Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 79

Sunday Snippets

Hello, Sunday Snippets folks! I’ve been absent for the last several weeks as life just got too crazy, but I’m back! Here’s my world in a nutshell (operative syllable being nut):

A Julianna primer–speech update

Beautiful and Terrible–my most-read post of the last several weeks, er, months.

Hurricane Basi (enough said)

And because of things like the hurricane, as well as this (good) and this (not good), I really needed this.

Looking forward to catching up with everyone!

Good Week, Bad Week (a 7QT)

___1___

Last week was not a good week–the first week of summer vacation is always a transition time, but this was ridiculous–but I thought after the weekend away, my attitude was bound to be so improved that life would be markedly better. And it was, at first. Although I’ve been growing steadily more exhausted by virtue of an inexplicable inability to sleep at night. Being tired makes everything so much harder.

___2___

X0000P0064 (Photo credit: Nottingham Vet School)

Wednesday evening was the opening ceremony of Alex’s cub scout day camp. He was super-excited at the prospect of building space shuttle models, shooting BB guns and archery. Until, midway through the talk given by an astronaut, he began cupping his hand over his ear and looking more and more mopey.

Considering he was supposed to spend the entire next two days running around doing boy things, I called home and said, “Do you think I should take him to Urgent Care, just to make sure?”

We arrived at the hospital at 7:45 p.m. and were told that there were four people ahead of us, so brace ourselves for a wait. We watched an entire program on Animal Planet about treehouses. Alex did an art project and two mazes. I worked on my column and a bit on a novel scene (thank God I had my NEO along). And finally, at 8:50 p.m., the doctor arrived. She spent 15 minutes confirming an ear infection and giving instructions I didn’t have the heart to tell her I knew backwards and forwards after Michael’s nonsense this year; then all we had to do was wait for the release instructions, including the amoxicillin prescription. And yet we didn’t leave the hospital grounds until 9:45p.m. By then the only place open was Walgreen’s, which doesn’t accept our insurance. But amoxicillin’s cheap, right?

Another 45 minutes and $45 later, we had 3 bottles of amoxicillin in hand. We got home and medicated him at last, getting to bed just before 11p.m.

___3___

You might imagine I was completely exhausted all day yesterday. I actually slept in until 6:30, when I had to get up in order to get everyone else going. I was crabby all day, but the grace of perspective gained by weekend away allowed me NOT to take it out on the kids. “Nicholas, please stop talking,” I said. “I’m very cranky, and I don’t want to yell at you, because you’re not doing anything wrong, so please just be quiet for a minute, okay?”

___4___

As an aside, that boy seriously does not EVER stop talking. Remember that opening scene from the movie Conspiracy Theory? That’s him. Except he doesn’t lose his voice from it. I can only assume that’s because his vocal cords are younger.

___5___

English: Romaine lettuce (Lactuca sativa var. longifolia). Français : Laitue romaine (Lactuca sativa var. longifolia). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Okay, back to the topic at hand. What’s the best thing to do on a day when you’re cranky and exhausted? Go grocery shopping with two kids, of course! We got through Aldi relatively unscathed, until, for the eighth week in a row, the checker stacked things on top of my lettuce and spinach bags. Now, I’ve been peeved about this for weeks. I’m like, Hello! You young whippersnapper of a college student, don’t you buy lettuce? Ever? It irritates me so much, I try not to say anything because I’m afraid I can’t be polite. But this week, my filters were off. “Please  don’t put things on top of the lettuce bags!” I said. “It squashes the lettuce!”

This college guy looks at me, startled. “I’m sorry. I thought it was already flat.”

“Haven’t you ever bought lettuce? When it gets squashed it gets bruised, and then it goes bad!”

His eyes got wide. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I promise, I’ll never do it again. Scout’s honor.” His mouth was twitching.

I had to laugh, but I felt a need to explain as I ran my card. “I’m sorry, it’s just been happening a lot here lately, and I don’t understand why people do it.”

“Never again, ma’am. I promise.”

Nicholas had been smacking my leg repeatedly and calling, “Mommy Mommy Mommy Mommy!” At last I looked down in time to hear him say, “But I wanted to push the buttons!”

“Oh, I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “I was too busy yelling at the cashier to think about it.”

___6___

Well, on the up side: I got an email accepting my Gospel(ish) arrangement of How Great Thou Art for publication, and another asking me to continue my column in Liguorian for a third year. So that’s worthy of a happy dance.

___7___

At the end of the day we went out to Alex’s baseball game. I watched Michael toddling around, throwing gravel and drinking water, and was awed at the way I could see into the future in the way he looked. It was like seeing middle school superimposed on babyhood. Man, that boy is cute. Julianna made a sensation by wandering into the opposing team’s dugout and then OUT ONTO THE FIELD IN THE MIDDLE OF PLAY.  Alex himself fell apart because, well, in reality because he was really overtired and had an ear infection, but ostensibly because he didn’t make it to base in five at bats, even though he hit the ball three times. Poor kid. He sat on the bench crying tears down a dirt-streaked face, and didn’t want to go out and smack hands with all the other players. “You get up right now,” I said. “No child of mine is going to be a poor sport!”

(FYI: Ice cream soothes a broken heart. At least at age 8.)

How Not To Lose Your Mind During Summer Break

This is the topic of my newest post over at Catholic Mothers Online. Hop on over!

A Julianna primer

First, an introduction to Julianna-speak:

Kwawk-wee–chocolate
Kee-yoh–carousel
Kohl-ee–Nicholas
Al-ee–Alex
Bah-koh–Michael
Bah-ee–Mommy
Geepaw Geepaw–Grandpa (or Grandma, or both)
wei-ee yah-yee–swim lessons
wah bee-bah–watch baby signing times (but it means “movie”)
pah-tah–pasta
Hah boh-bee–happy birthday
hoe-ee–horsie
geiger–tiger
goggie–dog
Beebee Iccshee–Baby Izzie. (Not sure how to put that consonant into letters; it’s in the back and the front of the mouth simultaneously, a sound related to both sh and the French r.)
Wow-kuh–fire truck
bih bugee–big bug
lee bugee–little bug
wow doy–loud noise

Go on, try saying these out loud. See if you can hear the original word buried in hers.

Julianna has difficulty with speech because her tongue is larger proportional to the size of her mouth, and because of low muscle tone, which makes it harder for the muscles to work together. If you think about it, speech is the finest possible fine motor skill the body performs. Minute variations of the tongue, the cheeks, the lips and the teeth create a vast array of sounds.

The human brain can clump sounds together that actually aren’t the same. For instance: Huge swaths of the population seem incapable of putting s, t and r back to back clearly. “Strong” becomes “shtrong,” thunderstorm “thundershtorm.” Yet we recognize the words despite mispronunciation. This also accounts for being able to talk to people with different accents.

Watching Julianna learn to talk has taught me how closely-related the various sounds really are. When he was little, Alex used to say “kyack” instead of “truck.” At first blush that sounds not even remotely similar, but say “truck” and pay attention to where your tongue hits. Now say “Kyack.” Both of them begin with an explosive consonant on the roof of the mouth, followed by pulling the tongue back for a vowel that sits in virtually the same place.

So it is with Julianna’s speech. One of the first phrases we identified was “wah bee-boh,” which literally translates “watch baby signing times,” but in reality means “movie, please.” Baby = beebee, shortened to bee. Signing and Times both have long I’s, but the shape required to produce a long I is not that far removed than that for a semi-long o.

The thoughts she’s trying to express are getting more sophisticated–she is, after all, six years old; imagine being six and not able to communicate in complete sentences. But as they get more sophisticated, they become harder to decode. Nicholas continues to boggle my mind by being able to understand things the first or second time he hears them. Maybe, being not far removed from that developmental stage where all sound combinations are a bit suspect, he’s got the brain plasticity to run through the myriad possible combinations and come up with the right one to fit the context. Or maybe this is an early indicator that he’s going to have a gift for languages. Who knows? In any case, I’m becoming more grateful for his gift every day, and although mostly I wanted to record this for my own memory, I thought other people might find it interesting as well.

And just for fun, here’s Julianna reading with Christian last night:

 

Beautiful and Terrible

Last week, Alex asked for a diary with a lock. “Not a girly one,” he specified.

“Why on earth do you need a diary with a lock?” I asked.

“To write things I don’t want you to see.” Duh.

“Like…like what kinds of things?” I wanted categories, you know, not details.

But he gave me The Look. “Things I don’t want you to see.”

I can’t tell you how much this exchange disturbed my peace of mind. On the one hand, it is inevitable–it is right and proper, even–for him to grow into his own individuality, a process that mandates a certain withdrawal from the intimacy of a parent and child in early childhood. And yet I have visions of all manner of dangerous things being withheld from my knowledge, preventing me from correcting misunderstanding or rescuing from danger. I reminded myself that Alex is pretty good about coming to us with questions and concerns, and I probably don’t need to freak out about it. But I searched Amazon for a non-girly diary with a sense of wistfulness.

It’s a beautiful and terrible thing to watch a child growing up. As he becomes increasingly autonomous, my ability to influence the development of his thoughts and attitudes wanes, and my living example becomes more and more critical. Which is a scary thought. Alex spent the first week of summer vacation losing his temper spectacularly at his siblings, Nicholas in particular. Nicholas is a button-pusher, and Alex is very protective of his belongings, even the ones that seem unimportant. Like a mylar balloon that’s been tied to the back of his chair since his birthday in April. Nicholas was batting it around, and Alex was screaming at him with rage. Now, Nicholas wasn’t doing anything wrong. Alex was completely overreacting. On the other hand, it is his balloon, and Nicholas wasn’t stopping because he likes pushing buttons. Whose side do you take in this situation?

But as I began thinking things through, I realized I do the same thing. Nicholas pushes my buttons, I overreact spectacularly. In fact, I was smack in the middle of a week in which I was feeling overwhelmed by the volume of what had to get done, and I, too, was flipping out at minor, but constant, infractions. I detour to clean up one mess, and thirty seconds later there’s another one. Michael Mayhem + Nicholas button-pusher + Julianna “how much does she understand?” + Alex surely-he’s-too-young-to-be-a-tween…writing it all down clarifies why it frequently overwhelms; that’s quite a combination of child stages and personalities, isn’t it?

But it doesn’t really matter what they throw at me. I’m still teaching them, by my example, about Christian life…accurately or not. I can teach them virtue, or I can teach them hypocrisy: platitudes that can’t stand up to the stresses of real life. My reaction to buttons pushed and messes made is my choice. I just frequently make a poor one.

Scarier yet is the realization that they’re going to remember things about me that I don’t remember doing or saying. There’s an “adult novelty” store that I pass by sometimes, and every time I do, I remember my mother idly wondering if a place like that might “accidentally” have what she needed to complete a farm task for which she hadn’t been able to problem solve a tool. Now, she wasn’t going to go in that store. It was just an offhand comment; I doubt she even remembers it. But I remember it frequently. Which makes me wonder: What am I saying that is making a lasting impression on my kids?

With all this in mind, I called Alex over. I told him frankly that he was not behaving well and neither was I, and we both needed to cool it. And go to confession, which we haven’t done since before Easter. In the last few days, I’ve been quite a bit better…Alex, not quite so much so.

The relationship between a parent and child, I’m realizing in deeper and deeper ways, is a beautiful and terrifying thing.

What I Did This Weekend

(Which is why I had to push so hard late last week, so I’d be ready to drop it all and go…)

“Date night for couples: French Bistro.” We were in charge of preparing (most of) the salads.

And we learned a lot about how to get a steak to cook properly (hint: hot pan!). And who doesn’t like flaming cognac?

Sunday morning, we went to church here:

(How’s that for a sense of scale?)

There was a reeeeeeally annoying 1/4-second delay with a tinny buzz in the sound coming from some side speaker in this gartantuan basilica…at least, that’s what I thought it was, and I was composing a “you might want to know” email to the staff in my mind and wondering if that would be presumptuous, even if I do have a music/liturgy background, when I realized what I was hearing was the bleed-through from the extremely old man sitting next to us, who had his audio aid turned up too loud. After that, I was able to tune it out.

After Mass we walked around a bit and I took a spin through the gift shop. Look what I found on display!

Then it was bikes in the park and Star Trek: Into Darkness on the way home. (Loving what they’re doing with those characters.)

While the kids stayed home with grandparents and did this…

And this….

And relaxation was had by all. Except the grandparents, probably. But you can’t begin to imagine the noise level and chaos when we arrived home last night to this:

And now it’s time to go plant those irises sitting beside the door…they’ve been there for over a week as it rained and rained and rained and rained and…well, most of you have been through it too. :/

I Capitulate!

The crescendo of madness this week has finally overtaken me. Between another three days’ of rocephin shots, the pending arrival of family, the first week of kids home for summer break, and one of my article sources getting ready to leave town, I have officially hit the “overload” point. I’ve got to devote today to deadlines in the home and the writing world. See you back on Monday.

Hurricane Basi

My sister and her baby girl were in town for Memorial Day weekend, so we spent most of the weekend at my parents’ farm. We descended on the house with our usual entrance of noise and chaos. My kids were over the moon about getting to see the baby. She thought they were very interesting, but her short life as an only child with no cousins nearby had left her woefully unprepared for the intensity of physical love exhibited by a “big,” boisterous family. Before long she had this look on her face:

(Perhaps you can intuit why.)

My sister suggested a walk. Dad had improvements he wanted to show us, and the kids think the farm equipment is their own private junglegym, just as I did when I was growing up there. So the suggestion met with instant approval, which meant it only took twenty minutes to find coats and shoes for everyone and get them out the door. I made it outside with Julianna, the last one, in time to hear my sister tell my dad, “Now this is where these kids belong–outside. Hurricane Basi!”

(note the muddy legs)

I got a pretty good laugh out of that one. It’s such an apt description! But it brings to the front some puzzlement, too, because I’m from a family of four, my dad’s from a family of four, and my mom is from a family of ten. And yet everyone seems a bit taken aback by the sheer energy level and moto perpetuo that is my brood of four. Now, why is that?

“You had three boys in your family,” I said to Dad as we followed the kids toward the big sprayer. (In fact, three boys and a girl, in the same birth order as my kids.) “Was it not like this?”

“I don’t remember it being like this,” Dad said, shaking his head.

“Then again, you guys probably were outside all the time.”

“We were just busy all the time,” he said. Perhaps that’s the solution to the mystery: when you get up to milk cows at 4:30 in the morning, and you spend the day following Daddy around helping with farm chores, you’re constantly in motion anyway. So there’s the solution to the chaos level in our house. Note to Christian: Quit your job and become a farmer. Today. Move to the country. I’ll keep the house & garden, and you keep the kids busy….

Er…

Yeah, maybe not.

A Fiction-Writing Mama Stares Down Summer Break

Photo by Eye-the world through my I, via Flickr

I’m working right now on the last (I hope!) major revision of my novel. I tend to be self-conscious about my novel. Its characters are so precious to me, so real, so alive, that exposing them to the real world feels like a high-risk venture. As if someone might judge me based upon their story.

Which, of course, is kind of the point. You know how in English class you used to gnash your teeth when teachers forced you to analyze themes and symbols? You wanted to shoot off your mouth and say the author was just writing a story, and never intended all that other stuff to be read into it. Well…you would be wrong. Maybe not every story has a deeper layer–maybe some of them are just for entertainment–but the good ones, the ones that stay with you all have a point. In this book I have a point (or twelve) I want to get across, but I’ve seen enough proselytizing masquerading as fiction that I’m pretty obsessed with making sure I don’t do it.

I used to get lost in my characters. I would become dissatisfied with my life, and spend all my time pretending to be my characters walking around through my day. It was not a good thing. I finally had to take a hiatus from fiction in order to get my head straight about the border between reality and imagination.

I have a much healthier relationship with my characters now, but they still have the power to preoccupy my brain power. At the best of times, a story is a living thing, burning its way out of you. All you have to do is plant your butt at the computer, and the words pour out for hours. That doesn’t mean they pour out without rewrites. You still jump around in a 400-page document, strengthening connections, incorporating ideas that came to you later, adding scenes and–more painfully–deleting them. But it’s a fire nonetheless, a fire that consumes time and attention and–hopefully–blank pages on a screen.

This is where I am right now. And it’s awesome. But also excruciating. Because my life does not allow me to plant my butt at the computer and vomit verbiage (or more accurately, revisions) onto the screen for hours on end. In the absence of that freedom, my brain is constantly problem solving in the background, so that when I do get the chance to sit down with a keyboard, I can just write.

There was a lot of “background work” going on this weekend, between family gatherings, extended family gatherings, house cleaning and family game nights. All of which I enjoyed, but still the novel tugs at the heart strings, clamoring for the attention I can’t give. Yesterday morning I got up at 4:55 a.m., went running, and sat at the computer anticipating a heavenly hour and a half to work before the family got up…and then remembered I had to write a blog post. :/

Today, summer break officially begins. Summer in our household means daily chores, weekly field trips, and curtailed writing time. I have so many things I want to do with the kids this summer–craft projects, outdoor play, picnics, some religious formation. Cleaning and organization projects.

And I have nonfiction projects jumping up and down and wagging their fingers at me. I haven’t been ignoring them, but the time has come when I have to prioritize them over the novel, and I’m dreading it. I don’t working on them, but I know how hard it is to get this kind of momentum going on a novel, and I don’t want to lose it. I want to finish this thing and start sending it out.

So life goes on, a juggling act as always. Only for the next three months, there will be more players on hand.

Oh, Alex! (or: what I did Memorial Day Weekend. Or: vital lessons in child rearing. Or: …well, never mind)

Laundry equipment within a room (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At 3p.m. on Sunday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend, I am lying on the couch with Michael on my chest, radiating heat and crying. I’ve been home from my parents’ cookout for less than an hour, and it’s clear that napping in a crib is not on the agenda. Christian has volunteered to take dinner duty, but there’s so much more that needs to be done. Like change the laundry load, the ones that contains Alex’s sheets and Julianna’s sneakers, which she caked with mud at the farm the day before.

This is when you enlist the help of the big kids. “Alex,” I call. “I need you to run upstairs and switch the loads in the laundry for me.”

He looks at me with puzzlement.

“Take the clothes from the washer and put them in the dryer,” I say patiently. “Put a dryer sheet in, and set it for 45 minutes.”

He heads upstairs. Michael continues to fret and cry. Five minutes pass. Then, Alex appears around the corner of the wall halfway up the stairs. “Mommy, the washing machine just started up again, all by itself.”

What?

Sighing, I labor to my feet with 26 pounds of unhappy toddler attached, and head upstairs. For some reason, the banisters are all wet. Weird. Upstairs, I pause and survey the laundry room floor, which is…wet. Freeze-it-and-you’d-have-an-ice-rink wet. “What the…?” I look in the dryer, and I see dripping wet sheets. Dripping.

My mistake was assuming the lack of sound from upstairs meant the washing machine had finished running. For the first time I see a disadvantage to the child who obeys without question! “Alex, did you pull these out of the water?”

“Yes.”

“Alex! Have you ever  seen me pull clothes out of water to put them in the dryer?”

Several expressions cross his face. “Um, no.”

Michael cries some more. Christian’s making dinner. And I have the almighty mess of water sitting on my second floor.

Sometimes, motherhood is all about split-second judgment calls, right? “Okay, Michael, you are going back to bed,” I say, and march him into his room. “Alex, bring me towels. A lot of towels.”

I strip off my socks and wade in. Step one: move the dripping sheets back into the washer and let the machine finish its cycle.

Now, let me explain my laundry room. It measures six feet by six feet, 2/3 of which is occupied by the washer and dryer. What’s left is a walkway across one wall. In other words, there’s no room to work in here. The water goes back under the washer and dryer. I send Alex for the mop bucket and pull out the dryer. Then I see the disaster of lint and debris under it, which is now slowly absorbing water and turning to slime.

The mop will not help. This is a job for rags. Lots of rags.

Across the hall, Michael starts wailing again. I grrrr and accept the fact that he and I are both going to have to put up with the unpleasantness, because fever or no fever, the cleaning job has to take priority.

I maneuver behind the dryer and clean up the slime, using the mop bucket as a wring-out pail. The foil tube that connects to the lint egress is disconnected, but I can’t put it back on, because there’s no room to work. I have to move the washing machine out to make room. I slide the dryer back to make room for the washer, then use the machines and the tubes & cords as a junglegym. There’s more slime under the washer. I get it clean and then realize I have to have wrenches to get the lint tube. I flop back, sweaty and uncomfortable, and send Alex to get the necessary tools. It takes him forever. At least Michael’s settled down. Maybe he’ll actually nap this time.

A few minutes of wrestling and we’re done at last. I exit the junglegym and push both washer and dryer into place. And now there’s more water on the floor. What the….????

Then I remember: water in the drum of the dryer.

More towels. More wringing. More floor wiping. (At least the room’s getting a good cleaning.)

At length, we have almost a full washer-load of filthy towels and rags. I load the washer again, and at last I’m finished…just in time for Michael to start wailing yet again.

What have I learned today? I’ve learned that even my 8-year-old needs explicit, clear instructions for EV.ER.Y.THING.

This, I think is a lesson I needed made clear at the start of summer break “daily chore” season. Although I think I could have learned it without quite that big a mess.

Question for you: I know you all have stories you can tell. Hit me, folks. I need to know I’m not the only one! Except Mom. Mom, if you have any stories about me, I don’t wanna hear ‘em.