Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 103

Fashion, Demystified. Sort of.

My idea of high fashion

I’m not a fashionable dresser. Never have been. But in the last seven years, gaining and losing thirty pounds, expanding and contracting, I discovered that I look much better when I’m pregnant…because the styles flatter me. I decided it’s time to find flattering styles when I’m not pregnant, too! When Elizabeth of That Married Couple had the audacity to suggest one day that it would be easy to check books out of the library, I was astonished. Call me dense; it had never once occurred to me that duh, of course someone has written books on this topic!

I went to the library. And I thought I’d share the general lessons I found out:

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You want to balance the top and bottom of the body. So if you have a long waist, then look for high waistbands.

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Prints on darker backgrounds are more slimming. Low-contrast prints attract less attention (i.e. pink on red, rather than yellow on black).

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Any kind of detailing, i.e. ruffles, etc. draws attention to what’s underneath. (Which is why I’ve never been happy with my last purchase. It’s a blouse that’s all ruffles.)

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In general, cheap fabrics don’t flatter as much.

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Stark color contrasts between top & bottom create horizontal lines.

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Cyan-Yellow-Magenta colorwheel, based on Image:Ryb-colorwheel.svg, with new colors. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve always been a “neutral-colors-go-with-anything” and “otherwise-match your-colors” kind of wardrobe person. Even though I adore bright colors and I love seeing people who mix up colors, I have never trusted my ability to mix them myself. That color wheel thing has never been my strong point. Here are three suggestions I gleaned from reading: navy with bright jewel tones (green, yellow, pink); gray with pastels; khakis with fall colors. (Well, I had that last one nailed, anyway.)

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The rest of what I collected is for curvy bodies, but I’ll share that next week. In the meantime, my daughter keeps taking “BRAVE” stickers off her shirt and sticking them on my arms and my face while I’m typing. Talk about disracting! (And super cute.) (Call me Ms. Sticker Nose.)

Oh yes, and in case you wanted more lists to peruse, here’s a bonus take: a list of Catholic music–my newest post at Catholic Mothers Online.

Big Feet

The thing about having four children close together is that I’ve been locked in small child mode for so long, I’ve become fixated on the age of five. By five, they should be past diapers and defiance, they can brush their own teeth and bathe themselves, be trusted with certain tasks and I can feel confident that they won’t disappear without telling me. If I’ve done my job right as a parent, five is the age of deliverance.

(Except for Julianna. But that’s another post entirely.)

But the funny thing is, having fixed my sights on the age of five for so long, my mind’s eye has also fixed Alex at that age. I know he’s growing, I see it, I respond to it, but deep within me, he doesn’t age. And then, I see the size of his shoes, and I do a double take.

How did he get so big? How did this little angel

turn into this humongous boy?

How does earth and air and water and food turn into long arms and gangly legs?

He’s changing so much, growing, learning, rocking my world with his sensitivity, his intelligence, his imagination, and his zest for life. He wants to be a scientist and a superhero. He asks questions that challenge me. Having grown up with a strong awareness of a little sister who needed more–more help, more protection–he’s become a very mature little boy, taking charge of his flock of little siblings with love no one can mistake. I see him growing out of his own skin, the self-consciousness of adolescence sniffing the air and seeking a place to root several years before it comes due, mixing up with the heedless abandon of little boyhood. He’s always been my cuddler, and however independent he grows, he still likes to have those moments with Mommy.

As we climbed over rocks yesterday on our Mommy-Alex field trip, I stared at the red rubber soles of his torn-up sneakers and shook my head with amazement.

I love having a boy at this age. I’m enjoying every moment of it, and praying the bond holds in the years to come.

What I Learned About High School After Twenty Years

[image error]It was quite a weekend. On Saturday I found out two of my articles had won awards, the scales tipped at pre-pregnancy weight, and we went to my twenty-year high school reunion.

I’ve been anticipating this event ever since Christian’s reunion last fall. And several years before that, actually. But as the time grew close, I got a little nervous. Like many other writers and bloggers, I’m an introvert at heart. For all the good memories of high school, that time in my life is tainted by the persistent sense that I never really fit in.

I’m a lot more comfortable in my own skin now than I was twenty years ago, and when I know my role in a given situation, I can actually come across as pretty extroverted. But this was not one of those situations. I knew I just had to take a deep breath and dive in.

Twenty years ago, I couldn’t look people in the eye–especially the guys. These days, I can stare down a room full of medical students, I can sing in front of a thousand people with total calm, I can interact confidently with editors and give frank critiques. So it was disconcerting to feel the impulse to run and hide in a corner fighting to resurface–as if the pattern of those four years was too strong to be overthrown by mere adulthood.

Christian scolded me gently when it was all over, telling me he thought I sold myself short in talking about myself. Maybe I did come across as a boring little housewife with a bunch of kids. (I got an award for having the most kids, tied with another Catholic gradeschool classmate. ). I am proud of what I’ve accomplished–what I continue to work toward, in disability advocacy, in NFP promotion, in publication. But I also know my tendency to get so focused on my own affairs that I forget to focus on others’–and tonight, of all nights, I wanted to know what was going on in other people’s lives, not bore everyone to tears by bragging on myself.

As the music level ratcheted upward, slowly driving all but a handful of die-hard dancers outside (are deejays the only people in the universe who don’t understand that they are not the reason for the party?), my nerves settled. I was intensely interested to see what these people were like now, how they’d changed, what forces and events had shaped them in the years since I’d seen them last. Not surprisingly, we all have a lot more in common than we used to. Twenty years later, party animals and uber-serious analytical music nerds alike have kids, jobs, responsibilities…we’ve all experienced independence and realized it’s not everything we once thought it would be. For the most part, the things that separated us in adolescence have become irrelevant.

We gathered around a poster lined with head shots, and people pointed out pictures, sharing what we knew about their lives. They joked about who was named most fill-in-the-blank and teased each other for their teenage quirks. And I mostly listened and wondered, Where in the world was I during high school? I don’t remember any of this!

“Kate was a girl who wanted to have fun, but was scared she’d get in trouble,” said one of my classmates, and I laughed, because that was probably a pretty accurate summation. I wonder what I missed out on by walking around with my head in the clouds (or a book), and what I’ve gained instead, and I wonder if the balance had been otherwise, would I be as satisfied with my life today?

Fascinating questions for an aspiring novelist, but probably enough navel-gazing for one day. Suffice it to say, it was a very enjoyable evening, and I love finding out how much I like the people who formed the tapestry that made me who I am. I’m just a little sad that I waited twenty years to find out.

Sunday Snippets

It’s the weekend again, and that means time for an e-gathering at RAnn’s place.

This week, I talked about our FAther’s Day…which was terrific, but made it clear to me that I need to back off to blogging three days a week. I rounded out the week by talking about giving extravagant love to our kids and combining fiction with mischievous child antics.

Of Toaster Ovens, Mischievous Children, and My Drama King

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I’m combining posts tonight, so I begin with ~100 words of fiction. This week over at Write On Edge we were assigned the task of changing “passive” to “active.” One of their examples: “My toaster is possessed by a demon,” made me laugh out loud, so I just went with it. Ergo:

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I swear a demon snuck in and possessed my toaster oven in the night. When I plugged it in this morning, it buzzed suspiciously. I paused in the act of removing the twisty tie from a loaf of bread, but everything looked fine. Not until I turned the dial (medium-dark, 375 degrees) did the sparks fly–literally, arcing blue-green from the cord to the serving fork, tines up in the caddy on the stove. pop-pop-pop, sparkles whirled inward and up–six inches precisely–and only spent gunpowder remained, tickling my nose until I sneezed violently.

Now you know how a pyrotechnic engineer celebrates April Fools.

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I wrote that little vignette at the side of a gym while two of my kids walked across balance beams and jumped on mats and rolled across the floor. Julianna qualifies for adaptive gymnastics, and since Christian and Alex had baseball, the powers that be allowed Nicholas to join the others.

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Meanwhile, I gave Michael pens to chew on, because we had no toys. Now, you may smack your head and wonder why I don’t just bring toys. But in my experience, they ignore the toys anyway, in favor of mats and shoes and, well, pens. So why should I haul more clutter around with me? But it backfired anyway, because you know what he went after all night? My NEO. While I was typing.

English: photo shot by me at request; see: http://www.flickr.com/groups/alphasma... it is also included in the photo pool of the AlphaSmart Group on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/92758528... no copyright; free for you to use (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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It’s been an interesting week since I decided to drop back to 3-days’ blogging instead of 5. My hits haven’t suffered as much as I feared, and I was startled to discover that my kids and I get along much better in the morning when I’m not trying to put up a post. I am so much better a mother when I’m not trying to blog with them around. Hmm. Looks like I need to be writing in the afternoons and scheduling ahead.

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This week, Nicholas has been holding tight to his Drama King crown. Burning his finger (what on Earth possessed him to touch the refrigerator light bulb, and who would guess he could get so bad a burn off it?) to a runny nose and fever to round-the-clock nosebleeds for almost ten days to–you guessed it–yet another ear infection, which came up in the night. I thought I was growing in grace and patience because I hadn’t lost my temper once through the whole ordeal, even though my back and neck hurt and I’ve been growing progressively less rested all week. But overnight I discovered the end of my patience. I lay awake for a long time praying for the grace to cool down and not be angry and resentful so I could actually get back to sleep. And then Michael woke up to nurse. Of course.

Today’s agenda: chiropractor for me, PT for Julianna, teacher visit for Julianna, and then, somehow, we have to get Nicholas to the doctor. And next week, he goes to the ENT. Enough is enough. The nosebleeds have to stop. There goes another $75 in copays and prescriptions.

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I have my class reunion tomorrow. Which I’ve been looking forward to for a long time.  Hope the antibiotics kick in, because my parents are keeping kids for us.

Well, Julianna and Michael are giggling at each other upstairs, so I guess that means I’m out of blogging time.

Extravagant Love

Photo by petalouda62, via Flickr

“They say that during adolescence, the teenaged brain develops from back to front, saving the pre-frontal cortex, or ‘reasoning center’ of the brain, for last,” a friend of mine wrote recently. “I know this is true, because the same day Nate excelled on his algebra entrance exam, he decided it would be a good idea to swat a fly with my Kindle. (Crack.)”

After I stopped laughing, I found myself thinking about this a lot–most recently two nights ago, when I found Alex taking a break from sweeping the kitchen floor to stick the broom handle in the baby’s mouth. Christian’s mind went straight to the water softener salt, which he breaks up using that handle. My mind went straight to klutziness and a broom handle in my baby’s brain.

Sometimes I think it’s a miracle any of our kids survive babyhood.

All parents want their kids to grow up to make good decisions–not only in terms of practical judgments, but also moral and ethical dilemmas. We want to prepare them to resist peer pressure and be good, productive men and women. Of course, in my world all these things are wrapped up with faith.

There are so many ways in which we can screw up our kids’ vision of God. We can take a rigid view of religion, thinking our Biblical and/or theological expertise qualifies us to act as judge and jury on others. We can make religious items or concepts more important than God Himself. We can fall into the trap of thinking God looks exactly like us (i.e., conforming to our particular philosophy). We can also act as if religion should never challenge, only affirm–should never make us uncomfortable, never ask us to confront hard truths or make changes in ourselves.

We’re so good at making God impotent, putting Him in a box. Frankly, considering the prevalence of these versions of “Christianity,” it’s no wonder so many people decide religion is a bunch of hooey.

Every time I think I’ve about got this whole faith/life thing under control, something happens to make me realize I know even less than I did before I thought I had it figured out. So how can I ever feel confident that I’m actually teaching my kids what I want them to learn?

Obviously I can’t. There are no guarantees in life, and especially in parenting. But I read a column recently that really made an impression on me:

A study that followed 500 children from birth to mid-life and found that the levels of affection these children received by eight months of age predicted the level of development of what I am calling the “moral brain” in adulthood. When the children (now 30+ yo adults) were divided up according to the levels of affection they received in infancy/toddlerhood (e.g., neglected, normal, extravagant), only the 7% of children who received extravagant levels of affection (as opposed to 85% who received “normal” and the 6% who received “neglectful” levels of affection) demonstrated the greatest degree of those skills associated with good moral decision making.

Another study involving 100 children found that the kids who received the highest levels of affection at home developed much larger hippocampi, the parts of the brain responsible for emotional control and stress regulation, two other skills that have been directly associated with moral decision making.

The bottom line is that if parents want moral kids, we need to do much more than sheltering kids’ innocence and telling them the difference between right from wrong. Parents need to prepare their children’s brains for the work of moral decision making by rooting them in extravagant physical affection and generous displays of parental love.

Photo by kelvin255, via Flickr

Am I extravagant enough in my love? Certainly in babyhood, I’m constantly kissing, cuddling, tickling, chewing on and loving my kids. But beyond that age, what does extravagant love look like? How do you measure it in comparison to the times you lose your temper or get self-centered? How do you measure it, taking into consideration a child’s need for other languages of love?

The floor is open, folks. I’m sure I’m not the only one waiting to hear your thoughts.

So Much To Say, Not Enough Time

I’ve been trying to do too much in this time with the fourth baby nursing–carry too many responsibilities, juggle too many balls. Something’s got to give. I love posting every day, but let’s be honest–it’s a lot of extra writing, and lately I’ve been scrambling to get it done at all.

So I am switching to a Monday-Wednesday-Friday blogging schedule, at least for the duration of the summer. We’ll see what happens when kids go off to school in the fall.

Now…out to mow the lawn, before the thermometer melts.

The Overachiever’s Fathers Day

Doesn’t look like all that much, does it?

I have this recurring dream. In it, it’s opening night of a big performance, and I have the lead (or at least, a major role). I’m standing in the wings, made up and ready for my big entrance, when I realize I never studied the script. I don’t know my lines.

In the past week I realized the meaning of that dream. Five days before Father’s Day, I realized I wanted to do something to make his day as special as he tried to make mine, but except for the list of songs I wanted to download for a compilation, I hadn’t even brainstormed the holiday yet. So I went online and found homemade crafts that looked within reach, and on Wednesday I took the kids to Hobby Lobby to shop for materials.

(Note to self: four children + Hobby Lobby = potential for costly breakage and frequent escapes = Very.Bad.Idea.)

Then again, most of the work went into this.

Then came three days of craziness, in which every spare moment was devoted to cutting paper ties, painting wooden letters, making cards, and knock-down, drag-out fights with the computer. (I thought it was supposed to be easy to buy, download and burn music!)

Of course, last week was also my grandmother’s 97th birthday, and for our field trip we went to see her and then ride the tractor with Grandpa, who was planting soybeans. Even out in the field, I was taking pictures for Fathers Day gifts…while my blood sugar nosedived unexpectedly, Julianna and Alex bickered over prime real estate in a cramped van, Michael wailed for a nap, and Nicholas embarked on one of his epic nosebleeds. Yes, all of that going on simultaneously.

Did I mention I have two big deadlines next week?

As the dream-familiar panic of standing in the wings unprepared for curtain call bled into my waking hours, I recognized myself at last: I am a classic overachiever.

(Really? you’re all saying. This is supposed to be news?) But how does one go about not being an overachiever? How do you shut off that switch before you hit the moment when you know you’ve overreached? And once you get there, how do you backpedal? Which part of that series of obligations was I supposed to leave unfulfilled? The visit to my elderly grandmother? Um, no. The writing assignments I committed to nine months ago? Another no. Father’s Day gifts? Is it really an option at all to shrug and say, Well, I’m really far too busy to do anything to make your day of appreciation special. Sorry, kids, all those gifts you were excited about making for Daddy are just going to have to go bye-bye.

No way.

Sometimes you just have to put your head into the wind and do it. Go without sleep. And make a mental note to aim a little realistically for the next performance holiday.

All that work? Totally worth it. I love this gift.

Sunday Snippets

It’s Sunday Snippets time over at RAnn’s This, That and the Other Thing! I missed last weekend, so here’s a smattering of my last two weeks:

It’s been a parenthood couple of weeks for me in blogging. Michael is six months old now. Pictures, anyone? Or how about a singles ad for a baby?

Here’s what happened after Venus crossed the sun.

And in this post, my daughter becomes me. And while we’re on the subject of my daughter, I’ve recently realized I’m failing to teach her independence.

And, since today is Father’s Day, here’s what was on my mind on the days leading up to today.

I think that’s enough. Head on over to see what’s going on in everyone else’s world.

Boys, Fashion (or not), and Homelessness: a 7QT post

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Someone in our house went to see The Avengers recently. Can you tell?

Having exhausted Iron Man and Captain America long ago, it really was inevitable that Alex would take to Hawkeye. But this is what I love so much about my boy–the way he can take paper spacers, water bottles, and straws and create art toys.

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Speaking of Alex: Awesome conversations with my boys this week, #1:

Alex: “Did you know I have a ten-pack?”

Me: “Where on earth did you hear that term, and I’m not sure you have the right number.”

Alex: “I have five bumps on this side, and five bumps on the other side.”

Me: “Those are your ribs, honey.”

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Awesome conversation #2:

Alex: “You need a cape to be Superman. Here you go. Now go fly.”

Nicholas (sounding shocked): “I can’t fly in the house!”

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CNN changed their feed on Google Reader, so now I’m getting a whole lot more than I was before. And most of it seems to be duplicate, triplicate, and videos I would have been better off not seeing. For instance, this. I’m pretty hot in outrage, just like I was recently on the post that hit the (semi)-big time.

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I’m 6 1/2 months postpartum now, and I’ve been working on losing weight (slowly and carefully, through permanent lifestyle changes–considering I’m still nursing). This is in preparation for a major wardrobe change when I finally get to where I want to be. I still have quite a ways to go, but considering my abysmal lack of fashion expertise, I’ve started doing some reading on how to dress my body shape. I’ll share my newfound knowledge at another point, but for now I just want to share that this pursuit of knowledge, along with a couple of other happenings, have made me realize just how far removed my life is from what the gurus would tell me it “should” be. According to Harper’s Bazaar Fashion, I’m supposed to go shopping early in the season–EVERY season, as in four times a year–make the rounds of all the stores without buying anything, and then come back when the deals are the best. EVERY season. Now, I’d like to draw your attention to a couple of problems with this:

a) The last piece of clothing I bought was something like, uh, three years ago. If you don’t count the shorts I bought for wearing with T shirts as part of my pajamas, so I am decent in front of my growing kids, and if you don’t count the single nursing bra I bought this spring. Which I don’t.

b) Who has TIME to go shopping that much?

c) Who has MONEY to go shopping that much?

d) Who watches your KIDS to allow you to go shopping that much? Because my kids are daily reminding me that taking them shopping, even to Hobby Lobby or the grocery store, is a crazy bad idea.

Please enlighten me, folks! I really am befuddled, and would like clarity.

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To underscore #5C, enter this one particular homeless man who I’ve seen twice at the same intersection recently. He reminds me of Tom Skerritt. Something in the way he sits makes him seem less out of it and thus more pathetic than the grizzled, beaten-down men I’m used to seeing there. Or maybe it’s just because when we pulled up the other day, I had absolutely nothing to give him–well, I had 35 cents in the car–and I thought the least I could do for Christ in his eyes was actually look at him, really see him.

Oh, it was uncomfortable. I suppose it really is a good thing to be consistently so disturbed and set back on my heels by the sight of the homeless.

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This has not been a productive writing week. Julianna had two appointments–another round with the med students and her first PT appointment to work on her overtight calf muscles. And we’ve been busy trying to do chores and field trips and make Fathers Day crafts. (By the way, if you missed this post, please read.) With the help of the sitter and a baby who took a 2-hour morning nap yesterday, I finally made some good progress toward one of my next deadlines. I’m starting to feel a need for some writing “down time” again. I want to tackle organizing my house!