The answer to the unspoken question: yes, we are still here at the dock. And yes, it was driving me crazy. I have—as I always do—finally gotten to the place where I don’t care one way or another and will be ready to go when the time is right. Until I arrive at this peaceful place of surrender, though, I tend to wallow, or, worse, drive Jay crazy asking, “When?” We are still trying to leave, but, as usual, I know very little about my own life or what is best for me, so I am trusting God’s timing, which is rarely early and never late.

It’s taken me awhile to figure out why I get so much more worked up about leaving than Jay does. It’s true that I am more excitable than he is in general, but there is something else at play here. It has to do with the contrasting patterns our lives have taken on during the last decade or so. I commented recently to Jay that his work must be very rewarding: he flies to some city far away, fixes a complicated technology problem for some big company and flies home victorious. You could say that his life follows a linear pattern. Even on the boat his projects have a beginning, middle and end. He sits down, takes the winch apart, cleans and lubricates it, and puts it back together again. Voila! Good as new!

Very seldom do I have that kind of linear project. My life’s shape (at least for the season in which I find myself) is a circle. A dizzying, whirling circle of cooking, laundry, cleaning, diapers, cooking, laundry, cleaning, diapers…throw in homeschooling and baking and you can see why I never have trouble falling asleep at night. I finish one task and go straight into another, turning around to see that the first one needs to be done again. I finish the dishes for breakfast, and it’s time to make lunch. Even the schooling, try though I might to keep it interesting, can become repetitive. One kid moves out of long division just as another moves in. The history lessons which have become our home-schooling mainstay seem to go from war to war to war—the names and dates change, but the pattern doesn’t vary much. My work is certainly rewarding and meaningful, but circular just the same.

That must be why I love jigsaw puzzles so much. In just a few hours, you can see a jumbled pile begin to take shape and within a few days, you have a beautiful picture: order out of chaos. You can then put it neatly in the box, call it finished, and go back to the cycle of daily life, refreshed. Traveling helps me break out of the circular rut, as well. Of course, my tasks stay the same no matter where we are (though making a passage does affect how I do them), but adding the exciting element of exploring, changing the scenery, and unexpected problems or wonderful surprises really throws my circle for a loop. I love every part of voyaging, from planning to passage-making, to arriving and exploring, through to the homecoming. Even when they take me geographically back to the place from which I left, journeys tend to be wonderfully linear, and sometimes I don’t mind being thrown from the carousel.

We’re beginning to see a return on our investment. We started our family about eleven years ago, not fully realizing what we were doing, and not really planning ahead. We knew that humans don’t hatch from eggs and crawl away, of course, and that we were making a commitment to raise this new life by hand, putting all our resources toward making what I often call “a decent human being.” But we didn’t know how long it would be before we had a good night’s sleep again, or when we would begin to see members of the family pulling their own weight, or when (or if) they would begin to take care of each other. Something magical has happened this past year, but how or when it happened I can’t recall. Maybe it was gradual and I just didn’t see it until it came to fruition. We’ve begun to work together like a team. Not quite a well-oiled machine, but a team just the same.

This became clear to me just after Rachel’s birth. With the last couple of kids, I brought a baby home to a house-full of toddlers. There was no rest for the weary, and for the first year of childhood, everyone’s in survival mode. This time, it was different. With a four-year gap since the last baby and a ten-, nine-, and seven-year-old at home, I came home and really rested. We had planned ahead and talked about how adding a baby would mean everyone working harder to pick up the slack. The kids made breakfast and lunch, folded clothes, did dishes, kept things tidy, fetched cold drinks for their nursing mama, held the baby, and ran errands. They felt important, and we started to see the teamwork that we had always hoped for developing. It isn’t always smooth—there’s still push-back and bickering—but it is the beginning of something great.

One morning, after an interrupted night’s sleep, I came upstairs to find Rachel on the potty eating cheerios out of Sarah’s hand, and Aaron pouring the coffee he had made for me. Eli had already put the clean dishes away, and he and Sam were working on their school work. I blinked a couple of times and then pinched myself. Another time, I sent the two oldest boys to the farmer’s market for bread and fruit. They came back with the needed supplies and had used the surplus to buy a gift for their sister. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but again, I was incredulous. We’ve recently developed a new docking plan which capitalizes on this team ethic. We leave the three oldest children on the dock with fenders in their hands while we take the boat out of the slip and then out the entrance to the marina. The kids get into the dinghy and make a rendez-vous with the mother ship in the river. Coming back in, we take the same steps in reverse: launch the dinghy full of dock hands and then come into the marina with helpers ready and waiting, fenders and lines in hand. The last example is probably my favorite: Jay suggested something we call “team shop.” This works well when he is out of town and I can’t sneak out to the store by myself. Since the kids know exactly which products I buy at the grocery store, I can make out several small lists and split up into teams to divide and conquer. I send two kids to the dairy, two to produce and wait in the line at the deli/bakery with Rachel. People at the store have started to notice this and I’ve become somewhat of a celebrity. Whether we’re famous or infamous depends on who you ask!

This teamwork, more than being an end in itself, is also a means to an end: sailing this big boat requires an able crew. Eventually, we’ll have kids who can navigate, take the helm, trim sails, trouble shoot when there’s a problem, scrub the bottom of the boat, dock and anchor, make repairs, prepare meals, and take watches. It excites me to think that we’re already beginning to see the kind of teamwork developing that will make going on an adventure both fun and relaxing, as many hands make light work. What other rewards we may all reap from this experiment can only be guessed at, but I can imagine nothing but good in the future of someone who learns at an early age to work well with others toward a common goal. People get married partly because the couple can become more than the sum of the individuals, and having productive children can cause that family to become a formidable force!

A couple of years ago, Jay and I gave each other whimsical birthday gifts: he gave me a sextant and I gave him a guitar, both of them instruments which require a lot of time and practice to use. We thought, “We’ll be out sailing with nothing else to do.” Right…except keeping the boat afloat and feeding-clothing-teaching five children! I read a couple of books and went to a seminar, and Jay took some DVD lessons, but beyond that, neither of us made much progress learning to use these gifts.

I have always been captivated by the stars and love all things old-fashioned, so the sextant seemed like a neat way to get redundancy for navigation electronics. But for practical purposes, I will never get the kind of accuracy or precision from the sextant that we will from GPS. On the other hand, if satellite communications get knocked out by something like a solar flare, we won’t be completely without options for navigating.

A few weeks ago, an opportunity arose to take an informal class (more of a home-study course with a tutor), and I set aside any free time I might otherwise have had to work on my navigating skills and learn celestial. At first I had my doubts, but after learning noon sites, the basic method for working out lines of position based on the sun, moon, planets, and stars is pretty much the same. Add some chart work with universal plotting sheets and some running fixes and voila! There you have it! So simple, so graceful…if it weren’t for all the complicated games with tiny numbers, I might even say that it’s easy. Now comes the test—not the paper and pencil test—but the actual day-to-day practice which will make me proficient and not just a beginner. Of course, with all the distractions of home life, it will be awhile before I even finish all the left-over coursework.

What I have come to realize through taking this course is that I really don’t want to be the primary navigator, but that I would like to be more involved in piloting the boat and keeping the log. I don’t think I will really do a noon sight every day to keep my dead-reckoning on track, nor will I use Jupiter to check the boat’s compass. However, after taking a few classes and working out the convoluted problems to try to find a boat’s position using heavenly bodies, I’ve come to see why the practice of navigating by the stars has not died out despite advances in technology. There is something magical about finding my place in this world by things so far out of it, and being able to use a tool that connects me to the seafarers of old.

Regarding our romantic notions about sailing, I guess we’ve gotten more realistic. If we’re relying on Jay to make music, we’ll be limited to songs with two chords, and if we’re relying on me to find our way, we’ll be late and lost!

Note: My two favorite celestial books are by Tom Cunliffe (great explanations and full-color diagrams but not very practical) and David Burch (short on theory but very practical).

I found this unfinished post from December and decided it was finished. We're ready to get outta' here, but getting ready to leave takes a lot of patience. My dad always said about vacations, "I can get ready to go, or I can go, but I can't do both."

Yearning for Adventure (December 30, 2011)

I’m practicing contentment. It’s a tough one for me. I have a real yearning for adventure, and when I feel like we’re stagnating, it takes concentration to be thankful for daily ups and downs. Just when I think I’ve got it—finally happy just where we are, even staying at the dock for another season, Jay says, “We gotta’ get out of this slip,” and off runs my active imagination, back to where we were this time last year (the Exumas) or somewhere else I’d love to go (French Polynesia).

Life with five children has no lack of daily adventure, but I long for the kind which takes us far from home and out of our comfort zones. Even the adrenaline-filled trip to the ER with Rachel brought on some kind of exhilaration that I had a hard time explaining until I recognized that the feeling reminded me of leaving the dock or navigating a shallow rocky coast. Some people like roller coasters, and some people like to go to sea. I hate roller coasters.
 

Jay and I are snowed in at the moment, which keeps us from posting. Not that we're not writing, just not finishing anything right now because we're up to our eyeballs in work.

Boat projects are his specialty, so I'll let him update when they're done, but they are tapering off at this point and we're thinking that it's time to stop working on the boat and go enjoy it for awhile.

In addition to the regular workload of home-schooling, bread-baking, and cloth-diapering, I've added a celestial navigation class to my schedule. It's really cool, something I've wanted to do for a long time, but balance goes out the window when I'm trying to work out the latitude from a noon sight. I'm feeling very compassionate towards my children right now, as learning something new humbles me. I think I know why they cry over long division and fractions.

When I come up for a breath of air, I'll write about why something so archaic as celestial made it onto our list of priorities.