"Those of you with or without children, you'll understand..."

So, yesterday started out kind of slow. I wasn't feeling well so Thom took the morning off to help out a bit. He had an afternoon meeting to get to, so we put Caleb down for a nap a little before 1pm, giving me a nice slow afternoon with him resting, I'd have a chance to rest, too. The afternoon went very well. I did a little work on the essays I'm writing. I heard back from my editor who was very pleased with the writing I had submitted yesterday morning, and it was Wednesday, so Kara was heading to my parents house after school. I even managed to get a little nap in the late afternoon. Caleb was taking a nice nap and I began to hear him stir around 4pm. I was talking with my brother on the phone at the time, I told him I needed to get off the phone to go ahead and get Caleb up, and specifically because I didn't want him sitting in his diaper for too long. I have compassion on the little guy and try to keep him from being uncomfortable when possible. I got off the phone with John and decided I could squeeze in a quick call to Thom regarding the comments from my editor before having to go get Caleb. Just a quick call. Just another minute or two. Not a big deal. Man, was I ever wrong!!

I did call Thom and we just spoke for a moment or two. I got off the phone and happily, stupidly headed into Caleb's room. The door was barely open when the smell hit me. You can guess what smell! Remember how concerned I was about him SITTING in a messy diaper -- well, I would have been HAPPY to see him SITTING in it. But stepping on it, smearing it around the crib and eating it -- I was not so happy!! After recovering from the initial shock it was some very quick moves between scrubbing his hands and face with babywipes, stripping him naked, cleaning what I could of him and heading to the tub -- all the while saying over and over "WE DON'T EAT THE POOO!" "WE NEVER EAT THE POO!" "YUCKY POO" "Oh, Caleb, WE DON'T EAT THE POO." "blluchhh, POO" "WE DON'T EAT THE POO"

I scrubbed him within an inch of his life and I still couldn't get the smell off his hands. Eventually I cranked it up to grown-up soap and scrubbed his hands again. Then it was on to the teeth! Breath should never smell like that!!! On a happier note, he seemed to like having his teeth brushed -- good thing I had already picked up a tooth brush and baby toothpaste for the little guy!

So, for those of you who remember The Great Vaseline Disaster of 2001 --- and for those of you who need to do the math -- that was Kara! This far surpassed it, and will forever be remembered as the "We Don't Eat the Poo" Day!

If any one is curious -- no, I did not take pictures!

Shaw on the Great Thanksgiving

What follows is excerpted from Bread for the Bones, an upcoming book by author Luci Shaw. Her prose is adjectival, but coarse; she is speaking from the heart. It makes her experience of worship worshipful. I’ve had it tacked up in my cube for weeks now, and discover that it weekly becomes less and less hers and more and more mine. She takes me less and less to her church and more and more to my own community of Saint Francis. Shaw writes:

“The Episcopal way of worship—with its sacramental interpretation of life and its richness of sign and symbol—speaks to my imagination and awakens a fresh, inner reaction. At first it was just one unexpected epiphany after another, but now it has become second nature: the vocal responses; the easy movement from knees to pew to standing to altar; the Peace; the genuflection; and the crossing of oneself to signal the blessings of grace from Father, Son, and Spirit—to me, beauty.

The Episcopal church provides sign and symbol—even incense, which may Protestants might find excessively ecclesiastical, but which is to me such a beautiful visual image of faith. The pungent aroma instantly speaks to my spirit of “prayer rising to God.” I love the progression from the Liturgy of the Word, with its tying together of Scripture from the Old and New Testaments, the Psalms, and the Gospels, to the Liturgy of the Table, with the bread and wine pressing a tender consciousness of Christ’s enfleshment into my heart. These moments, in the intimacy of the body of Christ, are what hold me in faith and in beauty. They call me to mystery and Godhead.

The show-and-tell of the liturgical service is not just talking about something—about God or his attributes or about truth from Scripture—it is actually enacting the mystery. Along with priests and deacons and lay-ministers, the whole congregation is involved in the worship service through congregational responses made of prayer and Scripture. The whole is antiphonal; a dialogue is going on.

There is beauty in the forward movement within the traditional service, the communion service. It begins with the Liturgy of the Word, where we read Scripture, we hear it expounded, and we pray for forgiveness and cleansing as we are confronted with the truth of Scripture. Then we move into the Liturgy of the Table, where we worship God in receiving the sacrament of communion, the bread and the wine, the body and blood of Christ. This is the high point of my week. My sense of God’s presence there rises to a peak that is sometimes too strong and too poignant to describe.”

Caleb is doing great. He's happy and healthy and growing and beginning to think about actually communicating with us. Below are some pictures of his newly redecorated room! 

Since someone asked to see some of the redecorated I've been doing. Here are the updated pictures of Caleb's room with the new Storybook Border. I chose brightly colored picture books with "boyish" themes -- trucks, builders, trains, etc. and framed the cover art from the book. I salvaged the books by simply removing the front cover. The frames are cheap plastic $2 from Walmart repainted to match the furniture I painted last Spring. There is a pattern to the frame color, with every other picture on each wall in blue -- this was mostly because the blue paint was the easiest to work with, but it looks nice, too! 

Here is the crib in Caleb's room with the border of books above it. You can't really tell that there's floor space, but it's a pretty nice sized room for a little guy with plenty of space for us all to sit and play. 

This is the wall withe door and you can see the dresser and shelves I re-painted back in the Spring. To tie it all together, I used the same paints for the picture frames. 

This is the opposing wall and also served as part of the inspiration for the children's book theme. The posters here are from the National Storytelling Festival. Thom has had these posters since college. 

Each book on the wall tells a story and this one reminds us of Joanna as it was one of the hundreds of books she passed to us over the years. This one was also one of her personal favorites. 

This book was the inspiration for the decorating theme. At one point I even thought of taking the book apart and framing each page, but then I realized how many copies of the book I would need to do that! This book was given to us by a good friend at church in Massachusetts along with a number of other hand-me-down childrens books which her children had outgrown. Her kids were older now and had loved this one and wanted Kara to have it then. 

This book is right over Caleb's bed. Thom and I remember a whole year of reading this to Kara every night. This particular copy was given to me by QE when I told her how I was decorating the room. 

Here is our family masterpiece. Kara and Thom and I painted this one evening over Labor Day weekend. We wanted a painting for over our bed and decided we'd do a painting together. It's really quite interesting the longer you look at it.  

Today's Discipline

Is it just me, or are we the crazy parents? I can’t tell. The world seems full of parents doing a fairly decent job (or at least Kara’s schoolmates seem well adjusted), but few things in my experience come without maximum complexity. Whether it is her medication, her ADHD, her new environment, her crazy parents, genes, TV, or depravity, our Kara is just rude. She storms around the house like today’s little queen, ordering us about in a universe which bends obsequiously to her every whim. Egad! At first, we took it fairly flat-footed. We were like those tourists during the tsunami who wandered out wide-eyed to see where all the water had gone. But going on a month now, we are beginning to paddle.

Discipline is not a welcome houseguest. All my happy little family fantasies are absent of crying and stomping, absent of frustrating irritation and the stubbornness not to give way before the most furious bellowings of pint-sized protest. My happy family fantasies are all about laughing with each other over a boardgame, taking a walk together on a sunny Saturday afternoon, or playing that fun dad-game called “swing the kid” in its multitudinous varieties. Discipline’s school-marmish attitude and hawkish demeanor nips such saccharine projections with a neck-pinch of absolute reality. Yes, Discipline is not a welcome houseguest, but she is a necessary one (besides, I’ve heard she’s pretty good at expelling saucy, royal attitudes.)

Given the ubiquity of the need, and the plethora of practices—if not wholesale traditions dividing along countries of origin, religious culture, or political affiliation—you’d think there’d be some decent material on domestic corrections. For that matter, why not a journal? American Baby and Parenting Magazine move over for Today's Discipline. In its glossy pages, attractive actors-now-parents tell us their disciplinary foibles in melodramatic four-hundred-word anecdotes. Psychologists write state-of-the-discipline pieces about homestyle-behaviorism and the cost/benefit of antidepressants. We run our eyes over backmatter ads for affordable finishing schools. And each cover of TD features a gorgeously coiffed little cherub in mid-pout with a satisfied model-mom nodding knowingly in the background. Unfortunately, no such rag exists, and tradition is what’s left to go on.

My parents had a limited, but effective disciplinary repertoire. I was confined to my room a number of times, and there were TV restrictions. My mother treated a messy room a la Stephen Hawking: pulling all the higgledy-piggledy into a central point, into a landfill-looking heap which swallowed the center of my room. It was dismemberment or worse if it wasn’t put away, and so, complaining, I’d get about it. Another of her favorite disciplinary games was nose-in-the-corner. And yet I became so creative in avoiding boredom that she had me stand in the tub (and, trust me, there’s nothing interesting about the rounded, white side of a shower insert). I can't say much about L.'s end of things, but I do know that on one occasion her dad set her down in front of the King James Bible and had her begin copying it from Genesis chapter 1.

And so, it is game on at our house! Toys have been confiscated. Bedtime has been moved up by half-hour chunks into the day. In short, we’ve dug in against this little queen of the night. We’re shooting for manners, politeness, courtesy, and even a few fruits of the Spirit before it’s all over in 2018. And, as I’m like to point out, we have as much time as it needs. “This isn’t being angry,” I calmly advised our fair-haired six-year-old last night as she grunted and whined through minute four of a five-term timeout, “it’s called parenting. You’d best get used to it.”

Good fences make good readers

“Here,” I said, grabbing the tallest book I could find from her overcrowded bookshelf. “Let’s use this to mark a boundary.” I put the book all the way to the left of the upper shelf. Kara and L. looked on. “Every time you read a book, it goes to the left of this tall, white one. Pretty soon, this marker-book will start moving until it makes it all the way to the other side!” My fingers flipped across the paperback spines, demonstrating how it would move.

That’s how it got started two nights ago. But who could imagine it would be so compelling a visual-aid. Last night the only thing that stopped her reading was that she could no longer hold her head up from drowsiness. And, before we turned off the light, she’d burned through two books. “You should have seen her face last night putting that second book on the shelf,” L. said to me this morning. “She was beaming!”