Precipitious birth, women’s baseball, groceries, invention, and balance in parenting

• I came home from Texas very late last night, after being nearly two days with my precious sister and her new baby, Sage.  I was going to be her labor coach, but Sage arrived with… incredible rapidity.  “Precipitous birth,” it’s called medically.  More, perhaps, on that later.  I love my new niece, and it was so lovely to see my sister almost instantly become a tender, loving mother.  I did get 7.5 hours of sleep last night, which is normally my ideal.  However, since my head hit a pillow for a cumulative four hours or so in the previous 48 hours, I’m still feeling very groggy.
• On the initial leg of my flight out, which went from Phoenix to Houston, I sat next to an amazing lady.  Other than a love for sports, our home state, and perhaps our ages, Sandra and I have very little in common.  Still, our shared two hours were spent in virtually non-stop conversation.  There was a logo on her top, which I recognized as belonging to the national baseball team;  I assumed she must be affiliated with the men’s team.  Nope!  She’s one of the four coaches for the women’s team.  I didn’t even know we had one!  She was on her way to Raleigh, for the final cuts to the U.S.A. National Women’s Baseball Team roster.  After those cuts are made, Sandra will be going with the team to Venezuela, for this year’s World Cup, which I will most certainly be keeping tabs on.
• It’s crazy how fast a family of seven runs out of groceries.  ~sigh~  Looks like I will be staying home from Bible study tonight, instead, making a serious run to several stores.   I tend to shop at night, both so I can go sans five children, and so that — especially like now, in the middle of summer — it’s not so hot.
• My 21-month old, Fiala, was asking for “bee-boo-bee jam”.  She is still on an extremely limited diet, and the only fruit that we know of that is safe for her is blueberries.  She eats one jam — Organic Reduced Sugar Blueberry Jam from Trader Joe’s.  It has no other ingredients of consequence besides blueberries, sugar, and pectin.  All other jams, even blueberry, have corn syrup, grape, or apple juice, none of which she can do.  Normally, when she has jam, she eats it on Farinata, an Italian flatbread made from garbanzo flour, sea salt, fresh rosemary, and water.  It is delicious.  I have made it every day — often twice — for the last year, and none of us are tired of it.  However, from start to finish, the bread takes about 35 minutes to complete, and it was clear that Fiala needed food now.  I looked in the fridge, and found a little head of Savoy cabbage.  I cut a square-ish portion of leaf, put a bit of jam inside of it, and rolled it up, with no idea how Fiala would receive it.  She ate five mini cabbage-blueberry rolls.  Ha!  Necessity is the mother of invention, right?
• I read two blog posts today, one from Daja at In Other Words, and one from Chris at the Man-Nurse Diaries.  Daja gently mocks the trend of Urban Parenting, and Chris relates a short, overheard conversation between co-workers, which led to the brave title:  Why my kids aren’t going to school with your kids, a micro-treatise on the benefits of homeschooling.  Both posts, though mostly dissimilar, led me down a similar path of thought, on the balance I continually try to achieve, in trusting God with the children He has entrusted to me —  not being FEARFUL in my parenting — but not… leaving them, like my older brother said to me yesterday, in reference to our own upbringing, feeling like they were raised by wolves.