bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Coschooling news.

    I frequently write about our adventures in coschooling with H’s family and M’s. To recap, we have been

    • spending the whole day together,
    • in various combinations,
    • once or twice a week,
    • alternating at each other’s houses,
    • with all the children,
    • for about thirteen years.

    We have been doing it since before it was coschooling, because before anybody was doing school. It’s pretty much our way of life now.

    + + +

    So, ever since back in April or May or whatever when I told H. I was pregnant and due in January, I we have been expecting a speed bump in this school year.

    At first it seemed a minor one to start with. I am responsible for teaching the three teens geometry, and supervising their self-teaching of history, and somewhere in between teaching and supervising Spanish and Latin. I also teach history and Latin to the elementary school aged kids. That is a lot, but we thought maybe it would not be too big of a deal to take off, say, three weeks, right around when the baby is born, with H. continuing to teach most of her subjects (English and language arts) to everyone, concentrating on the teens. Then, we figured, I would take another couple of weeks to phase back in all the stuff I do. I have done this before, four years ago, and that is about how it went last time; Six weeks or so post baby, I was mostly back up to speed.

    We figured that if any extra challenges popped up, such as if my baby were to have health problems or my delivery were to have complications necessitating longer recovery, we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.

    + + +

    What I haven’t told you yet here on the blog, but I have known for a few months now, is that only a little while after I announced my pregnancy to H. and to M….

    …it was H’s turn to announce her pregnancy to the rest of us. O happy news! Soon our long-term school plans started to extend far into the future. These two little ones will be buddies, we said. And what a wonderful coincidence, since we had not each told the other that we were TTC.

    We are due about six or seven weeks apart, which we decided would probably work out just fine. The tough part of pregnancy would just be beginning for H. when I would have my baby and we would take a break from school. And after my delivery, I would have time to get back up to speed before H.’s baby would be born, and hopefully be well enough to help out during her recovery.

    “We’ll have a crazy spring!” we told each other cheerfully, “but then we’ll pull it together by early summer and things will be back to normal by fall.”

    And then… this past week… after some delays caused by a job change and insurance paperwork… H. got around (at 26 weeks) to having her first ultrasound, the kind most people get around 20 weeks. I drove over to her house Monday morning hoping H. would have found out if she was having a boy or a girl and that if she did, she would let me in on the secret, so I could know whether to give her all my stored baby girl clothes or whether to pass them on to someone else.

    + + +

    I wonder if any of you have guessed where this is going yet.

    + + +

    Oh yes. There will be no “getting back to normal” for our co-school, definitely not by early summer. I never did find out whether I should get rid of the baby-girl clothes or not.

    But I did find out that she will be needing enough clothes for two babies!

    Yep. She is having twins.

    + + +

    “Fourteen kids in twenty-fourteen!” our children are exulting, counting all of them, H.’s and M.’s and mine. When spring comes, their ages will be 16, 14, 13, 11, 11, 10, 10, 9, 7, 6, 4… and newborn, newborn, newborn. And we’ll all be together, twice a week!

    + + +

    It has not escaped our notice that there will be three babies and three teenagers. Perhaps a major part of the high school curriculum will be “studying with a baby on your lap.”

    + + +

    Anyway, I am so happy for H. (and her husband, who later that same evening received from Mark a gift of a box of good beer and also some Red Bull). I really can’t think of anyone else about whom I can say so confidently, “If anybody can do this and maintain her strength under pressure, she can.” There is no question of quitting the work we do together; like I said before, this co-schooling thing is a way of life, and we will figure it out and help each other and keep going.

    But I imagine it will be a bumpy ride for now!

    If you are so inclined, please pray for all of us, but of course especially for H., who now has not a very long time to scramble together the information (and STUFF! And support! And backup plans and and and….) that she needs to get ready for the birth of twins. Healthy pregnancy and delivery and a smooth start to breastfeeding and all that good stuff.

    You know the drill.

     

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    9 comments on Coschooling news.

  • Home birth FAQ answer list.

    1. The midwife cleans up the mess.

    (End of list)

     

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    5 comments on Home birth FAQ answer list.

  • Advent is on.

    Just in time for the start of the Season of Joyful Expectation, I have now entered the part of pregnancy that I refer to as the “what was I thinking?!?” stage. It arrives when my energy levels start to drop at the same time that my to-do list suddenly lengthens. I am doing a lot of pre-emptive resting, and that is definitely good for me physically, but often I lie there in my nest of pillows fretting about the things I am not getting done.

    Sunday afternoons are the worst. Probably because they are the best time to lie down and rest a lot, since Mark is home and no one has to go anywhere. But I am always thinking of the things I could do to get ready for Monday. Ergo, more time to rest equals more time to fret.

    This pregnancy has really forced me to accept that the world will not stop turning if I don’t get it all done. Whatever “it all” is.

    + + +

    I did pull together all the Advent stuff on time. (What’s this? Is she actually getting a sense of proportion and perspective? Figuring out what the important things are and what things are small stuff not worth sweating?)

    It helped that we had a four-day weekend right before the first Sunday of Advent, and also two-day free shipping.

    My kids’ chocolate-filled Advent calendars arrived on time, for example.

    And! I got a belated birthday present of cash with strict instructions to spend it on something I wanted, just as I was wishing we had a proper nativity set; so I put the money toward a Holy Family and three kings and a shepherd and a flock of sheep. Porcelain would have been nice, but I trust I can upgrade from the Handpainted Unbreakable Polymer when there are not quite so many little people around. Anyway, now I can look forward to adding a figure or two each year for a while, which should be fun.

    Also, Simcha Fisher posted her Advent Chains activity and I got it all printed out, on purple and pink paper even! Totally recommend this one as it is nearly no work to set up, and if you print it on white paper instead you can even use it to do the Jesse Tree thing as it gives you a little coloring-page ornament every day. And the Advent wreath is operational too.

    + + +

    Our Advent wreath is Scandinavian-style, made of wrought iron with glass cups to hold ball candles. I bought it in our first year of marriage; at the time it seemed an extravagant purchase for an item that is meant to beused one month out of the year, but by now I am very glad of it. I like it because it is not very large, and the center of it comes up in a decorative handle so it can be easily moved without tipping it or accidentally taking hold of the loose glass holders. Both features are important in our compact house, since we have to use our dining table and countertops all day long as a work surface and can’t have any sort of centerpiece that just sits there and looks pretty.

    I cleared off a shelf above the computer and that is where it resides during the day (along with the aforementioned Nativity figures); in the evening after the dinner dishes are cleared away, I grab the wreath by its handy handle and set it on the table, and right before bedtime snack we gather around it for our Advent ritual.

    + + +

    That ritual, we keep fairly simple, and always the same. First, one child lights the candle(s); they take turns each day. Next, Mark leads us in a short prayer — a different one each week — that I downloaded from somewhere. My daughter has the privilege of taking a loop off Simcha’s Advent chain and reading the scripture verse aloud. Then we sing a verse or two or seven of an Advent hymn — sometimes “People Look East” or “O Come Divine Messiah,” because those are so much fun, but the kids are convinced that “O Come O Come Emmanuel” is proper. I have the verses printed out in Latin and in English this year. Finally the three-year-old gets to blow out the candles, his privilege as the youngest. The reason for that privilege should be obvious.

    + + +

    My daughter, and not any of the boys, gets to read all the scripture verses for a less obvious but quite specific reason. The parish we attend reserves altar service to boys, and I want her to have some roles that she can keep for herself.

    This is not a form of protest. I support a return to the “altar boy” tradition, for a number of reasons both practical and theological. But I am sympathetic to my seven-year-old’s annoyance that there’s this thing her brothers are invited to do that she isn’t. The reasons, compelling as they are to me as an adult, are not all that accessible to seven-year-olds.

    (Especially when the seven-year-old in question frequently goes to Mass at other parishes and notices that 90 percent of the altar servers at the other parishes are girls.)

    Ours isn’t a faith that operates one hundred percent at the “accessible to seven-year-olds” level, so I don’t necessarily see this as a problem; but I have taken pains to point out to her that women and teenage girls have visible and important roles at Mass too. When the boys were younger, we treated it as a matter of simple expectation that when they were old enough they would serve at the altar, learning how to reverently handle the patens and candles and such and how to walk just so and how to pay attention during Mass. Similarly, we treat it as a matter of fact that when my daughter gets old enough she will serve too, probably as a lector. She has to wait longer (in our parish, teenage boys and girls can read the readings at Mass after confirmation, whereas the youngest altar boys are only ten), but she is looking forward to it.

    Anyway, that is why it is always her privilege to read aloud any scripture passage that is part of a family devotion. She is practicing to be a lector.

    + + +

    As for the chocolate Advent wreaths, I only have one thing to say: Once you get your kids the kind with chocolates behind every door, you will not be going back to the plain paper kind. So don’t try it unless you are committed to keep it up for the rest of your years as a parent.

    Kids love ritual. It is amazing how quickly a single year’s activity can become “but that is the way we have done it for as long as I remember and so we have to do it every year.” I suppose it is less amazing when it involves eating chocolate before breakfast.

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  • Pregnancy update power. Form of: Quick Takes.

    1. I have written a few blog posts but not finished any of them because my powers of concentration and attention span are seriously attenuated. Hence, this.

    I have a post about Elisabeth Leseur and I have a post about natural childbirth. Neither is done, I really want to finish both of them, and that desire is clogging up the queue. This tendency is my blogging kryptonite.

    + + +

    2. My energy levels are overall pretty good, considering, but plummet to near-zero at unpredictable times. I have embarked on a program of eating lots of iron-rich food, which means that by now I could probably write an entire cookbook’s worth of recipes for different liverwurst sandwiches.

    Tomato and liverwurst on pumpernickel rye flatbread crackers, with just a little salt and pepper, is pretty good. This morning it was liverwurst, onion-chive cream cheese, leftover vinegar-sugar coleslaw, and sriracha on a toasted English muffin. I think sometime this week I may make banh mi.

    + + +

    3. “So, how are you feeling?” has a split answer.

    All the soft stuff feels pretty good for seven months pregnant. Decent energy (as long as I get periodic naps and infusions of liverwurst), good appetite and digestion, not a single leg cramp, circulation is great, no heartburn, no nausea.

    The skeleton and associated attachments, are way out of whack. The drunk staggering for the first ten steps after I get up out of bed or a chair, I could overlook or pretend is normal. But I have noticed a disturbing tendency to walk with my feet rolled out, on the outer edges of the soles, which is something I Do. Not. Do. in ordinary life and have never noticed before in pregnancy either. Something’s up. Also, the other day I tried the psoas release position (scroll down) on SpinningBabies, and I could not believe the intensity of the sensation in my back and hips.

    I think it is about time I embark reluctantly on a daily program of things like brisk walks and pelvic tilt exercises and squats and sitting on the exercise ball (which at least has the advantage of keeping the children from throwing it at each other).

    + + +

    4. For the first time, we aren’t traveling to Ohio for Thanksgiving, and we don’t have plans to get together with anyone else either. This seems very weird. We waffled about it for a while but in the end decided it wouldn’t be all that good for me to travel or to commit to anything big, so the nuclear-family Thanksgiving it is. Mark promised to deal with Thanksgiving dinner for me. I said I would do the grocery shopping and help where I could. This will be new.

    + + +

    5. Till last night, I had not had any Weird Pregnancy Dreams. No Dropping Dreams, no Misplacing The Baby dreams, no Giving Birth To Nonhuman Animals Dreams either.

    Last night I had the first weird pregnancy dream, in the category of Labor And Delivery Fantasy, in which I looked down in bed to discover to my surprise that there were feet emerging from my body. I gave them a yank and out came a perfectly healthy, normal-sized human baby. I wrapped the baby up and held her in my arms (in the dream it was a girl, although I am carrying a boy), and the baby looked up at me in the way that newborns do as soon as all the drama is over and the lights are dimmed.

    And that was that, except for the vague feeling of disappointment on awakening and discovering that I still have eight weeks and a non-fantasy childbirth between my arms and #5.

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    7 comments on Pregnancy update power. Form of: Quick Takes.

  • I have no idea where he got this.

    Yesterday afternoon my almost-four-year-old was angry at his brother, so he ripped up one of my paperback books.

    I said, "Don't rip up my book!  It makes me sad!"

    He said, "It's okay, mommy.  It'll be fine."

    I said, "No, it won't.  The book is broken now.  I can't read it anymore.  It's ruined.  That makes me sad."

    He said, "I was mad at [the 10-year-old]."

    I said, "I'm angry at you!"

    He looked concerned and asked:  "Will you be mad at me all of the times?"

    I was mixing up medicine for his sister and I paused.  "I will be mad until I calm down," I said.

    He looked at me quite seriously and then said firmly:  "Mommy!"

    "What?"  I was back at the sink.

    "Take a deep breath!"

    He pronounced it "breff."  

    I paused again and turned around.  He was standing there, his head level with the countertop, looking at me expectantly.

    I inhaled.  

    He pantomimed exhaling, exaggerating the motion of his chin and head.

    I exhaled, feeling the corner of my lip curl upwards.  I suppressed it.  "Now what?"

    "Take a deep breath again," he told me.

    I inhaled.  He pantomimed exhaling.  I exhaled.

    "Now what?"  I asked again.

    "Now you are all calmed down," he said.  And he went off to play.

    And you know, he was right.

     

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    1 comment on I have no idea where he got this.

  • Emily Oster on the conventional wisdom of pregnancy.

    Darwin of DarwinCatholic recently pointed me, via Facebook, to an interview with author Emily Oster hosted by EconTalk host Russ Roberts.  

    Oster is the author of Expecting Better:  Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong–And What You Really Need To Know.  

    I have been meaning to pick it up for some time;  now, thanks to the instant-gratification feature on Amazon (aka the Kindle store) I should be reading some of this book later today if I get a chance.

    Here are a few interview quotes gleaned from the transcript highlights posted on the EconTalk page.

    OSTER:  I think that patients sometimes will just say: "Look, I just want you to tell me what to do. I don't want to have to make this choice"….in combination with doctors sometimes saying: "Look, I don't have 45 minutes to go through all this with you; I'm just telling you, you should make this choice." 

    I think those two things….interact poorly in a way that makes us not always make the best choices. 

    [Y]esterday I was on the radio with a doctor who said: "Well, statistics is really hard, and so …we shouldn't really expect people to be making a lot of these decisions with data."

    And I think … "Are you kidding? You *have* to make these decisions with data."

    +++

    OSTER:  I think one of the things that is definitely true is there is variation across doctors. And there is also this very clear set of constraints that I think doctors face, some of which just has to do with not having that much time and some of which has to do with legal issues. 

    …And I think for both of those reasons, it is in some sense incumbent on women to think through these choices for themselves.

    And this extends past pregnancy into other parts of medicine: that there just isn't really a choice–you have to do this, to some extent, by yourself. There isn't another option.

    On one of her examples, caffeine use during pregnancy:

    OSTER:   [I]n a lot of what I researched in pregnancy there is a very clear problem with causality….

    So, the concern with having too much caffeine in pregnancy is that you might have a miscarriage. …. And so the way that this is studied early in pregnancy is you look at women who drank some coffee early in pregnancy; you ask them how much coffee they had; and you look at their rate of miscarriage and you compare them to women who didn't have coffee, and you look across different amounts of coffee. 

    [W]hat you find is…

    • that up to 200 mg, which is about 2  eight-ounce cups, is fine….you really don't see any increased risk of miscarriage up to that level.
    • When you start looking at, like, 8 cups of coffee, you see ….that there is an increased risk of miscarriage.
    • When you look in the middle, like 3, 4 cups a day, the evidence is a little bit mixed.

    So … it's clear a little bit is okay; it's probably the case that a lot is a problem; but in this intermediate stage it's unclear.

    And part of the issue is that when you look at these studies, the kind of women who drink coffee are just different from the kind of women who don't. And this is a problem in any observational study like this. And they are different in ways that are also, themselves, linked to miscarriage.

    [W]omen who drink coffee tend to be older. Age is the biggest issue with this.

     In addition, in the case of coffee–and this was in some sense the most interesting thing for me research-wise–there is also a problem with nausea. So, if you are nauseous in early pregnancy it's a very good sign about the health of the pregnancy. Women who are nauseous–good news, ladies: you are less likely to miscarry. But women who are nauseous are also more likely to avoid coffee.

    So when you look at women and you see some of them drink a lot of coffee, those women are also on average women who are less nauseous. And when you see that they then miscarry at higher rates, it may well be just that not being nauseous is a sign of miscarriage and caused them to drink coffee, but it's not that the coffee caused the miscarriage. And I think getting around that kind of challenge is very complicated. 

    There's more, on epidurals, alcohol, deli meat, and cats, among other things.  Unfortunately the interview transcript is poorly formatted, but you can also listen if that's your thing.

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  • A scary Halloween story.

    My daughter is feeling much better now, to the point where she hasn't quite stopped complaining about pain from her incision, but we are starting to notice that she tends to do it when it's time to unload the dishwasher.  So it's about time I start buckling down and blogging a little more if I can.

    I'll start with a story that doesn't have me in it.

    + + +

    On the day before Halloween, Mark dropped the three big kids off at religious ed and then rushed off to do the grocery shopping as quickly as possible so that he would have time to stop by the hardware store and buy dowels for my nine-year-old's Archer-Cloaked-In-Black-From-Head-To-Toe costume.

    1031131814-00

    Note the dowels emerging from the quiver on his back.  Mark is now an expert in duct-tape fletching.

     

    Anyway, Mark rushed my three-year-old in the Car Cart through the grocery store, made it to the big-box hardware store, grabbed dowels and headed for the checkout with the 3yo in tow.

    Just before they got to the checkout, Mark remembered that the three-year-old had been extra-wiggly back in the grocery store, and asked him:  "[Three-year-old], do you need to go to the bathroom before we check out?"

    "No, Daddy."

    But that's always a dangerous question.  Much as one should not point a gun at an aggressor unless one is prepared to deliver a disabling shot, one should never ask whether a three-year-old child needs to go to the bathroom before entering the checkout lane.  All asking does is begin the process of percolating the idea through the brain and down to the nervous system, eventually to find its way to the bladder.   One should either issue a firm parental command ("Time for the potty!") or else remain silent.

    Mark entered the self-checkout lane and began scanning dowels.  Three-quarters of the way through the transaction, the three-year-old informed him:  "Daddy!  I need to go to the bathroom!"

    Uh-oh.  "I'll take you to the bathroom as soon as I'm done paying for this stuff," Mark told him.  Then he let go of the three-year-old's hand to extract the credit card from his wallet.

    A moment later, the 3yo darted out of Mark's peripheral vision.  Mark looked up and saw him running toward the front of the store, where the big sliding entry doors are.

    And also where the displays are.  Display shower enclosures, and display vanity sinks, and…

    There was an attendant there to assist people in the self-checkout lanes.  Mark handed her the dowels, screeched, "Hold these!" and sprinted after the three-year-old, who was already lifting the lid (and the seat) of a display toilet and pulling down the front of his pants.    Mark scooped him up from behind just barely in time.

    "He was so very, very confused," Mark told me later.

    Mark carried the objecting three-year-old back to the checkout lane and one-handedly retrieved his dowels from the attendant.  On the way out he passed a sign that said "Ring Bell if you received excellent service!"

    Mark rang the bell.  After all, he did get his dowels back.

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  • Proselytizing vs. evangelizing.

    So, the word "proselytizing" has acquired in the last few generations a negative connotation (relative to "evangelizing") that it did not previously have.

    Disputations has a list of "negative" aspects of witness-to-the-faith, which he — quite interestingly — found in an ecumenical document composed in conversations between Baptist and Catholic groups.  It serves as a description, if not a definition, of "proselytizing" in the modern, negatively-tinged sense.

    We also admit that there are negative aspects of witness which should be avoided and we acknowledge in a spirit of repentance that both of us have been guilty of proselytism in its negative sense. We affirm that the following things should be avoided: 

    •  every kind of physical violence, moral compulsion and psychological pressure (For example, we noted the use of certain advertising techniques in mass media which might bring undue pressure on readers/viewers);
    • explicit or implicit offers of temporal or material advantages such as prizes for changing one’s religious allegiance
    •  improper use of situations of distress, weakness or lack of education to bring about conversion
    •   using political, social and economic pressure as a means of obtaining conversion or hindering others, especially minorities, in the exercise of their religious freedom;
    • casting unjust and uncharitable suspicion on other denominations; 
    • comparing the strengths and ideals of one community with the weaknesses and practices of another community.

    Sounds pretty good to me.

    The term "evangelist" has some negative connotation in the wider culture thanks to "television evangelist," but if it's used in its historical, more narrowly technical sense (i.e., to describe the authors of the four Gospels) that's generally avoided.  

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  • Why it’s important for science teachers to teach theories that aren’t “true.”

    At Gravity and Levity, a defense of teaching the Bohr model of the atom (at least as a prerequisite to teaching more modern models).  

    The Bohr model has been discredited, but it's still very useful.

    A few years ago, at a big physics conference, I was party to an argument about whether we should be teaching the Bohr model of the atom in lower-level physics classes.  The argument in favor was that the Bohr model is easy to teach and gives a simple way to think about the structure of atoms.  The argument against was that the Bohr model is completely outdated, conceptually inaccurate, and has long been superseded by a more correct theory.  The major statement of the opposition argument was that it doesn’t do anyone much good to learn an idea that’s wrong.

    How strongly I disagree with that statement!

    What follows is an explanation of the Bohr model and also an explanation of a similar problem in physics (Landau levels) that, in the blogger's opinion, itself justifies the teaching of the Bohr model.  But he says — and I agree — that there are deeper reasons:

    I can’t resist making a larger comment here about the idea that certain scientific ideas shouldn’t be taught because they are “not true.”

    Science, as I see it, is not really a business of figuring out what’s true.  As a scientist, it is best to take the perspective that no scientific theory, model, or idea is really “true.”  A theory is just a collection of ideas that can stick in the human mind as a useful way of imagining the natural world.

    Given enough time, every scientific theory will ultimately be replaced by a more correct one.  And often, the more correct theory feels entirely different philosophically from the one it replaces.  But the ultimate arbiter of what makes good science is not whether the idea an true, but only whether it is useful for predicting the outcome of some future event.  (It is, of course, that predictive power that allows us to build things, fix things, discover things, and generally improve the quality of human life.)

    It is undeniable at this point that the Bohr model is decidedly not true.  But, as I hope I have shown, it is undoubtedly very useful for scientific thinking.  And that alone justifies its presence in scientific curricula.

    I would like to add that it's pretty impossible to understand what makes a revolutionary idea (like quantum physics) revolutionary, unless one has some concept of what came before.

     

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  • Six small things.

    (1)

    I think my brain is de-stressing.  Mark and I saw his parents off at 5:20 this morning, then went back to bed.  Soon I fell back to sleep and promptly had a detailed dream about applying for a library card.

    (2)

    I was amused by this.  Summary in bullet points:

    • Solo ultralight backpacker's wife suggests that the two of them take up car camping in order to foster togetherness and have fun together.
    • Unsurprisingly, this leads to the need to BUY MORE GEAR!!!

     

    (3)

    Speaking of gear.  After I tucked the seven-year-old into her own bed for the first time in a week and saw her off to sleep on a dose of pain medication, I told Mark that I kind of missed the beeping machines.  "I think it'll be hard to sleep without wanting to get up and check on her breathing," I said.  "I almost wish I had a pulse oximeter."

    He got an evil-genius look and said "Reeeeeeealllly?"  

    I wasn't really thinking of the model from Brooks-Range Mountaineering, to tell the truth.

    (4)

    My nine-year-old turned ten near the end of his sister's hospitalization.  The night before his birthday, I sat him down and had to explain that we had not done anything whatsoever for his birthday, neither bought any presents (or thought of one) nor prepared to bake a cake nor planned a special outing.  

    And no, this was not a setup for a surprise reveal on the big day, either.  We are last-minute people when it comes to holidays and birthdays, and we had nuthin'.

    "You'll have to wait a few days for us to pull something together," I told him.  "Probably when the weekend comes around."

    He put a brave face on it, but his eyes were wet.  Poor kid.

    (5)

    I did manage to get the younger kids' Halloween-costume supplies ordered while I was keeping vigil in the hospital over my sleeping daughter.   The girl wanted help with her "Egyptian cat" costume; I ordered a cat-ear headband and tail and some black clothes for her, and some yellow fleece to make a golden neck collar/shawl type thing and some glue-on plastic gemstones.

    Amazon Prime has revolutionized Halloween costumes for me.  With free two-day shipping, I can order stuff faster than they can change their mind about what they want to be.  And I don't have to take a number at the fabric store.

     My 3-year-old, when asked about his costume, had announced he wanted to be an "orange knight."  (Last year my then-seventh-grader, having been immersed in the tales of Sir Gawain for some weeks, went as the Green Knight; I'm assuming this idea was related.)  I agreed quickly before he could change his mind, because "knight" is easy.  I ordered a cheap set of plastic knight accessories and some orange fleece.

     When they arrived yesterday, I draped the orange fleece over him to check size, cut out a rectangle and a long narrow strip, cut a hole for his head in the middle of the rectangle to turn it into a "tunic" (really more of a scapular) that hung down in front and in back, tied the strip around his waist, and then opened the Amazon box and gave him his helmet, shield, and sword.

    Unspeakably happy boy.

    This has got to be a costume-making record.  It took me about four minutes, not counting two-day shipping.  I didn't even need the hot glue gun.

    (6)

    This has been a wonderful object lesson in how homeschooling forces you into a different pattern than the common one.  Better or worse, it does not really matter, but it's definitely different.  If my older boys had been in school, they'd have gone on with most of their normal routines and kept up with their schooling; and we'd have had less worry about who was going to "watch" them, since they'd be occupied in a school building part of the day, but there would still have been the getting them to and from on time.  

    As it was, school was entirely suspended for them on the first day of the crisis (as it was for the homeschooling family who took care of them for us).  The second day they had some assignments cobbled together from my hastily-scribbled list and from the things that the other family had on hand.  After that, my thirteen-year-old, lacking specific assignments, went on with Algebra by trying to select problem sets for himself that looked like the sort of mix that I would have selected.  My nine-year-old (ten now, gotta get used to that) went on with his math with the standing instructions.  Both read books.  Their grandpa taught them to play five-card stud.  

    The lesson here is that our lifestyle choices are designed to make us interrelated.  We work together.  They stop working together.  We can adapt, but it takes time.  We are not an "institution."  We are a family.  We live like a family, and we learn like a family, and that means that sometimes we have a crisis, and it affects all of us, and we all have to pitch in, and — even if we would like to — we cannot pretend to make life "normal" for the other members of the family until the crisis is over.  It would exhaust us to try.  So we don't.

    Anyway, all the public school kids in the state were off for a couple of days last week because of a gigantic statewide teacher's union meeting that cancels school in Minnesota for two days every single year.  I figure that if my kids operated on 60% power for a few days, they aren't any worse off than the rest of them.

     

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  • Discharged.

    After a full week in the hospital, we are home. And feeling grateful all around.

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    3 comments on Discharged.

  • Satisfying bleakness.

    I left Mark and his dad with my sick kiddo in her hospital room yesterday afternoon so I could go to Mass at a parish on this side of town. The rest of the family will go this morning, the usual place, the usual time. Now that the 9- and 13-yo boys are both serving Mass, we have a little less flexibility than we used to.

    I’m not naming names, but when I opened that door I walked into the bleakest-looking sanctuary I have ever seen.

    + + +

    It isn’t ugly, per se; there was a symmetry and a proportion to it that satisfied the mathematical eye. And it isn’t haphazard or cluttered; clearly someone had inflicted this design with a sense of purpose. So I wouldn’t call it painful to look at.

    But it isn’t a place of spareness and simplicity, either, which has its place, if only among monks. It is more like a basketball court repurposed as a tasteful dungeon.

    The sanctuary there has no foyer; one walks through the double doors and finds oneself immediately at the entrance of the center aisle, face to face with a smiling usher handing out photocopied 11×14 sheets with a couple of hymns and the Nicene creed printed on them. The pews are arranged in forward-facing ranks. The space is a large box, with recessed can lights in the ceiling far above, pointed straight down. There are square windows crisscrossed with bars that break them into triangles, of frosted glass that filters the light to thin gray, around the very top of the walls. The total effect is very dim despite the large number of can lights. The quantity of light is enough to see by, but its quality is that of a late afternoon, with thunderclouds gathering but never releasing their rain.

    The walls themselves are beige brick all the way up to the ceiling. A couple of wide rectangular pillars, the same beige brick, rise on either side of the altar area. Low on the broad face of one is bolted a dull metal Madonna-and-child, symmetrical, hooded, expressionlessly gazing straight forward from mask-like, slot-eyed faces. This piece is surrounded by tea lights each also bolted to the wall.

    There is a crucifix, too small for the vast space, hanging on a surface that serves as a signifier of a reredos. This reredos rises in a peak — so it also serves as a signifier of a sanctuary-shaped space — and is made of vertical bands of dark wood. The bands are so high-contrast that if you gaze at them or at the crucifix for more than a few seconds and then look away, their ghosts stay imprinted on your retinas, casting stripes everywhere that then disappear.

    The tabernacle is a cube with a square pattern of black squares, tucked behind the Madonna’s pillar. The altar cloth is plain. Behind the altar are hung three plain narrow banners, off-center, for Ordinary Time. There is a single pot of orange mums next to the priest’s chair.

    I took a seat in a pew near the front. I was ten minutes early, and there were maybe five other people in the pews. I put down a kneeler and tried to kneel on it, but the kneeler was set so close to the pew in front that my pregnant belly could not fit, so I had to sit back down.

    An older man carrying an iPad and wearing a tie was dashing about asking questions; his voice echoed in the space, muffling his words, but it was clear enough that he was tasked with filling vacant slots, perhaps trying find a parishioner who would agree to serve as lector. He leaned over and asked a question of the woman behind me; she said she didn’t have her reading glasses. Meanwhile, parishioners were starting to come in through the double doors from the parking lot. They spoke to each other and the reverberating rumbles of their voices in the bare brick box grew louder and louder, their words still indistinct.

    “Father.” The one clear word came from behind me and startled me so that I half turned. The speaker was a youngish man seated in a pew back and to my left, leaning forward over a metal rubber-tipped cane. I supposed he had been greeting the priest, whom I could not see but who might have been the man dressed in a black short-sleeved shirt and black pants disappearing just now behind the reredos. When I turned the young man with the cane stared back at me and I turned back, a little embarrassed.

    Even though the space objectively offended my sight and hearing, something about the sanctuary atmosphere felt weirdly appropriate. I have had a bleak sort of week, starting out by missing Mass in favor of signing in to the emergency room downstairs. I have been plunged into knowing what it is to be sinful and sorrowful; I think a piece of the Memorare has fallen into place for me this week. I have been tired and afraid and lonely, and anguished, and watched my child be tired and afraid and lonely and hurting. I have not done any of the things I meant to do this week, and I find I don’t care.

    So I sat there and thought: Maybe this is perfect, the cherry on top. I get to go to Mass here in this place. God is here too, and I know that, and maybe this is just the reminder I need, that God is in the bleak places.

    I sat back, thinking to myself in an Eeyore sort of way, that it was a rather satisfying end to the week.

    Then the dashing-about man walked up from the side and put the book of the gospels on a stand at the edge. Next the priest, vested, came out in front and announced that the pianist had not shown up and so the Mass would be “somewhat abbreviated.” “Please rise,” he said cheerfully. And he climbed right up the steps and launched into “The Lord be with you.”

    And Mass started, processionless, music-free, chant-free. Readers, there was no Gloria, not even a spoken one. There was no Alleluia, not even a spoken one. I found myself somewhere sparer even than Lent.

    Well. I wasn’t even sure if this was allowed, but I guess (in an Eeyore sort of way, or perhaps by now we were crossing into Marvin the Paranoid Android territory) it was even more satisfying than I had originally thought.

    + + +

    The readings being the story of Aaron and Hur holding up Moses’s arms until Joshua defeats the Amalekites, and the parable of the widow pestering the corrupt judge until in exasperation he rules in her favor, the homily turned out to be an exhortation on spiritual persistence.

    Okay then.

    Afterwards, after kneeling for a brief prayer of thanksgiving (well, sort of, with my butt on the pew to make room for my belly), I determined to leave quickly and quietly, getting back to my other child, in the hospital. I remembered what St. Francis de Sales wrote in the Introduction to the Devout Life:

    When you have finished your meditation, take care to keep your heart undisturbed lest you spill the balm it has received: in other words, keep silence as long as possible and transfer your attention to other things quietly, trying to retain the fruits of your prayer as long as you can.

    A man who carries a vessel full of some precious liquid walks very carefully, looking neither right nor left but straight ahead to avoid stumbling over a stone or making a false step, making sure that the vessel is well balanced.

    This is how you must act after prayer, trying not to be too quickly distracted; for example, should you meet someone you must speak to, accept this as unavoidable, but keep a guard on your heart, so that you spill as little of the balm of prayer as possible.

    As I passed by, the young man with the cane looked straight at me and said: “God bless you.”

    I looked back at him and replied automatically, “You too.” I didn’t stop but went on out to the car, pondering, hefting my balm.

    —

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