Mall Musings

Static Electricity Ball at the St. Louis Magic...

Static Electricity Ball at the St. Louis Magic House (Photo credit: AdrienneMay)

I don’t understand the aesthetic that governs the catwalk model. The last several weeks, I’ve spent time in a public mall lounge in front of Target, waiting for Alex to get finished with his theater practice. In this lounge they’re playing a video of women modeling what we’re presumably supposed to be wearing this season. But I have trouble focusing on the clothes because of the women. For one thing, they all look like they’re grinding their hip joints to smithereens. It just can’t be good for the body to walk that way. Then there’s the hairstyles. Some of them are fine, but some of them look like they walked over to one of those fun-house electric balls, put their hands on it, and started spraying the hair into place.

But the real puzzler for me is the blank expression, the eyes fixed on nothing, straight in front of the face. Like they’re supposed to look as miserable as possible while wearing these super-expensive clothes. How is that supposed to make me want to buy the clothes? I want to jump into the TV and yell “boo,” just to see if they’re real people or robots.

People watching at the mall is interesting on a Saturday morning. So many couples wandering the hallways together, carrying insulated foam cups, wearing smart, stylish outfits. So many double strollers with carriers in them. Are there really that many twins now? It can’t all be natural, it must be fertility treatments, right? What have we done to ourselves to cause this epidemic of women’s bodies that won’t do what they’re created to do?

Of course, there are plenty of people wearing sweats, too. That brings me to an interesting observation. I first noticed the phenomenon when we went to the Lantern Festival in August. I dressed carefully–for comfort. I knew we were going to be walking around in 100 degree temperatures for hours. So I was astonished at the number of women who came that evening dressed in gorgeous sundresses, their hair styled in sheets to hang down their back. But the guys? The guys accompanying these women were slobs, every one. Sloppy t shirts, frayed jeans shorts, worn-out sandals.

I saw it again last week driving to writers’ group on campus: a college-age girl in a slinky black mini dress, long boots, sparkly pantyhose, walking with her (presumed) boyfriend, who was wearing paint-splattered sweat shorts and a triple-X sweatshirt.

Now, I know boys don’t, as a rule, like to dress up, but really? There’s a difference between “casual” and “slob.” But then again, it’s like pulling teeth finding nice casual clothes for boys. Alex doesn’t much care for getting dressed up in a suit for church, so I try to have nice polo shirts and khakis in his closet so he can go semi-dressed. But it can be hard to find that kind of clothing for boys. The girls’ sections are packed with cute clothes in various levels of dressiness, but the boys’ sections are overrun with what we would have called skater clothes in high school.

Oh, dear. I’m becoming an old fogey. Oh, let’s face it. I was born an old fogey.

Published in: on October 22, 2012 at 6:31 am  Comments (8)  
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A Farm Story

Parched ground

Parched ground (Photo credit: Al Jazeera English)

Growing up on the farm is on a short list of things that define who I am. My memories are filled with gigantic, buttery harvest moons rising through the jagged tips of cornstalks, of leaf piles reduced to pulsing embers that mirrored the night sky, of glittering frosty dawns and mist hanging over the woods, the roar of the grain dryer and the drop in the stomach while jumping off stacked hay bales. My entire childhood is woven with the fabric of the earth.

But there is a darker side that time has edited to make it more palatable. It’s not that I’ve forgotten the tough parts, but like childbirth, you dissociate from the visceral memory of how unpleasant things can be. And children (both as children, and as adults who’ve moved away from home) are insulated, anyway, from their parents’ fear and uncertainty.

This spring was lovely in rural Missouri. Early, but lovely. On Mothers Day, we ate dinner on the deck with my parents. It had been about a week since the last rain, and we were starting to look for another. None of us could imagine that it wouldn’t rain again for three months.

When the heat arrived in June, we shook our heads at how early it was–those 100+ days usually don’t set in until later in July or August. But surely we’d get a thunderstorm out of that blast furnace. It couldn’t last more than a week or two.

But it did. Week after miserable week it went on, and as my lawn crisped, and I watered furiously in the early mornings, I started watching the weather for my parents’ area, too. Every once in a while, a weak attempt at a storm would drift across the area, but only once did it leave more than a scattering of droplets in the forty-mile swath covering our house and all my parents’ fields. “Not even enough to settle the dust,” as my dad would say.

At last the rest of the country figured out this was a big deal. Wells were drying up, rivers were so low that navigation was questionable. When the storms finally came, it was far too late for the corn crop, and possibly too late for some of the soybeans. When my parents sampled their fields, they found ears with passable yields and ears with virtually nothing on them at all. Then there was the concern about a particular mold that thrives in drought conditions and can render the grain unusable. There was no way to tell how things would shake out until harvest began. Uncertainty is more punishing than a coup de grace.

Harvest began early, averaging 30 bushels per acre–not even a quarter of a normal yield, but better than nothing. But the corn was too wet, so they put it in the grain bins to dry, then sent it to the elevators. When the mold numbers finally came back this weekend, they were not good. My parents’ entire corn crop suddenly became completely useless. An entire year’s work and investment, gone. Harvest stopped. My dad, instead of running the combine through the field, instead went in with a mower and a disk to turn it all under.

Why am I telling you this story? Because the world removed from the land and from agricultural exposure needs to know what goes on beyond the grocery aisles. From these crops the cattle that become your steaks and burgers are fed. From these crops come the corn starch, the corn chips, the soft drinks and juices and cereals containing high-fructose corn syrup. We can argue the health benefits (or lack thereof) of many of these products, but the fact is they are staples of our lives. You may think it has nothing to do with you, but it does.

Some are convinced that the severity and breadth of this drought can only be attributed to climate change. Others are more cautious. Invoking climate change is not a popular point of view in some circles; most conservatives point to experts who say the whole idea that humans can adversely impact the environment is big-headed nonsense. Well, maybe it is. And maybe it isn’t. Considering what’s happening around us, we can’t afford to dismiss the idea of our own culpability on a knee-jerk reaction. The fallout from this drought will hurt your pocketbook and mine, but that’s just a nuisance. The people who will be most affected are the poorest people, those who can least weather it. Maybe this drought has nothing whatsoever to do with our vehicle and power plant emission. But what could it possibly hurt for each of us to cut back our usage, look humbly at our interactions with the world and rethink our assumptions? To act like the stewards we’re supposed to be, instead of the consumers we’ve become?

Published in: on September 17, 2012 at 7:37 am  Comments (3)  
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Let’s Talk About Fathers Day

One of my favorite images of Christian as father, watching over us. This is Alex.

(Stepping onto my soapbox)

You know, dads really get shafted, compared to moms.

Mothers Day happens during the school year. We bring home potted flowers, little crafts showing hand prints, booklets extolling our virtues, sculptures and who knows what-all.

Fathers Day? Middle of summer break. In other words: nothing.

Mothers Day, we get bombarded with ads reminding us that moms need diamonds, flowers, clothes and perfume to make our day special.

Another of my favorite images, also of Christian with Alex in 2006.

Dads? They get a barbecue. Candy. Maybe a power tool, if they’re lucky.

News flash, people: it takes two to make a baby. Women are not the center of the universe. Men and women may be different, but both sexes have lessons to teach that the next generation needs.

I’m posting this four days in advance of Fathers Day this year in order to issue this challenge: find some way to make this Sunday truly special for the man who raised you, for the man who is your partner in raising your children. If you, like me, are grasping for ideas, check out that awesome little tool called the internet.

(Stepping down from my soapbox now. Have a nice day.)

Related Posts:

7 Things I Learned From My Dad

7 Things I Learned From My Mom

Published in: on June 13, 2012 at 6:49 am  Comments (5)  
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In Defense Of Flyover Country

This weekend, we took a trip to Iowa City. It was the first trip in seven years in which we got to choose our destination. Yes, I can see your reaction right now. You’re thinking, Iowa?  You chose Iowa?

As enlightened and tolerant as we think we are these days, we still view certain destinations as intrinsically better than others. Times Square: the center of everything. Rural Iowa: cornfields, with no culture at all. I won’t even go into the way the Midwest is portrayed in the movies.

I’ve lived my entire life in “flyover country,” and thanks to my grandparents, who took me on long RV vacations when I was a young elementary schooler, I’ve traveled quite a bit too. I’ve been to Chicago, New York, Washington, L.A., Florida. They’re great places to visit, but all you folks on the coasts who think the only things worth seeing in the great interior are the Grand Canyon and the ski slopes of Colorado–it’s time to open your mind.

Iowa, for instance, has its act together. It has five minor league baseball teams, countless professional and semi-professional symphony orchestras, more than two dozen state parks, plus lots of trails, local parks and recreational lakes with summer and winter activities (snowshoeing, cross country skiing, etc.).

We spent three days in Iowa City visiting friends, and for every block of time we had to fill, we had to choose one option from among many. Friday morning we went to Coralville’s Devonian Fossil Gorge:

*

 

Saturday we visited the Iowa Children’s Museum. Our friends apologized for it being small–small, at least, compared to one big-city museum which boasts a carousel inside it so big that you can’t see the whole thing at once. But bigger isn’t necessarily better. It doesn’t take long to cross the line from “great” to “overwhelming for the target population.” This museum kept our kids completely occupied for three hours. Plenty of time.

(Julianna and I even got our faces painted.)

Saturday afternoon while the little ones napped, the older kids went to the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History.

I’ll grant you there’s something exciting about visiting the big cities, the historic sites and landmark images that permeate the culture. But there’s so much more to the world, and so much of it you can’t get on the coasts. The vast expanse of this country is beautiful and diverse in its geography. Just look at the national park system. It’s so much more than a handful of big-name attractions.

I learned this weekend that digital cameras have twice as many green sensors as they do red or blue. This is because the human eye sees more variations in green than in any other color. As we drove home, I realized anew how truly wired for nature we are. I marveled at the array of green all around me, framed by the brilliant gold of wheat under harvest: thick carpets and rippling waves of fields growing in strips of  pale lime-yellow and primary green, deepening to near-blue beneath the wide shadow of a cloud–to say nothing of the variation in texture and color of the woods beyond. I watched with wonder the puffy cumulus clouds stacked upon each other, tried to guess their height and superimpose cityscapes on them. Why haven’t I ever seen clouds like these swirling around skyscrapers? Are the clouds higher than I think they are, or does something about the buildings disrupt the flow of air and prevent such clouds from forming in a downtown area?

The cities, the coasts are great, and I will enjoy them to the fullest when the time comes to take those stereotypical vacations. But everybody’s been on those trips. Everybody has the same pictures, the same stories, the same experiences. I’m going to go looking for places to enjoy in flyover country. Because this is where the untold story is.

Your turn: I know a lot of my readers also live in Flyover Country. What should we all be going to visit, see or experience?

Published in: on June 11, 2012 at 9:24 am  Comments (11)  
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Parents need the freedom to make their own judgment calls

Chain Handcuffs

Chain Handcuffs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It began with my sister’s Facebook status: at the Steak & Shake where they were eating, a man was being arrested after leaving his baby sleeping in the car while the family, including grandparents, came inside to eat. I only had the sketchiest of details, so I tried hard not to get too worked up. I held my peace.

Last Friday, as we pulled into the field where we were meeting my parents for lunch, I realized Michael had fallen asleep. I knew if I pulled the car seat out he’d wake up. It was about 70 degrees outside, so I opened both sliding doors on the van and let the breeze blow through over him while we set up the picnic.

Seeing Michael in the car, my dad brought up the Steak & Shake incident. It turns out he saw the whole thing. The family had left the baby, who like Michael was around or under six months old (i.e. very distractable and hard to nap), in the car with the windows open. They were constantly turning their heads to keep an eye on things. An employee told my dad the family comes in every week, and when the baby was absent that day the manager asked them about it. And then promptly called the police. By the time it was over, the discussion was whether all the kids would be taken away.

“There’s plenty of blame to go around,” Dad said. “I don’t think the family was right to leave the baby in the car. But the manager could have handled it much better. He could have gone to the family and said, ‘If you don’t bring the baby in, I will call the police.’”

My reaction to this whole scenario is gut-deep and powerful. But first, I need to be clear: I think the family’s judgment call was bad. If your child really needs a nap and can’t get it in a restaurant, don’t go to the restaurant. You’re the grownup; you have to place your children’s needs ahead of your desires. You can’t have everything. If you really think you have to have it all, go someplace like Culver’s where you can eat outside next to the vehicle.

Nonetheless, this whole story frightens me far more than any overstated danger of abduction, or of my child falling down stairs or getting into the cleaning supplies. Why?

Maybe it’s because I’m a fiction writer, but I can think of several realistic back stories that make these parents’ choice understandable. And nobody else but the parent knows that back story. Nobody else can make that judgment call. Parenting is hard enough without complete strangers calling the cops on you.

No, our judgment calls will not always be right. Every parent–every one–routinely makes choices s/he regrets. Here’s one of my big ones. Does that mean I should lose my children? What about the daily judgment calls that are mine to make as a parent? Should DFS swoop down on me because when my son turned five, I started letting him play with friends down the street without an adult outside? Because I occasionally let a baby sleep on my bed, when other situations aren’t available? Because we use a seat with a 3-point harness instead of a 5?

Every child, and every situation, is unique. You cannot make one-size-fits-all judgments, because they don’t allow for the specific circumstances of a given situation. Yes, there is a time and place when society must step in, but from my limited vantage point in this story, all society did was scar a family, frighten the children and tie the hands of parents, who will never again feel that they have the authority to parent their children.

A bad deal all the way around.

Published in: on May 23, 2012 at 7:29 am  Comments (14)  
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Acknowledging The Whole Picture of Motherhood

In case you missed the memo, yesterday was a big day.

Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother’s Day (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Mothers Day is one of those holidays that bears the weight of impossible cultural expectations. I’ve had some doozies of Mothers Days in the past few years. There were three in a row, in the infertility years, when I tried to pretend the day didn’t even exist. But the mother of all Bad Mothers Days was the one I spent in the PICU with Julianna. She wasn’t in any danger by that time, so all my emotional energy went into feeling sorry for myself. After all, I’d asked for only one thing for Mothers Day: brunch at one of those wonderful buffets. Instead,  I was sitting under fluorescent lights being bored out of my skull and trying to keep a baby entertained while his sister slept…or didn’t.Since then, I’ve kept my expectations for Mothers Day pretty low. The whole thing is a crock, anyway. You should appreciate your mother all the time; this is just one more way to separate people from their money. As a stay-at-home mom, the best Mothers Day gift I can imagine is for someone to take them off my hands for a whole day so I can just relax! And, um, that’s not quite the point. Ahem.

This year, by the time the weekend rolled around, I was in not in a great frame of mind. Witness my Facebook status:

These are the days that make me want to engage in some serious theatrical drama. In an attempt to get naps coordinated, I force Michael to stay awake for an extra half hour till I get lunch on and the others are half done. Then I put him down, get them finished with lunch, and upstairs they go. Julianna goes in and wakes Michael up.

1 1/2 hours later, I despair of getting him back down by nursing, so I put him in his room and pray he’ll go down before he wakes Julianna up. After ten minutes of him crying, NICHOLAS wakes up wailing in the other room. I comfort him, tell him it’s not time to get up yet, and go back downstairs.

Ten minutes after THAT, Michael wakes Julianna up. I carry her into my room to finish her nap. Michael settles down at last. Three minutes after THAT, the @#$%^&*( neighbor turns on some jack hammer-sounding piece of lawn equipment…which won’t work. So he starts it again. And again. And again. And every time, Michael screams AGAIN.

Three minutes after THAT, Dish Network pounds (I don’t mean “knocks,” I mean “pounds”) on the door. “I’M NOT INTERESTED,” I say, and slam the door in their faces.

And Michael is crying again.

Michael did not sleep for FOUR AND A HALF HOURS on Friday afternoon. I spent the whole evening composing a long, foul blog rant in my head.

But Christian has been on a multi-year campaign to redeem my faith in Mothers Day. Last year, he took us all to a brunch buffet–quite an investment with our then-three children. It was wonderful. This year, he came home with a crabapple tree for me (I adore crabapple trees, and he hates them), and we bought a new outdoor table and chairs, which he and my parents put together at great inconvenience and time expenditure so we could eat our dinner outside yesterday. (Babe, you rock!)

It’s human nature to hug the extremes, I suppose. We get into a negative funk and look for things to get P.O.’d about, and then someone hears us and goes to the opposite pole: “Just enjoy it! It goes so fast!” I defy you to enjoy a baby who’s mad and refusing all forms of comfort for four solid hours. Please. Be real.

The reality, and it’s an uncomfortable one, is this: “Motherhood is the only time you can experience Heaven and Hell at the same time.” You can’t deny either part; to do so devalues the whole. In contemplating this humble post, less than a blip on the radar of the blogosphere, much less the sum total of human history, I traveled from borderline murderous rampage to blissful transcendence to grace-filled tolerance and back to pulling my hair out. (Fussing baby + preschooler who is physically incapable of closing his mouth while awake + clumsy daughter knocking over the marble run for the tenth time in half an hour = Mommy Meltdown.)

I think I would be less jaded about holidays like Mothers Day more if those trying to separate us from our money were a little less rosy about the whole thing and acknowledge how darned tough it often is. We all need affirmation. That’s why the card Christian gave me last night was so perfect:

The inside reads: “And that was all just since yesterday!” Did I mention my husband rocks?

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Published in: on May 14, 2012 at 8:17 am  Comments (16)  
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Looking For A Line

Photo by LucasTheExperience, via Flickr

I wasn’t there. I was supervising the little ones at Children’s Liturgy. But Alex, my thoughtful, empathetic Alex, was riveted to the missionary’s story of life in Haiti, of poverty so intense that children eat “cookies” made of clay.

When church was over, we drove home to a building that would house dozens of people in other parts of the world, but which shelters only six, a house filled with Stuff we rarely use but can’t or won’t get rid of, and a refrigerator stuffed with food, which we often stand in front of and sigh heavily, “There’s nothing to eat!”

In the days before, we bought a new DSLR camera for which we’ve been saving for well over a year, as well as solar lights for the front and a lovely arbor for my climbing roses. Each of these purchases, long anticipated, fills me with quiet happiness every time I look at them.

“Therefore I praised joy, because there is nothing better for mortals under the sun than to eat and to drink and to be joyful; this will accompany them in their toil through the limited days of life God gives them under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 8:15)

But now there’s an undercurrent of disquiet in my soul. The umbrellas and brooms in the coat closet fall over for the umpteenth time, and I growl, “We need some sort of closet organizer!”–and I think of children eating clay. “I hate all my clothes,” I complain. “As soon as I lose this baby weight I’m going shopping for things that actually look good on me!” And then I remember this picture, and I recognize my supposed necessities for the vanity they are.

We live in a world defined by our consumption. If we don’t consume, everything will fall to pieces, and everyone will be in dire straits, not just those in developing countries. Yet I look at the list of things I want to purchase, and I can’t help thinking how much better spent the money would be going to a place like Haiti, to keep people alive instead of feeding my need for more, more, more. Everything I want to do–travel, home decor, scrapbooking–in the face of such poverty, it feels vaguely immoral. It feels like a scam for me to earn money for singing or writing music or stories, for instance.

I know it isn’t. Beauty is built into the human psyche. What we need to stay alive is only part of the story; God made us to be fulfilled, not just survive, and art, music, beauty–all those “luxuries” are part of that. Somewhere there must be a line between using money to affirm and enjoy the beauty of the world…and gross waste of resources.

But I don’t know where it is.

How do you reconcile consumption and care for the larger world?

Published in: on May 8, 2012 at 7:02 am  Comments (11)  
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In Awkwardness, Escape

The Perfect Rose

The Perfect Rose (Photo credit: Scott Smith (SRisonS))

Twenty years later, I still cringe at the memory. Oh, let’s call a spade a spade: it’s memories. I was then as I am now, a hopeless romantic. Only as a sixteen-year-old who’s lived a blessedly sheltered life, I was perhaps a little less prepared for a little thing called “reality.” (If, by “little,” you mean something the scope of the Grand Canyon.)

I was primed for falling in love, steeped in pop songs that crooned Two worlds colliding…and they could never tear us apart. And then it happened. We worked together, and when I heard his voice upon entering the building, my nerves electrified; when his arm brushed mine, I thought I would burst into flame.

Young as I was, I knew better than to call it love, but it was strong. I think he knew the effect he had on me; perhaps it flattered him, or perhaps something about me was more attractive than I ever gave myself credit for. In any case, somehow one evening I was joining a group of them for a movie. Afterward, as I rolled down the window of my little white Escort and prepared to head for home, he loped down the street and leaned on my window frame. “So,” he said. “When we gonna go out, just you and me?”

I thought I might explode with happiness, and then…

Then I opened my mouth. “Whenever I can find the time,” I said.

That little exchange encapsulates all the romantic troubles I ever experienced. What kind of dumb answer is that?

Perhaps you’re not shocked to discover we never went out. And my romantic encounters in high school came to progressively more tragic ends. (Well. Tragic in a high school sense.) But now I recognize my escape. I was feeling wild and reckless, bewitched by freedom and hanging around a much more worldly crowd. Pushed just a breath, my life might have followed a very different trajectory, one that ended in real heartbreak instead of wounded pride that masqueraded as such.

As a mother, I now understand why a young and innocent girl might actually be attractive for the very awkwardness that causes her such agony. The world is even scarier now than it was then, the body and soul even less recognized for their beauty and goodness, and treated with even less respect. I would give a lot to shepherd my children safely through the mine field of young “love,” but I know also that there’s no teacher like an awkward, narrow escape.

memoir writing, remembeRED, writing prompt

Published in: on April 10, 2012 at 7:13 am  Comments (7)  
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The Drama Next Door

Photo by Tiger Girl, via Flickr

It was 6:20 a.m. on Palm Sunday when I smelled smoke. I sat trapped in my chair by the open window, Michael nursing greedily after sleeping all night, and peered out at fog hovering in the yard. But was it fog? Or was it smoke? It sure smelled like smoke. I knew it wasn’t our house, because I know how well our smoke detectors work. So I returned to playing handsies with Michael, and the next time I looked outside, the haze had cleared, though the smell remained.

Finally the sirens started up. I relaxed; somebody got the fire department called, anyway, even if I couldn’t get it done. I braced for Julianna’s waking wail of terror, but it never came. Oddly, the sirens never came anywhere near our neighborhood.

By the time we left for church three hours later, the fire department had put out a release: an auto parts store was burning a mile and a half directly south of us. After church, as we prepared to exit the highway, we spotted the cloud of smoke glowering just over the rise. What do they do, I wondered, when they’re fighting a fire at a busy intersection? Do people drive by on the way to Sunday brunch and gawk? Or do they reroute traffic altogether?

It got me thinking how much drama plays out just off-camera in our humdrum little lives. Whenever people start discussing 9/11, they begin by talking about their own lives–where they were, what they were doing. It’s always something ordinary made unforgettable by what followed. My memories of that day, for instance, begin with a drive down the highway, and a feeling–that gorgeous-morning feeling, that feeling that anything is possible, in the best of ways. It was a school Mass day, and I remember a little second grader sitting at the end of the pew by the music area, his legs swinging, and I almost laughed out loud, it was so cute. Wholly ordinary. I had no idea that in a place I could reach in a few hours by air, people were dying and buildings crumbling.

We gravitate toward the dramatic, but as I navigate the blessedly ordinary paths of parenthood and work, I realize that the humdrum and the dramatic are separated only by a thread–a yard, a street, the passing of one second to the next. There is a home next door to that burning business, and a parent staring down from the patient tower of a hospital, her baby fighting for life as thousands of us drive by without sparing a glance. We are caught up in our own fears and broken relationships, our own worries, our own frustrations, until the moment our lives collide with the more dramatic events happening next door.

These stories, when people share them, are riveting, ordinary though they are. And for that reason, I am committed to finding a niche for the stories of ordinary people in my fiction writing. The collective wisdom of the literary world says no one wants to read those stories. We need bombs counting down and body counts climbing; we need fabulously rich and angelically gorgeous protagonists who act and in fact are larger than life.

And although those stories certainly entertain, surely I can’t be the only person in the world who also longs for fiction that uplifts and sheds light on my own life. If I can learn to write characters so real that you forget you can’t pick up the phone and have a nice long chat with them–characters you care about so much that you forget their problems are not yours, or those of a dear friend–if I can learn to do that, I am sure there will be room in the market for it. Even if there’s not a bomb or a sculpted Adonis anywhere in it.

What do you think? Would you read such a book? What is it that you want from your fiction?

Published in: on April 3, 2012 at 7:45 am  Comments (7)  
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7QT

___1___

I wrote yesterday about teaching a holistic, healthy sexuality to our children. I’d love to have more perspectives from parents of older kids. Hint, hint. :)

___2___

As long as I’m asking for advice, I have a sleep question. Michael is now four months old, and he’s having a lot of trouble sleeping during the day. He’s actually slept through the night a few times (gasp! I didn’t know babies did that!) but it’s kind of frustrating during the day. I nurse him to sleep, put him down, he wakes up. Rinse & repeat. Very tiresome, frankly. With the other kids, schedules and nice long naps seemed connected to the “learn to put yourself to sleep” stage–i.e., the let them cry stage. But I’ve never done that until they were at least nine months old–into the object permanence stage. I’m really hesitant to do that with Michael so early. But he’s got to sleep longer than five minutes in a shot!

___3___

I know the first piece of advice is going to be sling/snugli. I did pull out the Snugli last night so I could go outside with my family and enjoy the evening. But a) he didn’t sleep, and b) while I can walk behind my kids with a baby slung across my front, I cannot bend down, throw baseballs, help kids learn to bat and pedal tricycles. So I’m really in a quandary, seeking solutions to the sleep issue. Because a baby who’s tired doesn’t do well with tummy time and learning to play with toys, and so on.

___4___

This week I served as adjudicator for our diocesan music enrichment day. I went into it with a fair amount of nerves. Partly that was because the logistics were so complicated. We had to figure out how to get Alex to his Harry Potter spring break theater camp, which began at the same time I had to be on site in a town half an hour away. And I couldn’t keep the baby with me, because the schedule was so compact. So I had to bring the sitter with me, and figure out how to keep the kids safe and entertained with a sitter. Very complex logistically. I kept having visions of Julianna running off while Michael was inconsolable. Fortunately, like most fears these proved unfounded.

___5___

The other nerves came from the fact that the very first ensemble I critiqued was my gradeschool alma mater, led by my high school band director. However, it proved to be very enjoyable, and a nice chance to catch up with a teacher who had a big influence on me, but whom I haven’t seen in a long time. All in all, it was an experience both energizing and exhausting.

___6___

I have a short fiction work up today. Wondering if it works; I’ve been trying to write this scenario for several years and I still don’t think I’ve nailed it.

___7___

I’m coming up with nothing but boring stuff now, so…have a great weekend!

7 quick takes sm1 7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 168)

Published in: on March 30, 2012 at 7:04 am  Comments (5)  
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