how to let the fruit ripen

Full confession: our kitchen fruit basket is where produce goes to die.

Maybe you have this problem, too. Each trip to the grocery store finds the counter fully stocked with too-firm bananas, too-green avocados, the occasional treat of a peach or pear waiting to be savored.

Early in the week I find myself hovering over the bowl, waiting for the fruit to be ready. But before I know it, bananas become spotted and soft, avocados squishy and dark, the precious peach or pear ready to rot.

It seems to take so long for the fruit to ripen, but if I’m not careful I miss my chance to enjoy it.

There’s metaphor hidden here, heaped upon the privileged problem of having so much food that it can go to waste. But when I meditate on this Sunday’s Gospel - the parable of the barren fig tree – the deepest truth it speaks to my life right now is patience.

Patience towards ripening fruit.

I look at these little boys running around my house, knocking into my knees and climbing all over my couches. It can be so hard to stay present to them, not to pull forward to days when we’ll be able to have two-sided conversations or leave the house for a whole afternoon without needing naps. Sometimes I want them to ripen quickly so I can enjoy them fully.

But I know this season of green, of tenderness, of waiting to burst into bloom is a fleeting time. I know that too soon they will be more than ready to wrestle out of my reach and rush into a world ripe for their discovery.

I don’t want to hover over them too closely or hold them too tightly. But I do want to witness their maturing and unfolding, not miss it in the blur of my impatience, always straining to see what’s next around the corner.

I want to cultivate patience towards their slow but certain growth.

. . .

This week I’m posting over at Practicing Families - a wonderful new resource for parents interested in exploring faith with children – with ideas for a family liturgy based on this Sunday’s fig tree gospel.

Simple practices to break open a parable about patience and forgiveness and second chances. Lessons I need to learn and relearn each day of this parenting journey.

Each day that I sigh and wonder why the fruit hasn’t ripened yet.

God, be patient with us as we grow good fruit.
Open our eyes to see how we are growing each day.
God, be patient with us as we grow good fruit.
Help us to forgive one another when we fail.
God, be patient with us as we grow good fruit.
Let us offer each other second chances.
God, be patient with us as we grow good fruit.
Wait patiently with us as we work to bear fruit.
God, be patient with us as we grow good fruit.

(a prayer for the Third Week of Lent)

callings and temptations

Today FaithND is running a reflection I wrote on this Sunday’s Gospel, about Jesus’ forty days in the desert and the words of Scripture that he falls back on in his hour of temptation. As I worked on this piece, I was captured by the idea that the devil preys on Jesus’ deepest callings and twists them just enough to pervert the true meaning of the Scripture he cites:

Jesus came to be bread for the world—why not zap stones into manna? Why not feed all the starving in one fell swoop, multiply the miracle by a million, transform every pebble of the earth into food for the hungry?

Jesus came to rule over the world with justice and compassion—why not become king in an instant? Why not seize the glory of all the nations, watch all the citizens of the world bow in honor to him in a single second?

Jesus came to model complete trust in God—why not hurl himself down into the arms of the angels? Why not prove exactly how it looks to fling oneself into the unfailing care of the divine?

I wonder how my own callings are confronted by temptations that look good on the surface, but deep down are distortions of the truth.

Take the calling to be a parent, for example. I find myself inundated by images and ideas and advice and assumptions about what it means to be a good mother. I’m still so new at this gig, just a few short years into a lifelong vocation, that I often find myself wrapped in doubts, worrying whether I’m doing this right, wondering if there’s another (or better or easier or righter) way.

I’ve never thought to consider these temptations as evil – I tend to reserve the term for large-scale horror, violence and destruction – but I wonder whether the weaseling of worry, the twisting of fears around my deepest loves, the perversions that prey on my keenest sense of calling, are nothing less than the power of darkness at work in my own mind.

We can do the right thing for the wrong reasons, or the wrong thing for the right reasons, but can this be calling? My belief in a God of goodness, who calls us in love for love, who longs to bring about fullness of life for the world, whispers no.

Perhaps, like Jesus, I need the words of others to remind me, to strike at the heart of truth:

There is no real occasion for tumult, strain, conflict, anxiety, once we have reached the living conviction that God is All.

All takes place within God. God alone matters; God alone is.

Our spiritual life is God’s affair because whatever we may think to the contrary, it is really produced by God’s steady attraction and our humble and self-forgetful response to it.

It consists in being drawn, at God’s pace and in God’s way, to the place where God wants us to be.

- Evelyn Underhill, The Soul’s Delight

 

how i nurture my mothering spirit – mihee

Despite the clean slate of the new year, it feels as if life is bursting at the seams with to-do lists and extra commitments. And in the midst of it all I long for convenience. I need and long for tools to help me make it through each hour, and help me juggle at least a minimum of three tasks, and make me get everything crossed off on the list for that day.

I will be the first to acknowledge the reality that life has a tendency to overflow one’s cup, especially during these kind of seasons, and convenience is almost necessary for survival. And that’s what I love about ordering online – for birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries. I had heard someone on NPR bemoaning the lack of thought and sentimentality in online shopping but obviously this guy didn’t have twins crawling all over the place 24/7. Try to shop for something at the local store? Not happening. Try to organize the pantry? Nope. Try to sew a little handkerchief? Not a chance. So it just warms my heart to be able to get something last-minute – like from the beautiful monolith that is Amazon and have it shipped to the recipient, or to even just get a gift card and send that out.

But.

I was talking with a good friend from college last night. She came for a brief visit between interviews for her medical residency next summer, and happened to be interviewing up in Indy. We figured out she could have stayed an extra day, and rather than flying back home today and then flying out tomorrow somewhere else, she could have just flown directly there from here. But she said she didn’t want to be an inconvenience, to which I replied without really thinking about it – something to the effect of: “Our life is one big inconvenience these days. It wouldn’t have been a big deal at all.”

Our life is one big inconvenience.

The funny thing is that I didn’t mean this in a negative way at all, even though inconvenience is seen as incredibly annoying/frustrating and generally something to be avoided like the plague. I said it with a laugh, tongue planted firmly in my cheek.

Because I remember that the so-called inconveniences I’ve experienced in my life – all the interruptions, disruptions, obstructions – they end up being incredibly…good. When I let myself be open to them, they are opportunities to experience something unexpected and usually, strangely gracious.

. . .

I’m trying to carry some thoughts over from Advent because it feels pertinent in this season of Lent, on the way to Calvary:

You know that saying, you can really tell who somebody is in a crisis?

You can really tell at Christmas, too. That’s because Christmas,

more than any other day in the American year,

is a day when we’re all handed the same stage props.

The same tree, the presents, the meal, the relatives,

and all the same expectations.

And then we all try to create, more or less, the same kind of day.

It’s like hundreds of millions of people all set to work

doing exactly the same art project.

And not just any art project, but a very high stakes art project,

an art project everybody cares about getting right.

And in that setting, the choices people make never seem clearer.

- from Ira Glass, This American Life

All these seasons are a bit funny. For instance, Christmas is supposed to be meaningful somehow while spilling over with tradition and nostalgia but a time of heartache and grief for so many. There’s a lot of truth to what Ira Glass says about how who we are comes out even more during these holidays.

But rather than following the same script every year and succumbing to cultural pressure to buybuybuy, I think that it can be a good time to foster a spirit of flexibility and openness, and a different kind of mindfulness and posture towards the culture around us. All these seasons, especially in this new year, can be a chance to shift our hearts and spirits towards what is unexpectedly nurturing.

Especially in the midst of what seems outside of our plans and visions and lists for the day.

. . .

I wrote this at 5 am in the morning. D had been sleeping horribly and was up crying for about an hour. When I heard him finally hit the pillow and fall back asleep, I found myself completely awake. I got up. I showered. I unloaded the dishwasher and got ready for the day. And I blogged. Sometimes these kind of revelations and moments come at what seems like an inconvenient time…like in the middle of the night.

But even that’s ok. I’ll take it. I’ll take the forced stillness, and the imposed quiet, like the angel Gabriel touching my lips and silencing them in the manner of the encounter with Zechariah. Sometimes those inconveniences are God sending an angel to shut me up so I can listen and see the grace before me.

Lord, it is night.

The night is for stillness. Let us be still in the presence of God.

It is night after a long day.

What has been done has been done;

what has not been done has not been done; let it be.

The night is dark.

Let our fears of the darkness of the world

and of our own lives rest in you.

The night is quiet.

Let the quietness of your peace enfold us, all dear to us,

and all who have no peace.

The night heralds the dawn.

Let us look expectantly to a new day, new joys, new possibilities.

In your name we pray.

Amen.

 -  from the Anglican Book of Prayer

Few things nurture my mothering spirit – cultivating patience, flexibility, and compassion – more than those inconveniences. Because, our life, after all, is one big inconvenience anyway.

. . .

Mihee is an ordained clergywoman in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and mom to twin babies with #3 on the way in Hoosier country, trying to keep up with college students in part-time ministry. Zealous about God and church, parenting, books, writing, snow, running, goldfish crackers (i.e. remnants from the babies’ meals), social justice, and fresh air.

She blogs regularly at First Day Walking and recently released her first book Making Paper Cranes: Toward an Asian American Feminist Theology published by Chalice Press. This reflection was originally modified from here.

a mother’s prayer for ash wednesday

God of Ash Wednesday,
whose hands first gathered dust to create us,
whose Spirit breathed new life into brittle bones,
whose fingers traced the sand to save a sinner,
take the dirt of my life -
the tempers lost,
the doors slammed,
the complaints muttered,
the harsh words thrown,
the dark doubts seethed -
take all these flaws and failings
and burn them blazing
in the fire of forgiveness.

Gather the dust that lingers, 
the ashes streaked across your healing hands,
and trace the ancient cross
once again across my forehead.
Press its humbling love deep into my mind and heart,
let it sink into my soul
reminding me that life is fleeting as the dark grey dust.

And when I see the same stark sign of sin and death
marked on the soft faces of my children,
let me breathe in the beauty of now,
this present we have together,
this gift of a life shared
no matter how dark or dry it sometimes seems.

Let the touch of another's hand on my bowed head
remind me of resurrection,
of hope and promise
that we are mere dust
and yet more -
beloved in your eyes,
our chins cupped in your hands
with a parent's loving touch,
our faces traced by the same fingers
that forever bear the prints
of every ashen life they touch.

Amen.

on surprises: lenten and papal

For over a week, half a post for Ash Wednesday sat waiting for me to finish it. And it started like this:

Anyone else feel like the gentle green of Ordinary Time just got yanked out from under their feet, and now they’re sitting plop in the purple of Lent, scratching their head and wondering how we got here so fast?

Is it even allowed to be Mardi Gras before Valentine’s Day?

Or am I the only anxious one who still has Christmas thank-yous on her to-do list?

From whence it wandered into ramblings about how maybe the fact that the dates for Easter and Lent change every year keeps us on our toes, on edge even, makes us more mindful or less likely to lull into complacency.

Which bumped into Scriptural allusions about how you know neither the day nor the hour.

(Which was apparently going to wrap back round to parenting or family life or something else that this blog claims to be about.)

But then we all woke up to the papal game-changer of the century (or rather, six centuries) and the looming start of Lent seemed even more surprising as we all sat around puzzling and pontificating (ha) about how we could possibly have a new pontiff by the time these forty days finished.

So now what are we supposed to do, I wondered. I thought about scrapping this post completely. But then it struck me that if this news is the Hayley’s Comet of ex cathedra announcements, I better scrape together two words about an all-points-bulletin Catholic news story that will surely never come again in my lifetime.

And that was precisely when it hit me:

Perhaps the early Ash Wednesday and the unexpected announcement from Benedict aren’t so far apart after all.

Both remind us of mortality, a sobering reminder that we are all dust and to dust we shall return.

Both mark the beginning of a time of great change, a season of renewal.

Both capture the popular imagination in surprising ways.

Ever try to find a parking spot at an Ash Wednesday service five minutes before it starts? Good luck. Catholic churches are crammed on this unofficial holy day. Every year I notice more and more people packed into the pews. Something about this simple penitential practice, this smear of ash on foreheads, touches us deeply.

Ditto Benedict’s decision. Sure, yesterday was full of ignorant chatter and conspiracy theories and snarky Catholic jokes. But it was also full of surprising resonance, of reporters and religion professors and regular church-goers agreeing that resignation could be wise, that retirement could be well-deserved, that respect was due to a powerful leader who knew when to step down, when to take leave of a calling that was ending.

It’s the eve of ashes, and it all feels surprising. But it’s always jarring when death interrupts life, isn’t it? When reminders of mortality upend our neatly planned calendars of The Way Things Are Supposed to Go?

Weren’t we were just waving our palms to welcome him in? Are they really so quickly burned to ash again?

lentissimo

The boys and I have been playing lots of piano lately. (Or I should say: I play while one bounces on my lap and the other bangs on the bass or slams on the treble, depending on his inspired accompaniment.)

During the day we play all the old favorites, the childhood standbys: This Old Man, The Itsy-Bitsy Spider, every tune Woody Guthrie ever dreamed up. The toe-tapping, hand-clapping, doesn’t-matter-if-mama-messes-up-that-key-change-we’re-rolling music that I always dreamed would come when we had a piano in the house.

But at night, after the winter sky sinks dark and the boys are wrapped in bed, I’ve been sneaking down to play alone.

Foot pressed down on the damper pedal so I don’t wake them, I settle into my own old favorites: the Beethoven and Mozart of high school, the Rachmaninoff and Chopin of college. A practice equal parts delightful and frustrating; nothing so humbling as seeing how quickly skill slips away without careful attention.

If I want to sit down and race through a piece without thinking, I’m stuck back around 9th grade for now. To tackle anything I touched in college, I have to take a deep breath and go slow, no matter the marking. Lentissimo.

And if I do slow my rhythm down, slow way down, painfully slower than my normal pace, then and only then do my fingers relax into what they can handle. My mind relaxes, too, slipping back into the deep memory of what these fingers still know: the tricky passages, the troublesome chords. My hands, my feet, my whole body can remember how to play, but only if I slow way down. Lentissimo.

What do I bring to Lent this time around? What do I crave, what do I need? Where is God’s call to go deeper, draw closer?

What might I find if I slow way down into the space set apart, step out of life’s ever-tempting swirls of more-more-more and remember how often I encounter God when I do less?

What would happen if I go lentissimo into Lent this year, simply slow down and let my mind, body, spirit and soul re-remember their way in this world?

It’s aggravating work, this deliberate halting, this restraint of a racing mind and antsy fingers. Lent is aggravating, too, when done right. Why not just binge on chocolate and gorge on Facebook and neglect prayer and forget about justice and ignore the nagging thought of millions of millions who will not settle into such a peaceful sleep as mine tonight?

Lent is humbling, hard work. I need to go slowly and deliberately into these forty days, if I go at all. Lentissimo.

holy week reads, day by day

We’re on the cusp of the holiest of days.

For those who call themselves Christian, the Triduum is the most sacred time of the year. A truth often buried under piles of Easter candy, pink bunnies and plastic grass.

Each day has a distinct flavor. The earthy service of Holy Thursday: washing dirty feet and breaking bread with friends. The stark emptiness of Good Friday: lamenting death and sitting with suffering. The long stretch of Holy Saturday: wondering and waiting. And the brilliant delight of Easter Sunday: singing joy and celebrating life.

I love Triduum. Every year I slowly slip into a lackluster Lent, but always find myself on the eve of Triduum with childlike anticipation. Because the journey from Thursday to Sunday never fails to surprise as it draws me into the stories and the rituals, the sacred and the mystery.

Triduum sums up what I love about being Catholic: ritual, liturgy, Scripture, sacrament. I wrestle with my faith and my church and my God every other day of the year. But for these four days, I enter in deeply, willingly, openly.

That said, the prospect of multiple church services with a baby and a toddler in tow is practically laughable. I’m sure we’ll end up with good story material this year as we always do. And I know much of our Holy Week will be lived out at home, which is just fine, too.

To balance the mayhem we’ll bring to Mass, I’ve collected a handful of lovely reads and reflections to help celebrate each day at home, during those rare gems of quiet moments to myself. Perhaps a few will intrigue or inspire you as well:

Palm Sunday lessons from an unlikely Pontius Pilate by James Martin, SJ. “Because, as even a six-year-old knows, everyone roses from the dead.”

Strip.ped bare: Holy Week and the art of losing by Richard Lischer for Holy Thursday

Busted Halo’s excellent Virtual Stations of the Cross for Good Friday

What did Jesus do on Holy Saturday? From the Washington Post’s On Faith blog

And lest you get overwhelmed, take this advice and let one piece of the Passion rest in your thoughts this week. The whole is too much for any of us to hold.

(Especially without a good soundtrack to accompany the highs and lows.)

Happy holy week. We’re almost there.

stubborn alleluias

A few days before Lent, I sat my son down for a serious conversation over crackers.

“So buddy, Lent starts on Wednesday. Lent is a time when we get ready for Easter. And during Lent we don’t sing Alleluia. So we’re not going to sing Alleluia for a while.”

His sea-blue eyes sparkled up at mine. His milk-smeared mouth turned up at the corners, and he cocked his head full of curls to one side.

“Should we sing Alleluia?” he cooed.

“No,” I replied patiently. “I just said we’re NOT going to sing it for a while. Because it’s Lent. And we don’t sing Alleluias during Lent. We save our Alleluias for Easter.”

“Should we sing Alleluia?” “No.”

“Should we – ” “NO.”

“Sh-” “NO! I SAID NO ALLELUIAS DURING LENT!”

Snack and failed attempt at liturgical catechesis both met an untimely end. The cherub scampered out of the kitchen and raced up the stairs, warbling as he went: “AH-AH-YAY-YOO-YA, AHHHH-YAY-YOO-YA!”

The rest of Lent? You guessed it. Our house has been filled with Alleluias. Cranky Alleluias and cheerful Alleluias. New lyrics sung to Alleluia tunes. Alleluia lyrics slapped onto nursery rhyme songs.

You would think we were already stuffing our cheeks full of Easter chocolates the way Alleluias are resounding round here.

I was annoyed for a while. Ok, I foisted my Lenten disciplines on my child and it failed. I tried to teach a two-year old about the somber tenor of a solemn season and it was a total flop. I realize now that if I had never uttered the A word on Ash Wednesday, I probably would have had a Alleluia-free Lent. I get it.

Silly, silly new mama.

But in the dusty midst of spring cleaning last weekend, a piece of paper fluttered to the floor as I swept a pile across my desk. I picked up the small scrap, its edges taped and retaped, remnants of a journey from childhood mirror to dorm room wall:

Let nothing so fill you with sorrow that you forget the joy of Christ risen.

(Dear Mother Teresa. That little lady had a gift for summing up the Gospel.*)

I thought about the stubborn persistence of joy.

Scraggly green shoots that push up through concrete cracks. Bandaged children who squeal with delight as they play in bombed-out buildings. Cancer patients who crack jokes with their nurses.

Something small and resilient within the human spirit seeks joy at any cost. Alleluia is a stubborn word to purge from our vocabulary. Our tongues ache for it during Lent: the forty days seem too long, and we’re cranky and tired by the end. We need more joy. Which is precisely the point: to do without so we remember how to do with.

This year, we’re plagued with an abundance of Alleluias, courtesy of one cheeky toddler. But I’ve given up fighting with joy. I figure God thought we could use an extra dose of delight in our days, and I’m done complaining. Aren’t all our Lents supposed to be lived in the light of Easter joy?

*For a little Lenten inspiration, check out these quick reads from some great theological minds on the Gospel in seven words or less. 

And if you want my spin?

“See those people?” God asks. “Love them.”

(Coincidentally, it also applies to parenting.)

ash wednesday: every parent’s nightmare

Last night I lingered in a long line of blinking tail lights to turn into the parking lot. I wondered about the growing crowds at each year’s Ash Wednesday services. What packs the pews this evening every Lent?

As I waited, I thought of four young girls killed in a weekend car crash. Freshmen roommates, victims of a mild winter’s rare snow storm. One was from our town. Another was our sitter’s co-worker. Shiny senior portraits show girls on the brink of adulthood, bright-eyed and smiling. Lots of ashes at their loss.

I looked around at faces, young and old, as I entered the church. Many at Mass knew and loved those girls. What does Lent mean when we’re staring at death?

Before I left home that evening, my husband had told me a story he’d heard about the American reporter killed in Syria. The night before she died in the bomb blast, she told of the suffering of women and children, often the focus of her wartime front-line reporting.

“I watched a little baby die today,” she told the BBC on Tuesday. “Absolutely horrific, a 2-year old child had been hit. They stripped it and found the shrapnel had gone into the left chest and the doctor said ‘I can’t do anything.’ His little tummy just kept heaving until he died.”

“Stop,” I cut him off before he finished telling me the story. “Stop. I literally cannot hear that.” I scooped up my own 2 year-old and squeezed his squirming limbs to my chest.

“My love,” I whispered into his hair as he wrestled out of my grasp. Overwhelmed at the thought of losing life closest to my own.

I prayed about both stories in the pew. Death close to home and far away. Parents living my worst nightmare. Mothers watching their babies blown apart, fathers sobbing at their daughters’ death. I hated to think about it. But I made myself sit with the terror of such loss.

Who doesn’t want to flip the page when they see the news? Who doesn’t want to turn their head from the TV’s wail? We shy away from the horror because it is too much for us to bear. And yet each day parents wake to our worst nightmare. Cancer. Suicide. Car crash. Overdose. Babies born too early; teenagers gone too soon.

I stared up at the cross while people shuffled forward to get their ashes. I remembered that at the heart of Christ’s story, too, stands this terrible tension. A mother holding her dead son’s body.

We have to sit with this image, this terror and sorrow. And not only on Good Friday, the day of death that makes us squirm so uncomfortably in the pews. But also Ash Wednesday. Ashes on our foreheads, burnt and smeared, remind us that we each will meet death. Even the young and the lovely among us.

A family filed down the aisle in front of me. In the mother’s arms was a tiny girl with blond curls. She, too, was marked with dark ash. What did her mother see when she looked down at the sweet face smeared with soot? A reminder of her child’s mortality? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Why do so many people come back to church this night? Perhaps because Ash Wednesday helps us make sense of life’s fragility. We ritualize our own mortality to remind us to turn from sin to life-giving love.

Ash Wednesday gathers us together as a church and reminds us that our community cares about the deepest realities of our lives. It gently leads us to the edge of our fears and shows us a way to live through the suffering. It shakes us loose from the clench of loss and speaks truth of rising after dying.

A stranger smudges soot on our skin, and the traces tickle our nose. Teenagers elbow each other and snicker at the size of each others’ crosses. Wide-eyed children peer over their parent’s shoulder, innocent of the dark sign they now bear on their forehead, as mortal as the rest of us.

This sacramental sign holds us in tensions we’d rather shudder off – we’re sinful, we’re mortal, we’re human – and transforms them from terrifying to something holy. Something we can hold.

If even for one night.

how to not prepare for lent

Yes, you read that right.

(And yes, I’m even aware that I split the infinitive. I broke my own grammatical pet peeve and did it on purpose.)

Lent starts tomorrow, and I could not be less prepared. No resolution carved in stone, no discipline established, no good intentions for prayer or fasting or almsgiving.

Sure, I’ve got a zillion ideas. Sugar purge. Facebook fast. Daily writing with Scripture. Creative donations to important causes.

But I can’t commit to anything. Why?

BECAUSE I CAN’T SLEEP.

My darling, beautiful, bouncing baby boy decided a few months ago to regress from his long-sleeping ways. Since Christmas, we’ve been up every three hours. Four if we’re lucky. Two if we’re not.

And everyone in this house is losing their minds.

Some days we can laugh about it. Some days I can drink enough caffeine to overcome it. But some dark days I do nothing but wallow in the exhaustion.

We’ve tried it all. And then we tried it again. And - parenting epiphany! – this child refuses to submit to our schedule, our demands, our desires.

Lack of sleep has affected every part of our lives: our work, our home, our relationships. After too many breaking points, we’ve finally come up with a new plan that we hope will work. (So please send prayers for this weekend’s launch of Finally Getting the Baby to Break Bad Habits and Stop Nursing All Night Without Crying So Loud He Wakes Up His Brother Next Door And Then We All Go Insane.)

But in the meantime, Lent has crept up to the doorstep and is gently knocking to come in. And I can do nothing but laugh and shake my head. This house? This family? You seriously want to come in here?

I have no time or energy to prepare for Lent this year. I don’t even have time to feel guilty about it.

So for the next forty days, all I can do is invite Lent into the chaos of our lives. And pray that God’s grace forgives my stumblings. And remember that God’s invitation – and my response – was present there all along.

Going about my daily work even when I’m dragging? That’s prayer.

Giving up the glorious sleep I love to feed a hungry baby? That’s fasting.

Investing my last bit of energy in my needy children? That’s almsgiving.

So come on in, Lent. Pull up a chair (you’ll have to kick the toys aside) and a cup of tea (you’ll need to wash that dirty mug).

We’re completely unprepared. But you’re always welcome.