Bits of Easter going and coming

So a few weeks ago, the family went to an easter egg hunt. It was a nice day on the whole, and the hunt was located in an expansive yard to the side of some acquaintances from church. The host and hostess fenced in large squares of grass, and placed multicolored eggs throughout. Kara and L. went to join the other little girls, bucket in hand. Caleb and I moseyed over to the babies square. I set Caleb down right beside a big orange egg, and adjusted his hat. Beautiful area, really. Standing, I looked up at the surrounding green hills. The lawn was long and flat, curing up toward the base of the nearest hill and falling away into a steep brook. I looked up at the clear sky, thinking about the dark clouds and the tornado that had screamed through this very landscape only a few days before. Caleb had discovered the egg. He lifted and turned it, trying to nibble on first its narrow and then its fat ends. "Is that egg tasty?" I asked him, crouching. He put it down in frustration, and glanced around. A purple egg was just a few feet away. He was on the move. Ah, another Dad. I stood. We talked about work. He told me all about working 150 feet up on cable towers and we talked about a group of American Indians that builds all the skyscrapers in New York. Caleb was munching. "Is that grass tasty?" I said, indulgent. He ignored me, hands lifted as if to say "there's so much to munch here, who can choose?" The Dad and I kept talking, this time about the tornado. It was on everyone's mind. No, he didn't know anyone who had been hurt. Caleb leaned out to grab a yellow egg, and then sat back hard against my foot. He studied it, looking for any strategic weakness. A few clouds had drifted above us. The Dad and I were making a joke about heights. His baby girl was losing patience from her shoulder perch. I looked down. Caleb had given up on the yellow egg. Instead a little bit of green grass went in and out as he sucked, uncaring, and pulled at the lawn. "Let me get that for you," I said, "It's a little disgusting." I grabbed the bit of grass and pulled, and out came an ENTIRE DANDELION!! He'd been sucking on the whole thing, from yellow flower to green stem.

L. and I sat down with our rector today, and we are joining an Episcopal church in Nashville. Many, I’m sure, believe we've lost our minds--or worse--but I couldn’t be happier about it. If the news media are to be believed, the Episcopal Church in the United States is as corrupted and lost as they come, and, frankly, that is probably true. Nevertheless, our new home confesses Christ as Lord and displays a fidelity to Scripture and a love for neighbor that is unmistakably orthodox. The preaching is straight from the text, its service is evident and the liturgy stays true to Cranmer’s prayer book without innovation. it is also aligned openly with the Anglican Communion Network, a reform movement within the Anglican communion.

Still, explaining this seemingly-from-nowhere change is difficult. I wish I had the thinking done on the matter; I'm wrestling with the draft of a personal statement to explain it as much to myself as to others. In the meantime, here's a story:

Palm Sunday. We faithful file out of our chairs and line up in the sunny open air, where we are given real palm fronds (not sheets of construction paper cut into leaves). Then, the rector and the other leaders file everyone in, all of us singing a hymn together. As we go, Kara looks up at L. and I and asks, "What's going on?" and I smiled an inner, ecstatic, wickedly wonderful smile. And, as I reminded her about Jesus' triumphal entry, I thought to myself: "What's going on? Why, catechesis, my dear, catechesis."

This and that

So, if you've been checking here for the last week and dissapointed that it kept on being the "sound I heard last night" story of the 10th day -- here's something new for you.

Let's see... Caleb is getting his top teeth. He's looking very cute with nearly four teeth now and thinks he can eat anything... including dandelions and sticks from the yard. He is loving the toys he got for Christmas and enjoys playing with them every day. His current favorite is an activity table from his Aunt and Uncle. It's by LeapFrog and plays lots of music and does ABCs and 123s and he laughs and dances while standing and holding onto it. He's getting so big. He's about ready for his 9 month checkup and I'm guessing he's about 22lbs and 30 inches. We'll see how close I guessed in a couple of weeks.

As for Kara, she is trying her best to overcome some struggles at school and being very sweet around the house. At school they are reading and writing sentences and she's not quite up to speed with the rest of her class, likely because of the move this year, but she's catching up. In the last two weeks we have seen a lot of progress in her reading and writing and we just wish she would feel more confident in school. Believe it or not she's actually having trouble with shyness and being too introverted. Crazy sounding isn't it?! Thom and I are still reading up on sensory integration issues for her and trying to help understand her in every way. We are very happy that there are two families with kids that live in the next building over and there is a lovely grassy lawn between the two buildings. It's a great place to sit on a blanket with Caleb and watch the kids. It's just outside Caleb's window, too, so really I could even be out there with Kara while Caleb naps if I open is window a bit. The other two families are both new to Tennessee, too and one is a pastor's family, so it feels familiar after being at seminary for so long!

Let's see, what else -- it's been full make-over treatment for me lately -- Lynn-nore, not Thom. It started with a bit of outlet shopping while we were on vacation in Gatlinburg. I picked up some new summer clothes and church clothes. Then my mom encouraged me to lighten my hair. Evidently, after Caleb was born my hair did some funky things including thinning out and coming back in darker, so, after much persuading my mom convinced me to lighten it some., it turned out a little more reddish-brown than we expected - but it's fun. So, to add to the dye-job, my mom offered me a visit to her salon and I got a new cut! So, new clothes, new hair, and to finish it off mom took me out for a manicure and pedicure yesterday. So, I'm a new woman!

As for Thom, he is still loving his job in every way and looking dashing wearing a shirt and tie to work everday. Thanks to all of you who gave him shirts and ties for Christmas!

Well, Caleb is presently resisting naptime, and he and I are scheduled to have lunch with Thom and the pastor of the church we've been attending, so I'd better wrap this up. Hope you all are doing well. Keep in touch!
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What I heard last night

They may as well have been playing basketball upstairs with as much thumping and thudding, heavy footfalls running here and there, shouts and collisions. The couple (are they a couple) that live upstairs are in their early 20's, with all the lifestyle up-late's of that age, and we've become used to a general awareness. But this was something else. This was a hurricane of pounding and wrenching and leaping around. "I'm going to have to go up there," I said to myself, remote in hand. The rest of the family was in bed, whereas I'd stayed up to watch some of the "real Jesus" oxymoronic pseudo-science a-news-ualities on the National Geographic Channel. "I'm going to have to go up there and ask them to stop before they wake the kids." I grumbled and they tramped.

Then it went up a notch. A dog started howling. "I didn't know they had a dog upstairs?" I chafed. They were a symphony. Their instruments, by wind and strike, the percussive membrane of ceiling and floor, wall and window. "Woof! Woof! Woo-oof!" went the dog. "Thump, bam, bada-da-da-da-d-ad-ad-a-da-daadaaa, thud!" went the neighbors.

Then it got bad. Suddenly, for no reason, the barking dog suddenly began screaming. Its howl was one of terrible agony. Primal, bloody, almost a woman's scream, it writhed vocally so loud the room itself seemed to take it up. It was everywhere, even in my head. I stood straight up in socked feet. "What is that?" I asked it the way a man asks when he doesn't want to know. 10 seconds. 20 seconds, screaming, screaming, screaming. I stumbled into the hallway and out the door, turning in the open hallway and rushing out under the sky to look up at the windows of the apartment above. The screaming came from everywhere, an open, terrible scream. I struggled to stay, to go up and nock, and could I even tell--did the scream come from upstairs? It seemed to bleed from every window, every car, every tree. "Maybe I'm an idiot for even going up there?" I said. I went back inside. L. was awake. "It woke me up," she said. "What is it?" "A dog, I think--from upstairs." "The people on the other corner have a dog," she said. "I'm going to go back outside" I started, "I should probably call the police." Images of police vehicles, burly men and women asking questions, knocking on doors, wheeling lights biting into every cornea, every window.

And then it stopped. The screaming stopped. The noise upstairs--the gallop of an hour--stopped. Nothing.

Now, I did nothing about this. For all I know, there are bodies upstairs right now. For all I know, there had been plans to murder that dog, if it had been a dog. Would I have interrupted some scene of nightmares if I'd gone upstairs? Perhaps pulled into a struggle for life? All I can say is the scream--that scream--no living thing should ever make a sound like that.

Does Kara suffer from SMD?

Sensory Modulation Disorder (SMD), a sub-set of the larger category Sensory Processing Disorder, is at the top of the learning curve today given recent conversations with Kara's kingergarten teachers. Both of them describe a child unable to focus her mind or body, a condition that used to only be challenging for her teachers but now increasingly results in alienation from her peers. Indeed, as L. and I review our Kara in all of her contexts, it is becoming clear that something is going on, something out of the bell curve for her age group. That something is most likely SMD. For more information, visit my more technical post Decoding the Out-of-Sync Girl. Related websites are listed there.

Quick take on Friday

Thank you to all those who have called or written. We made it okay through the storm last Friday, though not without much anxiety. I was stuck in downtown Nashville; L. and kids were at home. An F3 touched down about two radial miles from the apartment, and cut a 10-mile-long swath up to the West and further north, stopping in the town just north of us and killing 12 people. The stories are slowly starting to slip out: a sick woman stays home from work and falls asleep in her bed only to wake up later lying in her front yard with the remains of her house all around her; two children who were thrown into the twister as their home was ripped apart, taken up into the funnel and deposited, alive, in a field; a mother and her son cowering in a closet are sucked out and thrown 100 feet in different directions--she dies; a church with 40 pre-schoolers is hit head-on by the tornado, the sanctuary is demolished but the nursery is untouched, one of the children asks his teacher, "Are we going to heaven today?" Lynn-nore and I were pretty freaked, watching cell after cell come up from Arkansas, each one putting a tornado or two down; unfamiliar streets and counties constantly being cited on the radio: "A touchdown has been recorded in X-ner county"; "Residents north of Sullivan Farms need to take cover now"; "If you live south of Dixon, you should be aware of high winds in your area between 1:45 and 2:30 which could spawn a tornado," etc. The worst was that the highway connected Nashville with home was a parking lot. Thus, if I went home, I ran the risk of sitting trapped on the highway with cell after cell rushing overhead. I finally made a break for it about 6:30 and made it with no difficulties (a story in itself). I started to leave work earlier, at 2pm, but, while pumping gas, saw a dark, monstrous cloud come up over the horizon, like an upturned mountain of broiling black ashes hanging in mid-air. I went back to work, and learned later that there were three linked tornadoes in that cloud, none of which, thankfully, ever touched down.

I got a digital key-chain camera from Grandma last week. Here are some pictures I took of tornado damage.

Metro Baptist Church

 

 

 

 

 

My right eye

 

My Baby Brother!

 

Flubbed up

Well, the official weigh-in was this morning, and I, with others, lost to Alypius. What's worse, of all the participants, I lost the least, just a pound less than three months ago: a single pound! It is depressing. I'm sad about it. Not that I didn't win--though the money would have been nice--but that of everyone I weighed the most to begin with and lost the least. What happened to the initial determination and discipline of January? Fizzled out in the hurly burly of March, that's what. I wonder if I'll ever be anything near a healthy weight again; if only I'd not gained so much in seminary; too much reading, not enough walking! Worse, I'm hungry now. I skipped breakfast and I'm hungry. Food has me by the gut, and I'm too fat, too undisciplined, and too lazy to do anything about it.