The chicken or the egg???

So for the past 6 years I have been trying to unpeel where our culture came up with its view on conception, birth, breastfeeding, and sacredness of life. On an email list I am on, we were discussing when we would feel comfortable with our babies having babies. Most of our society is now saying that a women should wait until her late 20's early 30's before she has children so that she has time to build up her career, money, her esteem, etc. First the easy one is money. We just need to stop letting it rule our lives. Money is supposed to work for us as we created it, it did not create us. So last night I stayed up WAY to late listening to Barbara Behrmann speak at a previous LLLI conference on my iPod. She was talking about the healing and empowerment of breastfeeding. She told stories of many women but two in particular caught my attention as they tied into my week long thoughts on why do we have children so late in life. She mentioned 2 teenage girls that got pregnant both in pretty crummy situations one was on drugs the other just never valued. Both of these girls decided to keep their babies even though society told them not to and then they both decided to breastfeed. They talked about how much it transformed their entire being. It gave them the confidence to say and do what they believed to be best for their baby. It turned the one mother away from her drug addictions and she began to eat healthy and live healthy b/c she realized that whatever she consumed would be part of her child.
So back to the title question. Six years ago (after the birth of our first son) my husband and I realized that their is so much more to the current life issues then a few mere laws. We tried to back step to where did we as a society go astray (this time). We discovered that first women lost her bodies right to find the fulfillment that God provides through her bodies in her gift of breastfeeding ("Oh, that you may suck fully of the milk of her comfort, that you may nurse in delight at her abundant breasts" Isaiah 66:11-12) or ("Your breast are like twin fawns, the young of a gazelle that browse amoung the lilies" Songs 4:5 the description is evidence of the importance of the breast being full of life ready to spring forth new life)
After breastfeeding became taboo, birth was quickly moved from a life altering experience ("Nevertheless, she will be saved by child-bearing, provided she lives a sensible life and is constant in faith and love and holiness. " 1 Timothy 2:15) to one filled with grief, mourning, and fright.
After we lost the beauty and redemptive power of giving natural birth, we lost the ability to praise God for the fertility that he has blessed us with (Jesus speaking to a crowd of women during his way of the cross states "Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep instead for yourselves and for your children, for indeed the days are coming when people will say, 'Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed' " Luke 23:29).
After we contraceptive God's natural plan for the sacredness and redemption that lies in the women's womb (read JPII Theology of the Body on the parallels of the womb to the original Garden of Eden it is beautiful.) we lost the ability to love the life that God has created in his image and likeness ("Then the dragon stood before the woman about to give birth, to devour her child when she gave birth. " Rev12:4).
About a year ago I read Kellmeyer state that one of the major blows the importance of children was when our society changed from a farming one to industrial as children suddenly moved from being viewed as an asset and necessary part of the family to being a financial burden that needs to be minimized. Chronologically I am pretty sure this came before women stopped breastfeeding as women sought out to become more like men instead of reminding the world of the beauty of feminity. Between Steve Kellmeyer mentioning that in the late 1800's fathers (as a whole) started moving away from the home to work outside of the family and Peggy O'Mara's article on "Where's Joseph" I discovered that the women's liberation was a natural response to industrialization. Women were suddenly at home doing both the job of the mother and the father as the husband was off working (low and behold she got tired). As women took on more of the father's role, they lost some of the beauty of their own role and men took over some of the female roles (like breastfeeding with their invention of infant formula, childbirth with twilight baby removal, fertility with "the Pill")
So now I am trying to figure out where in this time line women moved back when they will start having children by about 10-15 years from the 1800s until today.

Bookcase

I am very proud of the bookcase I built for the kid's Atrium so I thought I would share it. This is what it looks like when opened up with the sparse materials I have so far on it. It is hinged so you can do it as a corner shelf or a flat wall and then when it isn't used, it all folds onto itself. Now I need to go get a board to make a table top that will rest on the top when it is closed so we have more workspace. The best part is that even with all of the wood the whole thing cost about $75.00 and we bought good wood. The guy at Lowe's cut all the boards so I didn't have to figure out how to manage a circular saw with 3 kids.

Faking it...

So the beautiful ceiling beams that we knew weren't structural or original to the house we just found out aren't even real wood they are Styrofoam. Brandon was cleaning the bookcases b/4 he started to unload his boxes and reached behind one and low and behold just Styrofoam. It is a really really good fake though.

some like it hot...

So these are called the "lazy" days of summer. I was chatting with some friends about living without air conditioning and the views are very interesting. Today the heat index in Evansville hit 102 degrees. The solution, well fill up a kiddie pool and enjoy the day with the kids. After I got out of the pool and came back in the house it struck me that our go go go society has lost the lazy days of summer. The heat makes us slow down so we spend more time doing useless activities like drinking sweat tea, playing in a kiddie pool, and "accidentally" spraying brother's with a hose. I look up and down my block though and notice that I am the only house with windows open and this is true when it is only in the 80s as I can see how the 100s would make people want air. So instead of slowing down and experiencing all the seasons that God gave us we have circumvented them all with perfect climate control at all times. Our children's generation will never remember the days of having to have water balloon fights to keep from melting, why ice cream is SO good (it is good anyway), and why evenings are best spent on the front porch (since the house hasn't cooled off as quickly as the outside does). I can't believe that the schools in this area start school in just 3 weeks, to me we are just in the middle of summer there is still so much of nature to learn about and explore and i for one am not ready to be stuck inside a building yet. I guess that is another reason to be glad we are homeschooling.

And the rain, rain, rain came down down down...

Well for the second time in the 9 years I have owned this house, the sump pump has had to kick in and for the first time in 9 years, there is seepage coming into our back room in the basement. What a mess as we haven't worried about putting things on the floor since in 9 years we haven't ever had water. I guess it isn't as bad as it could have been given the room that it came into. I think it all happened b/c our rain gutter pipe was disconnected so all the roof water was being drained into a very small spot right outside that wall of the house.

Anyway, on to a cute picture. Alexander is taking horseback riding lessons this summer so I bought him helmet. This is Xavier trying his helmet on riding the rocking horse.