Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 68

What My Family Needs To Learn From Sesame Street

I had hoped to give each member of our family one of these videos, but I don’t have time to do that much legwork, and you probably don’t have time to watch that many. But here are some good ones:

Michael: Delayed Gratification

Nicholas: empathy

Julianna: Concentrate!

And lest you think I count myself above such petty lessons…for me? Persistence. Particularly since I think I’m starting novel queries today!

A Stream Of Consciousness Rant About Pop Music

Katy Perry dancing with others at the Buda Castle with fireworks bursting from them. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Katy Perry was singing on the radio when Nicholas popped out with, “Is this song called ‘Tiger Rahr’?” I chuckled inwardly at the way his brain changed “roar” into “rahr,” and then suddenly chuckled at myself, because all our kids yell “rahr” instead of “roar” as a result of being chased them around the house by me, growling thusly on all fours before tackling them to tickle and chew. And why, it occurs to me, do we say “roar” in the first place? After all, it does sound more like “rahr.”

Pop music has been on my mind lately. From the time I entered college in 1992 until about a year ago, I had only the most tenuous connection with the contents of the radio stations. I spent a long, long time immersed in classical music to the exclusion of all else, and when I poked my head up it was in the presence of a boyfriend/fiance/husband who preferred country. When I started Jazzercise last year, the instructors were always shouting “who is this singing?” like a pop quiz I was doomed to fail.

I started paying attention, because there were quite a few songs I really liked. And these days it’s a matter of mood, whether I put on pop or the classical/NPR station. I keep a list of songs I want to download until I have enough to burn a CD. (No, I do not have an iPod. I don’t need music with me anywhere there isn’t a CD player, and I can’t even keep track of my wallet and sunglasses; I don’t need one more thing I’m worried about losing.)

Yet at the same time, I get really frustrated, because some of my favorite music ends up being on the list of things I can’t buy because of the lyrics.

Example A: Enrique Iglesias. Man! Some of the most creative music out there, and such filthy lyrics. That example isn’t one of the worst, but you notice I didn’t embed the video. As one of the Jazzercise instructors said, “Whatever happened to all that ‘I wanna be your hero’?”

Example B: Pit Bull. Okay, so rap is all the rage, and Pit Bull cameos on approximately a billion other people’s songs. I’m not a rap fan, but that song that goes with the Fiat commercial is actually a really good song. Except what’s up with that repeating lyric “sexy people”? I can’t play that in front of my kids. These people have got to be interested in picking up the next generation of fans; why make that lyric so prominent? It’s not even what the song is about, for all that it’s the title. In fact, that song seems to have three lyric strands that are only slightly connected: the beautiful love song about Sorrento, stuff about immigrants, and this befuddling “Sexy people”, implying, I suppose, that all immigrants are sexy? I don’t know…maybe I’m missing something.

The problem is, I really, really like these two songs. Or rather, I want to, and it’s frustrating to feel that I can’t actually listen to them, because–as noted above–there are little ears listening.

Of course, there are some really wonderful songs out there, too. Katy Perry seems to specialize in songs that affirm (think Firework), and this Jason Mraz was one of the first I knew I wanted to download–still one of my favorites. I suppose it’s always been this way, hasn’t it?

End rant. Time to start another crazy Tuesday.

Memo To Dog Lovers

English: Golden Retriever (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

**Note! Please take this as a lighthearted reflection, not finger-wagging! I’m well aware that this is dangerous territory. **

Dog lovers of the world–and I know there are a lot of you–I need you to listen closely. My daughter hates your dog. It’s nothing personal. She hates every dog. Every one. Every size. Every  shape. Every age. There has never been a single dog in the entire world that my daughter has liked.

Stop trying to tell me yours is the exception.

I know you like your dog. I believe you when you say other kids who are scared of dogs like your dog. But my daughter will not. There are a lot of dogs in my neighborhood. As in: fourteen dogs in the eight houses closest to us. We have a lot of experience with them. When I tell you my daughter is scared of your dog, please accept that I know what I am talking about.

I know it might be tempting to blame me, the “there will never be a pet of any kind under any circumstances in my house and especially not a slobbering, licking, barking, smelly dog” woman. But Julianna does, after all, have a confirmed dog lover for a father. A man who almost cried at age 24 when his parents were forced to put their cocker spaniel to sleep.

Trust me, I may not like dogs, but with fourteen of them within a hundred yards of our house, I consider it a survival skill to coexist peacefully with them. Heck, I’d be happy if my daughter would accept their presence in the universe. But it’s a lost cause. If I pull her away it’s simply because I have learned that dog + Julianna = more laundry, bloodcurdling screams, and a nearly-successful attempt to climb me.

Poodle looking up (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I know you don’t get it. You love dogs, and you just don’t see how anybody could view them otherwise. But I assure you, it’s quite possible.

And in my daughter’s defense, let me share two stories, one about me, one about her.

I grew up on a gravel road, and in the summertime I rode my bike to the neighbors’ house, 1/4 mile away, nearly every day. I had to grit my teeth and do it because a big black lab lived midway between our houses, and he chased me every single time, barking. News flash: that’s scary.

By the time I was a senior in high school, I had learned that dogs can tell when you’re scared, and the best way to handle them is not to be. So this particular day, I didn’t let him push me all over the road. I stayed in my lane and yelled at him.

And he bit me in the thigh.

I don’t like dogs.

Now, a much cuter story about Julianna. Picture an 18-month-old little girl, far from walking, just getting stable on her bottom and learning to transition into crawling position. Said cutie pie is sitting outside with Daddy, who has dug a 2-foot-deep hole to plant a tree. Great big–extremely friendly, but very big–golden retriever that lives next door comes running over and bops her on the butt. Darling daughter tips forward head-first into a hole full of water.

Some scars run deep.

So when we see you in the park, don’t tell me how not-scary your dog is. Don’t tell me all the reasons why we should fawn over and adore your pooch. Don’t give us the “are you crazy?” look because my daughter is screaming bloody murder. Please believe me: I really am trying to soothe her, to get her to release at least a couple of the 650 muscles she has locked up at the sight of a canine. I’m afraid you’re simply going to have to accept the unfathomable truth that some people just don’t like dogs.

Sunday Snippets

Time to link up with the Sunday Snippets community at RAnn’s This, That & The Other Thing. This week’s question: “What religious artifacts (statues, pictures, icons, altars, etc) would I find in your home if I stopped in for a visit?”

We have a cross on the living room wall, along with palm branches made by my great-grandfather. In the kitchen we have a statue of St. Michael the Archangel, a Madonna of the Streets and a few other “artifacts” on shelves. We all have crucifixes in our bedrooms. But mostly people know we’re Catholic because that’s what we’re always doing–writing, teaching NFP, heading to church to lead the choir, and of course because we have one kid in public school and one in Catholic, there’s always an explanation to be made.

My posts this week:

First of all, my Christmas collection for flute & piano is out!

I’m very happy with this collection. We were playing through the proofs to check for errors and I got lost in it. I got all excited, shook my head and said, “Man, this is good stuff. Who wrote this? Oh right. I did! Wow!”

Two posts to share this week: Sibling Love–about typically-developing and developmentally-delayed siblings; and

Maybe Preaching To The Choir Isn’t Always Such A Bad Thing.

New: Come To The Manger

Now available for flute and piano!

7 Quick Takes

___1___

Golden-mantled Ground Squirrel (Spermophilus lateralis). Bryce Canyon, Utah (USA). Image taken by Eborutta. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With Nicholas in the house, we have the most random conversations. Like this: “Mommy, there’s a squirrel in the pipe.” (He’s been pretending to be a construction guy named Jaylen this week. Before that it was Fireman Jaylen. Don’t ask me, I’m just the reporter.) “Do you want me to fix your pipe?”

“Why yes, that would be great. There’s a squirrel in my pipe?”

“Yeah, it’s tangled up in a vine in the pipe.”

“Is it alive, or dead?”

“It’s alive. In fact, there’s a whole family of squirrels.”

“Oh, really. Well, you’d better get to work, then.”

___2___

Michael is battling his first croup. Blech.

___3___

It’s amazing how far a golf ball will go when thrown down a sidewalk.

___4___

Man, I’m boring today. I fizzled out after the squirrel.

___5___

Really, I was just trying to avoid obsessing about the TWELVE versions of my novel query I’ve written. I can’t even talk about it to my husband anymore  because he rolls his eyes, he’s so tired of hearing about it. I’m so close to being ready to query, I can taste it, and it’s such an exercise in patience, not to rush it and blow the chance.

What’s a novel query, you ask? Before a book is published, an editor has to decide it’s worth looking at. Editors at major publishers generally want to be approached through a literary agent, not directly by authors. (Everybody’s written a book, you know.) So how do you get a literary agent to take you on as a client? You write a one-page letter that hooks their attention, encapsulates your story, and convinces them why they should take you seriously.

So that’s where I am: finished with the novel at long last, and trying to finish the submission package so I can start querying. I’ve been through this process once before, without success–hence my obsession with getting this package as tight and punchy as I possibly can, even if it means spending weeks and lots of mental and emotional agony over it.

___6___

This is my week for carpool duty. At Alex’s school you funnel through a long line, stopping at different class levels to pick up kids. On Wednesday afternoon, as we were sitting in the line, Nicholas suddenly said, “I think I have a nosebleed!”

I turned around and sure enough, he did. Of course, I was SITTING IN THE CARPOOL LINE, so I couldn’t do anything more than pass a tissue to him and tell him to keep pressure on it until we got everybody in the car, and then I’d pull off and take care of it.

Naturally, this meant it was the day that I managed to arrive at precisely the right moment to ensure that we were caught in every possible traffic snarl along the pickup route, so that it took nearly twelve minutes to get through the line. I think Alex was the last third grader to be picked up. By the time I got pulled off in a parking place at the far end of the line, the state of those tissues was something else. Put that on the list of things you never thought you’d have to do–deal with a nosebleed in the carpool lane.

___7___

Nicholas just came over and asked me to tie his shoe. “It’s my Ninjago shoe. You’re the leader of the Ninja. You tell us what to do and we do it.”

“Wow,” I said, “that would be amazing.” If only.

Fiction: This Tornado Loves You

They say you can tell a lot about a baby in the womb. I knew this was true before you came along, little man, but I learned it all over again in the last four months you were inside my womb. I don’t think I got a moment’s rest, but I counted it a blessing because at least with you, I never had that worry when babies go still for hours at a time.

When you were twenty months old, your daddy christened you “the human tornado.” There was the time you ran headlong into the hutch, crystal goblets toppling like dominoes in a musical menagerie of destruction. The time you came down after bath and hit the freshly-mopped floor at a dead run, and immediately and spectacularly wiped out, twenty-six pounds of naked toddler splayed across the Pergo. The time you colored the brand new couch with a Sharpie you found underneath it. Ate two of those not-really-ladybug things (the proof was in your diaper). Strung the contents of both our wallets across the kitchen floor at least a dozen times. Locked Daddy out of his iPhone, and caused the computer to retreat screaming into a passable imitation of the apocalypse by sticking something (we never did figure out what) into a USB port.

And when I’d get mad, you’d reach your arms up and cry, and the more upset I was the more pathetic…and adorable…you’d look. “For the love of all that’s holy!” I would cry. “Can you just leave things alone? I don’t want to cuddle you right now!”

“He loves you,” your daddy would say to me, all puppy-dog eyes, when you came running to me caked with chocolate and spaghetti sauce, looking for the umpteenth boo-boo kiss of the day.

Nothing could keep you down. Not your big brother sitting on you, or your big sister locking you in the closet when you were both supposed to be napping, so we didn’t find out until we came in an hour later and found every single piece of clothing in all five storage boxes flung higgledy-piggledy. Not even the time you tried to follow your siblings up the ladder of the old-fashioned slide at the park, and you fell from the fifth step. “He’s a tough boy,” we said every time somebody winced at seeing you on the bottom of a doggie pile. “He has to be. He has three older siblings.”

But it turns out there was one thing that could knock you down, my little tornado. It’s been lying in wait in your brain since the day you were born. And now that we’re here in a place of tubes and leads and beeping monitors and perpetual fluorescent daytime–now that the question is not when you’ll cause your next havoc, but if…now I’m asking for only one thing. Come back. Come back and cause me some mayhem.

*

Note to my regular readers: Michael is fine! I promise! When I saw the “tornado loves you” graphic at WOE this week, all I could think of was the wild, wanton potential for destruction and adorability that coexist in toddlerhood, and although I tried to come up with something else, this was what wanted to be written. I have such a wealth of material to draw from, how can I not use it? (Challenge: which incidents in this piece are entirely fabricated? Can you guess?)

This is the third of the seven pieces I set as a November writing goal, but the first I’ve posted online. And by the way–yes, children have strokes, too.

Sibling Love?

“I’m sure you know this already,” said Julianna’s teacher, sitting in our living room on Saturday morning, “but…Julianna is just so sweet.“

Christian and I exchanged a glance and chuckled, because we hear it all the time. In fact, he’d heard it from the counselor at her school just a couple of days before. And we get it all the time when we’re out and about as a family.

Which makes me really curious to know what goes through my other children’s minds when they hear such things.

The world’s perception of Julianna:

Strawberry Shortcake: Berry Blossom Festival (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My children’s perception of Julianna:

(:27)

People routinely tell you how great your kids are, and every time they do, you have this surreal moment in which you have to remind yourself that they don’t see all the moments you do. Right?  But you’re an adult and you can remove yourself a bit from your own experience and appreciate what others see.

The kids, though–it’s harder for them. Above kidding aside, I really do wonder what my boys think of their sister. The relationships among the three of them are pretty clear. Nicholas is a button-pusher and he knows Alex’s buttons at least as well as he knows mine, but they declare regular cease-fires to play Ninjago or Avengers or Other-Superhero-of-the-Day together. Nicholas wants to be Alex, and Alex’s most common spiritual goal has to do with being nicer to/more patient with his brother. Alex and Michael adore each other, pure and simple. Nicholas and Michael are hurtling toward a mirror image of Alex and Nicholas’ relationship.

But Julianna stands kind of outside all these relationships. She plays with them occasionally, but she’s not cognitively able to play pretend; she still prefers to sit and look through word cards and listen to music. Her communications are different. You never know if you’re getting a straight answer out of her. She’s just, well, different.

We’ve never tried to hide, downplay or otherwise sugar coat Julianna’s differences. Alex began learning about Down syndrome as soon as we could talk about it without crying. Nicholas, being far less empathetic and much more, er, let’s call it focused-on-himself than his older brother, has only in the last six months begun to process what that extra chromosome means. But both of them know that Julianna’s disability means they have an extra long-term responsibility as brothers.

The circumstances of each person’s life color childhood, but the way they react to those circumstances is unique to each child. When I see Alex playing with his cousin or a friend who is around Julianna’s age, it always causes a pang. We had our first two close together partly so that they could be playmates, but it didn’t work out that way. As much as we value treating Julianna like any other child in our family would be treated, we can’t escape the fact that she is different, and those differences force many, many accommodations to be made. She does get treated differently. And I wonder how my boys will react to their sister in the long run.

Maybe Preaching To The Choir Isn’t Always Such A Bad Thing

Angry Math/History teacher (Photo credit: sleepinyourhat)

Last Tuesday I got out of the house late. I was in a big hurry to get Nicholas to school on time because I had to get back across town for Julianna’s eye appointment. Naturally, this meant I ended up behind World’s Slowest Driver on the interstate. But we were close enough to the exit that I couldn’t pass him.

We got to the exit, he pulled off going 42 mph…and began braking…at the bottom…of the ramp.

We braked all the way up the exit ramp, toward a green light that I knew couldn’t last much longer. I knew he wasn’t paying attention to the green light, because I could see him talking on his phone. When he braked all the way to 15 mph about six car lengths ahead of the green light (did I mention it was green?), I started honking.

And he STOPPED.

And GOT OUT OF HIS CAR TO TALK TO ME.

He thought I was honking because he’d lost something off the top of his vehicle.

“No,” I said, “I was honking because you were STOPPING AT A GREEN LIGHT!”

“Oh, sorry,” he said.

I spend so much time trying to figure out how to teach my children to recognize the moments when Christian discipleship crashes into real life and requires you to DO SOMETHING. And then I turn around and pull a stunt like this.

Yes, he was being annoying. But was it Christlike for me to honk and yell at him? After all, it was my own fault I was in a hurry. Taking it out on him was definitely not my finest moment as a disciple of Jesus.

Every so often, I go through a little blogger-identity crisis. The conventional blog wisdom is that you pick a focus and you stick to it, but I can’t sustain a blog that way. Here’s where being such a “jill-of-all-writing-trades” presents a challenge. I try to be a little more in depth than the phrase “mommy blogger” implies. When I write about Down syndrome my stats go through the roof, but I know that’s because I don’t overdo it. I have a large Catholic following and faith issues are very important to me–obviously, since I have a column and three books–but my fiction is not religious and I worry about alienating people who come here because of secular writing connections.

Image by One Way Stock, via Flickr

And then, too, there’s the question about whether there’s really any point in writing about faith issues at all. Am I not just preaching to the choir?

But this weekend, it occurred to me that maybe preaching to the choir isn’t always such a bad thing. The central theme of my Liguorian column is that faith shouldn’t be compartmentalized; it has to be lived out in time and in moments and in relationships. Christianity suffers in the public perception for being all talk and judgment and “sin, hell and damnation” without kindness, compassion, and the witness of holy living. And there’s a good reason for this. We who call ourselves Christians, of whatever denominational stripe, too often fail to recognize how un-Christlike our behaviors, our words, and decisions frequently are. And when we do recognize it, as I did last Tuesday even while I was punching the horn, we don’t seem to have the self-control to correct before we space jump off the Sin Cliff.

We are all lukewarm followers of Christ to some degree. And perhaps, just perhaps, my preaching to the choir might light a fire under someone other than myself. If something I write causes someone else to think more clearly about their situations and relationships and habits and actions, and if that thinking causes them to move toward a truer, more lived faith–in other words, a real one–then preaching to the choir was worthwhile.

Sunday Snippets

Time for another linkup of Catholic bloggers at RAnn’s This, That & The Other Thing, where today we are answering the question: “Do you have any recipe you make for religious reasons–ie to celebrate a religious holiday or to teach kids something about the faith or to help you remember something about your faith or as a prayer?”

My answer: we’ve done St. Lucy buns the last couple of years, but like RAnn’s kids, I’m not sure they got the point. It takes all my energy just to get them made! Actually, come to think of it, we’ve done Tres Leches cake for Trinity and/or Juan Diego & Guadalupe. But it’s certainly not something we do regularly.

This week I did almost exclusively pictures of the kids. You can just scroll through the blog if you’re interested in seeing those.

Last week, though, I revisited the struggle with anxiety. I posted other things, but that’s probably the one you’d find most interesting. Happy blogging, folks!