It’s almost Lent, folks! I know, I’m ahead of the game, but I have a good reason: I am hosting a giveaway for my new book, Bring Lent To Life. If you’re a Catholic mother with young (or youngish) children, click over and leave a comment for a chance to win a signed copy!

Okay, now that I’ve done my shameless self-promo…moving on.

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I was poking around online, doing magazine market research yesterday, and an ad for “Molexit” caught my eye. Considering the helpless rage with which I am consumed every time I walk across my big lawn, my ankle twisting on the maze of mole hills, you can imagine I clicked. A little browsing led me to THIS. All I have to say is: These are people after my own heart.

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I teach flute and voice lessons in my basement, which you might imagine can be a bit of an adventure with three small children and, uh, a nursing baby. Alex used to be very quiet over in the corner, humming vocal warmups along with the students while he bent over a Lego creation or a rescue hero. (Precursor to the autopilot humming he does All.The.Time now.) But Julianna? Julianna takes it to a whole new level. This week in lessons, she turned her back to us, planted her feet shoulder-width apart, and sang to the sunny window with arms out Broadway-finale style, “Eee-AAAAAAAHHHHaaaaah!”

Ah, how I love that girl, despite her selective deafeness to anything she doesn’t feel like hearing…

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Speaking of Julianna, or rather, Julianna and Michael…my baby is 8 weeks old already. I cannot believe it. I’ve been anxiously watching for his first smile, and we got it this week–a few, fleeting, absolutely adorable smiles. But incredibly hard to catch. I spent twenty minutes making a complete, blithering fool of myself while the dish water got cold one night. Once–once–I hit the button at exactly the right moment….and the camera turned off. I had my finger on the power instead of the shutter. Sigh. In the end, this was the best I got:

While Julianna, who torments him ceaselessly, turning him sideways in his bouncy, soundlessly and sneakily rolling him over onto his tummy (and here I thought I was making a big joke when I said she was destined to be a superspy), dragging him by one arm when my back is turned, lying on top of him…what, you think I’m kidding? Look at this! Caught in the act!

Julianna is the one Michael smiles for most often. What is this, some freaky variant on Stockholm syndrome???????

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Smiles aside, Michael adores all his big siblings. He can’t smile with his mouth yet, but his whole face smiles. Moms, you know that look, right? Heart-meltingly bright eyes, arms and legs kicking, face alight? He does that often for us. And it makes me happy to see how much Nicholas loves him. I was worried about Nicholas, because he’s such a drama king, and so needy. I was afraid we’d be in for all manner of resentment and tantrums. But the transition has been remarkably smooth, and he absolutely adores his baby brother, asking to hold him at all times of the day. Of course, he lasts about ten seconds, but hey. He’s a boy.

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Alex was home from school two days this week. And now we have piles of homework to catch up on. Actually, he did most of it while I was teaching yesterday, but it’s a wakeup call, reminding me that whew, we are entering a new phase of parenthood!

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Well, I’m officially back to that phase of my life: the obsessed with sleep stage. It’s cyclical, and varies in cause and style. Right now it’s the “how many times did he get up last night?” strain. The Shangri-la of sleep for me right now would be getting to that stage where the baby wakes up around two and then sleeps till five or six. My babysitter keeps asking, “Is he sleeping through the night yet?” I’m like, uh…no. Is he supposed to? I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had a child who slept through the night until he or she was three years old.

Whatever, dude. Sleep is for wimps.

But that makes me wonder–how many of you actually have kids who slept through the night consistently? And at what age?

Enough from me. Don’t forget to enter my giveaway!

I know, probably most of you are sending die, evil woman, die! looks at your computer screen right now. I’m ahead of the game, but I have a good reason. I think Lent is the great misunderstood season, and it is possible to approach it with joy–as perhaps you can tell from the image to the right. Today I’d like to share a short excerpt from my new book, Bring Lent to Life, and…I’m hosting my very first giveaway! So let me begin by asking: have you thought about “what you want to give up for Lent”? Read on!

The problem with simply giving something up is what I call the Mardi Gras syndrome: You’re sacrificing sweets for Lent, so the day before Ash Wednesday you have four bowls of ice cream. (There’s a reason it’s called “fat Tuesday.”) And on Easter Sunday you celebrate the end of the fast with two chocolate bunnies, a couple dozen handfuls of jelly beans, three slices of pie, and a cinnamon roll.

Kind of misses the point of the fast, don’t you think?

Fasting should change us in some way–move us to a place of greater holiness. It shouldn’t be something we do to torment ourselves for a while, only to revert to our former selves when it’s all over.

I believe it’s time to think beyond the ordinary Lenten penance. Why not give up a  specific sin instead?  In many ways, sin is a habit, a pattern of behavior. Selfishness, irritability, unkind words, gossip, gluttony–each of us struggles with the same sins again and again. Instead of choosing a specific item to forgo, why not choose one sin particularly troublesome to you and spend Lent focused on breaking its power over you?

This can be a great exercise for kids too, although they may need help, and that help must be given carefully. It’s important that we, the parents, not tell children what sins we think they need to address. True conversion happens from the inside out; it cannot be imposed by authority, however loving.

Penance, when heartfelt, is frequently a very private action and very difficult for people to share, even with those closest to them. Respect this. If a child is unwilling to share what he or she is giving up, that’s OK. As a parent, it’s tempting to feel that we must know everything our children are up to. But it’s also possible that a child (especially in the teen years) may want to be free of a habitual sin but is too afraid to admit it to his or her parents for fear of punishment. If your children are sincere enough to choose to work on something for Lent, rejoice, and allow them the freedom to make good choices of their own volition.

(Excerpted from Bring Lent to Life, with permission of Liguori Publications. Click here for more excerpts.)

Okay, folks, it’s time for a book giveaway! If you like what you see, leave a comment here between now and Feb. 5th and be entered to win a signed copy of Bring Lent to Life!

For extra entries, help me spread the word! Mention Bring Lent to Life on Twitter or Facebook (and mention me so I know about it!–Facebook: Kathleen M. Basi, Twitter: @kathleenmbasi). Better yet, refer people to this post. For each one you’ll get an additional entry. For every day you tweet or FB it, you get additional entries. On Feb. 6th my lovely little ones and I will do an old-fashioned, low-tech drawing and announce a winner.

Any questions? If not–go!

Julianna’s the ringleader of this little comic group, and her repertoire of jokes consists of one: She signs “eat” and points to random objects–the baby’s nose, the pillow, the wall, my jeans, the phone–and giggles hysterically.

The first time, I admit, I was slow on the uptake (as I often am with jokes). “You’re gonna eat the phone?” I said blankly, and she fell on the pillow, overcome by mirth. Now that was funny. You poor people out there in the e-verse have no way of comprehending how magical Julianna’s laugh is. I was powerless against it. The first time, anyway.

Nicholas found it so hysterical, he couldn’t even sit up. Instantly, he adopted the joke as his own, wholly forgetting that he can talk.

Although–and I hope you’ll permit me the tangent; my story’s finished anyway–Julianna actually is talking now. She almost always asks for “milk please” and names a whole bunch of colors, as well as counting one to ten. You have to know the context; you wouldn’t just recognize the words automatically–but she is saying them. Yesterday her big speech therapy task was to learn to say “go home.” I’m so proud of my little girl. Except when she’s sitting motionless, pretending she can’t hear me issuing instructions, that is. That girl can use her disability to play stupid when she doesn’t want to do something. We really have to stay on our toes to try not to get manipulated. I know she’s winning some of the battles…like the chores battle. Nicholas is way farther than she is on the “complies with instructions” continuum. I know I have to fight that battle eventually, but I don’t have the time and emotional energy to deal with them simultaneously. Let’s just hope I manage to do it before Michael gets old enough to need the lesson!

(By the way–I’m well aware that today is Wednesday, not Thursday, but I have a special post prepared that requires editorial approval, so I’m doing Motherhood Moment a day early today to make room for it! Stay tuned!)

Photo by *hiro008, via Flickr

It’s 1:15 when the last door upstairs closes. I hear her patter down the stairs, one to fourteen, landing lightly on Pergo. Afternoon sunlight glows on dirty dishes; the floor at my feet is a mine field of plastic bags, the spoils of the morning’s Target run. She surveys the mess, then looks longingly at the office…and the couch.

Come on, girl. You know you need this. I heard how many times you were up last night.

She picks her way among the bags, and I cheer. Reaching across the glass surface, she presses a button, and I obligingly begin counting upward. At twenty, her finger lifts.

No way. That’s not nearly enough.

She makes a face; she knows that as well as I do. But there’s so much to do–the assignments that tap out from beneath her fingers, the music that’s due in a week, the mess in the kitchen… I watch her waffle; at last, she punches in another thirteen minutes. Thirty-three minutes. Three to fall asleep, thirty to nap.

I start the count: twenty-nine. Go on. Get over there and lie down. You don’t know when that baby’s gonna wake up again.

She takes a drink from a big hospital mug, grabs a few sheets of paper and tosses them in the recycling–halfhearted attempts to split the difference between rest and housecleaning. Then she flings herself across the couch, burying her eyes beneath a pillow.

Twenty-eight minutes. She’s having trouble getting to sleep; the breathing is all wrong.  She’s thinking about what she’s going to do when she gets up.

Twenty-six minutes. The phone rings. She punches it on and back off without answering–must have been one of those 800 number calls. Twenty-five.

At twenty-four minutes, her breathing slows; the house settles into a quiet it rarely sees during daylight hours: the soft ticking of the wall clock, the refrigerator’s hum, the low rumble and tumble of the dryer upstairs. I wish I could slow the relentless countdown, but I can’t; my reliability is the only reason she trusts me. Twenty minutes. Fifteen. Ten. Upstairs, a child rolls over, its feet thumping the walls. I tense, but the slow, even breaths don’t change. She must be tired. Five minutes. Three. One. Now we’re counting seconds…three…two…one..

Beeep. Beeep. Beeep.

She takes a deep breath, stirs, and groans. Nap time is over.

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To my regular (non-Write-On-Edge) readers, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do this prompt; it seemed pretty far outside of what I would normally write. But Christian encouraged me to try, and since the heavyweight stuff yesterday didn’t seem as interesting, I figured, What the hey? Hope you don’t mind.

Image via Wikipedia

Jonah had a really bad attitude. God gave him a job he didn’t want to do– the people of Nineveh weren’t worth his trouble–so he took off in the opposite direction, only to find himself stuck in the belly of a fish. When he proved indigestible (how lucky for him he was spit out near shore!), he did as he was told…but he did it with bad grace. The people of Nineveh repented, and God spared them.

Jonah should have been ecstatic. Who gets that kind of chance to change the world? Instead, he pouted because he thought God had made him look stupid. So he went into the desert to die. When his shade tree died, he threw a little hissy fit, and God said, “How can you get so upset over the death of this little plant, and simultaneously be completely insensitive to the deaths of the people of an entire city?”

This is the story our associate pastor told in the homily yesterday. It reminded me of a column from our diocesan newspaper this week, addressing the story about the Marines who urinated on the bodies of dead Taliban members. I won’t share it all because I don’t have permission, but this part really stopped me in my tracks:

“The irony is so great that we don’t get it. A sterile liquid produced by the kidney and streamed onto a cadaver is morally debated, but the hail of bullets that penetrated those bodies, making inanimate what was only minutes before a breathing, sentient being, does not enter the discourse. War gets reduced to an etiquette that shows more respect for the dead than the living.”

Christian and I spent Saturday morning at a training session to learn how to talk to parents receiving a diagnosis of Down syndrome–part of our local effort to start a hospital visitation program. Right now, the presenter told us, most people are being “surprised in the delivery room.” But very soon the paradigm will shift to almost exclusively prenatal diagnoses, because of the new tests. She reiterated that the Down Syndrome Guild is “pro-information,” not “pro-life,” a position I have always thought was untenable–how can you advocate for people without taking a stand that they are inherently worth taking a stand for?

But as the morning progressed, I began to see the wisdom, or at least the necessity, of such a position. If we come out all guns blazing, laying down a blanket “law” via a prolife message, we will never get the opportunity to witness at all; people will never let us near them, because they will know that we are more about our soapbox than we are about helping them. The fact is that abortion is an option, whether we like it or not. If we hope to be credible witnesses, we have to acknowledge that, and say “Look, we know what you’ve heard about Down’s is scary. Here’s the part the doctors can’t tell you”–without trying to “guilt” people into proper behavior at a time when they’re wounded and bewildered. If we can’t do that, then we can’t be trusted to have a family’s best interest at heart, and we have no right to be doing this work at all.

Sometimes we get so focused on the unborn child that we forget the wounded parents before us. And that’s why I bring it up in connection with Jonah and the dead Taliban. We must respect the dignity of every person–even when they are considering an action we find morally reprehensible–even when the dignity of another life is at stake. The risk to the baby’s life does not negate our responsibility to respect the parent as well.

I don’t have my thoughts all in order on this topic yet; I can’t help feeling there are holes in my logic that I haven’t yet identified. So I’ll be interested to see your thoughts.

Drive Through Wisdom

Off My Stride

In The Background

Great Expectations

Cute Kids in 7 quick takes

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.)

However, I have a good relationship with all the people who work with Julianna in preschool, soI wasn’t worried. it was generally a positive experience. It takes an hour or so to go through current skills strengths, weaknesses and goal-setting, and then we got to the part where we say “how many minutes in the regular classroom, and how many minutes of special instruction?” At that point, I sensed everyone in the room taking a deep breath, and I thought, Uh-oh.

The problem, her classroom teacher pointed out, is that the people at the new school don’t really know Julianna, don’t really know what she’s capable of. So while we, and specifically she (the teacher), know her to be more than capable of a high level of inclusion, the new team wants to play it cautious. After all, we’d rather over-support her and withdraw it quickly than under-support her and have her begin kindergarten with frustration or failure.

It makes perfect sense, and for that reason I took a deep breath and signed off on something utterly contrary to everything I want for my daughter: namely, putting her in a self-contained classroom for all regular instruction, with only her “specials” happening with her typically-developing peers. I did so with a very clear instruction that I wanted it in the plan that re-evaluation would begin immediately, and not late in October or November. And only after taking down three different names for people within the new school whose phone lines I can burn down to make sure it doesn’t get set aside.

I signed, but I have tears in my eyes thinking about it, and a vague sense of nausea. Because I know how hard it is to move a bureaucracy unless you have an advocate within…and my whole support system is at the early childhood center, not at the elementary school. And our goal for the kindergarten year is to see if Julianna can function in the classroom without that support, because only then can we explore the possibility of sending her to Catholic school with her brothers.

I spent all week watching her outdo the expectations for a child with Down’s. They think she needs special P.E. because she’ll need help with stamina navigating a school so big. Knowing my child, I shook my head and smiled. I smiled bigger three days later when she pushed a stroller containing a child almost as big as she is up a huge hill, down the hill, around the corner, 2/3 of a mile from the fire station to our house. Stamina: check.

I watched her name colors and identify letters, and shook my head at 65% special instruction, because she really isn’t much behind other almost-5-year-olds in terms of her knowledge…only in speech.

And then, as I worked on a music list before choir practice yesterday afternoon, she settled at my feet with the cards from the “Your Baby Can Read” box. I’ve ceased to wonder why she’s interested in a bunch of cards with no pictures, only words; she just likes shuffling through them. In the middle of scribbling notes to myself, Julianna uttered her usual “pay attention to me” grunt. I turned around to see her making a sign I didn’t recognize: her hands crossing in front of each other repeatedly, as if drawing attention to her ribs. “I don’t know that sign,” I said, but she kept signing insistently. I glanced at the card on her lap. It said “zebra.” “Zebra?” I said halfheartedly.

“Euh!” she said happily, and signed all the more furiously.

I frowned, trying hard to squelch the leap in my chest, and turned to the computer. And I found this link. And my breath caught.

My girl can’t talk, but she can read…at least a little.

My breath caught, because now I know I have reason to fight for what I always said I wanted for her.

Except we don’t. At least, I don’t. I can’t bear to part with them. For instance:

Last night I set out to cull the photos of Michael’s baptism. At first blush, I thought it would be easy: there were eight to ten pictures of every part of the ritual, and a couple dozen of our family. But as my finger paused above the “delete” key, my breath caught. Not at the foreground. At what was happening in the background.

There was this one: my godfather kissing my little sister’s forehead.

And this one, in which Alex’s expression as he holds his cousin’s hand is absolutely priceless:

Sometimes the surprise is in the action, but off-center, and not what you were taking a picture of, like this absolutely adorable moment between Christian and Julianna:

Sometimes the person behind the camera (my cousin Becky, in this case) realizes what’s going on and actually focuses in on it:

The camera captures something pretty profound in these pictures: while we’re distracted paying attention to the main stage, there’s a beautiful, complex world of other relationships playing out in the background, spinning threads that weave us all together and give depth to a world that will always, no matter how old and jaded and crusty we get, be able to surprise us.

(Linked to Wordful Wednesday at Seven Clown Circus)

Photo by iloveusb, via Flickr

My life is crazy now. As I try to get back into the swing of regular life, with writing assignments to finish and errands to run, I keep having to adjust my expectations ever lower. Lower, that is, in terms of what I accomplish outside of motherhood. For the first time, I am really not multitasking during nursing times, but simply being quiet, looking out the window, looking at Michael, doing neck stretches (okay, so maybe I’m fooling myself about that whole multitasking thing).

It’s not a bad thing. We had a really nice long weekend, with a visit to family and a visit to the fire station down the street, some outside time and opening the house up (how can you argue with 70 degrees on January 16th?). But it also means that I’m spinning my wheels a lot. This week, I lost one day to a trip to St. Louis for my postpartum visit and another morning to Julianna’s kindergarten IEP meeting…a meeting whose implications I’m still pondering, processing, and, well, generally spending emotional energy.

I don’t want to overstate things, because I’m really okay, it’s just I haven’t figured out how to juggle the extra child yet, and child outranks Everything Else, which means I’m dropping a lot of balls, and every day the list of things left undone gets a little longer. Things that I was able to do without difficulty even during pregnancy suddenly feel like too much, but I don’t know how to jettison them; there isn’t anyone else to do them…or more accurately, there probably is, but it would take so much energy to find that person that it’s probably simpler to try to continue juggling myself.

One of the things I do that I don’t talk about too much is teach natural family planning. For the past year or more, I’ve been working with our diocesan office to promote the visibility and accessibility of NFP in our diocese. It’s working, which is thrilling…but as the ranking teaching couple, it also means a lot of extra work as new couples come on board. And we need to meet with half a dozen engaged couples to plan music for their weddings in the next three weekends, too. And it’s time to be working on preschool for Nicholas in the fall. To say nothing of the scores of pictures piling up, crying out to be archived in scrapbooks. I’ve always, ALWAYS stayed caught up on scrapbooking…but I’m beginning to wonder if I’m reaching the limit.

Anyway, I know I will eventually catch my stride. Frankly, it’ll probably happen when Michael settles into more of a schedule, which means I probably have several months of this unsettled-ness to get through. I have to learn to accept less of myself, and to say no. The first “no” on that list is going to come later today, when I have to respond to a “can you please…?” email that’s been bold-faced glaring out of my email inbox all weekend. But I must confess, I just said “yes” this morning to something else…I promised to drive for a field trip for Alex’s class. But I mean, if I’m going to say yes, it should be to things like that, right? I should be staying hyper-involved in my family, and setting other things at a distance.

When I put a title at the top of this document, it was meant to be about something entirely different, and much more organized. But the introductory paragraph took me spinning off into a stream-of-consciousness reflection, and I decided to go with it. I can return to my original thought tomorrow, after all.