Caroline's point of reference: her own birth

Chris and I were talking and said something about Pope John Paul II. Caroline asked us if he was still alive. We told her no, he actually had died about a week and a half or two after she was born.

Her response: "Wow, he didn't get to live very long, did he?"

I love how they have very little concept of time at this age. I wonder if she really understands that I was once a child myself!

For the "regulars"

In case any of my family and friends are wondering where all these random people are coming from who are commenting on my empty envelope from the White House... both Thomas at American Papist and Fr. Z at What Does the Prayer Really Say? have posted the story on their blogs.

The amount of dissenters who have come to my blog via AmP or Fr. Z was a bit startling at first... I thought, "Why are so many people who think it's silly to protest abortion (in a non-violent way such as a letter campaign) reading AmP or Fr. Z in the first place???" Surely these people do not agree with the content on those two very pro-life blogs.

But I am thinking this is a good thing. If there are pro-abortion people out there who are actively reading AmP and Fr. Z, then they must care about the issue at some level. They must care what their opposition thinks. And, as Father Lopez once said, he's much more worried about those who are totally indifferent than those who have enough passion to care one way or the other. That is, it is easier to change somebody's mind who cares passionately about something than it is to get somebody who is indifferent to care enough to stand up for their beliefs (because they have no beliefs, or very weak or flip-floppy beliefs).

I'm fortunate that there are people out there who take the time to spread the pro-life word and to fight against the ever-present culture of death that has so subtley snuck into so many people's lives. Many young people today are searching for Truth, and they can find a lot of truth over at AmP and Fr. Z's blog. Perhaps the dissenters who read these blogs will have their hearts softened over time through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Daybook for July 12, 2009

Outside my window... it's dark. We had a nice thunderstorm roll through here at the girls' bedtime, but both still drifted off to sleep peacefully, Caroline with me and Cecilia with Chris.

I am thinking... about that weird "letter" I got from the White House!

I am thankful... for the chance to go to lunch with a friend tomorrow after our La Leche League meeting, and then on to the outlet mall, where I haven't been in quite awhile... gee, it's mid-July, so I bet they'll have summer clothes on clearance, right? ;)

Learning at home... Caroline has gotten so good at folding the cloth diapers and wipes. the other morning, she folded about a third of them on her own, unprompted, and then later said, "Look, Mommy! I'm helping our family run smoothly!" :)

From the kitchen... beef bourginionne (no, I have no idea how to actually spell that!) on Tuesday, maybe some cheesy casserole bread along with it... salmon on Friday. Kroger has wild-caught salmon at this time of the year, and for a nice price!

I am reading... several online articles about the Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, and other things that have the wheels spinning in my head for a post about the differences between attachment parenting and child-centeredness and why the two don't necessarily mesh.

To live the liturgy... Our Lady of Mount Carmel's feast day is this week, so maybe some reading up on the brown scapular is in order. The holy cards I ordered have arrived and will be saved for the last week in the month.

I am creating... a wooden "priest" made from dowel rods and vestments for him to wear. Caroline and Cecilia will be able to change the vestments according to the liturgical color each day. Got the idea here and here.

Around the house... the usual routine this week... laundry, vacuuming, cleaning sinks...

I am hearing... Chris listening to something on his computer.

One of my favorite things... getting ideas for living the liturgical year from websites and books!

A few plans for the rest of the week... La Leche League meeting tomorrow followed by lunch and outlet mall. That's enough plans to cover us for the whole week, don't you think? We are also having Caroline's hero, our seminarian, over for dinner on Tuesday. He won't be at our church much longer! :( And sometime before the end of the week, I need to get to the library to turn in the summer reading form so we can get our free ticket to the Creative Discovery Museum and Chick-fil-a kid's meal coupon.

A picture thought I am sharing...

Okay, so two picture thoughts... Caroline's chalk drawing on the driveway of kids on a playground, and Cecilia for one of the five seconds she stayed in the kiddie pool.

Not sure what to think...

Today I received mail from Washington... from the White House, in fact! At least, it said so in the upper lefthand corner of the envelope. I figured it was probably some sort of form letter response to my letter to the President regarding my opposition to the "Freedom of Choice Act."

Hand-addressed to me, too - wow! I wouldn't think that there was a person sitting in the White House hand-addressing and applying stamps to envelopes... they don't have some sort of bulk mail rate at the White House? Hmm, more wasted tax dollars, I guess!

So, here's the thing: the envelope was empty. There was nothing in it at all. Nothing. I even checked for white powder, and nope - empty. Where is my letter? Or is this some sort of prank? My husband says that the envelope looks exactly like the one he received (some font, I guess) as the one he received from President Clinton back when he was in high school, congratulating him on his Boy Scout Eagle Award.

Then I remembered... what a coincidence - I had sent an empty envelope to the White House myself a few months ago! An empty, red envelope. I had the courtesy to explain on the back of my envelope what its purpose was... there was nothing written on the back of the envelope I received today.

So, is this just some kind of mistake? Was there supposed to be a letter responding to my concerns about FOCA or my concerns about the genocide called abortion that remains legal in this country (and could become even more protected under the law as our current President seems to want it to be)? Or should I feel... mocked, perhaps? After all, I did send them an empty envelope myself, representing one life lost to abortion, one life that was unable to have its voice heard by our elected officials in Washington. Getting an empty envelope in response... is that their way of saying, "No response - we don't care. That life is still gone, and we remain silent on the matter."

So now I am really curious... did anyone else who participated in the Red Envelope Campaign receive a response? Or an empty envelope? Did anyone who mailed a letter directly to the President recieve anything in response via mail? What was supposed to be in my envelope??? Or was it intended as is??

See? It's really empty!

Red, White, and Blue Desserts!

We forgot to get the yogurt pops out during our cookout... probably better that way, since we had two other desserts (one of them unexpected... Chris brought one home from work on Friday). The girls love these "popsicles" and eat them like crazy!

They are made from plain yogurt, strawberries, and blueberries. Sometimes I throw it all in the blender, but I wanted them to be festive instead of purple... A few years ago, I pureed strawberries and blueberries separately and then layered them with the white yogurt to make red, white, and blue stripes:

That was two years ago! How little Caroline was...

And you can't really tell, but blueberry rhubarb crumble starts out being red and blue but turns purple after baking... add a dollop of vanilla ice cream, and there you have it! Yum!

Wordless Wednesday: A Fairy Tree House for Caroline

(please ignore all the clutter on the table behind the tree house!)

Independence Day 2009

We had a traditional July 4th cookout with burgers, hot dogs, and cole slaw. We had some good friends over who had just had their fifth baby on Monday! Caroline and I began preparing a few days ahead. We made a tablecloth for the kids' table - we used red and blue markers, Do-a-dots, and stars punched out of construction paper.

I taped two big white pieces of paper together to make a simple (and disposable!) tablecloth. Caroline and I decorated it here and there over two days.


And here Caroline shows off our "one-cut stars." If you fold the paper correctly, and then make the cut correctly (which was my repeated problem!), then you get a star shape with just one two-inch cut.

I did nearly all the cutting... eight layers of construction paper were too much for Caroline to cut through. She did most of the hole punching, and then we strung them on a long piece of yarn to make a star garland, which we would hang outside on the day of the cookout.

I completely forgot to take photos during the cookout, so here's the aftermath:


The wind won out against the stars... they got all bunched up despite the way I had spread them out after hanging the yarn between the house and the tree.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Independence Day!

Simplifying your Domestic Church

This looks like a great book for us Catholic moms... Simplifying your Domestic Church. Sounds very good from this review.

Yet another book to add to my Amazon wish list and my "to-read" pile... ;)

"Sleep Props" and Parental Expectations

You know, I really should not click on those targeted ads in Gmail... that's how I found the crib that's "just like being in Mommy's tummy." I clicked on a few again today, and found a website that had some information on "sleep props."

First off, this website (and another I clicked on) is the site of an infant/toddler sleep consultant. Yes, there is such a career now, believe it or not. These sites are run by "sleep experts" who will come up with a "personalized sleep plan" for your baby. Hmm, personalized? I would suppose that each plan is just a variation on "cry it out." Why people need to pay a consultant for this information that they could find in a library book is beyond me!! I guess it says a lot about this age of parenting... so many of us are looking for answers on child-rearing, whereas 100 years ago, people just knew what to do (from experience of being raised with many siblings and within close communities where they had lots of experience being around babies/children), or if they had a question, they just asked their mothers or the neighbor who'd raised eight children of her own. This is coming from someone who does read a fair number of parenting books, by the way! It is unfortunate that we need these books and even less fortunate when we feel that we must hire consultants to tell us how to care for our children.

Anyway, back to the sleep props... some people call them "crutches" instead of props. The term would appear to mean anything that is used to help a child fall asleep, stay asleep, or get back to sleep upon middle-of-the-night awakening. Sleep props might include rocking, walking, singing, nursing, laying down next to the child, patting his back, replacing a pacifer, etc. And apparently, according to this website and many others, they are bad. Bad, bad, bad. It is never really stated why they are bad, but one would assume that it is due to their inconvenience to the parent. From all appearances, sleep props are not bad for the child (hopefully nobody out there actually believes that "if you don't stop nursing that kid to sleep, he's going to have to take you to college with him in order to get himself to sleep in the dorm!"). So, one would assume that if they are bad for someone, they are bad for the parent - unless they are just "bad" on principle?

My real reason for blogging about what I read today is this: on a page of the above-mentioned website, there is a section on "introducing a lovey or blankie" to your child (a "lovey" would seem to be a stuffed animal-type toy which a child can cuddle for comfort). If you want to read it, you'll find it under the "reading" tab (which, I might add, is FREE!). What aggravated me about this article on loveys (or is that "lovies"?) was that it went into how sleep props are something to be eliminated so that the child can fall asleep alone, but that a lovey or blankie is not a sleep prop. Uh, hmmm... if a sleep prop is something that assists the child in falling asleep and a child cannot fall asleep without a lovey/blankie, then yes, by definition it is a sleep prop. If this item gets lost or if the child pukes on it a half hour before bedtime, well.... then the child will have a very hard time going to sleep. So it is still a prop.

So why does this author purport that loveys are acceptable sleep props whereas none of the others are acceptable? Because the lovey is parent-free. The other "props" (nursing, rocking, laying near) all require an adult to do something. Which again goes back to the issue of - who is it that these props are bad for?

I think the answer boils down to some of the testimonials found on that and other websites. The most common comment seems to be that after following the personalized sleep plan, the parents "got our lives back." Got their lives back? Got back "to normal" perhaps? Because life is guaranteed to go back to the way it was previously once a couple's first child is born - where is that written? It is "written" (pictured, actually, and we all know that a picture is worth a thousand words) in the media, in our pop culture, in life all around us. Parents are disposable - anybody can raise a baby/child, we are told. Babies are inconvenient, life is more fun before they are born, so something had better be done afterwards to get them trained into being more independent from the get-go so that parents can "have their old lives back." The thought of a pioneer woman in a covered wagon trying to "get her life back" just popped into my head, and what a silly picture indeed... she has her life and is living it out already! Our lives are what is in the here and now, not some idealized image of what it "used to be" or what life looks like on TV (like in soap operas how you see the kids maybe once a month, and when mentioned, they are "off at Grandma's for the summer" or "with the Nanny" - and then they appear all grown up three years later, lol!). And life with babies and children is much different than life before kids, no matter how much our society tells us it shouldn't be.

Expectations - it boils down to what we expect as parents. Our society does us a great disservice in that it portrays babies who sleep all the time and only need attention when they need to eat (which is only every 3-4 hours, by the way!) or to have a diaper changed. This is a fallacy! If parents were taught to expect that infants do not sleep like adults do (or even like five year olds do), babies and small children need very frequent contact (Harvard did this study a few years back), and that they cannot be spoiled by being carried around constantly as you go about your daily work, then parents would be set up with much more realistic expectations before the first child's birth. Instead, we have to dig for this information (did you know that babies spend more time in the lighter sleep cycles as a survival mechanism, to help them stay alive, and not because they want to manipulate their parents?) and then feel the pushback from the rest of society as they get the "you'll spoil that baby," and "you need to get your life back."

Ah, but my children are far from spoiled, and I have my life - my beautiful phase of life which will slip away from me as the years pass. To everything there is a season, turn, turn turn, yadda yadda - right? Expecting that each season of life brings changes and that life will never be the way it was before, and then embracing these changes (knowing they will pass) seems to me to be the healthiest way to deal with it all. Sure, there can still be frustration, longing for the past (this coming from a highly sentimental person!), but overall, expecting things to change and not having a set definition of "normal" has brought me much peace. "Normal" a year ago was a baby who needed much nighttime attention. "Normal" now is a baby who still needs nighttime attention but less frequently and accepts it from Daddy in the first part of the night. "Normal" in two years will be children that don't wake up often at all during the night... and so on, until the season in which the children are no longer as dependent and will need me in a very different, less hands-on way.

Turn, turn, turn...

Mary Garden Update

By the end of June, our Mary Garden looked quite nice with all the greenery in it. Our marigolds had grown up from seeds and were beginning to bloom by the last day of June. Our garden stone, a project I'd been meaning to get to during Mary's month of May, finally got finished this month as well. I bought a garden stone form and mix at the craft store, and we picked out various blue stones and gems there as well. Caroline made a border all around the stone while I worked on the rosary in the center. The idea to make a stone with a rosary on it came from an online mom friend who enjoys making garden stones with her own girls... she shared a great idea too, of trying to eventually have enough stones to make a huge rosary around the yard from them! What a fun idea!

One moment after I took the above photo, we had one less marigold bloom in our Mary Garden. At least she didn't try to eat it. Is it normal for a 17 month old to still eat sand??

Here's a shot of the whole garden, showing the marigolds, garden stone, signs, rosemary, and basil (not sure if basil has any connection to Mary or not, but it is quite possible as many herbs are associated with her - I just keep it here because it is convenient when I want to pick some to add to our dinner!).

The basil is doing amazingly well. I bought three basil plants (two are in our vegetable garden) and one more that is of a different variety - it has some purplish leaves along with the green and has a hint of a cinnamony taste and smell to it in addition to smelling like regular basil. We found somebody locally who sells a variety of plants and bought them from him (after our plants started from seeds failed) and are very pleased with our plants so far!

And here is our rosemary... it is multiplying like crazy, so I need to find more uses for it! One thing we have enjoyed is chopping some up and adding it with freshly ground black pepper to olive oil as a dip for bread.

Cecilia thinks the round stones that make up the rosary are balls. Technically, she is correct. But they won't come out no matter how hard she tries! Oh yeah, we have random lawn bunnies in the garden too... they have nothing to do with Mary as far as I know, but that is where they have ended up.

Future plans for the Mary Garden will be to add something new each year. Mary has so many nicknames and things that are associated with her that it won't be difficult to come up with ideas. For example, I saw some star-shaped garden decorations at Target a while back... Mary is known as "Morning Star." Stick the star decoration in the ground, and we'd have an easy-as-pie meaningful addition to our garden.

I would love to hear any other ideas people might have of symbols or plants to add to a Mary Garden!