It’s a Conspiracy, Man

Call me paranoid, but I think the toy companies and the battery companies are in cahoots.

Chrsitian and I have an allergy to battery toys. Our commitment to NOT having toys that require batteries in the house is a source of neverending amusement to our families. In our four years of parenting we have bought exactly two toys that require batteries, and 90% of battery toys that are given to our kids never get batteries put in them; those that come with them are not replaced, with a few notable exceptions (the star stacker, the Mozart cube).

We are on srike against Fisher Price Little People toys, because they lack the capacity for creative inspiration of the previous generation of play things. If we could get the “classic” ones without spending a fortune (check out the prices on ebay!), we’d do it in a heartbeat, choking hazard and all. Those toys are a huge hit with the kids when they go to Grandma and Grandpa’s. They hold the kids’ attention way better than any “sounds and lights” nonsense you can buy now. Plus, they’ve survived five boys and a girl in Christian’s family, and four girls in mine, and the worst that can be said for most of them is that they’re mising pieces. These things were built to last.

Which, naturally, explains why they had to change formats. Choking hazards, my eye. Kids have been playing with small objects for thousands of years. This is about sales. The toy companies saw that the old toys lasted for generations, and they realized if they wanted to sell a lot of toys, they had to make them flashy and cheap and crappy so they’d break and have to be replaced. As an added bonus, they got in cahoots with the battery companies so that the battery companies would also get a slice of the pie. (Or are they owned by the same company? Hmmmmm….) Then, to top it off, they designed the new toys such that kids would have zero attention spans (since the toys do everything for them, so no imagination is required), and thus, kids would get sick of what they had and clamor for new ones.

Exhibit A: Fisher Price Barn. The old barn made a cow noise when you opened the door. This required no batteries. Clearly, the ingenuity is there to make toys do interesting things without batteries. (Or anyway, it was.)

Exhibit B: Woody. Remember Woody? Toy Story? Cowboy? He had a pull string. A *pull string,* mind you, and he had two or three sayings. Yesterday our little neighbor boy brought over his new Buzz and his new Woody. Buzz does almost exactly what Buzz in the movie did. But Woody? Woody has a BATTERY and a BUTTON!!!

Published in: on October 13, 2009 at 7:07 am  Comments (5)  

Sunday Snippets

I’m a little late in joining the Sunday Snippets Catholic Carnival this week, but here’s my contribution:

In “Slices of Sweetness,” my son Alex gives me a new look at Respect Life Month.

“Affirming the Everyday Cross,” a guest blogging post over at www.catholic-chicks.com.

This week’s Thursday Motherhood Moments  is a gift that Alex gave me one day in church.

Since I’m so late, lots of other people have posted things already. Check it out!

Published in: on October 12, 2009 at 10:22 am  Leave a Comment  

I don’t understand-vol. 3

I don’t understand how they get store-bought bread to rise in a perfect rectangle. Whoever heard of yeast rising in right angles?

I don’t understand how the car companies, in the summer of ’08 (when gas was $3.99 a gallon) could keep a straight face when they claimed that “gas has never been cheaper.”

I don’t understand Schnucks, whose ads ask us to suspend reality and accept that they are cheaper than all the other grocery stores around. Come on, people! Do you really think that just by SAYING something you can make it true?

I don’t understand how the stores down the middle of the mall stay open. Who shops at those places, anyway?

I don’t understand what Alex is thinking when he takes the jack-in-the-box, which “lives” up on a high shelf so it doesn’t get bent and unusable, and throws it down the stairs…not in a fit of temper, but just out of nowhere.

I don’t understand how a disposable diaper appeared in the drawer of the nightstand, underneath the NFP charts.

I don’t understand where all of Nicholas’s socks go. I mean, come on. He’s not even crawling yet, much less walking!

I don’t understand how the sound of a child whining in her sleep, behind a closed door, down the hall, brings me instantaneously full awake, yet morning after morning, I can sleep through Christian’s alarm clock, which is the second-most annoying alarm clock ever.

I don’t understand the inverse relationship between inspiration and time to realize it.

Published in: on October 12, 2009 at 6:39 am  Comments (5)  
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Slices of Sweetness

As I write this morning, Alex is sitting beside me playing the electronic keyboard. All music is about something to him—I cannot convince him that some music is “music for the sake of music”—so as I type I’m receiving a narration, which I hope you’ll forgive.

          (Down in the bass range): “Mommy, this song is about a superhero.
          And when I play down here, it’s because he got tied up by the bad
          guys.”

On Monday we went to the Cathedral, where I played piano for Mass for the diocesan teachers. As we were walking out, we passed a series of picture boards with photos of fetal development.

            (Upper range of the keyboard): “And now he’s got the key.”

They were beautiful pictures, displayed for Respect Life Month. All things about babies in mommies’ tummies are very interesting to Alex, so I walked him through them from start to finish.

            (Around Middle C): “And now he’s got himself out.”

“Mommy, why are there pictures of babies in mommies tummies in the church?” he asked as we walked across the parking lot, headed for the playground across the street. Oh, dear, I thought. “Well, hmm,” I said. “Let me think how to explain this.” One of my earliest memories is of my mom trying to explain abortion to me. It was slightly traumatic—there is no way to make it even remotely comprehensible to a child that someone would deliberately kill a baby—so I want to attempt to ease him into understanding over the course of a few years.

           (Lots of banging): “And now he’s locked the BAD GUYS up, because he
           still had the key!”

But Alex saved me the trouble. “Wait, don’t tell me, I know!” he said.

“Oh, you do?”

“Yes.” He opened and closed his mouth a few times as he tried to gather his thoughts, and then he said, “It’s because this is a church for babies in their mommies’ tummies, too.”

It was one of those moments when a mother truly understands that we must be like a child to enter the Kingdom.

            “And everybody’s cheering because he defeated the bad guys!”

How did my baby get to be such a little boy?

How did my baby get to be such a little boy?

***

Julianna’s news is that she is digging in her heels and fighting with her speech therapist, who thinks that if we accomplish nothing else between now and the age of three, our time will be well spent in fighting the battle to teach her structure. In other words: we will do this now, whether you want to or not. A lesson that a three-year-old will need to have to succeed in Early Childhood Special Ed.

It’s hard to chide her, because there’s still so much of the sweet baby in her. We know we need to scold, to put our foot down, to make her behave as we made Alex behave, but one goofy grin from her, and we’re turning away to hide our smiles.  It happened with Alex, too, but it’s harder because this stage is lasting so much longer. She’s even funny when she’s in trouble. She puts her chin down, and her lower lip pulses in and out. Then she flutters her long lashes as she steals glances to see how her adorable-ness is playing with the crowd. Sigh.

In other news, she is teaching us, by way of varied and escalating nastiness, that we cannot leave her unattended on the toilet—even for a couple of minutes to deal with some other child. (Christian hates it when I include details like that, but this blog is also a family history, and such things are important for parents to remember. But I’ll leave it at that.)

Mirror images of sweetness Mirror images of sweetness

You’d never guess it, looking at her, would you? It must be instinctive to small children: subversive behavior that we don’t expect, because on the surface, they look so sweet.

Published in: on October 9, 2009 at 3:41 pm  Comments (6)  
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Affirming the Everyday Cross–Guest blogging

I’m officially a guest blogger. :) Today I’m sending you over to Cathlic-Chicks.com, where Monique posted my reflection, Affirming the Everyday Cross:

“If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.”
–Max Ehrmann, “Desiderata”

It never fails. A sister, a friend, an acquaintance, will be in the middle of sharing her frustrations with me when she remembers that my daughter has Down syndrome. And abruptly, she cuts herself off. “But of course, I shouldn’t complain. It’s nothing like what you have to deal with.”

This happens so often that I have a standard response:…

      (Read entire post at http://www.catholic-chicks.com/2009/10/affirming-everyday-cross-guest-blogger.html)

Published in: on October 9, 2009 at 5:08 am  Comments (1)  
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Thursday Motherhood Moment

Motherhood Moments

Precious moments. We’ve all had them—those moments that make your heart catch every time you remember them. No matter how often you revisit them, they never get stale or lose their power. Tender or funny, poignant or inspiring, they fortify us against toddler tantrums and pubescent (and pre-school) power struggles.

Leave a comment sharing your moment—or, if you’re feeling ambitious enough to write a whole post (or want to link from your own blog), email me and I’ll use your story as the moment of the day.

***

One Sunday morning when Alex was about 2 ½, we were kneeling during the Eucharistic Prayer when I heard him “reading” to himself from his Catholic Baby’s First Prayers book:

Two little eyes to look at God.
Two little ears to hear His word.
Two little lips to sing His praise.
Two little feet to walk His ways.
Two little hands to do His will.
One little heart to love Him still.

Every so often in parenting comes a moment of such beauty that your heart abruptly contracts, and joy pours out in the form of tears.

Published in: on October 8, 2009 at 4:47 am  Comments (3)  
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Tipping the Scales

The day after Julianna was born, Christian’s sister-in-law brought two hundred pages of info to the hospital, printed on once-used paper. The first page was “Welcome to Holland,” but the rest of it consisted of detailed information on matters medical, developmental and educational. It was exactly what Christian needed. For two days, he spent every moment poring over it, classifying, processing, organizing his thinking. That was how he came to terms with the birth of a child with Down syndrome.

But me? I wanted nothing to do with it. I didn’t think I could process it, and I was right. When I finally got started reading, my brain shut down in numb terror on page two. I didn’t want to know what was coming. To this day, I can’t remember all the things my child is at increased risk for, and I’m glad of it.

There is a story in the book The Hiding Place, by Corrie Ten Boom, that I think of often. She asks her father some question about sexuality, and instead of answering, he sets down his satchel and asks her to carry it. Of course, it’s too heavy for her.  He tells her that “it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It’s the same way…with knowledge. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you.”

The abortion rate for children diagnosed prenatally with DS is somewhere between 80 and 90%. This is a horrifying number, but to no one is it more horrifying than to a parent of a child with DS. And yet, I understand the fear that drives it. A doctor’s job is to give you medical facts, and in these cases the medical facts are scary. Overwhelming, even. It takes either a lot of strength or a lot of grace not to give in to sheer terror, knowing what’s coming. There is more to life with Down’s than Scary Bad, but doctors don’t—can’t—give you anything objective to illustrate it. The up side of Down’s is revealed in the living. It’s revealed in the experience.

This is one of the purposes of this blog: to counterbalance Scary Bad with Overflowing Joy. But experience is subjective. It’s not something I can quantify, saying, This point, right here—this is where the scales tipped, and the joy outweighed the Scary Bad.

In fact, what is beautiful about life with Julianna is the same as what is beautiful about life with my other children. It’s giggles and cuteness—tickles and chewing—the awe in connections made, the wonder of character revealed. It’s interactions and relationships, cuddling and play time and the joy earned by giving joy. It is love given and love received. What tips the scales from Scary Bad to Overflowing Joy has nothing to do with Down’s. Down’s is part of the person, but the person herself–the human being–is the cause of our joy.

Published in: on October 7, 2009 at 5:17 am  Comments (3)  
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Life: a Crock Pot Recipe

I want a crock pot recipe for life. One that tells me exactly what amount of time I need to devote, in what order, to which activities, in order to achieve the ideal balance of flavors to make life delicious.

A recipe would tell me how to get Nicholas on a schedule despite the EIGHTY minutes a day I spend in the car dropping off and picking up Alex from preschool.

A recipe would tell me how to squeeze in making dinner, washing dishes, sweeping floors, and folding laundry, and still be able to read to kids and get a little writing done—even if I do have a sore throat and am not feeling my best.

A recipe would tell me how to get the kids to cooperate with the plan, and not spend the whole time whining and screaming at me and asking where T. J. is, and then bursting into heartbroken sobs when I tell them I don’t know. A recipe would offer me equivalents when commitments multiply without warning in conjunction with babysitting evaporating.

Most importantly, a crock pot recipe would be EASY. Because crock pot recipes are, by definition, easy.

Except the one I decided to make today, of course. The one that required browning every ingredient before it went in the crock pot, putting together a sauce to pour over, and so on. Which is perhaps a lesson for a woman who wants an easy answer to life.

Published in: on October 6, 2009 at 12:33 pm  Comments (2)  
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Selfish=good?

Recently, I read a blogger whose point was that moms are not just moms, they’re also people—and how sometimes, they need to be selfish.

I find these kinds of posts difficult. It’s true that a mother needs to be able to express herself as a woman—and more basic than that, as a person. The same is true of fathers. She talked about taking time for the things that used to make your heart beat faster…a statement in which I recognized myself.

But I have to resist this point of view—because I know how easy it is to overbalance in the other direction—the selfish direction. The last two weeks, I have been gnashing my teeth over a lack of writing time. The paradigm is shifting in the house; Alex has finally graduated from nap taking, and Nicholas can’t get on a nap schedule because we’re having to run all over town to visit doctors and pick up Alex, and he’s always catnapping in the car.

At times like these, I question whether I’m really supposed to be writing at all. And yet I keep coming to the same conclusion: that writing makes me a better person. First, because I’m writing devotionals, which allow me to reflect on Scripture and God…something I probably wouldn’t make time for otherwise (ashamed though I am to admit it). But even working on my novel gives me spiritual exercise. It was writing my protagonist and hearing how she came across to other people that brought up the question of balance and selfishness in the first place.

And so I continue to carve out time to write. Someday I’ll reach the point where all my kids can dress themselves and open their own toothpaste tubes, when they are gone to school all day and when they’re home they don’t want me around, and then I’m sure I’ll be wistful (though not really wanting to run time backward) for the days when they were little and chewy. In the meantime, I just have to be very productive between 5:30 and 6 a.m.!

Published in: on October 5, 2009 at 5:53 am  Comments (6)  
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Sunday Snippets

It’s been a pretty insane week–one of those where you close your eyes and barrel through while the wind steals your breath, and keep your mental focus on the weekend, where there might be a little rest. The weekend has not obliged, so I haven’t been able to formulate a post. But I have slept in until the sun comes streaming through, with babies in the bed, until Alex comes in to force us to get up.  That’s a rarity.

I’ve been in a bit of a funk this week, so my contribution to Sunday Snippets–A Catholic Carnival consists of the “attitude is everything” conversation I had with the Holy Spirit the other night:

Yes, but…

…and, because I think my baby is absolutely adorable, I’ll share this, too:

Portraits: my first poll

Published in: on October 4, 2009 at 3:50 pm  Comments (1)  
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