Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 13
August 22, 2017
How We Eclipse
When it’s Eclipse weekend and we live in the path of totality…
…and your home parish’s feast day falls on Eclipse day…
…you go to an Eclipse party where you introduce your kids to a teeter totter (the real kind)…
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…and tug of war… (they lost, if you didn’t catch that)…
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…and Mom gives herself a concussion on the slip ‘n slide. (I’m only sort of kidding about that. I went down hard and banged the back of my head on the ground but the pain was all in the front, and it was hard to focus the rest of the day.)…
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…and merry-go-rounds. (Nicholas’ reaction: hold out a shaking hand and say, “Grandma, can you help me off?” Michael’s reaction: “That was AWESOME!”)
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A short night, spent worrying about whether it will be cloudy and we’ll see nothing at all, and my company arrives: my uncle and my cousin whom I used to babysit when I was Alex’s age.
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We spend the morning putting together a picnic and then head out to the park.
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And the SLR takes a bow before taking center stage:
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It is cloudy and getting cloudier all the time, but the sun is strong enough to overcome it. Most of the time. Still, with the glasses on sometimes it fades unexpectedly as heavier clouds drift across.
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Two minutes before totality, it’s finally feeling darker. Thirty seconds out, the light becomes pale and cold, without the warm tones, almost fluorescent. And then…totality.
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Everyone whoops. No picture can quite capture the moment, the clarity, the wonder.
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Yes, the streetlights come on, and the sky around the thunderheads surrounding us is yellow. I’m fiddling with the camera, trying to catch the right setting, and then I see it: the diamond. “It’s coming, guys, it’s coming!” I shout.
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…and just like that, there’s light again.
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Within 5 minutes, an enormous, heavy cloud rolls over the sun, obscuring the eclipse for the next 15 minutes. “Wow, was that ever a close call,” we say. But we saw what we came for, and it was amazing. I always thought it would be cool, but not worth traveling for. Now, I understand.
August 21, 2017
A Blast From The Past, viewed through new eyes
Photo from Wikipedia
This weekend, exhausted, while our kids were well occupied with their screen time, Christian and I were lying across our bed and hanging out when Christian ran across this video on Facebook:
I haven’t thought about “We Are The World” in years, and I don’t think I ever saw this video. It was so interesting to me on so many levels–watching them all dart forward and back with music in hand to record their solos.
One of the first things I thought was, “why does Michael Jackson always sound like there are five of him?” Clearly it’s an audio effect, but why does MJ get it and no one else? So interesting.
Even more interesting to me was realizing that the nicely-blended choir that sings the chorus is in fact, made up of the soloists. As long as I have been hearing this song, I assumed that was a completely separate choir. Because, you know. Cyndi Lauper. Bruce Springsteen. Ray Charles. Kenny Rogers. These are extremely distinctive voices
When this song came out I was a kid, and musical aptitude notwithstanding, I never thought about the difference between “real singing voice” and “performance voice.” Now that I’ve spent almost twenty years as a church choir director, and more particularly since I’ve been doing Jazzercise (frequently gnashing my teeth at the vocal abuse displayed by pop stars in the songs we dance to), it all strikes me much differently. Whenever I hear Rihanna or Megan Trainor or Beyonce sing, I think, “I wonder what they’d sound like if you were sitting next to them in church, singing the Old Hundredth?” Because there’s no way they’d be doing all that catch-breath-ing and groan-singing and vocal gyrations.
Watching the video to “We Are the World” was really an eye-opener about how much difference there has to be between these people’s “solo” voice and their natural singing voice. Because all those solo voices could not possibly blend into a choir that sounds just like every other choir in the universe.
Then, being almost as susceptible to rabbit holes as everyone else is, we ended up clicking through to this video:
I found this one really interesting, first, because of how long it took Cyndi Lauper to finally reach that distinct “woa-woa-woa” that stands out in the song, and second, because of the clear musical competence of the people involved. I know people are people and all that, but still, you tend to put stars into an “other” category, and what struck me as I watched this was how much this sounds like some of the rehearsals I’ve been part of, with really good musicians coming up with harmonies and playing around with pitch variance and trying different solutions to “that doesn’t quite feel right yet.” It made me realize even though these people are platinum stars and I’m a work-at-home-mom and church musician, we’re the same at heart. I could have a competent conversation with these people and not feel like I was out of my league.
And that was kind of cool.
August 18, 2017
Boys Will Be Boys
Not this innocent face. No. He would never throw spitwads at church…
The wadded up piece of paper shot across the music area right in front of me while we were kneeling for the Eucharistic Prayer. A minute later, Alex started snorting. I looked at him with a scowl developing, and he whispered, “Was that Michael’s nametag?”
And I realized: yes. Why, yes, it was. My kid made a spitwad of his “nametag Sunday” sticker and flung it across the music area.
Every time I think I’m done being caught off guard by the antics my kids are capable of…boom. There they go.
August 16, 2017
New Era, New Routine
Coloring a star is serious business.
Well, it’s official: all my kids are in full-day school.
For the past three weeks, things have been rather up in the air. I’ve been collecting a list of Things I Will Do When I No Longer Have Kids At Home All Day. Most of them are writing-related, but there are also things like going out and sitting in nature, which I haven’t gotten to do much of the last year or two. Maybe even a little shopping, occasionally. But then, for a while, I thought something else was coming down the pike in my world, that would call all that extra time into question. So I didn’t bother spending the time trying to figure out what my new world was going to look like. And then that “something else” didn’t end up coming to fruition, anyway.
So the first day of school pounced upon me without a whole lot of preparation. This is the first time I have ever found myself reeling on the night before school starts, asking myself, “Where did the summer go? It was unbelievably short. I don’t have a game plan yet for tomorrow when I’m by myself with time to work!”
Of course, yesterday I went from school dropoff to rehearsal to dental appointment, and by the time I got home, the morning was 2/3 gone already, so maybe it’s just as well I didn’t try to make a plan yet.
Still, I’m a person who does well with structure, and who gets stressed with lack of it. Our life with four kids is much easier if we know that Person XY does A on B day, and Person XX does it on C days. We’ve had the same pattern for, well, 5 years at least. But this year our families outgrew the carpool, so that changes the shape of the afternoon. And because I have the full day on my own, I’m taking more of the morning prep instead of trying to squeeze half an hour of work in between 5:45 and 6:20. (Or 40 minutes…or 45…) I’ve actually done the dropoff run the first two mornings. I’ve never done the morning dropoff. That’s always, always been Christian’s job. So clearly, things are going to be in flux for a while.
What I know so far is that the time between the boys’ departure and the arrival of the public school bus will be dedicated to reading comprehension with Julianna. This much I can set down in stone now, and make good use of a small block of time for something that gets pushed aside too easily in the afternoons.
Figuring out how to structure the rest of these days for best possible use of time? That’s going to take a while longer to figure out. But yesterday, remembering my friend’s words: Pace yourself, I paused at 2:35 p.m. and said, “I’ve worked all day. I think I’m going to play for half an hour until it’s time to pick up the kids.”
And I did. I played with a Shutterfly album of Colorado.
On to Day 2. Hopefully a pattern will emerge sooner rather than later.
August 14, 2017
Being Clear-Eyed About My Special Needs Child, And My Responsibility To Her
¾ of the way through Day 3 of iCanBike camp, the gym at the YMCA was starting to get less crowded as the more successful campers started heading outside with their volunteers to transition to independent riding. The speakers were playing “give ‘em hell” music like “Eye of the Tiger” and “How You Like Me Now?”, and at the far end, the head volunteer was trying to coax Miss Julianna, in her Frozen t-shirt and polka-dotted skort, off her roller bike and onto two wheels for the first time this week. She was not enthusiastic about the prospect.
And then the strains of The Heavy disappeared to be replaced by:
It worked. Soon enough, Julianna was circling the gym—slowly—on two wheels, the head volunteer holding onto the support pole on the back. Singing, of course. (Julianna, not the volunteer.) And about the time Julianna started sing-shouting, “The fears that once controlled me can’t get to me at all!”, she picked up some speed and the volunteer was able to let go and Julianna rode a bike about twenty feet without anyone holding onto her for the first time in her life.
Photo by ICanBike Fulton
As special needs parents, these are moments we cling to. Because the reality is that although these tend to be the moments we share, they are not the rule in our lives.
For every one of these, there are five or ten where I tell Julianna, “Put your clothes away,” and discover that she’s put her dirty underwear and socks back in the drawer with her clean clothes; then, when I scold her and tell her to put them in the laundry, she puts the entire contents of the drawer in the laundry. Or, in an excess of desire to be like her brothers, who are packing for vacation (and who are occupying every bit of my attention and then some), she pulls out every shirt she owns and dumps it on my bed. And when I say, “Julianna, we’ve got to make lunch right now. Put those back, and we’ll pack you after lunch,” she instead empties ALL of her drawers onto the floor of her room.
It’s hard for me to know how much she really doesn’t understand, and how much she is pretending not to. In the above examples, I wasn’t being very concrete. But often I do stop, look her in the eye, and speak very slowly: I need you to put your dirty clothes in the laundry…(pause)…and THEN…(pause)…fold your clean clothes and put them away. Sometimes I even have her repeat it back to me. And more times than not, the outcome is virtually the same.
It’s hard for me to accept that my 10 1/2 year old, who can read literally anything you put in front of her (well, okay, if you presented her with a foreign language or with medical jargon, you could stump her, but otherwise) really is incapable of carrying out a sequence of three simple instructions that she’s been doing every single day for years.
It’s also hard to accept that this experience gives credence to the stinging note on the final reading assessment of last school year–the one where it said she would be well served by handing her preschool books to read.
We’ve been very laissez-faire with Julianna…pretty much her whole life. Partly it’s philosophical, but mostly I think it’s because hey, we have three boys and it’s madness–madness, I tell you. This summer, for instance, I made a conscious decision to focus on getting Nicholas and Michael to swim lessons, because they can learn and learn quickly and be safe in the pool, and that’s one set of lessons we don’t have to mess with anymore! But Julianna isn’t served well by the same instruction–I mean, she does fine, but she’s so slow to progress, it’s a poor use of time and money–so right now she’s sitting out, and when fall ball is over we’ll spend the money on private swim lessons through the winter, when other things are not going on.
But I often feel my conscience pricked at the conviction that if I worked with her more consistently–on reading comprehension, for instance–that she would progress more, that she would be doing better. That I am underserving her mostly because I find the process frustrating. That I, in sum, am not being the best mother to her that I could. Or should.
And often I remind myself it doesn’t matter that much if it takes her 2-3 years longer to learn something than it would if I were more on top of things–because it’s not like we’re chasing a goal of success in trigonometry, statistics, and AP English.
But I really thought by the time she was 10, I could be reading Anne of Green Gables with her. I’ve been looking forward to that for a long time. And she’s just nowhere near that.
So when special needs parents share those moments that seem so small, so ordinary, it’s not just because we want people to understand that our kids can do the same things other kids can do, even if it’s harder or takes longer to get there. It’s also because we have this whole deep ocean of repeated failure that we don’t share. In part that is because we don’t want to be the whiners nobody listens to. But it’s also because we feel a huge, huge responsibility not to scare people off welcoming kids with disabilities into their worlds.
It’s an impossible juggling act, and one we navigate every single day of our lives. Just some days, we are better at it than others.
August 7, 2017
My daughter in one photo
Photo credit: Creative Photo (http://cpportraits.com/)
Yup, that’s her in a nutshell, hamming it up at the Children’s Miracle Network Glamourazzi event last week.
August 4, 2017
A Stress Dream And Friday Funnies
I had a stress dream last night in which it was several weeks into the college semester and I left my first class and realized a) I didn’t know which class I had next or where it was—and the copious number of file folders in my bag were not labeled well enough to tell me—and b) I was at least 2 or 3 assignments behind in math.
You know those online quizzes you’re supposed to take to see which Harry Potter character you are? It’s crystal clear to me that I don’t need to waste the time. I already know which character I am.
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Ahem.
You know what? I think today calls for a short “Friday Funnies.”
1: Things you might hear on a trail ride from the guide, who is leading Julianna by the rope:
“Oh, there aren’t any crocodiles in the mountains.”
2. Things you might hear on a hike in the Rocky Mountains when it’s sort of
raining and everyone is wearing rain ponch os:
[image error]Nicholas: “I’m Batman!”
Michael: “I’m Nightwing!”
Nicholas: “I’m Batman!”
Michael: “I’m Nightwing!”
Nicholas: “I’m Batman!”
Michael: “I’m Robin!”
Julianna: “I’m Frozen!”
3. This. Just this.
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This was taken in the parking lot for the Cub Lake Trailhead at RMNP. We had to wait out a thunderstorm before we started hiking. It was a doozy, I’ll admit, but the look on Nicholas’ face cracks me up.
4. Then and now, at the Fall River Visitors Center, just for fun:
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2013 (Michael was sleeping in the car)
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2017. Note Alex’s eye roll. It was deliberate. He said, “Mom, did you get my eye roll?” Sigh.
August 2, 2017
The State of an Author-Composer’s World
Do you ever have that feeling that there’s just too much going on? No, of course not, she says (wink-wink). This summer hit me like a Mack truck, and the grace in it was that I was so focused on two weeks in July–my week at NPM in Cincinnati and our trip to Colorado last week–that I didn’t have any time to spend calculating how much other work was getting shoved off to the side. If I had really processed how much there was, the stress level would have skyrocketed.
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As I was taking these pictures I was feeling bad for the poor mama moose, who was having to raise her babies with 50 people taking pictures…but now I think I sort of missed the part where she was living in ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK, with no responsibilities except existing. There’s some beauty in that.
My poor kids have two weeks of summer break left and it’s the first real unstructured time we have. We needed one day for recovering from twelve hours on the road–day 1 we saw moose at Sprague Lake, I battled Nicholas and Michael on the aerial course, we had lunch and souvenir shopping, and THEN drove 6 hours in 7 hours. Day 2 we got up, ate breakfast, and drove 6 hours in 7 hours. And then did eight loads of laundry and went to a birthday party for the baby of a choir member. So yeah, we needed Sunday to recover. And Monday.
By Tuesday, they were “all war zone, all the time.”
And me, in the meantime?
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I knocked out my first two deadlines on Monday and Tuesday–the shortest two. Some of the other tasks on my to-do list are gargantuan. It’s easy to say, “Query Trust Falls.” What that line item doesn’t tell you is I have to write a synopsis. And take the list of upwards of a hundred agents I’ve been collecting for the last two years and organize it and figure out which ones are the best match. Then agonize over the query letter and make sure it’s as compelling as it can possibly be, with the right balance of, well, everything. And only then comes the querying itself.
It’s also easy to write on that list, “Trio.” But writing a piece of music is not a short process. I will likely spend three or four months working on that.
So I view the upcoming school year with a mixture of emotions. On the one hand, all the kids will be in school all day for the first time. (Hurrah! Uninterrupted days to work!) On the other, homework season is starting. The reading assessments that ended 3rd grade underscored to us that we’ve really underserved Miss Julianna, and we can’t do it anymore. We’ve GOT to figure out where to scrape together 15-20 minutes a day for reading comprehension, and when the speech therapist sends home that 12-page packet that says “do this list of words 3x a day for a week, then do this list 3x a day for a week…”…well, we really need to do it.
Such things make me feel like whimpering. It makes me miss this even more:
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I could totally stand to spend every day climbing enormous piles of boulders at the Alluvial Fan and cuddle up by a fire in the evening to write. Wait. If I write, that presupposes all the deadlines and the other stuff…roses and thorns.
When this round of deadlines clears out I have to take a clear-eyed stock of what I commit to and be more realistic.
That’s the state of my world right now, and I know no one’s all that interested, but I debated not blogging at all today because I just remembered (I’ve been working on agent lists this morning!), and I have a flute duet rehearsal any minute, so I decided it was the type of day that calls for a stream-of-consciousness post that only takes 12 minutes to write.
July 31, 2017
Anxiety 2.0
The Alluvial Fan at Rocky Mountain National Park
Years ago, when I was in my first bout of full-blown anxiety, Christian passed on to me a book he’d been given called Telling Yourself the Truth. The point of it was that the words we use in describing to ourselves our reality have the power to shape our emotional state for good for for worse.
I realized anew how important this is this past week in Colorado. Just for a single illustration, let’s take Nicholas’ and Christian’s reaction to a sign posted at the Alluvial Fan in Rocky Mountain National Park. It said something like Warning: Swift Water, dangerous. And Christian was telling Nicholas to stay out of the water because it could sweep him away and he could be killed.
Well, the thing is, NIcholas wanted to put his feet in the water. He said, “I can be killed even if I put a pinky in?”
And this is the thing: putting a pinky…or a hand…
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…in the lower parts of the Alluvial Fan stream isn’t going to get you killed. In fact, Alex and I tried hard to cross that stream on exposed rocks and were thwarted at several spots, and the last time in turning back, I lost my balance and landed both hiking boots in the stream up to my ankles. Clearly, I’m still here to tell the harrowing (cough-cough) tale. In fact, I didn’t even notice the current.
[image error]And see, this is the thing: anxiety takes healthy caution and turns it into certainty of death. The sign doesn’t say “if you touch this water you will DIE!” It says, in essence, “Be careful and respect the power of nature.”
A few weeks ago, we all went for a short hike and cookout at a state park. Alex was the only one who didn’t put on bug spray. He went digging in the foliage for ripe wild blackberries, and he came home with two dozen ticks. (Seriously. Two dozen.) We were still finding them three days later, crawling around his room, presumably from the clothes he didn’t wash as ordered when we got home. It was incredibly traumatic for him, all the more so because for the first two days he tried to deal with it himself, without telling us.
He spent the entire week in Estes Park complaining and resisting going hiking, because that experience left such a scar. I totally get it, but he loves rock climbing, and he loves stargazing, and he’s always been a nature lover until this. So we’ve been having to really talk about the truth of the matter—the actual scope of the risk, and the need to get back in the saddle, so to speak. Yet I know his anxiety around the idea of ticks is branded onto his psyche forever. If I needed proof, it came when, ten hours into the twelve-hour trip home, he found a single tick crawling on his hair and fell apart. It breaks my heart that he will be fighting anxiety around the idea of the outdoors for years to come.
And of course, the obsession with safety in kids is another example of how we, culturally, have inflated reasonable prudence to six-alarm paranoia.
I am really conscious of this tendency to allow anxiety to inflate real causes for caution into guarantees of annihilation, because it is something both Christian and I struggle with. (His anxieties are about temporal things, mine tend to be emotional. Both of them can be crippling.) If we can do one thing for our children, it will be to teach them to be clear-eyed about danger, to recognize which ones are causes for concern and which ones actually call for an all-hands-on-deck anxiety response.
Note: If you want photos of our Colorado trip, they’re here. I was going to do a photo post but I already did the photo essay on Facebook.
July 21, 2017
A “Special” Tea Party (Photo Friday)
I know I said I wasn’t going to post, but some things simply must be shared. After months of attempts foiled by busy-ness, three of our local Down syndrome families with girls close to the same age managed to get together for a girls-only tea party this week, served by their sisters. How beautiful is this?
Click to view slideshow.
Thanks so much to my special moms for allowing me to share these pictures!
