Last night was one of those nights when I think we really ARE as crazy as people think we are for having four children. Nicholas (AKA drama king) is sick, and you know what that means. If you don’t, let me enlighten you: it means he got up SIX TIMES between ten-thirty and six a.m. Add two nursings and one scream from Julianna, who was convinced that there was a thunderstorm outside her window, and you can imagine I am one seriously cranky mommy this morning.

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Cranky mama status is especially troublesome as I intended to focus this post on my cute kids. They’re not looking so cute to me today.

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Which means, since my attitude shapes my reality, it’s even more important today than it would have been otherwise. So why don’t I focus mostly on Nicholas, the bane of my nights light of my life, the perpetual “why”-asker and camera ham? Now, when I say camera ham, don’t think I’m overstating. In the home videos from his babyhood he couldn’t seem to do anything but pose and give silly, goofy giggles. Now he says, “Mommy, wi you take pi-euh of me?” It’s hard not to oblige when he gives me pictures like this one:

(Those eyes are murder. Murder, I’m telling you. High school girls, beware.)

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 Or this one:

The moment I snapped this picture my heart almost stopped, because I realized I was looking at a teenage Nicholas. I know now exactly how he will look.

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 He’s also the klutz of the family. Wednesday night he tripped and smacked his head on the metal base of a schoolroom desk while we were at choir practice, and now sports a knot you can see from across the street. Thursday morning he hit his head six times between getting up and breakfast time. I’ve known for a long time that he was going to be his mother’s child in that regard. I was the one in our family who had to have stitches, who broke her arm, the only one who had to have surgery…there’s gotta be one in every family, and in mine Nicholas is it. You know what? That doesn’t jive well with drama king status. Ugh.

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 You haven’t seen much of Michael lately. How about one of him? Better yet, how about one of him and his brand-new cousin?Except you can’t really see Michael’s face, can you? How about this one?

Power to the people, man!

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Julianna got her own post and pictures yesterday, so let’s leave off with a picture of Alex doing what Alex does best these days: being an awesome big brother.

Now, how can I be a cranky mom after those pictures??????

(I’m sure I’ll find a way. Just give me time.)

EXHIBIT A:

EXHIBIT B:

EXHIBIT C:

Well, what do you say? Willing to take a stab at it?

But we are food people, and it was the highlight of Thanksgiving weekend: getting to visit Cheese and Crackers, our brother (in-law/uncle)’s store in Champaign, Illinois.

Spice and yeast washed over us in ragged, hungry sniffs. Bart came out to meet us, and the kids got the first samples: chocolate, but not just any chocolate—pumpkin chocolates! They tore back and forth across the tile space while their uncle cut slices of cheese for us, whetting our appetites for the deli tray he was preparing to send us home with for dinner that night.

It was a short visit, because we had just arrived in town and everyone was hungry and tired. But on Thanksgiving Day, Bart took us back while the store was closed.

I thought I was a food person, but touring those amazing imported cheeses and meats taught me how little I know. Slice after slice came over top of the counter—some I had never heard of, some that sounded half familiar: cheeses covered with red-brown and blue-gray rinds (“it’s penicillin,” Bart said. “It’s actually very healthy to eat, it’s just some people don’t like the aesthetic”), cheeses dried and hard at the edge, meant to grate (“take the hard rind and drop it in your pasta sauce—it’ll give it a great flavor”), cheeses so soft and creamy that they nearly melted in the mouth. (We’re thinking we’ll order some to have shipped to us later–everyone who works in the store speaks the language and knows how to guide you through the selection process.)

“Alex, c’mere,” said his uncle Bart. “Come around the counter.”

And Alex’s adventure began. I’m only sorry for the poor quality of these cell phone pictures; we left the camera sitting at home.

He got to cut cheese…

…and vacuum-seal them for us.

He got to serve chocolates and watch his uncle run the meat slicer.

(Chocolates flavored like cinnamon, rum, mango, pumpkin, cheesecake, tiramisu, you name it…)

We packed the back of the van with packages of deliciousness that we have been enjoying all week. Which leads me to this most uncharacteristic “ad”-like conclusion: if you have any “foodies” you’re shopping for, take a peek at Cheese and Crackers. They can ship anywhere in the country, and man, it’s good stuff.

(Linked with Wordful Wednesday at Angie’s Seven Clown Circus)

“Wight hee,” says Nicholas, from the opposite corner of the bunk. “I tuck my bay in!” Sure enough, Christian finds a two-inch-high stuffed Christmas ornament bear peeking out from beneath the Leaning Tower of Blankets…

…Attending Mass at Newman a few weeks ago leads to Alex begging to participate in their Christmas pageant. Because he’s not a member, he can’t have a speaking role, but he is playing a shepherd, who is to be led to the manger by an angel. Conveniently enough, his partner angel is his best (girl) friend from school. He comes out of rehearsal in high spirits. “Mommy, E__ and I are walking down the aisle together!” he says. “We hold hands!” He doesn’t understand why Mommy and Daddy have to pinch our lips to keep from laughing—or why we won’t explain it to him…

…We haven’t been down to the woods as much this year as in past years. Pregnant, tired mommy? Writing-busy mommy? Or just lazy mommy? In any case, there aren’t many days left to enjoy in the woods, so one morning I take the little ones down to the creek. I sit down, sharp rocks poking my heavy bottom, as Nicholas throws rocks. Julianna stands with her toes at the very edge of the creek, throws a rock or two, and then, quietly, without fuss, comes over to me and plants herself on my left leg for a snuggle. Fine brown hair against my cheek, body nestled against mine. We look up together as an unexpectedly warm late-fall wind sets the bare sycamores and russet-crowned oaks to dancing. “Buh-buh-buh,” she says as a bird flies overhead—one of many protowords she uses now. And it is a perfect moment…quiet, serene, and all too fleeting…

…I sit at the computer desk, and my insides flutter. I know that by bedtime I’ll feel bloated; in the middle of the night, the baby will shift so far to one side that I’ll moan as I try to roll over–that by morning, my back will ache from lack of support. But in this moment, the raindrop-trickle of little limbs and fingers on my insides feels like grace itself…

There are so many things to be thankful for, this week of giving thanks. I whisper the list silently skyward, but these I preserve and share.

May the coming holiday be full of grace, and peace, and love. I’ll see you all back here on Monday.

Image by glasgow's finest via Flickr

On Saturday night I was singing Julianna through hair washing (“I’ve got that joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart!”) when Alex turned to me and launched into an unfinished conversation from the day before. “Mommy, we don’t sing that Devil verse at school because it would be wrong.”

I paused in the middle of “If the Devil doesn’t like it he can sit on a tack—ouch!” (Julianna’s reward verse for getting through the rest of the torture. It makes her giggle.) “What do you mean?”

“I mean, we can’t sing that at church!” He looked appalled by the very thought. Somewhere deep in my gut, I felt a disturbing flutter. “Well,” I said, “I don’t know that I ever sang it at church when I was little, either. But Alex, church isn’t supposed to be all gloom and doom.”

He looked at me like I was completely nuts. “It’s supposed to be…” He couldn’t find the word, but I knew what he was searching for.

BORING.

IRRELEVANT.

I wasn’t about to fill those words in for him.

There are so many ways to skew how we approach God. An acquaintance of mine once told me, “A person’s faith ought to be a comfort to them, not a source of misery.” The point being that faith should never require suffering or challenge you to do anything you don’t want to do. There’s a strong movement in the world in which church is entertainment—I heard recently of a church where the cross isn’t even used, because it might “make people uncomfortable, and we want all to be welcome.”

On the other hand, there is a strong reaction to all this which focuses myopically on formality, on sacredness—to the point where it’s viewed as disrespectful at least, and perhaps sacrilegious, to crack a smile, to play an upbeat song, or to speak above a whisper.

Believing that God lies squarely in the middle on this topic as almost every other, I find myself continually frustrated. But to see the dawning of POV #2 in my own child brings me to a whole new level of soul disturbance. God created us as people who love laughter and companionship. And since we’re created in God’s image, doesn’t that say something pretty important about God?

At first, casting about for explanation, my mind settled on the strict regimen of behavior expected at parochial school. But as Alex stood beside me during Mass yesterday, his nose pressed to the shiny lacquer of the piano his daddy was playing, looking at reflections of his face and the ceiling in its depths—and more importantly, as we tried to scold him into paying attention—I realized that we bear a large portion of the blame, too.

Not so long ago, I read somewhere that when we’re trying to make the liturgy “relevant” for our young people, the opposite of boring is not entertaining, but meaningful. That’s what I want for my children. Alex shows some really wonderful early signs of reaching that goal—he’s trying to listen to Paul’s brutally convoluted rhetoric and make sense of it, and when he doesn’t (which is every week, of course), he tugs on my arm and says plaintively, “I don’t understand.” I love that about him.

But I think as his parents, we have a huge role in this too. Guidance and formation might happen without us…but it’s not very likely.

“Alex,” I said, “you know, Jesus didn’t walk around being all solemn all the time. He loved to laugh and tell jokes. Jesus was a human being, too.”

Two little ones screamed for attention then, and we never finished the conversation. But maybe that’s okay. Because this isn’t really a conversation that ever gets “finished,” is it?

Alex and me in November of 2006, 2 1/2 months before Julianna's birth

The magical thing about waiting for a baby is the anticipation of falling in love all over again. But the thing I wasn’t expecting is this: the magic of watching my children fall in love, too.

Alex is 6 ½ years old now, old enough to sit around drawing during natural family planning classes, which inevitably leads to him coming over and asking me what we’re talking about. And he’s preparing to read at Mass for the first time next week—the reading is Romans 8:18-25, which aside from being the most unfriendly 1^st grade reading ever, sparked this question: “Mommy, what’s ‘labor pains’?”

That was a moment to whisper: Holy Spirit, help me explain this in an age-appropriate manner. (If you’re interested to know how I explained it, let me know.)

The upshot of all this is that Alex is in a very different place now than he was preceding the birth of either of his siblings. He’s even asked to miss school and come to the OR for the birth. Although I’m pretty sure we said no and left it at that.

Every night for some time now, he’s wanted to say good night to the baby. He comes over, gives me a hug and a kiss, and then hunches over to press his lips against my belly. A few months ago he whispered. Now, thanks to the great WWW, he knows the baby can probably hear him, so he just baby-talks to it, incorporating all the lessons he’s learned along this journey. “Good night, baby! Now you go to sleep and wake up in the morning. Remember what I told you! It’s time to start acting like a human now, because you are one!”

Not to be outdone, Nicholas pops up out of his bed and pats my belly, too. “Doo-night, beebee!” he says. “I yuh you, beebee!”

Julianna looks at her brothers and giggles, because they’re talking to Mommy’s belly, but she also comes over and pats the baby and does a little baby-talking. It sounds something like “deh-beh-bdeh!” in the highest pitch she can muster…the same noise she uses for “cat.” And although from this paragraph you might not think it, I do believe she knows what’s going on, even though it is such a conceptual (read that non-concrete) thing to understand.

And however gray and grumpy my mental state, my heart warms a few degrees.

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In so many ways, he’s so much like me.

1. He spends his days in a wild frenzy of imagination. In theory, he loves toys. In reality, he doesn’t play with them. He is his own toy, acting out his flights of fancy with unselfconscious enthusiasm…as long as nobody’s watching.

A monkey costume for the school read-a-thon. Compliments to Christian for putting it together.

2. He loves with his whole heart, and with his whole heart he feels rejection…and frustration. He wants to hug and wrestle with his little brother and sister, and when they push him away, he crumples. When they drive him crazy, he feels that deeply, too. (Although he deals with it better than I did at his age. He screams. I used to hit.)

3. Because of these two traits, he is not a social butterfly. He is a child who attaches to one or two friends and devotes himself wholeheartedly to them. Like his mama, who never had more than two close friends at a time. (Still doesn’t.)

4. He’s interested in the world and the events on the news. He doesn’t talk about them much, which makes me wonder how much of the tragedy and angst goes right over his head. But he’s intensely curious about how things work and what’s happening in the world beyond his immediate experience. He says he wants to be (among other things) a scientist when he grows up.

I couldn't decide between the legs folded or the legs swinging picture. They were both so cute.

5. He has an artist’s soul—loving beauty in creation, thrilled by art projects, and a natural at music. He loves piano lessons, and tore through his primer level at a rate that left his teacher slightly befuddled. (And his mama weepy with pride.)

6. He has my ear. Yesterday afternoon he was sitting at the table reading while I made dinner, humming a snatch of song over and over. And over. And over. At length, I identified it as the Atkins theme song. Last week, he brought home his first “goal sheet” from school: he was getting distracted and leaving work incomplete, forgetting to write his name on his paper. “But I have this song in my head ALL THE TIME!” he wailed. Christian told him to make a radio switch in his mind and turn it off. I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “Honey,” I said as gently as I could, “that is not going to work. Take my word for it. He’s just got to learn to live with it.” (My musician friends call it an “earworm.” I will host the same music running through my head nonstop for 36 hours. Even at night. I’ll wake up and it’ll be there. So this, I know: he really does just have to learn to live with it.)

7. And perhaps the ease with which he learns music and art and reading and all things creative is why he gets so frustrated when he has trouble learning other skills. (You need only watch the first 55 seconds to see both my son and I in action.)

In so many ways, my son is just like me. And it makes me realize that everything I experienced as a child—the good, the bad, and the ugly, the glorious and the heartbreaking—I will experience again, through the experiences of my firstborn child.

I don’t know if I’m ready for this.

Shared with

The not-so-serious

1. How to chase people around roaring. This seems to be Alex’s favorite occupation lately, one met at various times by giggles and outraged screaming, depending on the mood of the chase-ee.

2. How to win anyone over by giggling. I can’t get over Julianna’s silvery, dusky laugh. There’s just nothing like it. And Nicholas? That warbling belly laugh holds me prisoner. I’ll do anything for it.

3. You are how you eat.

4. Tolerance of repetition. Repetition is not something we tolerate well in modern life. But Nicholas is learning to talk, and all day every day he walks around saying, “What doing…Mommy? What doing…Da-ee?” Absent that, he’s trying to communicate some other sentiment, and he thinks that if he says it enough times in a row, we’ll figure it out. It makes me want to hyperventilate sometimes. I have to remind myself to be thankful for his desire to communicate.

5. The law of equal and opposite reaction. The child who charms everyone also must have a dark side. Julianna had the receptionist at the cardiology clinic eating out of her hand yesterday from the instant she put on Alex’s Iron Man helmet and made flirty eyes through it. But when the doctor and nursing staff walked into the exam room, she morphed into demon child. After an hour of solid screaming and FOUR PEOPLE, we managed to get an EKG done. They gave up without even trying to get an echocardiogram.

The sincere

6. The wonder of seeing myself in them. Alex is taking to music like a mother tongue, reading music and playing by ear, transposing at the piano, making up songs—my skills. It gives me chills sometimes. But he sleeps like his daddy (like the dead, IOW). Nicholas, on the other hand, can’t get to sleep at night, just like me. I look at Julianna’s and my reflections in the mirror, and something familiar teases me, something I haven’t identified yet. She’s not my spitting image…she’s not even the spitting image of my older sister, whom she most resembles…but there’s something there nonetheless.

7. Sign language. We never in a million years thought we would know as much sign language as we do. And although most of it we learned with them, not from them, I learned the sign for ambulance/fire truck/police car (not sure which) from Julianna just two days ago.

8. Structure makes the world a better place. Occasionally I take flak for being a nap Nazi. But now that Alex is getting so much older, we’ve begun playing loosey goosey with the little ones’ naps, and the level of negative energy in our house definitely shows for it. Structure makes everything better. This is a lesson I’ve learned to apply to my writing and housekeeping and, well, everything.

9. Self-sacrifice. You would think eventually a parent would have this lesson down pat, but the level of sacrifice ratchets up regularly, and it never stops chafing.

10. A capacity for suffering. Is it harder to suffer through the frustration and stress of a hospital stay, or to watch your child suffer? In a word…yes.

Now it’s your turn: what lessons have you learned from your children?

Shared with Mama Kat’s Writers Workshop.

Image via Wikipedia

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Alex decided this week he doesn’t want to take a bath anymore because it takes too long. He graduated to the shower, and loves it. I think it’s funny, because when I was a kid I loathed showers. We didn’t have a shower in our house, only a tub, until much later. I remember my first shower vividly: with my grandmother, in a KOA campground on vacation. It was traumatizing. On vacations with Grandma and Grandpa, I took showers in KOA bathrooms from mid-America to the coast and back, but always under protest. Not until I went to college and had no other option did I make the switch to showering. So it cracks me up that Alex is doing it at six.

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I don’t know if I’ve ever said it, but Alex is an artist. When I was a kid, I drew pictures of beautiful girls, horses, and (eventually) ice skaters. Alex draws superheroes. And builds sculptures. Like this:

Mack, from Pixar's "Cars"

And this:

A cobra made out of pizza dough

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I have the signed contract in hand now, so at last it’s official enough that I feel comfortable announcing: beginning in January 2012, I will be writing a monthly column for Liguorian magazine. Very exciting!

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Contract aside, overall it has not been an enormously productive summer for writing. Parenting is more hands-on in the summertime (of course!). I’ve been working on a new novel, about a young woman, newly-wed to a winery owner, whose husband takes off for Europe for eight weeks right after she discovers she’s pregnant. In his absence, a former flame reappears in her life, and she finds herself having to confront the possibility that she’s married the wrong man. How does a person who believes in the permanence of marriage deal with such a thing?

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My mother-in-law scolded me when I began plotting this novel, which is a complete rethinking of one I wrote ten years ago. She said people are always publishing stories, movies, etc. about marriages falling apart; as a person who believed in sticking out the tough times, I should be writing about people who put their hearts into fixing a marriage. Her admonition has helped shape my thinking as I outline…I may go into that a little next week…but mostly what it gave me was an idea for the next novel.

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Wednesday evening, Christian and I were sitting outside on the swing, enjoying the cool weather (finally!), when a satellite passed overhead—a biggie. I was sure it must be the space station, but NASA’s Human Space Flight web page doesn’t list Wednesday as a sighting day. I’m disappointed. Now I don’t know what I saw. However, it does say that the ISS will be visible tonight at 9:01 p.m. Maybe I need a “date” with Alex.

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Yesterday I wrote about how people don’t hold special needs kids to the same standards as other kids, and how that makes life more difficult for their parents. I’ve had some thoughtful responses. I’m really interested to hear from others who might be not be daily readers.

Have a great weekend!

Image by aaipodpics via Flickr

A while back, when I was wrestling with guilt over not being a toddler mom, someone told me that the questions get harder as they get older. My cocky response was “bring it on.” And I stand by that, but I have to add a caveat:

I hate lying to my children.

You can bring me tough questions of theology and interpersonal relationships to sink my teeth into, and I’ll revel in it. I love that stuff. To me, the really hard questions are about Santa. And the Easter Bunny. And our newest friend: the Tooth Fairy.

For months, Alex has been learning to classify things as real or not real. I breathed a sigh of relief when he learned the difference between reality and fiction; he took the news that his superheroes were all made up in stride. (It was pretty dicey there for a while; he was getting mad because he never saw any of them in real life.)  As the holidays rounded the calendar this school year, he started asking things like, “Are leprechauns real?” And I, knowing the danger, answered honestly: “No.” Because I don’t believe in lying to my children. (I don’t believe in lying at all, but that’s another post entirely.)

But this summer, he’s been hanging out with some neighbor girls whose parents don’t do Santa & co. And they’ve been really in his face telling him about it. “E. says that anyone who comes to your house in the night and leaves stuff isn’t real,” he said. “But I told her I knew Santa was real, because I saw Rudolph’s nose in the sky.”

But it got him thinking. He lost his first two teeth last week, back to back on Friday and Saturday. In the middle of the night there was great wailing and crying in our room because he couldn’t find the envelope containing his tooth. (We had to put it in an envelope because he thrashes around so much at night, we knew we would never find it.) Then he turned the light on and tore the room apart and came running back in great excitement to inform us that the Tooth Fairy left him TWO QUARTERS. (There were actually four, but he’d managed to thrash two of them onto the floor.)

And at lunch on Monday, he began asking very hard questions about the Tooth Fairy. Deep, practical questions, hard to answer because they require lies, and I hate lying to my kids. “How does the Tooth Fairy even find out a kid has a tooth missing?” he demanded.

This is the turning point, I thought. I have two choices: a) cop out and call it “magic,” or b) lay the groundwork for future revelations. I chose option B. “Mommies and daddies have a way to let her know,” I said.

“Well, what is it?”

“I’m not telling!”

He paused, put his hands on his hips, and started giggling like a madman. “YOU GUYS PUT THE MONEY IN THERE YOURSELVES!” he shouted.

Well, at least he laughed about it.