Has it been a month?

Seizures have come and gone. It has been almost three weeks since he's had one, and life is getting back to normal. So normal, that I did a little bit of reading last night. That was done, in part, to help me feel more normal. Blogging here helps me feel more normal, too. Stefan is doing great - he is across the room, rolled over on his belly on a little quilt a lady from church made him. I wish I could make quilts. Actually, I can, I just don't! I spend my time doing other things.

Which is kind of what my reading was about yesterday; Stowe and Beecher were saying that American women were thoroughly capable of doing all of the work of their households, but instead, put themselves to work instructing others to do it. There were pros and cons to this; the pro is she can figure out how to do it more efficiently when she's not on the task herself; the con is that she grows physically weak and requires outside exercise. I never quite thought of chores as exercise, but certainly, they are! I have often felt too tired to do my chores, but once I started doing Zumba, felt more into it.

Baby rolling off quilt toward hearth.

A key point I read last night was about how running a household efficiently required lifelong training. She juxtaposed training in domestic arts with school learning, and balanced this against the women's movement. She says that the women's movement was in response to a lot of real problems of confining and underestimating women, but that, nevertheless, someone needed to take care of the house, and those skills were going undeveloped. There was a remark in there about women who were filled with book learning but totally lacking common sense about things. This reminded me of a time when I was reading a book on infant sleep. A friend told me to use the book and apply it using my own common sense. I thought to myself, "I don't have any common sense when it comes to babies. That's why I'm reading this book!" Well, I still feel like I don't have common sense about raising kids, and wish I had been school in that, too!