Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 92

A Visit (and giveaway!) with Sarah Reinhard, author of “Welcome Baby Jesus”

Last week I posted a review of Sarah Reinhard’s book, Welcome Baby Jesus. Today I’d like you to welcome Sarah herself to the blog!

Sarah, tell us a bit about yourself, your family, and what got you started writing for families and mothers.

I started blogging back in 2006 and it’s turned into writing for families and mothers. It’s a group I relate with because I’m part of it.

I live with my husband and three kids on a small farm in Ohio. We keep busy with all the usual things, plus chickens and horses and more, oh my!

There’s so much focus in your book on changing the heart. A lot of your activities have a strong penitential flavor to them. We tend to think of that as more a Lenten theme; why is it also important during Advent?

Advent is a penitential season! We forget that so quickly and easily, but it’s so critical that we prepare ourselves and our souls to meet Jesus. To do that, we have to step away from the sin we carry.

What better way to approach the manger than with a heart hungry for him?

Many of the “acts” you offer are all-day commitments, like Monday of Week 2, when you suggest that for one day, children obey the first time they’re told. Do you have suggestions for those whose mornings are so crazy, we they have trouble eating breakfast together in the morning? How do you suggest we share these reflections together?

In fact, I am one of those families! The first thing that comes to mind for my family (because maybe this year I will, in fact, try using my own book with my own family) is to do the reflections the night before, perhaps as part of an after-dinner (or even during dinner) discussion. I’ve even thought about making it part of our before bed ritual during Advent.

Then, the next morning, you can just remind each other of what the day’s focus is, maybe pray the prayer together, and out the door you go with your crazy day!

In the introduction to Welcome Baby Jesus you reassure us that it’s not critical to do every single day. Since the 4th week of Advent frequently gets swallowed up by the Christmas season, do you recommend moving some of those later reflections (which are beautiful!) earlier in the season? Or does it matter?

I don’t think it matters. At least, it can’t matter for ME, because I’ll get all obsessive and focused on that. And that is NOT what the focus is to be!

If you miss a day–and chances are, if you’re anything remotely like me, you will!–forgive yourself and pick it up the next day. It’s okay. Jesus understands. And he will be there for you on December 25. Period.

I love the fact that your book doesn’t end with Christmas Day, but celebrates the octave of Christmas and Epiphany. By the time Christmas arrives, so many are fed up with the whole season, and ready to get back to “ordinary time.” Why is it important to draw the distinction between anticipation (Advent) and celebration (Christmas)?  

We lose sight of what Christmas really is about when we don’t prepare. The culture would have us believe that we ARE preparing when we shop and buy and decorate all throughout December.

I would maintain, though, that the more important preparation happens internally, within us.

Who will we be on Christmas Day? Are we ready to hold our arms open for the Baby? Can we give him our all?

It’s such a big deal that there’s more than a day to process it and celebrate it. And thank goodness for that! We spent four weeks getting ready, so now we get to spend a whole season celebrating!

What other projects do you have to share with us? Any exciting news coming down the pike?

My latest book, A Catholic Mother’s Companion to Pregnancy: Walking with Mary from Conception to Baptism was released this fall and is the first in the new CatholicMom.com line of books from Ave Maria Press. You can learn more about the book here. I blog at SnoringScholar.com and also write regularly for CatholicMom.com and Integrated Catholic Life. You can hear me with a Mary Moment on the iPadre podcast and as for exciting news…nothing I can share as of yet.

Well, if that’s not a tease, I don’t know what is. Guess we’d better all keep Sarah on our radar!

And now….for a giveaway! Sarah and I are giving ONE lucky winner a set of our Advent/Christmas books. If you like what you see, leave a comment here between now and tomorrow (that’s Tuesday, Dec. 4th, 2012) at midnight and be entered to win a signed copy of Welcome Baby Jesus and Joy to the World: Advent Activities For Your Family!

For extra entries, help me spread the word! Mention Welcome Baby Jesus and Joy to the World on Twitter or Facebook (and mention me so I know about it!–Facebook: Kathleen M. Basi, Twitter: @kathleenmbasi). Better yet, refer people to this post. For each one you’ll get an additional entry. For every day you tweet or FB it, you get additional entries. On Wednesday morning, we will do an old-fashioned, low-tech drawing and announce a winner.

Any questions? If not–go!

Sunday Snippets

Welcome to Sunday Snippets for the first Sunday of Advent! If you’d like to join in, head over to This, That and The Other Thing for the linkup.

I reviewed Sarah Reinhard’s Advent/Christmas devotional for children, Welcome Baby Jesus (and will be interviewing the lady herself on Monday, with giveaway, FYI…)

Plus, there were the family posts:

Home Alone on Thanksgiving

Blossom (a Julianna post)

To Boo Boo, Upon Turning One

Hope you enjoy!

To Boo Boo, Upon Turning One (a 7QT post)

one….

How does a name like “Boo Boo” become associated with a child, anyway? Perhaps the same way this child…

becomes this one…

two…

It’s my name for him, no one else’s, although Nicholas has tried to adopt it. I have all manner of permutations, every one you can imagine: boo boo, baby boo, boo baby, boo boy, boo boo boy, boy boo (you get the idea). It was my brother-in-law who first called a baby “boo boo,” but in my nephew’s case I don’t think it stuck…except in my head. But somehow it didn’t feel appropriate for Alex, who was known as Mr. Bug, or for Nicholas, who had a few permutations of “munchkin.” Somehow, this time, it just seemed to fit.

three…

There’s been a lot of life lived in the past 366 days (don’t forget leap year): NICU and bad latch and battles for big sister’s education and laundry piles that move, field trips and homework and constantly, constantly, the feeling of having not quite enough of me to go around. A fourth baby doesn’t get the spotlight the way a first or second does; he’s playing perpetual catchup, trying to hold his own among his siblings.

four…

Which is perhaps why Michael walked at ten months, two months ahead of the earliest of his siblings. And why he’s carrying a bath “flute” (i.e. recorder) around the house blowing sounds on it, when none of his siblings figured that skill out until 18 months. And why he’s throwing baseballs when none of his siblings was even allowed to touch something that hard until age 2 at least, and then only outside. (How do those baseballs keep showing up in the house?????) Although he won’t sign, preferring to communicate by yelling, which routinely shreds my nerves to tiny slivers that blow in the wind around the witching hour.

five…

I know that’s why Michael was given milk the day before he turned one, and peanut butter and corn two weeks before he turned one, and tomatoes two months before he turned one, in defiance of the parenting experts’ paranoia about food allergies.

six…

It’s hard to believe…I keep shaking my head at the thought of myself, one year ago this morning, sitting on the couch talking to my doctor at 7:30 a.m. and making the decision to pack up and head for the hospital, apprehensive of the drama but really having no idea what form it would eventually take. Hard to believe it’s been a year, and yet I can still feel the mattress of the hospital bed I slept on for ten days, my body sweating and shivering simultaneously in the chill of a hospital in December, walking up and down hallways at 2 a.m. for NICU feedings. Meals stored in a tiny refrigerator and heated in a microwave. Mass in the hospital chapel for the second Sunday of Advent (I had to leave early because I was in so much pain that morning, four days post-op), and for Immaculate Conception (eleven a.m., and I managed to stand up for most of it…I was so late, waiting to talk to the doctor before I came down, that there were no more seats).

seven…

He’s so big now, so full of life and verve and, well, boyhood. Paper clips and marbles and Lego in the mouth. DVDs, CDs and VHS tapes strewn all over the floor. Coming back to the computer to find loseit.com spinning its wheels trying to find a calorie count for

“;Aza,Pdcccccccccccccccccccccccmyju jm u 9fewewewewewewewewewewewdscx qws dl,.”  (I put that on FB the other day and Christian joked, “We’re not having that for dinner AGAIN!”) Pieces of food held out to the side of the tray and, with a cunning “whatchagonnadoaboutit” look on his face, dropped. He sleeps on top of his blankets, no matter how many times you cover him up. He wants to walk, walk, walk and get into things at all moments of all days, except when I need him to keep himself occupied, at which point nothing will do but Mommy’s arms.

Happy first birthday, Boo Boo. I love you madly.

Welcome Baby Jesus

In these last few days before Advent begins (does anyone else feel discombobulated because there’s an extra week after Thanksgiving?), I’d like to take the time to introduce you to a great little book written for young families: Welcome Baby Jesus, by Sarah Reinhard of Snoring Scholar fame.

Liguori promotes Sarah’s book and mine as complementary resources. Where I’m focused in on the practical, she zeroes in on the heart of the spiritual journey that is Advent. Essentially, this is a book of daily devotions for Advent and the octave of Christmas plus Epiphany. It’s very easy to read–you could finish the whole thing in an hour–but it’s written to be savored a day at a time, to offer a chance to slow down and reflect–which is, after all, the point of the season of Advent.

Each Sunday lays out the “theme” for the week:

Week 1: getting ready–specifically preparing our hearts
Week 2: closely related: repentance
Week 3: love
Week 4: anticipation

Each day includes a short Scripture passage, a reflection, a prayer and a “live it” moment. These activities are targeted specifically at young kids and are incredibly practical, often drawing parallels between the interior and exterior lives. For example: to represent getting your heart in order, you should pick up a room in your house. Another day she suggests using a soft voice to help us remember that we are seeking the quiet of Christ’s presence in our hearts. I love this concept of using outer actions to help direct an inner reality.

Sarah is refreshingly frank about the troubles that plague family life: bickering, button-pushing, and the like. They happen in all our families, and it’s only natural to spend Advent examining relationships and looking for ways to heal them. And lest you think you, as an adult, will get nothing out of a book aimed at children, read this quote, from Monday of Week 4: “Angels are not the little winged babies we sometimes see in pictures; they are powerful spirits that fight for God. The fact that Mary was afraid tells us something about how we can rely on our guardian angels, the ones God has given us to protect us. “

Most resources treat Advent and Christmas separately, but not this one. For the eight days, or octave, of Christmas plus Epiphany, she digs into the Christmas story. I love how she gets into the minds of the characters and thinks about them in a fresh way. Were people ticked off when the shepherds showed up in the middle of the night yelling about angels? How crazy must it have been to see kings, in their fancy clothes, flat on the dirt floor in front of a baby?

By the time Dec. 25th actually arrives, most of us have been surrounded by trees, decorations, cookies and music for weeks, and sometimes it’s easy to feel all “holiday-ed out.” But during this time, Sarah’s focus is much less “Christmas-y” in the cultural sense and much more “person”-focused: a birthday banner for Jesus, a birthday cake or special treat (which, by then, will be a welcome change of pace from cookies–at least for our family!).

All in all, this is a book I can recommend wholeheartedly, and at $2 it’s a steal.

Next week I will have Sarah come “visit” and tell you a bit more about herself and her book, and we’ll give away a copy. So check back on Monday!

Blossom

I dreamed last night that Julianna had to have surgery that was likely to kill her.

I don’t have these dreams about my other kids. It must be some subconscious manifestation of the worries unique to special needs parenting. In that dream, Julianna came running over to me laughing, and I hugged her close, drinking in the feel of her and the sight of her long lashes and beautiful eyes and gleaming hair, letting the life in her fill my senses.

Things are changing for Julianna. She’s growing, sneaking up on milestones…like the first lost tooth. And writing her name:

The other morning, we were trying to catch up on homework–they receive a packet for the month, and in November we didn’t stay on top of it. This particular assignment was to write ten items she sees around the house. For the first four, I cued her phonetically for what letter came next, but she seemed to be almost anticipating me. When we started to write “ball,” I decided just to see what she would do. That girl wrote b-a-l-l without one hesitation or one cue. “CHRISTIAN BASI!” I yelled to my husband, who was over in the corner reading the paper. I think he thought he was in trouble. “SHE JUST WROTE ‘BALL’ WITHOUT ME EVEN TELLING HER WHAT LETTERS TO WRITE!”

And yet she still signs and whimpers pathetically, “Help!” every time she has to start her homework. She really wants someone touching her hand.

It’s so easy to underestimate her abilities because she doesn’t exactly talk yet–although she has hundreds of words now, they’re just not always understandable, and she isn’t putting together complex sentences, only word pairs, like a beginning speaker. Most of the time when she does try to communicate something, we have no idea what she means. It must be so frustrating, but she stays good-natured about it.

She has names for everyone in the family now: “Bah-ee” and “Da-ee,” “Bappa” (Grandma and Grandpa, inclusively), “Ah-lee” and “Koh-lee” (Alex and Nicholas), and of course, no one ever mistakes “Bah-khoh Bah- khoh Bah- khoh!” ….because she screams at Michael dozens of times every day. I can’t decide which of them is actually the guilty party in the Roommate Wars.

Speech or not, she is beginning to grow into her own, with dozens of words she knows by sight and a goofy, kindergartener’s sense of humor.

My long-term fears haven’t gone anywhere; no doubt they explain the early morning dream. But she’s blossoming these days, transforming from the child I love fiercely but don’t really understand into a full-fledged big kid, one who is poised to spread her wings and fly…as long as I pay attention and give her the chance.

Home Alone on Thanksgiving

thankful (Photo credit: madison faith)

When my husband was growing up, he lived a thousand miles from his cousins, uncles, aunts and grandparents. A family of eight does not travel well over that kind of distance, so generally they spent their holidays as a nuclear family, in their own home, by themselves, and they developed strong traditions around that structure.

When I was growing up, both my parents’ families tried to get together for one or the other of the big winter holidays, usually no more than two hours from our house. A family of six can’t travel well over large distances, either, but two hours is entirely doable. Thus, I grew up looking forward with all my might to extended family gatherings around the holidays. (Cousins rock, people. Right there’s a reason to have large(r) families.)

I always found the idea of a holiday spent at home, with nothing but your own family, incredibly depressing. To me, that’s sort of the point of the holiday: a break from the same people and surroundings you inhabit every day. I have always viewed a holiday spent with just us as the height of all that is depressing in the universe.

But this year, family circumstances are such that we spent Thanksgiving at home, by ourselves. My sister and her family joined us for Friday afternoon and evening, but outside of that, we were home alone from Wednesday through this morning.

And I am converted.

It was so relaxing. Our family is on the go All.The.Time. Having a super-long, unstructured weekend was a rare gift. It felt like a deep breath and a long, slow, relaxing exhale. I got to go to Mass and do Jazzercise on Thanksgiving morning, prepare a moderate Thanksgiving dinner (one vegetable, one starch, well, okay, two, but stuffing doesn’t count), eat it on my family’s schedule. We Skyped with a couple of family members, the kids played downstairs, and Christian and I pulled together some of what we needed to organize about our lives in the coming weeks. We’ve done most of our Christmas shopping already, so we waved off shopping entirely–Christian had to get an extension cord, and I needed to grocery shop, but both of us timed the outings to avoid the feeding frenzy. We took the kids to Chuck E Cheese on Saturday afternoon. We didn’t even have to play at church on Sunday, so we went to our old stomping grounds for late Mass in the gap between Michael’s naps.

At the end of this interval, the kids are sick of each other’s company, and everyone’s chomping at the bit to return to the routine. Especially me. But I loved this Thanksgiving, and I hope we have more like it in the years to come.

There’s a lesson in this, if I can only figure out how to apply it more widely. More is not better, or richer, or more fulfilling. Less is not barren; a smattering of activity, strung jewel-like along a weekend, is beautiful; crowding ten times as many “jewels” into the same stretch of “rope” just looks gaudy and overwhelming.

Nothing surprising in that paragraph. But it’s nice to know it applies to holidays, too.

Sunday Snippets

It’s been such a relaxed weekend, I forgot all about Sunday Snippets until this morning. Ah, well. Here’s my contribution to the roundup at Ruth’s place:

Twenty Minutes

On Thankfulness and Chaos, Stream of Consciousness Style

Who’s The Expert Here, Anyway?

And there’s Advent, of course.

7 Quick Takes

___1___

Guess what? It’s only a week until Advent! Are you ready?

___2___

I finished making our list of Advent calendar activities a couple of days ago, and I’m very excited about it. We’re going to do some new things this year–as the kids are getting older, we can transition away from busy work and do some things have more substance. We’ll celebrate the saint days this year, and we’ll do some stargazing. (Crossing my fingers that the weather cooperates on that one.)

___3___

Speaking of magical items….the writing is on the wall. “Mommy, who puts the pieces of paper in the Advent calendar?” Alex asked me yesterday.

“Who do you think does it?”

Alex grinned. “You?”

“Yup.” I wagged my finger. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to tell you ahead of time.”

Santa, thy days are numbered….

___4___

Speaking of Advent…is anyone else ready to tear their hair out that the bleedthrough of the shopping season has pulled back onto Thanksgiving Day? One has to wonder if Thanksgiving will no longer even be a holiday, for all intents and purposes, within a few years.

___5___

Perhaps you will not be surprised to hear that we did not shop at six, nine, or midnight. In fact, we’re not shopping at all today, with the possible exception of a grocery store run, because we’re out of eggs. No, instead of pursuing (not-so) hot deals, we went to bed at 9:30 last night. I slept until quarter of seven this morning. I can’t tell you the last time I slept more than 8 hours. I subsist routinely on six.

___6___

I’ve been doing Jazzercise lately. A friend of mine has been recommending it for exercise, and I was very skeptical, but there was a Groupon last week, and I decided it was worth a try. Day 1, I felt like it was exercising my brain more than my body, it was so hard to keep up. Day 2, I thought my head would explode. Day 3, however, I actually enjoyed it. And it burns a LOT of calories. Jazzercise advertises “up to 600.” Online sources are more moderate, giving a number of 380. That’s the number I’m taking, but it’s still more than twice what I burn walking, bike riding, or on the Nordic Track.

___7___

This has been quite a week for heavy-duty posts. I fussed about “experts” who (in my opinion) overstep the bounds of their areas of advice, and, more importantly, I talked about the difficulty of keeping patience as the number of children grows. Don’t you all have trouble keeping your temper about little things? I was hoping some of the more experienced moms would weigh in, but perhaps my timing–the day before Thanksgiving–was not the best. Hoping I can convince some of you with big families or older families to weigh in today! Hint, hint!

Have a great rest of the holiday weekend!

On Thankfulness and Chaos, Stream-of-Consciousness style

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Parenthood (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For weeks after Alex was born, I cried every day. I was hormonal, overwrought, and overwhelmed, and every time someone called and asked, “How are you doing?” the faucets turned on.

When Michael was born, six years later, I cried two dozen times a day for over a week, though that was the NICU’s fault. In fact, the only one of my children whose birth was not accompanied by extended periods of crying was Nicholas. (He was saving all his tear-worthy moments for the age of three.)

I’m not really very far removed from those years, but the feel of our home is very, very different than it was when Alex, and even Julianna, were babies. Specifically, it’s a lot louder, more chaotic. Just when I think things are settling down so we can have a peaceful hour or so as a married couple before bedtime, something erupts again: a child with a bad dream, or a baby with a cold. Someone wanting permission to get up and go to the bathroom.

Tonight, as I type, I am losing my voice again, so I put Julianna and Michael to bed and tasked Alex with reading to Nicholas. And since school’s out for Thanksgiving, I let them stay up. I said goodnight and came downstairs, exhaling the tension of another busy bedtime. And then, Nicholas came out into the hallway, right in front of the room where Michael was trying to sleep off his cold, and shouted, “HEY YOU GUYS, WE AHY WEADING A BOOK!”

I lost my temper.

This little vignette illustrates a truth about myself that makes me squirm. Parenthood has taught me patience and forbearance for the big things, but as the number of children has increased, my tolerance for the little things has grown thin. To handle the witching hour in the late afternoon, the time when children bicker and complain and babies cry while I’m trying to make dinner for the family…to handle that with grace requires a long fuse.

I used to have a long fuse. When there were only a couple of them, I was much closer to the memory of how I had longed for children, and how long I had waited for the gift of their presence in my life.

I still love them fiercely, each and every moment, but it’s so much easier to take them for granted these days, so much harder to hold on to that awareness of them as a gift. It’s that awareness that mitigates frustration and allows me to approach things calmly. These days, the fuse is always short; it never gets a chance to recharge. The baby hurling Tupperware lids and emptying the trash can, the three-year-old tattling on everyone in the house, the developmentally delayed child who puts on a great dramatic show of heartbroken wailing whenever her movie ends, and the mess, mess, mess–word cards and marble run pieces and socks and videos and papers everywhere, the mess I can’t keep up with–and how blasted hard it is to force them to clean it up themselves–the constant chaos wears away every incremental gain in my “fuse” almost immediately.

I feel guilty for even admitting it, because it’s more fodder for the “you have too many %^&* children” argument. The chaos can be beautiful, too. The kids adore each other, and there are blissful periods of respite every day when they chase each other around the upstairs, giggling hysterically. There are wrestling matches and Michael toddling along behind his big siblings with hero-worship shining in his mischief eyes. None of this short-term frustration changes my vision of the essential long-term good of having a “large” family. But the short-term is where we live, and it’s not always easy to look beyond. I feel nostalgic for the days when we could actually get done what needed doing before bedtime, and the hour and a half between their bedtime and ours was open for spousal communication, not hamstrung by dishes and lunch making and fixing whatever darned thing is broken now.

These are inappropriate reflections for the days before Thanksgiving, so I’d like the more experienced moms to weigh in. Surely you’ve been here. How do we (because I’m sure I’m echoing other moms’ sentiments today!) shift our attitudes to a default state of thankfulness, of calm and patience?

Related articles

Who’s The Expert Here, Anyway? (kathleenbasi.com)
How to Survive the Witching Hour (mumatheart.com)
Calm in the Chaos…. (camsgranny.wordpress.com)

Who’s The Expert Here, Anyway?

Document Imaging Man! (Photo credit: richtpt)

It’s no secret that I have a healthy skepticism of a lot of modern “wisdom.” This often puts me at odds with doctors. I’ve complained before about the waste of time that is a well-child check, unless immunizations are necessary, because it fills up appointments that would better serve someone who is–gasp–sick.

I get particularly snarky when doctors try to overstep their authority. They are not developmental experts; they are not parenting experts. Their expertise is medicine.

At Michael’s nine-month well-child check (one of those appointments that is a complete waste of my time), his doctor brought up bedtime routine, via a discussion of dental hygiene. I made the mistake of admitting that our routine followed a different order, and he admonished me that nursing needs to come before tooth brushing (which makes sense) and book reading (which doesn’t). Because after all, we want them to be able to put themselves to sleep, not have to be nursed to sleep.

I felt my hackles rise. You try putting four kids to bed, I wanted to say. You’ve only got one. Don’t tell me I have to do this a different way. It’s nearly impossible as it is. Michael is so distractible, I can’t get him to nurse at all while other kids are running in and out of the room, giggling, bickering, asking to have their shirts oriented the right way.

Besides, who made him the expert on child bedtime? I nearly said, “Dude. You’re like, twelve. You have one kid. I am a fourth-time mother. Don’t you dare lecture me about proper parenting skills.”

But I thought of my friends in the medical field, who often remind me that our family has greatly benefitted from the medical profession. Which is true. Although those benefits have come when doctors are doing what lies within their expertise, and never, ever when it oversteps those bounds.

Still, I like our doctor, and our bedtime routine already doesn’t work very well. Maybe, I thought, I ought to at least give his way a try.

So after a few days of teeth gnashing, I did. That first night, Christian was teaching, so I was flying solo. We nursed first–with, I might add, great difficulty and frustration (see above); then I brushed Michael’s teeth and read him a book amid the battle of getting the other three through their bedtime ablutions. I put him in bed…and there commenced forty-five minutes of screaming. He was hysterical. In the end, I pulled him out of bed to nurse some more, just to calm him down. After that, he went to bed beautifully.

I tried for almost a week to get Michael to adjust to the “experts’” version of ideal. And then I said, You know what? I know my child. They don’t.

Wow. What a concept. I know my child, and they don’t.

And this, folks, is my point. I am a fourth-time mother who has been through early childhood with boys and girls, both typically-developing and developmentally delayed. I have more than a decade’s life experiences on the doctor who sees my kids, and I have a strong sense of self and a strong vision of how I want my kids raised.

And yet even I felt compelled to ignore what I knew about my children, simply because he was the “expert.”

If I find myself pressured this way, how much more is a first-time mom going to doubt herself based on advice that feels wrong for her child?

For generations–millennia, in fact–people have been raising children without parenting books, without the benefit of research, without enrichment activities and educational apps and closets full of toys. It’s time we stop second-guessing our parental instincts. No researcher, doctor or educator knows your child the way you do. You are the expert. You can call in help whenever you need it, but don’t ever let someone tell you you’re doing it wrong. Because you’re the one who knows, not them.