Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 62

Then And Now

Alex and Julianna, age 25 months & 19 months

We stretched out across the front pew when we arrived at church Sunday morning, the boys (as usual) waging a silent war to sit by Mommy, who did not at all appreciate being consequently shoved so far to the end of the pew that there wasn’t room on the kneeler.

When the fallout cleared, Nicholas had won the prime position and Christian had Michael restrained on his lap at the far end. I did a quick calculation. Michael is now approaching 27 months. I thought: If I got pregnant now, how old would he be when the baby was born?  (I do this calculation a lot, actually. Is that weird?) Then I thought: When Alex was this age, how old was Julianna?

The answer: six months.

I took a minute to re-orient myself in that time. When Alex was twenty-seven months old, we were having PT twice a week, and speech and OT once a week. Julianna’s heart surgery happened right around that time, and Alex had already had at least one sleepover with a friend down the street, necessitated by Julianna’s frequent hospital stays.

Try that one on for size: Sending your two-year-old to a sleepover.

Can YOU imagine sending this kid for a sleepover?

I can’t imagine sending Michael to stay overnight with anyone but a grandparent, and even then only with his siblings along for company. And, ahem, supervision. Let’s be honest.

The contrast between “then” and “now” can be a really striking thing, can’t it? I tend to view Michael as a baby at the same age his older brother was being asked to start stepping up to the plate. Then, I only knew I had to start leading Alex toward responsibility. Now, I’m so occupied with trying to teach children #s 2 and 3 the responsibility, I can barely think about treating Michael like anything other than a baby. If I remember to tell him to start the dishwasher and bring his plate over to me, that’s about as much as I can expect.

And then, of course, he’s not talking, which makes him seem younger than he really is. And his physical prowess is so impressive, most of my energy goes into keeping things out of his reach and unbroken. (Did I mention he snapped my new Jazzercise DVD in half? And we subsequently learned the DVD had just been retired?)

The whole train of thought snapped me back to another then-and-now moment. About ten or twelve weeks into my pregnancy with Michael, I went to the Ob/Gyn’s office on a mission. In my first two pregnancies I had looked forward to those trips to St. Louis. They were an adventure, something to look forward to, even when they got to be more frequent. By the third I was starting to feel frazzled by them. By the fourth, I went in with a plan. “I love seeing you,” I said to my doctor, “but these trips are killing me. Do I really need to come every two weeks, and then every week? I mean, we already know I’m going to have a C section. It’s not like we have to keep an eye on the cervix.”

He twiddled his pen and thought his way through it, then wrote out the standard schedule on a piece of paper and started crossing out visits he thought we could skip. “Yes,” he said, “if you were a first-time mother, it would be different. But you’re an experienced mom now. You know what to look for.”

And I chuckled, because at that moment I flashed back to myself having a conversation in that very examining room when the doctor was reassuring me because I was a first-time mother. The difference between that “then” and “now” was just as great as the difference between that fourth-pregnancy moment, two and a half years ago, and yesterday in church.

Perfectly obvious but nonetheless earth-shattering insight of the day: an awful lot of things really do change drastically depending on perspective.

Olympic Quick Takes

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The Olympics–especially the winter Olympics– are the only sports events I’m ever interested in watching. As I type tonight we’re watching ski cross. Does anybody else just get a queasy sense of vertigo when the athletes come around that big curve and launch over the edge of a cliff?

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Me with my dad at Lake Tahoe, Jan 2006

I have been skiing twice. When I was twelve, I fell and couldn’t get up, and I quit. But when Alex was a baby, I tried again. We went to Tahoe with my mother’s family, and Christian and I took turns taking care of the baby. My dad was supposed to watch Alex for one afternoon so the two of us could ski together, but Christian tore his meniscus that morning. So my dad took me out instead. At the end of the afternoon, the sun slanting steeply across the mountain, Dad said, “You’re doing well enough, I think you could handle a blue run.” So up we went. I was getting shaky in the legs from tiredness when we crossed the black run and swept around a final corner and I found myself facing what looked like a vertical dropoff to the base of the mountain.

“I can’t do that!” I wailed. “I’m taking my skis off and walking down!”

“Yes, you can. No, you’re not,” my dad said patiently. “Just make wide sweeps back and forth, and you’ll be fine.”

I don’t quite remember how I got down that, er, “hill.” I do know I fell down a lot, and I know my poor dad didn’t get to enjoy his last run of the day.

It’s worth going skiing just for this view from the top of the mountain.

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As long as we’re discussing Olympic sports, let me focus on my favorite for a minute. I just found out that Dorothy Hamill runs a dream ice skating camp for adults? Supposedly it’s open to all levels. That’s on my bucket list.

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Bedtime reading has been suspended for the duration of the Olympics. The whole family is glued to the TV (with the possible exception of Michael Mayhem). When I picked Nicholas up from school Thursday I interrupted an Olympic marathon. He and his classmates had just finished bobsled runs (he won the gold) and ice skating (they were using paper plates as skates).

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Keeping to the Olympic theme, I’m grateful that the concerns about security have been addressed enough to prevent the bombings we were all worrying about.

It was interesting to see Putin in the first days. He just looked so flat and unemotional. He wasn’t much of a salesman for Russia being an inviting place. Come to think of it, I remember feeling a great deal of frustration with Putin in an earlier era of my life. If he hadn’t fired his entire cabinet, thus throwing the adoption bureaucracy into chaos and adding a year to the adoption wait, we might actually have gotten to go through with the Russian adoption. Don’t get me wrong; I love my children and I believe my family is what it was meant to be, but I still wonder, with a pang, what our family might have looked like if not for Putin’s political mess.

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This week began with a funeral for the husband of a musician friend. I took Julianna and Michael along (they apparently took angel pills that morning, because they were phenomenally well-behaved). It is always a privilege and an honor to help with music for a funeral, but this one even more so than most, as I got to work with a huge collection of music ministers from around the diocese and beyond. Since then the week has turned into a sprint of music writing, which is incredibly energizing. Actually, so was running yesterday morning. It felt so good to exercise outside. And then Michael strong-armed me into a ride in the Burley, so I got to enjoy the 68-degree morning while it lasted. Which was good, because the temperatures plummeted after lunch.

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Everyone who weighed in this week on my blog burnout said the same thing: it’s the kid stories, Kate. I am pondering some redirection, and working out an idea for the season of Lent. And while I do I’ll leave you with this:

Have a great weekend!

Numbers (or: Burnout)

I can always tell when I’m getting burned out. First I get panicky about fitting in blogging, exercise and work. Then I can’t think of anything to blog about. Then I forget altogether and go downstairs to write music instead (hello, Wednesday Feb. 19th)!

I’m sure many people can empathize with the count I’m about to share, so view this as solidarity rather than whining, okay?

In the last 13 weekdays, we have had:

5 snow days
1 holiday
1 teacher work day
1 early release day
2 days of Valentine parties (disclaimer: I skipped one of them)

I’ve spent a lot of days getting up blisteringly early (even by my own reckoning), which speeds the burnout process, and now I feel a sore throat and coated lungs coming on. Not only am I out of energy, I’m out of inspiration. That’s where you come in. What do you most like to read here? What topics should I cover? Inspire me! Pretty please? (begs the woman with a wailing toddler clinging to her because, well, frankly, you don’t want to know what HE has.)

So I’m going to ask you to w

Piggyback Rides

In Which I Feel Like Lizzy Bennet

Image by Michael R. Perry, via Flickr. Not us. Just a good image.

It is probably not a secret–or a shock–that I am a die-hard Jane Austen fan. I mean, let’s face it: what female blogger isn’t? I’m a complete sucker for a spinoff book invoking the name Darcy, Bennet or Austen (although some of them are quite markedly better than others), and I’ve seen a fair few movie interpretations, too. Those dance scenes, in particular, look like so much fun.

So when Christian’s pre-Valentine search turned up something called English Country Dance (with lesson and “called” steps), I held my breath. “What do you think?” I said. “It sounds like it could be fun.”

Because my husband is the best guy ever, he said, “Let’s go for it.”

We both spent the next two days trying to talk each other and ourselves out of it, right up until the time we went into the building. I told myself we were doing that “introvert” thing. A dance is inherently social, and we like to be a world unto ourselves when we go out, not feel compelled to make small talk with complete strangers.

When the man at the door told us the idea is to choose a different partner for every dance, I saw Christian’s body language bolt for the door. But we decided to stay.

We spent twenty minutes learning terms like set, cast, straight hey for three, pass right, Gypsy, and cross and go below. It was all done at a walk, and I shrugged and wrote off the bit of “exercise” I had been hoping for following a really big dinner.

Then the music began, and all of a sudden it didn’t work to walk the moves anymore. The music just about required you to skip through them. The dances were all done in long sets, just like in Emma  and Pride & Prejudice movies, and the songs lasted until you went all the way down the line and made it back to your starting place by moving back up. We did pretty much what you see in this dance, at the 29:19 mark. Including the “Other way, Mr. Collins!” comment. Made to me.

By the end of seven minutes, Christian had thrown off his jacket and I was breathing hard, partly from skipping for seven minutes almost without pause, and partly from laughing while doing so. Because it was so much fun.

I understand Jane Austen’s world in a way I never did before. I’ve heard them called social dances, and that means something. It almost doesn’t matter who your “partner” is, because you only spend about half your time dancing with that person anyway. The music is at a volume that not only facilitates but encourages conversation, as does the fact that you’re usually taking turns moving.

There’s a real art to it. The spacing has to be just right or you crash into other people–or you can’t get to the next person in time. Each dance consists of a sequence of moves that might take twenty-four beats of music. It’s a repeating pattern, but it’s a long repeating pattern. Your brain has to be on the whole time.

There’s a restraint to touch and to interaction that heightens the whole emotional quotient. Where modern dance is all deafening music, grinding and body gyrations to parade one’s sexual desirability, the seduction of the past is much more subtle. I can see how flirtations took place in those days: the gentle squeeze as you turn with a dancer who is not your partner, a squeeze no one can see; the expression on a person’s face as you greet and then move on to the next person in line.

It has been a long, long time since I had so much fun on a date. I felt like Elizabeth Bennet. And it made me wish we still entertained ourselves by dancing instead of parking our butts in front of electronics and big screens.

Sunday Snippets

I have been absent from Sunday Snippets over at This, That & The Other Thing for several weeks. It’s been crazy! Is anybody else past ready for spring? But I’m back this week to share with my fellow Catholic bloggers.

Question of the week: name a favorite book and tell us what you like about it.

Well, other than the ubiquitous Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, I can’t possibly choose only one book. Right now I’m in the middle of The Help and I’m caught between wishing it would go on forever and feeling anxious to go on to more great books. The Help is one of those books that’s been hyped up so high, you don’t want to read it just out of sheer cussedness, or at least a certainty that nothing lives up to the hype. Well, this one does. As a writer I’m in awe of how instantly sympathetic these three point-of-view characters are. It makes me despair of ever being a good writer.

Recent posts of note:

Waking The Soul

Faith, Love & Fear, a repost from a couple of years ago that is still relevant

The Trash We Cling To

And a few kidlet posts:

Because I Don’t Want My Daughter To Be “Peter Pan”

Fading Into Memory

Ah, Toddler

Minecraft, Novel Writing, and What DOES The Fox Say, anyway? (a 7QT post)

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We became a Minecraft family this week. Alex, proving the point that no matter how much Santa brings it’ll never be enough, began asking for the game before the Christmas Wii had even been installed permanently. We told him he could do chores to earn the money–maybe. I was all set to commit when he came home from a friend’s house one day and said nonchalantly, “We killed all the villagers, because we needed their homes.”

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That set us back by almost two months. Even Christian didn’t understand the strength of my antipathy to that statement. “They kill people in the Lego games, and the people just break into pieces. It’s not like there’s any gore.”

It took me a long time to realize exactly what bothered me. The Avengers game, the Lego Star Wars game, and so on are all save-the-world mission kinds of games. Games where the objective is to defeat bad people whose goal is to hurt others.

What Alex described was the slaughter of a group of innocents, simply because they were in the way. Even in a virtual world, I think that’s a scary, scary precedent.

When I finally gave in on Minecraft this week (Alex has shown remarkable persistence on this issue), I handed the iPad to Alex with a strict instruction. If there are people around and you need what they have, then you have to protect them AND you.

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I went to Julianna’s Valentine’s Day party at school yesterday, and midway through I had a great moment of self-revelation. I don’t like school parties, and I was feeling like I was a bad person because of it. But I realized this is the pinnacle of my introversion: having to go to a place where I don’t even know the kids’ names, let alone their parents’, and not really having a job or function. I do great in public situations because I know my role. Parties are not like that. At. All. I asked Christian, “Is it psychotic that I enjoy an IEP meeting more than a Valentine party?”

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A couple of years ago one of my novels critique partners referred to her book as “The Novel That Won’t Die.” I tsked at her for being tempted to give up, for feeling that further efforts were a waste of time and energy. But now I know how she felt.  I continue to work at revising my opening, and I am constantly fighting the voice in the back of my head that whispers gleefully, “You’ll never write an opening that will make people want to keep reading, hee hee heee!”

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Okay, enough of that. Take 5 is about music, and the way my children react to it. I want to know if this is universal or if it’s because we’re a family of musicians. Whenever the kids are getting on each other’s nerves in the car, if we put on music they settle down. The Lion King seems to work the best, but really most music will do. And yesterday I took Michael to a funeral, where he was beginning to wiggle when the soloist came out and began singing “In The Garden.” Michael instantly went still and stared at him until he was done–and it was several minutes. (I didn’ t know there were so many verses to that song.) Does this work for other people?

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Alex pulled up “What Does The Fox Say?” for Nicholas this week, and ever since they’ve been going around the house singing, What does the fox say? Ding-ding-ding-dee-ding dee-dee ding! Nicholas, however, had a real triumph of cleverness on Tuesday. He sang, “What does the fox say? Let it go, let it go, I can’t hold it back it anymore!“

It was hilarious, the first time. The boys still think it’s hilarious. Ahem.

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On a serious note, within forty-eight hours this week two families I know lost a father/husband unexpectedly. In light of what they are going through, all of what I am writing today feels trite, and I hesitate even to post about novels or kid moments on Facebook. It seems wrong to share rejoicing and frustration about trivialities in the face of such tremendous suffering. I ache on behalf of those who grieve, yet life marches on, and it seems wrong, somehow. I know it isn’t–I know that is the natural order of things. But I want to acknowledge the suffering of many people I know right now, and the need for prayers.

Oh, look, it’s Valentine’s Day, isn’t it? (Shrugs.) Not on my agenda today…although maybe I should try to fancy up dinner tonight for the family… Onward and upward, into another long weekend.

Ah, Toddler

If I had to sum up my youngest child in a pithy phrase, it would be this: he’s a holy terror, but at least he’s an adorable holy terror.

Adorable: blissfully innocent of gender stereotypes, he wears Julianna’s pink hat, Nicholas’s Mater ballcap, Michael’s monster-eyes stocking cap, or…Julianna’s pipe-cleaner-and-butterfly fairy crown.

Holy terror: We are quickly running out of safe places to store things, i.e., places Michael can’t reach. He can get the iPad off the top of the file cabinet, the candy dish out of the far corner of the kitchen counter or the hutch. He knows how to get into every drawer and cabinet in the house, and there’s only so much room on top of the refrigerator. Thus, things are constantly disappearing.

Adorable: last Sunday–not a choir day! No more sound system stories!–I glanced over at him during the penitential rite and saw him walking slowly up and down the pew with a hymnal in front of him, held above his head like the Book of Gospels.

Holy Terror: He will.not. leave the DVDs alone. He’s always pulling them out and handing them to me. When I actually put on something he gives me, however, he watches for two minutes and then goes to get another one to hand to me.

This leads to many problems, as you might imagine. Problems such as smudged Thomas discs and scratched Jazzercise videos. In fact, he broke one in half. And the Wii fit disc stopped reading last week.

Put those last two “holy terror” moments together, and that explains why the basket full of Wii games and controllers is being stored like this right now:

Adorable: while we were watching a family movie one night, Alex was jumping around, slapping his fingers on his palms as he does when it gets exciting. Next thing I knew, I saw Michael, his eyes fixed on Alex, jumping up and down and waving his fingers.

Holy terror: as I sat at Alex’s piano lesson typing this on Tuesday afternoon, one of the piano teacher’s children decided to play with Michael. Shortly they headed upstairs. I debated following, but decided he was with someone who was paying attention specifically to him. So I stayed put. Shortly another one of the kids came running down the stairs. “Excuse me,” he said politely, “but your baby is playing with scissors.”

When I got upstairs to intervene, Michael was no longer holding the scissors, but his playmate said, “He was trying to cut his hair.”

And he has a death wish, apparently.

Holy terror or adorable? You decide.

He used to grab Julianna’s underwear out of the (clean) laundry pile and wear them on his head. Yesterday I got out of the shower and discovered him wearing my (not clean) exercise bra like a very, very long necklace.

Now it’s your turn. Best toddler stories: Go!

Redneck Girl?

Author Elizabeth Aston (or anyway, her Polish character in Writing Jane Austen) says the word doggone is only used in old films. I suppose that means I’m a classic film star. That, or I’m just a whole lot more backwoods than haute culture.

Ever since A History of Western Music in college, I’ve adored opera. With the exception of Wagner, that is. But it used to make me roll my eyes, how dramatic people were, even in comic opera. How do you sigh in music? If it’s in German, you sigh with a tremulous “Ach!”

I remember very clearly thinking, Nobody in the history of the world ever said “ach!” when they meant to sigh.

The next day, a pile of papers fell on the floor, and I said, “Awk!”

And I realized a whole lot of people in the history of the world have said–and continue to say–”Ach!”

It took me into my thirties to realize that my vocabulary includes a whole host of colloquialisms, many of which I don’t vocalize regularly, if at all, but which are deep in my internal narrative anyway. Coming from a rural Missouri German community filled with names that begin in Sch and end in haus, my background contains quite a few colloquialisms that I never recognized as such:

Aw, foot!

…from the git-go (We say it just like that, git-go, even though it’s probably “get go,” and either way it makes no sense. It means “from the beginning.”)

Crime-a-nit-ley! (No idea how to spell that.)

There are also things we call by nonstandard names. Most people are familiar with the dinner vs. supper thing, for instance. In my world, “dinner” was when you had a big meal at noon. “Supper” was what you had every night. This is no longer how I refer to things, but that’s how I grew up.

I called upon my sisters to help me brainstorm more of them, they came up with these:

Sweeper instead of vacuum–one that has driven my husband mad since the day I met him. I have largely replaced it, but it still slips out once in a while.

Turner vs. spatula. I have to wrap the term “scraper” into it as well. To this day I’m not sure which name to use for whatever utensil I’m talking about. My poor children, like their mother before them, are completely lost.

What regional or ethnic oddities of speech do you use or encounter? Do tell! And tell us the region and/or ethnic component too!

Waking The Soul

Photo by Andrea Casali, via Flickr

It’s been one of those times lately, when the soul goes searching for meaning and all signs point in the same direction: Quiet. Silence, to hear the still small voice. And encouragement to accept what it says, even when the message is hard.

It was a rough week, last week–all those snow days, being cooped up and diverted from routine–and I didn’t handle it well. In the few moments I took to be quiet and still, the message I heard was, indeed, very hard. It said I was making my life, and my family’s, much harder than it actually was. I was resentful. I complained a lot. My fuse started out short and dwindled quickly. Nothing was good enough, and instead of looking on the bright side, I rode my attitude down a tight corkscrew of negativity.

Waking the soul is never a comfortable process. Recognition of one’s smallness–pettiness–is something everyone needs periodically, but when you get yourself stuck in a rut, it requires a real effort to suction your feet out of the mud. A bad attitude can always justify itself. There’s always cause for frustration, and that’s never more true than when you’ve managed to get yourself into a funk. You don’t put yourself in a funk, after all. It happens because lots of small irritants pile on top of each other and get blown way out of proportion.

The problem is, you get tired of feeling put-upon, so you defend yourself by expecting things to go wrong, thus justifying your bad reaction when, of course, they do. It’s an ugly cycle that almost everyone–maybe everyone–falls into at some point.

The trouble is that some people fall in, and they stay there. You know you’ve met people like that. People who are perpetually negative, perpetually angry at the world.

That’s not who I want to be. But it would be very easy for me to become that person.

I reached the pinnacle of this awareness twelve minutes into Mass yesterday, with a single line that I got to sing several times, to make sure the message sank in:

The just man is a light in darkness to the upright. (Ps. 112)

A light in darkness. That’s what I want to be. Not a proselytizer, not a finger wagger, not a complainer, not someone who lets five days stuck in the house turn her into a fire-breathing dragon.

A light in darkness. Someone whose actions and attitude breathe joy and peace into the world around her. Who lifts people up.

That’s a stretch for me, I’m afraid, but then again, maybe it’s a stretch for all of us. So I embrace this time of soul-waking, of soul-stretching, uncomfortable as it is, and the opportunity to wend my way back toward the narrow path yet again.