks.  For example, play, pray, spray, and pay all sound like pay when she says them.  But that is another topic.  Maybe I’ll document them here another day.)  “You ate earlier, but I haven’t yet, and I’m hungee.”  Seeing that she was still disappointed, I promised her I would fix my food and bring it back in to spend some more time with her.

When I returned, she said to me, “Hungee sounds funny when you say it.”  I guess you had to be there.  I thought that was really funny.  I was just talking the way I learned to talk from her! 

As I have discussed here before, I nurse my toddlers.  (Several times recently she has told me, “I wike your milk, mommy!”)  At the end of our time together in the bedroom, I nursed K.  While I did so, I told her, “You’re my little nursling.” 

She patted me back.  “You’re my big nursing,” she agreed. 

Kids can be so funny without ever meaning to be!

Currently Reading Calm My Anxious Heart: A Women's Guide to Finding Contentment By Linda Dillow see related

His Love Endures Forever

I have been really struggling with something the last few days.  I was dealing with something very difficult.  The details are not important, but I felt very hurt.  I was crying, praying about it.  “I don’t understand why you permitted this, Lord?  Why do I have to face this struggle?  If I didn’t I wouldn’t have to . . .”  Then it dawned on me.  God had permitted this to force me to grow, to do the hard thing. 

Sometimes, the struggles we deal with are overcome in a moment.  We make the decision to do what is right, and there is no turning back.  We are convinced that we have done right, glad to have made the choice to do right, and are now ready to move on to other things.  Other times, the decision to do right is a daily, hourly, moment by moment thing.  Just because I made the choice yesterday, or even an hour ago, doesn’t mean I’m inclined to do it this minute.  I think many, many such struggles are this variety.  An addict overcoming his addiction.  My precious little boy choosing not to read after bedtime.  Choosing to forgive someone who has wronged you.  Choosing not to give in to a temptation that you’ve fallen prey to so many times before.

This was one of those things.  As I have mentioned before, I’ve been reading in this book about worry.  Linda Dillow was talking about 1 Peter 5:6-7.  I’ll offer its text here:

Humble yourselves, therefore, under God's mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. (NIV)

She said that the word for “cast” means literally, to hurl, or to throw (Calm my Anxious Heart, pg. 124).  Because my struggle involves some worry, I did that, threw the problem to the Lord for Him to handle, humbled myself to trust in His sovereignty.  Then I read some more from my Bible, which happened today to be Psalm 136.

This Psalm is one that has been hard for me to understand in the past.  It has a repeated refrain, in every single verse, sometimes after no more than a phrase, “His love endures forever.”  I found the interruption to the train of thought distracting.  It made it hard to appreciate either God’s Love or the point of the phrases and sentences interspersed throughout.  It came across to me, before tonight, like nothing more than a constant interruption.

Tonight, I finally got it.  It was a recitation, a review of Israel’s history.  Here is how it begins, in verses 1-5:

Give thanks to the LORD, for He is good.
      His love endures forever. 
Give thanks to the God of gods.
      His love endures forever. 
Give thanks to the Lord of lords:
      His love endures forever. 
to Him who alone does great wonders,
      His love endures forever. 
Who by His understanding made the heavens,
      His love endures forever.  (NIV)

I guess it actually begins with a declaration of God’s supremacy and goodness, then spends a little time on the early history of the world, then transitions to Israel’s history.  With each aspect of history, it repeats the refrain, “His love endures forever.”  The point is this:  Everything that happens to God’s people is evidence of God’s enduring love.

Remember my question of why God had permitted this struggle?  Yes, even in this, “His love endures forever.”  What a great encouragement that was.  I hope it is encouraging to you.

Currently Reading Calm My Anxious Heart: A Woman's Guide to Finding Contentment By Linda Dillow see related

My Impossible Home -- A Refiner's Fire

I was looking at this book again recently, hoping to find something to get me on the right track spiritually again.  I hope I turn the book back up.  In the meantime, I will recall what stood out to me just the other day.  She was talking about Psalm 139.  Here, let’s look at some of the particular verses right now, verses 13-16:

For You created my inmost being;
You knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from You
when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
Your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me
were written in Your book
before one of them came to be.

She said the words, “inmost being” had something to do with our personalities, what we are really like.  I am certainly not defined by my weaknesses (at least, I hope not!) but I remembered my poor organizational skills.  God knew, before I was ever born, that I would struggle with figuring out how to store things.  He also “ordained” the fact that I would find myself in a home of about 1,000 square feet, housing a family of five.  This was no cosmic joke, no classic bad luck to come my way.  This was a plan, a design. 

My attempts at dealing with this have ebbed and flowed.  Sometimes, I really do work at it.  I tackle an area, am delighted by the progress I make.  I might even start getting the whole house semi-passable.  Then I relax a bit, maybe just for a day or two, and it looks horrible all over again.  Sometimes I will think about the impossible situation this is – there is no way to find a place for everything in a house designed for two or three people at most, when there are five of us.  Why try?  I can’t succeed, after all!  Then I realize that I am expected to do my best.  This is the job God called me to.  So I start again.   

Anyway, I had just gotten to one of those days just after the good phase, and was feeling defeated again, when I read that.  It occurred to me that God intended this situation for a purpose.  I live here for some reason.  This is intended to be my crucible.  I have been put in the refining fire.  What am I doing giving up?  I’m supposed to be learning something by struggling with this, not by sitting back in defeat!

If I can remember that for more than a few weeks, I’ll be doing well.  I think it is high time I learned whatever I am supposed to learn here.  Then, maybe, God will provide a bigger house!

Where's the Memo When Insulin Needs Change?

Diabetes is simply a fact of my life.  I’ve had insulin dependent diabetes since I was almost fourteen years old.  This isn’t the kind you get when you carry a few extra pounds and need to mind diet and exercise.  This is where the body does not make insulin at all.  The diabetic, without insulin, starves to death in a sea of food.  But, of course, there is no need for that today, with insulin.

I am so accustomed to life with diabetes that it is sometimes hard for me to imagine not having it.  Counting carbs and taking insulin for it is just life.  I forget everybody doesn’t do it.  Even insulin reactions don’t faze me much.  That is, until I have a few days like the last few.

My insulin needs, in recent months, have gotten extreme.  I needed way more insulin than was normal for a person of my height and weight.  I didn’t understand it, but neither did I question it.  I had to take what I needed to survive.  My doses were adjusted on the basis of need.  When I took less insulin for the carbs than one unit for every five grams of carbohydrate, my sugars went high.  Last time I adjusted my doses, I was running blood sugars of 250 after meals regularly.  (Normal is between 70 and 120, though two hours after a meal, with insulin still working to bring it back down, 150 would be perfectly acceptable.)

J got sick about a week ago, and Thursday, I followed suit.  I ate nothing on Thursday because I wasn’t hungry.  Friday, I followed the BRAT diet.  All day long, my blood sugar went low a couple of hours later, which I attributed to the lack of protein and minimal fat in that diet to keep the carbs in my system as long as the insulin was active.  Saturday, I had a horrible, horrible low.

Lows, or insulin reactions, typically cause shakiness, confusion, irritability, sometimes even cold sweats.  Reactions like these, I can handle.  It is the other kind that I really can’t.  Diabetics can be arrested for DUI for an insulin reaction.  While I’ve never been drunk, I think I know something of how it feels. 

I can go unconscious while low, or have periods that I was awake but have no memory of afterwards.  But the reaction that I hate more than any other is the kind where I lose muscle control.  I cannot walk.  Simple tasks like bringing my hand to my mouth (or my bloody finger to the test strip) are almost impossible.  I will my body to cooperate, but the result is jerky, sloppy motions that miss the mark.  Instead of walking, I crawl, and the crawling usually involves wildly flailing limbs.  I feel really horrible, and when it happens, it seems to last until my sugar is well into the normal range.  It seems to happen, too, with lows that don’t want to respond to the sugar that I am given to offset them. 

Such was the low I had Saturday afternoon.  G and I battled this reaction for a couple of hours.  He brought me juice that I spilled all over myself.  He squirted a glucose gel in my cheek before that, which I instinctively spit out.  (Every time I’ve been given this stuff, always when I was too incapacitated to eat or drink, I’ve spit it out.  I don’t know why.)  I had just showered before, but now I had glucose all over my face and in my hair.  My clean clothes were soaked in orange juice.  G dealt with the mess on the carpet. 

After a reaction like that, I don’t want another, not for a long time.  I called the on-call endocrinologist, who “just happened” (thank you, Lord) to be my regular diabetes doctor.  She suggested cutting my basal rates (that is, the amount I get automatically throughout the day via my insulin pump) by twenty-five percent.  This I did.  There they remain.

Sunday evening, after a normal meal, it happened again.  This time, I was fully conscience and I think coherent the entire time, but I did experience the awful loss of muscle control.  G brought me my kit and various sources of glucose, and my muscle problem was not so extreme that I couldn’t manage those tasks of checking my sugar and eating/drinking the necessary carb sources.  I still couldn’t walk, and we both went to bed much later than normal, after we knew my blood sugars were finally back where they should be. 

Today, I called my doctor.  She recommended that I cut my insulin to carb ratio from 1 unit for every five grams of carb to one unit for every ten.  Remembering my last experience of 250-300 blood sugars with a much lower insulin to carb ratio, I expected to have to adjust it in between the two.  While I’ve not had lows since then, my sugars two hours after eating are lower than they should be.  I may have to adjust to more carbs per unit of insulin before this is through!

I really wish my body could make gradual changes in insulin needs, rather than dramatic ones.  And I wish I could get some sort of warning when it was about to happen.

I usually don’t even think about what having diabetes means to me.  At times like this, I wish I’d never heard the word, but once again, I am grateful G was there to deal with them both times.  What if it had happened when he wasn’t at home?  J has certainly had my diabetes explained to him, but he’s never had the responsibility of dealing with it alone.  I pray he never does.  While G dealt with the Saturday reaction, he sent the kids to the back yard.  He usually prefers to have them out of the room, at least.

I am grateful for God’s provision for me when I need someone else there to help me.  In twenty-two insulin dependent years, I’ve never been alone or even alone with my children when I was unable to care for myself.  That is God’s provision.  I’m grateful for it, even though, for the moment, I wish I’d never heard the word “diabetes.”

Currently Reading I Kissed Dating Goodbye By Joshua Harris see related

A Noncommittal Reaction to the Courtship Movement

Today, I want to share my latest thoughts on the matter of courtship.  I realize that there are all kinds of people who may come across my blog, and this word has unfortunately become a catch all word to describe all sorts of things.  I’ll talk about the different interpretations about it, and what I think about each one.

Probably the most common use of the term is simply another name for dating, albeit an “old fashioned” one.  This was how I knew it for much of my life.  I was unfamiliar with the new applications of this term prior to my own marriage.  I consider myself fortunate to have come through the “dating” scene unscathed, for a couple of important reasons.  One, my parents taught me well.  They didn’t make rules that I had to wonder the purpose of.  They talked to me about the why’s.  As a result, the other reason is that I was encouraged to develop, and did, very conservative dating standards.  I knew that if I wasn’t careful, I would be strongly tempted to do some things I didn’t intend to do.  In the end, my experience was much like an early courtship one, in spite of the fact that I didn’t know the term and didn’t aspire to do “courtship.”

The problem is that my experience isn’t the common one.  Too many people out there have sad stories of bad experiences in the dating scene.  It isn’t just easy to get involved physically with the person you are dating, it is presumed and even expected.  It seems as though literally everyone is “doing it,” thinks it is great, and many Christian young people find it all too easy to join in.  Then things go wrong, and they greatly regret it.  Even if a person only gets involved with the person s/he later marries, Christians can really come to regret taking too soon what didn’t belong to them.  It wasn’t pleasing to God; thus, for someone desiring to please Him, it ultimately doesn’t please them, either (even if it did in the heat of the moment). 

How can we reverse this trend?  How can we end up with fewer casualties of morality in the dating scene?  That is what caused the buzz about courtship.  It began as an alternative to dating.  You wait until you are ready to get married to begin a relationship, and you enter into it for the purpose of finding a life partner.  This isn’t casual or “just for fun.”  This is only to find a marriage partner.  Most courting couples would also seek the oversight of their parents, keeping them accountable for purity, if nothing else.  Many times, the time they spend together is spent with their families.  One of the earliest proponents of this was Joshua Harris, author of the book noted above. 

Harris’ book came out after I was already married, but curiosity led me to read it, and I found a lot there that I agreed with.  I was pleased that, though I didn’t set out to do “courtship,” my end result was much like what Harris encouraged striving for.  I thought the idea was wise; this was something any Christian young person should strive for. 

Unfortunately, courtship has continued to develop.  People kept trying to improve on Harris’ ideas.  And, unfortunately, not every couple that starts “courting” discovers that the other person is what s/he thought that person was.  Rather than finding marriage material, even one committed to courtship could end up with a broken heart. 

It seems that many, perhaps even the majority of contemporary courtship proponents think that a broken heart is the ultimate tragedy that must, at all cost, be avoided.  Many of the current courtship advocates seem to almost be proposing a return to arranged marriages.  Some actually discourage the development of any romantic feelings at all!

A significant number of courtship advocates are homeschoolers.  Some of these people have adopted some very rigidly defined roles for men and women that must never be crossed.  These people look at the cultural habits in New Testament times as the model for how we should behave in the present times.  Women should not pursue a higher education; in fact, they should continue living under their father’s roof until a suitable husband enters the scene.  Only once she is married is she allowed to move out of her father’s home, and into the care of her husband.  She and her husband must never even entertain the thought of her working outside the home. 

Joshua Harris, I think, had some great ideas.  But these more extreme versions of courtship are bad news, in my assessment, and blind to the realities of contemporary life in the United States – or even elsewhere.  Some of these can get so extreme it is scary.  I’ve actually heard the idea suggested that parents should not help their daughters get drivers licences.  Instead, they should wait and let her future husband make the decision about whether she needs one! 

There is actually a new movement out there, too.  For those who think that courtship is too risky, you can always go the route of a betrothal!  I suppose having a more Biblical term makes it a more Godly choice.  The couple goes from being friends to being engaged, and this engagement involves a commitment.  It is supposed to be as binding as marriage.  This is very, very much like a genuine arranged marriage.   

It is really too bad that a nice term like courtship has been ruined by some very rigid people out there.  And it is downright scary to think of returning to arranged marriages.  I would have to wonder if some of the extreme courtship and betrothal advocates are major control freaks who desire to control their children’s entire futures.  Our children are people – people with the freedom, especially given the culture in which we live – to make choices of their own.  What happens if a girl who has a thirst for knowledge and ambition to serve God as a missionary nurse ends up with parents who think she should not have any education beyond high school, and that she must stay under their roof until Mr. Right arrives?  What if God’s plan is to use her as she is – unmarried?  A girl who loves the Lord in such a rigid environment may end up rebelling against everything.  Is that really what they want to drive their children into?  It is scary stuff.

So those are my thoughts on courtship.  I don’t know if you could say I am for it or against it.  It all depends on what the term means to you.  Tell me that, and then I’ll decide whether or not I actually like it.