Jenell's article in last month's Christianity Today about the spiritual un-discipline of life with very young children is now available online. I've heard, in various venues, (middle-aged, male) Christian leaders offering absolution to young mothers, assuring them that they ought not think of themselves as spiritual "failures" because they can't steal the time to engage in the uninterrupted quiet time that is evangelicaldom's one and only spiritual practice. But those rarely offer positive suggestions about how to think about spirituality in the whirlwind of early parenthood, or how a mother can nurture her own spirit in the midst of nurturing her babies. So I appreciate Jenell's first-person reflections in that direction.

She's also got a great blog post about fallacy that it's virtuous for academics to give 100 (or the mathematically impossible 110) percent to that segment of their lives. I would aspire to reserving 100% effort for eating and sleeping, but I definitely don't eat with anything near that level of consciousness, and if I could multitask sleeping, I'm sure I would.

(Sarah also wrote a wise post along similar lines some time ago, but I can't find it, because xanga doesn't seem to have a search-within-a-blog feature.)