Not all chaos is created equal.
Take, for example, my current chaos.
Right now my chaos is one of abundance. We spent almost three hours shopping yesterday (and I am an efficient shopper– even with littles along) and replenished our supplies that have been lagging since the anticipation of our trip over Thanksgiving week.
First big shopping trip in about a month. And it was big.
I now have produce in the the house again. Scratch-meals on the mind and *options* for dinner!
I also have two young chickens to cut up and steaks I got a great deal on to learn how to cook. (Sorry, don’t mean to hijack the blog to domesticity for long.)
This chaos is exciting and stirs my energy and creativity.
The Chaos of three days ago– a chaos of scarcity– sapped my mind and made me tired, even though I knew what to do with myself (which is not always the case).
With a moratorium on movies until the girls lifted their own strike, little clean laundry, and little in the refrigerator (coming on the heels of three days without milk– a bizarre experience that threw us all off-balance), I felt as much *lack* as maybe a middle-class home can feel.
Which, admittedly, isn’t much, but was still hard for me to function under.
But contrasting today with that day is intriguing. That day I didn’t even have the energy to blog or play EQ2 with my husband (we just re-started, and usually play over his lunch-hour while the kids nap). Today I’m writing while I brace myself to dive in. My lovely family’s actually getting a three-course meal today.
At least, I think that’s what it’s called (not really my realm, so I’m not sure). The steaks (I’ll figure something out), cream-of-cauliflower soup, and biscuits. There will be some green stuff too, but since I don’t do anything with it, it hardly counts as a “course,” right?
And the kids were adorable when I picked up the on-sale cauliflower. “What’s that?” (distrustful) “What do you do with it?” I explained it by saying you can do anything with it you do with broccoli. One of the girls gushed, “You can make soup with it!”
So that’s where dinner came from.
And I did it all. All the food prep-cooking and preserving, even the scratch chicken-stock for next week’s soup.
I only learned how to clean/butcher/de-bone (whatever you call it) a chicken in May, so I haven’t done more than a half-dozen.
With that newness I am still fascinated by the process– how easily the skin peels off for healthier cooking, finding the chicken “tender” nestled, unattached, under the breast meat as I slice it off the bone, and the line on the meat itself that shows where to cut to cleanly separate the leg from the thigh without damaging the knife.
My mind just marvels at the detail of God’s design, even in the practicalities of an animal largely used for consumption.
So. cool.
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